Fighter

I have been many places where the captain of the watch had a name I could not pronounce, a god I had never heard of, and a way of speaking I needed three days to learn. In every one of these places the captain of the watch was a Fighter, and I knew it the moment I saw them, and they knew that I knew. I gave them my weapons at the gate without being asked. They gave me a cot in the watch-house without being asked. We could not have explained anything else to each other for a week. We did not need to. The body of the trained soldier is older than language; we both spoke it. They were the captain because of it. I was a traveler because of it. The arrangement worked.

-- recovered fragment, courier's journal, Three Holds run, the year I stopped counting

What a Fighter is

The word fighter survived the Forgetting on its own. Nobody had to recover it from a data fragment. A century after every other word for the trade had drifted into local dialects, fighter was still what one settlement called the people the next settlement also called fighters. It is the closest thing the surface peoples have to a universal term.

A Fighter is not channeling the Winds. They are not bonded to a Redoubt's command intelligence, not carrying a blood pigment that resonates with one of the Miasm colors, not disciplined into a clean instrument by faction doctrine. A Fighter is the discipline of arms, training, and martial repetition — the warrior the surface world recognizes from any age. Where the Furyborn channels rage through bare tissue and the Sworn channels an oath through a held compact, the Fighter channels nothing. Their power is training. Repetition. Conditioning. The hand that has held the haft until the haft has worn into the hand.

This is what makes the Fighter useful in a world where most power-holders are doing something a witness cannot parse. A Fighter is legible. Every settlement understands them. Every faction has a place for them. Every wasteland warband recognizes one on sight and decides, instantly, whether to fight, flee, or hire. No Miasm color, no patron-protocol, no recovered codex. Armed. Trained. Present. That is the language.

Fighters split on what they do with the discipline once they have it. The Champion turns it inward, into the body. The Warlord turns it outward, into the warband. The Wind Warrior carries a body that has been altered by years in saturated zones. Sheriffs bond to a place; Raiders bond to the road between places. Some bond the practice to a mount — animal, mechanical, or aerial — and become something that neither foot-fighter nor rider alone can match. The discipline is one thing. The lives spent on it diverge.

Chassis

Class features

The Fighter's class features are the load-bearing skeleton of every Fighter, regardless of subclass. They are conditioning and drill, not Wind work. A Fighter at L20 has not learned a single recitation, channeled a single color, or signed a single contract with anything outside the settled world. They have practiced.

Feature ladder

Major class features

• Fighting Style (L1). Pick one trained style: Defense, Dueling, Great Weapon Fighting, Archery, Protection, Two-Weapon Fighting, Blind Fighting, Interception, Superior Technique, Thrown Weapon Fighting, or Unarmed Fighting. The style is a drilled posture, not a magical knack. It compounds over a career.
• Second Wind (L1). Bonus action: regain Hit Points equal to 1d10 + your Fighter level. Limited uses per long rest, recovering on a short rest. The conditioned body's adrenal reserve, trained to be called on rather than waited for.
• Weapon Mastery (L1). Three weapons begin trained in their mastery property (Cleave, Graze, Nick, Push, Sap, Slow, Topple, Vex). The mastery list grows by Fighter level. A Fighter does not just use a weapon; they have learned what the weapon does best, and they do that thing.
• Action Surge (L2). Once per short rest, take one additional action on your turn. At L17, twice per short rest. The body trained to spend itself when spending matters.
• Extra Attack (L5, L11, L20). Additional weapon attacks per Attack action. The fighter's rhythm in combat is denser than an untrained body's; trained reflex closes the gap an ordinary fighter could not.
• Tactical features (L5, L6, L14). Tactical Shift, Tactical Mind, Tactical Master. Battlefield reading translated into action: extra movement on Second Wind; using Second Wind to power a skill check; the Weapon Mastery option-list expanding for the Fighter's prepared weapons.
• Indomitable (L9, L13, L17). Reroll a failed save. The body and the will trained to refuse a finished outcome.
• Studied Attacks (L13). A miss against a target grants advantage on the next attack roll against that target before the end of your next turn. Reading what didn't land into what will.
• Epic Boon (L19). A trained-and-tested mastery that goes beyond what an ordinary career produces.

