The Chancellor¶

Class Document — Adventures Beyond the Mists

Level 1 at a glance¶

Personal die: 1 at Rabble (6 only), fixed; it never becomes 2.
Signature live now: Grand Muster (Set, a full second Pool action), Straight (a free command effect while fighting), the five command effects (Redirect, Anchor, Pacify, Mark, Field Command), Fight-or-Command each turn. (The third Split Cap unlocks at Level 5.)
Fielded Command Capacity: 6. Reserve: 2, off the fielded line. Split Cap: 2. Lieutenants: 2, automatically at Bond 2.
Starting Pool: 7 dice fighting (1 personal + 6 Retainers), or 6 when withholding a die for a command effect.
Hit Points: 3 base, plus armor (the shallowest Card in the game, by design).
Starting Specialties: 3 Advancement Points on the Chancellor's Level 1 menu, priced by tier. Extended Command is the signature pick (see Lieutenants).

Flavor

The sword is not the weapon. The order is.

You have never been the best fighter on any field you have stood on, and you have made a kind of peace with that. What you are is the one who sees the whole shape of a battle before anyone else does — where the line will bend, which flank is thin, which order given now saves three lives given later. Other Characters lead by example, blade in hand at the front of the charge. You lead by attention. Your household does not need to watch you fight. It needs to hear you think.

In the Known World, you might be a chancellor in truth — a court official who has learned that command is its own kind of weapon — or a quartermaster who somehow ended up running the whole campaign, or an aging captain whose knees gave out years before their judgment did. In Hynafol, that same instinct commands the largest household any hero can field. You are rarely at risk personally. You are almost always the reason everyone else survives the day.

There is a cost to this, even if it rarely shows in a wound. Every soldier under your command is there because you asked them to be, and every order is a debt you carry whether or not it comes due. When the whole army moves at once, as if time itself made room for the order to reach every ear simultaneously, you will remember it as the best day of the campaign. When an order goes wrong, you will remember that too, and no sword-arm will ever make up for it.

Mechanics

This document assumes familiarity with Core Resolution (the shared Pool, hit ranges, and the bank-and-push loop), Wounds and Fatigue (Hit Points, wound direction, death and return), and Command Capacity (Company size and Bond). Only what is specific to the Chancellor is detailed below.

Command Capacity and the Reserve

The Chancellor fields 6 Retainers in a battle, the largest fielded Company in the game, and this number does not grow. It is fixed at 6 on purpose: the Grand Muster (below) reads a Set off the battle Pool, and a Set grows more common as the Pool grows, so letting the fielded force climb would make the class's rare signature routine. Six is the ceiling that keeps the Muster rare.

What grows instead is the Reserve. A Chancellor commands more Retainers than they field, a roster that expands on the Level ladder (see the Level Table), and composes each battle's force of 6 freely from that roster between fights. The general commands an army; only part deploys to any one engagement. This lets the class keep growing its command, adding soldiers, swapping compositions, keeping fresh troops in hand, without ever enlarging the battle Pool the Grand Muster depends on.

The Reserve is a field-scale asset. It exists in open campaigns, sieges, and battles where a force has a rear to hold troops in. It is simply not available where the Chancellor has gone somewhere their army cannot follow: an underground barrow, a sealed tomb, any place a full Company physically cannot enter (see travel-and-hex-scale). A Chancellor in an enclosed site fights with the small detachment they brought and no Reserve, the same way every Company is left at the mouth of the barrow. That is the general out of their element, the mirror of the Errant and Squire finally being in theirs, and it is a feature of the setting rather than a limitation to design around.

A Chancellor's Company is typically large and mixed rather than built around any single Retainer role, reflecting a force assembled and organized by someone who thinks about logistics and numbers first, rather than a household built around one preferred fighting style.

