Exquisite CΔrpse: Ochrana Ossis

I present to you Exquisite CΔrpse 4. This one has the gimmick that each participant is writng not a full delta, but half of one. The delta's requirement is written by the first person listed, the effect is by the second. Except for GRIM CHALLENGER, Universal Constant and Uncrowned, all other names were made by me after the fact. The participants in this one are AntiTime, semiurge, Robot_Face, Blattella, Bad Doctor, BOROSILICATE_IVY, choiroffire, nayba and MystralianCryatist.

Ochrana Ossis

Despite the best efforts of the Church, various heresies, secret societies and mystery cults hide within the cracks of society like weeds. The most difficult ones to get rid of are not the worshippers of chaos, but those who are the rightful agents of Law. 

The Ochrana Ossis believes that for a just society, lesser creatures must be controlled by greater ones. Thus no human is able to rule over other humans without it inevitably leading to corruption. Thus to be in charge one must make themselves a creature greater than human.

They will calmly ask you, what does it mean to be in control of a creature? Then calmly answer that to be in control means control what is most important about a creature. The thing that matters most to all creatures is to persist. Thus to control a creature one must be able to control its life. Thus to control a creature, one must kill it. Thus to control humans one must kill humans. It is not sufficient but it is a very important step. 

They will calmly ask you, how does one become a greater creature? Then calmly answer that it means to get rid is essential for a lesser creature and gain what is essential of a greater creature. Thus one must find a greater creature as a role model. They will calmly answer that this is a solved problem.

That greater creature, the patron spirit of the Ochrana Ossis, is the Octopus King. Humans have “bones” and the Octopus King does not. Humans break their “bones’ when they fall and the Octopus King does not. Thus Gravity can not kill the Octopus King. Thus the Octopus King is a greater creature than Gravity. Thus to be like the Octopus King, one must be greater than Gravity, greater than “bones”.

“Bones” are not only bones, they are also souls, social bonds, and bureaucratic infrastructure. Things that make humans rigid and connected. To be their master, one must be greater than them. “Bones” know this intuitively, they know that they should be mastered and if shown the way, will reveal how they must be controlled. This is solemn work, essential for a just society.

GRIM CHALLENGER (Blattella and BOROSILICATE_IVY)

Fashion a weapon from a person's bones, and with it slay somebody who knew them by name. Repeat the process once more with a weapon made from their bones.

You can now begin making a skeletal armory-network. 

Arrange your two starting weapon-implements in a way that best describes how bones and names conspire to hold people together. It's alright if you don't get it completely right the first time.

With some patience and luck, your fledgling network will begin to whisper. It will softly speak on many things. Mine likes to say that "names are just a skeleton for the mind", and "what is a friend but a bony finger". I've heard some that simply count to 206 over and over. 

Eventually, if you are patient, the network will give very good advice on how to kill people. Its advice will be limited at first. It can only speak about those who know the deceased in your network by name. But as you extend the armory-network with weapons like the first the network's advice will grow in confidence and accuracy. It will become more opinionated and less mobile. Be sure to add to it regularly.

Junior Privileges

To even consider earning Junior Privileges, one must first be a GRIM CHALLANGER.

Broken Hand Badge (Bad Doctor and choiroffire)

Ask your armory-network for direction and guidance each morning. Follow its advice even and especially when it would be easier not to. If you disobey it, break one of your own fingers. If you have ten broken fingers, you may use the fingers of other hands.

You can project an aura of cold authority commensurate with your duty. Your shadow grows longer, footfalls louder, and your stare grievous and fulgid. Law-abiding citizens will bow their heads as you pass by. When you have to make a decision for which your armory-network did not specifically prepare you, your aura becomes chaotic and frightening, scattering most lesser beings into hiding.

Weightfulness (nayba and Garinia)

Find one that speaks truth to power and silence them forever without creating a martyr

Find one that makes a joke of order and have them become the object of laughter instead

Find one that bends the law instead of executing it and have them meet the full force of the law

You have proven your worth to the law, and thus are granted the ability to supersede it to an extent. When you are acting on behalf of the law you are legally and metaphysically allowed to ignore gravity at your leasure.

