#Magic Warrior

[digimontamerrichie-tcg]

[dailycharacteroption]

Magic Warrior (Pathfinder Second Edition Archetype)

(mask design by teonova on DeviantArt)

Oh, you thought we were done with the Magaambya?

Don’t worry folks, I think this is the last one for a while, but in truth, this archetype has less to do with the school directly, and more to do with it’s founder: Oldmage Jatembe!

You see, Jatembe was many things, a preserver and innovator of magical traditions, a teacher, but also a warrior of good and righteousness, but he did not fight alone. Indeed, his 10 most trusted disciples were known as his Magic Warriors, each one wearing an enchanted mask hiding their identity as they fought and worked alongside him.

In the modern era, the tradition of the Magic Warrior continues, and while the original 10 came from disparate magical traditions, the modern version was codified into a blend of arcane and martial prowess best represented by the magus… Or at least, that’s how it was in First Edition.

That’s right, this archetype is also another relic of 1E moved forward into 2E, and with the way that Second Edition handles archetypes, it is now available to many more classes without further cross-classing or archetypes. The only caveat is that the class in question must be able to cast focus spells of some kind, meaning that one could play a paladin or warden-style ranger, but not a fighter, at least, not without some help.

But in any case, as we’ll soon see, this archetype focuses primarily on the relationship between the magic warrior and their mask, which was a highlight of the original archetype, so let’s get right into it!

The dedication for this feat, as mentioned above, requires at least focus spells, if not full casting. More than that, it represents donning the animal mask that will come to be their public identity as a magic warrior. They must never reveal their true identity, though others knowing them before they chose this path do not violate it. However, being revealed will require atonement and the crafting of a new mask and identity. In any case, at it’s base level the mask provides a minor ward against divination magic.

Tapping into the animal their mask represents, these warriors can briefly gain the senses and mobility of the creature in question, partially transforming themselves to do so.

Later on, they can fully transform into said animal, gaining the full benefits of doing so.

Finally, the anonymity of their mask expands into a proper ward, making them nearly impossible to detect with divination magic.

This is probably one of the shortest Second Edition Archetypes we’ve ever done here on the blog, but it doesn’t need to be super complicated, as the archetype adds the power of the mask from the 1E original to whatever character you’re wanting to play. On that note, while magus might be the “traditional” option, you’re hardly limited by that. After all, every proper spellcasting class and a few beyond have focus spells, and there plenty of ways to also gain primal spellcasting in addition to your primary tradition as well. However you want to build your anonymous mage is up to you.

Now, while this archetype is associated with the Oldmage Jatembe and the Magaambya, it need not remain so in your setting. If there is space in your own setting for a group or individual with magical masks that let them take on the aspect of an animal, then this archetype could easily be adapted. Heck, you could even adapt it to use different shapeshifting spells as well.

The ceremony of Masking, where a new troupe of magic warriors are named and they leave to quietly take on their new identities, is normally a very private and quiet affair. Not so when an omen dragon shows up in the middle of the public portion of the proceedings, heralding a vision that one of the new warriors will betray the others… and another will bring them to justice.

Born from a freak twist of magic and a distorted carnival mirror, Solageb was created as a twisted reflection of a powerful mage named Belagos who visited the carnival five years ago. Keen to hide his distorted features, the fleshwarped reflection hides is face with a mask, using anonymity to do good with his magic.

The invaders dealt a crippling blow to indigenous morale when they unmasked the White Lion and executed him publically, but with his final breaths, he asked the people to look for the ones who would succeed him as masked warriors and protectors, that their time would come soon. This inspired a whole new generation, and now rebellion is brewing.

[thewisestdino]

The Moonpool

[tritoch]

the warrior of light as a game-breaking force of violence

there's a moment, relatively early in dawntrail, that establishes succinctly how out of place the warrior of light (as the savior of eorzea and main character of four successive final fantasy game plots) is in what is essentially the story of fresh new final fantasy protagonist wuk lamat. and it sets up quite nicely how the framework of fantasy video game conflict pulls the warrior of light forever towards violence as the expansion goes on.

spoilers through 7.0 follow

consider wuk lamat's kidnapping and rescue. bakool ja ja holds his blade to wuk lamat's throat, taunting you. his lackeys line up against your party in neat little ranks suspiciously reminiscent of a classic final fantasy encounter screen.

and it simply does not matter to the warrior of light. you stride right through their combat setup because you are beyond that by now. the warrior of light has absolutely no respect for the "we are about to do ATB combat" lineup. the camera even jumps the line for you in one continuous rotating shot, crossing the axis of action as though to emphasize through the disruption of visual convention how far outside the game's boundaries you are.

