Snakes, mushrooms, apes, and frogs

Myconid, by Erol Otus. (From Dungeon of the Slave Lords, 1981)

[Warning: this post is long and rambly and speculative and contains no useable game-related information whatsoever.]

I've been reading a lot of OSR stuff recently. The average quality is staggeringly high: not in terms of production values, necessarily, but quality of ideas and useability of material. It's been a very eye-opening experience.

Mostly, my newly-opened eyes have been spending a lot of time reading about snakes, mushrooms, apes, and frogs.

OSR writers love these things. Apemen. Frog- and toad-men. Serpent-folk. Myconids. Miscellaneous ooze monsters of a hundred varieties. The pattern eventually became so prominent that it prompted my sluggish brain into action. Why these? What was it about the OSR which kept making these the go-to fantasy creatures of choice? More specifically, why were they so much more prominent in OSR games and adventures than they were in 'mainstream' D&D?

What I'm saying is, why doesn't the typical D&D party look like this?

Some of it's just about source material, of course. A huge chunk of OSR writing is about pushing back beyond Tolkien, and his pervasive legacy of elves-and-dwarves-and-halflings, in order to reconnect with the pulpier fantasy literature which proliferated in the years before Terry Brooks ushered in the sub-Tolkien fantasy glut of the 1980s: Vance, Howard, Leiber, Lovecraft, Ashton Smith, and so on. Howard loved ape-men, Lovecraft loved frog-men, and both of them loved snake-men, so the use of such creatures became a kind of badge of fealty: by filling your adventure with frogmen rather than orcs, you signify your generic allegiance to the pre-Tolkien traditions of sword and sorcery. But I think there's more to it than that: a set of deeper factors which led behind the decisions of Howard and Lovecraft to use those creatures in the first place, and which point towards some of the core differences between mainstream D&D and the kinds of fantasy which proliferate in the materials produced by the OSR.

See, monsters are never 'just' monsters. Monsters are almost always metaphors for something else. (From the Latin 'monstrum', a sign or portent, geddit?) Elves, dwarves, orcs, halflings, ogres... they're just exaggerated versions of real human types. Similarly, the various 'giant predatory beastie' monsters - manticores, chimeras, owlbears - are usually just 'greatest hits' mash-ups of various real-world animals. Most stories about elves and dwarves and ogres and owlbears could just as easily be told about a bunch of haughty upper-class humans, another bunch of gruff working-class humans, a third bunch of thuggish human outlaws, and a variety of large, dangerous predatory animals of your choice. The only thing that the fantasy material lets you add is an exaggerated sense of scale.

So 'orc' is often a fairly clear metaphor for 'unpleasant violent person who, if killed, probably won't be missed', and 'manticore' is usually a metaphor for 'big, scary predatory animal that eats people': their metaphorical fancy-dress making them, among other things, more acceptable as targets of imagined violence, as many players who are fine with butchering orcs and chimeras might have qualms about mowing down human adversaries and exterminating the local bear population. But then there's this other space... this space in the middle, inhabited by things which aren't quite human and aren't quite animal but are uncanny combinations of the qualities of both. These are the sorts of creatures which people in the early modern period meant when the talked about 'monsters': freakish beings which combined human and non-human attributes in bizarre and uncomfortable ways. And those are the ones that a lot of OSR writers are interested in.

'The Monster of Ravenna' (woodcut from 1581)

Now, not all animal-human hybrids automatically fall into this space. Some animals have been so thoroughly anthropomorphised that we regard them almost as honourary humans: cats, dogs, monkeys, horses. Unless you go out of your way to emphasise their weirdness, a dog-man or a cat-man or a monkey-man or a centaur is usually going to be just as much of a metaphorical human as any elf or dwarf: cat-people could almost always be replaced with sexy, slinky, stealthy humans without making any real changes to the narratives in which they appear. Then there's a borderland of animals who we tend to think of in less anthropomorphic terms, but to whom we still tend to attribute strongly human traits: pigs, wolves, bears, lions, and so on. (Large mammals, basically.) Wolf-men and bear-men might be presented as more 'inhuman' than dog-men or cat-men, with a few more of their animal traits intact, but they're still usually going to play very human-like roles in the stories in which they appear.

And then there are the snakes and the frogs.

