Animal Powers (FiD)

Animals are an important part of mystic experience.

The entire domain of living creatures is governed by the animal power. Humans and other social folk are a special case, governed by Mind instead, and plants are not animals, but other than that, all natural creatures are considered animals.

You will often have a particular animal, and your relation to other animals is colored by the totem. Wolf totem is respected and feared by other animals, sheep totem is liked and regarded as harmless, and so on.

Animal attacks create phantom animal features such as teeth, claws, antlers, or horns to attack with. You can do things like grab, tackle, or knock back.

Animal spirits exist with all kinds of weird powers, often reminiscent of tribal society myths. Naturally animal creatures include all natural animals, including those that can be affected by elemental powers by virtue of living in that element. Animals with power abilities related to other powers are tied to that power, not the animal power.

Animal Power Effects Table

Action	Basic No minimum 3 Stress	Advanced Minimum 2 Dice 5 Stress	Master Minimum 4 Dice 7 Stress	Apex Minimum 6 Dice 13 Stress
Attune	Wild Watch Detect Animal powers and animals with powers.	Wild Ward Dismiss animals. End Animal powers.	Wild Wrangling Summon animals and animal spirits.	Wild Window You can create a portal that allows travel to and from the animal spirit realm.
Command	Beast Command Command animals. They understand you but you don't understand them.	Beast Master Crew can communicate with animals. Command animals to act as if trained.	Animal Authority Commands to animals as if you were their alpha.	Enslave Animals Permanently bind creatures to service.
Consort	Animal Mask Gain cosmetic animal traits to mask your identity or create a fabulous look.	Animal Shape Assume animal form or human-animal hybrid form.	Animal Transformation You can use Animal Shape on a willing or helpless creature.	Wild Hunt Transform a number of willing or non-sentient creatures and give them a simple instruction.
Finesse	Beastly Bridle Ride any animal or animal-powered vehicle, as if trained.	Fine Claw A fine and potent close-range attack. Give crew Beastly Bridle.	Control Animal Control an animal like a string puppet.	Storm of Fangs A storm of fangs, suppressing scale.
Hunt	Scent Seeker Track by scent, similar to a well-trained tracking dog.	Beast Bolt Flying fangs, similar in effect to a fine and potent rifle.	Annoy Animal You can irritate animals, causing them to buck and make noise.	Beastly Barrage Attack like fine and potent grenade.
Prowl	Camouflage Assume the camouflage pattern of an animal, hide where that animal could.	Beast Stride Use the movement of animals. Move through herds or packs of animals.	Pack Prowl Bring crew when you use Camouflage and Beast Stride.	Roaming You and allies teleport from one animal den to another.
Skirmish	Ravage Close-range attack, similar in effect to a melee weapon or pistol.	Potent Ravage Ravage, except the attack is fine and potent.	Pack Attack Create distractions that prevents scale.	Onslaught Attack all enemies in an area.
Study	Animal Analyze You can identify animals and objects relating to animals.	Animal Lore Learn the powers and abilities of something you analyze with Animal Analyze.	Pedigree Read past events of an animal or animal product.	Omniscience Animal Lore in a wide area, then Pedigree on chosen targets.
Survey	Sense Animal Sense animals and animal remains at a distance. Gain the senses of a chosen animal.	Beast Perception Tap into the perception of an animal you know is there and perceive as if you were that animal.	Pet Perception Choose a location or creature. You gain Beast Perception at the nearest animal.	Wild Sense You perceive from all animals over a wide area.
Sway	Read Animal Understand animal motives and what they are about to do and to avoid provoking them.	Animal Tunges Your crew can communicate with animals. Influence folk to be lustful and competitive.	Program Animal Post suggestions in the mind of an animal.	Domesticate Permanently change the personality and motivations of animals.
Tinker	Animal Crafts Work animal products as if you had the appropriate tools and protective devices.	Animal Shaping You can shape materials that manifest your power as if they were of clay.	Beastcraft Create objects made from animal parts out of nothing, or transform an object from one material to another.	Wild Fabrication Similar to Beastcraft, but you mass produce objects or make something large, such as a vehicle or building.
Wreck	Mangle Jimmy organic materials that animals could destroy. Noisy and leaves a twisted remains.	Decompose Apply the effect of reducers like bacteria and insects like woodworms. Slow but powerful.	Wildwarp Decompose or Mangle, but destroyed targets silently disappear or are reduced to a fine dust.	Infestation Decompose or Mangle over a large area. This can do massive destruction over time.

