GLÅUGUST 2026 Slush Pile - Tonberry and Barber
Here are two classes I wrote for GLÅUGUST which didn't end up being posts of their own.
Class: Tonberry
Challenge 2, prompt 6: classic monsters as classes. This was going to be the first of three Final Fantasy monster classes, but, in the end, I wrote one class and then decided I liked another prompt from that challenge better.
Randis Albion, Tonberry (2016)
Tonberry history, as they tell it, reads like unkind satire. To recount every tragedy and injustice they lament would take days, so here's the basic arc. The tonberries were once a beautiful, enlightened people, but their patron kin-goddess was infected with a terrible wasting disease by a jealous rival godling. Their decline mirrored hers over long, agonising millennia, their bodies shrivelling into hunched reptilian forms, their once-genius minds clouding with raw red anger. And nobody came to their aid, despite the generosity they had once shown to others; indeed, they were mocked, humiliated, plundered for their wealth and wisdom (tonberries invented everything), and left to fade away in the wet, miserable margins of the world.
What remains of tonberry society is driven entirely by vengeance - both the basic, concrete, eye-for-an-eye kind, and the high concept, Nemesis and Erinyes, filtered through the cracked lens of endless, seething fury. A rare few venture beyond their bitter little enclaves and seek justice for themselves, in the form of wealth, comfort, and perhaps the opportunity to vent their rage on the deserving. As a great philosopher once said, living well is the best revenge.
Starting equipment: Huge knife (damage as sword), big shapeless robes, lantern, abacus, smelling salts, well-worn flowstone slate with stylus and erasing comb.
Starting skill: Law, Mathematics, or History.
Per template: +1hp.
You are about half the size and one-fifth the mass of a human.
A: Slow and Purposeful, Chef's Knife, Rancour
B: Guilt Sight
C: Everybody's Grudge, Greater Rancour
D: Inevitable
A: Slow and Purposeful
You move at half normal speed. However, while you're on the ground and moving under your own power, nothing except physical barriers and personal encumbrance can slow you down further or restrict your movement. Difficult terrain doesn't trouble you. You are immune to paralysis. Ropes and manacles refuse to hold you.
A: Chef's Knife
If you attack without spending the previous round staring down your target and focusing your rage (you can still move), you take -4 to hit. If you do focus, you hit automatically and deal double damage.
A: Rancour
You keep your bottomless inner rage on a tight leash, but it will not tolerate competition. When you fail a save against a lasting mental or emotional effect, you get a second save at the start of the following round. Attempts to read your mind return only a throbbing red haze.
B: Guilt Sight
You see an aura around every living being's heart, or closest equivalent organ, which tells you whether they've killed a person ("person" should be interpreted broadly). This also tells you where the heart is, if you didn't already know. The following are listed in ascending order of guilt, as tonberries see it.
White: Doesn't understand the concept of murder (most animals).
Black: Understands murder, but doesn't have the capacity to feel bad about it (demons and very hardened habitual killers).
Green: Has never killed a person.
Blue: Has only killed lawfully. A one-for-one revenge killing counts as lawful. All tonberries read as blue, because all their kills are for revenge.
Yellow: Has killed unlawfully in self-defence.
Red: Has committed murder.
C: Everybody's Grudge
Once per round, you can fling divine lightning at a creature with a yellow or red aura that just attacked you. 1d8 damage, no save, irreducible by any means.
C: Greater Rancour
You shrug off any mental or emotional effect, even if it doesn't allow a save, after 1d6+1 rounds.
D: Inevitable
As your move, you can teleport adjacent to any creature you can see that has ever done you direct harm, or has a yellow or red aura. This ability then can't be used again until that creature dies or you rest for the night.
Commentary
This isn't tethered to any particular Final Fantasy game, it's more of a "best bits" mashup with a few personal tweaks. Everybody's Grudge is loosely based on the VII version, the teleportation ability is from Stranger of Paradise, and the background is thematically inspired by XI and XIV. Rancour and Guilt Sight are my own additions, because I thought the class could use some noncombat abilities; the latter is basically a narrower, cleaner take on Heaven Scent from my old Hound of the HIGHEST demiclass.