Lieutenants

A great commander's inner circle become veterans without being told to. The Chancellor maintains a number of named lieutenants equal to their Split Cap: 2 at the start, rising to 3 and then 4 (see Split Cap and the Level Table). Each lieutenant sits automatically at Bond 2, Distinguished and Sharper Edge, at no Advancement Point cost. This is the class's compensation for its deliberately small point pool (see the Level Table): where other Characters buy Bond, the Chancellor's officers earn it by serving under a commander who knows how to make veterans.

Because the lieutenant count is defined as equal to Split Cap, any effect that raises Split Cap raises the lieutenant count with it. Extended Command, taken at creation, is the case that matters at Level 1: it lifts Split Cap from 2 to 3, so a Chancellor who buys it fields a third acting Detachment and gains a third automatic Bond-2 lieutenant along with it. This is intended, and it is why Extended Command is a Tier 3 pick that costs the whole 3-point starting budget. It front-loads the Split Cap increase the ladder grants at Level 5 rather than stacking with it; whether an early buyer should instead reach Split Cap 4 sooner is logged in open-questions.

The automatic grant stops at Bond 2. Pushing a lieutenant to Bond 3 or 4 costs Advancement Points like anyone's, or grows organically in play. And the grant is bounded to the lieutenant count on purpose: automatically Bonding the whole Company to 2 would hand all six Retainers Sharper Edge at once, a Company-wide Hit Range boost, which is exactly the runaway mechanic this class was built to avoid (see Design Decisions). Capping the automatic Bonds at the lieutenant count, which tops out at 4 of the 6, keeps the benefit real but bounded.

Personal Die

1 personal die, fixed. Unlike most classes, this does not become 2 dice after character creation — the Chancellor is a deliberate exception to that general rule, alongside the Errant. Hit range is Rabble (6 only), the narrowest in the game. This Character can fight personally, and sometimes should, but they are not particularly effective at it, and the class's numbers are calibrated around that being true rather than a flaw to work around.

Fight or Command — A Real Choice Each Turn

On any given turn, the Chancellor chooses one of two things to do with their personal die. It may join the Company's Pool as a normal, if weak, attacker. Or it may be withheld entirely, spent instead to activate one of the five command effects below. This choice is made fresh each turn — there is no default, and no requirement to choose the same way twice in a row.

When the personal die is withheld, the Company's Pool for that turn consists of Retainer dice only. When it joins the fight, the Pool includes the personal die alongside the Retainers, as normal.

Command Effects

Each of the following costs the Chancellor's withheld personal die for the turn. Only one may be activated per turn. Each produces a fixed, predictable effect: none of them scale with Company size, and none require a roll of their own. The first four target a single enemy; the fifth, Field Command, targets the Chancellor's own Company.

Redirect

Declare on an enemy now. The next attack that enemy makes this round lands on a Retainer of the Chancellor's choosing instead of its intended target. Expires unused at the start of the Chancellor's next turn.

Anchor

Applies Slowed to one enemy: Speed reduced to 0 for the round. They may still act, but cannot move, reposition, or disengage. Named Root until 2026-07-30, when the name was freed for the Mage Guild's Root Component of Ritual magic; see retired-mechanics.

Pacify

Applies Weakened to one enemy: hit range narrows by one tier for the round.

Design note: because Pacify now applies the named Weakened Condition (see core-rules, Part Nine), it carries its own clear start and end rather than being a bespoke hit-range edit a table has to remember to revert. This resolves the bookkeeping risk flagged below in Design Decisions; the fix that was "deliberately left unresolved" there has been superseded by the Conditions system.

Mark

Choose one enemy. The first hit the Company lands against that target this round deals 1 additional damage. This applies once per round, regardless of how many hits ultimately land against the target.

Field Command

The entire Company gains +2 Speed this turn. Like the other four effects it costs the withheld personal die, activates only one per turn, requires no roll, and does not scale with Company size. Unlike the other four, its target is the Chancellor's own Company rather than an enemy, which is what makes it reliably useful in every fight.