Reptiles, insects, arachnids, and amphibians are much harder to anthropomorphise than mammals, which is one reason why creatures based on them so often act as the villains of the stories in which they appear. (You can do it - look at the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for example - but doing so often involves dialling down their 'animal' traits to a bare minimum.) Snake-men or spider-men can be used as metaphors for kinds of people - cold-blooded villains or lurking murderers, perhaps - but it's much more of a stretch. Human beings actually do loads of the same things that wolves do, although usually not in quite the same ways: we designate our territory, we compete for pack status, we work together to tackle difficult problems too large for any one of us to handle individually, and so on. But no human behaves like a spider, not really. To say that someone is wolfish is to imply that they've exaggerated one side of their (still very human) personality: but to say that they're spider-like is to imply that there's something inhuman about them. Lizard-men, insect-men, snake-men, toad-men: these stand for the melding of the familiar with the radically inhuman. Real difference; genuine otherness; the encounter with something which, on a very deep and basic level, is really and truly not like you. 

You know there's a conspiracy theory about this guy being a Deep One, right?

This, I think, is why they crop up so much in OSR products: because one of the crucial things which ties most of the OSR together is its shared desire to re-inject some of the fantastical strangeness back into fantasy gaming. Different OSR writers do it in different ways: some add sci-fi, some add horror, some play up the absurdist comedy, some shift the cultural reference points away from those with which their readers are likely to be most familiar, some try to return to the genre's roots in fairy-tales and folklore... but the basic objective is, I think, usually the same, namely defamiliarisation. To get us to look at these dungeons and monsters and wizards, these things which have become so worn with over-use that they have lost almost all of their original imaginative charge, and see them once again as something strange and exciting and new. To see the descent into the dungeon not as a routine exercise in grid-based slaughter and loot acquisition, but as a journey beyond the fields we know, away from the familiar and into a place which operates by very different rules.

Thus the frog-men, and the toad-men, and the snake-men, and the lizard-men. Thus the ape-men, who are actually harder for us to anthropomorphise precisely because they are so close to us: uncanny not-quite-humans, neither one thing nor the other. Thus the use of mushroom-men instead of tree-men: trees can be very human-like, as Tolkien's ents demonstrated, but fungi belong to some much odder realm. (Go on, imagine a human mushroom. You're imagining someone really weird, aren't you?) Creatures whose links are not with the everyday world of cats and dogs and short hairy people and tall pretty people that we actually inhabit, but with deep time, earlier evolutionary epochs, strange biomes, and unfamiliar classes of biological life. I strongly suspect that this is why Howard used them, and I know it's why Lovecraft used them: because they evoke the idea of life existing in totally alien ways, with just enough similarity to ourselves to be really creepy. And this, to come right back to the start at last, is basically the reason why I like OSR material so much more than mainstream fantasy gaming material: its embrace of idiosyncratic oddness, of things which would never be published in more traditional forms because they'd alienate too much of the target market. Of course I'm not suggesting that an adventure which features frog-men instead of orcs would be so strange as to be unpublishable: four decades worth of D&D modules prove the opposite. But I am suggesting that if one is the sort of person who finds oneself reflexively filling adventure after adventure with myconids and toadmen, probably while rewriting elves to be plant-men and dwarves to be robots and halflings to be evil death cultists in a desperate attempt to get them to feel genuinely weird again, then that might be a hint as to one's larger generic sympathies. And I don't think it's any kind of accident that so many of the apes-and-frogs-and-mushrooms brigade have ended up as part of the OSR.

Denizens of the Wicked City 9: The Golden Ones

Once there was a beautiful young maiden. Here is how her story goes.

* * *

Long ago, there lived a young woman of surpassing beauty. Many rich and powerful men vied with one another for her hand, each offering greater gifts than the last, so that her father was quite bewildered which of their offers to accept. But while he deliberated, the matter was cut short: for in the dark of the night one suitor more daring than the rest broke into their home, and stole the maiden quite away. This suitor carried the maiden to his hidden home, deep in the darkest part of the taiga. There he wooed her with gifts and music, with fair words and fine verses and rich gowns sewn all over with precious stones; but she would not accept him, and each day she demanded only that she be returned to her home. When she had rebuffed him for the hundredth time, her suitor grew angry: he locked her into her room, and swore that she would not leave until she consented to his suit. But still she denied him, until the fury of his failures turned the young man’s brain.

Seeing her resistance continue, the suitor became convinced that the beautiful maiden must have had some secret lover, whom she preferred to him. He suspected everyone, and not entirely without reason: for the other suitors had not ceased to search for her, and their servants and soldiers were prowling from village to village. So her captor gathered around himself a band of silent and merciless men, and he decoyed these agents of the other suitors deep into the taiga, and there he hanged them from the branches. Soon his suspicion grew so deep that he saw in every stranger or traveller a thief come to steal away his prize; and so he hanged them, one and all, until the woods around his hidden home were full of corpses swaying in the winds. As the fame and the horror of the place grew, legends began to circulate through the far towns that the most beautiful women in the world was being held prisoner there, deep in the pinewoods. Many a gallant young man rode off in search of her, fancying himself a lover or a hero. All of them ended their days choking in the hangman’s noose.

