Insider

A homebrew Miraculous Arc for Chuubo's Marvellous Wish-Granting Engine.

Insider is a miraculous Bindings (Blue) Arc. It is for characters who have become entangled in the machinations of conspiracies, institutions or groups greater than themselves.

It is also for those driven to pursue vice, and who have a tendency to pass this quality on to those around them.

Whether you have sought out and been inducted into the hidden masters of the world, unwittingly attracted the interest of shadowy cabal whom you fight with every waking breath or simply accepted a modestly well-paying job in public service, you are now part of an “in group”, a piece or a player in a greater game.

The deals you make with these forces to realise your dreams, and whether you take control of the conspiracy and cast it down, or whether it breaks you and remakes you as its willing pawn, these are the things which form the core of this Arc.

Insider offers the following abilities:

Genre Trappings
Pawn in the Game
Groupthink
Double Agent (at Arc 1+)
Map the Conspiracy (at Arc 1+)
One of Us (at Arc 1+)
Playing the Game (at Arc 1+)
Power Creep (at Arc 2+)
Mission Creep (at Arc 2+)
Company Assets (At Arc 2+)
Means Become Ends (At Arc 3+)
Unclear Allegiances (At Arc 3+)
Wheels-Within-Wheels (At Arc 4+)
Step Out of Any Shadow (At Arc 4+)
Grand Design (At Arc 5+)

In addition, Main Characters receive the power Frantic while actively pursuing this Arc.

Powers:

Genre Trappings

Type: Affliction, based on your Vice Issue
Cost: -

You live a charmed life. You’re forever doomed to be entangled in the affairs of some profane institution or other, but aside from that you have a pretty solid base upon which to indulge your vices. You don’t have to be *rich* or super-influential but even when you’re not actively part of the elite, if you’re on this Arc then you don’t usually have to go out of your way to maintain a middle-to-upper class lifestyle.

This Affliction represents a collection of mostly mundane resources that allow you to pursue your character’s Vice. If your Vice is something tragically mundane like Booze then you will have a steady income with which to buy alcohol, a reliable list of apathetic storekeepers willing to let you poison yourself by supplying your habit and the assurance that the rest of your mundane affairs will never become so desperate that you aren’t in a position to obtain another fix.

If your Vice is “throwing yourself into dangerous crises in far-flung places to protect America!” on the other hand, then this Affliction means you have the kind of contacts necessary to forge visas, set you up with fake IDs, a temporary home and cover, a vehicle, maybe even a local guide.

When you have no points in the Vice Issue this Affliction is still present, but expresses itself in relatively low key ways. You do have a big advantage at this level though, in that your vice isn’t set. You can experiment, try different Vices, and this Affliction will allow you to maintain a low-key but viable set of resources which shift and evolve to fit your new lifestyle. You have a bit of disposable income to splash around, or a knack for meeting people who know the right people.

As you climb the Vice Issue and narrow your choices down to a particular form of vice, the resources granted to you by this Affliction become correspondingly more focused, but also more dramatic and powerful. A dangerous ally gives you an unlimited line of credit, but only for resources relevant to the unsavoury task they’re demanding of you. You start to lose track of your vast web of minor contacts and acquaintances, but that’s mostly because you’re too busy attending gala luncheons or secret meetings with power players of Town. Then you resolve your Issue and your celebrity fades, you clean yourself up a bit, keep your head down and escape the attention of the dangerous circles you have been running with. You’re out of the game of Vice until something pulls you back in, and the Vice Issue begins to climb once more.

Pawn in the Game

Type: Affliction (Arc Rating)
Cost: -

You have joined a club, taken up a job with a local organisation of some kind, gotten involved with some kind of special interest group or become entangled in the machinations of a nefarious conspiracy. The group itself can be anything from a broad group you have some affinity for (e.g. the children of Fortitude, the fairies of the Walking Fields) to an organisation you work for or plot against (e.g. the Fortitude Regional Council, the School Drama Club, the Bleak Academy) to something really strange and esoteric. (e.g. people I have skewered with my enchanted silver pins.) As a general rule this cannot be a group whose membership is solely composed of other PCs.

Once picked, this choice of group is fixed for the remainder of the Book, and if it isn’t working out you can pick a new group between books. (Although once you reach Arc 1, you’ll get another method of switching the groups you are connected to with via the Double Agent power.)

