Seer (Action Greyhawk)
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| Greyhawk Action! |
Some people have the gift of second sight and can commune with the spirit world. Without seeking to use the powers of the spirits directly, like a Druid, the seers listens to the advice of the spirits and potentially develops a certain amount of personal power over them.
Action Traditions in Greyhawk
Traditions in Action are similar but broader than classes in Dungeons & Dragons; each tradition incorporates several similar classes. There is a bit of wiggle room within each tradition, but in general each has a specified origin, at least one mandatory method, and a list of recommended and prohibited forms and skills. No class in Dungeons and Dragons belong to this tradition, but it has been discussed at length in connection with the Vistani of Ravenloft and the Varisians of Golarion.
Powers
Seers have subtle powers of divination and charm. Some can fool the senses. They to a few forms and techniques; this is severe enough to qualify for the Incarnate limitation. Seers can only use powers that match a form and technique listed here.
Forms: Darkness, Death, Flux, Illusion, Magic, Spiritual, Mind, Time.
Techniques: Charm, Impress, Know, Maneuver, Ride.
Some seers have developed their abilities beyond this to frightening levels and can avoid taking the Incarnate limitation, but this is rare.
Origin
Methods
Attention
Your power draws attention. Your powers have side effects; they either have distinct and visible physical side effects or send shivers down the spines of people all around.
Limitation
Whenever you use your power, it is obvious to everyone within ten meters times the sum of your and their Mind attribute that something odd is happening. This does not spoil illusion or invisibility; people can tell something is happening, but not exactly what or where. It is likely to make them more wary, however. Characters of your origin can sense your power ten times as far away. For those related to you, this sense can extend all the way across the world.
Focus Condition
Trigger Action (Focus)
When others are watching you do power and their auras resonate with yours, your power increases. Whenever there are a dozen or more spectators who can see you use powers you can focus. Spectators are those who are not involved in the action - either because they were unaware of your presence before your power called their attention, or because they are bystanders.
Concentration
You are the linchpin of all your power; when you cease to concentrate your power dissipates. You cannot create power effects that continue to work when you are not paying attention to them.
Limitations
If you relax, fall asleep, or become unconscious all your power effects lapse. This includes any Inherent powers you have. Power effects end when a stance would normally end, such as when you are prevented from taking actions.
Focus Condition
Trigger Action (Focus)
Whenever you are not using any powers, including stances, you can focus.
Contagion
Contagion is the magical theorem of like attracts like. By manipulating a symbol, you can affect the real thing. You use this principle in all your power. Generally, it is sufficient to have rough substitutes; a person is symbolized with a small doll, a rock with his name on it or a rough image.
Limitation
You need your props in order to work power. These props are simple and easily improvised. You must also have some kind of link to your target; you usually arrange this by putting a name or symbol on a blank prop you are carrying. This takes no extra time, but requires that you have such a prop and an exact visual description of the target.
Focus Enabler
Inherent
You can use a Limit Break on those you have you have a personal object or former body part from; others are unaffected. Any such items you have against the target are consumed in use.
Costume
You have a special look you wear to work your power. This is distinctive, and marks you as odd; people in the know can learn things about your Tradition from it. It need not be a specific outfit, rather it is a range of outfits with some common and identifiable characteristic. The exact details vary, but specific colors, long robes, pointy hats, or embroidered signs and glyphs are standard. Variant costumes include extensive tattoos, nudity, a certain style of jewelry or accessories, or a very funky hairdo. If your costume includes a type of armor, you must wear that type of armor to count as being in costume, If it does not, you cannot wear armor while in costume.
If your costume is damage and worn, burned or otherwise mishandled it still works and is still recognizable.
Limitation
You must be in costume to work powers. Donning your costume is a basic action. It is possible to use powers while wearing the costume under other clothes, but this counts as a Disguise stunt.
Costume Focus
Focus
You can always focus at any time when in costume, but it costs you a Fortune point to do so.
Degeneration
Your powers derive from an secret innernature shocking to common sensibilities. As you use your powers, your power origin becomes shockingly obvious, making people shun and dread you. Typical examples are necromancers and demonologists turning into the monstrosities they control, androids losing their skin to expose the machinery below, or energies bleeding out in a frightening display.
Limitation
Degeneration is measured in points; each time you take a Hit, roll a snake eyes or boxcars, use a Finisher, or use a Limit Break result when using a power, you gain one degeneration point. All Charm checks (but not defense values) suffer a penalty equal to the number of degeneration points you have. When you have degeneration points equal to your Mind, you are no longer recognizably human (or whatever creature you normally look like); sensible people will run from you. In more tolerant settings, your degeneration becomes more disgusting so that they still break the mold of "normal" sufficiently to have you ostracized.