Years passed, and the maiden’s younger sister grew to be almost as great a beauty as she had been before her. She, too, had many suitors; but she swore to marry none but the man who could fetch her sister home again, and those who attempted this task did not return. At last, in despair, she set off to find her sister for herself; and when she went, she was accompanied by her four most persistent suitors, each of whom hoped to win her favour by some deed of heroism along the way. They had barely set foot into the woods when the Hangman caught the first of them, and hung him on a pine tree; they were almost within sight of the Hangman's house when he caught the second, and hung him on a larch tree; and when the three survivors, each from a different angle, tried to creep into the house itself, the Hangman caught the third of them and hung him from the flagpole on the roof. But the sister and her last surviving suitor found their way into the house, and crept through its corridors, sick with horror and fear; for the Hangman’s men were barely human any more, mere silent, mad-eyed ghosts who roamed the corridors with nooses dangling from their hands. At last, they found their way to the entrance of the maiden’s prison-room; and though they could not pass it, they communicated in whispers with her through the door. 

That night, when the Hangman came for the two thousandth time to demand her hand in marriage, she told him that her heart had softened towards him, and that she longed for him to enter her chamber and sing to her as he used to do. He unlocked the door – and as he stepped inside the maiden cast around his neck a noose woven from her gowns of silk and cloth-of-gold, the other end of which hung down over the room’s rafters; and her sister and her sister’s suitor rushed in behind him, and all three of them pulled the rope until the Hangman was lifted from the floor, kicking and gasping until he breathed his last. Then they gathered all the wealth which he had given her and they fled out of the taiga, and they did not stop until they reached their father’s house. Her sister married the last of her suitors, and they lived in wealth and happiness until the end of their days, but the maiden herself had resolved never to marry:  instead, she entered into a temple devoted to the Sage of Gold, and in time she became a great priestess and physician, as famous for her skill and wisdom in her old age as she had been for her beauty in her youth.

After their deaths, the three of them passed into legend: and today the Golden Maiden, the Brave Sister, and the Faithful Suitor are revered as quasi-deific figures, prayed to by would-be lovers and all who find themselves crossed in matters of the heart. As for the woods where the Hangman once lived, it remains a place of appalling ill-omen. Those who enter it often do not come out again; and those who do often speak of seeing corpses dangling from the branches, corpses which could not possibly be the remains of those killed by the Hangman all those years ago. Some say that it is the descendants of his murderous band who still lurk there, practicing the same grim customs which he first taught them; others assert that it is the Hangman himself, so far-gone in evil and madness that even death could not hold him, who now roams the woods with a tattered silken noose around his neck, or else that the ghosts of his victims prowl the forests, dragging others to the same horrible deaths as themselves. Few are so curious as to be willing to risk their lives to discover the truth.

* * *

The Sage of Gold, you will recall, is primarily revered by the Serpent Folk. This means that his cult has something of an image problem. People may respect the Serpent Folk, but they don't like them, and they certainly don't like going into whole temples full of them. There's only so many lines of hissing, heavily-robed serpent-men that you can walk past before you start to feel like a mouse which has accidentally wandered into the snake enclosure at the zoo.

As a result, the legend of the Golden Maiden has been a gift to the cultists of the Sage of Gold. Whenever an unusually attractive young person with a knack for healing comes to their attention, the cultists of the Sage lose no time in producing any number of spurious genealogies and family trees 'proving' that the individual in question is a direct descendant of the Brave Sister and her Faithful Suitor, and proceed to offer them all kinds of encouragements and inducements to follow the example of their famous ancestress the Golden Maiden and join the cult of the Sage of Gold. These beautiful young healers are called the Golden Ones, and the cult values them very highly indeed: they form the public face of the religion, one to which people tend to react much more positively than all those creepy serpent-men. After all, the Golden Maiden is one of the most popular folk-heroes in the region.

In game terms, the Golden Ones are the closest thing that ATWC has to the 'healer-priests' of D&D tradition. Like most things in the Wicked City; they come with a whole load of baggage: the cult they serve is run by the same serpent-folk who control the city's drug trade, most of whom find the current situation so profitable that they're not at all keen on rocking the boat. But the brighter Golden Ones usually work out that they're basically being exploited for PR value, and the braver ones sometimes even decide to do something about it. They're good-looking, they're articulate, they're medically trained, and they're absolutely adored by the common people. It's not a bad package for a would-be revolutionary.

