LEGATEE — ESSENCER CLASS
Salorras Path: Legatee (the asaar’adins) · OSE class: Legatee (a custom Salorras essencer class) The legatee is Salorras’s living wellspring of inborn power — one whose gift sleeps in the blood itself and wakes, often through some fierce or wounding ordeal, into something the world mistakes for a sorcerer or bard but which is stranger than either. The legatee has no official OSE equivalent: its power is not magic but a bloodborne mastery of the body’s own essence. It is therefore authored here as a custom class built strictly to B/X design conventions around its unique essence subsystem. The elite traditions of the gift (the Echoe, the Grafted Agent) are separate Paragon classes.
This file is self-contained. Everything except the essence subsystem follows standard Old-School Essentials conventions; the essence catalogue itself — every essence and what it does — lives in the essence catalogue in the Magic section of this system.
The Legatee in the World
Legatees, known in the Free Cities of South as asaar’adins, can reshape the essences that underlie a living body. Through meditation and self-hypnosis they master these essences, weakening and then empowering their own flesh, senses, and mind by methods only a legatee understands. The gift lives in the blood: legend traces it to the Era of the Second Moon, when the starborn Abdri received the boon of the goddess Orya, and his blood became the inheritance of the generations after him. In the last fifty years the gift ceased to be the sole province of Abdri’s line — the Citadel Researchers, through their experiments, propagated the legatee strain into the other peoples of Salorras, even the monstrous ones.
A legatee is usually unaware of the power at first; the gifted blood ignites after some intense or traumatic experience. Legatees tend to be strong-willed, with a flair for leadership and an exotic beauty, and their abilities — flexible enhancement of nearly any physical, sensory, or vital trait — make them superb warriors, spies, or both.
Class Overview
Requirements: Minimum CHA 9 Prime requisite: CHA Hit Dice: 1d6 Maximum level: 14 Armour: Leather or chainmail, shields permitted Weapons: Any Languages: Alignment, Colloquial
A prime requisite of CHA 13–15 grants +5% to experience earned; CHA 16–18 grants +10%. (Low Charisma penalizes experience per the standard prime-requisite rules: CHA 3–5 −20%, CHA 6–8 −10%.)
The Legatee
| Level | XP | Hit Dice (1d6) | THAC0 | D | W | P | B | S | 1 | 2 | 3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 | 1d6 | 19 [0] | 11 | 12 | 14 | 16 | 15 | 1 | — | — |
| 2 | 2,500 | 2d6 | 19 [0] | 11 | 12 | 14 | 16 | 15 | 2 | — | — |
| 3 | 5,000 | 3d6 | 19 [0] | 11 | 12 | 14 | 16 | 15 | 2 | 1 | — |
| 4 | 10,000 | 4d6 | 19 [0] | 11 | 12 | 14 | 16 | 15 | 3 | 1 | — |
| 5 | 20,000 | 5d6 | 17 [+2] | 9 | 10 | 12 | 14 | 12 | 3 | 2 | — |
| 6 | 40,000 | 6d6 | 17 [+2] | 9 | 10 | 12 | 14 | 12 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 7 | 80,000 | 7d6 | 17 [+2] | 9 | 10 | 12 | 14 | 12 | 4 | 3 | 1 |
| 8 | 150,000 | 8d6 | 17 [+2] | 9 | 10 | 12 | 14 | 12 | 4 | 3 | 2 |
| 9 | 300,000 | 9d6 | 14 [+5] | 6 | 7 | 9 | 11 | 9 | 4 | 4 | 2 |
| 10 | 450,000 | 9d6+1* | 14 [+5] | 6 | 7 | 9 | 11 | 9 | 5 | 4 | 3 |
| 11 | 600,000 | 9d6+2* | 14 [+5] | 6 | 7 | 9 | 11 | 9 | 5 | 5 | 3 |
| 12 | 750,000 | 9d6+3* | 14 [+5] | 6 | 7 | 9 | 11 | 9 | 6 | 5 | 4 |
| 13 | 900,000 | 9d6+4* | 12 [+7] | 3 | 5 | 7 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 6 | 4 |
| 14 | 1,050,000 | 9d6+5* | 12 [+7] | 3 | 5 | 7 | 8 | 7 | 7 | 6 | 5 |
* Modifiers from CON no longer apply. — Saving throws: D Death/Poison · W Wands · P Paralysis/Petrify · B Breath Attacks · S Spells/Rods/Staves. The columns 1–3 show produced essences per day by essence level — the capacity of the legatee’s thalamus, which grows as the gift matures.