This is a side effect of your powers; it never prevents you from using your powers, except that powers cannot hide your degeneration and Charm powers suffer the penalties mentioned.
Degeneration points reset to zero each game session. Full degeneration can be overcome/adapted to given time and care; this usually only happens between stories or when you take a time out from adventuring, not at the end of each session.
Focus Condition
Trigger Action (Focus)
You can focus at will as your current degeneration points are less than your Mind. Doing so gives you a degeneration point.
Echoes
Echoes add chance to your powers, and this does not stop at the effects you produce consciously. This can be because your powers affects the world in a very fundamental way, a form of backlash, a result of your rampant subconscious, or simply the workings of blind chance.
Your powers are subject to chance and strange effects occur around you constantly. What these side effects are can vary from time to time or have a set theme, as decided when you take the limitation. They are often origin-based. Echoes manifest spontaneously and outside your control. They are noticeable, and can give people in the know information they would not otherwise have. Technological powers cause technological side effects, such as brownouts or glitches. Mystic powers have effects similar to the ones you produce yourself. Echoes are generally funny, in a sadistic kind of way; they never obstruct the story, but can create setbacks and hindrances for you and (rarely) your friends. They are a great plot device for the GM to use when you are taking too much camera time or are using your power for tasks that should be role-played.
You can suggest echoes, or your game master can invent them. If you invent funny and annoying echoes, the game master will probably go easy on you with his own. In either case, it is the game master that has the final word on what happens.
Limitation
Echoes makes small odd things occur around you, but this is mostly flavor, tough they can sometimes provide clues to enemies or distractions to you. When you use your powers in obvious ways, they manifest more strongly; on a Snakeyes roll when using obvious powers you suffer a Setback from your echoes. This Setback often mimics the power you were using, escalating or reversing it, or changing targets. As setbacks go, this is usually pretty mild.
Focus Condition
Focus
If you invent a creative echo, you can focus. Alternatively, you can ask the GM for an echo, in which case it might be slightly more severe for making him think one up on his feet. In either case, it is an unusually mild Setback and usually manifests at the end of the round - after you've had a chance to use a Limit Break.
Handicap
Blind seers and lame but magically powerful smiths are a staple of legends. This is also something the GM can impose temporarily on players, due to damage or other complications of limited duration. Perhament handicaps should be left for the player to decide.
You have some physical handicap that is tied to your power. Perhaps you developed your power to make up for the handicap, or it is a side effect of having acquired the power. You can even have several handicaps if you like. Some examples:
- Blind - Still has a general awareness of moving creatures within Mind meters.
- Deaf - You cannot hear spoken conversation and are easily surprised. The perception element of all your skills are equal to your Mind, but you can use the perception element normally with actions, including as an active defense.
- Lame - Prevent movement as a part of normal basic actions. On a full move action, you can take a normal move instead of a full move
- Crippled arms prevent most physical manipulation and the use of weapons and implements.
- Mute - Prevents mundane speech. Make sure to enforce this strictly.
- Albino - Highly sensitive to sunlight, imposing visual penalties and causing Hits with extended exposure. Looks spooky.
Limitation
The handicap does not limit your power, instead the handicap itself is limiting. Your powers develop at the price of your physical prowess.
Focus Condition
Focus
Whenever your handicap causes you acute problems, actual penalties, setbacks, or damage, you can focus. Willfully provoking your handicap does work, but the situation must actually cause you some penalty or discomfort. Using powers to overcome your handicap prevents you from using it to focus, but often powers will only negate part of the handicap, in which case you can still use the remainder to focus.
Brian is lame, but has the magical ability to hover. He needs to kick a fallen branch out of the way to clear a path for his friends. Since he cannot, he can focus, despite that Hover negates most of the penalties of being lame.
Loss of Control
You are channeling powers beyond your control: sometimes these powers take you over and force you to go wild. You must specify the nature of the power you are connecting to, as this will influence how you focus and what happens when you lose control. In general, this amounts to a specific vice; focusing means tickling this vice, loss of control is when you are overwhelmed.
The actions you do when you lose control can be nonsensical or even destructive. You lose sight of your normal goals and live out your vice in an immediate and direct way. Such actions can indirectly benefit your normal cause, but you pursue them beyond what is reasonable and productive.
Limitation
You risk losing control in certain situations, especially when doing things somehow relevant to the nature or source of your powers. When you roll Snakeyes on any task, the GM proposes an action your powers tries to force you to do. The GM can also make one such proposition of his own per scene. You can agree, and behave as suggested. In extreme cases, the GM might even take temporary control of your character. If you resist, you lose access to your powers for the rest of the scene.