Design note: this is the fifth command effect the class's Growth Potential reserved a slot for, filling the space Break Guard left. It was chosen against the lesson from Break Guard's removal, that a new effect needs a reliably present target rather than one gated behind a specific enemy Retainer role. A Company movement order always has a target, because the target is the Chancellor's own force, and it reuses the movement-only safe axis (companies-and-command, Part One) so it cannot scale into the runaway Company-wide buff the class was built to avoid. Migrated from the Legends Diplomat's Flow formation; see diplomat-migration.md. [PLAYTEST] Whether a pure Speed order earns a whole withheld die alongside the four sharper single-target effects, and whether +2 is the right value, both need the same probability and value pass applied to the other effects. Deploy with this flagged as provisional and gather live data before finalizing.

The Grand Muster (Set)

Once in a great while, the whole army seems to move as if time bent for them.

When a Set (four or more matching dice) appears in whichever Pool was rolled this turn — whether the personal die was withheld or joined the fight — the Chancellor's entire Company gains a second, full Pool action this same turn. This affects only the Chancellor's own Company; no other Character's turn is touched, and no face value or damage formula is involved beyond a normal second roll of the full Pool.

When the Company is split into Detachments, the Muster reads a Set off the Chancellor's own lead Detachment, the one holding the personal die; when the die is withheld for a command effect, it reads the largest Detachment. Either way the Muster reads a bounded Pool, no matter how the force is split or how large the Reserve behind it grows.

Straight — Command in the Flow

The Grand Muster is not the only pattern the Chancellor reads. When the Chancellor fights (does not withhold the personal die) and a Straight, three or more consecutive dice, appears in the Pool, they may activate one command effect for free, without having withheld their die for it. This is the well-drilled army executing an order in the middle of the fighting, so the Chancellor both strikes and commands in the same turn.

This applies only in fighting mode. If the Chancellor withheld their die for a command effect this turn, they are already commanding, and a Straight adds nothing. The point of the pattern is to give fighting mode a command effect it otherwise lacks, so that choosing to fight is not simply the weaker option, without ever letting the Chancellor command twice in one turn.

[PLAYTEST] A Straight fires often at the Chancellor's Pool of 6 or 7 (roughly 58% to 72%), so a fighting Chancellor will frequently earn a free effect. Deploy this flagged as provisional: if a near-guaranteed free command effect makes fighting mode strictly better than withholding, gate it (once per Combat, or to a subset of the effects) after live data.

The Pair remains unread by this class, left open for a future effect.

Split Cap

Starts at 2, the default, and rises to 3 at Level 5 and 4 at Level 9 (see the Level Table). This is the Chancellor's clearest growth: a veteran fields three, then four, simultaneously-acting Detachments where every other class is capped at two, letting a large force strike on more fronts at once. It is completely safe for the Grand Muster, because the Muster reads a Set off the Chancellor's own lead Detachment (the one holding the personal die), not the whole splayed-out Company, so more Detachments never inflate the Muster's rate.

Split Cap also sets the Chancellor's lieutenant count (see Lieutenants): 2, then 3, then 4 named officers at automatic Bond 2.

Hit Points

3 at First Level, before armor, the shallowest personal Card in the game. Armor adds on top: Light +1, Medium +2, Heavy +3. This is the class's baseline under the Level 1 Hit Point table (see character-creation.md, Hit Point baselines).

Design note: the baseline runs inverse to how much a Company can soak. The Chancellor commands the largest force in the game, splits it, and fights almost entirely through officers and Retainers, so the least damage of any class reaches the Character in person; the personal Card sits at the bottom of the range at 3. A Chancellor caught in melee alone is in real trouble, which is the intended shape of the class. [PLAYTEST] The gradient is chosen, not yet confirmed in live combat.

Worked Example

A Chancellor commands a Company of 6 Trained Retainers (hitting 5-6).