Subclasses

At L3 a Fighter commits to a path — what they do with the discipline they have built. Three are shipped at launch: Champion (the body apex), Warlord (the band apex), and Wind Warrior (the Wind-saturated body). Two more are in design and will join in a future update: Sheriff (the place apex, pro-civic) and Raider (the wilderness apex, anti-civic).

Champion

They had told me what a Champion was, but I had not understood until the third night, when the Cinderwolves came over the south wall. The settlement's guard captain — a small woman, perhaps forty, called Marian by everyone, called Champion by no one to her face — was on the wall before the alarm finished sounding. I do not know how. She had been at the long table eating bread when the bell rang. I had seen her there. I would have sworn she had not stood up. But when I turned toward the wall she was on it, and the first wolf was already off it, back over the parapet, falling.

What I remember is not the strikes. The strikes were unremarkable; they were correct, but unremarkable. What I remember is that she did not stop. The second wolf came, she met it. The third came, she met it. The fourth opened her along the ribs. She did not stop. Around the seventh I understood that I was witnessing the thing the settlement-folk had told me about and that I had not believed, which was that a Champion does not get tired, not the way other people do, not at the speeds that other people do. I had thought this was a story. It is not a story. I watched it for nine minutes by my own counting before the last wolf went off the wall, and at the end of the nine minutes she sat down on the parapet, and she breathed, and she did not die. The opening along her ribs closed within the hour. I asked her, later, how. She said: I have done this a long time.

-- recovered fragment, courier's journal, Eastern Lattice run, late summer

Identity

A Champion is a Fighter who turned the discipline inward. Where a Warlord trains the warband, the Champion trains the body, and only the body, for thirty or forty years, until what the body does is no longer what bodies do.

This is not a lineage in the blood. There is no Champion pigment, no Champion patron, no Champion channel. There is only a teacher and a student and the long work between them. A Champion learned from a Champion. The teacher can be named. The settlement where the training happened can usually be visited. The drills are written down somewhere, in someone's hand, and have been written down for as long as anyone has bothered to remember; new copies are made when old copies wear out; the old copies are kept anyway. The discipline is taught, and what is taught can be passed on.

What a Champion does, in practice, is not what a baseline witness expects. They strike more often into the openings other fighters cannot see. They move through a fight without the small recoveries other fighters require. When they are wounded — and they are wounded; nothing in the training prevents that — they keep moving, and the wounds close, and they do not die. To the cargo-cult half of the world a Champion is a phantasm in a body that won't fall. The settlement-folk who have lived alongside a Champion for a year know better. They know the Champion eats and sleeps and stretches and complains about old injuries in cold weather. They know the discipline is real and that the discipline is enough. They are still going to step back from a fight that a Champion has entered.

Champions are scarce, because the training is long and most who begin it do not finish it. They cluster where there is reason to keep them: settlement guard captaincies, traveling weapon-masters who hire out a season at a time, the small and uncategorized wasteland figure who has been hunted and hunting for forty years and is still here. Most factions want one. Most warbands will follow one. A Champion is the rare Lethean Age power-holder who can walk into a strange settlement and be hired by sunset, because the language of the trained body crosses every border the surface peoples have not yet rebuilt.

Subclass features

L3: Improved Critical. Your attack rolls with weapons and unarmed strikes can score a Critical Hit on a roll of 19 or 20. The Champion has been in enough fights to know the shape of the moment when an opening is there. This is not luck and it is not Wind work. It is pattern-recognition trained into reflex over years. The same swing the ordinary fighter makes, but landed at the instant when it counts for double.

