I know there is a druid template in the shaman class. But some folks have been asking for a druid class so I created one, ACKS-style. They’re more tree and green focused than the shaman class. They’re also less restorative and contemplative and a bit more feisty, with some elementalist thrown in. The spells are taken from ACKS, modified from the 3.5 SRD, and a few re-flavored from 1st Edition.
Edit: Reworked the druid’s 5th level shapechange ability a bit. They can choose more forms than a shaman but have a set number of times they can change, their form size and power is limited by Hit Dice, and their to-hit throws are limited to the HD of the form they’ve taken. It makes a druid’s shapechange much, much less useful in combat, but more useful for evasion, scouting, etc. I also pared down the spell list to 10 spells per level.
Second, I attempted to create rules for a druid’s Circle in a wilderness domain that stays a wilderness domain. Since the player will have a lot of land and no money from populations, I tried to allow druids the potential to draw significant divine power from the land if they keep it in balance and settle creatures in their domain that help them do that. Folks with better math skills might be able to help me balance it in a real way.
I quickly skimmed it (will give a thorough look later)… I’ve never been a fan of the druid class, but this one looks very interesting. A couple things pop out at me:
predicting the weather seems like it would be a class ability rather than a spell (maybe a proficiency throw?)
I would work hard at getting the spell lists down to 10 spells somehow. For example, having different circles of druids with slightly different spell lists
Thanks for the feedback. I actually did a little work on the druid’s shapechange ability to make it broader in scope but weaker in power than the shaman ability (the druid’s shapechange was 2 points compared to the shaman’s 1 point cost - and now I’d say the druid is a 1.5 point ability), which I think gave me the build room to add a limited range predict weather spell-like ability.
As for the spells, I did some painful cutting and pared it all down to 10 spells per level, so spell-wise the character class is balanced with other Divine 2 casters.
I have not yet read your druid; I plan to do that in the future, but for now, note that I haven’t read it.
What I did for a druid domain when I was looking at them for Dark Sun was to say that you would continue to roll for population growth and have a land value and so on, and in terms of mechanics, their income would be identical to whatever it would normally be with the settlers. However, they would get it in divine power rather than GP, because there aren’t actually any settlers here.
It could probably be abstracted out another level, since you don’t have to actually pay garrisons or taxes or any of the like, you could boil it down to just a flat GP per unit (which would end up being a multiple of the land value).
It seems somewhat similar to how you describe yours, but I had assumed that druids would actively want to keep all sentients off the land (except fellow druids, henchmen, and the like).
That seems like a pretty simple and interesting take on it. I might default to that if my head explodes from my own method. But yeah the result is the same - smaller population and income from settlement balanced out by a wellspring of divine power.
I’m trying to encourage a balancing system with druids, where they can have some (small) settlement as long as it’s balanced out with dangerous wilds. I’m hoping to establish a system where druids populate hexes with monster lairs much like a mage would populate a dungeon and gain divine power from that. So there might be a hamlet on the outskirts of one end of their domain balanced by a tribe of centaurs in another region. Or a goblin lair balanced by an aerie of giant eagles. Unlike Alex and others on this forum, my imagination is not fertilized by my math skills and excel chart-making ability - much to my detriment.
Ooh, I like that. Mages would set up dungeons, and druids would set up wilderness lairs. There’s a symmetry there, and it ties back into world-building the same way a mage’s dungeons do.
Actively populating the hex with druidy sorts of monsters to keep the domain from graduating to borderlands, that’s ridiculously fun. Hell, reducing a stronghold to rubble and driving out the peasantry so you can install a centaur lair in the ruins, that’s glorious right there.
You’re unsecuring the domain, essentially. Alex gives some guidance to lairs-per-hex here:
As to what the Druid could get out of it, perhaps that can vary by monster treasure type? Incidental may flow up to the druid as it’s collected (the druid picks out an interesting sword left in the hippogriff nest); hoarders would give up some percentage as income (the local dryad hands of a pretty gem whenever she next sees the druid) I’d have to look at who has Raider treasure to see how many aren’t druid-compatible.
It’d probably be keyed off of wandering monster tables indicating some adventuring party just got owlbear’d or an off-course merchant caravan tried to make firewood out of a treant, so it wouldn’t be steady income.
Tie that back into divine/ovatic power gain for magical resource so that the druid doesn’t have to harvest her lairs.
Hm. There’s some interesting reverse-dungeon themes in there. I could see a whole subsystem to support the solo play of a druid reclaiming wildlands from the gauntleted grip of civilization.
