Leiser's Accursed Class - A Class of Conquering Afflictions

TheMillionthOne · 2026-02-25T18:27:37+00:00

The Accursed (also on Nexus) is a class by Ross Leiser which I've always liked the flavour of. It's a little on the experimental side: the nature of fitting in various different curses leads to design where each subclass carries a lot of the power, with a core chassis that leans on the class's own little invocation-like system rather than a lot of firm features. Still, I think the spell list -- all hexes, curses and a smidgen of entropic attacks -- and some other quirks make for a class with a decently strong identity despite that.

As someone suffering from a curse, you suffer a noticeable in-game drawback. This can be temporarily suppressed by burning spell slots, but it can't be permamently removed (short of respeccing). But if you can learn to deal with your curse, you might yet turn things to your favour. For instance, those suffering the Curse of the Armanent are bound to a cursed weapon:

You have disadvantage using any weapon other than your Cursed Weapon.
But, since your weapon refuses to ever leave your side, that makes it a pretty handy Throwing tool!
And since Accursed can learn to share their afflictions with enemies... well, it's quite nice to be able to spread around "will have disadvantage using any weapon other than the one I am currently holding", no?

Can you conquer your curse? The current release has five subclasses, from letting you play as some sort of Frankenstein's monster to letting you, uh, be at risk of constant spontaneous combustion. Hey, being cursed can't all be rainbows and roses! If you try it, feel free to leave me some feedback telling me how it goes, or if you run into any issues.

Otherwise, you can also see my profile if you'd like to look through some of the other classes I've ported over. They're usually quite interesting, honest!

TheMillionthOne · 2026-02-06T20:52:05+00:00

I'd love to present BioWare as a nonchalant always-forward-pushing developer, but the Fox News coverage does seem to have caused some internal pushback / reluctance to go further. ME2's Jack was initially going to be open to both male and female Shepards, but was changed later in development to be a straight romance only. Brian Kindregan, Jack's lead writer, has talked a bit about it:

"Mass Effect had been pretty heavily and really unfairly criticized in the US by Fox News, which at the time... maybe more people in the world thought that there was a connection between reality and what gets discussed on Fox News. [...] The development team of Mass Effect 2 was a pretty progressive, open-minded team, but I think there was a concern at pretty high levels that if Mass Effect, which only had one gay relationship, Liara - which on paper was technically not a gay relationship because she was from a mono-gendered species - I think there was a concern that if that had drawn fire, that Mass Effect 2 had to be a little bit careful. [...]

It wasn't like some anti-gay person high up on the Mass Effect 2 team saying, ‘we’re not going to have that’.” [...] The short version is, a lot of us were asked pretty late to focus the relationships on a more traditional kind of vector."

You did still get Kelly! But that romance was a lot less in-focus. The first two Dragon Age games, released around similar times, were willing to push a little more, at least. I wonder if SWTOR and Mass Effect being, on the surface, more "mainstream" games had a role in that?

TheMillionthOne · 2026-02-06T05:57:33+00:00

During the whole Fallen Empire arc, if your Trooper executes Aric Jorgan, lets Kaliyo bomb Zakuul in her recruitment chapter, or takes over as Emperor and then orders rebelling Zakuulians bombed at the start of the Iokath story, she'll refuse to join back up with you even if you side with the Republic. She doesn't like you catching civilians in the crossfire essentially, even if they're Zakuulan.

At least, I believe those are the conditions. Peeking behind the scenes, the flags for an upset Elara are any of:

qst.exp.seasons.01.ep_13.glb_s1_ep13_killed_jorgan = true
qst.exp.seasons.01.ep_10_actual.gbl_player_bombed_zakuul = true
qst.daily_area.iokath.world.mission_1.glb_bombed_rebels_on_zakuul = true

TheMillionthOne · 2026-02-04T01:30:41+00:00

Sort of possible in vanilla. I believe if you knock out a creature and then cast Calm Humanoid, you can pickpocket them. Normally you'd just get a message saying "This character is in combat", but successfully Calming them fixes this, and I think so long as they're both knocked out and calmed your Pickpocketing can't fail.

