The Loner
Arcs: Keeper of Gardens 1 / Prophet 2
Current Arc: Prophet
Emotion XP: Putting my Faith in You XP
Playbook
Skills
Superior Wizard 3. // You’re a master of the arcane arts and keeper of eldritch knowledge.
Grump 2. // You’re a crotchety old man, it’s amazing what that helps you accomplish.
Bric-a-brac 1. // You have a lot of useful things in your house but it’s not always easy to find them or make them useful.
Other Cultures 1. // You’ve picked up a little bit about a lot of places all over the world.
Dueling 1. // You’re not the duelist you once were, but you still have a few moves.
Housework 0. // You are crap at keeping up the house.
Perks
Bond: Old (2). You’re getting on in years. This is really helpful when you’re relying on your decades(?) of experience or manipulating the young, but it is less helpful when you’re trying to move a heavy wardrobe or understand brand new technology.
It’s like a Home to Me [My House]. You have a wondrous house, full of magic and mysteries and secrets. On the grounds of your property, creatures and effects of the Bleak face +1 level of Auctoritas Magister when using miracles (usually it's just a flat AM of one). This only applies to the grounds and innards of the home and not any self-directed extensions of the house that may or may not exist.
Connection: the Magic House 1. You and your house have been through a lot together. The closest thing to family you have left in this world is this house.
Quests and XP
Emotion XP: Putting my Faith in You XP
Basic Quest: Premodern Sensibilities
Melodramatic: Horsefeathers!
Mystic 1 Quest: Rekindling the Sun (21 XP)
Major Goals
- something rips the wickedness from you or otherwise aggressively purifies you; or, you bleed for an enemy’s sake;
- you descend below the surface of the world and share in or comfort the grief of something that lives there;
- you sacrifice a thing or object that could reasonably be referred to as your heart to somebody. At the end of the quest, you have the player-level option to receive it back.
Quest Flavor
- you receive something, often in the form of a seed or box, from a rival/enemy
- you travel to/enter the Keep of a deadly enemy or rival or the lair of some sort of literal or metaphorical dragon. There is a sensation of danger…
- you are torn apart by spirits or birds, or turn into birds (generally in a break from reality)
- you make a pinky promise with a ghost, angelic being, or in a flashback
- you do something amazing and transformative with your Talent or Keep-Skill
- you get a tattoo or other long-term or permanent marking
- you retreat to a garden or your Keep with a child, pet, or wounded friend
Powers
You are a weird old man! Kids are scared of you, your neighbors mumble darkly about you, the Jehova Witnesses steer well clear! It’s pretty great! You have a weird old house hidden away on a weird old street.
But people who manage to get passed the gate — to your house and your heart — are in for a real surprise. Excitement and spectacle twirl around you, the ordinary becomes extra-so, in short, things get pretty magical. Your Principle is Wonder, that spark of the arcane that excites the mind and imagination. You stand against the forces of Banality, Cynicism, and Satisfaction. The thing about having a life full of wonder is that things can, sometimes, get a bit too exciting - you have the power Frantic as long as you are on Prophet.
Shaping
You have full command of the shapes and structures of your home (well, as long as it doesn’t disagree and fight it off). Using your Wizard skill you can shape the things of your home, repairing broken teacups, turning end tables into dogs, shrinking and stretching whole rooms and hallways. With a few minutes of work you can reshape the things of your home. Once per book, you can reshape your home in greater ways, rearranging all of the rooms and spaces within in exciting and complicated ways. If you want to do so another time during the same book, it will cost 4 MP.
Untamed Magic
Despite appearances, you are a powerful wizard. Magic swirls around you, drawn up in your metaphysical wake. It is transformative and wild. You have practiced the techniques of shaping and using arcane forces but, even for a master, events can be unpredictable. Untamed Magic functions as a level 2 Bond which you can invoke to use transformative magic in an action, or when the magic around you causes an unexpected and potentially catastrophic cascade effects.
Master of the House
You are the master of your home, an authority figure for the inhabitants and magical creatures who make it their abode as well as the edifice itself. You get the ultimate vote when it comes to the rules of the house. You can use your Superior Wizard skill to impose your will on the creatures of your Gardens. This is mostly for the purposes of their behavior and attitudes within the house itself: attempting to stop the attic wyvern from kidnapping the neighbors’ goats at night is harder than getting it to abide by the rules keeping it from interfering with the bodkins in the walls..
Conjurer
You have dominion over simple spirits and arcane intelligences and can call them up from within your home, imbuing household objects and things with animation and life. Spirits are simple things, more like arcane patterns than true intellects, and are built around a core rule, lesson, or idea.
Once per chapter you can summon a named spirit or animated object to yourself for free. For each additional summoning you perform during a chapter, you must spend 1 MP. You can also craft a brand new spirits for 2 MP while within your home.
Share Spirit (Chthonic)
You have put some of yourself into your home, a piece of your life and spirit is comingled with it (and a bit of its spirit is comingled with you). The interior of your home, in addition to the usual Region Properties of Stranger’s Glade, has the Region Property "There is something unexpected but useful nearby". For now, you have wounded one of your Divine Health levels to power this Property, but by next Halloween the magic should be sufficiently bound to allow you to clear the wound again.
You can add another Region Property to your home once per book by wounding your other Divine Health level. If you manage to get another Divine Health Level somehow, you can do it again but with a 4 MP upcharge.
