Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 25
December 31, 2012
The Beast Fears Fire - Hulder
Hulder [Violence 3]
Impulse - To Share their Pain.
When a human impresses the Huldra and she finds them worthy, she'll often take them as a lover. Wise folks know to respectfully rebuff her advances, but some people take her up on the offer. The Huldra always conceives from any pairing she's involved in (regardless of details like whether it's a fertile pairing), and leaves her lover very shortly after. The Huldra passes pregnancy in the form of a tree - a period that lasts from conception to the winter solstice, however long or short that is. On the night of the winter solstice the tree that was the Huldra cracks open and a hulder is born. The Huldra usually appears sometime later, usually in a different area of her territory.
Hulder are skinny figures, sickly and sallow looking with a single horn growing on the left or right side of their head, tiny irises around pinhole pupils, cattle hooves for feet. They are either bald or possess extremely lank hair the grows on the top of their head, away from the side of their head where the horn is. Their teeth are tiny, triangular and extremely numerous. Hulder are ashamed of their forms and seek out means of covering themselves, completely swaddling themselves in cloth and anything else, if they can.
Hulder are constantly in a state of agonized violent frenzy, spewing curses and savagely destroying anything in arm's reach.
Harm - 2 Beating, biting and stomping. Some hulder pick up bludgeons as they go, but tend to break them pretty quickly. As combatants, they are dangerous due to their recklessness and aggression, but would be nothing special, if not for one thing. Aggression and violence cause hulder to reproduce through a grisly sort of budding. Once a certain threshold of violent action is met, a hulder's skin will simply split open, releasing two new hulder. It can be difficult, when fighting hulder to kill one fast enough to prevent it from splitting this way.
Impromptu Crowd Control
When you physically fight hulder, face Violence.
On a Hit, you are able to kill of the newborn hulder as the old one splits, but the remaining one is still about.
On a Hard Hit, you manage to kill hulder clean without them splitting.
On a Miss, you swing away, but more keep coming. Suffer harm as stated and now there are more of them.
It's worth noting that using magic or trickery and terrain or indirect violence (e.g. drop rocks on them) doesn't seem to provoke this reaction.
I'm gonna leave my body. I'm gonna lose my mind.
Hulder can appear male or female, and the sex of a parent doesn't seem to have any bearing on the sex of the children. Hulder can quickly become a regional disaster if no one is able to deal with them decisively. Fortunately, there are some factors that work against their becoming a true threat. First is that there is a limit on the number of generations a hulder can produce, this is variable, and uncomfortably geometric, but it seems that the frequency of splitting seems to cut down on the number of times total a hulder can split. Terminal generation hulder simply burst, which is messy and upsetting, but less messy and upsetting than a pair of new hulder. The second is that they seem to have a geographic range beyond which they do not willingly go. The last is that almost all hulder die at the vernal equinox. Those who remain are still relentlessly unpleasant and nearly always in frenzy, but not always, and they cannot split. It's very rare that a hulder who lives to see the spring will make it another season, let alone another year, but year-old hulder do not start up with splitting in the following winter.
Hulder take special care to destroy any and all dead trees in the area, and will choose these above anything else as targets.
Impulse - To Share their Pain.
When a human impresses the Huldra and she finds them worthy, she'll often take them as a lover. Wise folks know to respectfully rebuff her advances, but some people take her up on the offer. The Huldra always conceives from any pairing she's involved in (regardless of details like whether it's a fertile pairing), and leaves her lover very shortly after. The Huldra passes pregnancy in the form of a tree - a period that lasts from conception to the winter solstice, however long or short that is. On the night of the winter solstice the tree that was the Huldra cracks open and a hulder is born. The Huldra usually appears sometime later, usually in a different area of her territory.
Hulder are skinny figures, sickly and sallow looking with a single horn growing on the left or right side of their head, tiny irises around pinhole pupils, cattle hooves for feet. They are either bald or possess extremely lank hair the grows on the top of their head, away from the side of their head where the horn is. Their teeth are tiny, triangular and extremely numerous. Hulder are ashamed of their forms and seek out means of covering themselves, completely swaddling themselves in cloth and anything else, if they can.
Hulder are constantly in a state of agonized violent frenzy, spewing curses and savagely destroying anything in arm's reach.
Harm - 2 Beating, biting and stomping. Some hulder pick up bludgeons as they go, but tend to break them pretty quickly. As combatants, they are dangerous due to their recklessness and aggression, but would be nothing special, if not for one thing. Aggression and violence cause hulder to reproduce through a grisly sort of budding. Once a certain threshold of violent action is met, a hulder's skin will simply split open, releasing two new hulder. It can be difficult, when fighting hulder to kill one fast enough to prevent it from splitting this way.
Impromptu Crowd Control
When you physically fight hulder, face Violence.
On a Hit, you are able to kill of the newborn hulder as the old one splits, but the remaining one is still about.
On a Hard Hit, you manage to kill hulder clean without them splitting.
On a Miss, you swing away, but more keep coming. Suffer harm as stated and now there are more of them.
It's worth noting that using magic or trickery and terrain or indirect violence (e.g. drop rocks on them) doesn't seem to provoke this reaction.
I'm gonna leave my body. I'm gonna lose my mind.
Hulder can appear male or female, and the sex of a parent doesn't seem to have any bearing on the sex of the children. Hulder can quickly become a regional disaster if no one is able to deal with them decisively. Fortunately, there are some factors that work against their becoming a true threat. First is that there is a limit on the number of generations a hulder can produce, this is variable, and uncomfortably geometric, but it seems that the frequency of splitting seems to cut down on the number of times total a hulder can split. Terminal generation hulder simply burst, which is messy and upsetting, but less messy and upsetting than a pair of new hulder. The second is that they seem to have a geographic range beyond which they do not willingly go. The last is that almost all hulder die at the vernal equinox. Those who remain are still relentlessly unpleasant and nearly always in frenzy, but not always, and they cannot split. It's very rare that a hulder who lives to see the spring will make it another season, let alone another year, but year-old hulder do not start up with splitting in the following winter.
Hulder take special care to destroy any and all dead trees in the area, and will choose these above anything else as targets.
The Beast Fears Fire - Huldra
Huldra [Malevolence 5]
Impulse - To Test
It's possible that, like the pudding cloud, there is just the one. It's possible that there might be others, but there is just one in Crickton, to the best of anyone's knowledge, who haunts the areas where one would expect to find old Ash weapons.
The Huldra - it's possible that "Huldra" is the name of this individual, though she also answers to the name Thalia - spends a lot of her time in the form of a standing dead tree, the broken-off, human-high stump of a singed pine. She can hold this form indefinitely, and has used it to pass whole generations by in slumber. Otherwise, she appears as a young woman with light skin, dark hair and the tail of a cow. She does not always appear dressed (cold and weather does not appear to bother her in any state of dress), but when she does, it is in antique rust and slate colored Ash dress. She speaks the languages of the sea, but leans heavily on Demersal and Neretic and, thus can be hard for Cricks to follow (Crick uses only a handful of words from those languages - being mostly Litoral and Pelagic).
