Witness

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

Witness is a miraculous Mystic (Black) Arc. It is for characters who have been broken and look to their faith to save them. For those who have been brought low by some shadow in their past and who have given themselves to the keeping of a higher power for protection, escape or redemption. They have not been healed, not really. Whatever mistakes or horrors that haunt them are still out there and are likely to come back creeping back into their lives to bedevil them someday, but as long as they cling to their Principle they may sustain themselves, and draw forth from within themselves the power to work Miracles.

Witness offers the following abilities:

• First and Final Principles
• Torment’s Chain
• Alienation (At Arc 1+)
• Keeping the Faith (At Arc 1+)
• Martyr’s Reprieve (At Arc 1+)
• Deeds Best Forgotten (At Arc 2+)
• Impure Tools (At Arc 2+)
• Dreadful Gnosis (At Arc 3+)
• Revealed Wisdom (At Arc 3+)
• Matrimony of Light and Dark (At Arc 4+)

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

Choosing Your Principle

This Arc comes with an associated Principle or Mood. This is the power that sustains you, empowers you and allows you to at least make the attempt to put right what once went wrong. The cause is high and holy, but not necessarily painless. This power may be a discrete entity and may, at your discretion, come with an elaborate theology or backstory, but for the purposes of this Arc it is embodied in a single emotion or experience.

Are you an agent of:

• Faith?
• Freedom?
• Nihilism?
• Fury?
• Forgiveness?
• Love?
• Mystery?
• Hunger?
• Or something else?

Defining Your Torment:

Your Principle is your salvation, or at the very least it’s a crutch that allows you to get through the day without succumbing to your Torment. Unfortunately your Principle isn’t always enough.

You are wounded; haunted by something that happened to you or something you did in the past. You can outrun it, at least for a little while, but it has never yet gone away for good and no matter how hard you throw yourself into the service of a higher cause, your torment always finds a way to come back into your life in one form or another.

Write down two bullet points, outlining the core elements of your torment. For example, if your torment is a troubled past the bullet points might be:

• I am running from [A threat. Often a trauma, person, organisation or event. E.g. “My alcoholism”, “The military”, “My parent’s murderer.”, ]
• I used to [some job you used to do, or relationship, object or power you used to possess.]

Or possibly:

• I am afraid of [Some person or event that might or is destined to cast me down. E.g. “my destiny”, “my enemy”, “my foretold death”, “some specific failure or failing.”]
• I am destined to [destroy the world, save the world, kill my parent, ascend to the throne, join my enemies, be corrupted by the Outside]

Your character’s issues may well be much more complex than two simple points, but what we’re aiming for here isn’t so much the full picture as the parts which will tend to come back and haunt you time and again.

Nor do these points have to be very specific. Indeed, it’s better if they leave room for further development as starting from Arc 1 you can spend refresh tokens to add new bullet points to further define these aspects of your Torment or to branch off from them further down the line. Bullet points are purchased on a one-for-one basis.

Events which took place in-game may be used as a basis for new bullet points, provided they took place at least one Chapter prior.

Powers:

First and Final Principles

Type: Level 2 Bond (Level 4 at Arc 4)
Cost: -

You are haunted by something that happened to you or something you did in the past. That’s not important for now though. What matters is that you’ve found something new now. Something… better? Well, something that makes it all bearable anyway.

Right now it’s a crutch, something you hold to because the alternative is to have nothing. Maybe if you keep at it then it will become something more? Or maybe one day you will heal and be able to move on? For now though, you have let a higher power lay claim to you and given yourself over to its code.

This manifests as a level 2 Bond, which increases to level 4 at Arc 4. Examples of the type of Bond that would be appropriate include:

• “I must cling to my [Principle].”

or

• “I must have faith in [Principle]”

• Invoke First and Final Principles when you’re relying on your ironclad adherence to your principle to overcome an Obstacle or win a conflict and you can add the Bond rating (2) to your Intention level. You can only add this bonus from one such Bond.

