In this series, I’ll be slowly tackling a rework of one of our favorite classes, the Binder. The class was originally a straight update of the class of the same name from D&D 3.5’s Tome of Magic, including most of the original vestiges, but as we revisit this class, we’d like to examine its mechanics and its concepts with fresh eyes, improve upon them, and write a whole new list of vestiges.
Where better to start than the vestiges themselves?
Origins
Vestiges are the spirits summoned by binders, the source of their mystical powers. Binders offer a fraction of their soul to the spirits to gain this power for a limited time. The original list of vestiges borrow their names from the real-world book on demonology, the Ars Goetia, and a few of their depictions trace back to this source, as well as other public-domain demonology sources. While a few of the vestiges trace their stories to various locations in the D&D canon, most are original characters invented specifically for the binder class.
Strengths of Vestiges
The binder class’s greatest asset is its flexibility. Players running a binder can create a wizard-like character one day, only to turn around with a rogue the next. However, this flexibility comes with a complexity cost: players and DMs need to be familiar with the myriad of options available to the class in order for it to feel playable or fair. Attaching sets of abilities to vestiges, identifiable characters with backstories and personalities, makes the class’s options much easier to understand. For example, Malphas is all about rogue-stuff, whereas Savnok is all about armor. A player can picture these characters, remember their stories, and use this as an anchor to recall the abilities on hand.
Moreover, a few of the vestiges are engaging enough to make the entire class a worthwhile read. Reading through the vestige list feels a bit like reading a textbook on the spirits, as each vestige gets its own background story (with varying levels of detail), its own summoning description, and a physical sign it leaves on the binder. Sometimes, the attached background story is even more engaging than the vestige itself.
Old Weaknesses
Drawing all the character’s names from an old demonology textbook makes the class far harder to learn. Names like Otiax, Halphax, and Shax blend together, as do Naberius, Karsus, Malphas, and Marchosias. This not only makes characters much harder to confuse for one another, but it also makes the class feel more homogenous, which is a damning attribute in a class which relies on variety to be fun.
The vestiges themselves also have confusing standards for what makes a vestige. Some vestiges are murdered gods, whereas others are merely heartbroken lovers. This problem is exacerbated by each vestige having different lengths and perspectives on their legends; some say only a few sentences on a vestige’s role in the world, whereas others recount a personal tragedy with multiple twists and turns.
The vestiges themselves also seem confused as to which niche they occupy. Our update of this class to 5e addressed this to some degree, but some vestiges like Chupoclops still don’t seem to fit anywhere, whereas most others have at least one random feature that doesn’t belong with the others. This lack of focus might have been to tie more closely to vestige lore, but it makes the class harder to learn for newcomers, as the uses of individual vestiges are hard to parse.
Vestiges are also organized in a way which makes their features hard to read. Again, this was worse in 3.5 than in our update, but each vestige still includes a 4-part feature which does nothing other than describing the vestige and its non-mechanical influences. Though this aspect of the class shouldn’t be removed entirely, organizing the vestige’s information is critical for making it easy to read and understand. Components such as the Physical Sign or Influence will be talked about in detail when we examine Pact-Making.
It seems to me that these problems probably originated from a team of writers that tackled the original binder from the wrong angles. Names and legends were likely being decided upon before mechanics were devised, and mechanics were designed to fit. Few of the vestiges have a unified idea behind them, which makes them engaging to read for the lore, but hard to play in a game.
Top-Down Solutions
The binder is a big class which needs far more consistency, so we’ll be approaching it from the top down, laying out systems before we write any vestiges. First, we’ll work through how vestige mechanics should look, then we’ll decide on important archetypes for vestiges (archer, two-weapon fighter, illusionist, grappler, etc), and finally, we’ll name and begin writing lore for them.
Let’s set one baseline right away: vestiges should be dead gods and heroes — individuals who resonated so strongly in the world that their echoes persist in the Void. All of them possessed power and influence in life, but now exist only as dim reflections.
Building on this idea, let’s take our vestiges from world mythology, so there’s still a real-world inspiration for them and so that they feel diverse this time around. To be safe, let’s limit it to non-practiced religions, so that Bast, the Egyptian cat god, or Chernobog, the Slavic death god, are both on the table, but Shiva is not). We can write these vestiges from a mythology textbook perspective, detailing their lives from a distance and making academic mistakes when appropriate for the story.