The Affliction itself manifests in two broad ways:

  1. It represents the group’s power to interfere with your life, either to help you with whatever resources they can bring to bear or to complicate the situation and thus grant you additional will/MP. When you first take this power (or form a relationship with a new group later on) you and the HG should work together to define your precise relationship to the group (Member? Ally? Enemy?) and the way the group commonly interferes in your life.
  2. It also acts to keep the group focused on pursuing a core Policy, which you and the HG should work together to define when you become attached to the group. This Policy represents one of the main objectives of that group, something the group as a whole is working to achieve. This policy should be clearly and succinctly defined, as it is important for several powers in this Arc. (Typically this represents the group’s core, defining tenets or objective, but if the group itself isn’t particularly central to the story then the Policy may be a more peripheral concern of a larger group.) While every group you are connected to will have at least one policy that you and the HG come up with collaboratively, the HG should feel free to add a couple of additional policies to represent other major concerns of the group that are likely to impact on the story.

While the second power in particular is much, much broader in scope than a typical Affliction (it’s basically a Convention!) it won’t usually manifest so blatantly as to brainwash individual group members. Rather, it will create an “office culture” around that Policy. For example, the Fortitude Post Office has a policy that “all mail is delivered intact and on time” and as a result the Post Office is, on the whole, very keen on its quotas and it is unusual for mail to be late or delivered to the wrong address. This does not mean that there are not individual postal workers who still fall behind though, it’s just a tendency of the group as a unit. (Postman Jianliang Xiao, for example, must occasionally sacrifice particularly heartfelt letters to power his energy beam of love to drive back various demonic forces. As a result mail does occasionally get lost, for which his manager has placed him on a disciplinary plan.)

Group Think

Type: Imperial Miracle
Cost:

  • 0 MP- Switch your Vice with one of your group’s policies between Chapters, or reverse the process.
  • 4 MP (2 MP at Arc 1, 1 MP at Arc 3, 0 MP at Arc 5)- do so at any other time.

Your entanglement with impure forces goes both ways. Given time or a suitable traumatic impetus you can draw on your group’s code as if it were your own vice, the core of both any Vice Issue you might have and the purpose to which the resources granted to you by Genre Trappings are bent. At the same time, something of your flaws rubs off on the group. Your vice becomes their desire.

Mechanically, you take your Vice as defined by the Genre Trappings power and switch it with a Policy of one of your groups. If your Vice is currently in a shifting state, it becomes locked-in until you reverse the process. The switch will also affect several other powers in this Arc which key off of your Vice or the group’s Policies.

The effect on the group of having one of their policies replaced with your Vice is a subtle one, unless aggravated by other powers. Individual group members won’t necessarily feel the change right away, they’ll just gradually feel the old institutional pressures fade away, replaced by a culture of corruption.

If, for example, you are an employee of the Fortitude post office in good standing and you take the Policy “Deliver the mail on time.” and replace it with your Vice for “Fight the Commies!” then it’s not like every postman in Fortitude suddenly morphs into a crazed cold war warrior. It’s just… well, suddenly nobody at work seems to care very much about enforcing quotas, but management suddenly gets very keen about reporting suspicious behaviour and holding surprise inspections of employee lockers ‘just to be on the safe side’, and these new scary-looking posters suddenly start appearing round the workplace warning you about the dangers of filesharing.

The effect is similar on groups without formal hierarchies, but generally tends to take the form of a fad or general trend rather than an enforced policy. Infecting Fortitude’s children with “Fight the Commies!”, for example, won’t necessarily change the personality of an individual kid (except in fostering or reinforcing a general sense that being a commie is dirty and wrong and a bad word) but might well cause Captain Patriotism trading cards to become popular playground currency, while class presentations take on a “when I grow up, I wanna join an alphabet soup agency” kind of trend. Naturally “Assassinate the Cuban President” will become the playground game.

This effect is usually gradual and creeping, so much so that sending your Vice our or reeling it back in can usually only be done between Chapters, and will slowly take place over the course of the next Chapter. However, if you’re in a bind you can spend MP to do the switch instantly, and cause the effects to manifest over the course of the current scene (or over the course of the next scene if you spend the MP at the scene’s end).