• Invoke First and Final Principles when you’re using your drive and adherence to your Principle to enhance a miraculous action and you can add the Bond’s rating (2) to your Strike. Strike from a Bond doesn’t add to Strike from other Bonds, but it does add to Strike from MP and Strike intrinsic to a miracle.

• Invoke First and Final Principles when you put yourself at risk for your Principle, or when adherence to your code endangers or seriously inconveniences you—as a first-order effect, this can only happen when you want it to, but as a second-order or indirect effect it can happen on its own—and the HG may give you up to the Bond rating (2 or 4) in Will or MP. You can also get this MP if you spend a whole week in dedicated service to the advancement of your Principle.

• It is notionally possible for you to replace food, water, sleep, and even air with the act of spreading your Principle. For instance, if you are a kindly priest mentoring the lost and the fallen and convincing them through kind words and good works to hold to their Faith once again—well, that’s probably something you can do indefinitely, even when the sun goes out and the food runs out and you’re left afflicting an empty, cold, bland, lifeless world. This gets unpleasant almost as fast for you as for a normal person, though, and the Obstacles can range as high as 4.

Torment's Chain

Type: Imperial Miracle
Cost: -

Your past is behind you, but constantly threatens to catch up to you.

By confluence of Fate you tend to show up at scenes which are relevant to your Torment. Whenever you have one or more points in the Sickness Issue you may be present at any scene that you can link to one or more of your Torment’s bullet points.

This ability does not grant you superhuman senses or speed (not at the basic level any way, see below), and for the most part everybody is assumed to be able to choose the scenes they take part in. It’s just that the inexorable gravity of karma is a little bit more literal and measurable in your case. Even where it is not physically possible for your character to show up, the other characters might imagine what your character would say as a little shoulder angel/devil, or have appropriate flashbacks that effectively allow you to be present in spirit.

At Arc 1, when you have 3+ points in the Sickness Issue your Torment’s gravity is such that even incarceration is no obstacle, and you may be physically present at a scene even if it is impossible for you to be there.

Alienation (Arc 1)

Type: Affliction
Cost: -

Your secrets are a mystery to almost everyone; records conveniently disappear, the usual contacts clam up when asked to snitch on you and mind-reading or divination just don’t seem to have a hold on you. Unfortunately, no matter how perfect your cover the legacies of your past (whether physical threats or psychological scars) always seem to have a way of coming back to haunt you.

You have a free Affliction with a rating equal to your Arc Trait, which acts in the following way:

• People trying to find out specific information about your Torment meet miraculous resistance. This covers mundane detective work, social engineering or hypnosis, and also miraculous options like divinations, remote viewing or mind-reading. This does not, however, cause people to forget things that they already know.
• When something about your past is brought up in front of others, it can have the effect of alienating them. They get an involuntary glimpse of the skeletons in your closet and it drives them away from you. On the plus side the aura of palpable unease or dread works to prevent them from doing anything to dig further into your Torment or bring it up in any context. You get by, even if you have difficulty actually making any kind of real connection with other people. When this alienating effect causes trouble for you, the HG can award you Will or MP up to a maximum of the Affliction’s rating.

Keeping the Faith (Arc 1)

Type: Imperial Miracle
Cost:

• 0 MP- after a few minutes of observation or interaction with a target, make them susceptible to experiencing your Principle, and protect your Principle from Miraculous interference.
• 4 MP- do this instantly. (0MP at Arc 4)

By spending a few minutes holding a conversation with someone about what your Principle means to them, or watching them performing an activity that relates to your Principle, or otherwise coming to understand how they relate to your Principle, you can sanctify their soul.

This power lasts until the end of the Book, but you can only grant the blessing to one target at a time. Should you use this power on another, the original blessing will recede.

After activating this Miracle, the target’s mind and soul become fertile soil in which your Principle may take root. Additionally, your insight into their experience of your Principle is such that it becomes a potent tool in your hands. Any action aimed at evoking your Principle within the target or persuading them of something using their experience of your Principle receives a +1 Tool bonus. At Arc 2 the Tool bonus is increased to +2.