Focus Condition
Focus
When doing the type of actions you do when you lose control, you can focus. This can either be because because you gave in to the GMs suggestion or because you came up with a course of action the GM agrees is in accordance with your vice. When you are taking the initiative and choose to skirt the danger, you have to continue to act out your vice until it plays itself out, or risk losing your powers.
Plausibility
Your powers work by controlling chance, manifesting as extreme luck or skillful use of available tools or other plausible plot elements. No obvious supernatural power on your part is involved. What is normal is based on the perceptions of the local populace; if intervention by faeries are everyday events where you are, you can camouflage your powers as such.
Limitation
Inherent
You cannot cause effects that clearly and observably violate the laws of nature in the setting or cause an effect outside of local technology. Having a technological gadget at hand can often enhance plausibility. Your powers can also seem to be the side effect of another power-user in the vicinity, as long as the effect is in line with what people expect such people to be able to to.
Focus Condition
Trigger Action (Focus, Combo)
You can focus at any time when you manage to cause a power effect that seem entirely reasonable and commonplace but still has a distinct and concrete effect on reality. Subtle effects do not count; only actions that other notice but assume to be natural events qualify. If you come up with a use of a Limit Break that would satisfy this condition, you can use this as a combo to enable you to use that Limit Break.
Seer
This is especially common for seers that have overcome the Incarnate limitation and can have the spirits affect physical reality in a limited way.
Power Secret
Hi-Mi-Tsu! - Xellos, the Mysterious priest, Slayers
You have some secret that must not become known. A magical secret can be almost anything. A technological secret is a wavelength, passcode or other sensitive data that is easily used. It can be nonsense, such as a particular number or the name of some higher being or your own secret name. It can be some fact about you, such as that you are a woman, your exact age or that you are the descendant of Zeus. It cannot be something people would ordinarily say; people will not accidentally blurt out your secret unless the GM is using this as a plot device.
It is possible to find your secret through research or investigation, but this is always an important story development and should have its own dangers and drama. You might intuitively feel when someone is close to discovering your secret, which often leads to dramatic confrontations at the point of discovery.
Anyone who finds out your secret can use it to blackmail you and to gain dominance over you, as you cannot effectively use your powers against them. If your secret ever becomes common knowledge, you are doomed. But this should never happen if you play your cards right; the GM can invoke this as a plot device, but as long as you play along, no villain would waste the hook he has on you by publishing your secret.
The Naming and Power Secret methods are linked; naming magicians often have their own name as their secret.
Limitation
Anyone stating this secret in your presence negates your powers for the rest of the scene.
Focus Condition
Focus
Whenever your secret is in immediate danger of being discovered or used, you can focus. This means that an involving secret is much more useful than an obtuse one.
Power Supply
You are dependent on an external supply of energy to work your powers. This could be an electric grid, the universal web of power, the stars being right, the mystic field of force that connects all life, or the attention and good will of a supernatural entity or god. This method tends to be universal; either everyone of a tradition uses it, or no-one does. This makes the method suitable for campaigns where mysterious and remote events dwarf the efforts of the heroes.
Limitations
When you are out of contact or favor with your power supply, your powers don't work. There might be means for others to disrupt this flow of power, but mostly its something between you and your supplier. Unlike similar methods, this supply is either turned on or off at a remote location; it is not something you can carry an inventory of and use as needed, though there might be ways of getting around it.
Focus Condition
Focus
Whenever you have been out of supply, your focus sharpens and you have an easier time focusing as your powers come back to you. This free focus lasts for about as long as the power interruption, measured in real-world time; if you were out of power for half a session, you can automatically focus for the remainder of the session.
Seer
This is commonly not a machine or natural phenomenon, but instead a circle of allies in the tribe.
Power Reserve
You have a reserve of inner power, called mana for supernatural powers and by some technical term such as battery or capacitors for technology. You can use this reserve to fuel your power, but when you have done so you become weak and need to restore your power reserve afterward.
Limitation
When you have used your power intensely, such as in a fight, you grow tired at the end of the scene. Once the fight is over, you cannot use powers until you have replenished your power; a short ritual taking about 15 minutes. Exactly what you do to recover power reserve depends on your power tradition; eating, meditation, prayer, reading, recharging capacitors or connecting to a power outlet are all examples. If there is a condition placed on your recovery that is out of your control, such as sunlight, use of a power outlet, or high wind, your recovery varies - it becomes 5 minutes with access to this recovery aid, 1 hour without the aid.
Focus Condition
Focus
You can focus at any time. The first use is safe. Roll 1d6 when you focus this way. If the result is lower than the number of times you used this method to focus this session, the power limitation of Power Reserve kicks in immediately.