At Arc 5 the quickened version of this power becomes the default, though you can still consciously choose to have the effects be slower and more subtle.

Double Agent (Arc 1)

Type: Miraculous Action
Cost:

  • 0 MP, 1 Serious Wound- 1/Chapter Entangle yourself with another group, replacing the normal Wound bonus with an Affliction following the same rules as the one from Pawn in the Game.
  • 4 MP, 1 Serious Wound- Do so at any other time.

You may entangle yourself in the affairs of an additional group. The entanglement manifests itself as a Serious Wound. This may include ritualistically Wounding yourself at your option, but for the most part the Wound is simply assumed to be representative of the group in question complicating your life. Instead of the usual Wound bonus for a Serious Wound you gain an Affliction (with a rating tied to your Arc Trait) connecting you to the new group, using the same rules as the one gained from Pawn in the Game.

You may only take one such Wound at any given time. Even if you have additional health levels to support more Wounds, you may not be entangled with more than two groups via this Arc.

A Wound caused by this power will not begin healing until you want it to, at which point it heals at the same rate as a standard Serious Wound. Your entanglement with the group in question will remain until the Wound fully heals, at which point it disappears. Alternatively, when a Wound caused by this power heals you may instead choose to spend 4 MP and lose the inherent Affliction granted by Pawn in the Game, replacing it with the one you originally gained from the Wound.

If a Wound is cleared because you took a Wound to a higher Health Level, you may choose to instantly take a new Serious Wound for free to keep the Affliction, or simply let your entanglement to the group fade instantly.

Map the Conspiracy (Arc 1)

Type: Miraculous Action
Cost:

  • 1 MP (0 MP at Arc 2) – Learn information about a group you are entangled with.
  • 4 MP (2 MP at Arc 3, 1 MP at Arc 4, 0 MP at Arc 5) – Learn information known to any single member of a group you are entangled with, regardless of context.

Regardless of the actual relationship you hold with your groups you have an instinctive ability to access knowledge normally reserved for the inner circle, or to group members as a whole. (Even for groups that don’t really have an inner circle like “people I have skewered with my silver pins” you can divine knowledge as if you were inducted into the non-existent elite of that order.) This includes code-words, secret handshakes and information on the overall plans, resources and capabilities of the organisation. At this level the information must relate directly to your group in some way and must be something that is:

  1. known to the masters or administrators of your group (or would be if they existed, for leaderless groups like the children of Fortitude) such as the number of members in your group, popular meeting points, broad capabilities of the group and the talents of exceptional group members and so on (the type of things an competent or interested manager would know about their evil organisation and the people they employ), or
  2. generally known by a significant portion of your group (such as a regional office or local cabal). When using the power this way you can ask for a specific piece of info, or just ask the HG if there is any general information related to you group that would be useful in this particular situation.

By spending extra MP, you can extend the reach of your information gathering and obtain information of any type regardless of whether it is technically connected to your group, provided that the answer is known to at least one member. (Or information pertaining to your question has been experienced by a group member, even if they themselves wouldn’t recognise it as an answer to your query.) When used in this form you have to ask a question, or make a demand for a specific piece of information. You can’t do a general search. If there are multiple possible answers (for example you want to know the location of Jade Irinka’s tomb, and different members of your group have contradictory information) you will get all the answers but the power won’t inherently allow you to know which, if any, of those answers are true. The HG should give you the general context of where each answer came from, how each particular group member came by the information and how reliable they believe the information to be. The chief limitation of this Miracle is that it can’t give you access to information that nobody in your group actually knows.

One of Us (Arc 1)

Type: Imperial Miracle
Cost:

  • 0 MP- Talk to a single member of your group for a few minutes and mark them, Connecting you to them and allowing you to wield certain powers through them from a distance.
  • 4 MP- Do this instantly.

While you are entangled with a group or organisation as a whole, you can also refine that link and build a closer connection to a single one of its members. By talking to a member of one of your groups, getting to know them personally and forming some kind of relationship to them (or just spending a great whack of MP to fake the required empathy by mainlining their subconscious feelings) you can forge a greater bond with them, marking them as under your protection and wielding influence through them.

You can only mark one person from each of your groups at a time. If you mark another member of the same group in this way, the old mark fades.

