In the style of this and this.
There is in the world, magic. A force so mighty and potent it bears down on light and heat and the great sepulchral gloaming, pushing it back, piercing it and fracturing into the myriad colors of birds and sunsets, of bees and battlegrounds. It is kismet. Called satori. An epiphany. The moment when the dreary fog of your day to day is lifted to see something monumental. It is why the sun rises and sets and more importantly why you are compelled to look when it does. The tides and wind and storms and all the things that glimmer so enchanting that cry out for you to behold them, that is where this power goes. In love at first sight, in lightning strikes, in well placed curves and lipstick. Power they call it, like calling the splitting of the atom power. A great assortment of bastards have truck with it. Fools, a whole foolish lot of fools, who call themselves wise strangle it. Fighters claim they ignore it, like oily water off their foul backs and yet their Violence is the Arts, poetry written in blood.
It is spectacular because it is spectacle.
It is fantastic because it is fantasy.
It is magical for it is magic.
The Fool
A pied shirt and belled-hat for these types who instead swaddle themselves in robes and other such accoutrements d'inutile. They call themselves the Wise and seek a storied sunset with a closed eye; the heart is the optic nerve by which the fantastic can be seen which they do not use. Instead, their third eye, corrupting for it is the mind's eye, is how they seek magic and thereby how it is twisted. The poet seeks magic and writes in a flophouse sweat, hands greasy and malcontent from the snapping jaws of his typewriter. The fool ignores such perceived drivel for tomes of vile use and abuse. If they could peel back their flesh and sweating hold their ribs apart, under desperate panting they'd hear their own heart would cry out breathlessly -youdonotgetit-
Starting Equipment. Ugly musty robes, once clean, you have pilfered for the look of it. A heavy bandage worn across the chest. It muffles incessant ticking in the chest -youdonotge- and a great tome, heavy with oily Power.
Templates
A) A Great Bastard, A Spell or Two, Power +1
B) Third Eye, Power +1
C) Subservient is the World, Power +1
D) Transmogrification, Apprentice, Power +1
A Great Bastard
The world was unkind to you and its dark reflection shines in your black eyes. You may employ the following kens with ease: dirty tricks, backstabs, lies, stealth and begging. When you are Desperate, roll checks twice and like a great hooting ape take the lower value. You may always sacrifice that which keeps you sane, pacified or medicated to instead simply succeed.
A Spell or Two
You've done it you mean and miserly Pagliacci. For when wit was enough, you went without wit and grace, for charm stolen from the sunsets and the flowers and first loves. You chanted for enchantment freely given and bled for words already written. You poor wretch you have taken the constellations from the heavens and smashed them like a vase and ignored the scream in your chest -youdono- for magic. You command it though you are not its master, like a rider upon a loyal stolen horse. You now know magic, know these spells but you do not understand them. Your third eye flutters sensing the Power, intoxicated. You can cast them but it is a mockery. You know not a warm embrace, recall only the echoes of a friend's laughter and languidly, like a fell vulture, you push such recollections aside to rip and tear the spell from its home. You don't relish the cold greasy tendons straining against your hands but neither do you think it wrong. This is the world, taught by the mind's eye. Their names are foreign to you. Select one or two from below to start and another when you steal it, win it in a duel or sacrifice something for it.
Morning Embrace - set alight for d6 damage a target creature or flammable object you can see. The heat intensifies 1d6 for every combat round you keep your eyes on their burning form. It can be gained by sacrificing a friend. They never mattered.
At First Sight - d6 damage to target creature +6 if wielding or clad in metal. If the target has known mature love, it jumps to another. It can be gained by sacrificing a love. Too little, far far too late.
Lover's Guise - you assume the form of another whom you have seen or whose love you have seen. The guise is good by sight and sound, even to the gods but the touch and taste others will find repulsive. The gods are quick to punish oaths taken while as another.
Sight, Far and Deep - with hair or nail or blood you spy upon another in a still pool, once per pool for it is stained and brackish thereafter. Desecrate a corpse to have a question answered though it usually produces a ghost. Can be gained by stealing from the crypt of a mentor.
Enchant - a stranger becomes a sycophant. Costs 1 STR while ensorcelled. The more well known the target, the more it takes from you.
Guiding Hand - your mind's eye wears a glove and you can manipulate objects you can see with the dexterity of your own hand. Use INT for STR of the hand. It can choke, throttle and throw as you would expect. It costs only the renunciation of meaningful embraces.
Hide - shame is a powerful motivator. Predators like the orchid spider have none. Cloak yourself in it and be unseen, unheard or unfelt [1 dice per effect] for the duration. it can be found by sacrificing the very same and your ability to feel shame. A useful tool in pursuit of Power.
Power
Rather than use your [dice] to cast a spell, you may instead simply use it to force your will on the world. For any physical task you attempt you may use Power and attempt with a -10 to the roll. A foes task is hindered, +10. The will is brutish, unrefined and inelegant. It can empower magic and mortals but it twists spell and breaks bone. The Power cannot thread needle, tend wounds nor carry glass.
Third Eye
Manic now, the third eye opens, throbbing and bloodshot, darting, always open. It flows with tears, trying to find the source of a splinter that isn't there. If you concentrate, a painful thing, you can see a version of the world, one not meant for you. Some claim it's how the world really is, laid bare with cancerous growths and bone visible with skin shorn back. Others say it's just Heaven and Hell in a fractal dance around you, everywhere all at once all the time. Most just take another hit of what opened it in the first place and give in.