Dark Water Precipice (semiurge and AntiTime)

Bring in a bounty target neither dead or alive, but somewhere in between or something else entirely

If somebody is under a bounty you can see their vital signs, like heart pumping in their chest or blood flowing through the veins. Due to that you can never kill such a person accidentally, or can roll with advantage if your aim is murder.

Shiftiness (Robot_Face and MystralianCryatist)

Follow someone for eight days and eight nights without them realizing you're watching them.

You’ve certainly proven yourself an able sneaker! Somehow, this seems to have given you a boost, as a curious change has occurred.

You have gained camouflaging abilities similar to an octopus.

Additionally, you gain 4 small arms (each capable of holding half the weight that a human-equivalent’s standard arm could) OR a prehensile tail, whichever would have been the most helpful during your endeavor!

SILOVICH (AntiTime and Bad Doctor)

Become truly, fully professional. Lock in. Remove your soul, emotions, attachments and personality. Keep them somewhere externally if you want, but you can't use any of the major deltas when you are under their influence.

With all this empty space inside you, you can now contain part or all of your network within yourself if you'd like. Sure, it jams up a little, sticks out between a set of ribs. But now all of your teeth are cyanide capsules and whenever someone follows your advice about who to kill and how they are rewarded disproportionately by the universe. Meet cutes, windfall inheritances, lottery tickets. If you give them one of your cyanide capsule teeth and they bite down on it after their mission is complete they will go straight to the tippy top heaven and they know this for an absolute bone deep fact. You can add any weapons they used to your network.

Senior Privileges

To attain Senior Privileges, one must set yourself above bone and become a SILOVICH.

True Order (semiurge and Robot_Face)

Compromise a major public figure - get killer blackmail on 'em, replace 'em with a shapeshifter, whatever - so long as they're yours. Make sure everyone in the community knows you've done it, and make sure everyone's too afraid to say it out loud.

In an area you control, or which you control de facto, like through a puppet/figurehead, you gain the ability to walk through walls unimpeded, as though they aren't there.

Universal Constant (choiroffire and semiurge)

Find the seven living people who contributed the most to your becoming who you are today. For most, these will be parents, mentors, and close friends. Find them, and inform them each in turn that they will die by your hand if they ever again acknowledge to anyone that you were once different, once lesser, than you are now. Mean it. Write down a plan to eliminate each one, and submit them.

Whenever anyone utters your name without using your full titles & honours, you know who it is, where they are, and gain control of their mouth for a round.

Respectful Silence (BOROSILICATE_IVY and nayba)

assemble a necklace of 16 tongues. Ideally they are from bureaucrats of ascending rank, but a bunch of self important louts can work in a pinch

Whenever you encounter a bureacrat of equal or lower rank than one of your trophies you may have that person be silenced as long as they are in your presence. Those around will perceive you as a replacement for the old authority.

Uncrowned (Garinia and MystralianCryatist)

There is a secret place where the first law was proclaimed and the final law will be whispered. Let gravity kill you at this location.

There are some laws that are not meant to be broken, and some places which are not meant to be profaned. Gravity forsook its oath, and must pay amends.

You have claimed the price for the broken oath which was Gravity’s. You can no longer be damaged by the landing at the end of falling; your strength and agility are enhanced as though you dwelled on a planet with gravity one third of your own, while those of your foes are reduced as if a thrice-strong planet bore down upon their shoulders. Finally, you can enact a limited telekinetic effect on any object five pounds or less at any time as though you were a mage or psychic. This is not supernatural, but a natural consequence of gravity acting to your will, ensuring that it can be used anywhere. With intense training, you could increase your weight or item amount limits.

My Mouth is Full of Dust (Class: Rogue)

I found this Cloak and Sword class while browsing some sketchy sites that probably gave me virus or two. Inexplicably from what I can find this class originated from the Horror supplement and has nothing to do with the Sanguine class despite fitting each other quite well.

Vampyr

Start with: Stylish but dated nobleman’s clothes, disguise kit and a rapier.

Spawn of Hell: Your Fertility type is I, and you may not rest on hollowed ground.