this is how far you are above the problems of dawntrail's first half. you cannot even be bound by the normal rules of cinematography and video game combat. everyone else here lined up for a good old-fashioned scrap and the warrior of light said haha nope actually. i'm going to stroll through here like a god of war astride this tiny battlefield. your henchmen cannot even raise a hand to me. i don't even have to engage in violence directly anymore. my mere presence is enough.

in fact, not only can bakool ja ja's henchmen not raise a hand to you, he's not even worthy of your direct intervention. he kidnaps wuk lamat and steals her keystones and frees valigarmanda and kidnaps hunmu rruk and none of it warrants the warrior of light so much as raising a finger. he's wuk lamat's recurring villain, that's not your problem. you're just here to take in the scenery.

zoraal ja spends his whole life aspiring to be thought of as his father's equal and a worthy successor to the dawnservant as the "resilient son." all it takes for gulool ja ja to acknowledge you as a warrior on his level is like a five minute sparring match. the acknowledgement from gulool ja ja that zoraal ja hungered for his whole life and would eventually go full cyborg supervillain to get via regicide is something the warrior of light receives casually in a throwaway line after their level 93 solo duty on the way to more important plot conversations.

it really seems for a second, in the first half of dawntrail, like you are strong enough and the problems simple enough for this to be a clean and easy adventure. bakool ja ja? power of friendship'd. mamook? successfully reintegrated, no worries about the crimes against humanity. rite of succession? handily won. nothing can stop you. even duty finder queue times have been conquered: you can do all your duties with trusts now.

all of which only makes it better when the second half has sphene ask you and wuk lamat directly: could your strength have been enough to save alexandria? could you have found a different way?

i know some people get very annoyed we don't intervene in the gulool ja ja fight. now personally i think if you see arthur and mordred squaring up it's rude to intervene, but beyond that, it simply wouldn't have mattered. by the time zoraal ja's forces arrived in tuliyollal, alexandria and tural were already on a collision course and doomed to conflict. your hands alone could never have averted this conflict. sphene was always bound to do what she did—and certainly a gulool ja ja without his reason would not be any more inclined to peace than wuk lamat and koana were.

there's a great little moment just before living memory where estinien, champion at reading the room, is like "okay so if thancred and i stay here that frees up you up, aibou, to do what you do best and save the world and have epic fights. woo!!!" and immediately afterwards you basically have to apologize to alisaie because part of the sort of unspoken premise of this whole trip in the first place was that you were, finally, not going to plunge into mortal peril to save the world. you were finally going to take it easy. you were finally done with that. and she has to sort of ruefully be like nah it's fine bro. i was trying to get you to take it easy and not do insane risky world-saving violence. but y'know these things (interdimensional invasions) happen.

by the time you reach the very last trial, all pretense that the warrior of light could have ever been beyond these problems has vanished. you were, very emphatically, not strong enough to hold onto all that was dear without sacrifice. gulool ja ja and otis and cahciua died. yyasulani was irreversibly changed, physically colonized and culturally decimated by another dimension. you systematically shut down each part of living memory, and all its friendly, charming, loving ghosts, with your own hands. with your own clicks.

not even the vaunted strength of the warrior of light is enough to overcome sphene's inexorable logic of conflict. and so, in the end, she plucks you out of the crowd and says, explicitly for reasons of your strength, that you are going to have to do a boss fight now. you are going to have to kill her and you are going to have to do it in a proper 8-on-1 trial, and she forces you to affirmatively state that you understand you're going to kill her.

did you think you were above it all? did you think you could get away from here with your weapon undrawn, with your hands clean? that for you and you alone the logic of conflict comes undone? wrong. wrong. wrong.

your strength cannot redeem you, says sphene. your friends cannot make these sacrifices for you. if you would play the hero then you must play the hero. no half-measures.

back to the duty finder with ye.

[ichimakesart]

Commission for @syrinq

Thank you for commissioning me☆◇☆◇☆

~☆◇Prints◇☆~▪︎~☆◇Commissions◇☆~▪︎~☆◇Kofi◇☆~▪︎~☆◇For inquiries: ichimakes@gmail.com◇☆~

[hibbeln]

Magical Creatures LU Doodles - 1

As I said before, I made some doodles of them, just some interactions I had in my head!

It's probably obvious now who my favorite is based on how much I drew him, but I love them all equally and I'll try to make doodles of them all equally… and also Time didn't show up this time but I already have one planned for him! ;)

[spookberry]

magical embodiment of sapphic homoerotic friendships gives you magical girl powers, what do you do?

[turtleblogatlast]

I think a lot about Leo’s tendency to push his way into the spotlight despite clearly being a natural in the shadows. Hell, you could argue that his worst moments are when he’s forcing himself onstage, and his best are when he does things no one notices until it’s already been done.

[sneakyboymerlin]

Merlin is kind of like a dog to Arthur. I mean this in all of the good and all of the bad ways.

