Wildermyth and Advancing Characters Through Transformations
In "Toward Better Rewards," Matt Colville says (among many other things) that characters advanced in early editions of Dungeons & Dragons more by acquiring magic items than by gaining levels. He compared this to newer editions of the game, in which most character advancement is defined by the class levels you gain. I cannot vouch for his description of early editions, but he's mostly right about the current state of the game. (I do find that my players' characters' magic items affect the game quite a lot, but still not so much as class features.)
I've been thinking about Colville's observation lately because I have also been thinking about Wildermyth, a beautiful tactical RPG by Worldwalker Games. It is truly lovely, among my most favourites, with a wistful soundtrack, a mix of scripted and procedurally-generated storytelling, a fresh take on fantasy settings, and a whimsical, melancholy ethos that exudes sehnsucht1 and charm. One of my regular D&D players has put about as many hours into it as I have and he said a particular moment that came up in the campaign reminded him of Wildermyth. No allusion was intentional on my part, but I see the similarity and I wonder if there's more to be done with it. That's what I want to talk about in this post: how we could take a mechanic from Worldwalker Games and apply it to TTRPGs, specifically in light of Colville's "Toward Better Rewards."
As in virtually every RPG, Wildermyth's heroes do have classes, and they gain abilities when they level; however, the heroes can also gain new abilities by undergoing magical transformations. Depending on how you play out certain stories that come up through the game, a hero might become part raven or bear, or attach a fox tail to themselves, or take on the elemental powers of fire or lightning or stone. Most of these transformations start small and progress over time, either when the character levels up or when the character loses a limb, replaced with a thematically appropriate version: an arm of vines, a raven's talon, a lightning bolt in place of a leg. The transformations also come with new abilities. A frog-headed hero can now draw in enemies with his long, sticky tongue; a moth-winged hero can cloak her allies in shadow. Sure, a character can go from recruitment to retirement (or death) without making a strange pact or befalling a strange curse, so their body might be mostly the same at the end as it was at the beginning,2 but much of Wildermyth's tactical variety and visual charm comes from your heroes' bodily changes.
My player must have been thinking of these transformations when he said a particular campaign development reminded him of Wildermyth. The half-orc fighter was trying to complete a coming of age ritual to symbolically join her estranged mother's clan, and this ritual brought the PCs into an overgrown castle inhabited by plant-creatures and oozes, to find the three magic pools within. Each of these circular pools was associated with a different kind of creature, seen in the engravings along their edges: plants, oozes, and monstrosities. (A fourth pool, decorated with beasts, had cracked open and was empty of water.) The fighter's task was to submerge a weapon or piece of armour in one of these pools for an hour, which would enchant it. For instance, a weapon soaked in the monstrosity pool would make it stronger against monstrosities, while armour soaked in the ooze pool would better defend the wearer from oozes. While they waited, of course, various of the castle's inhabitants came to attack them, including an enormous slime king that I took from Hit Point Press's Descent into the Dark supplement for Humblewood.
The half-elf paladin, however, decided to soak himself in one of the pools, as I guessed he would, choosing the one decorated with plant motifs. The character didn't know what this would do to him, and the player didn't know either, though she was looking for ways to express his chaotic alignment and this was a good opportunity. She could guess, however, that it would do something, and that whatever it was, it would involve plants. At the end of the hour, I said the paladin now permanently had the following trait:
You gain proficiency (if you don’t already have it) and advantage on all Intelligence checks to recall information about creatures with the plant creature type; you also gain the plant creature type alongside the humanoid type for the purposes of all items, spells, and class features except for those which would grant advantage or proficiency on Intelligence checks to recall information about you.
You can see maybe why the bard's player was reminded of Wildermyth.