The Huldra is generally peaceful if approached cautiously and with respect. She enjoys conversing with people, as long as she does not judge them impolite. It's possible to speak to the Huldra for a short time without causing offense, and the people of the northwest are pretty well trained in this regard (you do not need to make any Moves in order to simply greet and bid the Huldra on her way). Not offending the Huldra during an extended or in-depth conversation, however, can be a difficult task - she's very sensitive about her tail and drawing or even paying attention to it will cause her to fly into a rage. She is also somewhat delusional and paranoid, and her use of sea-tongues that aren't commonly used by Cricks makes verbal slips easy to make. It may, however be worth the risk to speak to the Huldra, as she has a great store of knowledge on just about any topic and is an extremely powerful sorcerer.
Speaking to the Huldra is doubly dangerous in that her words are full of supernatural power, and a lot of people who are used to speaking with others (even practiced in speaking with monsters and spirits) find that conversation with her is especially tricky and dangerous.
Waking the Witch
When you seek information or tutelage from the Huldra, face Malevolence.
On a Hit, you make friendly contact and avoid offending her. The Huldra will ask for payment or service for her help or knowledge up front, and that is the price you must pay.
On a Hard Hit, the Huldra has judged you worthy. Her speech patterns change to match yours, her manners become a lot more relaxed, and she will usually help you freely. You can interact with her normally from now on.
On a Miss, you offend her, driving her into a rage.
Harm - 3, Peril [Cursed] If you offend the Huldra, she will turn her magic and her command of the Benthic and Abyssal tongues on you. Her powers often manifest as clouds of sparks, grayish horseflies and dry, broken pine needles sharp as steel. The Huldra has the powers to affect plant life and the earth as a wood and earth witch.
With friends like me, who needs enemies?
The Huldra is the source of most of our extant knowledge on the subject of the Ash people and their weapons, but the history of her own people is not the only knowledge she possesses. This can be more than a little problematic, in some areas, since it's well known that she knows the formula for making Trowir, and other equally dangerous things, which she will freely teach to anyone who does not offend her. As a result, there have been a few attempts on her life from people who would rather see what she knows forgotten or controlled. So far, none of these attempts have been permanently successful.
The Huldra will sometimes take someone she finds worthy as a lover. She has mentioned that she hopes to one day have a child, but thus far, all her pregnancies have produced hulder.
Impulse - To Test
It's possible that, like the pudding cloud, there is just the one. It's possible that there might be others, but there is just one in Crickton, to the best of anyone's knowledge, who haunts the areas where one would expect to find old Ash weapons.
The Huldra - it's possible that "Huldra" is the name of this individual, though she also answers to the name Thalia - spends a lot of her time in the form of a standing dead tree, the broken-off, human-high stump of a singed pine. She can hold this form indefinitely, and has used it to pass whole generations by in slumber. Otherwise, she appears as a young woman with light skin, dark hair and the tail of a cow. She does not always appear dressed (cold and weather does not appear to bother her in any state of dress), but when she does, it is in antique rust and slate colored Ash dress. She speaks the languages of the sea, but leans heavily on Demersal and Neretic and, thus can be hard for Cricks to follow (Crick uses only a handful of words from those languages - being mostly Litoral and Pelagic).
The Huldra is generally peaceful if approached cautiously and with respect. She enjoys conversing with people, as long as she does not judge them impolite. It's possible to speak to the Huldra for a short time without causing offense, and the people of the northwest are pretty well trained in this regard (you do not need to make any Moves in order to simply greet and bid the Huldra on her way). Not offending the Huldra during an extended or in-depth conversation, however, can be a difficult task - she's very sensitive about her tail and drawing or even paying attention to it will cause her to fly into a rage. She is also somewhat delusional and paranoid, and her use of sea-tongues that aren't commonly used by Cricks makes verbal slips easy to make. It may, however be worth the risk to speak to the Huldra, as she has a great store of knowledge on just about any topic and is an extremely powerful sorcerer.
Speaking to the Huldra is doubly dangerous in that her words are full of supernatural power, and a lot of people who are used to speaking with others (even practiced in speaking with monsters and spirits) find that conversation with her is especially tricky and dangerous.
Waking the Witch
When you seek information or tutelage from the Huldra, face Malevolence.
On a Hit, you make friendly contact and avoid offending her. The Huldra will ask for payment or service for her help or knowledge up front, and that is the price you must pay.
On a Hard Hit, the Huldra has judged you worthy. Her speech patterns change to match yours, her manners become a lot more relaxed, and she will usually help you freely. You can interact with her normally from now on.
On a Miss, you offend her, driving her into a rage.
Harm - 3, Peril [Cursed] If you offend the Huldra, she will turn her magic and her command of the Benthic and Abyssal tongues on you. Her powers often manifest as clouds of sparks, grayish horseflies and dry, broken pine needles sharp as steel. The Huldra has the powers to affect plant life and the earth as a wood and earth witch.
With friends like me, who needs enemies?
The Huldra is the source of most of our extant knowledge on the subject of the Ash people and their weapons, but the history of her own people is not the only knowledge she possesses. This can be more than a little problematic, in some areas, since it's well known that she knows the formula for making Trowir, and other equally dangerous things, which she will freely teach to anyone who does not offend her. As a result, there have been a few attempts on her life from people who would rather see what she knows forgotten or controlled. So far, none of these attempts have been permanently successful.
The Huldra will sometimes take someone she finds worthy as a lover. She has mentioned that she hopes to one day have a child, but thus far, all her pregnancies have produced hulder.
December 30, 2012
The Beast Fears Fire - Goat Children
Goat Child [Ignorance 3]
Impulse - To Accuse.
The mystery around the Ash and their weapons is almost never how they accomplished creating them in the first place. It's usually why they did when other cultures at the end of their histories did not and how so many of these creations persist to the present. Then there are goat children. No one's really sure what they are, how they came to be, or from where they originated. No records of how they were made survive. The best guess at their origin is that perhaps they are from the alien Other, but some region remote from the one that idiots in the living word just keep fucking contacting, and that their powers have some coincidental interaction with the human psyche. And that's the best guess; everything else degrades in rigor and evidence from there.
Goat children look like albino children in rustic dress with floppy, hairy ears, red eyes with goatish pupils, weak chins, little horns on their foreheads and legs covered in coarse white hair below the knees that end in cloven hooves the color of dried blood. Like many of Ash weapons, they spend much of their time in a fugue state, either unmanifest (evidence of them being spirits is very thin, but just in case) or elsewhere.
Like other Ash weapons, they spend most of their time in the highlands in the northwest of Crickton, though they sometimes come to the central region and the mountains there. In their fugue, goat children will do their best to avoid detection or notice, keeping to wild areas as much as possible, while searching for settlements of the people who exterminated the Ash. Old historical records of goat child activity held that the creatures would only activate once they found such a settlement, but those people are gone as well, and their blood is in almost everyone in Crickton to a small extent, so, in modern times, the goat children will activate after a certain number of incidences of human contact.