[dreamypyon]

probably a title card i think...

[diadraws]

LATER THIS WEEK ... something... is happening!! here is a completely unrelated photo, that surely has nothing to do with it

[gay-jesus-probably]

I like the general fandom trend to just take the plot of Hyrule Warriors as a loose guideline at best and just use the whole concept as a good excuse to get blorbos to interact across timelines, BUT I'm very disappointed that everyone is missing the comedic potential of a very specific squad of characters:

Young Link (aka Mask), who walks out of the nightmare of Majora's Mask and immediately gets portal kidnapped into a temporal war, takes one look at the whole mess and decides that you could not fucking pay him to admit to being the resident expert on Time Shenanigans. He introduces himself with the title of Hero of Termina, and definitely doesn't have any other ones, that would be crazy. Hero of Time? Never heard of him.

Tetra, who is a kickass pirate captain with zero patience for people trying to shove her into the Designated Princess role, and realizes immediately that Oh Fuck, this Hyrule has a lot of Ideas about how the Hero and the Princess are supposed to properly play their parts, the second they realize she's technically a Zelda they're gonna shove her in a goddamn dress and damsel her again, that's not happening. So she's definitely just a really cool pirate captain, nothing else going on here at all, definitely not the heir of the Hylian royal family in her time, that'd be crazy.

Ravio, who is literally just a palette swapped Link, meaning that the second his hood comes off, things are gonna get Awkward. There's no way in hell he's dealing with all that Hero baggage, that's Link work, so that giant bunny hood/mask is practically superglued to his head, and he's not taking it off for love or money.

Spirit Tracks Zelda, who is just in the Phantom Armour the whole time, and passing herself off as just a friendly ghost posessing a suit of armour to help the Hero of Spirits. Of course she isn't Princess Zelda, that's ridiculous, if she were a Zelda then people would start getting really weird about her technically being dead, and boy does that ever sound like a whole Thing she doesn't want to deal with, so she can't possibly be Zelda, she's just a nice ghost knight. Also, her teenage grandma is here, and that's kinda weird, so it's easier to just not admit to being royalty and avoid that awkward conversation.

Finally there's Sheik, who is not the Princess Zelda of the era straight up abandoning her war torn country for months at a time so she can risk her life in extreme cosplay for no clear reason, but is instead the actual Sheik from Ocarina of Time, who just beat Ganondorf like a month ago and is still trying to process what the fuck to do now. Also, he's been pretending to be a boy since he was ten, and is realizing there's a pretty good chance that he isn't pretending anymore, so that's a whole other can of worms. But for the last seven years of his life, being Princess Zelda meant certain death, so he's not really inclined to introduce himself like when in a new and stressful situation (not to mention he might actually just not be a girl named Zelda anymore), so he automatically introduces himself as just Sheik the spooky ninja man, and fuck he's in too deep to back out now, looks like he's committing to the bit. If you think you sense the Triforce of Wisdom on him, no you don't.

Cue shenanigans as the five of them attempt to hide that they're all actually kind of A Big Deal. The group motto is "Nobody says shit", which is usually delivered as a frantic hiss whenever someone slips up. Just the reunion between Sheik and Mask alone would be absolutely buckwild given how they parted, and how they're both frantically pretending to Not be involved with each other. For added hilarity and/or drama, Sheik gives his semi-bullshit cover story of having just been a friend of the Hero of Time, then runs into said Hero of Time and they both have to desperately pretend not to know each other, because if anyone picks up on the mountain of baggage between them then Mask is busted, and he won't hesitate to drag Sheik down with him out of sheer spite. Not to mention the weird balance of Sheik being used to this Link being a teenager that's actually a small child, and now has to adjust to Link who is a small child that's actually a teenager.

Also, i really feel like we're all missing out on the comedy potential of Ganondorf recognizing Young Link on sight and the two of them immediately launching into a grudge match with some extremely personal and specific insults on both sides. Meanwhile literally everybody else is just standing there watching, trying to process the fact that out of every single person that's been pulled out of time, Ganondorf only has personal beef with a literal nine year old.

I just feel like we're all really sleeping on the potential for Shenanigans here. The whole thing is an absurd mess, why not have some fun with it?

[digi-lov]

Shoto Kazama EX7-064 by Tsunemi Aosa, Pteromon EX7-031, Galemon EX7-032, GrandGalemon EX7-034, and Zephagamon EX7-036 by Spareribs from EX-07 Extra Booster Digimon Liberator

[strawbunnydoesart]

pretty old fanart for Magical Warrior Diamond Heart :3 it's an oldie but still pretty tbh

Very cute game,, has precure references, 100000/10 💕

[descendinight]

实验。。

prints

[fatedroses]

More than just the Demon.