Oddly enough, it was around this season way back in 2016 when I did a post about these same two classes, for the Beta 4 version of the rules. It's interesting to compare and contrast where the designs have changed over the years.
Working on the other "Disciple" classes (Druid and Occultist) helped to kind of lay the groundwork for how the Warlord would take shape, in this iteration. Essentially, there's one universal Warlord feature, one feature unique to each of the two subclasses, and one feature for each of the three combat roles -- similar to the other Disciples. I had been meaning to take the idea of the old-school Fighter getting an army of followers, and impliment some form of that into TNP for a while now; in pre-3.5 D&D (so, before my time in the gaming space -- apologies if I get any of this 2nd-hand information slightly wrong) Fighters got this perk when they received the title of "Lord." To me, it seemed obvious to fit this feature in with the Warlord class, just based on the naming convention alone. With the other Disciple classes having summoner-type "controller" abilities to work off of, the groundwork for the "Lord of War" was already laid, and this feature actually came together quite quickly.
As I had teased in earlier posts, the Spellbinder didn't need a lot of changes from the 2019-ish iteration, since it didn't require a class die makeover. I was kind of fiddling with the "Blademaster" specializations for this class right up until the last minute, so don't be terribly surprised if they get tinkered with a bit in the future. I've always sort of liked the idea of Spellbinder as the over-class for Swordmage and Hexblade; the name originally was meant to incorporate "the other, other Warlock subclass" from 4th Edition -- the Binder. But, when looking up the meanings of words to see if they really fit (something I agonized over a lot on the debilities, for example -- and also why the Mystic eventually became the Occultist) I found that the word 'spellbinding' means to captivate or even hypnotize; this helped to add another dimension to the class, and helped me build out some of its magical abilities. Sort of like the Acrobat and the Adventurer (to varying degrees) the Spellbinder kind of took on a life of its own with TNP, and became its own "thing."
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This post marks the end of this season, for the blog. Typically the first post of the new year will come out on January 11th, so I would check back then for any updates.
If you look back on the posts throughout this year, you'll know that there's still a lot of work to be done, in order to finalize the designs. I'll try and squeeze in some writing over the next month, to get some of the "SRD" ironed out; some other goals would be to get an updated "monster math" document (with at least some example monsters) as well as finalizing the campaign-building mechanics.
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