Anyway Solar Charms!
Essence Manipulation Charms:
Chaos-Repelling Pattern: (Essence 2) Passive/Active: While your Anima Banner is ignited, a large area around you functions as if it were In Creation. Unless directly tampered with by a hostile entity of equal or greater essence than you, it is not inimical to you or any other natives of creation (though it may be strange and terrifying). Also, you have the ability to shatter permanent Shaping Effects on others with a touch, including Wyld Mutations, Fair Folk Graces and Sidereal Astrology. Doing so costs 1 Essence per target. You may need to win a Conflict in order to touch the target if they resist.Wyld Cauldron Technology: (Essence 3, Chaos-Repelling Pattern) Active: While in areas of the Deep Wyld, you may shape the raw chaos into forms of your liking. You may craft land, people, wealth, artifacts, or anything else to your liking, as well as stabilizing any such areas as being part of Creation. This takes a lot of time, usually in the order of weeks. At Essence 4, you may perform such acts on Bordermarches and Middlemarches, transforming more stable areas to suit your whims and altering its flora, fauna and population to suit your desires. Before Essence 5, all things you change and create lack an internal Reality, and will dissolve back into the Wyld if they do not interact with the things of Creation more than once per season. After Essence 5, your will and work keeps them stable. Know that the Raksha hate this charm and those who use it, for it is inimical to them and all they stand for.
Spirit-Cutting Attack: (Essence 2) Passive: You may perceive and physically interact with dematerialized spirits, including Ghosts, Demons, Gods and Elementals. You can also perceive the entrances to spirits’ Sanctums, though you may not necessarily gain entrance to them.
Ghost-Eating Technique: (Essence 3, Spirit-Cutting Attack) Passive: When you slay a creature, you may declare you are terminating that creature’s existence, consuming their essence. You gain nothing from this, but the creature slain is ended utterly. It cannot reincarnate, reform, rise as a ghost, or be remade by the being it is a component of. This is the charm the Solars used to slay the Primordials at the Gods’ behest, creating Oblivion and the Neverborn, for the Primordials existence was such that even this magic was not enough to completely extinguish them.
All-Encompassing Sorcerer’s Sight: (Essence 3, Spirit-Cutting Attack) Passive: Similar to Glory of the Twilight but in all ways greater, while the character’s Anima Banner is ignited, the character is perfectly aware of the essence around her, able to immediately identify any creature’s Essence Score (anything with a 4+ is obviously supernatural) and easily analyze the function of any artifact or charm that they are aware of. Invisible and dematerialized creatures are not only visible, but identifiable. Stealth still functions against a character with charm active. While a Twilight Caste’s anima banner is not ignited, they gain the benefits of Glory of the Twilight.
Sun’s Wrathful Rays: (Essence 2) Passive: You are armed with the light of the sun. While your Anima Banner is up, you may strike out with sorcerous blasts of holy light, leaving you never unarmed.
These are a combination of what were originally Lore and Occult Charms. Wyld Cauldron Technology gained significant power due to the removal of having to roll, so I added the much slower rate. Spirit-Cutting Attack provides the basic means to interact with and fight Spirits, Ghost-Eating Technique lets you obliterate them. All-Encompassing Sorcerer's Sight is a very useful charm for anyone, even more for Twilights now that it replaces their Anima Banner and provides them with their Anima Banner power while their anima is down. Sun's Wrathful Rays is a completely custom charm (thus why it's marked in Red), but doesn't feel inappropriate to certain character concepts.
Healing Charms:
Flawless Diagnosis Technique: (Essence 2) Passive: The secret ways of the body are no longer secret to you. After a few minutes with the victim of any malady (poison, disease, infection, madness, curses or sorcery) you know exactly how to cure it, as well as any possible methods of alleviating symptoms, prolonging the patient’s lifespan or reducing their suffering.Wound-Mending Care Technique: (Essence 2) Passive: You do not need simple medicines or tools to heal injuries, your Essence is both balm and bandage. You also eliminate any risk of complications from uncertain medical procedures you perform: while the treatment might not be successful, a patient will never be worse off than before you helped them. That you do not need instruments reduces preparation times, but not the actual time required to provide care. Also note that this does not allow you to speed a patient’s recovery time, nor allow you to perform procedures you do not know how to do. This charm does not allow you to substitute it for the effects of any uncommon medical ingredient.
