Many moons ago I wrote a class for the the Citizens of the terrible imperial metropole. This was in the very early days of the blog, and many things have since changed. I was never really happy with it - it ended up being a sort of downtime class that could nebulously 'infect' populations with ideas and concepts. Not a terrible idea for a class, but a bit blunt and brute-force and crude.
I wrote a while ago about optical wargames, which depend on the machine/interface relation to produce a play space composed by sensors, registering marks, spoofing tech, etc.; a literally or infinitely 'artificial' space, layered atop the one that the characters physically navigate with their bodies.
A pictorial wargame operates under superficially similar principles - it introduces an abstracting/artificial strata over the embodied space where the game usually takes place. Unfortunately, the image/relation diagram is much trickier to build out than that of the machine/interface - where the interface aims to produce clarity from obscure processes, the relation introduces layered interpretations into previously distinct categories. The class is an attempt in this direction. A debt is owed to Grek's very great Psychic.
This is also technically a Glaugust post: a class that is absolutely not a Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, or Thief (I cheated a bit in that this class is also NOT short lmao).
Class: Citizen of the White City
Introduce an image, then introduce a relation. The image is anything-whatever; the relation is the thing that you tie to your soul.
Gear: a heavy spear, a heavy arbalest, a light stamped-steel misericorde, light fabric amour, two detailed and accurate maps of your starter region, one topographic, one Special (roll on the list below), d3 Intelligence Reports.
Skills: none that are useable outside the White City - while in the City, you have an innate and unselfconscious sense for the million shibboleths required to be recognised and accepted as a native of that place. In addition, your militia training has given you proficiency with spears, crossbows, knives, and the digging and maintenance of earthworks, tunnels, and fortifications.
A: The Machinery of the Eye
B: Postures of Critique
C: The Place of Abomination
D: A Prototype
Angels, demons, and entities hate and fear you as a baseline.
The inhabitants of Dream find it difficult to think of you in neutral terms: treat their reaction rolls of 2 - 7 as a 2, and rolls of of 8 - 12 as a 12. No matter what their reaction to you is, they will appear to you as their nightmare variants.
The Machinery of the Eye
Every person that you meet has a Mind. Unlike other people, you can both perceive the Mind and interact with it. The interface that you use to do this is complicated and intuitive, but it can be (crudely) represented spatially.
This means that every NPC you meet can have their mind represented by a small dungeon-like space, which you can interact with. Expect your DM to veto this class if the campaign they are running is not the type that is interested in things like every NPC's mind being represented by a dungeon space.
A Mind will be more or less complex depending on its host's mental alacrity, imaginative power, and self-awareness. In practice, the Mind will feature [derived INT bonus +1, minimum 1] +[derived WIS bonus +1, minimum 1] + [derived CHAR bonus +1, minimum 1] rooms, plus an additional +1 room for every HD they possess.
These rooms will always be connected to one another directly, and will always be pitch black throughout. You should also mark which specific rooms are derived from mental stats (INT, WIS, and CAR), and which are generated from HD. All rooms and corridors are nondescript, colourless, and empty.
Other PCs also have Minds, but interacting with them is analogous to PVP play, and you should check in with both the DM and other players before doing so. If necessary, the DM will design Minds for other PCs in conversation with them.
People who have grown up in the White City or otherwise have a facility with its strange culture have twice as many rooms in their Minds as normal. You might also find ancient or inhuman Minds with impossible or actively hostile architectures of various kinds.
To interact with a Mind at all, someone must enter into unguarded conversation with you for at least an hour. This could be while marching, in downtime, by a campfire, in the prince's audience chambers, whatever. Once this contact has been established, you have access to their Mind and can go to work.
You have a pool of 'points' that facilitate this work, and which are initially equal to your templates in this class. You always start with [templates] points in any Mind you gain access to, and additionally gain one point for each of the following:
- You learn what someone is prepared to sacrifice in pursuit of their goals.
- You learn what those goals are in specific detail.
- You learn what someone fears most.
- You learn what that fear might push them to do if they thought there would be no repercussions.
- You learn if they love anything or anyone selflessly.
- You learn who or what the object of that love is.
- You learn the extent to which desire rules them.
- You learn the object of their most powerful desire.
You get your template points with every new Mind that you contact, but additional points are on a case-by-case basis per Mind. Once a point is spent, it is spent forever and can never be recovered. Once a change has been implemented in a Mind, it is permanent, and can only be reversed or removed by spending its cost in points a second time.
Using a single point you can:
- Instantiate yourself as an avatar in the mind. This is in a fixed location, with a fixed 90 degree line of sight. In a mind you can see forever, providing that what you are looking at is lit. If you wish to 'move' inside a mind, or change your angle of view, you must do so by spending an additional point.