Harm - Front. Once the goat child activates, it will start seeking out contact, however fleeting, with the people in the area it's chosen as hunting ground. Active goat children are very fast, silent, and possibly capable of accessing an otherworld or turning invisible. In any case, it's usual mode is to approach people at a distance, speak its name and then retreat.
The name of a goat child is a memetic hazard. Those who hear the name directly from the goat child first will start to dwell upon their shames, guilt and secrets, occasionally speaking the name aloud, unconscious of the fact that they are doing it. People who hear the name from other people first will hear other things when the goat child talks to them (and the child will seek out anyone who has heard its name from others) - usually they will hear other names. Once a member of this second group comes in contact with the goat child, the full effect of the name hits them, though, in this case, they become convinced that something salacious and terrible is happening. The hybrid appearance of the goat child and lack of a widespread education to tell people that biology doesn't work that way tends to get people's minds working in certain directions.
From there, things can get ugly.
1. A goat child begins contacting people, dividing them into the shameful and the suspicious. Arguments begin over unspoken crimes.
2. The goat child enters the settlement itself, appearing to anyone who has heard its name and causing minor things to go wrong (milk sours, things break, the usual).
3. Arguments begin escalating into physical altercations, local officials put some sort of posse or inquest together.
4. The posse chooses someone from the ranks of the guilty and delivers it to the harshest form of capital punishment available to the community (inventing something on the spot, if there's no tradition of capital punishment in the community). At this point, the suspicious all convert to the guilty. Anyone who is able to do so usually leaves the community.
It takes months for the effects of the goat child's meddling to wear off. Anyone who has been infected with a goat child's name is unable to refer to the child directly, even under strong compulsion.
Investigating what's going on in a community affected by a goat child is made all the more difficult by the fact that no one talks about the goat child directly. People will say its name and assume you know who to whom they are referring. Also, there's the matter of the mind altering quality of its name.
Goats Go to Hell
When you are investigating the actions of a goat child, face Ignorance
On a Hit, you find a useful clue as to what is going on and where you might be able to find the goat child. Gain 1 hit forward on any further moves to investigate the Goat Child.
On a Hard Hit, you are able to confront the goat child in a place where it is not immediately able (for no apparent reason) to flee. You can face the goat child as you see fit.
On a Miss, your investigations stir up more trouble. Advance the Front.
Murderers, you're murderers. We are not the same as you.
Goat children are not very good combatants when cornered, and, once slain, all power goes out of their name (which, incidentally, degrades from the mind itself, becoming an only partially remembered smear of sound). Player's characters aren't exactly immune to the power of the name, but there's no compulsion on them to act like everyone else around. If they learn the name of the goat child before they meet it, play on the notion that something is wrong and that some people about seem to be hiding things. If they meet the goat child first, play up the suspicions of the people around, how everyone is unfriendly and nosy and thinks they're up to no good.
The remains of a goat child degrade pretty quickly after death.
Impulse - To Accuse.
The mystery around the Ash and their weapons is almost never how they accomplished creating them in the first place. It's usually why they did when other cultures at the end of their histories did not and how so many of these creations persist to the present. Then there are goat children. No one's really sure what they are, how they came to be, or from where they originated. No records of how they were made survive. The best guess at their origin is that perhaps they are from the alien Other, but some region remote from the one that idiots in the living word just keep fucking contacting, and that their powers have some coincidental interaction with the human psyche. And that's the best guess; everything else degrades in rigor and evidence from there.
Goat children look like albino children in rustic dress with floppy, hairy ears, red eyes with goatish pupils, weak chins, little horns on their foreheads and legs covered in coarse white hair below the knees that end in cloven hooves the color of dried blood. Like many of Ash weapons, they spend much of their time in a fugue state, either unmanifest (evidence of them being spirits is very thin, but just in case) or elsewhere.
Like other Ash weapons, they spend most of their time in the highlands in the northwest of Crickton, though they sometimes come to the central region and the mountains there. In their fugue, goat children will do their best to avoid detection or notice, keeping to wild areas as much as possible, while searching for settlements of the people who exterminated the Ash. Old historical records of goat child activity held that the creatures would only activate once they found such a settlement, but those people are gone as well, and their blood is in almost everyone in Crickton to a small extent, so, in modern times, the goat children will activate after a certain number of incidences of human contact.
Harm - Front. Once the goat child activates, it will start seeking out contact, however fleeting, with the people in the area it's chosen as hunting ground. Active goat children are very fast, silent, and possibly capable of accessing an otherworld or turning invisible. In any case, it's usual mode is to approach people at a distance, speak its name and then retreat.
The name of a goat child is a memetic hazard. Those who hear the name directly from the goat child first will start to dwell upon their shames, guilt and secrets, occasionally speaking the name aloud, unconscious of the fact that they are doing it. People who hear the name from other people first will hear other things when the goat child talks to them (and the child will seek out anyone who has heard its name from others) - usually they will hear other names. Once a member of this second group comes in contact with the goat child, the full effect of the name hits them, though, in this case, they become convinced that something salacious and terrible is happening. The hybrid appearance of the goat child and lack of a widespread education to tell people that biology doesn't work that way tends to get people's minds working in certain directions.
From there, things can get ugly.
1. A goat child begins contacting people, dividing them into the shameful and the suspicious. Arguments begin over unspoken crimes.
2. The goat child enters the settlement itself, appearing to anyone who has heard its name and causing minor things to go wrong (milk sours, things break, the usual).
3. Arguments begin escalating into physical altercations, local officials put some sort of posse or inquest together.
4. The posse chooses someone from the ranks of the guilty and delivers it to the harshest form of capital punishment available to the community (inventing something on the spot, if there's no tradition of capital punishment in the community). At this point, the suspicious all convert to the guilty. Anyone who is able to do so usually leaves the community.
It takes months for the effects of the goat child's meddling to wear off. Anyone who has been infected with a goat child's name is unable to refer to the child directly, even under strong compulsion.
Investigating what's going on in a community affected by a goat child is made all the more difficult by the fact that no one talks about the goat child directly. People will say its name and assume you know who to whom they are referring. Also, there's the matter of the mind altering quality of its name.
Goats Go to Hell
When you are investigating the actions of a goat child, face Ignorance
On a Hit, you find a useful clue as to what is going on and where you might be able to find the goat child. Gain 1 hit forward on any further moves to investigate the Goat Child.
On a Hard Hit, you are able to confront the goat child in a place where it is not immediately able (for no apparent reason) to flee. You can face the goat child as you see fit.
On a Miss, your investigations stir up more trouble. Advance the Front.
Murderers, you're murderers. We are not the same as you.
Goat children are not very good combatants when cornered, and, once slain, all power goes out of their name (which, incidentally, degrades from the mind itself, becoming an only partially remembered smear of sound). Player's characters aren't exactly immune to the power of the name, but there's no compulsion on them to act like everyone else around. If they learn the name of the goat child before they meet it, play on the notion that something is wrong and that some people about seem to be hiding things. If they meet the goat child first, play up the suspicions of the people around, how everyone is unfriendly and nosy and thinks they're up to no good.
The remains of a goat child degrade pretty quickly after death.