The players were interested to see where this would go, narratively and mechanically. At first it had very little real effect: the PCs do not often encounter plant-type creatures, nor does having the plant creature type do very much for PCs mechanically. However, because the player expressed an interest in multiclassing into sorcerer, I talked it over with her and we decided to slightly alter the divine soul sorcerer subclass from Tasha's Cauldron of Everything; using the paladin's plant nature3 as a narrative pretext, I said the paladin could draw from the druid spell list instead of the cleric spell list. First, though, the party traveled through myconid country in the Underdark, where the mushroomfolk led them on a rapport-spore-induced vision journey to help the paladin get in touch with his plant-self (justifying the sorcerer levels). I also made sure the paladin got hold of a magic item to which only plants can attune.
The players have really enjoyed all of this and I am tempted to include more along these lines. I don't mean that I want to introduce more magic phenomena that give PCs additional creature types; I mean that I'm tempted to create new opportunities for players to take risks on strange transformations that give them new abilities, but may also result in new vulnerabilities, as well. (Blight is now far more punishing against the paladin than it once was, and I was sure to direct it at the paladin in the Underdark adventure.) I am thinking of these as sort of like magic items: clusters of rules technically outside the character progression track that nonetheless provide a character with ability advancement. The difference here is that a weird new limb does not require attunement, nor can you lend it to another character – unless it's a detachable limb, I suppose. Nonetheless, this is much like what Colville describes: the players make choices and take risks in order to empower their characters.
I have two ideas for incorporating transformations into my existing campaign, and some thoughts about building them into the very base of a hypothetical future campaign.
Scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Titania and Bottom, Edwin Landseer, 1851. Bottom, of course, only spent one donkey-headed night.
Magic Items
I like the idea of particularly powerful magic items that have a curse or similar effect so that, each time you use it, you have a chance of gaining a permanent transformation. The player would roll on a d40 table: a d20 + the number of times you used the item since your last transformation. Rolls of 0-20 would result in no change, while rolls 21-40 would result in transformations, with higher numbers yielding more dramatic changes. Now, the transformations I have in mind for these items are not primarily positive ones: most would have both positive and negative effects, but some might only have negative ones. After all, the point is that using the item carries an inherent risk, counterbalancing its extraordinary usefulness. Such transformations might look like the following:
21-22. One of your eyes dies, taking the appearance of spoiled milk. You have disadvantage on attack rolls and Wisdom (Perception) checks that rely on sight until the beginning of your next turn, when you gain the Ghosteye trait.
Ghosteye. You have disadvantage on any attack roll against a target more than 30 feet away, but you can clearly see any creature within 30 feet of you that is invisible or on the Ethereal Plane.4
23-24. You start to itch as patches of your skin slowly turn into an unalloyed conductive metal like copper, nickel, or gold. When you next complete a long or a short rest, you gain the Transmuted Skin trait.
Transmuted Skin. When you take slashing or piercing damage from a weapon attack, you may reduce the damage as though you had resistance to it. Once you use this ability, you cannot use it again until you complete a short or long rest. You are vulnerable to fire damage, and you are always wearing metal for the purposes of spells like Heat Metal.
25-26. Your body loses some of its cohesion. You gain the Strangely Pliable trait at the end of your next turn.
Strangely Pliable. While you are not wearing armor, you can squeeze through spaces as narrow as 6 inches. However, you have disadvantage on all Strength saving throws and your maximum Strength score is reduced by 2.
In theory, though, if you had mostly positive transformations, it could also work, though it would feel different. Maybe an angel's spear refines the one who wields it, turning its bearer into an envoy of the Seven Heavens. Or maybe the brewer's concoctions have temporary mutagenic effects the first few times you quaff them, but they will turn the body of a regular drinker into an alchemical forge.
