Blue Collar Necromancy: A World on the Edge

The Final War began when Princess Brunhilde of Diutisca was assassinated by an ant-royalist group receiving funding from the Union of Cassterides. Eventually the allies of both nations came to fight in the great war. Even the armies of Columba crossed the great western sea to fight in the war. During the war horrors were unleashed upon the world, weapons never before seen. The death toll was massive.

The war lasted for over a decade. it seemed as though it would never end. As the years went on each nation became more entrenched in their positions, physically and politically. It took a disaster on a scale beyond anything ever heard of before to end the war. The spell plague tore through Aurut and then the rest of the world. It killed one in three people. Rich and poor, noble and commoner, all were equal in the eyes of the plague.The plague did more than kill. It damaged the very fabric of reality. No one knew how to deal with this new problem. No one save the necromancers.

The necromancers had been working for centuries to defend the world from just such a threat. passing down the secrets of necromancy through families and apprenticeships, eventually forming a few loose organizations. Each had its own outlook and ideas on how best to deal with the nastiness they dealt with.The war and the resulting spell plague changed everything. So many people died so quickly and so many magical weapons where used that the very world became unbalanced. The dead rose in numbers unheard of. The families were overwhelmed.

Five years after the war the heads of the various families came together to discuss this trend in the world. After much discussion they decided to join together in order to best deal with the problems of the time. This is when the first alliance of necromancers was formed. As the years went by the alliance became something more, finally the necromancers had a way to negotiate with the more powerful Sorcerous Lineages. The Sorcerous Lineages and the Church, in turn, wish to break this alliance and go back to the old ways.


Before character creation you must first create the home office. The Home office is the central hub of necromantic activity within a given city. It has aspects and faces. This is where your characters will be working out of.

Aspects
Concept: this is like a characters high conceptexcept it is for the whole home office. Is the office respected? Is it well off? Does it struggle? what is the core concept of the home office? Remember the whole world is in the midst of a masive economic depression. The death toll of the Final War was so great that everyone lost someone, probably a whole bunch of someones. How do they feel about you putting the dead back down?
Trouble: again this is like the character's trouble aspect. What is the biggest issue with your home office? Do they lack political pull? Are they destitute? Are there far too many incedents or too few necromancers? Is there a rival firm of people who think that they can do the same job without any necromancy? Is the mob demanding protection money, or a percentage of your rackets?
Focus: the focus aspect is what your office is known for. Do you have a great library of forbidden books? Do you have an experimental weapons division? Does the church back your moves, even if only surreptitiously? perhaps you have access to friendly spirits that offer advice and give aid when they can? Basically what makes your office special?

Once you, as a group, have come up with a Home Office you need to come up with some faces for the office. One for each of the player characters and the head man. The players will each come up with a face that is related to the characters in someways(maybe literally as the necromancers tend to stick with family for their business). Come up with three aspects for each one: Relation, Function, Trouble. The GM will come up with the Head Man for the office, instead of relation he will have an aspect related to leading the group.

Relation: How is this NPC related to your character? Is he blood? Is she a new recruit? Does he hate you? Does she keep showing you up? Does he have a secret crush on you? Come up with an aspect that expresses this relationship.
Function: What is this Faces function within the office? Archivist? Weaponeer? Spirit Talker? Office supply guy? Public relations(such as they are, mostly they deal with the papers)?
Trouble: this is the same as trouble for the PCs. Come up with a way for this aspect to make the story more complicated at least once every other session.

Now you have the Home office fleshed out a bit, you can make characters. You have probaby been making parts of your characters as you went through this process, so just finish them up and get ready for action. Next post I will walk you through Character creation and the skill list.

Fate Core:Stress...what the hell?

Stress is not damage. It looks like damage. It acts like damage. But brother, damage it is not. Consequences are damage. Stress is just your ability to avoid permanent, or semi-permanent harm. I have been involved in a lot of conversations about what stress is, and what it is not. There are, essentially, two views on stress. On the one side stress is viewed as a type of damage. On the other it is not. I think I have established which side of the argument I fall under.

See the problem I have with stress being viewed as a type of damage is that it doesn't really behave like damage in a few key areas. It has no lasting effect. It is not immediately statistically relevant. It does not require any sort of recovery action. To me damage must have at least one of those factors to count as damage. I could be wrong. Hasn't happened yet, but there is always the possibility.


If stress isn't damage, what is it then? Stress is a pacing mechanic. Its the ticking clock that pushes conflict forward. It is also a damage mitigator. It is there to help the players avoid consequences. Here is where I tend to get into arguments with folks. They look at stress the other way around. They see consequences as a way to avoid stress. To me this is baffling. Why would the longer lasting issue be the mitigating factor?