While a group member is marked, you gain the following benefits:

  • The ability to freely get an idea of that person’s general condition, and to be instinctively aware if that person needs you or is in danger.
  • The ability to access that person’s sensory information, allowing you to scry on the world through them. To invoke this effect you must sustain a Miraculous Action. When you do this it creates a mystic connection between the two of you, and any miracle which would normally target that person can optionally affect you instead of or in addition to them. This link lasts for the remainder of the scene and cannot be terminated early except by the person you are linked to being utterly defeated. (Note that the choice of whether to target you is made by the attacker, not the marked group member. Many an unscrupulous wielder of this power who finds their servant facing unfavourable odds has tried save themselves by assassinating said minion with some pre-prepared self-destruct device, usually while shouting something like: “You have outlived your usefulness!”)
  • When you are scrying through that person, you gain the ability to take actions through the group, using that person as a focus point. This is not actually possession as such; you cannot exert total control over that one group member, or over anyone else for that matter. Rather it is an ability to wield the group as a whole, channelling your intentions through them as an unnatural action. You don’t choose exactly how the action manifests but if, for example, the post office is on fire and you create the intention “put out the post office fire” you can wield it through the group, causing various members of the group in the vicinity to co-ordinate to put out the fire.
  • Finally, when you are mystically linked to the marked person and sustaining a miraculous action to scry, you may wield certain other powers in this Arc through them, usually to augment actions taken through the group. This is described in the entries for the individual powers.

Playing the Game (Arc 1)

Type: Imperial Miracle
Cost:

  • 1 MP- Enhance an action pursuing one of your group’s policies, giving it a Tool bonus and gaining some Edge when you work through or in tandem with the group itself.

At Arc 3:

  • 0 MP- Starting mid-scene take 1-2 enhanced actions as per above.
  • 1 MP- Take a single enhanced action at any time.
  • 2 MP- Starting mid-scene all actions are enhanced.
  • 4 MP- Take an arbitrary number of enhanced actions for a scene.

When pursuing a Policy of one of your groups, your actions become more cinematic and effective. When you are simply taking a personal action that is in-line with the Policy you receive a +1 Tool Bonus.

This power becomes more potent when you act in tandem with the relevant group, or when you channel this miracle through the group using One of Us. When this happens, your actions also receive a small amount of Edge. (1 point of Edge, all else being equal.) Depending on the context of your relationship with the group “in tandem” doesn’t necessarily mean working as allies. If the group is an evil organisation you are fighting you could just as easily get the increased bonus by performing the action while locked in combat with the organisation’s henchmen.

At Arc 2 your power to wield your group increases, granting you access to a larger amount of Edge. (Approximately 2 Edge, all else being equal, though the HG should lower or raise this based on how appropriate the nature of your group and its Policies are to the problems at hand. The Fortitude Post Office probably has 3-4 Edge when assisting you in delivering a package, but only 1 Edge when helping you steal all the Broccoli in Old Molder, far away from your group's power base.)

Power Creep (Arc 2)

Type: Miraculous action.
Cost:

  • 1 MP- 1/Chapter increase the reach of your organisation, boosting the number of agents acting in the area, equipping them with enhanced resources or just plain creating a new foothold for them from scratch.
  • 2 MP- Use this power a second or later time in a Chapter.
  • 4 MP- Use this power a second or later time in a scene.

At Arc 3:

  • 1 MP- 1/Chapter increase the reach of your organisation.
  • 2 MP- Use this power at any other time.

At Arc 4:

  • 0 MP- 1/Scene increase the reach of your organisation.
  • 1 MP- Use this power at any other time.

You may use this power to bolster one of your groups or increase their reach. Exactly how this manifests depends upon the nature of the group, but typically this involves extra manpower springing in from nowhere, or the arrival of new equipment or resources, or simply the management getting its ass in gear and co-ordinating the group in a much more effective manner.

Alternatively this power may be used to flat-out create a foothold for your group where none existed before, allowing you to arbitrarily declare that there is a new branch, chapter or cabal of your group active in the area despite all evidence to the contrary.

While this power has offensive applications, the actual actions of your group are not part of the Miracle per se. Rather the Miraculous effect is the influx of resources or the increasing of the group’s capabilities. This is a power for defending the group from attack or for setting up new avenues of action, not for making an attack in and of itself.

