RPG-Class Horoscopes — Advice for the Season Ahead
These are uncertain times in an uncertain world. As the sun sets red in the distance, it casts a strange light over the valley below. From your campsite in the foothills, you gaze abroad, tracing your intended path across the landscape, wondering what the future will hold.
You have maps, arcane knowledge, intelligence from sources you’ve interrogated, whispers from ancient gods out of this world, and hard-won experience from seasons of campaigns and conquest. But, as in any adventure, the road ahead always seems to change the moment you set foot on it.
There’s no true way to predict your fate until you meet it, but the experienced sorcerers, tacticians, gamblers, and statisticians on our Adventure Forecast Advisory Council will attempt to provide seasonal guidance to assist you on your path.
Finding Your Sign
Unlike an astrological sign, an adventure sign is yours by choice and by identification. We all serve different roles at different points in our adventuring lives; sometimes more than one at the same time. Sometimes we’re in the role we feel we were born to play, and other times we do what we have to for the good of the group. Your adventure sign does not necessarily have to match a class in a game you’re playing.
Read on for descriptions of the adventure signs used in our seasonal forecast, along with our predictions for the season ahead.
Sign of the Fighter
You feel most at home as part of a team, and take pride in the knowledge that others rely upon your strength. Physicality is important to you, and you find peace in activities that ground you in your body, like athletics, martial arts, or meditation. You think that most people think too much before acting, and believe in action over hesitation. You hate bullies more than anything, are fiercely loyal to your friends, and are comfortable being the center of attention.
Your decisiveness, confidence, and calmness-under-pressure are huge assets to your friends and allies, but you can sometimes verge into stubbornness and bullheadedness. At times, your impulsivity gets you into trouble in situations where you would have been better served considering your best course of action before committing.
Sign of the Fighter Autumn Forecast
The coming harvest season is a time of action and hard work. You will thrive on diving head-first into the challenge and reaping the fruits of your efforts of the past year. Seeing your success, others will look to you for help with their own burdens, and you will have to choose who is deserving of your help and trust. The possibility for betrayal is there, but so is the possibility of burning bridges over a hasty judgment of someone’s intentions.
Savor your own accomplishments this season, but take care in balancing your celebration with work on your relationships with friends and allies.
Sign of the Hunter
You’re only here with the group because you have to be. If given a choice, you’d be alone in the woods, where you wouldn’t have to rely on anyone but yourself. Your self-reliance is your strongest trait, and it allows you to survive and endure in situations where most could not. The serenity of nature is your source of calm and energy, and you form close bonds with animals. Humans, on the other hand, perplex and exhaust you more often than not.
Despite your reluctance, the people you allow in your life value you and appreciate your presence. With proper boundaries and adequate time apart, you form bonds with a social group when situations require you to. Your self-sufficiency makes you a source of balance and support for those around you.
Sign of the Hunter Autumn Forecast
As you hear the sound of dead leaves crunching beneath your boots and feel a chill on the morning wind, you may start to worry about meeting all of your goals before the snows come. You also worry that your party is slowing you down and wonder if you should leave and adventure solo before settling down to camp through the winter.
Harness this energy to motivate you, but don’t wear yourself down if you can’t achieve every quest in your journal. Ample time to be alone and reflect will come in the winter season, so take time to create connections with others before the autumn ends.
Sign of the Bard
Given your affinity for performing and drawing attention to yourself with humor, it surprises people to learn that you’re really an introvert at heart. You’re more comfortable when in front of a group where you can get out of your own head, and would rather talk to a group of three or more people than have a one-on-one conversation. Some of this comes from a closely held sense of insecurity of some kind, which you defend by deflecting with self-deprecating humor and grand attention-seeking gestures.
You bring joy, insight, entertainment, and relief to those around you, but can be cruel or cutting with your sharp wit. You’re skilled at defusing tension in interpersonal situations and can connect with most people, though you rarely form close emotional bonds that would require you to make yourself vulnerable. Though you’re in your element in front of a crowd, you only truly relax and cease performing when you’re alone.
Sign of the Bard Autumn Forecast
After months of creative drought, you doubt you will ever again find the source of inspiration that has guided you in the past. As the weeks pass, you feel yourself pulled in several different directions, and experience an escalating sense of frustration and hopelessness with yourself and your seeming inability to tap into the creative productivity that has buoyed your spirit in the past.
This season, get back to the root of your creative drive and make something simple, from beginning to end, that is intended to bring joy to one person. Be it a well-written letter, a poem for a friend or lover, a song that amuses a companion around the campfire, or whatever else you may think of — the key will be to finish a project you have started, and to experience the effect it has on another person to refresh your creative confidence.
Sign of the Mage
Growing up, your spent hours upon hours with your nose buried in books, learning ancient knowledge and tales of lands far away. You approach the world outside your mind from an analytical perspective and thrive on abstract thinking. You’re most comfortable alone, or in social situation where you’re prepared with research or a clear role.
You feel that any problem can be solved with knowledge, planning, and the willingness to do whatever is necessary to succeed, regardless of societal norms or other people’s emotions. Your learning and experience are vital to your personal achievement, but sometimes your ambition and perceived ruthlessness get in the way of your ability to connect emotionally with people in your life.
Sign of the Mage Autumn Forecast
This season you will witness needless suffering due to poor decision-making, leading you to deep anger and a certainty that you would have done better. When witnessing similar events in the past, you have become bitter and resentful, withdrawing from the situation or employing gallows humor to insulate yourself from your feelings.
In the coming months, you will have an opportunity to step into a role of leadership to correct for the failings you have identified in someone else. This will require you to check your natural pessimism and act with a new responsibility. The conflict between your certainty-from-afar and the more complicated reality on the ground will be frustrating, and you will be tested in your ability to sit with the judgment of others while you take charge of the situation.
Sign of the Priest
You feel best when helping others, comfortable in the knowledge that you are needed. Because of this, you are an essential member of your group and community, and take pride in the good that you’ve done. When you close your eyes at night, you run through every worst-case scenario that may befall your companions, and figure out what you could do the next day to prevent them or to repair the damage afterwards.
Your sense of empathy, abundant energy, and your ability to heal and comfort others are your strongest traits. However, you sometimes forget to take care of yourself, and can find yourself in relationships where you’re giving more than you’re receiving.
Sign of the Priest Autumn Forecast
The previous season has brought misfortune to many around you, and you feel guilty that you haven’t done enough. There is one person in particular whom you wish you could have saved. You feel a great pressure to assuage your guilt by doing more, giving more, but you find yourself feeling tired, restless, and irritable.
This is a time to take stock of your internal resources and to forgive yourself the responsibility you feel for the pain of others. An honest inventory of your actions will show that you have given much of your time and care, and circumstances were beyond your control. Make time for yourself this season, with the knowledge that you will be more helpful to others when you are at full strength yourself.