* * *

The Brave Sister Would Be Proud of Me: Playing a Golden One requires Intelligence 11, Wisdom 11, and Charisma 13; they need to be bright enough to cope with a rigorous medical education, and pretty enough to persuade people that maybe they really are the descendents of the Golden Maiden. Game information is as follows:

• You can only use simple weapons, and cannot use shields, or any armour heavier than heavy leather (+3 AC).
• You gain a bonus to all your to-hit rolls equal to half your level, rounded down.
• You gain 1d6 HP per level.
• Your beauty, self-confidence, and air of untouchable holiness makes it very hard for people to bring themselves to hurt you. When fighting intelligent enemies, you may add your Charisma bonus (if any) to your AC. 
• You have a disturbingly complete knowledge of human anatomy, which you can use to your advantage in combat. When wielding a dagger-sized or smaller bladed weapon (knife, scalpel, etc) in melee against a living target with more-or-less human anatomy, you gain a damage bonus equal to half your level, rounded up.
• You are a highly skilled healer. Each day, you may care for a number of people equal to your level; as long as you are able to check up on them every few hours, giving them medicine and dressing their wounds, they will regain an extra 3 HP per day in addition to whatever they would normally recover. If you focus your entire attention on caring for a single patient for an entire day, they regain a number of extra HP equal to three times your level. If more than one Golden One is tending to the same patient, these bonuses stack.
• You know a wide range of cures for diseases and poisons. After inspecting someone suffering from a poison or disease, you can spend one hour preparing a medicine which permits them a new FORT save to shake off its effects, with a bonus equal to your level. You may only attempt this once per patient.
• You can perform amazing feats of battlefield first aid. If someone takes a fatal injury, then you have a number of rounds equal to your level to attempt life-saving treatment. If you get to them in time, then spend one round performing emergency first-aid and make a Wisdom roll; if you succeed, they immediately regain 1d6 HP. If this isn't enough to save their life, then they die for real. 
• You can identify almost all drugs, poisons, and medicines by smell. Especially obscure ones might require an Intelligence roll.
• You are attractive, eloquent, and widely believed to be descended from a popular folk-hero. You gain a +1 bonus on reaction rolls (in addition to any bonus from your Charisma), and all your followers gain an additional +1 bonus to morale. 
• Between your good looks, your ancestry, your eloquence, and your habit of saving people's lives, people just really like you. Any ordinary people you meet should be assumed to be friendly, helpful, and well-disposed towards you unless they've got a strong reason to behave otherwise. This isn't mind control - they won't die for you, or tell you their deepest secrets - but you'll always be given the best seat at the concert, the last slice of cake, the first warning that the guards are coming, and so on. If you're really trying to push your luck with what this will let you get away with, the GM may call for a Charisma roll. 

Golden One Summary Table

Level	Hit Points	To Hit Bonus	Fortitude save (FORT)	Reflex save (REF)	Willpower save (WILL)
1	1d6	+0	14	14	14
2	2d6	+1	13	13	13
3	3d6	+1	12	12	10
4	4d6	+2	11	11	11
5	5d6	+2	10	10	10
6	6d6	+3	9	9	9
7	7d6	+3	8	8	8
8	8d6	+4	7	7	7
9	9d6	+4	6	6	6
10	10d6	+5	5	5	5

Starting equipment: Beautiful clothes, bag of medicinal herbs, medical instruments (scalpel, forceps, etc), golden icon of the Sage of Gold, 1d6 copies of a cheaply printed book telling the story of the Golden Maiden (illustrated with woodcuts), impressive-looking documents 'proving' that you are a lineal descendent of the Brave Sister, 3d6x10 sp.

B/X class: the Angel

Last one. I promise.

This is a class for people who want to play angels or similar benevolent spiritual types. It's basically a 'build your own righteous dude' class. People with fond memories of Planescape could use it to play aasimar. I always felt they were kinda shortchanged by the rush to make tieflings a core race.

Anyway. Angels.

Hit Dice, Experience, saving throws, to-hit charts: All as Cleric.

Weapons and Armour: Angels can use any kind of weapons and armour.

Angelic Gifts: At level 1, select one of the following Angelic Gifts for your character. Select an additional Gift for each subsequent level. Some gifts may be chosen more than once, as explained in their writeups.

