Class Review: EcksianRaven's Commander
Käthe Kollwitz. Charge. 1902/1903. Etching and drypoint.
There are so many GLOG classes! More than you could playtest in a lifetime and more being written all the time. I want to comb through them and write critical reviews, gradually curating a list of suggested classes for my table and honing my sense of how exactly a GLOG class works.
The Commander
I'm no stranger to military fiction. I grew up reading the Richard Sharpe novels by Bernard Cornwell long before it was probably appropriate for me to do so and ended up a Napoleonic history buff as a result. I dabbled in Warhammer, collecting a 1000 or so points of Imperials and Dwarves and consumed all the related fiction I could get my hands on. For me, these are the fictional references that EcksianRaven's Commander recall - stories centered on small scale troop combat that is primarily concerned with the personality and decisions of a few key heroic individuals.
It's worth noting that the Commander seems to be written for a variant of GLOG with some non-standard features (OICCS?). Characters appear to have 6 templates instead of 4 and at least one class references a "proficiency bonus." This isn't an issue in and of itself, but may require some conversion to work at your table.
The signature feature of this class is their Company Tradition - a tie to a specific military unit that provides a backstory for the character, a benefit, a drawback, and a list of maneuvers that are learned gradually alongside the classes' main feature progression. Ecksian Raven has provided a generous variety of these, each with a few sentences of evocative fiction and a custom set of maneuvers. I think this is where the writing is at its most imaginative, both mechanically and narratively. The traditions are peppered with hyperdiegetic proper nouns, but none of the units or places described seem like they would be terribly difficult to adapt into an unrelated fantasy setting.
I get the sense that some may technically be more powerful than others. For instance, the "Yeomen of the Bowmen" offer consistent mass movement and volley attacks while the "Chiefs of Strange Tribes" offer a trickle of extra damage and a situational banishing effect. I don't think this is a big problem though. Players who care about eking power out of their class will gravitate towards some backdrops while others will pick based on the flavor.
The main issue with these traditions is that each contains almost as much rules text as a traditional GLOG class. This proposes two problems. First, it's a lot to read through and make informed decisions about at character creation. Second, when stacked with the classes' core features, we are starting to talk about a lot of complexity to keep track of at the table. I'd love to see these presented as a rollable table, both to provide an index for the content that follows and as a GM aid if they want to recycle any of these groups as potential encounters, something I'd personally want to do frequently if I had a player running a Commander.
Fortunately, the central Commander's other class features are relatively straightforward. They mostly pertain to either recruiting followers (Drill Sergeant, Flock to the Banner, and Prophet of War) or eking action economy out of them in combat (Warlord's Command and Banneret). Followers are the critical resource for this class. Most of the Commander's abilities won't function without them. The power level of these abilities is also quite constrained, somewhere around the effectiveness of a magic missile with a maneuver attached. In this light we can think of followers as something like the Magic Dice of this class, resources that the player wants to accumulate that provide bigger effects when expended en masse.
It's hard to get a sense of how many followers EcksianRaven expects the Commander to have. This presents a real concern in play. The class starts with two hirelings and quickly gains ready access to a 3+ extra souls with a days work. I presume these are cumulative with conventional hirelings and mercenaries. I think this class might only function at a table that is willing to engage with combat as a robust skirmish game, one where you track tens of characters instead of a handful. If other players don't have groups of hirelings or multiple adventurers, then they'll be sitting idle as the Commander takes actions for all their various hangers-on.
Alternatively, if the GM has control of the followers, their work is suddenly doubled and half the class abilities are substantially weakened. Outside of combat, followers tug on all sorts of other systemic issues - the logistics of feeding a large group, keeping track of all these characters in the non-combat fiction, and developing personalities among the followers to name a few. I rarely want to speak prescriptively in these reviews, but I think a section of concrete advice and procedures for handling this small mass combat scale are a must to make this practically usable at the table.
Returning to class features briefly , I want to flag Prophet of War and Master of Tactics as two features that risk being short-circuited by roleplay. The former lets you automatically convert an enemy of roughly equal or lesser power level once per month, something a player might be able to do by just talking to them. The latter provides information that I would also want to give to a character with a relevant skill or background. Master of Tactics begins to point to something with its focus on enemy commanders, but that theme doesn't really reoccur elsewhere in the class.
The Commander points to a game with larger scope than just dungeon crawling, both with its follower mechanics and an explicit reference to controlling hexes. This is a class that wants to follow a rags-to-riches story of a lone fighter and their two aides forming a rag-tag coalition and leading them to become a geopolitical power. It wants you to come up with clever tactics that employ larger numbers of combatants than most games incorporate. It also wants you to care about military units - their histories, their traditions, and implicitly their reputations. All of these things are achievable at the table, they just require a group interested in following these threads.
Because the Commander strays so far from the traditional scale of most GLOG games and because of the significant interpretive load it puts on the GM, I'd describe this as a Novelty class using Skerples' rating system. Play it if the above stories sound fun to you and if your table is bought in on spending significant session time in small unit combat.
12/15: Since publication, I have amended my rating system. I would now rate this as requiring heavy effort to bring to the table for the reasons listed above.