This is the beauty of stress and consequences for me. it is a constant balancing act to keep you dancing around in pain and moving toward the end of the conflict. Conflict becomes a game of chicken. Which side concedes first? How bad do you want, or need, to win? This interplay makes every hit you take a choice between shortening the conflict(taking stress) or making your life harder(taking consequences).

Magi v001

I finished(sort of) the first pdf version of Magi. There are a lot of things that still need work. Think of this as a working play test document. To use this you will need to have access to the Fate Core rules. I would love to hear any feedback about this, either from reading and finding problems or from actually playing it(should you feel the urge to do that).

Anyway here is the pdf:




And here is an epub version: pdf version
Sorry about the quality, I can never get these things to turn out right, sorry.

Blue Collar Necromancy: Things That Go Bump

The gods are dead. This is what the Church says. They died to save all of man from The Great Unchanged. Two thousand years ago the skies grew dark and the earth shook and The Unchanged have troubled man directly no longer. Occasionally they shift in their endless sleep and the horrors rise for a brief time. The gods have not been heard from since the time of the Shadowing. The Church Says the gods are dead.

The world,though no longer troubled by The Great Unchanged, is still troubled by forces from outside the universe. The dead, undead, and the half dead hunger for the flesh of the living. Horrors, fragments of the dreams of The Unchanged, seek bodies to inhabit. They hope to wake the sleeping Unchanged, to return the world to its proper state. This is what the necromancers face, the dark tide rising evermore each year since the end of the Final War.

The Restless Dead: When Aether becomes unbalanced with the world around it it tends to focus on points of great human emotion. Negative emotions draw it more than others, no one is sure why, though most people in the know have an opinion. This means that funerals, murders, and suicides tend to be lightning rods for Aether imbalance. When all that emotion builds up it can draw a piece of the soul off and create a ghost. The greater the emotion(the more people feeling it) the more powerful and unbalanced the ghost or spirit. Is the ghost the actual soul of the dead? The Church's position is that they are not. Though there has been quite a bit of debate on the subject.

The Hungry Dead: Sometimes a burial goes wrong. Sometimes a body is not properly destroyed in fire and salt. Sometimes the subtle humors of the body remain after the soul has passed. When this happens the hungry dead rise. Their is nothing left of the soul, only the desires of the flesh remain. The simplest of the hungry dead are the Zombi. They seek out the flesh of the living. No one really knows why, but it is always thus. Those few that survive(if that is the correct term) long enough go through a transformation. They become a Guhl. Faster, stronger, and more cunning, the Guhls hunt actively for prey. Should there be enough Aether around to draw it in, a spirit or Horror can inhabit the Guhl, granting it powers and intelligence and enhancing its appetites. These flesh eaters are often able to interact with the world and even gain access to the halls of power. Beware the Horror infested Guhl.

The Great Unchanged:  Before Man was, before the gods were, before the world was...something. Beings so old and powerful that their very nature altered the universe around them. The story is that they created the gods, who in turn created the world of man. The story goes that the gods fought an endless war with The Great Unchanged. Two thousand years ago the gods sacrificed themselves to put the Great Unchanged to eternal sleep. That is what the Church says. No one knows for sure.

The Half Dead: When a mortal Alchemist or Sorcerer tries to gain life eternal, only bad things can come of it. No one has successfully created The philosopher's stone or Ambrosia, the two suspected ways to immortality. When they try, something else happens. A change is wrought in the practitioner. An exchange must be made, A life for a life. At least at first. As time goes by the now damned person must kill more and more to continue their existence. The magics involved are so alien that they will slowly drive the users mad, shatter their soul. Shatter it enough for something else to inhabit the body. This is where Vampires, Werewolves, Mummies, and the like come from. Experiments in immortality always fail. When they fail, people die.

Necromancy

Necromancy is a skill. All you need to have access to it is study and place it in your skill pyramid. Oddly enough some of the best monster hunters, while part of a necromancer family, do not have the necromancy skill. Necromancy is, at heart, the ability to deal with horrible things from outside the normal universe. Primarily the undead and the restless dead. Dead is dead and should remain so. Other things reside outside the universe, some will trade information with the necromancers, and some are just pests to be kept out.

Overcome obstacle: Used primarily for gathering information. either through folk knowledge of the undead and the outsiders, as well as interacting with the strange contracts of spirits and demons.
Create advantage: When one needs to figure out the weakness of a monster or to set up a ritual circle or implement that will aid in dealing with a spirit, demon, undead, or tear in the universe.
Attack: Cannot be used to attack directly.
Defend: Cannot defend directly.

Fate Points Episode 2: White Picket Witches

Yesterday +Stacey Chancellor and I had our second episode of Fate Points. We interviewed +Filamena Young author of White Picket Witches. After some technical difficulties we got going, and I must say I thing this went swimmingly. Here is the recording in case you all missed it first go 'round. Also I would like to take a moment to let you all know that we are having +Jason Morningstar on the show to discuss Fire Fight, very exciting!