From Arc 3 onwards, this power may be combined with One of Us as a single action. When used in conjunction with the scrying power of One of Us, you do not need to use a separate Miraculous action to invoke this Miracle and may reduce the activation cost of this Miracle by 1 MP. (Though you still need to use a separate action to channel your intentions through the group.)

Mission Creep (Arc 2)

Type: Imperial Miracle
Cost:

  • 0 MP- 1/Book set out a new Policy for one of your groups.
  • 4 MP- Set out a new policy for one of your groups a second or later time in a Book.

At Arc 5:

  • 0 MP- 1/Chapter set out a new Policy for one of your groups.
  • 4 MP- Set out a new policy for one of your groups a second or later time in a Chapter.

Using this power you may set out a new Policy for one of your groups which will take effect over the course of the scene, afflicting the group in much the same manner as your Vice does when you activate the quickened version of Group Think. This Policy counts as a natural Policy of the group for all purposes, including being switched out using Group Think. This Policy will remain a formal Policy of the group’s until at least the end of the Chapter, but there is no explicit maximum time limit. If the policy is a logical one for the group to hold and no one is inclined to fight against it, it may well persist indefinitely. (So for example, making it a Policy of the Fortitude Post Office to create a set of limited edition stamps for every Festival will probably last forever. On the other hand, making it a policy of the Post Office to corrupt the stamp-collecting youth to the worship of Hedge the Fang through subliminal messages in the stamps probably won’t outlast the Chapter unless you really put in the work to make true believers out of the staff, maybe with an anytime Quest of some variety.)

Company Assets (Arc 2)

Type: Special, Miraculous Action
Cost:

  • 1 MP- Activate the power of a wondrous asset connected to one of your groups, granting them and you a new capability while the Miracle is sustained.

At Arc 3:

  • 0 MP- Activate the power of a wondrous asset connected to one of your groups, granting them and you a new capability while the Miracle is sustained. Add Miraculous power to actions with this asset when they fuel or resolve your Vice.

This power allows you to grasp the threads of vice connecting you to a group and weave items of mystic potency from them, both for yourself and for the group. For each point you currently have in the Vice issue you may design an asset/item/gadget with a single wondrous power that you and one of your groups has access to. The nature and power of the asset typically expresses your Vice in some way, though the link may be tenuous and highly metaphorical. For example if you sin is impatience you may equip your knightly order with pale horses that can ride all day without tiring or if you are a glutton you might gift Fortitude’s children with juice cups that never run dry. This always keys of your “natural” vice(s), not a Vice you have temporarily assumed with Group Think.

When you lose a point of Vice or resolve the Issue, you lose access to the relevant wondrous assets. (All your assets if you resolve the Issue completely, a single asset if you lose a point of Vice.) Your group may still be able to use them at the HG’s discretion, but they will not use this power in harmony with your own actions. The same goes if you lose your connection to the relevant group by healing the Wound they are anchored to.

By spending 1 MP and sustaining a Miraculous action you may activate an asset’s power, and you or any member of your group may wield this asset as a mundane action. Alternatively, individual group members may pay the MP and action cost to wield the asset themselves, but in that case they do not confer these benefits to other group members. This power may be used in Combination with the scrying portion of One of Us. If so, these two powers may both be sustained as a single Miraculous action.

At Arc 3 you no longer have to pay MP to activate the asset’s power as a mundane action (Though a group member using a power without your supervision must still pay 1 MP). If the asset’s power is used in conjunction with an action which the HG agrees will cause you to gain a point of the Vice Issue (or resolve the Issue) then that action gains the benefit of miraculous convenience; it will miraculously strengthen and aid you, and may miraculously Wound or inconvenience others.

Means Become Ends (Arc 3)

Type: Miraculous Action (Major Miracle upon completion)
Cost:

  • 4 MP (2 MP at Arc 4, 1 MP at Arc 5)- Assemble a great and terrible device or ritual to accomplish a large-scale goal tied to your Vice. Once complete, activate the device as a Major Miracle.

At Arc 5:

  • 4 MP- Once complete, activate the device as a Wish.