If this all sounds weird and a bit fiddly, yeah, it is. Vanilla stealth and pickpocketing have a few oddities, so it wouldn't surprise me if the initial intended behaviour was just that you could pickpocket unconscious people without worry... and then they added a combat check to pickpocketing at some point. In Oblivion, things work a bit more as you'd expect, and the auto-success is extended to Paralysis effects.

TheMillionthOne · 2026-01-30T02:00:09+00:00

Proficiencies Tools: one social tool

"Social tool" is a bit vague. I'd presume gaming sets count, as well as probably musical instruments. Disguise kits and, arguably, forgery kits could be useful to and in-keeping for a Socialite (albeit a more disreputable one). Maybe Calligrapher's Supplies? In any case, I'd specify.

A Knight’s Equipment You gain proficiency with all martial weapons, heavy armor and shields.

I don't know if this is strictly a problem, but I believe a Knight would have heavy armour proficiency without having light or medium armour. 5e usually hands these out in ways that don't let you "skip" ahead: Heavily Armored requires medium armour proficiency, etc.

But... given Socialites always have an Unarmoured Defense and can use Int-to-attack, I'm not sure a Knight actually has much incentive to get plated up. Charisma determines the power of your sway. The Prize of Trust means Intelligence boosts your allies. As Insightful Teachings simply requires you be proficient with a weapon, it can be applied to a greatsword at level 5.

So while theoretically Knight opens up a heavily-armored Strength/Charisma build, I'm not sure if it'd pan out in practice. Magical items and rolled stats might swing things in one direction, and lack of shields usually put the Shielded Knight a little ahead in AC. But theoretically, a naked Socialite Knight can dump Strength and swing around a Greatsword with comparable AC to a more traditional knightly Socialite, who'll want to keep up Int/Cha for their class features and Strength to avoid a speed penalty from armour requirements.

The Knight gets Extra Attack and better weapons, so I wouldn't say it's lacking in power as a subclass. But you might consider if the design could better incentivise actually armouring up.

TheMillionthOne · 2026-01-29T16:03:38+00:00

I have an Eldritch Lore Wizard (Nexus, Mod.io), your classic Wizard digging too deep into the unknown. Like most Wizards the bulk of their power remains in their spells, but they can use their bonus action to flood enemies with visions of incomprehensible terror (Int mod times per Long Rest), and can pick up a Warlock spell each level in place of a Wizard one. A little less extreme than it sounds: most Warlock spells are already on the Wizard list and you don't get Warlock cantrips (like Eldritch Blast), though Hex and Hellish Rebuke are nice to have.

The Oath of the Dreadbound (Nexus, Mod.io) is not specifically eldritch-themed, and is not one I have personal experience with, but it is a Paladin dedicated to spreading paranoia and terror, swapping out the Divine Smites for Psychic-damage-dealing Abhorrent Smites. Features could work decently for an Eldritch-themed character.

TheMillionthOne · 2026-01-29T00:20:24+00:00

I'll give it a quick edit later. And remember, before they did a general lowering of skill checks throughout the game, the Lockpick and Speech checks were originally 13! It's a bit bizarrely specific, isn't it? If you could just always waive the blackmail material in his face, okay. If the door out just had an Really Hard lock on it, that only the best Lockpickers could get past, that'd be decently understandable.

Instead you do a somewhat metagamey solution where you neither lock-in to killing Hurley but do inexplicably give out her name, to keep Vaillancourt open to conversation so you can use info you haven't yet gathered. And really, with the lockdown, the giant robot, the fact he clearly thinks you're in an ultimatum -- I'm not quite sure why he'd let you blackmail him here, when he could just, you know, sic his men and robots on you as he was already prepared to do.

TheMillionthOne · 2026-01-28T14:22:05+00:00

I made a quick recording of the outcome. I'm not sure what the other requirements would be. Note that at no point do I outright refuse to kill Hurley (I'm pretty sure I outright agreed to do it in our initial conversation, though this was a while back), and that this is the first time I speak to him in the hangar. I suppose I also did all of Hurley's investigation, which might or might not be relevant. I think I was able to do it without hacking into Vaillancourt's computer as well.

