Class Review: Vulnavia's FIGHTER
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.
FIGHTER by Vulnavia
Today I'm reviewing Vulnavia's FIGHTER, a class I played briefly last year. I won't overindulge in comparison, but its interesting to review this just after the fighter I considered the other day. Both technically treat a core dungeon fantasy class, but they each approach the challenge with totally different aims. Where Hilander's work was interested in presenting a streamlined, essential form, Vulnavia's invokes the core class as a trope to subvert and inflect. We're still in the long shadow of OD&D, but the thing described here can't be substituted for the "fighting man" of yore.
FIGHTER is as much a work of short fiction as it is rules text. The prose is haunting, frequently written in the second person and darting between intense descriptions of alien bodily experiences and lofty invocations of entities like the Queen of Air and Darkness. I really want to underline the quality of the writing here, because it really is superlative, but it comes at a significant cost in terms of ease of use. The names of class features only obliquely describe their contents. In turn, those features are composed of multiple paragraphs of prose only briefly interspersed with recognizable rules jargon like dice rolls or "once per session" restrictions.
This is already a lot to parse, but many features secretly contain multiple distinct abilities. The Full Dark World, the class's first feature is the most egregious example of this. It contains an activated ability, two passive abilities that require the player to interject whenever combat might break out, and three restrictions that might prevent the FIGHTER from engaging in different types of non-combat narrative beats. None of these individual abilities are too complicated; they just require close attention in almost every area of the game.
The other class features are more contained or defray their complexity by having you pick from or roll on a table. I'll also say that once parsed the actual mechanics of the class are coherent and self-contained. The GM won't have to improvise magical effects or make huge sweeping changes to their prep in response to the FIGHTER's class features. Still, I generally find this class hard to reference in the heat of the moment. These concerns can be mitigated by taking notes on the different abilities, but summarization risks flattening the powerful descriptive text that is at work here - descriptive text that as a player I would want to hold true with the same rigor I apply to the mechanics.
I do want to applaud those tables I alluded to earlier. Butcher Bird presents a list of "Wicked Little Tricks" for hand-crafted weapons that give you a nice variety of custom maneuvers. I'll admit to having stolen some of these for minor magic items in my home games. Société des Sadiques presents a table of potential coterie members that, when combined with the 6 potential random backgrounds for this class, provide a rich sense of the world the FIGHTER lives in. I particularly delight in the surprises here - the gourmets and the fashion designers in among the supplicants and pawns. I wish every class had a weighted d20 list of who might hang out with them.
It is unclear whether we are supposed to take Vulnavia's description of the world as canonically true or as the perceptions of the FIGHTER. Is the world rapidly closing on an end time or is that just projection? This is an open question that as a GM I would want to play with at the table. I would particularly want to make some decisions with the player about the Queen of Air and Darkness, a hyperdiegetic reference that resounds throughout the class. I'm familiar with the Queen through D&D's Unseelie Court, but I know it's also a Shakespearian reference picked up by authors like T.H. White and Jim Butcher. If the Queen is literally in the world, then this class imports a whole cosmology that might take some work to fold into play.
The FIGHTER is a class that wants to be in a game where combat matters, but equally it wants to be in a game that spends time considering the interior life of its characters. As written, the FIGHTER seems traumatized by the world. Their combat abilities manifest from being honed to a razor's edge, tensioned to the point of snapping. The cautious adventurer, tapping with their 10 foot pole to check for traps, takes on a compulsive air here. Hit points are recast as sensory experience to be "burned away" or "isolated." I think these dimensions have always been there in fantasy adventuring games; the FIGHTER just conjures them into clear view.
This class wants you to tell stories about being worried, stressed, and worn out. It wants you to think about burning resources, sometimes resources that you don't have to spare, but also about enduring in spite of everything. I think that is broadly compatible with a typical dungeon adventuring game, but will really thrive if there is space in the fiction for dwelling on how the characters internalize the world around them. That's not every table. If only one character in the party engages in this space, it can wear a little thin. Notably, the FIGHTER lacks any on ramps to invite other player characters into this part of the fiction. Think of how a cleric might tend to the spiritual health of their fellow party members. How does the FIGHTER relate to their peers?
Using Skerple's tier system, I'd describe this class as Core. Everything works mechanically here in a way that requires little GM intervention and there is nothing in the fiction here that would break a fantasy setting, but the class's emotional dimensions might not be a perfect fit for every table. I'd love to play in a game that exclusively uses Vulnavia's material and plays these themes to the hilt.
12/15: Since publication, I have amended my rating system. I would now rate this as medium effort to bring to the table for the reasons listed above.