Body-Purifying Admonitions: (Essence 3, Wound-Mending Care Technique) Active: Spend 1 Essence while treating a willing patient. You may utterly banish a single malady affecting the target, no matter its origin. Depending on the harshness of the malady, treatment may take as long as several days. This charm can be used to regrow lost limbs, eyes, or other traditionally impossible injuries.
Instant Treatment Methodology: (Essence 3, Flawless Diagnosis Technique) Active: Pay 1 Essence when taking any action to treat or heal heal. This reduces the required time for the action (even a major disruptive surgery or Body-Purifying Admonitions to restore a lost limb or eye) to 5 seconds. It does not speed the recovery time of the patient.
Anointment of Miraculous Health: (Essence 4) Active: Pay 1 Essence when taking any action to treat or heal. Their recovery time is immediate upon the treatment being administered, whatever ailments were healed are gone instantly and the patient is returned to the picture of vitality.
Medicine Charms are extremely powerful, even in a game with no direct damage system. The ability to save allies and mortals is among the most miraculous things the Exalted can do. Which is why there's actually a substantial tree of Medicine Charms rather than just a single 'bink you're better' charm. I feel like creating the lines between these charms also lets you define what sort of supernatural healing you provide: do you simply know how to cure them, no matter what? Do you lay hands and heal? How far does your healing power extend? There should probably be some Craft: Genesis charms here too, but I think those can be custom charms (which really every Essence 5+ charm should kind of be).
Physical Prowess Charms:
Increasing Strength Exercise: (Essence 2) Passive: You are superhumanly strong. This is literal physical power, not the general destructive ability of Heaven Thunder Hammer. This allows you to engage in Improbable acts of might with your Anima Banner down and Impossible acts with it ignited, such as lifting up a burning building to save those trapped within, moving a great caravan or pushing open an impossibly massive but indestructible door.Graceful Crane Stance: (Essence 2) Passive: You are supernaturally graceful and can leap great distances. your gymnastic agility is no longer limited by reason. You may now perform Improbable acts of agility while your Anima Banner is down and Impossible Acts while it is ignited. You can walk tightropes on your hands, gracefully flip out of a wagon rattling down a mountainside land on your feet or roll smoothly back to your feet after being thrown by an ogre. Additionally, your jumps carry you great distances, approximately five times your normal jumping distance.
Lightning Speed: (Essence 2) Passive: Your mobility and agility surpasses the speed of mortal eyes. You can move Improbably fast with your Anima Banner down and Impossibly fast with it up. You can move so quickly as to appear to teleport, and you may travel at great speeds over modest distances.
Feather-Foot Style: (Essence 2) Passive: Your effective weight and traction are no longer limited by reason. You may perform Improbable Stunts of this type with your Anima Banner down and Impossible stunts with it up. You can walk or run surely on snowflakes, falling raindrops, water, lava or a floor of writhing maggots as well as run on vertical surfaces or upside-down (though you cannot stand still on them, movement is key). You are also capable of gaining traction on thin air, though only long enough to jump.
Racing Hare Method: (Essence 3, Monkey Leap Technique or Feather-Foot Style or Lightning Speed) Passive: You can travel long distances quickly under your own power (how the travel occurs is up to the player, but it is not significantly impeded by any obstacle short of the Great River). Doing so is tiring, requiring a night’s rest after the travel is complete unless you spend 1 Essence.
Eagle-Wing Style: (Essence 4, any 2 of Graceful Crane Stance, Lightning Speed and Feather-Foot Style) Passive: While your Anima Banner is ignited, you can fly and glide, though not as fast as you would travel on foot. You treat 20 feet above the ground as the 'equilibrium' you drift down to. You can rise higher than that temporarily, however.
Creation-Crossing Comet Style: (Essence 5, Racing Hare Method) Passive: If you use Racing Hare Method while your Anima Banner is ignited you can fly at around 500 feet altitude. This movement mode is never tiring.
I mentioned early on that Athletics charms are dear to my heart, here are the final versions of them. I'm pretty happy with Increasing Strength, Graceful Crane, Lightning Speed and Feather-Foot, Racing Hare is designed to be a very simple personalized Travel Charm (subsuming Mountain-Crossing Leap Technique, which in Core was simply a rather inferior Travel Charm), Eagle-Wing Style is a greater expression of mobility, and Creation-Crossing Comet Style is a custom charm that builds on Racing Hare Method.