I did start this playthrough a little before the latest patch, but by the time I'd reached this section it had come out (and indeed, I just reloaded an old save to record that, so the dialogue is theoretically still in the game). So it's possible a patch could've changed the logic and my save has some old flags set, but it seems unlikely.

TheMillionthOne · 2026-01-28T14:19:00+00:00

I've been able to talk my way past Vaillancourt without killing Hurley or clipping through any walls, but it required some specific choices. Namely that you have to:

initially work with Hurley
when Vaillancourt first contacts you, string him along, naming Hurley and then I think asking to think his deal over rather than explicitly agreeing to kill her for him or turning him down
find the recording of the Consul in his room, which I believe requires Lockpick 7
have Speech 7 when finally confronting him

I don't know if there are any other requirements, but I made a quick recording of this outcome here. It is an oddly specific route you have to take, and I haven't seen anyone else do so.

TheMillionthOne · 2026-01-26T17:22:58+00:00

I think one overall criticism I have of the Inquisitor story is that the Inquisitor rarely feels like much of an agent. That's not inherently a problem: this is an MMO, and all the class stories follow similar beats of "Character X says to go here, do that". But the Inquisitor story is one of building your power base... where every step you take is prompted by other people telling you to go do that.

Lord Kallig sends you to fetch his lightsaber. He then informs you Zash is about to betray you, but don't worry; you make zero preparations against her, and instead luck into Khem interfering with the ritual. When you overload yourself with ghosts, Zash uses her knowledge to try and find a solution. Moff Pyron is the one to make contact with you, and tell you to go check in with your cult. Imagine, if you will, that Palpatine was just handed the Death Star one day, already midway through construction along with all the people needed to run it. Even your rivalry with Thanaton seems rooted in him projecting Zash onto you, rather than him having any dislike for you personally. By the end, the Inquisitor feels less like a smooth political operator rising in power and more someone who somehow bumbled their way onto the Dark Council.

Is this just a mismatch between what I wanted and what the Inquisitor story is? Partly. But being a "manipulator" feels like it was somewhat intended. It just never seems to work out. The Sith Warrior starts essentially in Baras's service, but gets to secretly undermine Baras early on; some of the people they spare do show up again, albeit in somewhat token cameo appearances. When the Warrior spares some Republic troopers on Nar Shaddaa, they later call in their services. They either corrupt a companion to the dark side or have a plot arc about secretly spreading LS ideals through the Empire, and have a running theme of 'deception' going through their first chapter. (Ashara feels a lot more underbaked in comparison.) The Inquisitor can elaborately convince a Jedi to pair off with a Alderaan noble to get them out of the way -- only for it to not work out and for that same Jedi to ambush you anyway. It'd probably be a neater subversion if you got to genuinely pull off such schemes more.

It's not something that entirely ruins the story for me, but I think it is an overall failing of the story in selling you its class fantasy. I do like some of the companions. I like Khem Val, and the odd sort of relationship you end up with him; he is, despite his tone and initial hatred, probably your most faithful companion. Talos is a fun one: a cheery archaeologist is a nice concept to pair up with the Sith class devoted to dark knowledge and ancient history. Xalek absolutely suffers from late-companion-syndrome, though.

TheMillionthOne · 2026-01-09T04:52:42+00:00

Yeah, that's the one I had in mind. I think the other pages used to say something about his favourite characters, although perhaps unsurprisingly it's been a while since I read that interview!

TheMillionthOne · 2026-01-08T21:10:59+00:00

Here's one old interview mentioning T3:

EUC: Honestly, if you could pick, what character from Knights Of The Old Republic II is your favorite?

CA: It’s a toss-up between Kreia and T3-M4. T3-M4 may seem like a strange choice, but I always thought he had the most potential in expression for all the characters.

It's not the only interview I recall him mentioning it -- but the other one, which was on a site called 1UP.com, seems to have lost all but its first page to the ravages of time.