Furthermore, the target’s ability to experience your Principle is protected by an Auctoritas equal to your Arc rating. The Auctoritas doesn’t aid in directly making someone experience your Principle, nor does it do anything to stop Miracles evoking other emotions as well, but any Miraculous attempt to suppress an experience of your Principle or otherwise deny your target the ability to feel your Principle’s touch will go up against it.

Martyr’s Reprieve (Arc 1)

Type: Special (Activates as an Affliction when used)
Cost: 4MP or 0MP

Your Principle is your salvation. The thing you cling to because the alternative is to be broken beyond saving. When acting in its service you are a priest, prophet and miracle worker. It is your shield in times of crisis, and as long as you risk yourself for the right reasons, it’s got your back.

You may activate this Miracle by spending 4 MP, or for free if you have just received Will or MP for being troubled by the Bond linked to First and Final Principles.
While you sustain an action you have an Affliction equal to the Arc’s trait rating that basically allows your Principle to act as a wondrous shield. This has the following effects:

At Arc 1: Your Principle exists within you, shielding you from anything that would suppress, pervert or destroy your experience of your Principle. Your principle also aids you by strengthening your attempts to rescue yourself from immediate danger. At this level the experience is almost entirely internal and your Principle acts mostly in the emotional context. Your Principle won’t reach out and wound your enemies, and doesn’t grant you superpowers or anything, but it can strengthen actions of self-preservation driven by your faith in your Principle and make them miraculously successful.

At Arc 2: Your Principle can reach out and directly affect the world around you, usually by infecting objects with its essence, or boosting and strengthen itself within nearby people as needed. As such, your Principle is now capable of Wounding (or more accurately, negatively affecting others in ways they can take a Wound to resist) but only insofar as is necessary to directly protect you from harm. Unlike Arc 1 though, your Principle will take a somewhat more long-term view of what is necessary to protect you. (So if your Principle is ‘Peace’ and you are being physically attacked, your Principle will help you evade the direct attack, but is also likely to boost and strengthen feelings of pacifism in your attacker so that they will stop trying to hurt you again.) At this level your Principle might magically kindle itself in other people, but it is still restricted to acting in the emotional context.

At Arc 3: Your Principle’s effect is deep and powerful. It will often affect the entire local area around you, rather than just you and any immediate threats. (E.g. if your Principle is ‘Rage’ and you are being attacked, your Principle may reach out and inspire everyone close to you to feel a burning, murderous fury towards your attacker.)

Your Principle is not purely restricted to the emotional context any more, it may operate in a limited fashion on the level of metaphor if it is absolutely necessary to protect you from immediate harm. (Rage may scald an attacker’s hand when they strike you, Peace may act as a mystic shield to turn aside a blow etc.)

At Arc 4: Your Principle can warp reality over as wide an area as is necessary to come to your aid and resolve whatever problem is currently causing danger to you. It is not restricted to acting in a purely emotional context at all. It can freely operate on the level of metaphor whenever it is useful to do so. Rage may burn so hot it sets the target aflame, Faith may move mountains, Peace may heal the righteous, Desire may drive you to break the world record for the 100m dash on broken legs etc.

Deeds Best Forgotten (Arc 2)

Type: Imperial Miracle
Cost: 1 MP

Your Principle has given you a new lease on life, helped you fashion a new identity for yourself, but it has not taken your Torment from you completely. The memories, skills and passions you thought you’d left behind are simmering just beneath the surface, and all it takes is a sufficiently stressful situation to bring your warped and deviant skills to the fore.

Whenever you possess at least 1 point in the Sickness Issue, you may spend 1 MP to treat your Sickness Issue as a superior skill for the purpose of constructing a single intention. This intention must relate to the pre-defined facts of your Torment in some way. Once the intention is created it is fixed until you declare it finished or reach the end of the chapter, and does not go up or down based on your shifting Sickness Issue.

Impure Tools (Arc 2)

Type: Miraculous action.
Cost: 2 MP

As long as you have 1+ points in the Sickness Issue, you may have some legacy of your Torment come to your aid in some way, helping or strengthening you.

