Back to character sketches today. I hadn’t quite realized it’d been over a week since I put that project down. So, what do you do when you need to fill white space on a page? You write a sidebar!
Now, sidebars can be great for examples, designer notes, and other digressions that don’t fit in the main body of the text. But the decision to use a sidebar can be driven by nothing more than the need to fill a bit of space. Somehow I didn’t feel like tactical advice or design notes worked that well here, though, so I went with a whole alternate treatment of the stat block itself. So, with an empty chunk in my Cap’n No-Beard page, I dug up an alternate character class pretty much tailored for pirates. Here we see why d20pfsrd.com just got that ENnie award.
Mind you, using this material isn’t quite the same as endorsing it. I don’t need to pass judgment on the class as a whole to decide that it’s got a reasonable-looking first four levels, especially when I’m already providing a stat block for people who want to stick to the core rules. So, unlike the variants in some other entries, I’m not reprinting the source material in its entirety here. Just enough of an amendment to the main stat block to do the job.
With five characters reasonably done, I suppose it’s past time to start thinking about what the final shape and scope of this project are supposed to be. The fact that I haven’t done that already is one of the many differences between a job and a hobby.