Flagellants are some of the Old World’s best-known denizens. These grotesque zealots are a perfect fit for the religiously saturated world of Warhammer, and players would agree. They have appeared as units in the recent Total War: Warhammer, feature as a sub-class for the Witch Hunter in Vermintide 2 and have been a playable career in the role playing games since the first edition.
The flagellant career in 4th edition is about what you might expect, flails whips and violent zeal, with the added fun of perpetual poverty thrown in for good measure. It’s a fine enough career.
It wasn’t quite what I wanted though. Sure it’s fun, and very much fits the Warhammer ethos, but it didn’t fit with what I wanted to do.
And what I wanted to do was play a fringe religious figure who did not run around clobbering his enemies (and himself) to death with a barbed whip. I wanted a genuine, contemplative, religious mystic.
No career already in the game modeled the sort of religious hermit that I wanted to play. The priest career is a pretty typical, orthodox, cleric. The nun models a more contemplative individual a bit better, but is still much too mainstream. The flagellant certainly has the “zealous and shunned by polite society” thing going on, but is just as focused on violence as religious matter. Finally, the so-called “mystic” career is basically an illegal wizard, and doesn’t really have anything to with religious mysticism. If you want to be a slightly unhinged hermit who lives in a wilderness cave subsisting on only berries and prayers then you’re a bit out of luck.
Thus the ‘Anchorite’ was born!
Named after a peculiar brand of medieval hermit famous for spending long periods of time alone in little cells for the purposes of religious contemplation, this new career is designed for players who want to follow an unorthodox religious path without also beating people’s heads in with a grain thresher.
The career initially provides skills and talents useful for divine contemplation and surviving the wilderness. You will also get access to divine spellcasting, since nearly all the common folk agree that hermits are men of exceptional holiness. Do be careful with your Sigmar-given miracles though, the religious authorities may have a different opinion.
The latter half of the career sees the player become the center of new religious movement (revival? heresy?) and gain more social skills as they, likely reluctantly, are brought into the political spotlight.
So if you hate fun and love obscure religious history as much as I do then you can download the anchorite career at the link below. Enjoy!
Originally published on October 27th 2019 at my now defunct original blog- The Gamemaster’s Codex
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