Welcome to Aldhaven

Aldhaven, that metropolis in which a hundred adventure have led to a thousand stories and countless more would be adventurers have ended their final chapter. Aldhaven has been an ongoing campaign setting in one form or another since 2001 but grew to its largest in the 2010s with an online play-by-post game with over more … Read more

Design Notes: The Black Templar

The Black Templar is originally a Pathfinder prestige class published in the Akashic Mysteries supplement. It did some of the things I wanted but in a more clunky, complicated manner than I wanted to have, and some of the other mechanics were just weird. I didn’t care for much of how it worked mechanically, though … Read more

Design Notes: The Evolutionary

The Evolutionary was born from wanting to create a Specialist Class that makes use of both Mutations and Aberrant Feats. It’s actually a fairly simple and straightforward class in what it grants, but the systems it makes use of are complicated enough that the class needs the simplicity. Designing the Evolutionary While most specialist classes … Read more

Design Notes: Aberrant Feats

While a player in one of my games was building a character using the ancestral bloodlines redesign, he asked about the lack of aberrations on the bloodline list. Of course, the simple answer was that the original author didn’t include any, and I haven’t created any new bloodlines (just changed the system to use them). … Read more

Design Notes: The Vitalist

I’ve been developing quite a bit of healing-focused content lately, and the vitalist is the latest product of that. One thing that psionics simply does not do well is healing. The system has some decent self healing, although that’s not really great. When it comes to healing others, the options are even more limited. This … Read more

Design Notes: The Akashic Healer

The akashic healer was designed as a way to improve some of the secondary healing abilities to make them more viable options in the game. This Specialist Class uses akashic magic, because that’s personally one of my favorite subsystems. It’s also a good system for balancing and limiting game options while still giving the player … Read more

Design Notes: The Wildling

There’s not just a whole lot to the wildling that isn’t just an obvious progression from the base, though it still makes for a rather good Specialist Class, progressing and enhancing a specific basic option just as such a class is meant to do. Wildling requires wild empathy to enter, which can be picked up … Read more

Design Notes: Mutations

The ability to change and modify a character or monster without adding class levels or applying templates is something that D&D just doesn’t really do; however, d20 Modern introduced a system of Mutations that do exactly that. I’ve brought that system over for Aldhaven while modifying and expanding it to work within the game a … Read more

Design Notes: The Psychic Capacitor

The psychic capacitor is a Specialist Class that is simple in concept: turning the character into a capacitor that stores and super charges psionic power points. More Power Points! The class needs Psionic Talent to enter, which gives additional power points. Psychic capacitor class levels stack for manifester level (but not actual manifesting) which increases … Read more

Design Notes: Ancestral Bloodlines

Bloodlines (introduced in Unearthed Arcana) are one of those things that is really cool in concept but poorly designed and explained. The shifting level adjustment and virtual bloodline levels that sometimes increase other class features and sometimes don’t and other oddities are often poorly understood and poorly implemented as well as being ripe for abuse … Read more