Echoes - Character

The Morrigan's Favor & the Reincarnation Loop (from the original brief - preserved)

The Morrigan: triune goddess of fate, war, and death. Attracting her gaze is dangerous and is the gateway to late-game mastery.

"Blessed by the Morrigan" prestige class - unlocked not by XP but by a True Life-Sacrifice: willingly guiding your character into an un-winnable conflict that protects the home tribe's core shrine or sovereign.
The Reincarnation Cycle - on True Sacrifice the soul enters the Cauldron of Rebirth; you keep memories, recipes, and affinities, but the vessel re-rolls into a new lineage with different traits. (Reconcile with Death & Rebirth's diminishment: the True Sacrifice is the heroic, intentional version of rebirth - the player chooses everything - which contrasts cleanly with the everyday, costly, partial rebirths.)
Raven's Sight - see upcoming death-timelines of NPCs and spirits; intercept or hasten fates. (Drives the PvP "hasten fate" verb.)
The Triune Shift - once per phase cycle, swap bonuses between Badb (frenzy/warfare), Macha (sovereignty/regional command), and Anu (fertility/curse-cleansing).
The Doom Geas - kill a specific rival spirit within three phase changes or the life force returns to the Cauldron, forcing another cycle.

Class & Lineage: Ways of Seeing

The RPG layer, built to descend from cosmic balance like everything else (The Thesis). Generalises the Morrigan prestige class (The Morrigan's Favor) into a full system. A working first pass to build on.

What a class is here (and isn't)

In most RPGs a class is a power profile. This game refuses power-scaling (The Thesis) and defines a build as who you are bound to (The Core Loop). So class is reframed as two things that are native to this world:

Your class is the way you see the world, and the bond you start already carrying.

It changes which verbs and which information you have, never how big your numbers are. A blocked pass: the Warrior breaks it, the Druid asks the timber-spirit to part, the Hunter finds the animal trail around, the Bard sings it open. Same world, four games. That asymmetry is the variety engine (Death & Rebirth) expressed as character.

Design rule of thumb: a class should change what the player perceives and can ask for, not the size of the damage number.

Two axes: Tribe and Class

Tribe (Starting Tribes & Biomes) is the body and blood you are born into: biome, innate spiritual bias, ancestral vulnerability.
Class is the vocation you held in that life: your training, your bond, your way of seeing.

They are orthogonal and combine into a start (a Fir Domnann Warrior plays unlike a Tuatha de Danann Warrior). Both can be touched by the rebirth engine (The Morrigan's Favor): the vessel and lineage re-roll, while the soul's grain carries forward (below).

Class is a way of seeing (the perception binding)

The cleanest binding to the soul of the game: each class begins looking through one register of the perception-mirror (The Sacrifice Menu and Art Direction).

Druid starts with spirit-sight - reads fae truth, harder to deceive - but is correspondingly naive about mortal and physical danger, and likely physically frail (rhymes with Tuatha de Danann fragility, Starting Tribes & Biomes).
Warrior starts fully mundane - mighty in the world, but blind to glamour and fae trickery. This is not the weak class: it is the physical-sight sacrifice (The Sacrifice Menu) taken as a starting condition, which the design already calls fair because it is knowingly chosen. The fae's bargains and curses find little purchase on an iron-souled brute who will not listen; they bull through with steel and fortitude. The Warrior is the most human, most tragic class - powerful by daylight, doomed against the unseen until alliances are earned.
Hunter reads the living world - tracks, beast-intent, the ecological truth; sees the wolf's hunger and the bird's alarm where others see scenery.
Bard resonates an auditory register - hears names, hears the discord of a lie, hears spirits in sound.

Each class's blindness is also its personal arc of loss: the thing it cannot see is the thing the game will make it confront.

Power is relationship (the inherited bond)

Because power is who you are bound to, class is the alliance you start pre-bound to: the Druid to nature spirits, the Bard to a fae patron owed tribute, the Hunter to a beast-spirit or companion pact, the Smith to the forge-power - and the Warrior, tellingly, to nothing spiritual, which is both their freedom and their peril.

Aptitude vs Vocation (class inside the erosion engine)

Class is your past self's role - and the past is sacrificeable (The Sacrifice Menu) and the vessel re-rolls on rebirth (The Morrigan's Favor). So class splits into two layers:

Aptitude (the soul's grain) - a faint affinity that transmigrates across vessels. A soul that was a Hunter keeps a half-instinct for beasts even lifetimes later.
Vocation (the trained expression) - named techniques, rites, recipes, tribute-tunes. This erodes when you sacrifice your past, and must be re-earned.

So across a long save, "class" is not a creation-screen lock; it is the current shape of a thinning, transmigrating soul. Genuinely novel, and it refuses to fight the death-and-rebirth core.