Physical Perception Charms:
Crafty Observation Method: (Essence 2) Passive: When investigating an area, you gather information quickly and without a trace. You can perform the equivalent of 15 minutes of searching a specific area you can see without interacting with it. This search takes a few seconds. You will not gain information you could not have accessed without taking substantial actions, but you will gain all other action. For instance, when searching a room, you would immediately know everything in a large chest of drawers, but not the contents of a locked chest (though if you were a skilled locksmith, you would know how to pick the lock). If you were at a murder scene and a victim was lying face-down, you would know what form the wounds on their front took, as well as the exact posture they were laying at. This charm does not provide the means to analyze information, only the information.Keen Sense Technique: (Essence 2) Passive: While your Anima Banner is ignited, your natural senses increase to impossible levels, while it is down they are merely preternaturally sharp. With your Anima Banner down, you can focus your senses become about 10 times as sharp as a human's: you can read a book from across a room, hear whispers clearly from twenty feet away, and identify familiar people by scent before they enter a room. With your Anima banner ignited your senses are approximately 100 times as sharp as a normal human’s: you can track by scent, clearly hear conversations through thick stone walls, recognize the faces of people 500 yards away at night, and identify a subtle poison in a meal of extravagant spices (in addition to identifying all of the spices). You never suffer from the use of these heightened senses (you would not be deafened by a scream next to you while listening through a stone wall or blinded by a sudden explosion while staring into the night). You also will not notice things with your heightened senses unless you are deliberately seeking them.
Unsurpassed Sense Discipline: (Essence 4, Keen Sense Technique) Passive: Your Keen Sense Technique is enhanced, with Keen Senses being active when your Anima Banner is not ignited and the following-level senses (approximately 10,000 times sharper than a normal human’s) being available while it is: You can read by touch, gauge a stranger’s mood by scent, read lips from several miles away and eavesdrop on conversations several blocks away on a busy street. Like Keen Sense Technique, you will not necessarily notice things with your heightened senses unless you are deliberately seeking them.
Surprise Anticipation Method: (Essence 3) Passive: You have a sense for danger. You become aware of a potentially harmful situation you were not aware of with just enough time to attempt to avoid it if you act immediately. You can only become aware of potentially harmful situations if you have the senses to become aware of them, though you need not be awake for this charm to function. For instance, if you were asleep and an assassin fired an arrow at you from a window, the charm would wake you up with enough time to react. If you were shopping in a bazaar and a dematerialized spirit attacked you, the charm would not function, unless you had some way of being aware of a dematerialized spirit. If a harmful effect is subtle enough that you might miss it, such as an invisible arrow being fired at night, you become aware that something harmful is approaching you but not necessarily what it is or where it is coming from.
Eye of the Unconquered Sun: (Essence 5) Passive: While your Anima Banner is up, you are immune to deliberate deception, including but not limited to: lies, Gossamer illusions, sorcerous illusions, stealth of any sort, mundane disguises, invisibility, shapeshifting, Sidereal Astrological disguises, Supernatural compulsions or compelled beliefs that force them to deny reality. You are aware of the effects that are attempting to deceive you, but you may ignore them. If any effect attempts to overcome this effect, you passively add +3 to your Conflict Score to contest their deception.
Today we end with Perception Charms, notably drawing from both Investigation and Awareness charms. Crafty Observation Method is a valuable tool for both infiltrators and investigators, Keen Sense Technique contains all three of the original Awareness charm versions, though at limited forms unless your Banner is up. Unsurpassed Sense makes you absurdly perceptive, though both of the enhanced senses charms require that you be deliberately looking for things, to prevent the problem of 'Why didn't I hear him sneaking up on me?' As much as this somewhat reduces the effectiveness of these charms, it helps preserve narratives. Anyway, if you don't want to be snuck up on take Surprise Anticipation Method, which is greatly improved by not being treated as a charm use. Eye of the Unconquered Sun is mostly an example of how insane Solar Perception gets at high levels, though it notably is both a Social and Physical Perception charms.
Tomorrow I'll finish up the list of Solar charms with Stealth and Deception, Social Perception, Travel and Organization Charms. I may toss in Solar Hero Form and Snake Form as freebies, too.
Thanks for reading and feel free to leave questions or comments as always.
No comments:
Post a Comment