In honor of this auspicious day (where we celebrate the annihilation of that dreaded agricultural pest, the spaghetti weevil), I am pleased to present my own take on a character class for AD&D; the Jester.
I was inspired to do this while going back through Gary Gygax’s notes and stated intentions for an updated version of AD&D, which never ended up getting developed and published. One of the new character classes he intended was the jester; a mix of magic, acrobatics, and skills of verbal persuasion and obfuscation.
Taking the bare-bones notes that he laid out for the class, I went to another of his published works, Dangerous Journeys, to get more inspiration for just how some of the stated powers and skills might function, and filled in the rest with my own material. There are a dozen new spells (some inspired by classic circus clown gags), a fully laid out system of acrobatic and verbal patter skills, and a few new magical items to round things out. It comes in at eight pages total, and you can download it —–> here.
10 thoughts on “Preeeeesenting… the Jester”
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This looks great! For some reason I’ve always been partial to a jester character class. Roger Moore did one back in Dragon #60 or thereabouts that wasn’t too bad.
I agree.
Would you like to publish something in Fight On! sometime? You could put links to your blog and products in the article if you wanted. Contact me at gmail dot com if interested. Either way, keep up the great work!
– Calithena
Nicely done!
I love the blog as a whole. Someone linked over here from the TLG boards, and I’m glad to have found it!
I love this Jester! The write-up is long and a little complex, exactly how I would expect from the Gygax that produced the Cavalier, Barbarian and Thief-Acrobat. One issue: Early in the write-up it says gnomes can only multiclass as thieves, later it’s fighters.
Excellent, inspirational write-up. My thanks!
Whoopsie! I’ll correct the thief/fighter thing, Jeff. Didn’t realize I had mentioned it earlier when I changed it. Thanks!
Glad you all like it.
This is a thing of beauty. Of course, you now condemn me to dealing with a party of players who will off their own characters, all so they can play a jester!
Excellently produced and thought out. Thank-you 🙂
This is actually a very good interpretation of the class, IMO. I'm very glad you took it from Gary's other published works, as I felt there are many hidden gems people ignore if they didn't study Gary's whole career output, not just the D&D stuff.
Just to clarify, the fighter-jester option is not allowed to the gnome. Gnomes, like halflings, may become thief-jesters. The reference to the fighter-jester is a typo.