Seven spirits stir, ready for change. Supernatural entities, powerful and strange, ready to increase themselves, shape their world, and perhaps even look beyond...
Will they create a Hell, rife with demons and slaughter, ready to spill out into the mortal world? A Heaven, peaceful and serene, flocking with angels and ready to wage war in realms of evil? An elemental paradise, chaotic and alive, bustling with elementals and keeping to themselves? Or something entirely different, all at once, or somewhere in between?
Only time will tell.
Players are supernatural entities- minor gods, demons, angels, elementals, spirits, etc- on their own plane. They then shape their world, create and alter servants and themselves, interact in various ways, and generally do whatever it is they want to do. With some difficulty, they can even find their way onto other planes.
Players are then cycled out based on a combination of random chance and how well they're doing, and a new player comes in. Rejoining players can almost always come back in as their old selves resurrected.
Power is your lifeblood and the currency with which you affect changes. Those who spend it too quickly burn out; those who hoard it too zealously smolder away.
Gaining Power
Power may be gained in a variety of ways, but you can usually only gain one point of Power per turn from any given general source (living conditions, sacrifices, events, etc). Some actions or events may also provide Power for a certain action, rather than simply adding it onto your total.
Because Power represents your strength as a supernatural entity, most methods of gaining Power are either greatly beneficial to you personally or to the powers you wield or represent. Lavish living conditions or events matching your Spheres can both provide Power, for instance.
More detailed examples are given below.
Living Conditions- Pleasant, and usually imposing and fitting living conditions for your personal form, can provide you with a source of Power. As might be expected, you must actually dwell within such conditions to maintain this bonus, though leaving on errands will generally not interfere.
Worship/Fealty- The worship of minions or neutral creatures can empower you if it's from a sufficiently devoted and numerous following.
Events- Certain events may match your Sphere well enough to give you an influx of Power from them.
Spending Power
Power is required for any major action, and certain actions may require or be empowered with further expenditures. Rare conditions or effects may require constant Power upkeep, but such things are usually truly ambitious endeavors.
Actions may be empowered by spending an additional Power point on them; doing so provides a +1 bonus to the action's roll.
Power Costs and Gains
Power is usually lost and gained in increments of 1 point; only particularly impressive actions and sources grant more than this.
Combined actions are one such action, though even then each participant usually only spends one Power point, with the increased effect coming from the teamwork, Spheres, and sum total of each participant's contribution.
Your physical form determines, to some extent, what you can do. Most large-scale actions are more concerned with your Sphere and available Power, but certain physical traits can still provide hindrance or aid under the right circumstances.
Traits
Your body may have Traits added onto or removed from it, which represent important or noteworthy features. Sometimes these features provide an overt bonus, penalty, or other effect under the right circumstances, but more often they are simply descriptive features that might then be argued to provide an effect under the right conditions.
Stats
Your body also has a unique stat associated with it. As with Traits, these statistics may be used to justify various effects.
Power- Your body's innate Power, similar in concept to your normal Power, but constant. Higher Power allows you to perform more effective personal tasks, notably those supernatural in nature but too petty to warrant actual Power use, and in some cases may even provide benefits to normal Power-expending actions. Spending normal Power is usually the only way to directly increase your body's Power, but Power-providing events may be utilized for this purpose.
Creatures are most commonly grouped into Tribes, which are identifiable, but not necessarily particularly organized or uniform, collections of them. Tribes can perform a variety of large-scale actions.
Tribes may perform actions at your direction, which has the advantage of saving you Power. You are still generally limited to a certain number of actions per turn including those of your servants and tribes, however, and for obvious reasons many tribes will be considerably less powerful than you personally.
Traits
Tribes may have traits, which are noteworthy features shared by either most of the tribe or the collection as a whole. Traits may provide explicit bonuses or penalties to specific actions or under specific circumstances, but more commonly simply describe a feature, which might then be used as justification for bonuses, penalties, or other effects under the right circumstances.
Tribes generally require upkeep to remain useful and loyal. The precise type depends upon the qualities of the tribe and their relation to you, but generally more powerful, useful minions require more in the way of infrastructure. Tribes rarely require Power or other individually-tracked resources as upkeep.
Units are collections of creatures that are smaller, more organized, and more uniform than Tribes. A Unit's name is prefaced with the Tribe it is attached to. While Units may travel apart from their Tribes, most prefer to stay nearby, or at least fulfill their Tribe's goals.
Units differ from Tribes in a number of ways, but share many similarities. The primary advantages to units are that they can more easily be specialized and operate on a smaller scale than Tribes.
More specifically, Units are easier to modify and may rely on their Tribes for things they can't do themselves, which usually makes it easier to create a Unit devoted to a specific task than a Tribe.
Units are also not usually perturbed by other units, whereas trying to keep multiple Tribes in a given Region can sometimes prove difficult.
TODO: Interactions. Essentially, you can raid or war on each other for a variety of reasons. Note that most forms of conflict, surprisingly, do not harm the loser, but do benefit the winner.
TODO: Losing. Essentially, whoever's doing the worst come certain turn thresholds gets shunted out and replaced with someone new, who will usually but not always be rising from an existing power.
TODO: Regions and Locations. Essentially, Regions are anything that would be denoted on a map by lines or terrain patterns. Locations are anything that would be denoted on a map by a symbol. Creating or modifying regions may become more difficult as time goes on.
TODO: Several other things. You can have lieutenants, invent things, and all manner of doings-on that are not yet detailed here.
Name:
Physical Description: Just kidding, you're formless right now! You can always describe the color of your smoke or other vague details on your basically incorporeal form, however.
Mental Description: Much more important. Subject to change when you feel like it, of course.
Sphere: What you represent, are imbued with, or otherwise strongly identify with. May be anything, but should probably be broad enough to come up a lot and narrow enough to not come up a lot. Excessively broad terms will generally only count in "pure" forms, rather than every concept or term that goes under them.
Dream: Only used for initial game start. Essentially, what you'd really like to do, given the power and chance. May leave blank, in which case your Sphere alone will be used.
Horribly unfinished, I know, but I'm suddenly short on time for the moment, and I'd rather have it in signups than waiting for the full version. Feel free to ask questions in the meantime.
Author
Topic: Planar Power RTD [Turn 3: Grand Forms] (Read 7550 times)