Hmmm, if it's going to have bullywugs and dinosaurs as races I can only assume that we're going to see classes for ninjas and pirates.
Close. The new power source is Dramatic Convention, whose classes have powers based around narrative tropes and fantasy cliches.
There's the
Mememancer, a controller whose primary mechanic is that each of his powers is viral. Whenever a creature you hit with your last power comes within 2 squares of another enemy, part of the initial power spreads to the next creature. Usually there's only one cascade like this for each attack, but you get an encounter ability, Gone Viral, which causes a single power to keep cascading as long as there are unsullied enemies within the meme's range.
It has two builds: Funny and Wrong. The funny build lets you conjure various incarnations of lolcats - walls of longcat, psychic attacks with ceilingcat, forced movement with cheezeburgercat, and of course simple summons who get in your base and kill your mans - as well as higher level options like ORLY which can simply counter an opponent's attack.
The wrong build does lots of psychic and necrotic damage. I won't explain quite how, but if you search on the internet you can find out.
There are shared daily powers, like "This Is . . ." which depending on your build either becomes Madness, or Caketown. A personal favorite is "Flame War," a burst which causes creatures it hits to attack their allies. It's save ends, but every time a creature currently under its effect hits you, you get inflamed again, and the condition spreads to you.
Here's a quick video explaining how one of the
more annoying powers works.
Another class is the
Battletrope, a leader with three builds that hew towards different roles. The main mechanic, Enforced Tension, lets the PC influence the dramatic rising action of the battle. The battletrope can't do much when his team is winning, but his powers grow stronger as his side gets into deeper s***.
Their tension meter goes up or down based on the number of healing surges the party, who many PCs are bloodied, and how many XP worth of monsters are still active. When the meter is higher the battletrope starts to give his allies access to the powers Do Something Cool, and later on Do Something Awesome, which a PC can trigger by spending a healing surge.
Build one is the fanboy, a defender. At the beginning of combat, and again when your tension meter gets to halfway, and again at full, you choose between two possible Opinions. One Opinion is that 'It's Awesome,' which grants a shared temporary hit point shield among the party each round (because things are so cool, you ignore any minor problems like getting shot with arrows). The amount of shield per round is based on your tension meter. The other Opinion is that 'It Sucks,' which grants you and your allies tension meter-based bonuses to attacks and damage (because you hate this so much you want to destroy everything).
Build two is the pirate, a striker, which is totally awesome. They actually move faster across difficult terrain, and can increase their Tension meter by running away and appearing to abandon the party, only to make a dramatic return at just the right moment. They're the only class allowed to use guns. One of their powers - I Like Explosions - lets them shoot anything even slightly technological or magical, and make it explode.
Additionally, when you choose this build, you receive a copy of the PHB4 in pdf format, plus 50 free mp3s.
Build three is the ninjae, a controller. Yes,
ninjae, the inappropriate Latin pluralizing of ninja. In this build, you're a master ninja, but you can spawn ninja minions who appear out of nowhere in droves. As long as you have ninjae minions on the board, you are invisible and cannot attack unless a creature attacks you first, in which case you chop it up and teleport away. You're too cool to enter battle until you're the last ninja standing (and your tension meter is high enough).
At that point, you Flip Out and Kill People.
While flipping out and killing people, you produce an aura around you, and any creature that enters the aura takes damage, which represents you jumping around and slicing your katana or swordchucks at anything that gets near. Whenever you kill a creature you can either slice off the monster's head and karate kick it as a projectile, or simply explode the monster into gore, dealing close burst damage.
However, as a ninjae, if you fall into water you drown. Also, if you're trained in Stealth you actually deal less damage. The ideal ninja wants to be seen as he's killing, and so he dresses like this:
or this
or this
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and even this
So far WotC hasn't sent me a cease and desist, so tomorrow I'll post details on the new magic items, like The Dice that Always Rolls 20s, the Sword of Breaking Stuff.
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