The Beast Fears Fire - Trowir
Just as a fair warning, this entry contains pyschic assault by spirits who enter the bodies of their hosts. It reads moderately rapey to me, and while I try to fix the wording to turn that bit down (it is not something I want in this project), I'll throw a cut on that part.
Trow [Hardship 2+]
Impulse - To Die with You.
It's not difficult to pervert a custodial spirit of nature, you simply need to poke at it long enough and in the right way. Trowir are, however, the result of the only large-scale and systematic attempt to do this, dating back to the last generation of the Ash people. There's a facile and popular interpretation of history that paints the Ash people as having a legacy of only monsters; that they were an especially wicked people, possibly even deserving of extinction. It's wrong in both the sense of being incorrect and immoral, but the existence of trowir make it tempting.
Trowir used to be elves, and when they manifest, they resemble elves, at least in the sense that you are not going to mistake them for anything that isn't an elf. You also will not mistake a trow for an elf - they are clearly gone all wrong. Trowir are about half a meter tall, when they manifest, freely levitating, proportioned similar to oversized, sexless human infants (unlike elves, they are not proportioned toward the shoulders or hips depending on the gender they have chosen to express). Their skin is ashen, ranging from black through gray to white, with a distinct "front" and "back" skin tone. Their hair is lank and patchy, ears long and ragged, and the creepy-cute aspect of them is degraded to fully creepy.
Trowir were created as terror weapons. Most of the time they drift, unmanifest, in a fugue state, grouping together unconsciously, and moving toward human habitation. When they reach a critical mass of trowir and humans, they activate. Trowir want to die. Unfortunately for them, the only two ways to manage death for a custodial spirit are being deliberately destroyed by a practitioner of magic and inhabiting a host when he or she dies. I suppose you can guess which one the process that made them usually prohibits them from seeking out. Elves are custodial spirits of human nature, so people are their only viable hosts.
Trowir cannot control the actions of their hosts, so they remain inhabiting them in hopes that the trauma of their presence will drive the host to a psychotic break and death through accident, suicide or external violence.
In Modes and Fits and Verbs
When inhabited by a Trow, face Hardship
On a Hit, suffer Harm as stated, but you may act to eject or destroy the trow as normal.
On a Hard Hit, you eject the trow and force it back into its unmanifest fugue state.
On a Miss, suffer Harm as stated, and the Moderator gets a Hard Move to describe what you did while driven out of your mind by the trow.
I influence so easily, so influence me please.
Some trowir are stronger than others, and may have a higher Threshold, depending. There are wards and charms to prevent a trow from inhabiting a person, though these are not terribly common knowledge. Hosting an elf prevents a trow from entering as well (hosting a trow prevents a different trow from entering, but whoop-dee-do), and any human who plans on going up against trowir is going to have very little difficulty convincing any elf to help.
No one knows how many trow there are. Elves say that there were enough of them made to have affected their population some, elves don't know how many elves there are or what proportion of the population would have had to have been changed. Every elf from that time and before does know someone who was turned into a trow. And there are new ones still being created, though not a consistent rate or in high volumes. Barghests love getting their hands on the formula, and there are other villainous, self-willed and magic capable creatures out there who do as well, but they don't account for all the trow creation.
It is possible, however difficult and dangerous, to heal a trow and make them into an elf. This requires someone willing to host a trow for extended periods of time. It's generally considered not worth the risk; elves are usually horrified that someone would even try.
It's probably worth noting that exposure to a trow psyche leaves a fair amount of psychological damage. There's no mechanics for this; it's entirely up to an individual player whether they want to explore this aspect of their character or not, but it would not be unreasonable for a player to change one or more of their character's Traits in response to the attack.
Trow [Hardship 2+]
Impulse - To Die with You.
It's not difficult to pervert a custodial spirit of nature, you simply need to poke at it long enough and in the right way. Trowir are, however, the result of the only large-scale and systematic attempt to do this, dating back to the last generation of the Ash people. There's a facile and popular interpretation of history that paints the Ash people as having a legacy of only monsters; that they were an especially wicked people, possibly even deserving of extinction. It's wrong in both the sense of being incorrect and immoral, but the existence of trowir make it tempting.
Trowir used to be elves, and when they manifest, they resemble elves, at least in the sense that you are not going to mistake them for anything that isn't an elf. You also will not mistake a trow for an elf - they are clearly gone all wrong. Trowir are about half a meter tall, when they manifest, freely levitating, proportioned similar to oversized, sexless human infants (unlike elves, they are not proportioned toward the shoulders or hips depending on the gender they have chosen to express). Their skin is ashen, ranging from black through gray to white, with a distinct "front" and "back" skin tone. Their hair is lank and patchy, ears long and ragged, and the creepy-cute aspect of them is degraded to fully creepy.
Trowir were created as terror weapons. Most of the time they drift, unmanifest, in a fugue state, grouping together unconsciously, and moving toward human habitation. When they reach a critical mass of trowir and humans, they activate. Trowir want to die. Unfortunately for them, the only two ways to manage death for a custodial spirit are being deliberately destroyed by a practitioner of magic and inhabiting a host when he or she dies. I suppose you can guess which one the process that made them usually prohibits them from seeking out. Elves are custodial spirits of human nature, so people are their only viable hosts.
Trowir cannot control the actions of their hosts, so they remain inhabiting them in hopes that the trauma of their presence will drive the host to a psychotic break and death through accident, suicide or external violence.
In Modes and Fits and Verbs
When inhabited by a Trow, face Hardship
On a Hit, suffer Harm as stated, but you may act to eject or destroy the trow as normal.
On a Hard Hit, you eject the trow and force it back into its unmanifest fugue state.
On a Miss, suffer Harm as stated, and the Moderator gets a Hard Move to describe what you did while driven out of your mind by the trow.
I influence so easily, so influence me please.
Some trowir are stronger than others, and may have a higher Threshold, depending. There are wards and charms to prevent a trow from inhabiting a person, though these are not terribly common knowledge. Hosting an elf prevents a trow from entering as well (hosting a trow prevents a different trow from entering, but whoop-dee-do), and any human who plans on going up against trowir is going to have very little difficulty convincing any elf to help.
No one knows how many trow there are. Elves say that there were enough of them made to have affected their population some, elves don't know how many elves there are or what proportion of the population would have had to have been changed. Every elf from that time and before does know someone who was turned into a trow. And there are new ones still being created, though not a consistent rate or in high volumes. Barghests love getting their hands on the formula, and there are other villainous, self-willed and magic capable creatures out there who do as well, but they don't account for all the trow creation.
It is possible, however difficult and dangerous, to heal a trow and make them into an elf. This requires someone willing to host a trow for extended periods of time. It's generally considered not worth the risk; elves are usually horrified that someone would even try.
It's probably worth noting that exposure to a trow psyche leaves a fair amount of psychological damage. There's no mechanics for this; it's entirely up to an individual player whether they want to explore this aspect of their character or not, but it would not be unreasonable for a player to change one or more of their character's Traits in response to the attack.