With this power you may repurpose the destiny of a group, bending them towards a dark and terrible purpose stemming from your Vice. You start by conceiving a terrible device; a doomsday weapon, a forbidden ritual, and occult engine or eldritch machine with some great and terrible power that expresses your Vice in some way. Go into as much detail as you like in the aesthetics of the thing and the rituals and ingredients that will be needed to bring it about. Unlike the lesser assets created by the Company Assets power, this engine may express a Vice you have assumed with Group Think, but you will not be able to shift your Vice while you are sustaining this Miracle.

While you are sustaining this power, any actions taken by that group in the construction of this device (from actually building the thing to gathering necessary ingredients to bringing about the circumstances for its use, whether under your direction or not) will move forward with inexorable, miraculous force. This power does not ensure that the machine will be constructed instantly, and if its ultimate power is something particularly elaborate or large-scale it may take weeks, months or in extreme cases years to come to fruition, but given enough time it will happen.

In the meantime, the integrity of the machine is protected by an Auctoritas equal to your points in the Vice issue, which will defend against any Miracle aimed at disassembling the device or rendering it non-functional. (The Auctoritas will not directly protect miraculous actions by the group to gather ingredients or bring the plan to fruition, it’s much narrower than that. It is purely a defensive effect around the object itself.)

When the HG rules that the fated hour has come and the group has successfully assembled the device, you may stop sustaining this Miracle and activate the device’s power, which functions as a Major Miracle. This final Miracle is also protected by an Auctoritas equal to your points in the Vice Issue.

At Arc 5, when the device is complete, you may spend an additional 4 MP to activate the device’s power as a wish. You can be fairly flexible with the Wish you make, but the closer you Wish ties to both your Vice and the theme and goals of the group that the device sprang from, the more reliable and predictable the manifestation of the wish will be.

Unclear Allegiances (Arc 3)

Type: Miraculous Action, Major, Ritual Power, Unreal
Cost:

  • 0 MP- 1/Book shape the world so as to change your relationship with a group.
  • 4 MP- Do so at any other time.

Betrayals, reversals and plot twists are inevitable in your line of work. This power allows you to make them happen at a time convenient for you.

Declare that your relationship to one of your group’s has changed and outline the general context. Maybe you have been framed for treason by one of your enemies, going from trusted secret agent to a wanted criminal on the run from the very agency that trained you! Or maybe someone spread a cool rumour about you and you’ve suddenly gone from social pariah to the most popular kid in School overnight. You can get pretty wild with the nature of the change, though the HG may veto changes that are too specific or which stray too far beyond just altering the relationship to your group. For example, you cannot usually use this Miracle to declare that you are not being merely a cultist of Hedge the Fang, but actually Hedge the Fang in disguise! (Though you could probably say that the cult is now convinced you are Hedge the Fang in Disguise.) Basically you want to be able to word the change as a single sentence that directly and succinctly described how your relationship to the group has changed.

You declare this change, and lo! It is now so. This is a Miracle of major, world-reshaping proportions, though only the portion of the Miracle which directly changes your relationship to the group is actually capable of Wounding another character. For example you may declare that you have been framed for stealing a book from the School Library and are now on the run from the raiders of the lost reading room, and the world will change to accommodate this, but if the player of Audrey Wheway the assistant librarian doesn’t want to go along with this then Audrey herself is unaffected and just hears from her comrades that you stole the book (and might find Miraculously created evidence of this fact). You can’t actually Wound Audrey to force the change of perspective on her if she won’t accept it. However, if the Raiders of the Lost Reading Room were also one of Audrey’s anchors, she or the Raiders would have to take a Wound in order to resist the Raiders as a whole acting on the charges of theft, as doing so would directly challenge the change in group-attitude.

The HG narrates the general nature of the change and the players react to the event as a Ritual, after which the scene breaks, moving forward an appropriate amount of time to contextualise the new events.

Step Out of Any Shadow (Arc 4)

Type: Miraculous Action, Major
Cost:

  • 0 MP- Appear as a shadowy figment to someone you have marked with One of Us and gradually integrate yourself into reality over the course of a few minutes.
  • 2 MP- Appear as per the 0 MP version of this power to any member of a group you are bound to.
  • 4 MP- Step out of the shadows close to any member of your group instantly

With this power you are one of the hidden masters, able to step out of the shadows to aid or confront the members of your groups as dramatically appropriate. Unless you are using the 4 MP version of this power you must first move into a place of darkness. Once in darkness, you may activate this power to be instantly whisked away to your target where you will appear before them as a shadowy figure.