While you use it you see though illusions, not just magical ones but notional ones too, for mercy and justice are pale forms before the absolute of Death. You see the true forms of shapeshifters, though men hide their visages too and you can see through those as well. Things that are enchanted, cursed or radioactive are as apparent to you as the stained glass in a window and ground holy or unholy is hot to the touch of your shod irreverent feet. The gleeful macabre forms that possess men, demons, smile gleefully at you, astride their man vessels. They are Greed, Rape and violent mental illness.
Observing them costs your STR. The first time you use it, your STR is halved. The second time, it is set to 1. The third time, if used without potent painkillers or other crutches of vice, kills you. If you draw a second vice, you may use the sight with only -1 STR penalty per use per day but sacrificing it would kill you.
Subservient is the World
Wicked goblins and dancing devils cavort in the pale moonlight. Raucous they hunger for the treasures of men, hunger to bargain and be made free to cast their wickedness wherever they go. You seek them, summon them and bind them to your will eternal. Magic may not be an oxen you can yet yoke, but these apparitions may yet bend to your heel. You read the bloody passages of the book, pages cracked and sticking from viscera they once contained. Diagrams of suffering poured over, sacred geometry studied and eye watering coin spent to acquire the Satanic tools. Naked you howl at the moon lit by fire, covered in the blood of the trusting now burning on the pyre. The black goat bleats savagely, alerting the arrival of the shades who lap the blood and wine, libations one and the same. From the woods will pour the goblins and wicked folk, banshees and redcaps. You will dance and dine with them and about you will swirl Power like so much bloody rain. This is the Summoning Dance, a mockery of the word and the magic.
You may use an instance of your Power to bind, torture or banish a shade or devil, hag or goblin. If bound, they are your unwilling attendant. It will hate you, plan your downfall, curse your progeny and most of all obey. Strike them and strike them often lest they leave razors in your bread or pox blankets in your chambers to acquire the blood they need for their freedom. Always your mind's eye will be upon them, burning them, and they will sit on your chest while you sleep in hopes you suffocate.
Transmogrification
This flesh, yes, this very flesh, I should have known -youdon- SHUT UP. SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP. Its all mercurial, the eye they eye was the hint I should have seen instead of watching yes yes. Too late. Too late for that. I must see, see with my mind's eye. The flesh is quicksilver. Magic is the flesh, its in the flesh!
You misunderstand. So close, so close and like always you cannot see. Blood, blood is all you know. You fail to see its most potent inside you and you smear it on your face in lieu of grease paint. The carnival is in town and you're the show. you've found magic is in the flesh. the blood. The heart even. And you force it because the book, the damn book is a hammer and your corrupting mind's eye can only see nails. And you see yourself as a template of you own choosing. Form is function and like God's clay you can be shaped and you breathe life into yourself.
You learn the powers of transmogrification. It is sickening. Bones reknit themselves, hair tearing through skin and bleeding so much bleeding the first time, like a virgin again. The Change is an Art and you are a child who can barely grasp the brush, but you will learn oh will you learn and pain and Power your teacher ever present. You may assume the visage of a loping wolf, thieving raven or whatever form pleases you. Be honest, they were inside you all along, clawing and pecking their way out. Balefully you may also subject others to this curse. Test Charisma after a day to revert to your true form, whatever that means to you or remain trapped a year and a day in that form. The urges of each form never go away either. Draw two cards, any combination of Hunger or Vice.
Apprentice
Love you have thrown out, comradery a sound in your ear. And yet craven need for kinships not even you can shake off. Magic's last hope for the fool, to be saved, to be understood, to be held again. You take on a partner, whom you have power over. Your needs of the other are intimate, intwined and adversarial. They desire your knowledge and Power, their reasons their own. You need their humanity, their vitality. Sex, pain and madness are the colors that paint the dark tapestry before it frays and you are redeemed, part ways or tear each other asunder.
Mistress. there is magic in her pale beauty and she plans to kill you with a knife. A pretty face can get you out of almost any trouble, if you promise fame. Killing her grants a powerful charm. But your heart leaps into your throat at the thought and beats in time with her own.
Student. hungrier than even you and with more talent. plans to make it look like an accident. A useful scapegoat when they come looking. Killing him provides a new spell, peeled like a hangnail from his own oily book. And yet you notice his magic is like a caress, and you feel a longing in your heart when he casts.
Lackey. running from something, something you shield him from and dirty and dirtier work you have for him. He'll break your neck with his meaty bare hands for your Power. Killing him grants a powerful favor from an enemy. But his drink his strong and dark and he shares it unthinkingly. it loosens your tongue and your bandages. You listen to your heart while you drink.
Gravedigger. a miscreant, physically or in the legal sense, and they will hit you in the back of the head with a stone when they think they can get away with it and bury you themselves. They hide all your worst misdeeds and never judge your desires, as long as the drugs flow. Killing them produces and oracular skull for speaking with spirits. Mercy they elicit from you, when, convulsing as the drugs wear off, you wipe the sweat from their brow.
Nurse. Sweet, brave, desperate. An injection in the neck while you sleep is the most painless way she can think to do it. Sews you up when things go awry, almost back to perfect. Why does she frown listening at the stethoscope? Killing her would grant a talisman against fell magic. but she whispers, you already have one, don't you?
Bookbinder. obsessive and keen-eyed, willing to overlook anything you might do, shy of hurting a book. For access to your library she can successfully defend you from investigation and hide your practice from prying eyes. She coddles them like babies, lovingly tending to their cracks and tears and bindings. Its never too late to save one she always says, there's magic in them, not always refereeing to the same ones as you. Killing her would bind a powerful guardian to place of your choosing. but you think, she'd forgive you for your cracks.