Class: Barber
Challenge 6, prompt 1: a class which is emphatically not a fighter, wizard, cleric, or thief. As with the tonberry, I settled on a different item for challenge 6. Also, from the right angle, this might be a cleric?
William Carpenter, A Muslim Man Having His Head Shaved (1885)
BLESS the HAIRDRESSER
He attacks Mother Nature for a small fee.
Hourly he ploughs heads for sixpence,
Scours chins and lips for threepence.
He makes systematic mercenary war on this WILDNESS.
He trims aimless and retrograde growths into CLEAN ARCHED SHAPES and ANGULAR PLOTS.
BLESS this HESSIAN (or SILESIAN) EXPERT correcting the grotesque anachronisms of our physique.
-- Wyndham Lewis, "The Vorticist Manifesto", in BLAST: Review of the Great English Vortex, No. 1 (1914)
Starting equipment: Scissors and straight razor (as daggers), white suit, bag of hairdressing supplies, heavily annotated anatomy textbook, bottle of disinfectant, bottle of laudanum, bottle of cheap gin.
Starting skill: Hairdressing. What did you expect?
Per template: +1 to Saves vs. soiling, disfigurement, and the special abilities of wild animals.
A: Styling, Barber-Surgeon
B: Next to Talent
C: A Cut Above, Disarraying Strike
D: Immaculate
A: Styling
Choose two adjectives that could describe a person (beautiful, dangerous, honest, kind, intelligent, evil, foreign, etc.). These are your Styles. Each template after A, gain another.
You can spend 30 minutes styling someone's hair and choose one Style from your list; they will appear as that adjective to onlookers until you style them again, or until they sleep, get wet, or take damage. This is good for ±1 to reaction rolls, depending on context, and has all sorts of other intangible social effects which I won't bother trying to summarise here.
Styling works on any creature with something approximating hair and the capacity to care about their appearance. This includes many animals. Baldness is no object - you can do a lot with facial hair and eyebrows. And yes, to some philosophers' chagrin, you can use it on yourself.
A: Barber-Surgeon
It's not your main gig, but you incidentally have most of the required skills and gear. You can dress and disinfect wounds and amputate appendages without fail. You also always know when an injury or illness is life-threatening, though not necessarily the exact mechanism.
B: Next to Talent
When you Style someone, you can choose to imbue them with a spark of supernatural confidence in their new look. As long as they're Styled, whenever they attempt something that harmonises with their Style (bluffing while honest, threatening someone while evil, jumping across a gap while dangerous), they have a 2-in-6 chance of succeeding in addition to and independent from normal resolution mechanics.
You can only maintain this stylistic blessing on one person per Barber template at a time. Unlike regular Styling, you cannot use it on yourself.
C: A Cut Above
Your Styling only takes 10 minutes, and is no longer ruined by getting wet or taking damage.
C: Disarraying Strike
You can make a special melee attack with any bladed weapon to ruin a creature's appearance. If you hit, you deal half damage (or you can choose to deal no damage at all), but they're treated as if Styled with ridiculous. This does not stack.
Precise effects vary. Many thinking creatures will be enraged or embarrassed to some degree, liable to act less rationally. If the enemy has a single clear leader and you hit them, that'll probably force a Morale check.
D: Immaculate
As long as you are clean, uninjured, and Styled, creatures must Save to harm you. You can transfer this ability to anyone you Style, but you don't get it back until the following morning even if they lose their Style.
Commentary
The Barber is close to a pure support class, weak alone (especially early on) but potentially very strong in a group, especially if they have time to plan and prepare. Styling the party is likely to become part of their daily routine, which I hope is a feature rather than a bug. Disarraying Strike is very niche, but the one time you swing an encounter with it should be pretty funny.
I could maybe have done more with the quote's theme of hairdressers as enemies of nature. I'm not unhappy with this version, but that feels like fertile ground for an alternative take.