Touched by Magic
No more than once per chapter, you can listen to the subtle voice of Wonder, and take action to let it into existence. This allows the HG to let you know what would best increase the level of Wonder and magic in the world, or nudges you towards a Wonder-advancing quest trigger on someone’s Storyline quest.
By spending 2 MP, you can instead apply Wonder to an Intention of your choice. This dramatically empowers it - if it was lower than Intention 4, it upgrades to Intention 4, and receives a +3 Tool bonus towards the service of Wonder. It shatters the first Bleak or Enemy miracle you face, and shatters itself alongside the second, with +3 Edge. Shattered miracles backlash upon their enactors. Finally, you may declare that the Intention was always intended to improve the Wonder in your surroundings.
If you sustain this power for a full chapter, or at least through two XP Actions, you can declare that it is building towards a historical moment of total Wonder - a historic moment in which some great magical working or transformation is brought to be and it’s awesome and not scary at all and it doesn’t even go wrong!
You may use this power freely up to twice per book. Using it a third or future time costs 1 MP.
Wonder-Working
When you are facing an immediate problem, you can wave your hands, intone a magic spell (your go-to is “Ala Kash Azam!” but you can mix it up) and let Wonder solve it for you. You and the HG and the other players can suggest ways in which Wonder could actually solve this problem, and that’s basically what will happen. Usually, this is the invocation of some very flashy spell effect that makes the world that much more magical and awesome… a fireball isn’t usually very wonderful way to deal with your problems, but summoning a cloud of rainbow birds to sing the hits of Aretha Franklin is pretty great.
You can instead try to direct this force, which is more narrow but easier to do! As long as Wonder could make something more likely, you can make a thing about eight times more likely to happen, or a power about twice as strong. By spending 2 MP, you can boost this - make an event about 33,000 times more likely, or a power ten times as strong! This also makes an attached Intention miraculously perfect - if you say that your act of prestidigitation convinces Stalin’s ghost to release you from the spectral gulag, it’ll probably work!
You may ask Wonder to solve a problem for you no more than twice per book, but you can make things more likely or powerful up to twice a chapter! Doing this more than twice per chapter costs 1 MP.
Cantrips and Prestidigitations
You are an old man. It’s not as easy getting around as it once was, so it’s hard to keep the dishes done and the lawn mowed, and your dueling form is no longer what it once was. But when you’re a wizard, little things like age don’t usually stand in your way. This power enhances your “Housework” and “Dueling” Skills. When you activate it, your Intention with whichever Skill you’re using rises to a base of 4, and ignores 1-2 obstacle points for not having a plan or important information or whatever. Your skill also becomes a Level 1 Superior Skill, letting you do some mildly superhuman coincidental stuff. Lights dance around you and brooms start sweeping themselves as your magic handles the hard parts and your Shield of Mezzidni is still just as strong as it ever was.
When you’re in a magical location - your own home, a hidden realm on the other side of a wardrobe, the Magic Castle in Los Angeles, California - this power automatically upgrades to provide a Level 2 Superior Skill. If you can manage to find a Wonder-themed artifact or spirit, that could also apply.
You may perform an inspired feat up to twice per scene; a third feat costs 1 MP, and performing as many as you want costs 4 MP. You can’t perform inspired feats in places that are entirely without wonder, such as the IRS Headquarters or James Randi’s living room.
The Staff of Heshihotep
You received this gnarled wooden staff as a gift from some sultan for helping him deal with a particularly noisesome djinn. It may look like a simple walking stick, but stairs and light glitter from it with a practiced flick of the wrist. The staff is a powerful relic which radiates Wonder and aides you in battle.
Raising the Sanctum (Imperial)
With work you can make any place a magical place, letting enchantment and mystery and excitement leach into the world. If things are already pretty spectacular or magical, they cross over into explicitly so over the course of a few minutes. If a place isn’t particularly unusual to begin with, this can take you a few hours of work as you draw diagrams and realign ley lines to achieve the desired result. Locations which are magical tend to quickly attract or generate minor spirits and magical creatures: a library transformed into a Sanctum will probably have laughing books by the day’s end and a family of goblins would find an enchanted garage a great place to set up shop.
Spending 4 MP at once lets you make a place as magical as you like, and can even (at your discretion) fill one of your Perk slots with the Perk, “It’s like a home to me”, granting you access to a Garden in which Trust reigns, applying a Level 1 Obstacle and Auctoritas to the miracles of your Enemies. This generally remains accessible to you for the rest of the current story. If you don’t want to spend $ MP, you can just work at it for a while, slowly filling the world with magic. This takes several years to bear fruit… but what are years to a wizard?
Crotchety Wisdom (Special, Chthonic)
You don’t usually like to talk to people, but sometimes you can’t help it. People come to you for advice, for help with the occult, for understanding of this strange and exciting world we all live in. Once per session, when you listen to an NPC’s concerns about the magical world, and you haven’t gained an Issue this session, you may take either a Foreshadowing or Sympathetic Action and offer them advice. The advice that you give helps them to deal with the magical world (“Manticores are allergic to bees, kid, now get out of here”) or with their own blossoming arcane nature (“What you need to do is stress the ‘e’, ‘ha-la-ka-NEE amarisham!` otherwise it’s just a bunch of waving”). Either way, you gain a point of Mystery.
You may use this power on a PC, but in that case you offer them a chance to take a Shock action, instead of you taking an action, and offer them a point of Calling instead of giving yourself Mystery.