Expanded Animal Powers

Connect with the natural world and harness the power of animals for various purposes.

Attune

Harness the power of Attune to perceive and manipulate supernatural energies, allowing you to detect and interact with beings and phenomena from other planes of existence.

The consequences usually depends on what happens around you when you do it. Having helpers and bodyguards reduces the consequences, and sometimes a creature wants to be dismissed and the consequence might be that it loses control of itself, or that other creatures appear to intervene.

Wild Watch Detect Animal powers and animals with powers.

This is usually done to spot a disguised summoned creature. However, it can also help identify a creature's connection to powers, providing valuable insights into their nature. Limited effect suffices against a creature you can clearly see. You need greater effect against against a creature that is hidden (standard effect) or behind a wall (great effect).

Wild Ward Dismiss animals. End Animal powers.

Dismissing a creature is hard and usually requires great effect. A creature that has been wounded or otherwise weakened only needs standard effect. A creature that wants to be dismissed requires only limited effect.

Dispelling is usually easier. You can dispel Animal effects and powers that affect animals.

Dispelling is often used as a setup action to help another character in a situation when the opposition is using powers. This improves the position of the supported action. It can be used as a defense against others' use of power, or it can be used to break the continuing effects of powers.

When used directly, the effect is usually limited unless the opponent is relying on powers for their safety. Against an opponent that uses Animal wings to fly or turned into a fish to breathe underwater you can have a better effect.

When dramatically appropriate that a power is hard to dispel, often because it is the crux of the situation, this will not negate the power but instead give you a clue to what you need to do to resolve the situation.

Wild Wrangling Summon animals and animal spirits.

Summoning can bring you allies to fight or labor for you, giving you scale. Summons can use simple effects of their power and maintain power effects you have created.

You must know what you are to summon. In general, you can summon generic creatures one tier lower than yourself without having to do a flashback. Such a creature is similar to a gang member in ability and are often summoned in groups to add scale.

To summon a particular creature, similar to a cohort, you need its unique identity, often called true name in the mystical power traditions. For a technomancer this would be a type id number, a blueprint, or a block of data. Learning about the right creature to summon is a task in its own right, often requiring a flashback or downtime activity to use Command, Consort, Study, or Sway to gain information.

It might be worth the extra effort to summon a creature of higher tier, but this is also much more demanding, using the usual rules for tiers.

You can summon include mundane animals, but may if they exist in the setting you can also summon animals with powers. These include beasts like unicorns and dragons, which can have a wide range of powers. Animals with powers resemble normal creatures, having a biological body, metabolism, and functioning as ordinary living creatures but also some exceptional abilities related to their power. A fire dragon is impossibly large, flies, and breathes fire. An air turtle hovers and can grow to massive size, to the point where a city can be built on top of them. And so on. This makes animal summons very versatile, the limit is that animals are not intelligent or capable of speech. In order to summon an intelligent animal you need to also know the Mind power.

Not all animals with powers are summonable or dismissible, many are native to this world and have no special vulnerability to Attune power effects.

Depending on your degree of effect the creature is willing to do different things. Limited effect allows you to demand a service that aligns with the animal's nature. A beaver will cut down trees, a horse will carry riders or pull loads, a predator will hunt. Standard effect allows you to ask for any service not alien to the animal. Great effect allows actions any action that does not require intelligence.

Typical consequences are: The creature strikes out at you once. A tightwire struggle to keep the creature under control The creature breaks things around you, demands concessions from you. The creature deliberately does its tasks poorly. It challenges you and will obey if put in its place.

Offering a creature appropriate food can make the position controlled, with consequences like half-heated efforts, demanding not to be summoned again until some time or event has passed, or just general sulkiness.

Wild Window You can create a portal that allows travel to and from the animal spirit realm.

This is situational, but can be vital in exceptional circumstances. There are things that are possible to do on these planes that are not allowed in the regular world, most effects are reduced one step in difficulty, from advanced to basic, master to advanced, and apex to master. This opens the possibility of new super-apex powers that have to be negotiated with the game master. Such effects rarely reach outside the plane where you perform them, but if they affect creatures on that plane, the effect may remain when you return to the mundane world.

Gating can allow access to creatures too powerful to summon, so you instead ask for an audience. The creature may then use the gate to come to you, call you into its presence, or just communicate with you. Unlike animals you summon, these are often intelligent.