Class as narrative seed

To make a class gripping rather than a stat pick, each opens with a wound and a debt, not just abilities: the Warrior survived a battle their warband lost; the Druid is the last of a burned grove; the Bard already owes a tune-debt to a fae patron; the Hunter's bonded beast is dead or stolen. The class is the opening of your personal story and your first entry into the bargaining economy - what got you out the door, even if (The Core Loop) it is not why you keep walking.

The base roster (first pass, grounded in the aes dana)

Early Irish society had a recognised class of skilled professionals, the aes dana ("people of art"). Adapting these is more authentic than inventing generic fantasy roles.

Class	Irish root	Register / signature	Starting bond
Druid	Drui	Spirit-sight; ritual, weather, curse, divination	Nature spirits
Hunter	Fennid (the Fiana)	Living-world sight; tracking, fishing, companions, ambush	A beast-spirit / animal companion
Warrior	Curad (champion)	Mundane; martial mastery, fortitude, iron-soul; battle-frenzy (riastrad) ties to Badb	None spiritual (free, and exposed)
Bard / Poet-seer	File (outranks the bard)	Auditory; tribute-tunes, satire (aer) and praise, fae favour	A fae patron
Smith	Gobae	Forge-craft, ward-smithing; shapes the iron that wards fae	Forge-power (Goibniu)
Lawkeeper	Brithem (brehon)	Master of oaths, geasa, contracts; reads and exploits the rules of a bargain	The letter of the law itself
Healer	Liaig	Herbs, mending, tending body and essence	Healing powers (Dian Cecht / Airmed)
Seer	Faith	Omens, dreams, fate-reading; early echo of Raven's Sight	Fate / the Otherworld
Wanderer / Exile	(landless)	Classless start, bound to nothing - the purest expression of the erosion theme as a starting state	None

Two authentic mechanics worth lifting: the Dagda's harp played three strains - goltrai (sorrow), geantrai (joy), suantrai (sleep) - a ready-made Bard toolkit; and tribute-tunes as audible contracts (composing a tribute is striking a bargain; replaying it calls the debt due), which fuses the Bard with the cosmic-balance core and the word-as-power thread (Camera & Expansion).

Respecting the source

Keep the deities' domains accurate; frame the game as a secondary world inspired by the myths rather than a depiction of sacred truth (the title "Echoes of the Tuatha" already buys this latitude); and get the grammar right - reciprocity, geas, sovereignty, triplicity, the Otherworld - even while inventing specifics. Irish myth survives through medieval manuscripts rather than an unbroken living religion, so there is real creative room, but it remains living cultural heritage: do genuine homework, avoid mockery, keep the morality off the good/evil axis (The Thesis), and don't flatten distinct figures.

Hero Classes (Deity-Chosen)

A second tier layered on top of the base classes, generalising "Blessed by the Morrigan" (The Morrigan's Favor).

What they are

A patron bond truly earned in one life becomes a startable class in a future life - meta-progression expressed on-theme. You do not unlock a stat boost between runs; you unlock the right to begin as who you became. The soul remembers what it earned even as it forgets everything else (The Core Loop and Death & Rebirth) - a poignant exception to the erosion engine, and the one bond that can transmigrate intact.

They redefine, they do not upgrade

To stop power creep from making base classes obsolete, a hero class is high-power and high-constraint - it carries a geas or curse intrinsic to its deity. They are sidegrades-with-teeth, not ladders, so the humble Hunter stays a legitimate way to play forever. Attracting a god's gaze was always dangerous (The Morrigan's Favor).

One per major deity, each with its own earning-path

The path expresses the deity's values, and the abilities stay grounded in myth:

The Morrigan's Chosen (war, fate, death) - earned by a True Life-Sacrifice / shaping deaths (The Morrigan's Favor). Crow-sight (Raven's Sight from the start), the washer at the ford (marking the doomed before they fall), the bean sidhe keen as a death-herald, fighting as a shade of war. Bound by something like the Doom Geas.
Lugh's Chosen (Samildanach, "skilled in all arts") - earned by mastering many base classes across lives. The polymath hero: the reincarnation loop itself made into a class.
The Dagda's Chosen (abundance, music, life-and-death) - earned through provision and song. The cauldron that never empties, the harp's three strains; the sustainer / support hero.
Manannan's Chosen (sea, mist, the Otherworld) - earned through crossing and concealment. Master of feth fiada, the concealing mist - a hero class built on the perception-deception core itself.
Brigid's Chosen (forge, hearth, healing, poetry) - the maker-healer, earned through craft and care.