On one turn, the Chancellor withholds their personal die to cast Pacify against an enemy Veteran-tier captain, dropping them to Trained for the round. The Company's Pool this turn is the 6 Retainer dice only. They roll 6, 5, 5, 4, 3, 2 — three hits (the 6 and both 5s). No Set. The turn ends normally, three hits dealt, the enemy captain weakened for whatever comes next.

Later in the same fight, with the captain already dealt with, the Chancellor decides to fight personally rather than cast. Their Pool is now 7 dice: 6 Retainers plus their own Rabble-range personal die. They roll 6, 6, 6, 6, 5, 4, 3. Five of these hit — four Retainer dice showing 6 or 5, plus the personal die (which happened to show one of the 6s). Four matching 6s among the seven dice is a Set. The Grand Muster triggers.

The full 7-die Pool is rolled again as a second action this same turn: 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 1. Two hits this time (the 6 and the 5). Combined with the five hits from the first roll, this turn deals seven hits total — more than double what either roll produced alone, entirely on the strength of one lucky Set.

Level 1 Starting Specialties¶

The menu a first-level Chancellor spends its 3 starting Advancement Points on. Costs are the standard Specialty tiers (see character-creation, Starting Specialties): universal picks are open to any Character, picks marked (exclusive) are this Class's own, and a requirement in parentheses must be met. Spend the 3 points however you like across the menu: one Tier 3 pick, a Tier 2 plus a Tier 1, or three Tier 1s.

Extended Command (3, exclusive) — Split Cap 2 to 3, and with it a third automatic Bond-2 lieutenant; the signature pick, and the whole budget (see Lieutenants).
Hold the Line (2) — wider cohesion, so his large Company acts as one Pool.
Encourage (2, Presence Trained) — hand an ally +1d6 on a roll.
Standard Bearer's Word (2) — clears the Conditions his own Pacify and Anchor impose, and monster ones.
Bonded (1) — sense all six Retainers; feeds the fall-back-to-a-lieutenant rule.
Reopen the Question (1) — reopen a settled matter out of combat.
To the Rescue (3, exclusive) — deploy Reserve reinforcements mid-battle (see Growth Potential).
The Whole Line Moves (2, requires the Commander's Mace Kit) — the whole Company gains +2 Speed.

To the Rescue now qualifies at Level 1 because the Chancellor holds Reserve 2 from the start; at 3 points it is the whole budget and only works where the field has reinforcements to send. The Whole Line Moves is listed but held: the Commander's Mace is a draft Kit, so the pick is unavailable until that Kit is confirmed, and a Chancellor on a confirmed Kit cannot take it yet.

