Hi everyone. Latest S&V prep post:
The setup for our S&V game is coming along nicely, we had a Session 0 to discuss characters and do a little setup today before our first real session next week, and everyone’s real excited.
I think I have nearly everything ready for my character, but the one thing left to do is to decide on my Precursor Artifact from the Mystic playbook. I’m playing as a type of mildly Way-sensitive xeno we’ve added who are basically Space Tieflings™ native to Vos, and since I maaaaay have been partially inspired by the recent Devilman anime in wanting to play a space devil… man… >_>
I was thinking the artifact might be related to some ancient Vosian ability to temporarily transform from nice human-ish person with horns to full on demon monster.
However, I’m having a hard time settling on what the mechanics of that should look like. A fairly uninteresting option that came to mind would be letting it work like the Muscle’s Unstoppable ability, giving the user temporary superhuman strength and/or increased scale while it’s active. We don’t have a muscle in our group, so it wouldn’t be stepping on anyone’s toes, but just taking a playbook ability as is feels like it’s not taking advantage of the potential creativity that could go into creating an artifact, so I don’t love that idea.
Does anyone have any ideas for what a cool devilman transformation artifact could look like? Maybe sweet laser beam powers? Rad fiery punches? Flight?
Blades in the Dark SRD might have more ideas that didn’t make it into BitD or S&V.
Other than what you are already thinking of, what about having it trigger in a way you can’t control? Rolling doubles, or a 1, etc… You lose control and start punching a random NPC, need to roll (4, 5, or 6?) to regain control.
bladesinthedark.com – Character Playbook | Blades in the Dark RPG
So one thing I’d recommend is deciding what you want the artifact to do, and having the GM decide what the drawback is. This will help establish the right power balance for the scope of the game.
As for the actual artifact, I’d suggest considering it like you have the Xeno ability while transformed. So you get some variable stress powers – something like 0 stress (freak people out and be generally intimidating, maybe +1d to command checks), 1 stress (fire punches, you can light things on fire when scrapping in melee, they take more harm), 2 stress (fly like a goddamn demon).
And I’d definitely make the thing slowly take over your mind and turn you into an actual Vosian demon.
John LeBoeuf-Little Oh I like using the Xeno ability! Thanks for the advice!