L3: Remarkable Athlete. You have advantage on Initiative rolls and Strength (Athletics) checks. Immediately after you score a Critical Hit, you may move up to half your speed without provoking opportunity attacks. Where another fighter starts a fight on their back foot, the Champion starts already moving. The conditioning is total: the standing posture is the starting posture; the breath at rest is the breath that is already braced. After a strike that lands clean, the Champion steps through to the next thing before the first thing has remembered to fall.

L7: Additional Fighting Style. You gain another Fighting Style of your choice. Most fighters learn one style and stop. There is no time and no reason to learn a second; the first is enough to keep them alive. A Champion has trained the first style into the disciplined musculature, the read of timing, the calibration of breath — the foundation onto which a second style can be grafted without ruining the first. They will switch between the two of them inside a single exchange.

L10: Heroic Warrior. During combat, at the start of each of your turns without Heroic Inspiration, you give yourself Heroic Inspiration. The Champion knows the shape of the moment when a fight is lost or saved, because they have been the moment more than once and they remember. Each new turn finds them already braced for what the fight will ask of them next.

L15: Superior Critical. Your attack rolls with weapons and unarmed strikes can now score a Critical Hit on a roll of 18-20. At this level of conditioning the openings have widened. They are not stronger; the body has been at its strength for decades. They are not faster; the body's reflex ceiling was reached long ago. They simply read the fight more completely than the fight believes it can be read.

L18: Survivor. Two effects:

• Defy Death. You have advantage on Death Saving Throws. When you roll 18-20 on a Death Saving Throw, you gain the benefit of rolling a 20 on it.
• Heroic Rally. At the start of each of your turns you regain Hit Points equal to 5 + your Constitution modifier, provided you are Bloodied and have at least 1 Hit Point.

This is the feature that reads as supernatural and is not. The Champion at this level of training has conditioned themselves into a body that does not stop when ordinary bodies stop. The mechanism is biological — the adrenal cascade trained until it triggers cleanly under load, the blood-pressure response calibrated to keep the head conscious through what would drop another person, the pain-modulation rehearsed until pain is information rather than command. None of this is visible to a witness. The witness sees a person bleeding from three places stand up. The witness sees a person who was down lift their weapon. The witness says: she should be dead. The Champion will tell them, later, that she has done this a long time. To the cargo-cult half of the world she is a phantasm in a body that won't die. To herself she is a fighter who trained for this. Both are true. Only one is mysterious.

Warlord

The captain did not draw his weapon for the first thirty seconds. He stood at the centre of our formation and he looked, and we watched him look. Then he said one word, which I did not catch, and pointed at the third raider from the left. The bowman fired. The third raider went down. He said another word, and our pikes shifted six inches. The raiders charged and broke against the new line as if it had been there for hours. He did not raise his voice once. He did not raise his weapon at all. We took the field in eight minutes, lost no one, and we did everything he said because we could feel the shape of the fight he was reading and we wanted to be inside it.

-- recovered fragment, recruit's letter, Eastern marches, midwinter

We had been six on the road for nineteen days when the Carrion-stock came down the slope. There were perhaps thirty of them; we had perhaps three minutes before they were on us. Halvar said: Janne and Wren, the wagon, get behind it, bows up. Brann, you and me, that gap in the rocks, we hold there. Mireille, the high stone, you shoot anything that breaks past us. Tomas, you stay alive and you do not fight, you watch where they come from. Then Halvar moved, and we moved, and three minutes later the Carrion-stock were on us, and after them six of us were still alive, which is the part of this story I do not understand.

Halvar said two more things during the fight that I remember. One was a name -- mine -- and a direction, and I went the direction, and the thing I did not see coming did not kill me. The other was a single word, brann, said calmly, and Brann broke off from the gap and threw himself sideways and the thing that came through where Brann had been was on Halvar's blade before it had finished arriving. I am not telling this right. The fight was nothing I could have read by looking at it. Halvar read it. We followed Halvar. We are alive.

