The gates are locked. You're one of the very few people left who still stands at them and knocks.
This is not a class most tables build a party around. It's the one referenced in the Setting Bible as a rare holdout of "true" faith — not a Petty-God Cultist trading favors with something small and bored, but someone still addressing the actual Abrahamic God who left, or the actual angel He sent who broke everything and is still, somewhere, caged. Neither is answering in any way that shows up on a character sheet most days. That's the whole design: a Vigil does small, quiet, unglamorous things constantly, and once in a great while does something that gets written into the setting's history.
Chosen at 1st level. Grants a feature again at 7th and a capstone at 15th.
You pray to something that hasn't answered in two hundred years and has given you no reason to believe it ever will again — and you keep doing it anyway, because the alternative is admitting the wasteland is all there is. You gain Grace by enduring hardship faithfully, protecting the powerless at real cost to yourself, and refusing shortcuts that would betray what you still believe.
You believe Uriel's Turning was a mercy the world flinched away from before it finished, and that a second, cleaner burning is still owed. You gain Cinders by committing violence in Uriel's name, recovering relics of the Turning, and feeding the belief — yours and others' — that the world must break again to be made right.
A Vigil is not a nova caster and not a striker. Turn to turn, expect steady, unglamorous support — not because the class is weak, but because that's the actual bargain: small and reliable now, in exchange for enormous and rare later.
Typical turns spend actions on things like: steadying a panicking ally, interposing yourself to take a blow meant for someone else, offering a word that keeps someone fighting one more round, a minor and slow heal rather than a burst. None of it reads as exciting on paper. All of it is the reason the people who travel with a Vigil tend to survive things they shouldn't.
Concrete examples at each tier, for both Paths. Lesser is usable from 1st level at a cost of 1 Grace/Cinder. Greater unlocks at 9th level and costs your full accumulated pool (typically 2–3). Great unlocks at 17th level and costs your full pool at its highest cap (typically 4). Attempting a Miracle or Unmaking beyond what you've unlocked either fails outright and burns everything you'd banked, or succeeds anyway at a terrible personal cost — GM's call, and it should hurt.
| Tier | The Unanswered — a Miracle | The Choir of Ash — an Unmaking |
|---|---|---|
| Lesser | A wound that should have festered closes clean. A lie is compelled into truth for one sentence. A soul moments from becoming a raging spirit finds peace instead. | A weapon remembers the Turning and burns hotter for one strike. A machine-spirit obeys you briefly, as if you were Uriel himself. A small structure fails exactly where you need it to. |
| Greater | The recently dead draws one more breath and speaks. A radiation-scarred acre turns green for a season. A crowd's despair breaks all at once, becoming resolve. | A building becomes ash and rebar in a single heartbeat, no fire required. Every ghost-machine in sight turns on its former masters for one minute. A memory is simply removed from someone's mind. |
| Great | The dead of an entire battlefield rise just long enough to walk home and be buried properly. A drowned district's floodwaters recede for a day. A raging-spirit epidemic across a whole region falls silent, permanently. | A fortress becomes a crater. Every raging spirit within miles answers a single call at once. The seal on Uriel's prison measurably, permanently weakens — and anyone capable of noticing, notices. |
| Lv | Class Features |
|---|---|
| 1 | Path, Presence, Grace/Cinders (cap 1), Lesser Miracle/Unmaking, initial proficiencies |
| 2 | Skill feat, Vigil feat |
| 3 | General feat, skill increase, expert Religion |
| 4 | Vigil feat |
| 5 | Ability boosts, ancestry feat, skill increase, Grace/Cinders cap 2, expert Will |
| 6 | Vigil feat |
| 7 | General feat, skill increase, master Fortitude, Path feature II |
| 8 | Vigil feat |
| 9 | Ancestry feat, skill increase, Greater Miracle/Unmaking unlocked, expert Class DC |
| 10 | Ability boosts, Vigil feat |
| 11 | General feat, skill increase, Grace/Cinders cap 3, master Will/Religion |
| 12 | Vigil feat |
| 13 | Ancestry feat, skill increase, master Fortitude/Reflex |
| 14 | Vigil feat |
| 15 | Ability boosts, skill increase, Path capstone, legendary Religion |
| 16 | Vigil feat |
| 17 | General feat, skill increase, Grace/Cinders cap 4, Great Miracle/Unmaking unlocked |
| 18 | Vigil feat |
| 19 | Skill increase, Testament |
| 20 | Ability boosts, Vigil feat, The Gate Answers / The Cage Cracks |
A representative loadout, not an exhaustive list. Ivory bar = Unanswered-flavored, open to all. Ember bar = Choir-flavored, open to all. Unmarked feats are open to either Path.
Your past Miracles or Unmakings are remembered — genuinely, as established world history, the way the Turning itself is remembered. Choose a lasting benefit reflecting your legend: NPCs recognize and react to your reputation unprompted, or once per day a failed faith-based check succeeds anyway because your name alone moves the outcome.
Once in your entire career — not per day, not per campaign arc, once — the defining act of your faith actually happens, fully, unmistakably.
Your prayer is answered directly, from beyond the sealed gates themselves. Effect scale: undo a catastrophe, resurrect several of the dead, banish a Turning-era horror outright. This is table-legend material, built with your GM, not rolled for casually.
You channel a genuine, controlled fragment of Uriel's power through the seal at a target of your choosing — campaign-defining destruction, and the seal is now measurably weaker for it. This should visibly move the setting's main plot (Setting Bible §13) forward.