Appendix

Design Decisions
Command effects redesigned from a flat Company-wide buff after the original version proved to scale out of control. An earlier draft let the withheld personal die grant a flat hit-range boost to the entire Company. Direct calculation showed this outperformed a Knight's personal die contribution even at equal Pool size, and grew worse as Command Capacity increased — the exact stat meant to define this class made the ability more broken, not more powerful in a controlled way. The four single-target command effects (Redirect, Anchor, Pacify, Mark) replaced this specifically because a fixed, single-target effect cannot scale with Company size the way a Company-wide multiplier can.
Break Guard was included, tested, and cut. An early fifth command effect removed or denied an enemy's banked Guard token. Testing showed it had no valid target in any fight without a Shieldbearer-equivalent enemy present, making it dead weight in most Combats. It was removed rather than reworked, on the view that four consistently useful effects serve the class better than five, one of which is frequently useless.
Personal die held at 1, breaking the universal 2-die-after-creation rule. As with the Errant, the Chancellor is a deliberate exception. The class's fighting-mode and withholding-mode Pool sizes (7 and 6 respectively) were calibrated assuming exactly 1 personal die; introducing a second would require recalculating both numbers and the Grand Muster's trigger rate. The class's intended growth path is Command Capacity and command-effect versatility, not personal dice.
Command Capacity set at 6, not the originally proposed 7, nor the requested 5. Direct calculation showed that a Command Capacity of 5 made the Grand Muster's trigger rate, when withholding, identical to the Knight's Charge (both roughly 2%) — erasing the entire point of Chancellor being built around a rarer, bigger payoff than a company one-third its size. At 6, the withholding-mode Set rate is roughly 5.2%, meaningfully higher than the Knight's, while still smaller than the original proposal of 7 (11%). This was the smallest number found that preserved real differentiation from the Knight.
Rabble hit range chosen deliberately, not as an afterthought. The personal die's weakness is load-bearing, not decorative — it ensures the Chancellor's fighting-mode choice is a genuine, usually inferior alternative to withholding, rather than a free bonus with no real trade-off attached.
Pacify's bookkeeping risk was raised and left unresolved. Because Pacify alters hit range — the single most frequently checked stat in the game, referenced on every die rolled against the affected enemy for the rest of the round — it is more likely than the other three effects to be accidentally left in place past its intended duration at an actual table. A fix (limiting the effect to the enemy's next single attack, matching Redirect's cleaner expiration) was proposed but deliberately not adopted, pending observation of whether this is a real problem in practice or a theoretical one.
Fielded Command Capacity fixed at 6; the army grows as a Reserve. Growing the fielded force would inflate the Grand Muster's Set rate, since a bigger battle Pool hits a Set more often, and the Muster (a full second Pool action) is far too large an effect to fire commonly. So the fielded force is capped at 6 and the class grows a Reserve instead: more Retainers commanded, composed and swapped between fights, deployed in combat only via To the Rescue. This lets the Chancellor keep growing its command without ever breaking its own signature, and it grounds the Reserve as a field-scale asset that an enclosed site simply denies.
Fewest Advancement Points, offset by automatic lieutenant Bonds. The Chancellor is the deliberate inverse of the Errant: the largest Company and about 15 points over a campaign rather than 23. The gap is covered by its lieutenants, a number equal to Split Cap, sitting at Bond 2 for free. The automatic Bonds are capped at the lieutenant count precisely to avoid the whole-Company Sharper Edge this class was built to avoid (see the first decision above); at most 4 of 6 Retainers are ever auto-Bonded.
Straight added as a second read, fighting mode only. The class read only Set. A Straight-granted free command effect gives fighting mode a reason to exist next to withholding, and it is scoped to fighting mode so the Chancellor can never command twice in a turn. Flagged provisional for frequency, since a Straight is common at this Pool size.
Testing Done and Pending

Two worked combats have exercised this class's kit directly.

Solo Hollow Knight test. Used Anchor and Pacify against a single tough enemy. Confirmed both effects function as written, though the fight resolved quickly enough that their impact read as incremental rather than dramatic — the fight would have taken only one additional round without them.
2v2 test against a Raider Captain and a Raider. Exercised Redirect (successfully protecting a nearly-fallen Retainer by forcing an incoming attack onto a fresher one) and Mark (a single bonus damage contributing to finishing an already-weakened target). Break Guard was attempted in an earlier version of this same test and found to have no valid target, leading directly to its removal.

Not yet tested:

The Grand Muster in live play. The worked example in this document is the first time a Set has actually been walked through with specific dice for this class. No prior test fight produced one.
Whether Pacify's bookkeeping risk materializes at an actual table. This requires observation during live play rather than further calculation.
The fight-or-command choice under real pressure. No test fight has yet put a Chancellor in a position where both fighting personally and withholding for a command effect were both clearly tempting — the choice has so far always had an obvious answer.
Level Table

Finalized. The Chancellor is the inverse of the Errant. Where the Errant has no Company and a large point pool, the Chancellor has the largest Company and the smallest point pool. It keeps the universal 100 XP per Level (see character-creation, Advancement). Its personal die never grows (1, at Rabble) and its fielded Command Capacity never grows (6), so the odd Levels grant command growth instead: the Reserve expanding, and Split Cap rising (which also raises the lieutenant count). Even Levels grant Advancement Points, and the Chancellor grants fewer than any other class, about 15 over a full arc versus the scaffold's 23. That is not a punishment; the class's power is its Company and command layer, both held in full from Level 1, and its lieutenants Bond automatically (see Lieutenants) where others must pay.

