Cantrips (Action)

Heroic Action Role-Play

This is the inherent abilities of each Form, collected in one list to help in form selection.

Air Cantrips

Basic Action

You can cause local currents in air, causing paper, dry leaves, dust, and curtains to billow and move, cause a cool breeze, and create a draft or move a small cloud. You cannot effect more than a small room full of air (approximately 100 cubic meters). You can create luminescent mist that drifts about and glows.

Animal Cantrips

Basic Action

You can send one basic request or order to an animal in non-verbal form. The animal is likely to obey but quickly forgets complex orders. You can tell the health, kind, and sex of an animal you touch. You can cause animals to glow, giving them a ghostly appearance, outlining a particular creature or part of an animal, and providing dim light.

Chi Cantrips

Basic Action

Chi allows great body control and awareness. It can be used to allow normally impossible body control, such as contortion, immobile levitation, suspended body functions, controlling normal body functions such as hair growth and skin pigmentation, ignoring hunger and thirst, and overcoming common cold and the frailties of age. It also allows an awareness of the body posture of others, giving insights into their powers, particularly Melee and Chi powers.

Dark Cantrips

Basic Action

You can create small blobs of free-floating darkness, similar to puffs of dark smoke but wholly insubstantial. You can darken the color of objects and deepen areas of shadow. You can create shifting patterns in shadows and darkness, giving the illusion of movement or faint light. These effects are limited to one cubic meter of space.

Death Cantrips

Basic Action

You can tell when and how a creature died by touch. You do not learn details, only general information such as if the creature died by violence or disease. You can read the emotional state a creature died in if it died no more than a Mind roll hours ago. You can cause corpses to move depending on its size; a dead insect can move around freely, a dead human only twitch slightly or slowly move a body part, such as a hand. You can temporarily render a creature or plant infertile. You can make dead tissue glow, using such remains for illumination, this includes the nails and hair of living creatures. You can chill dead flesh a few degrees and prevent decay by killing microbes, fungi and other reducers.

Earth Cantrips

Basic Action

You can cause small amounts of pebbles, gravel, or sand to move, possibly weakening larger structures over time. You can affect the balance of a precariously placed stone. You can sense fault lines inside a solid object you touch, which can help in stonecutting, to evaluate, or to find fault lines or secret compartments. You can polish and spruce up stone, bringing out any pattern it might hold. You can cause crystal and reflective facets of stone to glimmer and actually glow strongly enough to illuminate an area.

Electricity Cantrips

Basic Action

You can recharge batteries, power minor electrical devices, send little harmless sparks, or create an arc light - typically between your fingers. You can sense electric current or charge, even behind isolators.

Fire Cantrips

Basic Action

You can light and snuff out candles and small flames. You can create a free-floating flame, which will provide heat and light. This flame can float up to Mind meters away from you and be used as a match to light combustible materials. You can alter the color of flames and cause them to shine bright or dim.

Flux Cantrips

Basic Action

You can control small random events, like the roll of dice. You can cause small disorderly mishaps, such as making a precariously balanced object tip. You can accelerate wear and decay, making worn items break. You can cause random sparks and puffs of light to burst forth to provide erratic illumination.

Force Cantrips

Basic Action

You can do minor telekinesis, slowly and jerkily levitating objects weighing up to a kilogram within Mind meters of you.

Gifts Cantrips

Basic Action

You can make your eyes (or other significant part of your anatomy) glow, providing illumination for a scene or until you use this power again to shut the light off.

You can detect if someone else is a power-user as soon as you sense them. As you get within Mind meters, you can compare one of your own skills to that of another power user, noticing if they are stronger, within 1 point of you, or weaker than you. The result is quite obvious and instinctively understood by all onlookers. It is brusque but not rude, like two beasts evaluating each other for dominance. It can be repeated for different skills. Often used to establish a dominance chain between monsters and sometimes between other gifted. A creature can pretend to be weaker than they are to fool you with an opposed Charm check.

Ice Cantrips

Basic Action

You can create hoarfrost, tiny cold spells, or a light mist in a cubic meter. You can freeze ice cubes, water, or organic material of up to a kilo. You can cool air and chill drinks . You can extinguish candles and kill small plants. You can cause ice to glitter and glow, or to display faint images as if reflected in the ice.