The gifts you may choose from are as follows:

• Angelic Beauty: Once per day per two levels, you may charm someone by looking into their eyes. This has the same effect as a Charm Person spell cast by a Magic-User of the same level. 
• Angelic Gaze: May be chosen twice. Chosen once, this gift allows you to see in the dark. Chosen twice, it allows you to see into the souls of men: when you make eye contact with someone, you become instantly aware what single action they feel most guilty or ashamed about. Unwilling targets may resist this effect by making a saving throw.
• Authority: You may cast Command, as a Cleric of equal level, once per day per level.
• Blessings: You may cast Bless, as a Cleric of equal level, once per day per level.
• Divine Aegis: Once per day, you may reroll a failed saving throw. 
• Exorcism: You gain the ability to Turn Undead like a Cleric of equal level, but your power also works on demons, devils, and similar evil spirits.
• Fire From Heaven: May be chosen twice. Once per day per two levels, you may call down holy fire to blast one nearby target. This has the same effect as a Magic Missile spell cast by a Magic-User of the same level. If chosen twice, you can use this gift once per day per level, instead.
• Flight: May be chosen up to three times. Chosen once, this gift allows you to float up to 1' above the floor at will, letting you float over water, avoid certain traps and hazards (collapsing floors, quicksand, etc), and move without making sound or footprints. Chosen twice, it permits you to slowly levitate vertically up and down. Chosen three times, it permits true flight.
• Gift of Tongues: You may cast Comprehend Languages on yourself at will.
• Halo: May be chosen twice. You have a glowing halo, which provides bright illumination at all times. You may cause it to vanish and appear at will. If this gift is chosen twice, the light of your halo also fills all allies who can currently see it with hope and determination, granting them (but not you) a +1 to-hit and damage bonus.
• Healing: May be chosen up to four times. You may cast Cure Light Wounds, as a Cleric of equal level, once per day per level. If chosen twice, your heal spells also cure poison; chosen three times they also cure madness or disease, and chosen four times they also remove curses.
• Holy Blood: Your blood counts as holy water, and you may create vials of holy water by bleeding 1 HP worth of blood into a container. Any undead or demonic creature which hits you with a bite attack immediately takes 1d8 damage.
• Holy Weapon: May be chosen up to six times. Chosen once, it allows you to conjure a flaming weapon of your choice into your hand at will: only you can wield it, and it vanishes if you let go of it, but it is otherwise an ordinary weapon aside from being on fire. Each subsequent time you choose this gift the holy weapon gains +1 to-hit and damage, up to a maximum of +5.
• Judgement: May be chosen any number of times. Once per day, you may pronounce a Judgement upon someone as though you were an Inquisitor of equal level.
• Miracle: Each morning, pick one spell that a Cleric of your level would normally have access to. You may cast that spell once. If not used by the end of the day, the spell is lost - unless you pick it again the next day, of course!
• Music of the Spheres: Once per day, you may sing a song of such heartbreaking beauty that anyone who hears it (friend or foe) must make a save or sit and listen, enthralled, until you stop singing. You may sing for a maximum of one hour per level. Any kind of violence breaks this effect.
• Sense Evil: You feel intense discomfort whenever a source of supernatural evil (e.g. undead, demons, etc) is nearby. The range of this power is 10' per level. 
• Shepherd of the Dead: Once per day per level, you can communicate  for up to one minute per level with the spirit of someone recently dead: the dead are generally well-disposed towards you, and will answer your questions truthfully unless they have strong reasons not to. Will not work on anyone who has been dead for more than one day per level.
• Sustenance: While you can still eat and drink if you want to, you can survive indefinitely on nothing more than air and sunlight. 

B/X Class: The Inquisitor

Man, remember when this blog used to be about clockpunk fantasy in Central Asia?

I was skimming the Pathfinder SRD the other day, and I came across the Inquisitor. It's a cleric variant where you get to pronounce Judgements against people. Sounds cool, right? Well, let's look at the Judgements:

Justice: This judgment spurs the inquisitor to seek justice, granting a +1 sacred bonus on all attack rolls. This bonus increases by +1 for every five inquisitor levels she possesses. 

So, first of all, this makes no sense. You... pronounce a judgement of justice on... yourself? 'Hey, self, you're a pretty just guy, you know? In my judgement, you should totally keep going with that whole justice thing.' Secondly, it's totally underwhelming. You declare your divinely-inspired intention TO! SEEK! JUSTICE!, and you get... +1 to-hit. Rising to +2 to-hit at level 5.

But it made me think: what would it look like if you built a whole class around going about judging people?

Maybe something like this...

