A Deal with the Goddess
In the RollPlay: Blades series, Mr. Firm, our worshipper of She Who Slays in Darkness, has decided to use his Occultist ability to Consort with the goddess and negotiate a deal.
He wants to temporarily boost the power of Glorious Visage by one level, to help him deal with a Spirit Warden strike team. In exchange for this boost, the goddess will demand a price.
What price will the goddess demand? Let’s brainstorm some juicy goddess bargains!
the easy, if somewhat harsh, answer could be another part of him – another point of Trauma. Not sure this is interesting enough though, but it could be part of whatever deal it ends up being. Afterall, it’s hard to put back those powers you unleashed once.
To play off Heiko Qd giving a part of himself could be too easy, Cariless still thinks himself the deal maker he once was so now he must make a deal on her behalf. She’s taken an interest in Rune so maybe Mr. Firm has to get Rune to give herself over more to SWSiD. Cariless already needs her but there may come a day when he feels he doesn’t and makes a move for that what better weapon to strike him down with than the one he gave her (Rune).
Pros: involves multiple players at the table in the eventual play out of the scene, has a heftier weight to the decision Mr.Firm has to decide if Rune is worth sacrificing or if he even views it as a sacrifice.
Cons: potential player problems but in this instance if Anne refuses to let Rune be corrupted it just creates more interesting complications like what happens when a former deal making demon can’t deliver on his promise.
His brother’s hand in marriage; but he just need to deliver the ring finger.
Random SHSID Price Table!
1- Body horror. His insides get taken over by the goddess’ tendrils every time he uses Glorious Visage. Resist or Lvl X Harm “possessed by the goddess.”
2- Cariless is bound to the concept of revenge, having to help the unquiet dead settle their mad vengeance. Extra unquiet dead entanglement after every score.
3- Special vice “Feed She Who Slays in the Dark”, can only relieve stress by following her dark designs which may or may not be comprehensible by
humandemon minds.4- New clock: “Paid in blood”. Valuable people start dropping off dead every time the clock is completed. Tick one segment after using Glorious Visage.
5- Another clock: “Mark of Darkness”. Cariless slowly maniphests the mark of the goddess, becoming a monster not just on the inside, but from the outside as well.
6- Reality warp. Do a fortune roll depending on Cariless current favor with She and his level of trauma every time he uses Glorious Visage. On 1-3 something really bad happens, brains melt, crows become crazy, she maniphests in the flesh for a moment, things don’t go as planned. 4-5 stressful things, people start crying blood, murderous ghosts are beaconed here, the power strains Cariless. 6, just tick on the “She Will Come” clock. Crit, tick on the “Favor” clock.
I’m sure it would depend on the group and the player, but some mechanism whereby the character is cursed to always go for the kill. Can’t take prisoners. Seems reasonable for She Who Slays. I suppose it could be Resisted, which has it’s own downside.
Or maybe a +1d to kill (Skirmish/Wreck/Prowl), -1d to try talking (Consort/Command/Sway)? Pretty harsh, though.
**SPOILERS HERE**
I wonder what She wants. If she wants a loyal servant then I’d target the price at Cariless directly. His current motivations are:
1) Kill in the name of She who Slays
2) Destroy Setarra/Regain his demon nature
3) Elevate his crew so they can help him perform #1 and #2
If She wants more of him she could ask for proof that he’s given up #2 or that he has focused the group to serve her (change to a Cult maybe?)
Both of those are pretty extreme. Maybe too much.
If She has her own agenda though, I think she should instead use Cariless as an agent of her specific desires. Perhaps they must perform a score for her. Seems like that would be right up their ally. There is a good book with some score opportunities in it. I can’t quite remember the name…
He must visit 8 sites where her worshipers slew victims in holy silence, across the city. There will be a woman he sees when he is in each location. This is the woman who is capable of serving as an avatar for She Who Slays in Darkness, who will then be able to arise and act in her might, even in the light, for one whole night.
If he fails in this, then he will be compelled to slay in holy silence in 8 places across the city, and someone else will do the deal to find an avatar.
Some of the sites that must be visited are… hard to reach. Protected, or inconvenient, dangerous for some reason. And he must stay there long enough to see one or more women, in ways he would never expect.
Maybe he daydreams, or hallucinates, or sees someone in a hood. But one way or another, an avatar will be identified, and it will not be through expected means and it will not be the person you’d expect. If he can’t close the deal and prepare the vessel, he will not be allowed to die until he completes the work of 8 kills for her.
She is impatient while Cariless squanders her gifts to him on paltry thugs and would be crime lords the Acolytes of Setarra build new vessels of worship (like I dunno, an orphanage over a corpse toilet for example) and build Setarra’s strength. Cariless must personally strike at Setarra’s acolytes and desecrate their alter in the name of SWSiD.
Carriless can’t accept assistance or mechanically help in group actions until She deems it in line with Her goals. She is all the “help” he needs.
Time. The goddess could ask for Mr Firm for a week of his life, then use the imbued power to hijack his body for a blackout. When he returned to his senses he would find his status with a couple of figures changed and need to investigate to figure out what arrangements SWSiD had been up to while on walkabout in his meatsuit.
He must diminish himself in front of the crew for a time.
