fictitiouswhimsigot | Entries tagged with perk

The sun is a god of supreme and all-encompassing power. He is untouchable and perfection is his breath. The light of the sun is the rectification of wickedness and the inspiration of great and heroic deeds.

The sun is not a god of mercy or hope. He is a god of power, conquest and pride. He faced the universe emperor and overthrew them, yet choose to sacrifice the crown of the cosmos in order to preserve the existence of free-will.

Some people are touched by his light, and they can draw power from his legacy and story. This MP shop represents the powers and blessings you can receive by committing yourself to his path and narrative (by spending MP). These blessings are not physical objects, but supernatural powers or obvious magical enchantments.

Characters with a strong connection to the sun, such as those with a Connection skill or those with a Superior skill or Affliction marking them as an Anthol of the sun, can purchase these blessings anywhere- so long as the sun's light has ever touched that place. However, this divine connection is build on the principles of the sun, and so it is closed off for 1-3 chapters after a character takes a Wicked Action involving any of the following:

Turning from a promise or oath you have sworn.
Turning from a conflict that challenges your supremacy or honor.
Allowing yourself to be subject to corrupting social or physical influences, like poison.
Willfully harming someone you believe to be innocent or worthy of protection.

Other characters can sometimes gain access to this MP shop as the reward for an Aspect 5 quest, in lieu or in addition to a perk.

Accumulated blessings dissipate naturally at the end of each Book.

Sample blessings:

1 MP

A wisp of blazing solar purity that takes root in your soul. It gives you a +1 Tool bonus to resisting a specific type of temptation, so long as your Vice issue is 2 or less.
The power to summon golden arms that aid you in combat, but only against the wicked foes of the sun. This gives you a +1 Tool bonus in such circumstances.
An unstoppable resolve. This grants a +2 Tool bonus to calling on courage in the face of death or danger.
A use of the Well-Lit power of the Creature of the Light arc.

2 MP

A golden halo, mandala of golden fire or something similar. This ethereal blessing marks you clearly and undeniably as a true scion of the Sun. This acts as a miracle that allows you to communicate your role as someone connected with the Sun to anyone and anything, including ancient spirit-servants of the sun, lesser solar deities and foes the sun. This is a miracle with infinite uses.
The sun perfects and uplifts your strengths. This blessing grants a +1 Tool bonus when using any skill you have a 3+
A use of the Divine Warrant power of the Creature of the Light arc.

4 MP

This power rejects the sovereignty of death over the sun. As long as you possess a Vice of 2 or less, this miracle can be used as a single use of the Immortality power offered to Immortal Arcs. For characters with that ability, it instead grants free Strike equal to their arc.
The sun is an unparalleled conqueror, you are no less. This blessing manifests as some solar-powered extension of your natural fighting abilities. It's obvious, flashy and supernatural. It conveys a +2 Tool bonus to conflicts that make use of it.
- A 15XP Gold Anytime quest can alter the nature of this blessing to instead grant you supernal talent in your highest mundane or superior skill.
This blessing passively grants you a potent aura of light. This light can be indefinitely wielded with your mundane intentions to harm or inflict pain on creatures of darkness, or other thing anathema to the sun. However, you can cause the light to break out into an unbearable solar corona. This fills a neighborhood sized region with your aura, which holds the temperature and luminescence of the surface of the sun. It's utterly indiscriminate, and doing this expends the blessing.

Miraculous characters who are able to purchase blessings like this can slowly internalize the powers it offers as permanent Perks with appropriate quests. If they complete an Aspect 5 or Mystic 5 quest, they can gain possession of the Blessings power of the Awakening arc as a perk. This would initially closely mimic the blessings offered here, but invocations of that power could (of course) allow them to change those. Like any character, they can benefit from their own blessings by spending the requisite MP.

And the tide rose,
And the fire came as it would, with all of its heat and agony.
The screaming pain of a world's death throes rang out in her heart.
It hurt. It ached with the dull, throbbing pain of an ancient wound.
Of a life lived in exhausted heartache and cruelty borne.

It would kill her and the world.
She should weep.
It should make her cry.
But quietly,
So quietly,
she whispered,
"It was just a foolish dream."

And try as it might, the fire could not eat her heart.
Because it had already drowned a tide of glittering obsidian.

Obsidian Tide of the Heart
Type: Chthonic, Bleak

0MP - Invoke this power, 1/book.
4 MP - While at Hollow 0 or 1, invoke this power an additional time.
2 MP - While at Hollow 2+, invoke this power an additional time.

This bleak power makes you apart from the world. It separates you from yourself, from them, from the foolish dreams of the heart.

You gain a point of the Hollow issue whenever you use this power.