-- recovered fragment, survivor's account, road north of the Eastwall

Identity

The Warlord is the Fighter who turned the discipline outward. Where the Champion trains the body for thirty years, the Warlord trains the warband: how to read a field, how to call positioning, how to keep a line alive through three engagements when an undisciplined band would have broken at the first. The Warlord rarely strikes first. They strike at the moment that decides the fight, and by then their band has already done most of the work because the Warlord put them where the work was easy.

A Warlord's authority is not titular. It is demonstrated. Settlements that appoint Warlords by ceremony fall to settlements that appoint them by survival rate. A warband that has followed one Warlord for two seasons will follow them across most boundaries the surface world recognizes. Warlords who lose their bands — through attrition, betrayal, or simple bad weather — rarely raise another. They become Veterans, or Champions, or trade-captains, or quiet figures in old settlements. The work is identity-defining; doing it alone is not the work.

The discipline is taught. A second Warlord can be made if a first Warlord finds an apprentice and lives long enough to finish the lessons. Most Warlords were once someone's second-in-command. The line of teaching is one of the few things in the surface world that has held continuous across the generations since the Forgetting.

Strip a Warlord of their band and what remains is a Fighter. The discipline does not leave with the band. A Warlord between companies is not a lesser class; they are a trained soldier who happens to be alone, and most of them will have a new company forming around them before the season turns.

Subclass features

L3: Captain's Call. As a bonus action you call an order to one ally within 60 ft who can see or hear you. Choose one of the following effects, which the ally gains until the start of your next turn:

• March. They may move up to half their speed without provoking opportunity attacks.
• Strike. They may use their reaction to make one weapon attack.
• Hold. They gain temporary Hit Points equal to your Fighter level.
• Brace. They have advantage on the next saving throw they make.

You may use Captain's Call a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus. You regain all uses on a short rest.

L3: Read the Stand. Allies within 30 ft of you who can see or hear you at the start of an encounter add your proficiency bonus to their Initiative rolls. The fight is starting from a posture you put them in before the dice hit the table.

L7: Read the Field. When you roll Initiative, up to four allies within 60 ft who can see or hear you may choose to use your Initiative roll instead of their own. In addition, at the start of your turn you may identify the most dangerous enemy in line of sight as a free action; allies who hear you call the target gain +1d6 damage on their first attack against that target this round.

L10: Held Line. Allies within 30 ft of you have advantage on saving throws against being Frightened, and gain a bonus to AC against opportunity attacks equal to your proficiency bonus. In addition, when an ally within 30 ft of you drops to 0 HP, you may use your reaction to give them temporary HP equal to your Fighter level. They remain standing. The line does not break.

L15: Captain's Vision. Your Captain's Call options expand. You may also call:

• Rally. Target ally regains Hit Points equal to 2d8 + your Fighter level.
• Withdraw. Target ally moves up to their full speed without provoking opportunity attacks.
• Open. Target ally has advantage on their next attack, and on a hit deals an additional 2d6 damage of the weapon's type.

In addition, you may use Captain's Call as a reaction (instead of, or in addition to, a bonus action) once per round.

L18: The Warlord Endures. Three effects:

• When you drop to 0 HP, before falling unconscious, you may issue one final Captain's Call to up to four allies within 60 ft, naming an option for each.
• Allies within 60 ft of you treat your Initiative as their Initiative permanently, for as long as they remain within range.
• While you are above 0 HP, the first attack each round of any ally within 30 ft of you has advantage.

The Warlord at this level has become the band's nervous system. They go down and the band still has them, for as long as the Warlord can hold consciousness one more breath.

Wind Warrior

He took the hit on his shoulder and did not even check the wound. The blood ran for a count of three, and then the wound closed itself, and then he was moving again. He fought us for an hour like that. Toward the end one of our band hit him hard enough that he should have fallen and he did not fall. The watch said, later, that the south wind that night was thick. They said it the way an old smith says a forge is hot. The wind was thick, and the man we could not kill was a Wind Warrior, and we had been outside in our wisdom.