Level	Fixed class grant	AP granted	Cumulative AP (incl. 3 starting)	Field Cmd. Cap.	Reserve	Split Cap	Lieutenants
1	die at Rabble (6); five command effects; Fight-or-Command; Grand Muster (Set); Straight (free command effect while fighting)	3 (starting)	3	6	2	2	2
2	—	2	5	6	2	2	2
3	Reserve +2	—	5	6	4	2	2
4	—	2	7	6	4	2	2
5	Split Cap 3 (lieutenants 3)	—	7	6	4	3	3
6	—	2	9	6	4	3	3
7	Reserve +2	—	9	6	6	3	3
8	—	3	12	6	6	3	3
9	Split Cap 4 (lieutenants 4)	—	12	6	6	4	4
10	—	3	15	6	6	4	4

A full arc to Level 10 grants 15 Advancement Points, the fewest in the game, spent on Guild, gear, Skills, pushing lieutenants past Bond 2, and the class's own Specialties such as To the Rescue (see Growth Potential). Field Command Capacity holds at 6 throughout so the Grand Muster stays rare; the army behind it grows as a Reserve, from 2 extra Retainers at Level 1 to 6 by Level 7, so the Chancellor commands 12 in total while fielding 6. Split Cap and the lieutenant count rise together, at Levels 5 and 9. The exact point amounts and Reserve figures are a playtest dial; the shape, fixed field size, growing Reserve, rising Split Cap, automatic lieutenants, and a lean point pool, is the finalized decision.

Growth Potential
Split Cap raised to 3, and to 4. Realized on the Level ladder rather than left as a floated idea: Split Cap rises to 3 at Level 5 and 4 at Level 9, the class's clearest growth, a veteran Chancellor fielding three then four simultaneously-acting Detachments where every other class is capped at two. It also drives the lieutenant count.
To the Rescue. A class Specialty (3 Advancement Points). Once per Combat, when half or more of your fielded Retainers have Fallen, deploy a fresh Detachment of Reserve Retainers, up to 3 but never more than the current Reserve holds (so at most 2 at Level 1, and the full 3 only once the Reserve has grown), within 10 squares of you; they act from your next turn. The dramatic, gated, in-combat face of the Reserve, reinforcements arriving in the nick of time. Available only where the fiction has reinforcements to send, which the GM adjudicates by the same field-scale logic that governs the Reserve itself (see Command Capacity and the Reserve); in a sealed tomb, no one is coming.
A fifth command effect, chosen carefully. Filled 2026-08-01 by Field Command (see Command Effects above), a Company movement order migrated from the Legends Diplomat's Flow formation. It was chosen precisely against the lesson from Break Guard's removal, that any new effect needs a reliably present target rather than one gated behind a specific enemy Retainer role: a Company movement order always has a target, since it targets the Chancellor's own force. Deployed provisional, pending the probability and value pass noted with the effect itself.
Widening the personal die's hit range slightly, at real cost. Given how deliberately weak Rabble tier is, a later feature might let the Chancellor spend something meaningful — a Life, or a permanent reduction to Command Capacity — to fight at a wider range for a single Combat, framed as a rare moment where the general personally takes up arms at real risk to the whole army's leadership.
A resolution to the Pacify bookkeeping question. Once live play shows whether this is a real problem, either tighten the effect to match Redirect's single-attack expiration, or formalize a clear table reminder as part of the rules text itself.