GLoG Class: Teleopath
Åke Rålamb, Engraving from Skeps byggerij eller Adelig öfnings tionde tom. 1691.
You have heard the truism: "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." This is a sort of natural order, a law of instruments, akin to the ones safeguarded by the druids and the fey of the wild, but more subtle. Unlike the movements of the stars or the changing of the seasons, tools are cultural artifacts. They may change in subtle ways, but still they project their use. A teleopath embodies this singular focus in ways both figurative and literal.
Background: 1 Blacksmith | 2 Carpenter | 3 Tailor | 4 Toymaker
Starting Gear: A leather apron (as leather armor). A repair kit appropriate to your background. Two random adventuring tools in your mental toolkit (but not on your physical person).
| A | Thingtongue, Thingshape |
| B | Detect Absence, Wear and Tear |
| C | Rapidshape OR Farread OR Scaleblind |
| D | The Right Tool |
Thingtongue
You can speak with inert objects you can touch. As a general rule, they don't have much to say. They perceive through use and often lack critical context for what they do perceive. Particularly old or magical objects might know and say more.
Thingshape
When you carefully study an object you can hold in two hands (over a period of at least 8 hours), you may add it to your mental toolkit. You can store a number of objects there equal to 3×[Templates].
At will, you can turn into any object in your mental toolkit over the course of a round. In this form, you do not need to breathe or eat, and can only be hurt by dangers that might harm that tool. On the other hand, you cannot move or do anything except return to your original form.
Detect Absence
You're a keen observer of where things should be. When you carefully search a space, the GM will tell you of any notable absences. You tell them what clued you in.
Wear and Tear
With a touch, you can spend d6 HP to advance the process of natural wear, decay, or fatigue on a mundane object by one hundred years. A lock might rust to the point of failure, a ladder rung might snap at the joint, but you can't wear a stone block down to powder without persistence.
Rapidshape
You can thingshape nearly instantaneously and from one thing to another without returning to your original form.
Farread
You can speak with and become familiar with objects you can see, even if you can't touch them.
Scaleblind
When you thingshape, you may turn into a version of that object at your scale rather than that object's original scale.
The Right Tool
You no longer need to be familiar with a non-magical object in order to thingshape into it. You just need to know its purpose. This process of transformation is much slower, taking a week (or a day if you have Rapidshape).
GM Notes
I was thinking about city druids, particularly the kind that show up in Shadowrun from time to time. Usually they're just a normal druid, but they turn into a rat, a pigeon, or occasionally a sewer alligator. What if a druid could talk with and shapeshift into the stuff you actually find in a city?
As a media archaeologist, this activates all sorts of fun theory for me. As Marshall McLuhan puts it, "we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." Use isn't actually a natural law; it's social and cultural. Just as any class plants a flag on a topic you want to discuss in the fiction, this class signals you want to talk about mundane tools and why they were designed the way they are.
There is also an interesting shift from subject to object here, from actor to actee. I like how this cuts across the grain of the usual expectations of a roleplaying game, usually geared towards the fantasy of having agency. The teleopath will necessarily need to rely on someone else to see their powers come to fruition. As a GM, I would want to fill the character's life with people willing to (mis)use their toolforms, but I would also want to intervene if they just find a hireling to carry them around at all times.
I would substitute the sample backgrounds found above with a set appropriate to the culture the player comes from. In doing that, I would stick to a group of three "practical" trades and one slightly weirder or whimsical one.
I'm sure if you run this class you will have a player at some point who tries to turn themselves into a radio, a flashlight, or the detonator for a nuclear warhead, particularly with The Right Tool. I would insist on tech-level-appropriate objects for your game, but I also think this is a social problem to be resolved in conversation with the player in question. Or maybe you just roll with it and allow a team of players to turn themselves into a motorcycle?