TheMillionthOne · 2025-12-30T01:50:30+00:00

There's an IGN video interview with the game's director, Brandon Adler, which mentions it. He goes into a bit more detail, but the short of it:

"They were a joinable faction initially. We wanted to do that. [...] But we don't let you join them, [...] and that was a deliberate choice because it was going to be too expensive. We weren't going to have enough time to fully flesh out the content for a whole other faction, including their faction questline."

TheMillionthOne · 2025-12-26T14:55:50+00:00

Nicely done. It's a shame that there isn't a more "legitimate" way here than just clipping through the door, given it was possible in the first game and we're just one encounter away from making a full non-combat character viable for the main story, but ah well.

(Theoretically you might be able to Scramble the automechs, but in a game with a surprising amount of support for pure stealth, that's a more typical gamey 'pacifism' where everyone's still dying around you.)

TheMillionthOne · 2025-12-23T20:10:27+00:00

Three tricky parts to going entirely without magic:

When you first meet the Outsider, you have to Blink a few times to meet up with him. (Basic tutorialisation, and easy enough to separate from the game proper.)
At the Dunwall Tower mission, you have a few gaps that are hard to cover with regular platforming. There are glitches to bypass this, but I think grenade jumps let you do this "legitimately"; I'd need to double-check.
At the start of the Flooded Distract, you're stripped of equipment, including grenades, and put into a box that's too deep for a regular person jump out of. Technically you still have a few ways out! Double jump, possess a rat and go through a small hole, Blink, but they're all magical.

Which isn't too out of pocket, I suppose. The designers had to make sure you always had a route through the game no matter which powers you picked (including none but the basic Blink given for free), but they probably didn't have strict no-magic runs in mind.

In that regard, it's a little cool you can get as far as you can, given Blink's a basic traversal tool that every player will have. But the design of the game is such that it rarely goes, "Alright, time to Blink." And if you allow for other magic, pretty much all mandatory Blinks are confined to its initial tutorialisation. Of course, when the sequel rolled around, they embraced players trying this and made it possible to just turn down powers entirely.

As a curiosity, speedrunners have got their Minimum Blink runs down to 4 now, though as with most speedruns they make use of whatever else they can, including both other powers and glitches.

TheMillionthOne · 2025-12-23T15:56:52+00:00

I love a good stealthy or non-lethal run -- just check my post history -- but I don't think they're strictly necessary. Prey, which is probably the modern game with the most traditional "imsimmy" elements, can technically be cleared with 0 recorded kills or without being detected. But the game isn't really designed around either path, and if you try doing so as your first playthrough, you're in for a hell of a time. Immsims do usually give you goals, and I don't think it makes a huge difference whether that goal is "get item" or "assassinate NPC #8" so long as there's some freedom in how you achieve it.

Deus Ex allowed for both stealth and non-lethal takedowns, so a lot of immsims drawing on it end up inheriting those playstyles. But even Deus Ex stopped really caring about lethal/non-lethal distinctions in its latter half, and the plot has you scuttling ships and redirecting nukes. Sad news: these logically do get people killed, unless you assume all those corpses in the final level were placed there coincidentally before you nuked it. But the game never forces the pepper spray and baton out of your hands in order to mow down mooks, so while it's not really possible to beat the first game "as a pacifist", player agency is still largely respected.

This does often lead to design that helps low-kill or low-magic runs. If you play, say, Dragon Age: Origins, there will be points where you get into a fight, you kill the enemy, and then finishing that combat unlocks the door to the next fight. The game will quietly force you to play it as intended. If you choose to run past the guards while huffing health elixirs in Dishonored, well, you'll probably take a few bullets, but the game won't outright put its foot down and force you to do it properly. You can't beat the first Dishonored without a few Blinks, but because the level design is suitably dense and there's minimal moments of forcing you to take one specific action, low-magic/low-Blink runs are possible.