December 29, 2012
The Beast Fears Fire - Pudding Cloud
Pudding Cloud [Disaster 4]
Impulse - Ruin your picnic plans.
As far as anyone in Crickton knows, there is only one of these things that ever comes around, floating in the uplands of the northwest at an altitude of 1000-2000 meters; there might be others on the Surlycrow, perhaps even others that come down from the plateau, taking turns. It's difficult to tell.
The Pudding Cloud isn't easy to mistake for anything else. It's a little cloud, about the same shade of black as a traditional Crick blood pudding (and similar shape, being kind of round and regular as clouds go), moving against the wind, sparking orangy-red lightning in all conditions. Sometimes, it will take on the shape of a thinner, diffuse cloud with the unmistakable cloudy shape of a man's head, arms and torso - rippling muscles and wispy hair and beard - coming out the top. This is the form "he" usually takes for throwing lighting around, but lighting and rain are dangers in any form.
Harm - 2/Peril [Chill] The Pudding Cloud presents a serious difficulty for most people who want to fight it. Thing is just too far away, and can't really change altitude if he wanted to, which is alright, since he usually doesn't. Mostly, he wants to get over you and rain. Pudding rain is black and gritty, and when it comes in contact with skin, it is incredibly cold. Also, it causes blood to evaporate out of your skin and rise back into the cloud. Takes about 2 minutes of full contact to incapacitate a person and about 6 to totally exsanguinate someone. Naturally, this is exactly what the Pudding Cloud wants.
Get your Gun and Bring the Cat in
When the Pudding Cloud is trying to rain on you, face Disaster
On a Hit, you stay out of the rain, but the Moderator gets a Soft Move to tell you where you ended up in order to stay dry.
On a Hard Hit, you get to say where you go an how you stay out of the rain.
On a Miss, take Harm as stated, and, as a Soft Move, the Moderator can make you face this again or hit you with lighting and up the Harm to 5. Not both.
If a wind witch, a corbin, or someone else with the means to fly or reach an altitude where they can fight the thing, the Pudding cloud will shoot lightning at them.
Ride the Lightning
When you are facing the Pudding Cloud in air-to-air combat, face Disaster.
On a Hit, you can avoid the lightning and deal Harm as stated.
On a Hard Hit, you can avoid the lightning and deal great harm, most likely driving the Pudding Cloud off.
On a Miss, suffer 5 Harm and the Peril Falling. Recovering from this Peril is probably your first priority.
This place is so quiet, sensing that storm.
Someone in Crickton has the formula for becoming a pudding cloud, and yet, for all of Crick history, there's just been the one. It's not a difficult ritual to accomplish, though it does require you be a wind witch, and it does kill you in the process, your body torn apart by the black wind and vaporized by lightning. The Pudding Cloud is technically also an evil spirit, most similar to a vampire and a lich, but he, it, retains a lot less of whatever will and volition drove it in the first place. Now, the thing is content to trace a centuries-old circuit, raining out of hunger on anything that passes below.
People who are killed by the Pudding cloud occasionally raise up as vampires, but this is a lot less common than people victimized by vampires, and it could be a false correlation. A lot more people have been victimized by a vampire than killed by the Cloud.
Impulse - Ruin your picnic plans.
As far as anyone in Crickton knows, there is only one of these things that ever comes around, floating in the uplands of the northwest at an altitude of 1000-2000 meters; there might be others on the Surlycrow, perhaps even others that come down from the plateau, taking turns. It's difficult to tell.
The Pudding Cloud isn't easy to mistake for anything else. It's a little cloud, about the same shade of black as a traditional Crick blood pudding (and similar shape, being kind of round and regular as clouds go), moving against the wind, sparking orangy-red lightning in all conditions. Sometimes, it will take on the shape of a thinner, diffuse cloud with the unmistakable cloudy shape of a man's head, arms and torso - rippling muscles and wispy hair and beard - coming out the top. This is the form "he" usually takes for throwing lighting around, but lighting and rain are dangers in any form.
Harm - 2/Peril [Chill] The Pudding Cloud presents a serious difficulty for most people who want to fight it. Thing is just too far away, and can't really change altitude if he wanted to, which is alright, since he usually doesn't. Mostly, he wants to get over you and rain. Pudding rain is black and gritty, and when it comes in contact with skin, it is incredibly cold. Also, it causes blood to evaporate out of your skin and rise back into the cloud. Takes about 2 minutes of full contact to incapacitate a person and about 6 to totally exsanguinate someone. Naturally, this is exactly what the Pudding Cloud wants.
Get your Gun and Bring the Cat in
When the Pudding Cloud is trying to rain on you, face Disaster
On a Hit, you stay out of the rain, but the Moderator gets a Soft Move to tell you where you ended up in order to stay dry.
On a Hard Hit, you get to say where you go an how you stay out of the rain.
On a Miss, take Harm as stated, and, as a Soft Move, the Moderator can make you face this again or hit you with lighting and up the Harm to 5. Not both.
If a wind witch, a corbin, or someone else with the means to fly or reach an altitude where they can fight the thing, the Pudding cloud will shoot lightning at them.
Ride the Lightning
When you are facing the Pudding Cloud in air-to-air combat, face Disaster.
On a Hit, you can avoid the lightning and deal Harm as stated.
On a Hard Hit, you can avoid the lightning and deal great harm, most likely driving the Pudding Cloud off.
On a Miss, suffer 5 Harm and the Peril Falling. Recovering from this Peril is probably your first priority.
This place is so quiet, sensing that storm.
Someone in Crickton has the formula for becoming a pudding cloud, and yet, for all of Crick history, there's just been the one. It's not a difficult ritual to accomplish, though it does require you be a wind witch, and it does kill you in the process, your body torn apart by the black wind and vaporized by lightning. The Pudding Cloud is technically also an evil spirit, most similar to a vampire and a lich, but he, it, retains a lot less of whatever will and volition drove it in the first place. Now, the thing is content to trace a centuries-old circuit, raining out of hunger on anything that passes below.
People who are killed by the Pudding cloud occasionally raise up as vampires, but this is a lot less common than people victimized by vampires, and it could be a false correlation. A lot more people have been victimized by a vampire than killed by the Cloud.
The Beast Fears Fire - Unexploded Munitions
History has a window; on one side, things too recent and unfinished to really get a narrative put on them, and on the other, a long, long stretch of past which lost records and context make damned dim and murky. The Ash people and their culture are just far enough in the past of that window that no one debates that we can really try to understand what was going on with them.
They lived to the west and north of Crickton, in or beyond the Surlycrow; they were wiped out by another people who lived in or north of the plateau, their bloodlines live on in some of the more fair-skinned of Cricks and Savels, maybe, and they made monsters. There's more details to the history left over than that, but nothing sufficient to resolve a picture of their politics, culture, daily life... They made monsters. Because they were dying. Now they are gone, the ones who wiped them out are gone, but the monsters are still around. Because the monsters are always still around.