Illusion Cantrips

Basic Action

You can change the color of objects. You can create translucent free-floating images and animate them by concentrating. These effects are limited to one cubic meter. You can change ambient lightning, sounds, and small visual details altering the atmosphere and level of illumination of a person, room, or other small area. You cannot create complete darkness or blinding light.

Life Cantrips

Basic Action

You can tell the health of a living creature by touch, diagnosing illness and ailments. You can relieve pain. You can make blood and living tissue glow, using it as a ghastly source of illumination or to outline blood vessels, bleeding, infection, or other localized medical phenomena.

Light Cantrips

Basic Action

You can create a light of any color in the area within Mind meters from you. You can make this solidly illuminated, or create bright spotlight effects at certain points.

Magic Cantrips

Basic Action

You can detect Magic powers out to a range of a Know roll and other Powers and Items by touch. You can create free-floating glowing runes, glyphs, or symbols out of thin air; these can be used as a chalkboard or to provide dim illumination.

Metal Cantrips

Basic Action

You can change the elasticity of metal objects, making small metal objects soft and bendable, elastic like springs, or stiff and inert. Such changes only last while you hold the object. You can turn ferrous metals into magnets or demagnetize them. You can sharpen edges and cause metals to tarnish or give them a polish. You can cause metal to glitter and actually glow, creating ghostly illumination or pointing out particular parts of a large metal object.

Mind Cantrips

Basic Action

You can telepathically transmit a simple image or short sentence and read similar thoughts in others if they concentrate on transmitting them. This will not transcend language barriers, but you can use non-verbalized message for simple communication even without a common language. The range is your Mind in meters.

Order Cantrips

Basic Action

You can avoid chance, making worn objects last, longer or making a die or coin spin without falling on any of its faces. You can calculate odds on simple events, such as dice or cards. You can spot the weakest part in a mechanical structure. You have true pitch and can tell the frequency of sound (tough you may express it in less technical terms). You can keep an exact pace or beat, like a metronome.

Plant Cantrips

Basic Action

You can instruct a living plant to do something it is capable of doing - usually limited to such things as unseasonal growth, flowering, or turning to face a certain direction. You can tell the health and kind of a plant by touch. You can make plants grow as much as they normally do in one week of growing season. Over time this can be used to grow plants into unusual and useful shapes. If you use these powers more than once per day on a particular plant or in a way that leaves the plant out of its seasonal rhythm, it may die. You can cause plants and plant matter (including dead wood) to glow, outlining certain parts and providing ghostly illumination.

Psi Cantrips

Basic Action

A psychic can sense masses of minds and the emotions they undergo. This can be used to sense places of habitation or population concentrations over long distances. A psychic can also tell the general mood and feelings of a group of people this way. Creatures with developed psychic powers (those using the Psi origin) potentially register much more strongly, but also learn to shield themselves. You can sense them when they actually use psychic powers or if they are closely linked to you by friendship or blood.

Space Cantrips

You know your exact movement as long as you can perceive your surroundings. You can teleport wallet-sized objects to and from a location within 10 cm of your body, but it is a stunt to do so accurately or unobtrusively. You magnify your vision to emulate a normal telescope or microscope.

Spiritual Cantrips

Basic Action

You can project an air spirituality, making it obvious to others that you are a spiritual person. This does not insure a positive reaction, and might have the opposite effect on enemies of your brand of spirituality. You can detect those who share your faith and ideals, but this can be faked by a good charlatan. You can sense the presence of Principles and Creatures relevant to the Forms you know.

Technological Cantrips

Basic Action

You can figure out the workings of a technological device, understanding what it does and how to make it do it. You do not learn any special keys or passwords needed to bypass security, nor are you automatically skilled in using it. You can sense the power, efficiently, and degree of complexity of a technological device, evaluating it.

Time Cantrips

Basic Action

You can tell time, both subjective time and objective time, avoiding confusion caused by temporal disturbance. You can set a silent alarm to alert you at a specific future time. You can time an event in the world around you. You can sense temporal disturbances out to Mind x 10 meters away.

Water Cantrips

Basic Action

You can cause currents in a volume of water no more than one cubic meter. You can remove particles from water, making it clean of solid impurities, but you cannot affect solutions or desalinate. You can collect moisture out of the air, creating small amounts of water. You can manipulate up to one liter of water, causing it to run in unusual ways or separate it from other substances, drying them or separating mixed liquids. You can make liquids glow, providing illumination and highlighting different parts or layers of a liquid.