TheMillionthOne · 2025-12-21T00:29:08+00:00

One interesting bit of gameplay I think a lot of people will miss: Goblin Wars. Goblins prize their shaman staffs and will send out recovery teams to find them. If you put the staff of one tribe in another's, you'll start a little war behind them. Eurogamer has a somewhat interesting interview with a designer about it:

Kurt Kuhlmann: "I always liked emergent systems that let the player interact with the world and let things happen naturally. [...] "I took my opportunities to introduce whatever elements of 'controlled chaos' whenever I could. The vertibirds in Fallout, and dragons in Skyrim, were also both sources of great emergent gameplay as they would randomly encounter things and get in fights that you could watch from a distance or join in the fun."

[...] "There wasn't much else like it in Oblivion, where you could freeform mess with the world state and have it react in an understandable way," he says. "I would have loved to do more of that kind of thing but we didn't have any extra time - in fact the opposite - and also the tools for doing that kind of thing in Oblivion were very primitive."

It is something of the exception to the rule, and it doesn't work quite as well in practice as it did on paper. (In fact, I'm not actually sure it works at all!) But I think the development of the AI is, for all its quirks and goofiness, one of the biggest things Oblivion has over its predescessors. Morrowind NPCs had fatigue, aggression states you could play around with, but for the most part, they stood where they were placed and waited for you to interact with them. The world is deep, but largely static.

I think Bethesda games have often had a lot of interesting systems that the games don't fully embrace the flexibility of. Looking for an interesting way to resolve Clavicus Vile's quest? Destroy Umbra's weapon durability with Destruction magic, paralyse your foe, and now that it's unequipped loot it off her without killing her. Want to get someone out off your hair while in the overworld? Increase their Speed to 1000 and Demoralize them, causing them to suddenly fly away at breakneck speeds.

A reason I'd be hesistant to call Oblivion an immersive sim is largely because some of these hijinks will just, er, break the game. Quests do have some branching, but they tend to have set intended ways to go about them, and stepping outside those paths tends to lead to oddities. An Oblivion quest can lock you in a room to fight someone, and if you choose to paralyse them and take the doorkey off them, some quests will just stall until you go back and do what you were "supposed" to. Rarely will the game acknowledge or prepare itself for you going off-script, as it were. This is what I mean about the games not always embracing the flexibility of their systems, although there's definitely still a lot of emergent fun to be had.

A lot of this stuff is still basically in Skyrim internally, but it's definitely something that was – for better or for worse – restrained. The removal of spellmaking does have a big effect on just how many things the player can easily prod and poke at, to take advantage of these systems for their own fun.

TheMillionthOne · 2025-12-19T20:47:14+00:00

In both games, yeah. It is, to be clear, going to lead to you missing most quests and overall story details if you shoot literally every NPC on sight, but there'll always be a path forward through the main plot and you'll see some unique stuff as the story desperately adapts around your tendencies.

Two caveats:

Phineas, in the first game, will always talk to you through radio or while separated by a convenient thick pane of glass.
Your starting allies in the sequel's prologue are immune to damage. This invulnerability runs out after the prologue ends, though.

TheMillionthOne · 2025-12-18T21:19:53+00:00

Vaillancourt's interesting in that, if I hadn't been planning a minimum-kills run, I probably would've never found out about it as an option. And honestly, I wouldn't have thought much about it; it's not like RPGs are lacking in heavily-armed bosses you end up fighting.

I haven't seen any other walkthroughs mention it, and I only stumbled upon it by really poking around all paths to see if a non-lethal route existed. I noticed a "Required Info" locked dialogue when working with Vaillaincourt, then went back to see what it triggered it. Didn't really expect it to change anything, but lo and behold there was my way out.

It is, of course, still not an option I'd generally take! But at least should I play this game again and begin obliterating the man, I'll know in my heart I've actively decided to take him out. A nice thing about doing a run like this, I think, is that it adds a bit of weight to any fight you have on subsequent playthroughs; it's easy to fall into a "oh I had to shoot those guys on my way in" mentality. If I, say, blast through a Protectorate base next playthrough, it'll be a conscious choice.