Using a gate is often played out as a score, which means there is an engagement roll. Depending on how quickly the matter is resolved, the game master may require a separate use of the power to return home again. However if you do this in a scene that is dangerous, such as asking for help against an enemy too powerful for you to defeat, the position is usually much worse. Once you have established a connection to a certain place or audience with a certain creature, you can usually do so again from a controlled position.

Command

Beast Command Command animals. They understand you but you don't understand them.

Beast Master Crew can communicate with animals. Command animals to act as if trained.

Animal Authority Commands to animals as if you were their alpha.

Enslave Animals Permanently bind creatures to service.

Consort

Animal Mask Gain cosmetic animal traits to mask your identity or create a fabulous look.

Animal Shape Assume animal form or human-animal hybrid form.

Animal Transformation You can use Animal Shape on a willing or helpless creature.

Wild Hunt Transform a number of willing or non-sentient creatures and give them a simple instruction.

Finesse

Beastly Bridle Ride any animal or animal-powered vehicle, as if trained.

Fine Claw A fine and potent close-range attack. Give crew Beastly Bridle.

Control Animal Control an animal like a string puppet.

Control an animal like a string puppet. If the animal trusts you, this control is very fine indeed.

Storm of Fangs A storm of fangs, suppressing scale.

Hunt

Scent Seeker Track by scent, similar to a well-trained tracking dog.

Beast Bolt Flying fangs, similar in effect to a fine and potent rifle.

Annoy Animal You can irritate animals, causing them to buck and make noise.

Beastly Barrage Attack like a fine and potent grenade.

Prowl

Camouflage Assume the camouflage pattern of an animal, hide where that animal could.

Beast Stride Use the movement of animals. Move through herds or packs of animals.

Pack Prowl Bring crew when you use Camouflage and Beast Stride.

Roaming You and allies teleport from one animal den to another.

Skirmish

Ravage Close-range attack, similar in effect to a melee weapon or pistol.

Potent Ravage Ravage, except the attack is fine and potent.

Pack Attack Create distractions that prevent scale.

Onslaught Attack all enemies in an area.

Study

Animal Analyze You can identify animals and objects relating to animals.

Animal Lore Learn the powers and abilities of something you analyze with Animal Analyze.

Pedigree Read past events of an animal or animal product.

Omniscience Animal Lore in a wide area, then Pedigree on chosen targets.

Survey

Sense Animal Sense animals and animal remains at a distance. Gain the senses of a chosen animal.

Beast Perception Tap into the perception of an animal you know is there and perceive as if you were that animal.

Tap into the perception of an animal you know is there and perceive as if you were at that animal. A dog's perception focuses on scent, a cat's on hearing and the ability see motion even in the dark, and so on.

Pet Perception Choose a location or creature. You gain Beast Perception at the nearest animal.

Wild Sense You perceive from all animals over a wide area.

Sway

Read Animal Understand animal motives and what they are about to do and to avoid provoking them.

Animal Tunges Your crew can communicate with animals. Influence folk to be lustful and competitive.

Program Animal Post suggestions in the mind of an animal.

Post suggestions in the mind of an animal, which will be triggered under conditions you specify. Common suggestions are to steal something, attack someone, or ignore some event. This is a subtle power, but easier to spot once triggered.

Domesticate Permanently change the personality and motivations of animals.

Tinker

Animal Crafts Work animal products as if you had the appropriate tools and protective devices.

Work animal products like leather, bone, teeth, sinew, and horn as if you had the appropriate tools and protective devices. Items you work with can have small parts made of other materials, such as metal eyelets or synthetic thread.

Animal Shaping You can shape materials that manifest your power as if they were of clay.

Beastcraft Create objects made from animal parts out of nothing, or transform an object from one material to another.

You can create objects made from animal parts out of nothing, or transform an object from one material to another as long as you know the power required for both the starting and final form. This can create complex tools, such as fine and potent items.

Wild Fabrication Similar to Beastcraft, but you mass produce objects or make something large, such as a vehicle or building.

Wreck

Mangle Jimmy organic materials that animals could destroy. Noisy and leaves a twisted remains.

Decompose Apply the effect of reducers like bacteria and insects like woodworms. Slow but powerful.

Wildwarp Decompose or Mangle, but destroyed targets silently disappear or are reduced to a fine dust.

Infestation Decompose or Mangle over a large area. This can do massive destruction over time.