What can a Whisper do?

7 thoughts on “What can a Whisper do?”

1. /sub

2. /sub

3. We treat attune like feeling through the veil for the right frequency. Tune in to sense things nearby, you can see fleeting images of scenes that took place in a location – especially if they were emotionally charged. You can wrestle spirits and communicate with them. You can tap into the electrical field, dim lights or blow out bulbs, sense conduits of power throughout a building and sketch a wall layout based on the switches. With your ghost key you can access passages and travel the veil itself (build your own lore on how this works). With ‘Compel’ and ‘Tempest’ you can scale these up and use ghosts as weapons or conjure fogs to hide your activities.

   Set a goal and build your scoundrel around it, our Whisper wants to live forever so his rituals centre around preparing corpses for hollow-fication so he can transfer to them once he is ready to leave his current body.

4. .

5. Adam Brimmer’s answer is fantastic.

   I’d just add three things:

   (1) If the Whisper grabs Tempest, to me it implies that Duskvol’s weather & other natural forces and its supernatural field are deeply intertwined. What does it /mean/ that lightning and ghost fields are maybe sort of the same thing? What does it /mean/ that the eddies of ghost fields and the movement of the rain are maybe the same thing? And what does it mean that those things plug your PCs right into their network? That there’s a blurring of the line between “Cutter”, “Ghost”, and “Fog”? And what does it mean that that blurred overlapping is malleable to a Whisper’s force of will? That various other PC’s have spectral abilities of one sort or another, that blurs those lines? That one of the PCs can turn incorporeal means something… Don’t answer those questions. Let the whisper and the other players discover it in the course of play, through their decisions and rolls. But, keep in mind:

   They’re not just setting questions. They determine the nature of your ghost field, which in turn determines what the Whisper can do with it.

   For example: maybe a character turning briefly incorporeal is because they’re so damn alive… and this world is so damn dead, they can push right through it. In that case, I’m betting it suggests something about what a powerful whisper might do with solid objects (and suggests the basis of the Strange Methods move. e.g., If Lightning and Ghost Stuff are intimately related, I bet I could adapt the underlying theory of the Spirit Mask to make something that resists lightning strikes…)

   On the other hand, maybe they turn incorporeal because the living in Duskvol are half-dead already, saturated with death-stuff. In that case, maybe if a foe is turning incorporeal as a move, the Whisper can use Warded against them – while they’re effectively ghosts – or can Compel them back into a material state.

   Or maybe neither of those. Maybe its their relationship to Demons and the Dead Gods that gives the Whisper non-Ghost powers. What would that imply about your Whisper, and your Duskvol?

   The Whisper’s powers interact with the fictional domain of “weird, hellish, ghosty stuff,” but what belongs in that domain and how will be part of your group’s fictional development of the world.

   (Tangent: When I say “If the Whisper grabs Tempest…” I don’t mean that’s what makes you notice that weather=ghost or hell stuff. I mean, until they take that move, we don’t know the answer to that question. The answer is discovered in the course of play, by player’s Moves, decisions, and dice outcomes – we play to find out. Grabbing the move makes an assertion about the world: in this world, ghost stuff or hell stuff interact with the weather. That relationship exists. If they don’t grab that move… who knows? We’ll find out if it comes up. Part of the reason it’s important to keep that in mind is to keep yourself from building up some great metaphysics and getting attached to it. It’s for you and your players to collaboratively create as you play – don’t build it up ahead of time.)

   (2) The Whisper is the one most comfortable talking to ghosts, demons, and deities. Don’t just think in terms of Compel: think of this like you would about Urban Shadows. If only one guy in your crew is a werewolf… maybe he’s the one that reaches out and makes deals with the werewolves? In the same way various PCs might reach out to constables, spirit wardens, other gangs, etc. you can reach out to those other entities.

   I mean, I guess getting a blood transfusion from a Cultist’s bastard offspring of their dark god isn’t a power? But probably weird stuff happens, and if you’re dying it might save you (at some weird cost to your sanity or dignity or physical integrity). But mostly, it’s a route to pursue when you need a plan, and it’s the kind that probably only the Whisper thinks of – or could make feasible.

