Badass Bookworm/Tabletop Games

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Examples of Badass Bookworms in Tabletop Games include:

Board Games

  • Anne Marie in A Touch of Evil is quite literally one, as she gets an increase in her Combat skill for each book in her possession.

Tabletop RPG

  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • As far as tabletop games go, the wizard class (or magic-user, in the older versions) is probably the oldest example. Raise your hand if you can wish for something and have it come true. See this motivator. One should always remember the primary rule of Epic Levels and Forgotten Realms. "Beyond level 20, you should listen to the wizard." Epic monks can shatter castles with their fists. Epic wizards can shatter planets with a couple gestures and some words.
    • Similarly, Archivists and Cloistered Clerics (the divine bookworms) can cast Divine Power to transform themselves into beefy bruisers.
    • There is a feat called Knowledge Devotion which allows one to translate knowledge about a given creature directly into more accurate and powerful attacks against that creature. Numerically, the potential benefit rivals the most powerful non-epic weapon enchantments.
    • Third edition Bards are basically fantasy Indiana Joneses. In addition to decent fighting ability, they get the Bardic Knowledge ability. For class skills they get Appraise, Decipher Script, Gather Information Spellcraft and Use Magic device; all of the "knowing skills". They are also the only other base class that has every knowledge skill as a class skill. A successful Knowledge check gives the character (not just the player) meta-game knowledge of a creature's stats, giving the player a huge advantage in combat. And they have Whip Proficiency!
    • Bards are also the only core class with Speak Language as a class skill; all other classes aside from the non-core spell thieves, paragon humans, and (depending on skill selections)NPC class experts have to gain additional languages as a cross class skill.
  • The GURPS Black Ops RPG setting features an organisation of Badass special ops/MIBs, with two divisions filling the Badass Bookworm category: the Science division (multidisciplinary scientists) and the Tech division (engineers). The former usually knows medicine and how to best fix or take apart the human body, while the latter can build ultra-tech (if unstable) superweapons.
  • The New World of Darkness has entire playable supernatural factions devoted to this trope:
    • The Ordo Dracul in Vampire: The Requiem throws themselves into this trope. The Sworn of the Axe, the "militaristic" faction of the Ordo Dracul, are Badass Bookworms par excellence. For the "goon squad" of the covenant, the Sworn of the Axe is nevertheless filled with geniuses, mad scientists and librarians... all of whom are dead fascinated in mowing over anybody that stands in the way of Transcendence from vampiric existence. However, the Ordo Dracul's founder, Vlad Tepes, subverts this trope quite a bit, though; Vlad starts out as Vlad The Impaler (yes) and it takes him 200 years to get to the point where he can read. Then, of course, he goes on to become the Vampire L. Ron Hubbard.
    • The Mysterium (Mage: The Awakening), meanwhile, has been in steady existence since the fall of motherfucking Atlantis. It's been hinted at fairly regularly that the Mysterium could have Awakened the whole of mankind a dozen times over, but they choose not to, if only because they are the librarians of the secrets of everything, and nobody comes to understand anything about the real universe unless they pay homage to the Mysterium first.
    • Also, innumerable hunters in Hunter: The Vigil also fall into this flavor, including the Loyalists of Thule (ex-Nazi occult researchers turned to killing the bad things and trying to atone for World War 2 being their fault) and the Null Mysteriis, who blend the Badass Bookworm with the Sufficiently Analyzed Magic.
    • The Autumn Court from Changeling: The Lost are also this to the degree. They're the ones who are most typically focused on finding out just how far fae magic goes, so they're the ones who study the Hedge, look into the origins of Contracts, and gather as more occult wisdom and lore as they can. But all courts have a guiding emotion. Theirs? Is fear. Which means they have powers that can make you wet your pants with a mere gaze.
  • Meet the Twilight Caste from Exalted. They are engineers, scholars, and lore-keepers; the signature character, Arianna, Exalted while trying to interpret a particularly tricky poem. They are also the ones most likely to design a BFG powered solely by the flow of the universe and unleash the kind of sorcery that can scythe entire battlefields clean.
    • They were also largely responsible for exiling the Primordial Malfeas to Elsewhere, and then sealing a whole bunch of Yozis (plus every demon in Creation) into him - effectively, they created Hell. The "scythe entire battlefields clean" spell is aptly named "Total Annihilation", the magical equivalent of a tactical nuke - and it's far from the only one. There is also the Light of Solar Cleansing, not to be confused with Cleansing Solar Light - basically killing all "creatures of darkness" (doing severe damage to bosses) within 5–10 miles from the caster. And if you are smart, you can use a Crucible of Tarim to bottle spells for future use...
    • Their cousins, the Daybreak and Defiler Castes, are also this, which is unsurprising given they're based on Twilight Exaltations. As of setting start, they've only been around about 5 years, so they haven't had the chance to match the Twilights' full scope... yet.
  • Rifts has the Rogue Scholar and Rogue Scientist classes. They are seekers of lost knowledge and Lost Technology, dedicated to uplifting the masses and learning all they can. However, Rifts Earth being the Crapsack World it is, they can also handle themselves in a fight, with weapon proficiency and hand-to-hand skills being part of their starting package of skills.

War Games

  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • Space Marine Librarians and Techmarines are psychics and engineers in an organisation Badass down to the man; they use their extra abilities to kick even more ass.
    • Eldar Farseers even more so -- visionary masters of lore, leaders of craftworlds, and seriously badass fighters. Now compare them to the Great Harlequin, the leader of the race's organization of historian-librarian-bard-acrobat-ninjas who are some of the most feared close-combat specialists in a game that already turns everything Up to Eleven.
    • Don't forget the Adeptus Mechanicus, although many of them will just run for their lives in fear there are some Magos whose enhancements and equipment make them more than a match even for a Space Marine and have no problem in showing it.
    • Any Champion of Tzeentch would be one, to say nothing less of the master of change himself. Notably Ahriman is both an extreme bookworm and can kill a Monstrous alien with one smack of his staff.
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