Blue Collar Necromancy

Its just a job, dealing with this stuff. The High and Mighty talk all day about High Sorcery and Holy Alchemy, but when things go wrong, the necromancers come in to fix the problem. There ain't no theory in necromancy, it is practical know-how that matters. All the book learnin' in the world won't save you from the eldritch horrors and their minions. It's a dirty job. Its our job.

I was listening to Backseat Producers the other day and they were discussing The Hobbit. During the course of conversation Adam said something about, "Blue Collar Necromancy." That phrase made me stop and focus. I really wanted to do something with it so I got to thinking about it and after discussing it a bit and writing for a while, the next bit is what came out.

A History of the Modern Problem

Necromancy, also known as Black Magic or Low Magic. Three hundred years ago it was unknown. Magic was the purview of gods, demons, and the great unchanged things that spawned them. Then came the first Sorcerer, Gretta the great. She discovered the secrets to manipulating Aether, the breath of the gods. This led directly to the first Lineage. At around the same time a man named Christophe Victorine left the Hermetic Order and wrote Une étude de l'âme de la Matière. This book set down the precepts of alchemy and how it related to mans place in the universe. The Church destroyed all copies of the book save for those they controlled. This was the beginning of Holy Alchemy, and the search for eternal life.

Necromancy had always been the magic of the common man. Anyone could learn it. Anyone could do it. At its core it is simple, sacrifice. Give something to gain something. It deals with communing with spirits, reading the future, and the transition from life to death. It is simple magic, dirty magic. It has nowhere near the versatility or power of High Sorcery or Holy Alchemy. What does have is speed and ease of use. It is passed down through families who specialized in it since before the rise of the Sorcerer Queens. Back before the discovery of Sorcery, necromancy was all their was, and the god-talkers where its masters. Holy men and confidence men they ruled in all but name over the thousand city states. They stood between man and forces far outside their ken.

The necromancers still stand in that breach. Though their is no glory in it anymore. Sorcery and Alchemy have brought forth wonders to the world. Together they created Odiceen, congealed power pulled from living things. Generally they use trees as the age of the living thing can enhance the power of the end product. Odiceen has allowed for massive ships powered by engines to cross the great oceans in days rather than weeks. Automobiles and artificial light allow for massive cities and industrialization. It was an age of wonder and riches, until the War. The Final War, as some with a poetic bent might say, changed everything. It destroyed economies, and blasted apart borders taht ha lasted for centuries. 

The War ended ten years ago. It was the Spell-plague that ended it. all sides in the war where playing with forces far outside of their ability to control. Eventually something(or things) went wrong. The Spell-Plague was the result. One in three died from it, worldwide. of the survivors many were made sterile or horribly disfigured. The world was on fire from the funeral pyres. It attacked noble and commoner alike. Through all of this the forces of nature became far more unbalanced than at any time in history. 

The hungry dead rose to torment and feed upon the living. The bodies of the slain sleep walked through the last actions of their life. Strange things from beyond the world roamed free. It was too much for the existing necromancer to handle on their own as they had before. They were forced to gather together and form a union of sorts. A group dedicating to dealing with those things no one else wished to deal with. Know this, it is the year 1937 on the Holy Calendar, and things are not as they should be. A darkness walks the land, corrupting or destroying all it touches. Few in power care about it, or even acknowledge its existence. Those that do pay us to deal with the demons, the undead, and the restless dead. We are necromancers, and we do the dirty business other refuse to.

So there you have it. The back story of the game. I would love to hear what you all think of it. I will be working on the mechanical bits and adding more setting details and NPCs to the game.

Bad day

Today, something horrible happened today. Horrible. Also today was the first night of my show. So there I am trying to hold together my crumbling inner self while smiling and glad-handing at the post show party. Containing the emotion is causing an actual physical reaction, nasuea and a headache to rival any I have ever faced. I am holding back the shacking and the crying and the gnashing of teeth. This was supposed to be a happy day, a good day. Now all is ashes and dust. I can't express...I-I don't know. That's all I can say to those few who know what happened today.

They say, "How are you doing?"

I say, "I don't know."

Over and over again this will happen in the next few weeks, maybe for the rest of my life. The rest of my life. Around it goes in my mind, over and over. Why? Why? WHY! There is an answer? If there is I don't see it. This is stream of consciousness writing I don't-I don't suppose you will understand. Be glad you do not. I just cannot express. All is just shards of pain floating in my chest. Ripping. Tearing. Shredding. I am hollow. I am sorry. I am sorry. nothing makes sense anymore. I just don't know.