The Foundry

Happy Halloween everyone! It’s that time of the year again and that means it’s spooky project time! Those who have been with me for a while know that every year for Halloween I put out some big thematic project for my favorite holiday. For this year, I wanted to keep the rework train going and rework a previous year’s project. And that project is my Corpseweaver class!

Before we get started I just want to take a second to shout-out @dm-clockwork-dragon and his Necroficer class, which helped inspire many aspects of my own take on the “Frankenstein-ing” monsters together concept.

I also want to mention that I still have a huge GDrive folder of 100+ creepy creatures and malign monsters pulled from across the internet to inspire your own amalgams!

In a way I got lucky this year. I started reworking my corpseweaver MONTHS ago so I already had a lot of it done. I was hoping to have the basics done in time for a campaign I was going to be in but time got away from me and I ended up playing something else so I’ve just been slowly working on it over time. Before October even began the entire base class and one of the subclasses were mechanically done, which left only two more subclasses to finish and I needed to rewrite all the fluff text which was honestly pretty cringeworthy in my opinion.

So what are all the changes? IT’S A LOT! I reworked how the class collects resources and the amalgam creation system completely from the ground up. The old systems were overly complicated and REALLY bookkeepy so I simplified them. Now you get Flesh, Bone, and Exotic from creatures and you use those in specified amounts to make amalgams and make alterations. The system for doing so has been greatly streamlined. Now you have a dedicated stat block that all amalgams are based on and that gets modified throughout the creation process.

Another major change is that the base class is no longer a spellcaster, so all those features have been moved to a subclass of their own, the Skaab Scribe. I didn’t like how based in normal magic the old class was as I always wanted it to be more focused on mad science, alchemical formulas, and occult ritual.

And one of the last huge changes is that the Soma Smith has been removed from the class completely and will likely never return, though the name does live on as the Fleshwarper has been renamed. As much as I liked the idea of the old soma smith, I felt that it didn’t fit the class upon further examination. Its whole deal was about creating new life basically from scratch and that’s not what I want this class to be about. That’s actually a theme that I kept seeing in the flavor text throughout the class as I’ve been working on it, creating new life, and it’s a goal of mine to remove it wherever possible. The class does not create life, it reanimates the dead, and in my mind those are very different things.

So yeah, on that note those are the biggest changes but obviously everything got touched in some way. As with many of my reworks, this one is an overhaul on a grand scale, and one I’m honestly quite proud of.

As for the updated aesthetics, however, I have mixed feelings. Overall I think they fit the class much better than the default theme I was using before but there’s a lot of visual jank that I’m not a fan of. I also would have liked to use better artwork but I had so little time to finish this as it is. I was also forced into using GM Binder for this project instead of Homebrewery because the theme I chose doesn’t work with HB very well so that was less than ideal. For smaller projects it’s not a big deal but for something this huge all the weird little issues I have with GMB start to compound and get frustrating. It’s not a system I like but it has its uses sometimes.