Anybody have any success creating new special abilities for the game based on your character’s stories?
My crew’s Whisper has “Nightmare in a Bottle: Your Spirit Bottles can now be used to contain Demons and Horrors. You start with one Demon or Horror in your possession”
Likewise my crew’s Hound shares some mindspace (has been partially-possessed) by a demon, and can manifest that demon’s energy into a potent arcane weapon.
Any cool abilities you folks have come up with? Particularly any that relate to your (or your players’ character’s story?
Not a special ability but I allowed my crew’s Slide to have a Exorcist Shotgun as a starting item, because that idea has hung around my group sense long before any of us heard of Blades and I don’t trust fate to allow us to play often enought that creating it is plausible in game time. The Exorcist Shotgun (or Blunderbuss really considering the tech level) is a state of the art weapon that shoots out finely tuned blasts of electroplasm. This weapon is tuned so that it shoots out just enought that a possessor ghost get’s blown out of the possessed but doesn’t take the native spirit along with it. Coincidentally, this also works to clear a person of any sorcery that isn’t embedded and bound into the flesh. Unbound vampires and faulting Hulls can also get blasted out.
Not as something in the actual game but as an idea in the back of my mind goes as follows. “Phantom Limb: You lost one of your limbs, however the echo of that limb is still attached to you, which you to control it. This allows you to completely freely interact with ghostly objects, locations and entities through that one limb.”
Gorinich Serpant love that Phantom Limb idea, I’m going to steal it and show it to our Whisper 😄
Gorinich Serpant … so finally you can scratch at your phantom pain if only in the ghost field. Like it! cool!
So for my Mothlands game I needed to replace some of the ghost moves. I wanted a kind of plucky-hero vibe and so one of the things I wanted to give the Lurk/Thief type character was a bit of that “fumble upon success” feeling of the old DnD ability Use Magic Device.
Fool’s Gambit: When you Finesse or Wreck devices to produce their intended effects you don’t suffer from decreased effect or position for recklessness or ignorance. Neither do you gain any special knowledge or understanding of the device’s nature or operation.
Basically it gives players “alternative” ways of interacting with devices they might normally need to Study or Tinker with but doesn’t give them the benefits of understanding what the thing does or is intended to do.