If you used to be a Camorra Hitman, maybe you still have a contact in the area who can point you in the direction of the person you're seeking. If you’re an ex-military super-soldier maybe you still know how to shatter a stone wall with a pressure-point strike. If you used to be possessed by a demon, maybe they can conjure an aura of burning sulphur.

When you activate this power, choose one of the bullet points that define your Torment. While you sustain an action you have an Affliction (tied to your Arc Trait) which is, loosely:

• [That legacy of your Torment] interferes with your life, helping you or coming in handy in some way.

These legacies can come to your aid independently of your direct physical actions and do not have to be directly wielded by you.

At Sickness 1-2 this Affliction will usually manifest in ways that are mundane or mildly magical in scope. At Sickness 3+ the legacy may come to your aid in ways that are actively wondrous and supernatural.

Of course, your Torment is not generally a *nice* thing. You don’t get to benefit from your legacy without it complicating your life somewhat. As with any other Affliction, when it inconveniences you, puts you in danger or complicates your life the HG may choose to award you points of Will or MP up to a maximum of the Affliction’s rating.

Dreadful Gnosis (Arc 3)

Type: Imperial Miracle (Ritual Power, and/or Bleak at the HG’s option)
Cost:

• 0 MP- 1/Book, declare that a person, object, location or event is relevant to your Torment.
• 2 MP- Invoke this power a second time or later per book.
• 4 MP- Invoke this power a second time or later per chapter.

Your Torment is a powerful, living thing in its own right. One which is ready to unleash itself on you and upon the world, and which will no longer be denied. Using this power you may declare a person, object, location or even to be relevant to your Torment. This functions as a Wish, arranging circumstances to make the association a reality.

You get to pick which bullet point it relates to (or simply that it relates to your torment as a whole) but the HG determines the exact nature of the relation. For example the manifestation of this power may simply involve a declaration that the scene is relevant and the rewriting of any plot notes, it may not involve any rewrites of the past at all and simply prompt the HG to have the target get swept up in the oncoming storm of your plot or it may prompt a Ritual in which the players mark out how reality shifts and previous facts change to incorporate the new truth.

Whether it manifests subtly or overtly, you sense this new reality personally. You, as a character, know that your Torment is connected to the subject of this power, though you don’t necessarily know how.

Revealed Wisdom (Arc 3)

Type: Imperial Miracle
Cost:

• 0 MP- 1/Chapter after a couple of minutes interacting with a person ask the HG a question about them. Your Principle will tell you the truth, such as it knows.
• 1 MP- Invoke a second time or later per Chapter.
• 2 MP- Invoke a second time or later in a Scene.

At Arc 5:

• 0 MP- After a couple of minutes interacting with a person ask the HG a question about them. Your Principle will tell you the truth, such as it knows.

After a couple of minutes of uninterrupted interaction with a person, you may ask your Principle a single question about them. The question can be anything at all.

The HG (or, if everyone prefers, the subject’s player) will answer the question, taking on the role of your Principle. Your Principle will answer the question to the best of its ability, narrating it to you in the form of prophetic visions. These are nearly always surreal; a lurid, multi-coloured glimpse into the spiritual underpinnings of the universe.

It should be emphasised here, there are very few questions your Principle won’t be able to provide some sort of answer to. The answer is not limited simply to topics directly relevant to your Principle, your Principle can look beyond its own borders for information, beyond even what would normally be possible for your Principle to know. This is not simple spying; this is high and holy prophecy.

The answer will almost always be flavoured in terms of your Principle (how an action relates to your principle, how it doesn’t relate to your principle etc) and generally framed in the appropriate emotional context wherever possible.

The answer given should generally be enough to give you the information you need to know, relative to your objective in asking the question. That said, the longer and more involved the answer, the more confusing the vision imparting it to you will generally be as more information will have to be conveyed through symbolism. (This isn’t an instruction to deliberately make the vision confusing, just a prediction that the HG or player’s ability to assign meaning to symbolic visions is going to become taxed by particularly complicated explanations.) Conversely a simple “yes” or “no” answer should always be pretty obvious, regardless of the import of the question. A vision of a complex answer can also get exceptionally confusing if the link between the answer and your Principle is a particular stretch, simply by nature of the medium that the answer must be imparted in. Your Principle should not be deliberately obtuse however. Your Principle wants to help you, it just doesn’t necessarily have the same perspective or priorities as you.