* * *

The Inquisitor

A B/X class for players who love over-acting at the gaming table

Hit Dice, Experience, saving throws, to-hit charts, weapons, armour: All as Cleric.

Turn Undead: As cleric of equal level.

Judgements: The Inquisitor does not gain cleric spells. Instead, he gains the ability to pronounce Judgements upon his enemies. An Inquisitor can pronounce one Judgement per level per day.

To pronounce a Judgement upon someone, the Inquisitor must point at them and declare: 'Sinner!' (or Blasphemer, or Heretic, or Adulterer, or whatever.) 'I judge you to be worthy only of...'

They then complete the sentence with one of the Judgements listed below, which then takes immediate effect. Note that some of these are only available to Inquisitors of a certain level or higher. An Inquisitor who is unable to point at people and/or unable to speak is unable to pronounce Judgements.

(NB: In case it isn't obvious, the person playing the inquisitor needs to actually speak the judgement, preferably in their best, spittle-flecked, hellfire preacher voice. GMs may award saving throw penalties to their targets for particularly impressive delivery of the line.)

This is you.

The list of possible Judgements is as follows:

Judgements available to all Inquisitors

• ...Destruction! The target takes 1d6 damage per level of the Inquisitor. (Save for half.)
• ...Fear! The target must save or flee in blind terror for 1 round per level of the Inquisitor. 
• ...Humiliation! The target must make a saving throw or throw themselves prone and grovel in the dirt for one round per level of the inquisitor. They will continue doing this even if attacked.
• ...Pain! The target must make a saving throw or be overwhelmed with agonizing pain, taking a -4 penalty to their attack rolls and AC. After a number of rounds equal to the Inquisitor's level, they are permitted another save to shake off the effects; if they fail, the effect resets.
• ...Silence! The target must pass a saving throw or be stricken dumb for 1 hour per level of the Inquisitor.
• ...Slavery! The target must make a saving throw. If they fail, they must obey all orders given to them by the Inquisitor for one hour per level of the Inquisitor. Ordering them to do something totally abhorrent to them permits a new saving throw to break the effect, potentially with a bonus for particularly awful acts. ('Eat your own eyeballs' is probably worth a +10 modifier or so.) Being directly attacked by the Inquisitor or his allies causes this effect to end immediately.

Judgements requiring Inquisitor level 3

• ...Foulest Pestilence! The target must pass a save or be infected with a horrible rotting disease for 1 day per level of the Inquisitor. During this time they suffer a -2 penalty to their to-hit and damage rolls, and the stench of their rotting flesh is so awful that everyone within 15' of them suffers a -1 to-hit penalty unless they wear a nosepeg or similar. Everyone will avoid them if at all possible, and they suffer a -2 penalty to reaction rolls. 
• ...Hellfire! The target takes 1d4 fire damage per level of the Inquisitor. If this damage is enough to kill them, they explode in a ball of hellfire, inflicting half this much damage on everyone within 10'
• ...Icy Torment! The target takes 1d4 cold damage per level of the Inquisitor, and must pass a saving throw or be so numbed with cold that they suffer a -2 penalty to their to-hit and damage rolls until they get a chance to warm up.
• ...Repentance! The target must make a saving throw or spend 1 minute per level of the Inquisitor grovelling on the ground, tearfully confessing to all their misdeeds. These confessions will always be true, but the first sins they confess will be the ones that they personally feel most guilty about, which will not necessarily be the ones that the Inquisitor is interested in. The effect ends immediately if the victim is attacked.

Judgements requiring Inquisitor level 5

• ...Blindness! The target must pass a saving throw or be stricken blind for 1 hour per level of the Inquisitor.
• ...Imprisonment! The earth beneath the target's feet opens up to swallow them. They must make a saving throw to leap clear; if they fail, they will be imprisoned six feet beneath the earth for one day per level of the Inquisitor. Their lightless earthy prison is just big enough to stand up or sit down; it has its own air supply, but food and water may be a problem for long-term imprisonments. The victim is unable to damage the walls of his own cell, but anyone else can dig down through the earth and free him with no more difficulty than would normally be involved in digging a hole six feet deep. This Judgement will not work if the area immediately beneath where the target is standing does not contain enough earth and stone to contain such a prison. At the end of the effect, the victim is spat back out onto the surface. 
• ...Loathing and Abandonment! For one hour per level of the Inquisitor, all who look upon the target will perceive them as being wretched and loathsome, deserving only of scorn and contempt. They must pass a saving throw to bring themselves to obey, defend, or cooperate with the target; if they fail, they just can't bring themselves to work with such a vile creature. The target themselves gets no save against this effect.
• ...Madness! The target must pass a saving throw or be reduced to feral, paranoid madness for 1 day per level of the Inquisitor. During this period, they will regard the Inquisitor himself and any symbols or regalia associated with his religion with hysterical terror.

