ZEITGEIST ZEITGEIST class confusion

[GracefulBreath]

I'm loving my new Adventures in ZEITGEIST book that came in the mail today, but I'm confused about the subclasses. The queen bee mentions rage bonus damage, but I thought that Berserker lost that in the transistion to Level Up in favor of raw survivability in the form of rage hit points. Would you have the subclass instead grant rage hit points to the other person raging since it has the same scaling route, or access to your brutal criticals since the queen bee is designed around damage? The Durala Carao is absolutely cool, but it mentions spending "focus points" which I don't think I've seen anywhere in any of the books. I'm assuming currently that focus point was just one of the former names for exertion during development of Level Up and it slipped through the cracks. Less confusing more-so disappointing is that this book that mentions schools and colleges for studying battle and war has no new material for Marshal characters. Seeing prestige classes for 5e was a bit of a shock, but I love these things and I think that the right route was taken with them.

 

[Heraldofi]

I'm guessing Queen Bee is due for errata, given how the text presents on the tools website:

"If your rage grants Rage Damage it also adds your Rage Damage to any melee weapon attack they make. If your rage grants Rage HP it also gains that Rage HP each turn. A character already benefiting from another rage gets whatever bonus damage or HP is higher."

Similarly, the Durala Carao there references exertion points instead.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

as for the schools and colleges for battle and war - that's about the savant. it's kind of strange, but (alongside the other oddities you mentioned) makes more sense when you learn the book was originally meant to be for o5e.

 

[xiphumor]

The good news is that they’re usually pretty quick to add errata when they see the need for it. It only took one guy on Facebook/Reddit to get the Annihilator Sorcerer an expanded spell list. Speak up a tad and I’m sure errata will be forthcoming.

 

[RangerWickett]

You can see the errata'd versions of the Adventures in ZEITGEIST classes at ZEITGEIST | Level Up. There are updates to Durala Carao, Queen Bee, and Annihilator.

As others said, we originally finished the mechanics in mid-2020, but held off on releasing the book when Russ decided to develop Level Up.

At that point, there were 12 subclasses for the 12 core 5e classes, and then one subclass for the Noble and Savant, which were new classes EN Publishing had released in The Masterclass Codex.

When we decided to move to Level Up, I decided to move the Enclavist Noble into being a Wizard archetype, and then I converted the Savant from 5e to Level Up. (That was a bit of a challenge, since Savants were all about 'neat little tricks in combat,' but did it in a totally different way from the Level Up combat maneuver system.) I kept the Vox Savant archetype I'd originally made, and added a Steward and Vanguard to give the Level Up version more options.

It was only after I'd done all those conversions that the team working on Level Up decided to add a Marshal class.

If you kinda squint and tilt your head, you could probably just slap the Enclavist into Marshal as a magical archetype for it, then just tweak the levels you get its abilities, and do wording changes so you don't have to worry about spellcasting and spell slots. Marshals get subclass abilities at 3rd, 7th, 11th, 15th, and 18th, whereas the Enclavist grants powers at 2nd, 6th, 10th, and 14th. You'd want to increase the level of all those abilities by 1, and have the class spend exertion points instead of spell slots for the abilities it grants, and then add something new at 18th level, should your group ever perchance get that high.

Of course, if you have a player interested in an Enclavist marshal, I'd probably put a little more effort in to have the demesne power align somehow with your commanding presence.

 

[GracefulBreath]

I Appreciate the insight, i do have a player who was excited to see if the book had marshal material, so I'll follow your advice and present him with the subclass alternative. Likely I'll run it like Ranger, any of the spells the subclass grants being cast once per long rest, then add that any additional casts spend exertion as you said. The demesne definitely needs some tinkering to fit in, but it doesn't seem to be too far-off an ordeal to mess with. Thanks for the response!