The weapons of the Ash stick to highlands and mountainsides. We assume it's because both the Ash and their conquerers lived in the mountains. Some remain from those days, but even the most sociable of the Ash weapons have very narrow, focused minds. They were meant to harm only those who harmed them, but the bloodlines of their enemies, well, they were conquerers and traders and slave-takers, and you have to travel a long way to find someone who lacks some hint of the blood that makes Cricks, Savels and Murrens targets for these creatures.
There remain the means of making more of each variety of the Ash weapons. The formulae aren't terribly mysterious or tricky. A couple are dead easy and survive in numbers as curiosities, cautionary tales, and, occasionally, something someone uses. None of them are a good idea. They were the last gasp of a dying people that long outlived their enemies and their memory.
They lived to the west and north of Crickton, in or beyond the Surlycrow; they were wiped out by another people who lived in or north of the plateau, their bloodlines live on in some of the more fair-skinned of Cricks and Savels, maybe, and they made monsters. There's more details to the history left over than that, but nothing sufficient to resolve a picture of their politics, culture, daily life... They made monsters. Because they were dying. Now they are gone, the ones who wiped them out are gone, but the monsters are still around. Because the monsters are always still around.
The weapons of the Ash stick to highlands and mountainsides. We assume it's because both the Ash and their conquerers lived in the mountains. Some remain from those days, but even the most sociable of the Ash weapons have very narrow, focused minds. They were meant to harm only those who harmed them, but the bloodlines of their enemies, well, they were conquerers and traders and slave-takers, and you have to travel a long way to find someone who lacks some hint of the blood that makes Cricks, Savels and Murrens targets for these creatures.
There remain the means of making more of each variety of the Ash weapons. The formulae aren't terribly mysterious or tricky. A couple are dead easy and survive in numbers as curiosities, cautionary tales, and, occasionally, something someone uses. None of them are a good idea. They were the last gasp of a dying people that long outlived their enemies and their memory.
December 28, 2012
cucumberseed @ 2012-12-28T14:05:00
View Poll: The Beast Fears Your Vote
Actually, you can feel free to post suggestions, even if you choose something else or nothing at all.
Actually, you can feel free to post suggestions, even if you choose something else or nothing at all.
The Beast Fears Fire - Harpies
Harpies [Want 4]
Impulse - Ruin Everything.
Religious scholars and philosophers try to categorize the cruelties and match them to particular sins, and no small amount of sweat and ink gets spilled trying to tell the things that give rise to the werewolf from the things responsible for giants and auroxen. No one has ever had to think too hard about harpies. Harpies come from spite, pure and simple. Shock is really hard to come by among those who knew the people who became harpies. Kind words, on the other hand, are awfully scarce. Pettiness is another key ingredient in making a harpy; those who are grandly cruel get recruited to crueltyhood as ogres, and there's usually at least a couple people who speak of their deeds with a sort of disgusted wonder or awe. Not so much with harpies. Fuck those guys.
When a person becomes a harpy, it seems that every nasty impulse fragments as it grows; a harpy is a composite creature, sometimes inaccurately referred to as a flock of individuals. Each aspect of the harpy's spite and pettiness becomes its own semi-autonomous body, something like a bird on the lower half and a person on the upper, but the proportions tend to shift, and like most cruelties, be indistinct and hard to perceive or remember. Their facial features differ, being a mutable combination of the person who gave rise to the harpy and a person who was either the target of that person's cruelty or a perceived cause of that person's grievances. Since these people become prime targets for a harpy's initial monstrosities, they get the double whammy, so to speak of getting tormented by a harpy and seeing the harpy as a series of awful caricatures of themselves and those around them.
Harm - 2/Moderator Hard Move [Take Their Stuff]
A Harpy can split its cruelty up and reform as it goes, gathering into one great entity with up to 10 meter wings or splitting into many around the size of a respectable vulture. In either case, it comes shrieking and cursing, grasping and scratching at anything it can get to and shitting on the rest. Generally, a harpy's main interest is not injuring its targets (or anyone who gets between it and its targets) so much as simply destroying or taking anything and everything the person has. When a harpy kills, it does so with starvation or thirst. A Harpy is incredibly fast, strong, and redistributes its life force among its bodies as one is destroyed, so it thinks nothing of using its bodies as a battering ram to get inside structures.
Remember When you Ruined Everything
When you are trying to make, get or use anything when there is a harpy around, face Want
On a Hit, choose 1 - You make or use the thing in question, you keep the harpy around long enough to face it, you do not lose something else you have in a Moderator Hard Move.
On a Hard Hit, choose 2.
On a Miss, the Harpy comes, wrecks your shit and leaves before you have a chance to redress the attack. Suffer Harm as Stated, whatever you were attempting also fails.
The Ruiner, he's a collector, he's and infector, spreading his shit to the flies
We don't like to throw around the term "no redeeming value" here too often, but it sort of fits here. Of some special note is harpy waste, which a harpy is able to make in vast quantities, all the time. The waste is caustic enough to eventually destroy most materials, if left to sit, and cause mild chemical burns. It's also a highly toxic skin irritant, on par with plants in the Dendrocnide genera, capable of casing painful rashes and feverish flare ups for months after exposure. It is possible to contain the waste indefinitely in glass and some types of ceramic, but, outside of scholarly study-specimens, collecting the stuff is really impractical and dangerous. Left alone, it tends to degrade quickly under full sunlight.
Some folks have gathered harpy waste to use against enemies, but it's worth noting that a lot of those people very quickly run out of supply problems when it comes to harpy shit in short order.
Impulse - Ruin Everything.
Religious scholars and philosophers try to categorize the cruelties and match them to particular sins, and no small amount of sweat and ink gets spilled trying to tell the things that give rise to the werewolf from the things responsible for giants and auroxen. No one has ever had to think too hard about harpies. Harpies come from spite, pure and simple. Shock is really hard to come by among those who knew the people who became harpies. Kind words, on the other hand, are awfully scarce. Pettiness is another key ingredient in making a harpy; those who are grandly cruel get recruited to crueltyhood as ogres, and there's usually at least a couple people who speak of their deeds with a sort of disgusted wonder or awe. Not so much with harpies. Fuck those guys.
When a person becomes a harpy, it seems that every nasty impulse fragments as it grows; a harpy is a composite creature, sometimes inaccurately referred to as a flock of individuals. Each aspect of the harpy's spite and pettiness becomes its own semi-autonomous body, something like a bird on the lower half and a person on the upper, but the proportions tend to shift, and like most cruelties, be indistinct and hard to perceive or remember. Their facial features differ, being a mutable combination of the person who gave rise to the harpy and a person who was either the target of that person's cruelty or a perceived cause of that person's grievances. Since these people become prime targets for a harpy's initial monstrosities, they get the double whammy, so to speak of getting tormented by a harpy and seeing the harpy as a series of awful caricatures of themselves and those around them.
Harm - 2/Moderator Hard Move [Take Their Stuff]
A Harpy can split its cruelty up and reform as it goes, gathering into one great entity with up to 10 meter wings or splitting into many around the size of a respectable vulture. In either case, it comes shrieking and cursing, grasping and scratching at anything it can get to and shitting on the rest. Generally, a harpy's main interest is not injuring its targets (or anyone who gets between it and its targets) so much as simply destroying or taking anything and everything the person has. When a harpy kills, it does so with starvation or thirst. A Harpy is incredibly fast, strong, and redistributes its life force among its bodies as one is destroyed, so it thinks nothing of using its bodies as a battering ram to get inside structures.
