Priest Guild Specialties¶
Blitz Eternal: Adventures Beyond the Mists — v0.4 Draft¶
The Priest Guild's mechanical layer: the Opening Ability granted on joining, the Verbum resource, and the Specialties a Priest Guild Character can buy afterward. The Guild's vocation, its Faith and Domain flavor choices, and its rank lore live in setting/guilds. How joining a Guild and buying its Specialties works is in character-creation, Advancement.
Opening Ability¶
A blessing, not a heal. Once per rest, grant an ally one extra die (+1d6) on their next roll.
Verbum¶
Power granted through devotion rather than personal force, drawn from a Priest's own followers rather than from the Priest alone. A Retainer in a Priest Character's Company may Pray instead of fighting on their turn. This contributes no die to the Company's Pool that turn, the same state as a Retainer who is Disarmed or out of range (core-rules, Part Eight), except freely chosen rather than forced. Praying requires no roll: each praying Retainer simply generates 1 Verbum, banked immediately and available for the Priest to spend right away. Verbum accumulates across a fight and resets between fights, the same convention as the Witch's Mana. What Verbum can be spent on is a growing list of Priest abilities; the first real sink is Reclaimed by the Mist, below. Further Verbum abilities are tracked in open-questions.
Guild Retainer¶
Joining the Guild grants the right to recruit a Priest Retainer into your Company (companies-and-command, Part Five). It uses the Shieldbearer base stat line and advances as a Shieldbearer (companies-and-command, Part Three); the Guild adds one perk. Once per fight, in place of its own attack, it may restore 1 Hit Point to an adjacent wounded ally. It can also Pray in place of fighting to generate Verbum, exactly like any Retainer in a Priest's Company (see Verbum, above).
The wound-reverse is deliberately smaller than The Priest's Hand, below: no revival, no reach beyond adjacency. That gap is the point. Recruiting a Priest Retainer is a meaningful earlier step on the way to earning The Priest's Hand as a Specialty, not a replacement for it. Provisional and untested.
Specialties¶
The Priest's Hand¶
3 Advancement Points. The Priest-rank Specialty: reaching Priest on the Guild's clergy ladder (see setting/guilds, Priest) is what earning it represents in the fiction, so it doubles as this Guild's Priest-rank Specialty rather than needing a second name.
Effect. Instead of rolling their own personal die this turn, the caster may fully restore one ally: reversing a wound on a standing combatant, or fully reviving a Fallen combatant, Retainer or Character, so long as it fell during the current battle and that battle has not yet ended. The cost is the caster's personal die only; the rest of their Company still rolls normally. A revived combatant does not act the turn it returns; it resumes contributing on the caster's next turn.
Open question. Whether reviving a Fallen Character with The Priest's Hand also refunds the Life that Fall cost. Logged in open-questions.
High Priest Ability: Reclaimed by the Mist¶
[PLAYTEST] Not a routine Advancement purchase but the power the High Priest rank confers, the way The Priest's Hand represents reaching Priest. High Priest is a singular, campaign-scale position (see setting/guilds, Priest). Reimagined from the Legends Sage's Breath of Time (an in-combat heal-and-reset) and re-themed onto Hynafol's own cosmology: the High Priest borrows, early, the mercy the Mists normally grant only between fights.
Flavor. You open your hands and the Mists answer, not with mercy earned but with mercy borrowed. Your people are made whole where they stand, wounds closing as if the fight had already ended. The Mists always collect what they lend.
Effect. No more than once per Combat, as your Action, call the Mists to reclaim the still-standing: every ally and Retainer within a set range is restored to full Hit Points and freed of every Condition (Weakened, Slowed, Stunned, Blinded), exactly as the Mists close wounds between fights (core-rules, Part Thirteen). It does not raise the Fallen; it saves those not yet down.
Cost, deliberately heavy. Two prices, both paid every time. First, spend a large sum of banked Verbum (a threshold set high enough that the Priest's Retainers must have Prayed rather than fought to fuel it); this is the first real Verbum sink, the growing list of Verbum abilities begun here. Second, each use marks one step of the deity's claim: after the third use across the Character's whole life, the deity consumes the Priest, an Avatar's end, and the Character is claimed by the Mists and removed from play, the campaign-scale beat the High Priest rank already carries. This is a first concrete answer to the logged corruption-cost question, not a settled one; the Verbum threshold and the three-use ceiling both need calibration. See sage-migration.md and open-questions.
Changelog
- 2026-08-06: Added the Guild Retainer section (base stat line, advancement, the heal perk, and its Verbum Pray option), moved here from companies-and-command, Part Five, including the design note on why its wound-reverse is smaller than The Priest's Hand.
- 2026-08-05: Created. Priest Guild mechanics (Opening Ability, Verbum, The Priest's Hand, Reclaimed by the Mist) gathered here from setting/guilds and magic-and-mists as part of the per-Guild Specialties split. The Priest's Hand relocation, long flagged in magic-and-mists, is now complete.