Guest of the Court: With a minute of preperation you can appear as a noble of high enough status to be allowed in any court but low enough that he won’t be the center of attention. This noble has +2 reaction with unsuspecting nobles and romantics. On entering this guise, you may choose to appear as either a frightfully handsome gentleman or an eerily beautiful lady, swapping virility and fertility as appropriate. This noble’s skin is so very pale.  This is not your true form.

Guest of the Woods: With a minute of preperation you can appear as a wolf of high enough status to be allowed in any inter-pack gathering but low enough that it won’t be the center of attention. This wolf has +2 reaction with unsuspecting wolves, -2 with peasants and -1 with common soldiers. On entering this guise, you may appear either as an unnervingly quiet stalker or a horrifically large beast, swapping virility and fertility as appropriate. This wolf’s fur is so very dark. This is not your true form.

La Mascarade: While you are in the guise of a guest, you can not be reached in a way that matters. You are immune to fear, Charm, Esprit, Love and death. However, you can mimic those things convincingly if you need to. When you would die, the guise merely gets destroyed and your true form is revealed, leaving you at 1 Elon.

The Reveal: You may sunder your current guise like you would armour, which causes your attacker to be stunned for a round in addition to the normal effects.

Naked Shadow: Your true form is a cloud of sulfurous black particles clumped around a heart with teeth. In this form you can fly as an arrow and fit through any hole your heart can pass through. Against normal weaponry your AC has double the dexterity bonus because they can have effect if they manage to hit your heart, but you take damage as normal when attacked with fire or magic.

Unearthly: Your likeness can never show up correctly in paintings or mirrors. When under a guise you may freely fly as fast as a raven, when out of guise fly as fast as an arrow.

Blood of the Earth: You consume blood instead of food.

• The average hireling contains 5 rations of blood. Losing 1 tires them; losing 2 exhausts them; and losing 3 or more kills them.

• Liquid blood rations are fragile and 3x as heavy as normal rations.

• You can eat normal food (to maintain appearances, or enjoy the flavor), but don't digest it.

Your bite with either your toothed heart or the teeth a guise deals d4 damage, increased by one die size each (d4 → d6 → d8 → d10 → d12) if your target:

• ...is physically smaller than you.

• ...is sexually or romantically involved with you.

• ...is indebted or subservient to you.

• ...trusts you completely, in this exact moment.

Vampirism is punishable by death, but this rarely applies to the rich and powerful. Maintain plausible deniability, and the Church will leave you alone. Hunt your impoverished kin, and they'll reward you.

Doppleganger: With 10 minutes of preperation you may put on the guise of someone who's blood you have tasted within the last sunset.

Dark Magnetism: When you are touching someone you can take 1 damage to send a particle of your self into them to Charm them. This effect lasts until they next would lose or gain Esprit.

(The difference between Charm and Esprit in Cloak and Sword is rather confusing. But from what I understand it’s meant to be passive where Esprit is active. When you hold Esprit for someone, you're trying to get something from them, whereas when someone Charms you it dulls your mind and makes you more malleable to their suggestions. The most notable difference is that Charm does not lead to romance. Generally speaking Esprit overrides Charm. The only exception I’ve found is the Nothing ability of the Beguine, which I think is an interesting way to represent a mysterious connection to the Divine, even if mechanically it’s a little wonky.)

Loyalties: Willing or unwilling, you are the deniable servant of dark powers. Roll on the table below 1d3 times to see who you are bound to. If you roll the same result twice, that indicates a different NPC who fits that category.

1. Grendelle Archfiend

2. Tarnished Angel

3. Fay Lord

4. The Order of the Fly

5. The Scholomance

6. The Cardinal

Each of these is a Figure of Le Great Game, but you might not know each one. The GM secretly chooses one which of the campaign Figures are your patrons. After the Lions/Foxes/Wolves procedure, your patrons use dead drops or intermediaries to give you a mission and an amount of weeks in which to complete them, unless you are already on a mission. If you succeed in that time you gain a Favor with them, if not then you get an Impatience. 