Anatomical Experiments
In my main campaign, we just finished up a storyline in which the players hunted down the self-styled Sages of Liberty, a loose conspiracy of artificers, druids, blood hunters, wizards, and ascendants5 engaged in illicit magical experiments bankrolled by aristocrats who sought secrets of apotheosis. The party's first real lead was a three-armed elf woman going by the name of Ellazith, who appeared previously as the villain of an anthology game; she's a relentlessly-curious ritualist obsessed with anatomical experiments, often lacking the sense to think through self-modifications before trying them. Her third arm is the most obvious change she's given herself. In the anthology game, she was trying to figure out how to give a creature the doppelrat's doppeling ability, and when the party found her she was on the run from the law for smuggling magical animals and being a public nuisance. They promised not to turn her in if she helped them find the Sages of Liberty; since the Sages were fellow (or rival) researchers who ghosted her, she was eager to help.
The party has finished their investigation of the Sages of Liberty, and in the last session they needed to decide on Ellazith's fate. They sent a recommendation to their patron that Ellazith be taken on as a researcher for the realm's royal adventurers, where her work could be supervised; although she doesn't look forward to the oversight, she did express her hope that some of the adventurers might be open to trying experimental combat enhancements. This is a pretext for me to eventually offer the players a more tightly defined risk-reward proposition: let yourself be one of Ellazith's guinea pigs, and you could get a cool ability out of it. Specifically, I imagine she will offer procedures with effects that are probably beneficial and probably temporary. It is not in the fighter's nature to submit herself to weird magic (and, in her eyes, all magic is weird), but maybe the bard or paladin will go for it.
Hypothetical Campaign
The highest form of advancing characters through strange transformations is to build a campaign, or system, around it. There are of course already games with similar ideas; the 7th edition of Gamma World has random mutations, but these are temporary. I'm more interested in something where you accrue mutations as you progress. White Wolf and Onyx Press's Deviant the Renegade is all about characters who have been brutally transformed, but these changes are built into experience-based character advancement rather than being picked up through narrative alone. Although I quite like both Gamma World and Deviant, these don't do what I'm talking about.
Ideally, while you would have some amount of advancement gained simply through character level progression, you would agree as a table that encounter difficulty would outstrip this advancement and characters would need to endure at least a few of these transformations in order to keep up. Seeking such transformations in a pre-war laboratory, a cicada-god's hallow, or a well in the Underworld would be minor adventures in themselves and would not be tied to or dependent on levelling or experience points in any way. Because these transformations would make up so much of the character's stories, you could use a system with stripped-down classes, relying on the weird changes the characters undergo to provide specialization and individuation. (Wildermyth has only three classes, though character leveling does provide plenty of opportunity to specialize these classes.) If you wanted to be really radical, there might be no experience- or milestone-based character advancement, and all progression would come from items, training, and transformations that the players would have to gain through adventure.
German for "desire" or "craving," sehnsucht is often used in English to mean a yearning for the ideal completion of something imperfect; it recurs as a theme in the works of C. S. Lewis, who calls it an "inconsolable longing" for "we know not what" in Surprised by Joy. In Pilgrim's Regress he associates it with "the smell of bonfire" and "the sound of wild ducks flying overhead," among other things, both of which are very Wildermyth images.↩
There is one transformation you cannot do much about, however: aging. With few exceptions, your heroes will wrinkle and grey. As with us, I suppose.↩
The paladin's player is a priest, so I made sure to make some Christology jokes about the paladin's two natures, which she caught. She posted this in the chat: "Who although he is half-elf and plant; yet he is not two, but one Ealis. One; not by conversion of the half-elf into foliage; but by assumption of the planthood into half-elf."↩
When I was a child, I misheard the lyrics of the Four Tops song "Ain't No Woman (Like The One I Got)" as "Ain't no woman like a one-eyed nun"; based on this I later came up with a comic book character I never did anything with, a medical student and ex-nun with one dead eye, through which she could see ghosts. I thought it would be cool if she used a thurible as a flail, which I swear I came up with well before it was a common D&D homebrew trope.↩
The Ascendant is a Constitution-based close-range control class perpetually in development for Planegea, available exclusively (to my knowledge) through the Planegea Discord server. An ascendant takes traits and abilities from another creature type according to its subclass, gradually becoming more beast-, celestial-, plant-, or aberration-like as it grows in power.↩