Whenever you are exposed to one of the following, you may invoke this power:

A primarily magical, spiritual or metaphysical attack or danger.
A sudden swell of emotions.
A sudden recollection of a memory.

The offending threat faces an Obstacle and Auctoritas equal to your Hollow issue in order to affect you directly. If the issue is primarily an unthinking part of the world, it simply fails to affect you at all- you may take an Obstacle 0 action to simply avoid or quell it.

This protective ward lingers until the end of the scene, and can be applied to any broadly similar type of threat. Using the dark chill of the void to quash your feelings of angry jealousy could also oppose other angry, jealous or envious feelings, for example.

However, this power lingers in your soul. It inundates it. It becomes part of you. For the rest of the chapter, you are cursed with a hollowness in your heart. You suffer the same Obstacle and Auctoritas granted by this power on any attempt to:

Feel good about the world or yourself.
Feel love, joy, enthusiasm or any other positive feeling.
Open up to others, or for others to read your feelings and connect to you.

If this power is invoked while at Hollow 2+, this negative lasts instead until the Hollow issue is resolved.

If someone overcomes the lingering curse of this power by Making Answer to the Bleak, this may, depending on the desires of the character’s player, resolve the Hollow Issue or lower it to 1 or 2. But not always- sometimes the tide of night cannot be stymied by even the most heartfelt of efforts. There is no shame in the healing being long-fought and slow.

This perk is an appropriate miraculous perk for an Emptiness 3 or 4 quest. It could also be, in theory, the reward for a particularly long and awful Emptiness 2 quest.

Credit to @RoseMythos for her invaluable and insightful assistance in making this miraculous power.

A watchful eye, a fluttering page.
Discovered secrets of the twilight age.
Fear, pride and cooling rage,
The men who made the mirror.

Molten glass and song of steel
Permit whispered thoughts to reality unreel.
At last their dead hearts fear do feel,
But still they work.
The men who made the mirror.

With hiss and crackle
And muttered word.
With hearts soaked in forbidden verb.
With whisper knife and guillotine ring.
And thousand spiders dancing on ancient string.
They labored their doom to bring,
The men the mirror made.

This is about a perk for CMWGE called Toxic Shine. It modifies the normal Shine skill. You are still charismatic, but it’s a dark charisma. You are not inspiring and uplifting. You are an object of obsession and fixation, and of reverence. Interest in you is sickly and draining and unhealthy.

Toxic Shine functions much like normal Shine, in that other people may use your Toxic Shine to form intentions. However, unlike Shine these intentions act similarly to Magical Skills. They face a natural Obstacle, which renders their use is draining and unnatural. Another character may use Toxic Shine to form intentions that:

Uplift, protect or directly benefit you,
Sacrifice themselves or their health for your sake,
Pursue your stated plans,
Pursue what they believe your plans to be, or
Endure unpleasant conditions in pursuit of an obsession with you.

These all face an Obstacle of 0 in a place that has been ritually dedicated to you in some way, or while in the Outside. They suffer an Obstacle of 1 in normal places and contexts, and an Obstacle of 2 in places that are notably distant from the Outside or spiritually distant from you, like a place that is consecrated to some principle or ideal that is antithetical to your own paradigm.

If a character uses your Toxic Shine to perform a magical technique with a skill that resonates with your personal ideals, principles, aesthetics or drives- such as one you possess or embody, then that character may claim edge up to the rating of your Toxic Shine.

Access to Toxic Shine is an appropriate reward for a Bindings 4, Otherworldly 3, Emptiness 4 or Mystic 5 quest. The character may convert their Shine into Toxic shine, or move a point from one of their inherent skills into Toxic Shine. Other perks that raise Shine may also raise Toxic Shine.

The tree is dark, the tree is ugly. It is a thing of bowed limbs and countless crevasses. Cracks and knobs in the wood reach out like eyes and open like hungry mouths.

It radiates a dark want. An unholy desire.

But the fruit is beautiful. There are so many- a thousand different kinds, shifting from day to day and hour to hour. Every color and shape imaginable is present. A cure for every ill and a balm for every pain is there, if you watch and wait.

If you give the tree what it wants, those things can be yours.

Traditional payments for the tree are written prayer, whispered secrets, beloved photographs, precious relationships and, in a pinch, blood.

This is formally an MP shop. The tree offers blessings that hold back or repel death, cure or heal injury or illness, break enchantments or curses or return to the dead to life.

Sample blessings:

1 MP

A simple bracelet woven from the tips of the lightest branches. The dark wood conveys a +1 tool bonus to evade the attention of ghosts or resist their ghost magic.
A bright and shiny apple that conveys a +2 tool bonus to resist a specific illness that is neither rare nor frequently fatal, like a cold or chicken pox. This benefit lasts about 2-3 books after the apple is consumed.
A twisted purple fruit that smells faintly spicy. This can restore the vigor and health of most domestic animals, returning them to the prime of their life and health. One use.