Remember When you Ruined Everything
When you are trying to make, get or use anything when there is a harpy around, face Want
On a Hit, choose 1 - You make or use the thing in question, you keep the harpy around long enough to face it, you do not lose something else you have in a Moderator Hard Move.
On a Hard Hit, choose 2.
On a Miss, the Harpy comes, wrecks your shit and leaves before you have a chance to redress the attack. Suffer Harm as Stated, whatever you were attempting also fails.
The Ruiner, he's a collector, he's and infector, spreading his shit to the flies
We don't like to throw around the term "no redeeming value" here too often, but it sort of fits here. Of some special note is harpy waste, which a harpy is able to make in vast quantities, all the time. The waste is caustic enough to eventually destroy most materials, if left to sit, and cause mild chemical burns. It's also a highly toxic skin irritant, on par with plants in the Dendrocnide genera, capable of casing painful rashes and feverish flare ups for months after exposure. It is possible to contain the waste indefinitely in glass and some types of ceramic, but, outside of scholarly study-specimens, collecting the stuff is really impractical and dangerous. Left alone, it tends to degrade quickly under full sunlight.
Some folks have gathered harpy waste to use against enemies, but it's worth noting that a lot of those people very quickly run out of supply problems when it comes to harpy shit in short order.
December 27, 2012
The Beast Fears Fire - Aurox
Aurox [Violence 3/6]
Impulse - To destroy everything that made it. Auroxen are different than the other cruelties; each other cruelty is, at its base, a tragedy of one person falling prey to their darker impulses and to magic which gives those impulses great consequence. An aurox is a tragedy that belongs to a community and spans generations. The person who might have planted the seeds of an aurox will be long gone by the time it emerges. An aurox is the locus of rage that is entrenched and enduring. The communities that give rise to auroxen are usually remote, usually poor or constantly on the verge of collapse, almost always marginalized or oppressed. It takes several generations for one to emerge, but once it comes, it will destroy everything between where it was born and the place where it believes its oppressors can be found. Nothing survives in either the beginning or end point of its rampage, nor anything along its path.
Like other cruelties, auroxen are hard to look at directly, hard to perceive, hard to remember. Most accounts describe them similar to colossal horned pigs with burning eyes, covered in black fur, but this does no justice to the presence of the beast, which is a construct of pure aggression.
Harm - 4/6. Auroxen are terrible to begin with, and once born, they will methodically destroy the community from which it came before heading out to face the ones it blames for being born. Until it is finished with its birthplace, though, an aurox can be stopped. Once its birthplace is gone, there is almost no way to defeat the creature. Auroxen are Threshold 3 while one building and one person from their home yet stands, then becomes Threshold 6 afterwards. In both cases, they are immune to magic of any kind, and if they are faced, it must be physically.
Strong Animal
When you face an aurox, face Violence.
On a Hit, you can stay the beast for a little while, staring it down, giving others a chance to flee or prepare to defend themselves. If you are from the community that gave birth to the aurox, you defeat the beast and it dissipates.
On a Hard Hit, you face down the beast. You can choose to defeat it, and in so doing, you become a member of the community that gave birth to it. You are now obligated to help your home and face whatever conditions brought the aurox into being. If you die before this happens, the aurox will return. If you are from the community, you simply defeat the beast.
On a Miss, the aurox rampages, destroying all in its path. Suffer Harm as stated (4 in its community, 6 once the community is destroyed). If you fail while it's in its community, you can attempt to face down the aurox again.
And you perish in the waves
Auroxen do show up in the iconography for gods whose concerns include rulership and justice, and I suppose to the powerful, they do sort of serve a purpose as warning. That said, it's a three way split how that warning finds the warned, at best. Some heed the warning and try to see justice done, but they are rare enough to be famous in death as they were reviled in life. More often the warning is ignored or used as a pretext to displace, scatter or exterminate those already marginalized. An aurox is rarely of any use as an avenger, either, since a person from the community that gives it birth must be the catalyst for it, and whoever or whatever external to the community has caused that person the most pain becomes the aurox's target.
It's said that if you carve an aurox horn into a blade, it causes wounds equal to a person in proportion to the amount they have benefitted from the misery of others. Since auroxen usually dissipate into nothing when defeated, there aren't any specimens of such a blade in Crickton.
Impulse - To destroy everything that made it. Auroxen are different than the other cruelties; each other cruelty is, at its base, a tragedy of one person falling prey to their darker impulses and to magic which gives those impulses great consequence. An aurox is a tragedy that belongs to a community and spans generations. The person who might have planted the seeds of an aurox will be long gone by the time it emerges. An aurox is the locus of rage that is entrenched and enduring. The communities that give rise to auroxen are usually remote, usually poor or constantly on the verge of collapse, almost always marginalized or oppressed. It takes several generations for one to emerge, but once it comes, it will destroy everything between where it was born and the place where it believes its oppressors can be found. Nothing survives in either the beginning or end point of its rampage, nor anything along its path.
Like other cruelties, auroxen are hard to look at directly, hard to perceive, hard to remember. Most accounts describe them similar to colossal horned pigs with burning eyes, covered in black fur, but this does no justice to the presence of the beast, which is a construct of pure aggression.
Harm - 4/6. Auroxen are terrible to begin with, and once born, they will methodically destroy the community from which it came before heading out to face the ones it blames for being born. Until it is finished with its birthplace, though, an aurox can be stopped. Once its birthplace is gone, there is almost no way to defeat the creature. Auroxen are Threshold 3 while one building and one person from their home yet stands, then becomes Threshold 6 afterwards. In both cases, they are immune to magic of any kind, and if they are faced, it must be physically.
Strong Animal
When you face an aurox, face Violence.
On a Hit, you can stay the beast for a little while, staring it down, giving others a chance to flee or prepare to defend themselves. If you are from the community that gave birth to the aurox, you defeat the beast and it dissipates.
On a Hard Hit, you face down the beast. You can choose to defeat it, and in so doing, you become a member of the community that gave birth to it. You are now obligated to help your home and face whatever conditions brought the aurox into being. If you die before this happens, the aurox will return. If you are from the community, you simply defeat the beast.
On a Miss, the aurox rampages, destroying all in its path. Suffer Harm as stated (4 in its community, 6 once the community is destroyed). If you fail while it's in its community, you can attempt to face down the aurox again.
And you perish in the waves
Auroxen do show up in the iconography for gods whose concerns include rulership and justice, and I suppose to the powerful, they do sort of serve a purpose as warning. That said, it's a three way split how that warning finds the warned, at best. Some heed the warning and try to see justice done, but they are rare enough to be famous in death as they were reviled in life. More often the warning is ignored or used as a pretext to displace, scatter or exterminate those already marginalized. An aurox is rarely of any use as an avenger, either, since a person from the community that gives it birth must be the catalyst for it, and whoever or whatever external to the community has caused that person the most pain becomes the aurox's target.
