Sickly [Arc Trait]
Type: Special
You are prone to trials, and your life is hard thing to live! Once per session, you may declare yourself under attack by corruption or trauma. Invoke a suitable:
- (suffer) Corruption
- or (suffer) Trauma
XP action, and automatically pick up a point of Sickness unless your Sickness issue is either at 5 or has just recently been resolved.
Allegory [Immortal Knight 3]
Role and Failing
You’re something cool. You’re trying – and succeeding! – at being something so gosh darn fantastic. Something straight out of a fairy tale! In fact, you’re Rinley Yatskaya: the one and only, legendary adventurer! Buccaneer, privateer, treasure seeker, action-archaeologist, man slayer, lady killer, hero, villain, trickster and lead of a thousand stories~ (penned by you, famous auteur-author-artist!)
And you’ve been so successful in the biz, that you’ve become an allegory for Adventure! itself. You’re emblematic, symptomatic, symbolic and representative of interesting times, and what interesting times you live in! So interesting that Adventure! is your failure as well as your success. Your life is one high-top, non-stop rollercoaster of dashing, daring-do and dubious misfortune. And you love every second of it…!
Trained by Ninjas [Allegory 0]
Type: Special
You’ve got stealth for days! I mean, you ought to stand out (you’re a legendary adventurer after all!), but you don’t. You pass among mortals undetected. It’s not that you’re invisible…you’re just super great at catching people by surprise!
There’s a level 3 Obstacle in the way of:
- recognising you or your distinctive features when you’re not trying to be recognised;
- describing you effectively (people just love to embellish so much!);
- spotting you when you’re trying to hide, be subtle, or disappear.
Trickster’s Heart [Allegory 0]
Type: Miraculous Action, Major
If there’s one thing you’re famous for – above everything else – it’s that no one ever (ever!) sees their downfall coming. You can flummox, bamboozle, and thwart any villain, nefarious scheme or obstacle that gets in your way. You have a preternatural, supernatural, over-the-top ability to tug on the loose thread of destiny, and unravel it in just such a way that you come out on top. Usually through means most ridiculous!
Legendary Adventurer! [Allegory 0]
Type: Miraculous Action, Major
When acting in the person of your Role (Rinley! Legendary Adventurer!), you are miraculous. By announcing your presence, revealing your identity and perhaps recounting your past exploits, you can charge your mundane actions with miraculous effects. You invest some emotional or metaphorical substance into its products or processes to bring them to the miraculous level.
When you invoke Legendary Adventurer!:
- affected mundane actions, in a contest with miracles, do not automatically lose. To resolve a conflict, treat the Intention rating as a miracle level (up to a maximum of Legendary Adventurer!’s miracle level).
- if appropriate, you can directly manipulate miraculous energy with such mundane actions. For instance, you could steal a treasure protected by a miraculous ward because that’s a very adventurer thing to do!
One Thousand and One Nights [Allegory 0]
Type: Imperial
In the person of your Role, you’ve either literally been there for a lot of history, or you’ve seen things a lot like what’s going on now – enough so that you declare you were:
- around for!
- or around for something almost exactly like!
…just about anything. This functions as a wish: “I wish I had detailed personal experience with that.”
You can use this, for instance, to know exactly what happened in someone’s dream based on the first part of a description, or to drag up memories of a particular event in ancient Rome, and so on! You can even use this power to infiltrate yourself into events that happened in play!
You can also kick this up a notch. You become a driving force in history! And can use One Thousand and One Nights to declare that you actively participated in something.
Mechanisms of Transport [Allegory 1]
Type: Superior Skill
You are a superior traveller. In particular, 1/book, you may use an available Perk slot to design a mode of transportation going to, from, and through some occult realm (e.g. the Far Roofs). This could be anything from “I have a magical whirlwind that seizes me up” to “I can walk there”>
This functions as a level 2 Superior Skill Perk, and possible applications include:
- sending someone else there;
- travelling there yourself;
- having a mode of transportation that makes some concessions to ‘realism’ (e.g. a ship that can sail along the roofs and streets but only when the wind allows) but is still basically pretty awesome.
Accumulating multiple vehicles is legitimate, but the expected practice is you’ll either keep one vehicle forever, or swap in a new one every 1-2 stories.
Motley Crew [Allegory 1]
//Type: Imperial
Invoke this ability to rouse the inanimate to life or an animal to consciousness and speech – calling upon it in the person of your Role, filling it with the energy of your Failing, or whatever else is most appropriate to your character! This doesn’t grant you any special power over the target, but you do start with a mutual level 1 Connection that lasts for the rest of the story, and you can withdraw your gift by applying this power again.
You can also use your miraculous action to target “the world around you” for awakening. Over the course of a few minutes, a collection of things (up to and including “everything” comes to life.
This power takes a\ few minutes to operate , but you can sustain it to have it move with you.