Judgements requiring Inquisitor level 7

• ...Eternal Servitude! This Judgement can only be pronounced on a corpse. Uttering it causes the corpse to rise as a zombie or skeleton under the Inquisitor's command. An Inquisitor can have a maximum number of undead servants equal to twice his level. 
• ...Penance! The target must make a saving throw or spend one round per level wounding itself with whatever weapons it has available, screaming that it does not deserve to live. During this time it takes 1d4 damage per round (1d6 damage per round if armed), and will not actively defend itself against attacks. 
• ...Oblivion! The target takes 1d6 damage per level of the Inquisitor, save for half. If this damage is enough to kill them, then their corpse vanishes and everyone except the Inquisitor forgets that they ever existed. People may gradually be able to piece together proof that they used to exist from diaries, official records, etc, but their lost memories will never return.

Judgements requiring Inquisitor level 9

• ...Everlasting Misery! The target must pass a save or become desperately ill. They will not die, but become so weak and feeble that they cannot stand or walk, and even speaking requires enormous and painful effort. Unless dispelled, this effect will last for the rest of their natural life.
• ...Vile Deformity! The target must pass a save or be warped into a horrible, mutated parody of themselves, with hideous features, animal-level intelligence, and an instinctive, hysterical fear of the Inquisitor and the holy symbols of the Inquisitor's religion. This effect is permanent unless dispelled.

An Inquisitor can remove the ongoing effects of a Judgement that he has pronounced at any time simply by pointing at the target and declaring: 'Sinner, I grant thee pardon for thy vile transgressions.' In the case of the Oblivion judgement, this will cause all lost memories of the victim to return. Judgements can also be removed with Dispel Magic just like any other ongoing spell effect.

Mass Judgements: At level 5, the Inquisitor can pronounce a judgement on a whole group of targets, up to a maximum of one per level. The Inquisitor must still be able to point at them, so this will only work on a group of targets all standing fairly close together. The victims of a mass judgement receive a +4 bonus to their saving throws.

Counter-Judgements: Any Inquisitor may remove the ongoing effects of a Judgement inflicted by another inquisitor of equal or lower level by laying on hands and declaring: 'Behold! The infinite mercy of the divine extends even to a wretch like thee!' Doing this uses up one of their Judgements for the day. 

I Appeal That Judgement: If an Inquisitor attempts to use a Judgement on another Inquisitor, then the target may spend a Judgement and declare: 'I defy thy false authority!' Each Inquisitor then rolls 1d6 and adds their level. If the defending Inquisitor scores higher on this roll, then the Judgement has no effect. If the defending Inquisitor was one of several targets of a Mass Judgement, then it has no effect on anyone. 

New Class: The Noncombatant

I've mentioned before why I feel that B/X D&D is a better match for romantic fantasy than most subsequent editions: the rules place a much greater emphasis on social solutions, negotiation, persuasion, and so on than the murder-fests which later editions tended to become. Similar factors mean that it's much more friendly to 'noncombatant' PCs: without 'search checks' and 'diplomacy ranks' and whatnot, it's perfectly possible for a non-leveled character to make a major contribution to a story despite being useless in a fight. But while such a noncombatant can do a great job of bargaining with monsters and solving mysteries and finding secret doors and whatnot, the fact is that any D&D game is sooner or later going to feature a fight scene: and at that point, it's a bit rubbish for your only option to be 'cower and scream'.

It's particularly frustrating because this isn't at all the case in so much of the source material. Loads of fantasy fiction features a character - often an audience stand-in character - who is no good at beating people up, and yet contributes enormously to the overall success of the protagonists, usually through a combination of empathy, diplomacy, quick thinking, and luck. I've already mentioned Chihiro in Spirited Away; Sarah in Labyrinth would be another great example, as would the 'girlfriend' characters in most older action or adventure movies - Dale in Flash Gordon, Marion in Raiders of the Lost Ark, even Elizabeth Swan in the first Pirates film. Give them half-a-dozen levels in Fighter and you spoil the whole effect. The point of them is precisely that they can achieve these things without being able to cut baddies into bits.

You know it's a metaphor for adolescence, right? You can't beat adolescence by punching it in the face. More's the pity.

