Today I’m going to dive into Iron Kingdoms: Requiem by generating a character for the roleplaying game and hopefully give you some inspiration when it’s time to generate them yourself. I’ve used one of the new subclasses to show off to some of the new features coming to character generation.

So, let me introduce you to Niall Kain. She is an advocate of Thamar, devoting herself to her goddess and a nearly pathological quest for learning and self-empowerment. Since she came of age, she’s walked Thamar’s path by traveling the world in her never-ending pursuit of knowledge and power.

Let’s start with some of my initial choices when generating this character. First, she is a Cygnaran human, specifically from the Thuria region. Instead of utilizing the Cygnaran traits, however, I used the optional system of Essence (we’ll get more into that later). As she’s been essentially a traveling scholar all her life, I decided the vagabond background was a good fit. Niall’s devotion to her goddess has imparted on her the divine powers of a cleric. Finally, since she is more than a decade into her quest and has experienced many hardships, including fighting the infernal menace during the Claiming, she is level 5.

Essence is an alternate system that combines with your choice of race to allow for more customization of your character. There are five different essences in the Requiem book; for Niall, I used the Intellectual essence. When you take an essence, it replaces the ability score increase you gain from your race with one granted by your essence. You also gain a feature tied to your essence, in addition to the features granted by your race. This means a character created using the essence system will be slightly more powerful than one that isn’t designed using that system.

The Intellectual essence grants Niall her choice of adding 2 to her Intelligence or Wisdom score. As a cleric, I want Wisdom. She also gains the Intellectual Aptitude feature, which causes one of her skill or tool proficiencies to add double her proficiency bonus. The Intellectual essence, like the others, also gives the character access to several feats. When she reached level 4, she took the Quick Thinking feat from among the Intellectual feats she had access to. Quick Thinking allows her to take an action or bonus action at the end of another creature’s turn, once every long rest.

Despite taking the Intellectual essence, she still gains Cygnaran features. One of particular interest to her is the Well Educated feature. It gives proficiency in any two from among the following: Arcana, Insight, Medicine, Nature, and Religion. Gaining two skill proficiencies from one’s race is quite rare. I assigned her the Arcana and Insight skills.

She also gained skills from cleric and vagabond, adding Persuasion and Religion from cleric and Survival and Nature from vagabond. This gives her the same number of skills as your normal rogue! Further, one skill of my choice (Insight) gained double proficiency bonus from Intellectual aptitude.

For stats I used the standard array: 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, and 8. That got me the following base stats before I assigned my bonuses from my essence and background: 8 Strength, 10 Constitution, 14 Dexterity, 13 Intelligence, 15 Wisdom, and 12 Charisma. I decided my character would focus on medium armor and firearms, so she has abnormally high Dexterity for a cleric. Whenever you make a character, you can choose to swap either (or both) of your simple or martial weapon proficiencies for the same level of firearms proficiency. Thus, Niall—having never been particularly strong—decided to master the use of firearms, the great equalizer, instead of learning to use simple weapons. Finally, Intellectual and vagabond each added to her Wisdom score, bringing it to a very respectable 18.

So, that finally brings us to Thamar’s preferred Divine Domain: Guile. Thamar wishes for all her advocates to possess a liberated and crafty mind; she doesn’t care so much about what they do with that intellect, just that they are always the masters of their own future. Guile is all about getting one over on your opponent, so not surprisingly, it grants the user proficiency in Deception, bringing Niall’s total skills to a whopping seven! Just because Thamar’s advocates utilize guile doesn’t mean they are defenseless—anything but, in fact. They gain one of the most conventionally powerful cantrips from the domain: Eldritch Blast.

Also at 1st level, Guile clerics gain Shrouded Magic. This allows you to significantly reduce the required somatic and verbal components of your spells and causes your spells to not emit spell runes. Only those paying extra attention will even know you cast a spell.

At 2nd level, you get Channel Divinity: What You Can’t See. By utilizing this feature, you can add your Wisdom modifier to your spell damage rolls. All creatures damaged by your spell will also have to take a Wisdom saving throw or be blinded until the end of your next turn.

All in all, Niall is not a woman you want to cross. Stand in her way, and you quite literally will not see it coming—the spell, that is, or the end. She is a crafty fighter, using guile, intellect, knowledge, and occasionally a gun to bring down any foe. Thamar may not be as widely worshipped as her brother, but those who are devoted to her can be spectacularly deadly.

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