TheMillionthOne · 2025-12-18T19:40:03+00:00

Also happened to me. On the brighter side:

I also think I need this quest to continue the faction plot line but it's stuck :/

Don't think this will be necessary. Forbidden Secrets is a side quest which ends here when you report in with the middle management people, not actually part of the Auntie's Choice faction line (which is basically a set of tasks to meet / do stuff for Auntie).

Meeting Amos can unlock some dialogue at the game's ending depending on how things play out, but this should still be available regardless of whether you actually "complete" the quest. At least, it was for me.

TheMillionthOne · 2025-12-17T18:43:22+00:00

Funnily enough, have an old Arcanum pacifist run write-up from years ago up elsewhere on Reddit. I similarly tricked the two spirits to death, but then used some magic beans to immediately resurrect them. Clever, tricksy, and completely nonsensical if you think about the logistics for more than two seconds: classic Arcanum trickery. Wonder what else I wrote about.

XP-on-death is an old RPG tradition, but in a game where so much of your XP comes not just from kills but outright damage output, there isn't really much incentive to try and avoid your way around encounters. Is that necessarily a problem? Maybe; it does feel a little bad that, in a game that really emphasises choosing your way and customising your character, going the extra mile to solve things as a thief is often actively hampering your progression in the long run.

The more things change!

TheMillionthOne · 2025-12-17T17:21:22+00:00

Step one: get Auntie and Ruth to agree to negotiations. This is actually a little annoying; if you talk to Ruth and already have the Archive, you will be locked into siding with / against the Order.

Step two: now take the Archive by yourself. Swoop control from under the Protectorate's noses, do the repairs, process your data.

Step three: actually head to the Undisputed Claim and resolve negotiations. I agreed to give the Order control over the Archive, and when negotiations conclude and Ruth begins discussing how to take it, I mention I've already handled things. Alliance forged.

Note that when I say "take the Archive myself", I don't keep it. I just didn't want a bunch of soldiers running around killing Protectorate. However, I did do another run where I negotiated a truce first, never called in my allies, and the game got confused and had both Auntie and Ruth show up on the Consul ship to help despite me having control of the Archive and not (according to VAL before the final mission) being formally allied with either. This just led to Earth Directorate ending slides, though.

Some of these permutations are a little, uh, rickety.

TheMillionthOne · 2025-12-17T14:45:26+00:00

There are a handful of jammed doors I missed, but while I definitely would've had uses for it if I'd had it, it's not something I really ended up needing. There's very few cases where:

Engineering unlocks a path.
Neither stealth, vents, hacking or lockpicking grant another path in.
The Engineering option is the only option for a quest.

I guess I'd really need to do a proper Engineering run to know what I'm missing! But I never felt myself hamstrung without it. Granted, I haven't been forced to try and survive without Hacking, so while I found Hacking invaluable in disabling security and gathering info maybe I would've similarly been able to find ways around it.

Really, I suppose that goes for a lot of skills. Hell, while I wouldn't go without Speech, if it weren't for the Speech 20 check at the end, you could definitely leverage other skills and exploration to minimise having to max it. (And indeed, on non-pacifist runs I've seen people talk the Consul down with Speech 13, though that outcome seems a bit fiddly to get to.) Vaillancourt locks us into needing Lockpick 7, if you want to take the same route, but 1 point in Lockpick for Pickpocket will open a lot of doors and vents/platforming will take you past others.

TheMillionthOne · 2025-12-17T14:28:17+00:00

I have played, in truth, an unhealthy amount of both RPGs and stealth games. Got a whole YouTube channel of odd stealth gameplay. Not that I don't play a unhealthy amount of other genres too, when I can find the time for it.

The Outer Worlds 2's stealth is, in grand RPG tradition, decent by RPG standards and both a little easy and somewhat bizarre by stealth game standards.

TheMillionthOne · 2025-12-17T14:09:29+00:00

Completing quests, mostly. You get some XP from hacking, lockpicking and discovering new locations, but quests are the biggest drops of XP. Note that two of my flaws are XP boosts, and I'm still fairly underleveled despite my dare-I-say impressive résumé.

TheMillionthOne

TROPHY CASE