Bard

Rules wise, bards function identically to their SRD counterparts.

Their common place in the world, however, could not be more different. While there is no shortage of minstrels and other traveling bards mucking about the continent, more often than not, bards are found among the company of military men. Their unique access to arcane healing magic, coupled with the church's prohibition on divine participation in wars between Goodly Races, makes bards invaluable on the battlefield, even without considering their effect on troop morale and combat effectiveness, as their songs and stories while away the boring hours and dark winters that make up most of military life, while invigorating the spirit during frenetic clashes. Additionally, as schooled and literate folk, their advice is generally sound and grounded in historical context, and rare is the noble or general who does not have a bardic biographer on staff.

In addition to being fixtures on the battlefield, or perhaps because of it, bards are highly represented among the nobility and educated set, and most Alexandrian Universities feature a Bardic College, each with its own flavor. For example, the Choral College of Flannary is generally seen as being peerless in the craft of music, while The Academy of Ubrekt produces orators, historians, and dramatists second to none. The King's Conservatory serves as the bardic college of Odessa, and Gildenhome, of course, has no bardic college, per se, but an active contingent of bards and skalds is always to be found in the Halls of the Ancestors. Despite the University of Hakan being almost entirely devoted to the study of arcane magic, there is no bardic college attached to it. Most gnomish bards, in fact, are essentially gnomish skalds from the Scarlands.

In the Peteran Empire, bards are actually quite rare. The highly magocratic Petran elite actively discourage bards, and culturally the niche bards occupy - actor and entertainer - is seen as on par with prostitutes and other lower sorts.