His demonic essence is expended, temporarily, in the effort and he becomes more “human.”
He must offer someone close to the crew up for hollowing. Prime candidates would be Rune’s healer friend, if you just want to be as mean as possible.
He must personally assassinate a powerful Dimmer Sister.
He must throw himself into the service of the church and let his desires for revenge take a back seat to Her glory.
Granted, I have fallen far behind on Blades, but it’s not She Who Traumatizes in Darkness or She who Undermines Enemies in Darkness. I think Cariless should be asked to kill someone who 1) is important to the group in a practical sense, and 2) tied to the group in a very personal sense. The other option is to have him very publicly murder either someone who’s powerful or a whole bunch of people, openly, in her name. Whatever it is it should tear away at his professional career as well as personal life and bring down hell upon the crew.
The question is what does the Goddess want? Why give Mr. Firm anything? Gods/Goddess want worshipers and/or the spread of their influence on the greater world at large.
They are called Forgotten Gods after all and I can imagine they don’t want to be forgotten any longer.
Anything asked of Mr. Firm should be working towards increasing her influence which is why she admonished Careless for killing the Fog Hounds and Dockers. They were in the pursuit of her domain ‘vengeance’ after all.
The first thought Careless may only kill in the pursuit of vengeance’. This makes the point to him that he serves at her beck and call. To kill outside of this means he’s serving only himself not her and should could withhold her power.
Mr. Firm is mortal regardless of suspicions about his past. And She Who Slays in the Darkness is a god after all.
Mr. Firm has to give her the control of his body occasionally. Maybe this eats up one of the downtime actions or something like that. The point is that Mr. Firm has only (possibly) vague flashes of what has happened (probably some very bad things). His body is being used as a sort of Jack the Ripper and each time he slays one segment of a clock gets filled. If it gets fully filled people come knocking on his doorstep. Of course there should be something to be done about it.
Start giving him brutal flashes of pretercognition, and the cosmic mandate to prevent or enable the sanity-taxing things that he sees coming to pass.
Compel him to make himself the perfect flirty gift for her lover, another dark god. There are several steps, and the end of this road is unlikely to be happy.
She takes from him all physical form but his hands, feet, and head; all else is shadowstuff that vanishes if exposed to light.
Pick an NPC all four players want to kill. Then She tells Cariless this person cannot die before they have achieved their own plan for vengeance (which she does not reveal), and if they do, She’ll dump him. For good.
If he will cast aside his personal feelings to advance the philosophical principle of revenge, that is the mark of a true acolyte. If he refuses, he proves himself a mere opportunist, trading favours for temporal power, and no true servant of the goddess.
I almost feel like it should have to do with the Foghounds, because he killed them and ruined their revenge. That was how he earned her displeasure and drove him to make the deal.
On the one hand, I feel like he should end up being forced to sacrifice Myth.
On the other hand, I also feel like he should be forced to deal a very harmful attack to Rune, one that forces her to take her first trauma and acts as a proxy killing blow for the now-dead Foghounds.
And it could get interesting in a couple of ways because then She Who Slays could trick him by instead pouring her favor into Rune and turning the Whisper into a kind of avatar/emissary who directly receives visions from She Who Slays, or it could be used to somehow convince Anne to get more of the Bloodletter tattoos for, or something else that doesn’t just mean a huge complication here and now, but also leads to more complications down the road.
Maybe he is forced to kill one of the new hanger ons the crew has picked up at the lair. Like Margette. Or perhaps someone who is more innocent in relevant terms, and was important to one member, but is now important to two. And is an accomplished healer.
Finally, wrestling will serve me in Blades! So, in Lucha Underground, there’s a wrestler called Mil Muertes that’s managed by a woman named Catrina, who carries a stone that holds Mil’s power. She marks people (by licking the side of their face but let’s ignore that) for death and Mil (and at one point a trio of luchadores but they’re no longer around) reaps them in a match. Sometimes, more literally in the case of the couple of casket/Grave Consequences matches. Maybe pull from that.
She Who Slays In Darkness manifests physically and marks someone for death in some way. Only the Last Word can see this mark and know what it means. She manipulates as needed as well to get to harder target (Mil had a a feud with Fenix and stole his power to bring himself back from the dead more powerful in early/mid-S1). He, and by extension the Last Word, owe her one thousand deaths. Or maybe just sinking all of Doskvol. Something like that, something essentially impossible.
I see like a Ghost Rider type thing, He can’t turn off Glorious Visage until Vengeance has been doled out. While Visage is on, he must push himself if he wishes to do something that doesn’t straight forward and directly progress towards vengeance. (My mind this is almost like partially shifting into that “Trauma 4+ but not dead yet* period)
Kill everyone in the tattoo parlor as a way to stop Rune from getting more tattoos. and then turn her to a new vice one that will get her closer to She who slays in darkness
Something deceptivly simple. A certain someone to help get revenge. However digging into the plot reveals himself as the lerson the revenge happens to be against.
😮 that’s is me and fine
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/KAgV004STdAXQhWqdAiMWfAE44OjWz3zsS4flwGvMb8JWPE35Lv8p3n7CzibgcSIKfCM-_sVng
Thanks, everyone! Lots of good ideas here. We’ll see the results in the game tomorrow.