Choosing a Class¶
Every hero in the lands beyond the Mists leads in their own way. Some command soldiers, some fight alone, some stand between the danger and everyone else. Your class is the shape of that: what you bring to a fight, and how it feels to be the one bringing it.
Read these for the feeling first. Pick the hero you want to be, not the one that looks strongest on paper, because every class here is built to carry its own kind of legend. Each name links to its full rules, and you do not need them to choose.
The Chancellor¶
You are a commander who wins by giving orders, not by swinging a sword. You field the largest force in the game, and each turn you choose: add your own weak attack, or hold it back to command instead, slowing an enemy, turning a blow aside, or speeding your whole line. The thrill is the rare turn when the entire army acts twice at once, as if the order reached every soldier in the same instant.
The Errant¶
You fight alone. You command no soldiers and have nothing to hide behind, and that is the point of you: nothing stands between you and the enemy's blades. Your power is a single die that grows as it succeeds, each good roll earning another and bigger roll, so one lucky turn can build into a storm of blows from a single fighter. The thrill is that snowball, the run where you fight like an army of one.
The Knight¶
You are a sworn knight, and you lead soldiers who trust you. You are not the best fighter among them, and you do not need to be, because your household fights as one body: when you tell them to hold a line, they hold it, and the enemy breaks against it instead. The thrill is the moment the charge lands together and the enemy's formation simply comes apart. Your Oaths are the heart of it, sworn promises that make you stronger where they apply and cost you something real if you break them.
The Ranger¶
You are a patient hunter who turns waiting into a weapon. Every round the enemy fails to land a hit on you, you bank Focus, and you spend that Focus to turn your own worst dice into guaranteed hits with no gamble at all. You are the one fighter who trades luck away for certainty, and the thrill is the clean, sure strike that patience earns.
The Sage¶
You are the one who has already seen how this goes. You keep a small circle and fight poorly, and it does not matter, because your power is over the dice themselves: you spend hard-won Insight to reroll a bad throw, nudge a die a single face, or catch a push the instant before it busts, and once a fight you can watch a roll happen and simply decide that it did not. Where the Squire makes an ally's best moment bigger, you make their worst moment never happen. The thrill is Predict Fate: naming the moment, watching it fall wrong, and quietly rewriting it.
The Skirmisher¶
You lead a loose band that fights scattered instead of in a line. Your people strike from every direction at once, so the enemy has five separate threats to answer instead of one shieldwall, and where every other leader pays to spread out, you never do. The thrill is slipping a hit clean past the enemy's guards to the leader giving the orders.
The Squire¶
You command no one, and you own no company. Instead you attach yourself to another hero and make them better than they could be alone: your signature is a small, perfect nudge that pushes one of an ally's dice up a face, turning a near-miss into the exact roll that completes their biggest move. In time you learn to catch an ally the very moment they would fall. The thrill is being the quiet reason someone else's best moment happened at all.
The Witch¶
You channel a power that was never fully yours and does not always answer the way you want. You bank the dice that miss, the ones every other fighter simply wastes, and store them as Mana to spend on curses, walls of fog, and sudden storms that bend the battlefield to your will. The thrill is the uncanny turn when your two worst dice are exactly what fuel the working and carry a curse clean through an enemy's guard.
Designer's notes
These are pitches, not full rules. Each is written to answer one question, what is it like to play this, so a new player can commit to a class and feel good doing it. The complete mechanics for each class live on its own page. The first release ships with these eight classes; the roster is not meant to be exhaustive, and playtest feedback on which of these read as exciting and which fall flat is welcome.
Changelog
- 2026-08-09: Reworded the designer's note from "this is a quickstart" to "the first release ships with these eight classes," matching the project-wide scope reframe.
- 2026-08-04: Added the Sage pitch, filling the seat left by the deprecated Warden.
- 2026-08-04: Removed the Warden pitch; the class is deprecated pending a replacement.
- 2026-08-04: Alphabetized the classes and linked each heading to its class page.
- 2026-08-04: Created. One-paragraph pitch for each of the eight classes, written in the Explanation voice (see design/voices.md).