Frantic
Type: Special
Cost: ——
Your never so resilient as when you're terrified.
You may take the (Be in) Trouble action anytime you meet it's condition. Doing so earns you 1MP, up to your starting MP. Each additional group XP that you earn from this action also earns you an additional MP.
Choose Your Technique: Devilishly Clever
This Arc comes with an associated Technique.
This is basically … how you get things done. It’s what you use to do quest miracles. Do you do magic? Do you create inventions? Are you incredibly clever and tricky?
Title
The Silver Masks Brotherhood
Type: Bond, Level 2
Cost: —
You receive a free Bond that represents your position in the world—your relationship to society or to the forbidden. “Heir to the Kichi Temple,” perhaps, or “Raised by Wolves.”
When you’re drawing upon that relationship socially—to intimidate those outside your circle or connect to those inside it—and you’re
using a mundane action, and facing an Obstacle or conflict, you may add +2 to your Intention; or
using a miracle, regardless of opposition, you may add +2 to your Strike.
When that relationship causes trouble for you, the HG may give you up to the Bond rating (2) in Will or MP.
The support you receive from this Bond can notionally replace the need for water, food, sleep, or even air—it doesn’t reduce the Obstacle to surviving a long time without these things, and you typically won’t even get the +2, but it will be feasible to do so. The heir to the Kichi Temple won’t let a little hard vacuum stop them from completing their duties!
If you should come to re-evaluate your position in the world, you can change this Bond by spending a Recharge Token.
Costume
A double breasted maroon suit, clean white shirt, mauve ascot, pink claw polish, pink lipstick
Panoply: behind the bar
Arc 1+
Type: Miraculous Action
Cost: —
Invoke Costume to gain access to a characteristic costume, weapons, goods, and tools that evoke your archetype and your legend. You’ll choose these when you get this power—e.g.,
a School uniform and appropriate books and School supplies for the current year;
your favorite hat, robe, and medicine chest;
a celestial sword and the ability to transmute basic elements out of the ground;
a cheese knife, a hat, and a bag with a gold, silver, and copper coin in it.
You may also use this power to dismiss the summoned goods.
You may define the special effects for this power—does your characteristic stuff just appear out of nowhere, do you “rummage around” to find it, or have you “stored a spare set nearby?” Does your costume replace what you’re currently wearing, and revert back when you dismiss it, or do you have to actually change? All that stuff’s up to you.
This power is limited to mundane items and cosmetically-interesting-but-not-terribly-amazing magical stuff, but you can use it to justify your access to powerful items acquired through Perks—that is, if you’re getting a cool Accessory, why not declare that it’s part of the Accessory’s power that you can summon it through Costume?
Secrets and Lies
Arc 1+
Type: Miraculous Action
Cost:
0 MP—get basic information
1 MP—get means and motive information
2 MP—get a “clue”
You have a way of finding things out. It’s not generic—you have a specific thing you do—and you can derive three sorts of information from it:
Basic Information. You can get a sentence or two of general information on just about anything—from a particular television set to a book to a neighborhood.
Means and Motives. You can get more specific information on the “why” or “how” of something.
A “Clue.” Given a matter of interest, you can get a piece of information that points you somewhere you can go for more information on that matter. That’s usually a location to stake out or visit but it can be a conversational topic, a research topic, or somewhere else you can metaphorically go.
When possible, this power defaults to publicly available information or existing clues—it only creates information ex nihilo if there’s nothing to work with. This means that it can be fooled, and in fact will tend to return cover stories, faked clues, and false information first, provided:
The fake information is plausible given your existing knowledge;
The fake information is consciously established by some agency;
The fake information is more plausible or conspicuous than equally available truths; and
Sufficient investigation of the fake information will allow future applications of this power to see through to the truth.
Once you’ve seen through fake information, you’ll tend to get the kind of information that’s available to the set of people who know the fake information is false—for instance, if a company is publicly run by a board of directors, secretly run by a conspiracy, and even more secretly run by aliens, you’ll learn about the conspiracy first.
This power improves with practice and the use of relevant Skills.
If the HG gives out basic information or clues liberally in their game, you receive whatever they would normally give you as bonus information first, then the additional (ideally unrelated) information in the standard format for this power. For instance, if the HG wasn’t going to let the PCs leave the scene of a crime without some sort of clue anyway, using this power will get you two different leads.