By default the target of this power is someone you have marked with One of Us, but if you spend 2 MP you may appear to any member of a group. When appearing this way you don’t even have to specify a particular group member by name. You can just specify a location and you will appear next to the closest group member (or crowd of group members) to that point.

When you first appear you are a figment. You can only perceive and be interacted with by the targeted person, or by members of the group they are part of. It’s not that you don’t exist or that you are a ghost as much as your actions simply don’t affect the wider world. Your dharma simply isn’t connected to anyone outside of your group. The exact form/mood of the appearance is variable depending on your character’s general theme. Common effects include appearing as a devil on a person’s shoulder, or on a stool next to them at a bar or as a priest in a confessional, or at their restaurant table disguised as a waiter. Over the course of several minutes your interactions with the world will become more pronounced, reality will begin to notice your presence and eventually you will be fully existent in the new location.

For 4 MP you can just cut the whole gradual process of appearing to the world and instantly step out of the shadows near any member of your group, fully real and interactive.

Wheels Within Wheels (Arc 4)

Type: Miraculous Action, Major, Unreal or (sometimes) Bleak
Cost:

  • 0 MP-1/Book Retroactively change your group’s nature and agenda.
  • 4 MP- Do so at any other time.

Invoke Wheels Within Wheels and the very nature of one of your groups is changed. Invoking this power doesn't simply change the objective of the group, it reveals a plot-twist of such magnitude as to mean the changing of everything about the group.

You may use this power to completely rewrite a group’s policies, reach, capabilities etc. (Including replacing policies granted by Mission Creep or assets granted through Company Assets with new ones.) It can change basically everything about the group. This is the power you use to reveal that the Fortitude Post Office was secretly an arm of the Student Council all along, or that the Student Council were in fact being manipulated by Fortitude Post Office the whole time and that behind their Masks they’re actually just papier mache golems made out of stolen letters to Santa.

This power functions as a wish, though it has been given the Unreal keyword to give the HG a bit of leeway to say that some plot twists are just themselves a front for something else. The changes to a group’s policy and capabilities still stick though, it’s not that the plot twist itself is completely Unreal and things just go back to the way they were, rather the implications the twist has on the world aren’t necessarily the full picture and some of the wilder elements may in hindsight turn out to be misconceptions or shadows of a deeper conspiracy. (E.g. In time, it may become apparent that the Student Council are not actually paper golems, but they had been secretly replaced by golem doubles for a while.) Alternatively, if the effect isn't Unreal but results in an organisation being set in direct opposition to its former ideals or corrupted beyond any conceivable desire of its members then this power may switch to using the Bleak rules.

Grand Design (Arc 5)

Type: Imperial Miracle, Ritual Power
Cost:

  • 0 MP-1/Book Bring about a dramatic final conflict involving one of your groups.
  • 4 MP- Do so at any other time in a Book.

When invoking this power (which may be done once per Book per group you are connected to), outline a final conflict involving a grand scheme or plot, the ultimate culmination of one of the group’s Policies. Maybe your group is holding the world hostage with a doomsday weapon? Or maybe the Hall Monitors are gearing up for Ragnarok, the much-prophesised final battle with the delinquents?

Once the power is set in motion it functions as a wish, bringing about the circumstances of this final conflict. It also ensures that you will be present at the moment when everything hangs in the balance and that it will be within your power to decide the outcome of the battle. This doesn’t mean it will be easy to tip the balance the way you want it, the wish won’t automatically render the opposition meaningless, but it will always be *possible* for you to alter the outcome of the battle in either direction. (Your enemies are terrifying but not unbeatable; this principle applies to this power even when you make yourself “the enemy”)

This wish may expressly be used to speed up the construction of a device being created with Means Become Ends, in which case the device is invariably completed and ready for activation at the conclusion of the ritual. You may use this power to circumvent similar delays on other powers that you or a group member possess if the HG agrees that it would fit the general theme of a big, world-shaking plot coming to a head. (Possible candidates include several of the more powerful effects of the Sentimental Arc.)

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