-- recovered fragment, raider's confession, Northcairn marches, late summer

Identity

A Wind Warrior is a Fighter whose body has been steeped in the Miasm for years, or processed by something they survived, until the nanite colonies in their tissue act without their direction. They do not channel. They do not recite. They do not focus. They simply have a body whose colonies repair, brace, and amplify in real time when ambient miasma is present.

In a saturated zone they fight beyond any ordinary Fighter's limit. In a dead-zone they are back to the discipline of arms alone. The settled world has learned the shape of this: a Wind Warrior fought in the wrong place is no harder to bring down than any other trained body. A Wind Warrior fought in their place — tuned ground, a Cultivator-tended Hold, a Vril-touched grove — is the last figure standing.

Wind Warriors do not know, in any rigorous sense, what they are. Most carry a vague conviction that the wind favors them. Some have heard the word "augmented" from a Mage and shrugged. None of them are wrong. The backstory varies: long service in saturated zones, a recovered military augmentation program their training class survived, a close brush with Vril-touched tech, years fighting alongside a Wind Cultivator who tuned the Miasm around them habitually. The mechanism is the same. The body has been changed.

Subclass features

L3: Wind-Suturing. While you are in an area with normal or saturated miasma, at the end of each of your turns you regain Hit Points equal to half your proficiency bonus (round up). In a dead-zone you do not. The colonies are doing the work; without ambient Miasm they have nothing to spend.

L3: Wind-Sense. You feel the moment you cross between dead-zone, normal, and saturated miasma. You do not analyze it — you feel it, the way a fish feels temperature. As a bonus action you know the miasma density of your current 30 ft area. Other characters can be told. The Wind Warrior already knows.

L7: Wind Reflex. While in non-dead-zone miasma, you sense any creature within 60 ft that channels the Winds (any psionic effect-user). You have advantage on saving throws against psionic effects while in normal or saturated miasma. The colonies brace before you consciously react.

L10: Wind-Pulse. Bonus action, once per short rest. The Winds around you pulse through your body. Until the end of your next turn: your speed doubles, your melee attacks deal an additional 1d8 force damage, and you have advantage on Strength checks. Cannot be used in a dead-zone.

L15: Saturated Body. Your Wind-Suturing now functions in dead-zones at half value (round down). The colonies are self-sustaining at low levels. In addition, when you reduce a hostile creature to 0 HP while in normal or saturated miasma, you regain Hit Points equal to your Fighter level.

L18: Wind-Anchored. Two effects:

• While in normal or saturated miasma you cannot be knocked unconscious by damage reduction to 0 HP. Instead you remain conscious at 1 HP. The exception: a single hit that deals damage equal to or greater than your Fighter level does knock you out as normal.
• Your Wind-Pulse uses are now unlimited — but each Wind-Pulse beyond the first in a short rest imposes one level of Exhaustion. The Winds give, and the body still has to carry the work.

Subclasses in design

Two further Fighter subclasses are on the slate and in active design. They are noted here so players and World Masters can plan around them.

• Sheriff — the Fighter who has bonded to a settlement and its defense. Pro-civic, place-anchored, the keeper of the wall and the Law in their jurisdiction. Counterpart to Warlord's mobile band.
• Raider — the Fighter who has bonded to the road and the wilderness between settlements. Anti-civic, mobile-aggressive, the warband-attacker. Counterpart to Sheriff.

Other Fighters

The discipline of arms is the broadest of the surface-world classes. Other Fighter paths exist in the world and may be added to the slate in future updates: Sentinel (the defensive specialist), Marksman (the ranged specialist), Mounted (the rider-and-partner, animal or mechanical or aerial), Outfitted (the recovered-military-kit specialist), Duelist (the single-combat specialist), and Veteran (the long-survivor whose advantage is having seen it all before).