Scheme
Arc 2+
Type: Miraculous Action
Cost (Arc 2):
0 MP—enact a reactive scheme, 1/book
4 MP—enact a second or later reactive scheme in a given book
Cost (Arc 3-4):
0 MP—enact up to two reactive schemes/book, in separate chapters
2 MP—enact a third or later scheme/book
4 MP—invoke a second or later scheme/chapter.
or
4 MP—enact a proactive scheme
Cost (Arc 5):
0 MP—enact up to two reactive schemes/book, in separate chapters
1 MP—enact a third or later scheme/book
2 MP—invoke a second or later scheme/chapter.
or
2 MP—enact a proactive scheme
Invoke Scheme to come up with a solution to some problem. This functions as a wish:
“I wish I could use my Technique to solve this problem, (with the solution lasting) at least until the end of the story.”
This is a reactive scheme if the problem came up for the first time in this story, or if the HG already expected it to be solved in this story. Otherwise it’s a proactive scheme, which is impossible at Arc 2 and more expensive later on.
Arc 2. You could solve the problem by the end of the next chapter. However, you’re not guaranteed to actually do so—that depends on your mundane actions. The miracle does guarantee that following the plan is plausible, faces reasonable Obstacles (0-2), and will overcome the expected opposition … but it could be foiled if circumstances change.
Arc 3. You’ll receive a +2 Tool bonus on the relevant actions.
Arc 4. Actually solving the problem is now part of the miraculous action—and if “before the end of the next chapter” puts time pressure on you, you’re guaranteed to solve the problem “just in time.”
Arc 5. You can also guarantee a solution that’s snazzy on some level—you can aim for subtlety, or doing a really good job, or being visually impressive, or something like that.
Note that Scheme is a miraculous action and not an Imperial miracle. That means that any time your scheme comes directly head-to-head with a miracle—typically, when someone who has figured out your scheme targets a miracle to directly oppose it, or when your scheme is for disrupting somebody’s miracles—you’ll have to beat the relevant miracle level. (Remember that you can spend MP for bonus Strike.)
Note additionally that the wish doesn’t specify that the player can come up with the scheme—it’s in the hands of the group and the HG. If the player has a good scheme handy, that’s probably the scheme in play, but there’s room for the wish to go another way.
In some games/groups, players will already have a relatively free hand to invent problem-solving schemes based on magical, superscience, and other weird Techniques, even without applying miraculous abilities. In such a game, the HG should allow you to propose substantially fuzzier/more handwavy solutions and, if you propose a comparatively sound idea instead, escalate the significance/impressiveness of your Scheme’s results.
In some games/groups, chapters pass very quickly. The HG may optionally increase the default time for a Scheme in such a game.
The Dark Side
Arc 2+
Type: Miraculous Action
Cost: —
You’re drawn to certain tabu acts—things that are forbidden, or frowned-upon, or wicked, or dangerous.
You can sense them from miles away.
Pick what you can sense:
dark magic?
gruesome murders?
witches?
vampires?
runaway children?
the rattling of dice?
liquor?
campsite fires not properly put out?
slurping one’s soup?
playing with matches?
violations of traffic safety?
being rude to one’s parents?
… or something else?
Is it a subtle psychic sense? A blatant physical one? Do you get visions? Does the wind bring you the story? Is it just an OOC cluing-in that lets you stumble IC, again and again, on the right kind of scene? You can freely pick a handful of different sins that you can sense and specify the details of what things you learn. Typically getting really detailed information relies on a mundane action, though—the miracle isn’t the information you get, it’s having this special sense.
This power does not need to be actively invoked, although you may need to remind the HG of its existence.
Slippery
Arc 2+
Type: Miraculous Action
Cost: 1 MP
Invoke Slippery when you choose not to resist a magical, miraculous, or Imperial effect and you can slip out from under it as soon as the scene ends, or the effect is no longer sustained, whichever is later. You shed the effects of magic and miraculous actions entirely and mitigate wish-level effects.
You may delay the invocation of this effect—
As long as you haven’t chosen to resist, you can invoke Slippery at any point from the initial onset of the effect to the instant that it is no longer sustained.