Power Words
You focus your power in exclamations, battle cries, and sharp yells. It is not enough to mumble an arcane formula; you shout the name of your power, berate your target, and otherwise make a nuisance of yourself expressing your power.
Limitation
You cannot use your powers silently. Your words of power need to be audible over your surroundings; in a noisy place your powers themselves might roar. When using Power Words but not focusing, it is not obvious what specific power you are using, only that you are using powers.
Focus Condition
Focus
You must shout out what Limit Break you intend to use at the start of the round. You can only use this specific limit break this round.
Props
You use tools in your power; a variety of gizmos, diagrams, books, wands, sigils, dried insects, eye of newt, incense and so on. Depending on your tradition, your props have a theme: the props of a technomage are distinctly different than those of an alchemist.
Limitation
You cannot use your power without your props. You need to resupply or build new props during downtime; this is not generally a hassle, but can make for nice cut scenes. In an emergency, you can usually whip up the prop for a specific power with a little scrounging and a few minutes of work.
Focus Condition
Basic Action
You can focus by using your props, but it is a basic action instead of a trigger action, and you cannot move while using this action - tough you can still move later on.
Using props is pretty obvious, and stunts can be used to make you lose your props and thus the focus.
Talisman
You have some unique item you must have to work your power. Talismans are reasonably large and obvious, like a staff, diadem, dowsing pin, special hat, gizmo or whatever. Without it, you are powerless. Unlike props, this is one specific item. Your talisman is a signature item; it will not disappear unless there is some plot-driven reason for it to disappear, and customs officials and other bystanders will generally ignore it. But its function is always apparent to others of your tradition and to everyone once you start using it for obvious effects. Those in the know might try to take it away from you.
This focus can be either destructible or indestructible. If it is indestructible, it cannot be replaced; you MUST get your unique item back. If it is destructible, it is still tough and hard to destroy, but it can be damaged, and you can replace it.
It takes a Basic Action and a Know roll against your Dodge to identify a talisman for what it is, except when you use it to focus whereupon it becomes obvious.
Limitation
You suffer power loss when you are without your focus item.
Focus Condition
Trigger Action (Focus, Combo)
When your focus item is directly involved in a successful use of your power, such as if you strike with your staff or throw your power diadem, you can focus. You can even do this as a combo with your Limit Break if the Limit Break itself fulfills the condition. This involves a bit of risk; you call attention to your talisman and could potentially lose it.
Seer
Most commonly a crustal ball or set of cards.
Tantrism
Your power is fueled by sexuality, both your own and that of your targets.
Limitation
You must have regular sex to replenish your power. You must engage is some sexual activity each day (even if it is as modest as masturbation or sexual fantasies), and you must have a full-fleshed sexual encounter with a partner at least once a week.
Focus Condition
Focus
Whenever you manage to create sexual tension you can focus. If this is with a friend, it must be a sexual act or a noteworthy development in your relationship. If it is with an opponent, a successful sexually-themed stunt involving Charm or Presence is sufficient.
Trance
Your powers work best when you are in a trance, and you are aware even when asleep.
Limitation
When you use your powers, you enter a trance until your next shot comes up. You cannot use Trigger Actions while in this trance. You do not sleep. Instead you trance as above, and you can still act in this trance.
Focus Condition
Focus
You enter into a trance (as above) for the rest of the scene. You can break out of the trance trough conscious effort - a Basic Action.
Vow
You have taken an oath, and your power only works while you maintain this oath. Stricter vows are likely to interfere much more with your power, but also to grant many more opportunities to focus.
- Vow against killing
- Vow against violence
- Vow of abstinence (from drugs, eating meat, or similar)
- Vow of celibacy
- Vow of fasting
- Vow of forthrightness (no sneaking, approach problems head on)
- Vow of poverty (entrust your upkeep to others, handle no valuables)
- Vow of silence
- Vow of truth (no lying or deliberate deception; silence is acceptable)
You can stand by and watch others breaking the vow with no consequences for you, but in this case you cannot use your adherence to the vow to focus (see below) unless there was some personal stake or advantage you gave up.
Limitation
You must not have broken your vow recently to practice power. Willfully breaking the vow negates your power for a session, or longer for plot reasons. Breaking it because of coercion or necessity (and this might be frequent in case of such things as fasting) means you cannot use your powers for a scene.
Focus Condition
Focus
When your vow makes you behave in a way that is irrational or causes a loss in the long or short term, you can focus. This applies even if just one of these three conditions are met; taking a short-term disadvantage might well work out to a long-term advantage, but it still allows you to focus.