Citizen of the White City - GLOG Class

Citizen of the White City

You are a player of the image games of the White City, a citizen-soldier and an Imperial patriot. To people in the Barony you are almost a separate species. Yours is an apocalyptic vision of light, noise, speed, lines, energy. You have seen what progress is; its costs and its demands; and you have remade every piece of yourself in its image. 

Starting Skills: Religion, Criticism, Art Appraisal.

Starting Gear: Stamped-steel short sword, cheap misericorde, arbalest with 20 ammunition, Chemical Lantern, Foreign Attire, d3 + [INT-10] Intelligence Reports, x5 doses of stimulants, x5 doses of Imperial War Drugs. 

A - Militia Training, High Tolerance
B - Deconstruction
C - Player of Games
D - Prototype

Militia Training - You are proficient with spears, swords, shields, crossbows, and all armour. You are also proficient with digging and mining equipment, and can assess the integrity of earthworks and tunnels and make suggestions to non-specialists on how to make them safe. As long as your morale has not broken today, you roll to hit at +1 with all proficient weapons.

High Tolerance - You may consume a dose of stimulants to ignore any adverse mental effect, at the cost of d3 exhaustion. You do not add exhaustion to your inventory as normal; instead, keep a separate tally of how much you accrue. For every 2 points, you gain +1 temporary CHAR. If this score ever rises to 6 + [templates], roll a CON save (and again every hour that it remains at this level). On a failure, your heart explodes. 

Deconstruction - You are constantly illustrating why things are alike or not alike. It's not a magical effect, but the rhetorical tricks, slippages, and feints are extremely persuasive, especially to people who have not previously been exposed to the psychology of the White City. This ability has 1 in 20 chance of triggering each day, rolled before you sleep. When it does, you may choose someone you have intimate access to, and subject them to one of the following effects:

• Extract a secret from them. They will believe that they shared it with you willingly. 
• Raise or lower their loyalty to a person or institution. 
• Sow doubt in their mind about someone or something that they trust. 
• Increase or decrease their perceived value of an object or concept. 

Targets may make a contested CHAR check against you to ignore the effect, and make this save at -1 per point of exhaustion that they have. This works on anything that has a mind. Targets are not aware that they have been subjected to this ability.

Player of Games - When your Deconstruction ability triggers, you may choose to forgo the usual effects and instead create a mundane image which can be copied/distributed/destroyed etc. Encode this image with one of the effects from Deconstruction (not secret extraction). People who are exposed to it have a 1 in 100 chance of being affected by the encoded effect. 

Prototype - There is some horror about you, so subtle and alien that it doesn't even process consciously for most people. Intelligent enemies must make an opposed CHAR check to strike you in melee - on a failure they hesitate. If the difference between your CHAR and theirs is 5 or more, they must also check morale. Angels, Demons, and anyone with 16 or higher INT or WIS must always check morale, and do so at disadvantage. If someone passes the test, they do not need to test again for the rest of the combat. 

Special Gear

• Chemical Lantern: as a normal lantern, but burns twice as brightly and five times as long. The light is unsettlingly white and harsh. Refuelling it in the Barony requires an alchemist, and costs 150 silver. 
• Foreign Attire: clearly marks you as a curiosity. Nobles and other worthies will probably want to speak with you, bandits will assume that you are carrying lots of money. 
• Intelligence Reports: each report allows you to ask for a briefing on a specific character or region. The DM will provide you with an accurate, up-to-date sketch of the person or place, with any pertinent information included. You must declare what your reports are focused on at character creation. 
• Imperial War Drugs. For the rest of the combat, and for ten minutes afterwards, you have +1 attack, +1 damage, cannot be broken, and must attempt to kill those that you perceive as threats. You also take d3+1 points of exhaustion. 

Umberto Boccioni, sketch for The City Rises