Since I decided to abandon the 2024 Dancer Dard (looks fun, it just... doesn't enable Gossamer to mechanically work the way I want her to) and continue with my re-flavored College of Swords build, I also finally. renamed. her Blade Flourishes.
They're Dancer's Flourishes now, and they are:
Defensive Flourish -> Guarded Chassé
Slashing Flourish -> Fouetté Strike
Mobile Flourish -> Pas de Deux
College of Dance just focuses too much on ally mobility and positioning, whereas Gossamer is predominantly a martial artist who brings an unmistakably dance-like rhythm and flare to her motions -- very much, in my imagination, like capoeira fusing with ballet.
Granted, real-world capoeira/ballet fusion references are difficult to come by, but the timestamp here does a decent job of communicating a vague idea of how she might move in combat.
Gossamer has one tattoo: a small spellwrought tattoo of find familiar linked to a lust imp that calls herself Moxie. It's on the right side of her body, ribs, just beneath the line of her breasts, and it's simply Moxie's True Name in Infernal. Every member of the Saints of the Eye has one, linked to a different variety of imp; they were gifts from Baator. (The wizard was a spy sent to keep an eye on the Demon Lords, and her middle-manager devil brought them to us as we prepared to heist our way through Menzoberranzan.)
She hasn't summoned Moxie since the end of the Rage, though. The last time they saw each other was at Gossamer's 'coronation' in the Argent Palace, when she fought her way free of Graz'zt. Moxie was disincorporated in the fight, and that was that. Gossamer never re-summoned her again when all was said and done.
I have all sorts of thoughts and feelings about healing magic and how I like it to work, but with Gossamer specifically: she only ever took Healing Word and Mass Healing Word, and when she cast them, I rarely saw it as her actually literally healing anyone (in the way that Cure Wounds would, for example).
Rather, I'm thinking of HP in terms of "hero points" rather than "hit points"—not a literal measure of physical health but a gauge for how much fight you have left in you before you stay down. So, when Gossamer restores someone's HP, she isn't healing them; she's just giving them the resolve to keep going a little longer.
Bards of the College of Swords are called blades, and they entertain through daring feats of weapon prowess. Blades perform stunts such as sword swallowing, knife throwing and juggling, and mock combats. Though they use their weapons to entertain, they are also highly trained and skilled warriors in their own right.
From Xanathar's Guide to Everything, the Swords Bard is a pretty quintessential swords dancer/fencer archetype, but Gossamer doesn't use weapons. (I mean, she has a dagger strapped to her thigh, but it's for emergencies.) Because we haven't had a proper canon/published dancer bard, I did my best with what I did have - and College of Swords took basically no homebrewing to make work.
Fighting Style
At 3rd level, you adopt a particular style of fighting as your specialty. Choose Dueling or Two-Weapon, but neither was really what I wanted. We swapped in the improved Unarmed Fighting from Tasha's Cauldron of Everything:
Unarmed Fighting: Your unarmed strikes deal 1d6 + Str damage, or 1d8 if you don't have a shield or weapon. At the start of your turn, you can deal 1d4 damage to a creature grappled by you.
Once she picked up her Belt of Hill Giant Strength, it was game on. The real magic started with her Blade Flourishes, though; per RAW, they must, of course, be executed with a weapon. But my DM and the table approved just hand-waving it and saying that Gossamer's flourishes were Unarmed Flourishes. She's dancing!
Blade Flourish
Whenever you take the Attack action on your turn, your walking speed increases by 10 feet until the end of the turn, and if a weapon attack that you make as part of this action hits a creature, you can use one of the following Blade Flourish options of your choice. You can use only one Blade Flourish option per turn.
Defensive Flourish. Expend one use of Bardic Inspiration to deal extra damage to the target you hit. The damage equals the number you roll on the Bardic Inspiration die. You also add the number rolled to your AC until the start of your next turn.
Slashing Flourish. Expend one use of Bardic Inspiration to deal extra damage to the target you hit and to any other creature of your choice that you can see within 5 feet of you. The damage equals the number you roll on the Bardic Inspiration die.
Mobile Flourish. Expend one use of Bardic Inspiration to deal extra damage to the target you hit. The damage equals the number you roll on the Bardic Inspiration die. You can also push the target up to 5 feet away from you, plus a number of feet equal to the number you roll on that die. You can then immediately use your reaction to move up to your walking speed to an unoccupied space within 5 feet of the target.
It's easy to see how and why these are sword-fighting maneuvers, but they work just as well if you imagine she's:
Hitting hard, then dancing out of reach
Hitting hard, then twirling to unexpectedly strike a second target
Hitting hard, then using her momentum to basically dance her opponent away for a touch of battlefield control
Now, with Kinetic Jaunt on her spell list, she can also move without provoking opportunity attacks and move through the spaces of other creatures without it counting as difficult terrain. She's no monk, but she's got mobility options. Throw up a Mirror Image and watch her turn any combat into a game of you can't catch me!
Steel Wind Strike is great flavor because it allows her to target up to five creatures in rapid succession for 6d10 force damage each, then teleport to an unoccupied space within 5 feet of one of her targets, whether she hit or missed. This is perfect for a moment of Gossamer, with Flash-like speed, dancing through a big group of enemies and wrecking shop.
And finally, the equivalent of her ult is Tenser's Transformation. She can't cast any other spells while she's in full magical girl mode, but she:
Gains 50 temp HP
Has advantage on her attack rolls
When she hits a target, they take an extra 2d12 force damage
Her Strength and Con saves are boosted
Can still use her Blade Flourishes and class features, so you KNOW she is spamming Defensive Flourish for that extra attack damage, extra 2d12 force damage, and extra buff to her AC all in one turn
By RAW, the only languages Gossamer should have had at start were Common and Infernal because the Entertainer background doesn't grant any extras. This got a little complicated by virtue of her being a Menzoberranzan native, so I swapped in Undercommon and Elvish (Drowic). Fortunately, a lot of the party took Undercommon (I call that an appropriate level of metagaming when you know that you are preparing for an Underdark campaign), so the language barrier issues were minimal.
She would eventually go on to learn Common (she's been on the surface for six years by the start of BG3), but it's extremely obvious that she has a Drowic accent. Specifically a rather posh one. I can't imagine she ever cared to study Infernal, though; she has virtually no connection with that side of herself, and is not especially curious.