Class Abilities
Combat. Legatees can use all weapons, and wear leather or chainmail with a shield. Essences are not spells and are in no way hindered by armour.
Essences. A legatee does not cast spells. Instead they produce essences within their own body and burn them to enhance flesh, senses, and vital traits (see How Essences Work below). Essences are extraordinary, not magical: they cannot be dispelled, are unaffected by anti-magic, cannot be scribed onto scrolls or brewed into potions, and function normally where magic fails. Where an essence affects an unwilling creature, the target resists with a save versus spells.
The essences are grouped into three great families, the essential cores — Physical, Sensorial, and Vital — each with five subcores of related essences. Physical essences improve strength and combat, agility, health and stamina, travel, or toughness against blows; sensorial essences sharpen sight, hearing, taste, touch and danger-sense, or smell; vital essences reshape the organs, bend gravity, expand the mind, or warp space and time.
Essences known. The legatee knows one more essence of each level than they can produce per day (e.g. at 7th level: five 1st-, four 2nd-, and two 3rd-level essences), chosen freely across the three cores. New essences awaken when the character gains a level; they are not studied from books and cannot be taught.
Thalamus and reactor. At the gift’s awakening the legatee’s body grows two inner organs: the thalamus, beside the liver, where produced essences are stored — its capacity is the per-day columns of the table — and the reactor, within the stomach, the burner in which essences are combusted.
Essential grace. From 2nd level, the legatee’s uncanny vitality grants a +1 bonus to all saving throws; the bonus rises to +2 at 10th level.
Essential aura. At 4th level the legatee permanently attunes to one essential core. By sacrificing one produced essence of that core (of the level the table below demands — a full round of concentration, once per 8 hours), they wake an aura around themselves lasting 12 turns, affecting the legatee and allies within its radius:
| Legatee Level | Aura Power | Radius | Bonus | Essence Sacrificed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4–8 | Faint | 10′ | +1 | 1st level |
| 9–13 | Moderate | 15′ | +2 | 2nd level |
| 14 | Strong | 20′ | +3 | 3rd level |
The physical aura grants its bonus to saves versus death/poison and to feats of bodily prowess (climbing, forcing doors, and the like). The sensorial aura grants its bonus to initiative rolls and to chances of detecting hidden things or listening at doors. The vital aura grants its bonus to saves versus spells, and lets the legatee hold a silent telepathic link with a number of willing creatures inside the aura equal to the bonus.
Catalytic combustion. From 6th level the legatee can burn an essence catalytically, forcing greater power from it at the cost of endurance: the essence’s effect is strengthened and its duration halved, as noted in each essence’s entry in the catalogue. The choice must be declared as the burn begins.
Body restoration. From 7th level, once per day, the legatee can knit their inner substance back together, restoring 1d4 points of drained or damaged abilities to a single ability score. From 13th level they can do so twice per day.
Purity of body. From 9th level the legatee is immune to all nonmagical diseases.
Wholeness of body. From 11th level the legatee can close their own wounds by will, healing up to 2 hit points per level per day, divided among as many uses as desired.
Haven — After Reaching 11th Level. A legatee of the eleventh circle of mastery may establish a haven — a manse, sanctum, or estate. Newly awakened legatees, frightened of their own igniting blood, arrive seeking guidance, and agents of the Citadel Researchers begin to take a close — not always welcome — interest in the household.
Diamond body and the unchanging flesh. At 14th level the legatee’s mastery of their own substance becomes total: they are immune to poison, and their body ceases to age.
How Essences Work
Producing essences. Essences are not granted by a deity or written in any book — they are produced within the legatee’s own body during 8 hours of rest and meditation, once per day. Production demands a production penalty: a temporary sacrifice of some ability, sense, or trait for those hours, noted in each essence’s catalogue entry. The legatee chooses which of their known essences to produce, up to the thalamus’s free capacity; essences remain stored until burned.
Burning essences. Burning a stored essence takes one round of concentration unless its entry says otherwise. Most essences work passively on the legatee while they burn — quickening limbs, hardening skin, opening senses — for the duration given in the catalogue; a burning essence may be quenched at will, ending it. Being struck while igniting an essence spoils it.
Paragon Classes (the legatee’s elite traditions)
The legatee’s Paragons are standalone OSE classes; a player who wants one plays it from 1st level, the gift’s strange flowering part of the character’s story:
- Echoe — the foresight-touched legatee whose mind reads the moments just ahead; drawn from the Golden Thread of prophecy.
- Grafted Agent — the pure-blood asaar’adin remade by the Citadel Researchers and the Abominable Brigade, their innate gift fused with grafted monstrous and extraplanar flesh.