Thus the Noncombatant class: for people who want to play runaway noblewomen, tag-along younger siblings, teenage love interests, and similar 'civilian' types without having to give them inappropriate class levels. It's a little bit non-traditional, in that some of its 'powers' are actually ways of modifying the unfolding fiction around the table, rather than special abilities consciously employed by the PC: so if you hate that, then you'll probably hate this too. But I've tried to keep these to a minimum, and modeled them wherever possible on the kinds of things that such characters tend to do in their source material.

Noncombatants: Game Information

• You are proficient with simple weapons, and with armour no heavier than heavy furs (+3 AC). You are not proficient with shields. 
• You gain a bonus to all your to-hit rolls equal to one-third your level, rounded down.
• You gain 1d6 HP per level.
• You are really good at resolving situations without violence. As long as no bloodshed has yet taken place, you get a +1 bonus to all reaction rolls as long as you are the one doing the talking. This stacks with any bonus you may get from a high Charisma score. 
• Your noncombatant status is obvious to everyone, and enemies won't treat you as a threat unless you give them reason to view you as one. For as long as you are cowering, hiding, running away, etc, all enemies will always ignore you until all your more threatening comrades are dealt with, and will not use lethal force against you unless they have a strong reason to leave no survivors. Once they see you inflict real damage on someone, this no longer applies.
• Because they don't take you seriously as a threat, enemies won't bother to defend themselves properly against you unless you give them reason to do so. If you attack an enemy who is currently ignoring you, or who is fighting you but has not yet been given any reason to view you as a real threat, you get +4 to-hit and inflict bonus damage equal to half your level, rounded up. For as long as these attacks keep missing, enemies will continue to not take you seriously (although they will try to stop you attacking them, in a low-priority sort of way), but once one of your attacks actually hits and does damage then this bonus no longer applies.
• You are fantastic at knocking out unwary enemies by whacking them on the head with blunt objects. Any time you are able to sneak up behind someone, either because they don't know you're there or because they're ignoring you, you can try to whack them on the head with a table leg, rock, vase, etc. Make a to-hit roll (with your +4 bonus, if appropriate): if it hits, your victim must make a FORT save or be knocked out cold for 1d6 rounds. (Enemies in helmets get a +4 bonus to this save, and enemies without heads or brains are, of course, immune.) Once enemies have seen you do this, they will start to take you seriously as a threat, so this ability will usually only be usable once per combat.
• Once per day per level, while another PC is fighting someone, you can make some kind of vital contribution which lets them get in a telling blow. Maybe you trip the enemy, or distract them; maybe you clumsily stumble through the melee at just the right moment to knock them off balance. Whatever happens, the PC in question gets a free attack, with a +2 bonus to their to-hit and damage rolls; but while, in the fiction, their character is the one who makes the attack, you roll the attack and damage dice for it. 
• You have an almost supernatural level of luck when it comes to dodging and ducking things. Once per day per level, you may declare that a single attack automatically misses you, or that you have automatically passed a single REF save. You may make this declaration after the to-hit or saving throw, turning a hit into a miss, but not after damage has been rolled.
• Any time a ranged attack would take you to 0 HP or below, any other nearby PC may elect to take the hit instead by yelling 'NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!' and jumping in the way of the bullet / arrow / whatever. They take the same damage you would have done. This can only occur once per encounter.
• You are surprisingly adept at sneaking around. For as long as there are things to hide behind, you can sneak from place to place without being spotted except under the most extreme circumstances. People looking for you will never find you unless they have the time and opportunity to exhaustively search the location you are hiding in.
• Any time you surrender to your enemies, they will always tie you up and take you prisoner unless they have a very strong reason for doing otherwise. You will always be tied up in such a way that you will be able to wriggle your way free in 1d6 hours, and your captors will never notice the looseness of your bonds until it is too late. If you are subsequently recaptured by the same group of enemies, however, they will treat you in the same way as anyone else.

Noncombatant Summary Table

Level	Hit Points	To Hit Bonus	Fortitude save (FORT)	Reflex save (REF)	Willpower save (WILL)
1	1d6	+0	14	14	14
2	2d6	+0	13	13	13
3	3d6	+1	12	12	12
4	4d6	+1	11	11	11
5	5d6	+1	10	10	10
6	6d6	+2	9	9	9
7	7d6	+2	8	8	8
8	8d6	+2	7	7	7
9	9d6	+3	6	6	6
10	10d6	+3	5	5	5

Starting equipment: Civilian clothing, unsuitable shoes, pocket knife (1d4 damage), 5d6x10 sp.

(NB: NPCs should never have Noncombatant levels; they should always be real noncombatants, and be treated by the rules and world as such. This class is strictly for 'noncombatant' PCs!)