On the start of each month roll against each patron’s impatience with you. If you roll below the value, then they consider you a liability and discretely tip off vampire hunters to your location.

Favors can be used to cancel out Impatience, a week of help from one of your patrons’s other agents, information or 100 silver.

Sunflower Shells and Cherry Pits: The undigested remains of what you once more. Choose two of these.

• Gain the Ferocity ability of the Lupe.

• You may perform one Working from the Magician of your choice, using either the relevant components or by paying 1 Elon.

• Gain the Association ability of the Noble’s Man.

• Gain Los Estrallas ability of the Fay.

• Gain Cruel Barb ability of the Damosel.

• Gain Excommunicat ability of the Huguenot.

Drink From My Cup Til It Runith Over (Class: Cleric)

Everyone remember the conversion of the Cloak and Sword Sanguine class I made last year that was inspired from the half burned pages I stole from someone's attic? Well, I did some digging and have managed to track down a fully copy of class from an old magizine. Turns out I missed a major part of the class in my glog version of it. I think there's three other humor based classes out there based on the name but I haven't been able to track them down. I think the funny thing about this class is it's obviously meant to be intended only for women but nothing about it says you have to do that, I think the thought of a male character wanting to play this character simply did not occur to the author.

Sanguine

Start with: Frumpy and outdated noblewomen’s clothes, a lancet, a roll of bandage and a bundle of very strong scented herbs.


Eternal Spring: You were always a weak and sickly child. You would constantly suffer bloody noses, have trouble focusing on anything and spray blood everywhere from the smallest cuts. This terrible Blood has burdened you for as long as you lived. After each meal, grasping Esprit, being charmed, scared or another sudden surge of feeling, you gain d6 Vitae. At 5 Vitae you start to feel dizzy and faint, requiring WIS checks to think straight, at 10 Vitae you are overwhelmed and fall unconcious, only waking up when Vitae lowers below 10. There are four ways to rid yourself of it.

• Recuperation: It can be converted one for one to heal your Elon during rest.
• Mosquito: Vitae can be removed by a dracula or some sort of mosquito. Which is basically fine because they are made to do this. When such a creature deals melee damage to you, it will take Vitae before Elon. Two Vitae are equal to 1 blood ration.
• Frog: Vitae can also be removed by, say, some kind of murdersaurus, or maybe a really big frog. This is bad because they are not made for removing blood, and your Blood knows this. When such a creature deals melee damage to you, it also takes an equal amount of Vitae. If you don’t have any spare Vitae then it just deals damage as normal.
• Bloodletting: Anyone skilled with medicine can relieve you of your Vitae like a mosquito, an amateur relieves you like a frog. If they bottle it, then they need to gather at least 4 Vitae for a useful magical or alchemical reagent. Oh, also you're a universal blood donor.

Object of Desire: Other girls are prettier, more popular, and more accomplished. Despite being plain and unnoteworthy you have many admirers in the dark. Upon sight, monsters and angels hold Esprit for you, even vampyrs in guises. When you bleed, any present monsters or angels who can smell you must immediately make an Esprit Reaction Roll, with these modified results.

2 or less: If a monster attempts to eat you then and there, if an angel flees to not be a monster.
3-5: Demands allegiance.
6-8: Demands a service.
9-11: Offers a service.
12 or more: Pledges service.


Can I Fix Him?: There are monsters who are not like the others. Somewhere buried beneath the prizes and hatred you can see an ember of humanity. When you can look into the eyes of a monster ask the GM “Can I fix him?” and the GM will give one of the following answers.

• No, it is set in its nature.
• No, but you can make him worse.
• Yes, and you can make him worse.

Monsters which you change for the better or the worse fall in love with you.

Demure: You have the Harmlessness and Suggestion Graces for free, but without the MD. Roll the MD as normal and lose that much Vitae. You can’t use these Graces if your out of Vitae.

• Harmlessness- seem so helpless that unless you do violence or interfere directly, for [sum] minutes no one will harm you worse than dragging you around by the arm.
• Suggestion- target saves at -[sum] or remember a suggestion you made as their own idea.

