OutfoxedA Kitsune RTDAs enlightenment comes upon you, the First Mystery is revealed.
From the stars I once descended, and made you into my image.
In return I ask that you see to my altars and enforce my will,
That you aid the faithful and confound all mortals and heathens.
Become unknown in this, and the Second Mystery will reveal itself.-
The First Mystery of the Fox God, the Mystery of Purpose, revealed to you upon achieving maturity, and the only one you know.
Deep in the Lands Untamed, slightly beyond the reach of humankind lies the Altar of the Fox God, still pristine after all these thousands of years through the tireless service of you and your peers. You approach the altar together with the utmost piety, forming a solemn circle around it as you carefully observe the nine-tailed golden fox perched atop the great stone slab flanked by rotten offerings made in times past, seemingly awaiting your arrival. It is the Old Wise Fox, the closest thing to a direct representative that the Fox God has in this world, and it is her wisdom that you have come to listen to. You are among the few who have kept to the godly ways, following the dictates of the Fox God that your other kin turned away from all these years ago, unwilling to make the sacrifices required, preferring instead to lead a lowly existence outside of the holy lands. Even now you hear tales of their trickery and villainy. But this is not why you are here today, of course.
As the Old Wise Fox speaks, not in words, but in suggestions appearing in your mind, you feel that the others here, as you suspected, are here for the same reason. The holy lands have grown sick. Horrid parasites overwhelm your weaker kin, rendering them unable to shift their shapes as freely as you do and thickening their blood, and you have not seen a younger fox than yourself make it to fifty in some time now. Your enemies in the holy lands grow bold, numerous and fierce in the face of this, hunting down young and old. The powers of your fellow foxes, by attrition if nothing else, appear to be dwindling. This is why you are gathered here - the youngest and most talented among your number shall be sent westward, straight out of the Lands Untamed towards the lands of the lesser races, humans among them, to seek their magical cures and artifacts, whatever you can find, to solve this great and terrible crisis. You are to trust no one on the way, for any helpful stranger may be secretly a heathen fox sent to lead you astray. Trust only in the Fox God and your better judgement as you make your way to find your people's salvation.
As the intro may have clued you in, in this game you play as a party of kitsune, henceforth referred to as foxes, gifted creatures with the ability to shapeshift at will (though the process requires time and conserves one's mass - 14 kilograms or thereabouts, mostly) and a great talent at magic that no other species in the world can boast, which naturally lends itself to all manner of trickery and criminality. The less scrupulous members of your species are well-known to the lesser races, and so you too can expect to be required to use a certain degree of subtlety to have a decent chance at locating the cure for your tribe's misfortune, and possibly a great deal of skulduggery as well.
The system is the RTD system you are well-familiar with, with 1s and 6s being exploded into another dice roll that determines the nature of the critical failure/overshoot. Skill growth (and, for that matter, talent growth) happens upon tangible progress on your objectives or due to exceptional or at the very least highly relevant acts pertaining to a certain skill. a 6-->6, for instance, is probably going to result in some kind of noticeable improvement in your abilities. A 1-->1, however, may prove to do the opposite.
Will be taking five players, and they will be chosen based on how much interesting their application is. The application itself is fairly freeform, and requires a name, a magical talent and three nonmagical skills - other than that, you can add anything that feels appropriate, from current appearance to personality to biography and perhaps something else I haven't thought of. Perhaps write the entire thing as a cohesive text, or maybe just keep the bits separate (in the standard character sheet Name:, Talent:, Skills:, Personality:, Biography: kind of way) for convenience. Would also be nice if you could assign yourself a color.
Magical talents, it should be noted, are a specific form of magic the fox in question can do. Examples include heat manipulation, tricks of the light, tricks of sound, tricks of the mind, faster shapeshifting, more precise shapeshifting, healing, telepathy, empathy (wild or otherwise), necromancy and basically anything else you could possibly think of. Note that your abilities, since foxes don't have anything even near a formal education for this stuff, are largely self-taught and you're not high-level wizards or anything. You get one form of magic that you're talented at, just as a reminder.
Nonmagical skills on the other hand are things like hunting, acrobatics, argumentation, seduction, swordplay, architecture, medicine, swimming, meditation, basket weaving and what have you. These will confer a +1 to relevant rolls. You get three, as mentioned.
Finally, signup period's a bit nonspecific. Once signups dry up, that's when the players get chosen.
Just to endow you with a bit of background info, foxes here are all magical. That's right, all of them. Upon reaching the age of forty, foxes begin to attain proper sapience, which becomes complete around the age of 50. This is also when their magical talents start to blossom, foremost being their shapeshifting, but also other talents. Once a fox develops shapeshifting abilities, their lives change quite a bit - for one, they become significantly harder to kill, and no longer have the traditional weak points of a living being, being able to shrug off even decapitation (though they cannot regrow mass normally, so reclaiming the lost head is probably still a good idea if you discount the benefits of not leaving a suspicious continually shifting blob lying around where people can see).
The only weak spot of a fully mature fox is a small, luminous sphere that they (typically) keep inside their body, about three centimeters in diameter. Its precise location is up to the fox in question, and can be more or less quickly shifted along the body if there is need for such a thing. Its size is the lower limit of a fox's assumed size (and indirectly the upper limit for its density, which averages out at about 14 kilograms per 14 cubic centimeters, or 106 kilograms per cubic meter, which is quite a bit indeed - you had best hope you don't transition into other forms of matter at that size).
Shapeshifting, as mentioned, conserves mass. A fox maintains a mass of roughly 14 kilograms barring loss of parts, and usually uniformly along its body. This is an important thing to note when, say, imitating a human being, as well as before you try and get into any fights in larger forms. Shapeshifting is also not a continuous effort of will - when a fox shifts its shape, it remains that way.
Humans and foxes are not the only sapient species found in the world - you have heard tales of subterranean dwarves, tree-dwelling elves, ill-advised goblins and other such things, but more than that you cannot say - you know only that there is a village at the very edge of the Lands Untamed, though you have not seen any of its representatives venture into your lands, probably due to well-justified fear of reprisal for defiling your holy lands with their foul presence.
Author
Topic: Outfoxed - Chapter 1: A Sense of Direction (Read 14692 times)