It's said that if you carve an aurox horn into a blade, it causes wounds equal to a person in proportion to the amount they have benefitted from the misery of others. Since auroxen usually dissipate into nothing when defeated, there aren't any specimens of such a blade in Crickton.
December 25, 2012
The Beast Fears Fire - Hell-Brand
Hell-Brand [Malevolence 5]
Impulse - To spread infection. There are a lot of cultures in the world and a lot of hierarchies of transgression and evil, but one of the constants between all the cultures that make up Crickton, and, really, the world, is that treachery is right at the top of those hierarchies, the worst of the worst. It may not be the most punishable, but it is the least justifiable offense, and in a world of magic, the penalty for dramatic or habitual treachery is fairly poetic. Part of your body rots to the bone. This part remains intact and functional, smelling of carrion and drawing flies. Wherever you go, the smell and the negative energy you draw off everything, curses, fragments of ghosts, the attacks that witches and priests inevitably throw at you, those follow you.
Hell-Brands are the least psychologically changed of the cruelties. Their natures and memories tend to survive the transformation, though their better qualities tend to dwindle and die, leaving their worse to run without check. Hell-Brand begin their existence as such looking for revenge for the circumstances that led them to their new status, however justified that may actually be (usually not very, otherwise it would be the hell-brand's tormentors without flesh on some of their bones). Once they manage that or time brings an end to their enemies, they move on to getting revenge on the world. In either case, their behavior is pretty similar.
Harm - 3/Peril - Cursed Hell-brands are drawn to sources of negative psychic energy - hauntings,residual curses, kuons, other magical monsters. Their natures protect them from the worst effects of magic and spiritual or psychic attack, and, furthermore, draws some of the energy into the swirling storm of malevolence that surrounds them. Coming into contact with a Hell-brand is intensely damaging to the psyche, and there is a strong likelihood of picking up one or more of the curses that swirls around them.
Mr. Self-Destruct
When you come into contact with a Hell-brand, face Malevolence.
On a Hit, you force your way through the psychic maelstrom around them and can attack them, but the Moderator can force you to remake this Move as a Soft Move if circumstances change.
On a Hard Hit, the Hell Brand suffers 3 Harm in addition to Harm stated as the psychic maelstrom feeds back on itself.
On a Miss, suffer Harm as stated. The Moderator can choose to make the Curse into a move that you have to make in order to do or avoid a certain action or fate.
Unholy and dirty words I gather to me.
The curses that flail about the Hell-brand tend to transform, over time, into reflections of the Hell-brand's worldview, creating something of a narrative in and of themselves. Common curses that follow a Hell-brand are the attentions of a creature that the Hell-brand has encountered before (e.g. being in transgression of a Specter) or a conditional curse. If the Hell-brand is present, the Threshold on working against these curses is 5. It drops to 3 if the Hell-brand is not around and 2 once the Hell-brand is destroyed.
Step on a Crack, Break your Mother's Back
When you are the subject of a conditional curse and attempt to do (or not do as the case may be) the action specified, face Malevolence
On a Hit, you can do or not do the the thing as you will, but the Moderator gets a Soft Move.
On a Hard Hit, you can do or not do the thing as you will, and in the act (or refraining from the act), break the curse upon you.
On a Miss, the Moderator gets a Hard Move, related to the curse.
Hell-Brands don't tend to bother monsters much; even ones whose whole existence is one big attack-on-sight-fest tend to give the wretches free passes. For their part, the Hell-brands aren't concerned with monsters at all, choosing (or compelled) to focus their hate on humans.
The marrow and joints of a Hell-brand's exposed bones are a treasure trove of eldracite, astracite and maelcryst. Also, residual curses, so beware.
Impulse - To spread infection. There are a lot of cultures in the world and a lot of hierarchies of transgression and evil, but one of the constants between all the cultures that make up Crickton, and, really, the world, is that treachery is right at the top of those hierarchies, the worst of the worst. It may not be the most punishable, but it is the least justifiable offense, and in a world of magic, the penalty for dramatic or habitual treachery is fairly poetic. Part of your body rots to the bone. This part remains intact and functional, smelling of carrion and drawing flies. Wherever you go, the smell and the negative energy you draw off everything, curses, fragments of ghosts, the attacks that witches and priests inevitably throw at you, those follow you.
Hell-Brands are the least psychologically changed of the cruelties. Their natures and memories tend to survive the transformation, though their better qualities tend to dwindle and die, leaving their worse to run without check. Hell-Brand begin their existence as such looking for revenge for the circumstances that led them to their new status, however justified that may actually be (usually not very, otherwise it would be the hell-brand's tormentors without flesh on some of their bones). Once they manage that or time brings an end to their enemies, they move on to getting revenge on the world. In either case, their behavior is pretty similar.
Harm - 3/Peril - Cursed Hell-brands are drawn to sources of negative psychic energy - hauntings,residual curses, kuons, other magical monsters. Their natures protect them from the worst effects of magic and spiritual or psychic attack, and, furthermore, draws some of the energy into the swirling storm of malevolence that surrounds them. Coming into contact with a Hell-brand is intensely damaging to the psyche, and there is a strong likelihood of picking up one or more of the curses that swirls around them.
Mr. Self-Destruct
When you come into contact with a Hell-brand, face Malevolence.
On a Hit, you force your way through the psychic maelstrom around them and can attack them, but the Moderator can force you to remake this Move as a Soft Move if circumstances change.
On a Hard Hit, the Hell Brand suffers 3 Harm in addition to Harm stated as the psychic maelstrom feeds back on itself.
On a Miss, suffer Harm as stated. The Moderator can choose to make the Curse into a move that you have to make in order to do or avoid a certain action or fate.
Unholy and dirty words I gather to me.
The curses that flail about the Hell-brand tend to transform, over time, into reflections of the Hell-brand's worldview, creating something of a narrative in and of themselves. Common curses that follow a Hell-brand are the attentions of a creature that the Hell-brand has encountered before (e.g. being in transgression of a Specter) or a conditional curse. If the Hell-brand is present, the Threshold on working against these curses is 5. It drops to 3 if the Hell-brand is not around and 2 once the Hell-brand is destroyed.
Step on a Crack, Break your Mother's Back
When you are the subject of a conditional curse and attempt to do (or not do as the case may be) the action specified, face Malevolence
On a Hit, you can do or not do the the thing as you will, but the Moderator gets a Soft Move.
On a Hard Hit, you can do or not do the thing as you will, and in the act (or refraining from the act), break the curse upon you.
On a Miss, the Moderator gets a Hard Move, related to the curse.
Hell-Brands don't tend to bother monsters much; even ones whose whole existence is one big attack-on-sight-fest tend to give the wretches free passes. For their part, the Hell-brands aren't concerned with monsters at all, choosing (or compelled) to focus their hate on humans.
The marrow and joints of a Hell-brand's exposed bones are a treasure trove of eldracite, astracite and maelcryst. Also, residual curses, so beware.
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