Sympathy: When you and another person have some combination of holding Esprit for each other or have drank each other’s blood, a sympathetic bond is formed. This means that you both involuntarily share dreams and can use divination to find out how far away you are, in what direction and your current state. A sympathetic bond can be severed by an ordained priest or beguine.

Sylphe Sister: Due to the overabundance of your sanguine humor, spirits of blood, air, merriment and swords will reveal themselves to you and treat you as a younger sibling. Your Fertility type is S, despite being human.

Flutter: When you feel strong emotions a gentle summer breeze will blow around you, seemingly coincidentally. While this is happening you may spend Vitae to do the following.

• Spend it 1 for 1 to heal the Elon of someone you're fond of within sight.
• Spend 1 to blow away a piece of paper, knock away someone’s hat or so forth.
• Spend 2 to make the weapon of someone protecting you count as magical.
• Spend 2 to wreath helpful winds around someone you want to protect, granting them +2 AC.
• Spend 2 to whisper a message and have it be carried on the wind to the target regardless of distance.

Fury: When you see someone gravely injure someone you hold Esprit for, a hot and wet gale winds coil around you. Everything not nailed down gets blown around, everyone except you has -3 to hit and you need to make a WIS save or cause a ruinous thunderstorm to descend on your current location. You may also spend Vitae or Elon 1 to 1 to increase either your to-hit or damage.

Write These Name in Mercury (Class: ???)

I actually wrote this class way back during the original Cloak and Sword bandwagon, but was never quite happy with it so never posted it. It just sat in my drafts with the spider witch and the Lovely Dark CLERIC. The recent revival of the trend has gotten dig it back up.

Enigma

Start with: Ill-fitting clothes and an ill-fitting face.

Nobody Was Close: Neither of your parents were there when you were born. You are so very alone. You hold Esprit for them and can hold Esprit for no one else until you meet them.

Mystery: Everything is so hazy, you do not know what home is but you need to find it anyway. Nobody can tell you what you are, they don’t know. Peasants think you're a devil, nobles think you're a ghost, priests think you're impossible and angels have forgotten. Speculate all you want, the GM may not directly state the answer. You will need to infer from the evidence you have. When someone (including yourself) performs a test to uncover information about your nature, they state a hypothesis for what they expect to happen and roll a d6.

• 1. Their hypothesis is proven correct.
• 2-3. Their hypothesis is partially correct and something goes wrong.
• 4-6: Their hypothesis is wrong, either nothing of note happens or something goes very wrong.

Record the result somewhere, if someone performs a test under the same conditions, the results will be the same. Truth seekers and occultists which realise you do not fit known laws hold Esprit for you.

Night Creature: You are foreign yet familiar, like a half remembered stranger. Maybe if you could just find someone else like you, you wouldn’t be so lonely. You do not suffer -2 reaction with desperate forgotten things, Night’s agents and those favored by the moon. You suffer only -1 with wolves and woodsman. With everyone else you have a -2 reaction.

Sculpt Flesh: You can sculpt flesh as if it were clay with your hands or tools wet with your spit. The process is mercifully painless but the affected flesh will treat its new arrangement as natural. 

• With a simple swipe of your hand, you can cause horrible disfigurement. Opening new holes where there shouldn’t be and closing holes that should be open.
• With a few minutes to an hour, you can do sloppy work, leaving thumb prints and odd shapes. Enough to perform life emergency surgery or make someone’s face unrecognizable. 
• With a few hours of work, you can get something pretty decent. It won’t hold up to close inspection but it’s not immediately horrifying. With this time and good lighting, you can safely perform almost any surgery without the need of scalpel or anesthetic.
• With many hours of work, you can make it near perfect, with only a hint of the uncanny.
• To sculpt a convincing replica of an existing person, you need a good reference. Such as extensive and detailed drawings or their fresh corpse.

Roads To Nowhere: There are paths that only you can see, and doors only you notice. If you step in them you are taken somewhere that is to the outdoors as the outdoors are to indoors. There the wind bites, light withers and darkness swallows. A route through this space ages anyone there by 2d10 months, but is untrackable by anyone who does not know those Roads.