Patron rules (confirmed)

One major patron, or none. A soul cannot serve two at once.
Patron-swapping is possible but costly. Earn another deity's blessing by meeting its criteria (across one life or several reincarnations), and you may trade one patronage for the other - giving up the first to take the second. This always incurs the distaste of the abandoned patron: a lasting enmity that colours future bargains, encounters, and standing. Forsaking a god is never clean.
The ultimate stake. A patron bond may be the highest tier of the Sacrifice Menu (The Sacrifice Menu) - a Tier IV offering. Bargaining away a god's own favour to pay a debt is the most expensive thing a soul can spend.

Open threads for this section

Class permanence in one life - within a single life, is your base class fixed, or can you retrain / cross-train toward a second vocation before death?
Hero-class breadth - how many base classes must Lugh's path touch; how is "mastery" measured without XP?
The abandoned-patron penalty - how punishing should a god's distaste be, and can it ever be reconciled?
Tier IV sacrifice - formalise patron favour as a sacrificeable stake, and what residue it leaves.
Warrior parity - confirm the mundane-register Warrior reads as a different way to play, not a deficit, through deterrence, fortitude, and fae-immunity payoffs.

Classes & Resources

Design, balance & unique-identity model (working draft).

Pairs with: Seeming & Sight (the tier ladder; this doc sets each class's starting Sight), the Design Capture (essence/self, the sacrifice menu, the death-rebirth loop), and the Fae Manual (the favours the bard captures; the bargaining classes live on).

1 · How classes are differentiated - trading axes, not stacking power

Classes are built so that choosing one means genuinely giving something up. Each sits at a different point on a set of inverse currencies, and the same spine governs how every class handles a wolf, a trap, a glamour, and a bargain alike:

Proximity ↔ Distance · Endurance ↔ Control · Sight ↔ Survivability

One pole: be where it's dangerous and outlast it - close, enduring, hardy, low-sight.
Other pole: make sure danger never reaches you - ranged, controlling, fragile, high-sight.

This single principle is why the classes feel coherent in every system they touch, not just combat.

2 · The two defensive layers (the core balance model)

Avoidance and survival are different defensive layers, and each class lives on a different one:

Avoidance layer (perception). High-Sight classes: the trap never triggers - they read it (Sight > Weave) and step around.
Consequence layer (resilience). Hardy classes: the trap always triggers, but lands on someone built to absorb it.

So a fae's trick isn't "win or whiff." Against a druid it is prevented; against a warrior it is survived - the same trap, two different scenes. Which means every trap / illusion carries two values:

Value	What it tests	Resolved by
Weave	how hard it is to see	Sight (per Seeming & Sight)
Severity	how hard it is to endure	resilience

A complete encounter threatens both axes, so no class is ever fully safe: a druid who can't out-see a high-Weave trap must still survive its Severity; a warrior who can't be felled by Severity can still be led by what he can't perceive.

3 · Soul as the real meter (unifying with the death system)

Recall the spine of the whole game: the true survival resource is essence/self, not HP - it thins across rebirths toward the sapling. So:

A glamour or illusion deals to essence/self what a blade deals to the body.

Warrior hardiness = soul-resilience against being spent - he shrugs off the toll of a sprung trap.
The druid spends fast - a trap that catches her bites deep; a few missteps put her at the Cauldron.

Death-by-rebirth therefore comes for the classes by opposite roads: the warrior wades through traps and wears down by sheer accumulation; the druid sidesteps a hundred and then a single lapse drops her toward the forest.

(This is essence - permanent. It is not the renewable caster resource; see §5.)

4 · The anchor classes (poles to calibrate the rest against)

Warrior - the Hardy Blind

Sight 0, highest survivability / soul-resilience.
Defends at the consequence layer: survives 2-3 sprung traps where a fragile class falls to one.
That durability is a runway - each survived mistake is a chance to course-correct (find a ward, buy an adder stone, recruit eyes that see). The warrior arc is blind-but-buying-vision: acquiring Sight is the meta-goal his hardiness buys time to pursue.
Combat: wins by closing - body to body, outlasting. Can trade blows with the wolf and endure it.
Bargaining seat - leverage: "deal honestly, for you cannot simply trick your way past me." The Folk treat him like a dangerous animal they can't fully con - easy to deceive, hard to move; a cornered warrior is a real threat even to them.
Signature vulnerability (so blindness isn't trap-immunity): not dying to traps, but being maneuvered by a world he can't see - led astray, oath-bound to something he couldn't perceive, robbed of a memory or companion while fooled. He survives the blow and is still led.
Resource: a mundane martial pool (vigour/stamina - name TBD), not the Measure.