Bit Parts [Allegory 2]
Type: Imperial
Invoke this power to transform or curse a sentinel target. This transforms them in a way that is an expression of, metaphor for, or intensification of their experience of your failing. It’s ultimately up to the target’s player how they experience your Failing, but you’re allowed to guide them through it, e.g.:
- visualisation: ask them to free-associate about what kind of creature or person they might turn into when experiencing your Failing. Ask them what kind of physical characteristics they might have, what kind of magical effects they might be under. Tell them to visualise becoming something in the height of that emotion or situation! What is it?
- metaphor: ask them what it’s like for their character when they experience your Failing. Ask them about what kind of changes or curses would be a good metaphor for that. Help them refine one!
- enhancement: ask them what their experience of your Failing is like, and about what kinds of changes or curses would heighten that. What would it take to make them more…of whatever your Failing might be!
Afterwards, they pick up an appropriate transformation or curse – typically lasting until:
- the resolution of an appropriate Issue (e.g. Sickness 4);
- the completion of an appropriate quest;
- or until they take a wound to mitigate its effects and then heal the wound.
This ability works through mundane actions (like Legendary Adventurer!) though you get a +1 Tool bonus to accomplishing these changes. This means that mundane actions can resist the effect; and you’re likely to face an Obstacle if you’re doing curses or transformations you don’t have practice with, or with a Skill not normally used for such things. And that you need at least an Intention rating of 2 to guarantee that it happens! An intention of 3 to guarantee that you’ve done it properly, and higher ones to ensure that it serves your interests.
Narrate [Allegory 3]
Type: Miraculous Action, Unreal
Invoke Narrate and almost anything becomes possible – like you were just acting out a part in a story you yourself were writing! While you sustain this power, in moderate portion of the local region, you may choose to:
- realise a metaphor, e.g. making happiness buoyant or saw-horses rideable;
- make it possible to move a collection of objects (or perceived distant objects) around;
- Waive environmental hazards for yourself and others;
- wake it easier to organise people into unusual activities in the form of a +2 Tool bonus;
- or invoke Motley Crew or Bit Parts at no further cost.
“Making it possible” to do something means that it’s now inherently feasible to do that thing with mundane actions, typically also reducing any Obstacles by two points (to a minimum of 0).
This power is fair: when you “make it possible” to do something, or waive an environmental hazard, or make it easier to do something that applies to everyone in the area! So if you decide you can move starts around by hand, so can everyone else. If you decide a friend can talk to cats and birds, so can you! Similarly, when you make happiness buoyant, that’s everyone’s happiness and you don’t have any unusual access.
This power has the Unreal tag, which means that after the power ends local reality reasserts itself – the evidence that anything particularly unusual happened will fade away over time. This includes any applications of Motley Crew or Bit Parts that you invoked under the mantle of Narrate.
Taboo [Allegory 3]
Type: Bond [2]
People aren’t supposed to stop your adventurers! Sure, you can be captured (for a time), experience set-backs (for a time), and even be thwarted (temporarily)! But you – Rinley Yatskaya – wins out in the end. That’s your story. That’s your soul and your wishing heart! If you got shipwrecked in a storm the likes of which the world had never seen, it would be a disaster if you didn’t survive to tell the tale! So, you survive. Because your adventures aren’t supposed to stop!
This is a law of your nature. And it takes effect as a Bond.
Knave of Hearts [Sickly Knight 0]
Tales of Adventure [Knave of Hearts 0]
Type: Miraculous Action
You’ve divined a pattern behind the ordinary events of your life, leading you upwards toward adventure and glory! Invoke Tales of Adventure and you can look directly at that pattern, and see how each piece fits into the greater puzzle. While this power is active, you can determine whether any given object or person fits into your Mythos, and how. If it doesn’t currently have a place in your Mythos, you see how it could!
You’re an adventurer. You see people with interesting plot threads dangling off them. You see people with parts to play in your story – people with problems that will be exciting to solve, guards and policemen who’ll chase you over roofs and through crowded markets, rivals or enemies to match against – just by looking at them!
While you’re lost in all that symbolism, the ordinary details of the world are harder to see – there’s a level 1 Obstacle in the way of paying attention to the boring stuff.
Cut and Edit [Knave of Hearts 0]
Type: Miraculous Action
Invoke this power to bring things a little more into line with your Mythos! Oever the course of a short (2-3 second) break from reality, you can reshape and redecorate things to match your aesthetics, bringing them into line with your story or your world. Alternately, you can strength your Mythos’ influence on something (just a little!). You might turn your friends into appropriately dressed scallywags for your ship, enter an abandoned meatpacking plant only to find it full of ghastly adventure, or arrive somewhere just in time to meet someone exciting!
Cut and Edit functions as a level 3 magical Intention, and it’s unnatural enough that resisting or seeing through it is typically Obstacle 0. But if not resisted, you can make substantial cosmetic changes to the world around you – changes that’ll tend to linger until roughly the end of the next chapter.
This power can be used in reverse to undo the transformation you caused, if you see the need. You can even use it on yourself, which is convenient if you need to quickly change into a special costume or return to ‘civilian’ identity!