Matrimony of Light and Dark (Arc 4)

Type: Imperial Miracle, Ritual Power
Cost:

• 0 MP- 1/Book Give rise to a Convention and a Wish based on your Principle and your Torment
• 8 MP, 1 Deadly Wound- Invoke this power a second time or later per Book.

At Arc 5:

• 0 MP -1/Book Give rise to a Convention and a Wish based on your Principle and your Torment
• 4 MP - Invoke this power a second time or later per Book.

Your Principle is a thing of awesome power. It is a holy, numinous existence that nonetheless reaches out and intercedes in the world to save you. Correspondingly, the Torment it keeps at bay has become an awful, terrible thing. A dark mirror of your Principle. A phenomenal existence that has grown so much greater than it has any right to be, by dint of its role in your Principle’s legend.

Once per book (or another time in the same Book for 8 MP and a Deadly Wound) you may call upon both forces in their full majesty, giving your life over to them to use as their battleground, and setting them against one another in a conflict that will shake the foundations of the world.

This Miracle has two parts which, for the sake of convenience, we will refer to as paths. The right-hand path is an expression of your Principle, its raw power approaching you from afar and reaching in to touch you. The left-hand path is its shadow, your Torment, arising from your heart’s shadow to reach out and strangle the world.

One path you will have some measure of control over, the other will be given over entirely to the HG. Normally you will control the right-hand path, your Principle will answer your prayers and come to your aid. If, however, you have four or more points in the Sickness Issue at the time you activate this Miracle, you will control the left-hand path. Your Torment is too strong (or you are to soul-sick) for you to call out to your Principle. Instead you grasp on to your Torment and twist it, giving its sickness form by your own will, while your Principle comes unbidden into the world the save you as best it can.

Both effects occur at once and their continued existence is tied to one another. If some force or power prevents one path from functioning, the other will also fail.

The different paths work as follows:

Right-hand Path: When you are in control of this path you create a Convention based on your Principle and its emotional and metaphorical associations. This can be as wide-ranging as you like and is typically a powerful, blatant effect. Like most Conventions, it has the power of an Affliction over the entire story, with a 2 point Auctoritas protecting it. While enforcement of the Convention is ultimately in the hands of the HG, when you control the right-hand path the HG should interpret the Convention’s manifestation in harmony with your desires. Your Principle is not completely under your control, but You and your Principle should have an understanding.

When you do not control the right-hand path, the effect is the same, but the HG sets the Convention. When this is the case your Principle will typically be a wild, uncontrollable thing that acts out of harmony with you and regardless of your own desires. Your Principle is still trying to help you, trying to save you, but it is not a safe or tame power and has its own ideas of what it is to save you.

In either case the Convention lasts until the Wish created by the left-hand path has resolved itself (or where this is ambiguous, for the remainder of the chapter)

Left-hand Path: Your Torment is ever in your shadow. While it is a thing of reality, its power over you comes from the shadow of your heart, and it is ultimately a thing of the Wishing Heart itself. As such it manifests as a Wish.

When the HG controls the left-hand path, they will make a Wish related to your Torment, which will always be framed in the context of an ending or a great, climactic battle, or at least some kind of resolution. When under the HG’s control, the manifestation of the Wish is completely out of control. Your Torment infects the very fundament of reality itself, twisting every shadow against you, trying to control or consume you. But your Principle is there to save you. Sometimes. (At the very least, since it acts independently of you doesn’t have a Wound Track the miraculous effects of the Right-Hand path can defy the Wish completely without penalty. This is actually a very big deal. I mean your Principle can basically blaspheme against the very fabric of reality itself to help you out, if it thinks that will help you out.)

When you control the Left-Hand Path, you get to make the Wish. This is handled in exactly the same way as the powers of the Wishing Boy or Wishing Girl. Use your Torment’s bullet points, along with the restriction that the Wish must concern an ending, battle or resolution, as a Wishing Map.