Druid - the Sighted Fragile

Sight 2, low survivability - caught, she bites deep on herself.
Defends at the perception layer: reads the trap and steps around; can avoid even fighting the wolf.
Almost no runway - one bad bargain from the forest - so she survives by foresight and planning, and must plan for the later trick her sight is too low to catch, before her luck runs out and she meets a fae too tricky for her.
Combat: wins by control at distance - ensnaring roots, holding the wolf at arm's length, turning the ground against it.
Bargaining seat - fluency: "I know what this is worth." The Folk treat her as a near-peer - harder to deceive, but enmeshed, legible, and worth deceiving for the greater prize. Sight as gift and exposure at once.
Resource: the Measure (§5) - channelling nature's aid spends it, which indirectly pressures essence, so safety-now trades against the slope toward the forest.

Bard / Wordsmith - the Ranged Voice

Sight ~1. A ranged class whose power is collected, not innate.
Encapsulates the essence of fae favours into tunes and words - captured favours are stored as Airs / Strains (see §5): play the River's Strain to drown a foe, a tree-fae's favour to lash with vines.
Combat: distance and borrowed fae power - a different flavour of control from the druid's innate nature-command (the bard's arsenal is a repertoire gathered from the Folk).
Bargaining seat - collector/negotiator: the bard is a bargainer; favours become repertoire, and the word-as-power thread (satire, true-names, praise) is his native turf.
Resource: the Measure - the rhythm he literally plays in.

5 · The Resource System - the Measure

Two resources, kept strictly apart. Essence/self (§3) is permanent - it thins toward the sapling, spent only in the realm-between. The caster resource is renewable - drawn on and recovered in play. Keep them lexically distinct (no soul-words - anam, enaid, "spirit" - for the renewable one; those belong to essence).

The Measure (working name) - the renewable channel casters draw on. The word means a musical rhythm and an allotted portion at once, which is exactly a resource that is a rhythm. The druid "keeps the Measure" of the living world; the bard plays in measure.
Authentic Celtic alternates if you'd rather the name itself be Celtic: Awen (Welsh - the flowing inspiration of poets and druids; well-known in modern druidry) or Imbas (Irish - prophetic poetic illumination). Both lean "inspiration/flow" over "beat."
Dissonance - the out-of-beat failure state. Overspend or misuse and callings misfire, nature answers wrong, the rhythm fights you until you find the beat again. Power isn't "do you have mana" - it's "are you in time."
Airs / Strains - the bard's captured fae-favours, stored as named tunes drawn from the same well (the River's Strain, the Oak's Air…). A bard collects Airs the way other classes collect spells.
Class colouring of the same resource: the druid keeps the Measure of the living world and spends it on innate nature-command; the bard plays it and stores favours as Airs. The warrior doesn't touch the Measure at all.

6 · Keeping power fragile (design notes that protect the balance)

The druid's control must cost the Measure (and indirectly pressure essence), or "everything held at arm's length" quietly becomes "never in danger" - which would collapse the fragility that defines her. Spending to stay safe edges her toward the forest. Her power and her fragility are the same meter.
Give the warrior foes and traps that punish distance or patience, so "just tank it" isn't always correct: something that grows stronger the longer it's near, a swarm that overwhelms endurance, or body-bypassing fae harm (the maneuvering above). His durability must be a deep resource, not an off-switch.
Both poles must occasionally lose something it hurts to lose, or the symmetry rots into "trap-immune" vs "danger-immune."

7 · The two (three) bargaining seats - the social half of the same duality

Class	Seat	How the Folk treat them
Warrior	Leverage	a dangerous animal they can't fully con - easy to trick, hard to move
Druid	Fluency	a near-peer - hard to deceive, but enmeshed and worth deceiving
Bard	Collector / negotiator	a dealer who turns favours into repertoire; the word has power over them

Same Sight-vs-survivability trade, expressed at the bargaining table instead of in combat.

8 · Class identity checklist (use this to design every remaining class)

For each class, pin a point on each axis so it has a distinct identity, not just different numbers:

Starting Sight tier (Seeming & Sight ladder).
Survivability / soul-resilience (how much toll it shrugs off).
Proximity (close ↔ ranged).
Endurance ↔ control (outlast vs keep-at-bay).
Resource (the Measure / martial pool / other) + its failure state.
How Sight rises (innate progression vs external means; innate ceiling).
Bargaining seat (leverage / fluency / collector / …).
Sacrificial economy (what it can and cannot offer the Cauldron).
A signature vulnerability that stops its strength being an off-switch.

9 · Open slots - remaining classes (lock in Cowork, then fill)

The Warrior, Druid and Bard are the anchor poles; calibrate every other class against them using §8.

[Class - TBD] - …
[Class - TBD] - …
[Class - TBD] - …

When the full list is settled in Cowork, drop each into §8's checklist and we'll place it on the inverse-currency spine, set its starting Sight in the Seeming & Sight ladder, and define its resource + failure state.