Advanced Armor Training

   Armor is very useful against most primitive and medieval weapons. Sure, a heavy crossbow bolt, or a longbow, or military pick, or quite a few other weapons could sometimes punch through it, and you could still be beaten to death right through flexible armor, but armor would still deflect some attacks and cushion a lot of the ones that it couldn’t deflect. It was a vital component of military life up until quite recently – when the offensive punch of weapons started to reach the point that armor capable of deflecting them was too heavy to use.

   In role-playing games, armor tends to get downplayed. After all, most games revolve a lot more around fantasy than realism, and people want their lightly-armored rogues, scholarly unarmored mages, and swashbucklers to be effective combatants too.

   Others, of course, want their armor to really be effective – so here’s how to use Eclipse to build some armor-boosting Feats. Since a standard Feat is worth 6 CP, if you want to build a standard-style Feat for your character, just pick options that total 6 CP. If you want to spend more than one Feat, just spend another 6 CP.

   If you want to start dropping and adding other abilities, you might as well go to a full Eclipse point-buy character.

   So what do you want to do with your armor?

• Add Damage Reduction: Buy Damage Reduction, Specialized/against physical attacks only, Corrupted/only while wearing armor. That’s DR 2/- for 1 CP, 3/- for 2 CP, 4/- for 3 CP, 5/- for 4 CP, 6/- for 5 CP, and 8/- for 8 CP, with costs increasing sharply from there on out.
• Increase the Maximum Allowed Dexterity Bonus: That’s Immunity/Penalties for wearing armor (Very Common, Minor, Trivial, Specialized in eliminating Dexterity Bonus Caps only for half cost. That’s 2 CP to raise the (Dex Mod) cap by two points, 4 CP for 4, 6 CP for 6, 12 CP for 8, 18 CP for 10, and 24 CP for 12 – which is the limit, and probably well past the point of diminishing returns.
• Increase the Armor Bonus: That’s Defender, Specialized and Corrupted/does not improve with level, only while wearing armor. 2 CP for +1 AC, 4 CP for +2 AC, and (since the Specialization loses meaning after that) +4 CP per additional +1 AC.
• Make it an Effective Weapon: That’s Martial Arts, Corrupted/only usable while wearing armor. That’s 1d4 for 2 CP, 1d6 for 4 CP, and 1d8 for 6 CP.
• Make you more Intimidating: That’s Augmented Bonus/Adds Str Mod to Cha Mod with respect to Charisma-Based Skills, Specialized in Intimidation, Corrupted/only while wearing armor (2 CP).
• Overcome the Speed Penalty: Buy Celerity, Specialized/only to overcome movement penalties for wearing armor. That’s normally +10′ for a total cost of (2 CP). If you want to reduce this to the ability to overcome 5’of the penalty, Corrupt it to reduce the cost of (1 CP).
• Reduce it’s Effective Weight: That’s Immunity/the weight of armor (Uncommon, Minor, and either Trivial (1 CP) to ignore the weight of light armor, Minor (2 CP) to ignore the weight of moderate and light armor, or Major (3 CP) to ignore the weight of light, medium, and heavy armor. If you just want to reduce the weight by – say – 50%, that will be Corrupted – reducing the costs to (1 CP) for light and medium armor or to (2 CP) for light, medium, and heavy armor.
• Reduce the Armor Check Penalty: That’s either the Smooth modifier on the armor proficiency, Specialized/only negates the Armor Check Penalty (1 CP for Light, 4 CP for Light and Medium, 8 CP for Light, Medium, and Heavy) or – to simply reduce it – buy Immunity/Penalties for wearing armor (Very Common, Minor, Trivial, Specialized in eliminating Armor Check Penalties, That’s 2 CP to reduce the penalty by two, 4 CP for 4, and 6 CP for 6. Beyond that, it’s cheaper to just buy “Smooth” as above and negate the penalty entirely.
• Reduce the Arcane Spell Failure Percentage: Buy the “Smooth” modifier for the armor type in question, Specialized in eliminating the spell failure percentage. This eliminates it entirely at a cost of 1 CP for Light, 4 CP for Light and Medium, 8 CP for Light, Medium, and Heavy armor. If you only want to reduce the percentage, you can Corrupt this as well – but it’s hardly worth the bother.

   If you want to give it magical properties, or short-term boosts, or have it (effectively) made out of some special material while you’re wearing it, you can do that too. You’ll probably want to use Imbuement, Innate Enchantment, or Inherent Spell to do things like that – but, unfortunately, all of those abilities are a little too complicated for a simple mix-and-match approach and rather look like they go beyond “training” anyway.

   Eclipse: The Codex Persona is available in a Shareware PDF Version, in Print, and in a Paid PDF Version that includes Eclipse II (245 pages of Eclipse races, character and power builds, items, relics, martial arts, and other material) and the web expansion. It will be updated with Eclipse III when that’s done as well