2 MP

A glittery blue pomegranate. It splits neatly into two parts and, if the halves are pressed together, returns to whole. It never spoils or goes bad. You gain a +1 tool bonus to attempts to heal physical injury or illness, so long as you give someone a seed from the fruit. The seeds are notionally endless, but you can declare that you’ve run out- or feed the whole fruit to someone, to increase the tool bonus to +3.
A star shaped and slightly hairy looking fruit that tastes absolutely dreadful. If someone under the effects of a curse of some kind, this fruit lessens the severity and side-effects of that curse. It can temporarily allow them to rewrite Afflictions, Wounds, Superior Skills or tweak the context of the Sickness issue. The duration of this effect depends on the perceived severity of the curse- if the character’s arc centers on the curse, then it usually lasts 1-2 chapters. If it is something that is a recurring problem they face, but their story centers on other things, then it may last until the end of the current book- or longer, if the book ends soon. If the curse feels minor enough, this can actually permanently alter the curse. This is a one use effect.

4 MP

A shriveled fig that can return the dead to life. If given to a ghost or similar undead creature, they become a living person once more. This can also be given to a dying person, or offered up ceremonially to someone a character knows who once died. The dead person returns, cured of whatever killed them in the first place. However, this is a taxing and very unnatural effect. All characters revived by this fruit bear a serious wound representing the way the forces of death continue to seek them out, the trauma they suffered as part of their return, or a way that death changed them. This can be healed with time and effort, as normal. If a character revived wishes, they may also use the moment of their resurrection to rewrite or reorganize their skills, or tweak bonds or afflictions to represent the change. This is a one use effect.

This is another version of the Tree of Monstrous Divinity miraculous perk, intended to be used as a mundane replacement. Access to this MP shop can be the reward for a Bindings 4 or Shepard 3 quest, in lieu or in addition to a perk.

There once was a boy who was a good listener. As he had patience in spades and a clever way with words, he soon found he had many friends.

But the boy also had a spider nature, and this he feared.

For he could never really tell what was the call of his human heart and what was that of his innermost nature. Sometimes he asked himself if he had a human heart at all. It could be a cunning spider trick so well done even he was taken in.

The dark clouds of anxiety that troubled him swelled as he feared his friend trapped in an invisible web, being pulled ever closer to something he neither knew nor trusted.

He… detached. His heart was torn between his fear for them and his fear of the terrible silence of solitude. A web of deceptions was born to cover the clouds of his mind, for who could trust a boy with a spider nature?

They spun and spun…

Until his cocoon was so complete that he could no longer tell the lies from truth, the pure from the corrupt, the sincere from the artificial- and his every action only wound the webs around him tighter.

And to him, his heart said nothing at all...

Someone who possesses a spider nature may be represented be either the following Superior Skill or with an Affliction Perk, both detailed below.

Superior Spider Nature

1: You have the focus and patience required to be a good listener. You read just a bit more of the subtext of their words they really intend. You have a touch more social poise than normal, a way of knowing what people would laugh if they heard.

2: People like to be around you. They open up to you far more than they should. You don't read minds, but people make jokes about it. You have a keen knack for always knowing how people feel, and you can always read a room. You have to make a conscious choice to show fear, anger, impatience or anxiety. Not that you feel impatient much anymore. You could wait, completely still and silent, for hours at a time if you needed to.

3: It’s so easy for you to know what people want and what they are afraid of. You can tell by looking at people what their soft spots are- you can see the fractures of a person’s heart and know exactly where not to tread. Consequently, people adore you. You’re very comfortable to be around. You can just.. not say the things they don’t want to hear. No one feels they have to explain themselves around you, no one worries you’ll see what they’re like and leave.

….but you can also draw people close, even from a distance. People show up when you want them to. People call when you need them, they give you the things you require with barely any prompting. It’s impossible for you to show that you’re afraid, that you’re angry, that you’re anxious- the emotions slide off your face and out of your words, leaving charm and brightness instead. You couldn’t stop the people from laughing and coming closer, even if you wanted to.

As an Affliction Perk, Spider Nature scales off of Sickness or Hollow issues. It provides you with an increasing awareness of other people’s desires and fears as the issue’s rating rises. The HG can invoke Spider Nature to perform intentions that make people feel better around you, draw people closer to you, or prevent you from articulating your own feelings- even to yourself.

Whenever you want to say something, but can’t-
Whenever you want to push people away, but can’t-
Whenever you feel like your actions are manipulative and awful, but people just can’t see it-

The HG can award you with Will or MP up to the rating of the chosen Issue.