- Instantiate a light source in the mind. The light is omnidirectional and travels forever, but is blocked by walls as you would expect.
- Instantiate an image in the mind. This is 'drawn' onto a surface wall, and can be of any scale you wish. If you wish to remove, move, or resize an image, you must do so by spending an additional point. Images that you can 'see' inside the mind, from the POV of your instantiated avatar, have various effects, which are elaborated further on in this most. Most of your class abilities rely on 'seeing' multiple images at a time from your avatar's fixed POV. Each room can only hold a single image without the aid of mechanical contrivances, elaborated below.
If your instantiated avatar can 'see' more than one image at the same time, then the Citizen of the White City can choose to make the two images alike, not alike, equivalent, mutually exclusive, opposed, or complimentary, in the view of the person whose Mind you are working in. Establishing a relation this way costs a point, and players are encouraged to come up with their own relations and suggest them to the DM.
This process can lead to serious personality changes and the working through of violent contradictions. The DM is encouraged to give a Citizen broad leeway when interpreting images for this purpose: a sunrise might stand in for a birth, a night sky for death, a rose for repetition, a face for a specific face, and so on. Any changes will occur to the affected party as though they were the natural and reasonable products of their own thinking.
Inside the mind, the instantiated avatar is itself an image, provided that it can see itself. It is always an image of the subject whose Mind you are working on, or of you yourself, the Citizen, and is the only image that can be interpreted as either of these two things. As a general rule, the avatar cannot see itself without mechanical assistance (by mirrors etc.).
In addition, specific rooms marked with images have the following effects:
- If the room corresponds to a mental stat, the Citizen of the White City can declare before the roll that a check or save made using that stat is +/- x, where x is the number of rooms marked with images. If ALL of the rooms that correspond to a given mental stat are marked with images, and all these images can be 'seen' by the avatar, then the Citizen of the White City may instead choose whether the test is passed or failed, with no roll necessary.
- If the room corresponds to an HD, the Citizen of the White City may choose for that HD not to apply during combat. They can choose to do this when the combat is first joined, or when the effected person first takes damage, and HP will immediately rerolled at that moment (in rare cases this may result in more hp being rolled, which is intended). The person will feel something wrong, but will not know that the Citizen is responsible.
Note that the avatar itself does not move, change its POV, or meaningfully navigate the Mind that it is placed in. Every point spent in the process of working on a Mind changes a fixed set of spatial relations within that Mind - it can and should be represented by a diagram, which the player will be responsible for producing, which can be referred back to if in doubt of any particular effect, and which will need to be redrawn should another point be spent.
Postures of Critique
You may now spend a point to create a mirrored plane of any dimensions that you wish inside a Mind that you are working on. It reflects light perfectly.
In addition, you have +templates to to-hit and damage rolls against anyone with a visible image of you inside their Mind.
The Place of Abomination
You now gain a new point each morning for every Mind hosted by someone who trusts you. This point is lost if not spent before the next is generated from this template.
You may now spend a point to create a magic lantern - a machine that projects an image in a 90 degree cone and displays it on the first wall it hits. The room hosting the lantern counts as holding the image it projects, regardless of where the image actually lands.
If your avatar can see an image of you, and of the host of the Mind being worked on, you can choose to permanently sever any connection that they have to entities of any kind.
A Prototype
You can choose to give your avatars 360 degree vision or to turn all walls in all of your Minds transparent. You make this choice once, when you receive your D template, and it applies in perpetuity.
You can choose to become invisible or inaudible to anyone with a visible image of you inside their Mind.
Humans and other sentient beings capable of feeling fear must test CHAR to strike you in melee.
Special Gear
Intelligence Reports
For each report, ask your DM a question about the area that you find yourself in. They will give you a truthful answer, such as would be known by a well-informed local. You must spend all Intelligence Reports on campaign start, you cannot 'bank' them. Just say NO to unmarked packages.
I addition to your topographic map, you have (roll a d10):
- A map of the local waterways, wells, and faults that give access to the water table.
- A map of marked with local population densities, fertility, and life expectancy.
- A map of local petroleum deposits beneath the earth.
- A detailed and accurate map of local military forces and political alliances.
- A map that marks all local productive farmland.
- A map of local weather patterns, notated to cover the whole year.
- A map of food distribution hubs and logistics chains.
- A map that marks the names and locations of the 20 most influential people in the area.
- A map that marks the locations of all local concentrations of monetary wealth above 5000s.
- A Pragmatist's Map, a strange, swirling constellation of diagrams tracking flows and state-changes that are largely illegible to you, non-specialist that you are. When you study it it reminds you of home - if you do this for an hour, you heal 1 fear damage.
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