   Think carefully about how your crew’s scores are going to move differently if you can make a deal with a Dead God and get their cultists loaned to you as a gang. Think about the debts you’ll owe.

   This adds an entirely different set of strengths and possibilities to the course of play (or at least, strengthens the likelihood of that set being explored.)

   (3) You think like a Whisper. Know why you just knocked over the lampblacks and took their warehouse? Because when they put up guards, they didn’t think, “Huh, what if a ghost walks through the backdoor and supernaturally terrifies everyone into flight… and we all have to flee through the front, where an ambush is waiting to cut us down?” They thought like cut-throats. They think of ghosts as fearful supernatural entities, sure, but they don’t think about them tactically – about the ways they’d be deployed as tools.

   You do.

   You’re the one that remembers to put up spiritbane charms in your HQ every 2.5′, to make sure a Ghost can’t just waltz in. You’re the one that throws up an Attune when you’re prepping your ambush, to make sure there are no ghost spies hanging around waiting back to report to Lord Scurlock. You’re the one that mines the ghostly echoes of walkways to build stairways in your HQ that only someone Attuned to them can walk on. And then maybe you build a Ghost Key that attunes to them, and hand that out to your squad. It’s not a super power: other people in the city have keys and whispers and etc., but doesn’t that give your crew a seriously unique flavor (and something of an advantage if getting raided – Crews that can afford to distribute Ghost Keys to everyone aren’t a dime a dozen.) And if you weren’t thinking about all this stuff, and making sure your crew stayed on top of it? Well, maybe then you’re the ones getting knocked over and losing your turf.

   Etc. Okay, yes, just thinking about things from the lens of a Whisper isn’t a “roll the dice and do d20 dmg” kind of power, but it makes you fictionally important, effective, and interesting.

6. Some great answers here! A few thoughts from a novice Blades GM and player who is making their first Whisper but has been thinking about it for a long time:

   The specifics of the lore of a blades game are built and discovered in play, so suggest and ask and let the dice, other players, and the GM inspire you to make interesting decisions.

   For example, in the game I’m running, one of the PCs is a Hound with more dots in Attune than Hunt. He was controlling a ghost due to a crit on a previous Attune roll (he does not have compel but I just took that to mean I could play with how well it worked if needed) and tried to Attune to a rip in the ghost field that the ghost he was supposed to be controlling was suddenly being drawn to.

   He ended up with a complication: because he used his connection with the entralled ghost to try and gain information about the breach in the veil, his own ghost and the ghost he was controlling both reached into the tear and he would have taken level 2 harm (spiritual dismemberment) as his soul lost a hand. (I decided in the moment that this was a thing that could happen to a person.)

   He resisted, pulling his ghostly arm apart from the controlled ghost (essentially they appeared to be fused at first, than he pulled his arm back as the ghost plunged their hand into the void). Later, because I had chosen to talk about his ghost being sort of outside his body for that moment, he decided to look into long-term projects that might let him temporarily leave his physical body behind and maraud as a ghost for a while.

   None of this was established beforehand as things that could happen, and in fact all of it came out of the crew’s Leech taking a devil’s bargain while Wrecking the ghost field earlier in the score. The scene ended with the previously controlled ghost getting supercharged with void energy and the essence of murder and pushed through the void somewhere beyond even the veil. Now it is trying to find a way back to take revenge on the Hound.

   All this opens up new doors for both me as a GM and the players! My Hound has a new idea for a useful arcane project, I have a void-dwelling murderghost, and even my Leech has essentially been told that her Ghost Ward ability can tear open the void in a way that is dangerous enough to be weaponizable.

   Discovering these things through play is all about coming up with ideas, building off the existing fiction, and playing to find out what happens! I’ll be starting my first post-crew creation session as my Whisper tomorrow, and I’m excited to find out what they can do.

7. In one of the campaigns I’ve watched John DM at one point he had said that the world of Blades was sort of a fantasy world that was brought to ruin (Please correct me if I’m wrong). Something that comes to mind when I think of it is that perhaps a whisper can tap into some of the old world, ancient magic via learning them through ritual or through rituals themselves. Though I’d imagine it’d have to be more old world dark magic to keep with the dark theme.

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