Third-Partystravaganza 8: Spectral Dancer (Bard Archetype; Frog God Games)
While most bards do enjoy the limelight, there are those that prefer solitude and more somber settings that the typical bard. Certainly we’ve seen this before in the dirge bard and sorrowsoul bards. However, while dirge bards make the dead dance and sorrowsouls use their personal connection to pain to achieve stronger, personal effects, the spectral dancers in today’s entry focus on dealing with death and the dead in their own way, some striking out against them, while others allying with them, sharing in their torment and loneliness.
It is these spectral dancers that wander in forgotten and forsaken places, communing with the dead, destroying those that cannot be reasoned with, and enlisting the aid of those who can. They often adorn their bodies in various ways to symbolize their defiance of living convention, such as white makeup or facepaint, tattoos of macabre subjects, and even various piercings of bone or other symbols of memento mori.
Regardless, it is these bards that speak to the dead, unnerving most others around them.
Like many bard archetypes, they learn a handful of unique performances. One allows them to charge a weapon with morality-based energies, to better strike foes of the opposing philosophy.
Another allows the incorporeal to dance among those with flesh, forcing them into physical space to be more easily harmed by weapons.
Finally, they can use their performance to call upon a ghostly warrior to fight for them. It is implied that this warrior is some ghostly spirit that the dancer has previously befriended.
Versed as they are in the afterlife, they can quite adeptly recognize various undead and outsiders alike.
Similarly, that knowledge helps them stave off the powers of such beings, though this does not apply to outsiders that did not arise from mortal souls.
Later on, these bards learn the secrets of channeling energy, but in a limited way, either damaging or healing undead, never affecting the living. As such they might be destroyers of undead, or those that support them.
Looking for an interesting way to make a bard that deals with the dead? This archetype can certainly serve well in that regard. They might be allies acting as anti-undead support, or they could be supporting the undead themselves, either as antagonists to the party or allies. I would probably recommend a finesse, flank, and feint build for this archetype, though feel free to experiment.
While not necessarily evil, it’s pretty clear their atypical philosophy towards the dead will not make them many friends among the clergy of many gods, who may not differentiate them from actual practitioners of necromancy. This likely causes them to reject those religions, though a few may find it worthwhile to try and endear themselves to the religious.
Many times, the victims of the soul-tearing bite of an amarok arise as spectral dead or phantoms, their souls cast adrift by the otherwise bloodless assault. This prevalence attracts plenty of mystics seeking to help the dead, including the spectral dancers, whom help the dead to pass on by reminding them of how it felt to live, to dance, to be free of pain and trauma.
In ogre culture, there typically isn’t much consideration given to the dead. Funeral rites and cooking instructions go hand in hand for most. However, ogres recognize and fear the existence of the restless dead, and often employ “Ghost-Beaters”, pariah tribe members marked by skeletal paint and bellowing various chants to empower themselves against the dead, both spiritual and corporeal.
Always considered a barely-tolerated deviant even by bard standards, Sherid surrounds themselves in imagry of death and ruin, composing dirges and lays fit for funerals and forgotten places. Despite being thought of as blasphemer by the church and bohemian radical by the wider community, their art has its fans, and now they are on the verge of a breakthrough, a bardic masterpiece of their own design, in the form of a totentanz, a dance of death.
