Short, but sharp claws grow from the widow's fingertips. Her martial arts are an original product of the Widow's relentless martial arts training and her fastly mutating body: the Iron Serpent is a physically demanding style focused on grappling, immobilization, and powerful, precise and disabling strikes. Inspired by the movements of constrictor snakes, this style emphasizes controlled, heavy actions that apply constant pressure, overwhelming opponents with both physical dominance and precision attacks to vulnerable areas. Unlike lighter, quicker martial arts, Iron Serpent relies on wearing down the opponent through relentless holds, chokes, and joint locks, while leveraging surprise strikes to blind spots when the enemy is immobilized.
Key Principles:
Constriction and Immobilization: Practitioners of Iron Serpent should excel in grappling techniques that focus on tightly controlling the opponent's body. Chokes, locks, and body-weight pins are designed to restrict the enemy’s movement and breathing, gradually sapping their energy.
Heavy, Controlled Movements: Every movement in Iron Serpent is deliberate, focusing on using body weight and leverage to apply maximum pressure with minimal energy loss. It relies on solid stances and grounded techniques, designed to prevent easy escapes and maintain constant pressure.
Opportunistic Strikes: Aim to exploit opponents that are restrained, controlled or surprised. Practitioners strike with precision and these strikes, whether punches, elbows, or kicks, target weak points such as joints, ribs, neck, or behind the head, using the enemy’s weakness to avoid retaliation and maximize damage.
Endure, Disable, Overpower: The Iron Serpent style requires great endurance, both physical and mental. It focuses on wearing down the opponent over time, applying slow, constant pressure or chiping but disabling strikes until they can no longer fight back. Practitioners must remain patient, waiting for the right moment to strike with overwhelming force.
You gain the following benefits as long as you are engaged in unarmed combat.
+2 dice to rolls for Attacking, Defending, and Clashing without a weapon. Unarmed attacks do +0 Weapon Damage (instead of -1).
Possession of this Power grants the following Battle Scar: Overtrained Left Hand.
You may Defend against melee, projectile, or firearm Attacks from any range and Clash with those in range of your Attacks. Attacking materials like steel or spikes will not Damage you unless it has an Effect that does so.
You also gain the following effects:
The time-twister presses a button on one of their wristwatches, and, in a flash of orange light, disappears. They have skipped 12 seconds forward in time. To them, the travel is instantaneous, but everyone else must wait until they reappear.
Exert your Mind and spend an Action. You must actively and obviously use a clock or watch to activate this Effect.
You phase out of reality for 4 Rounds. During this time, you cannot perceive or affect the outside world or take any Actions. You cannot move. Nothing can interact with you in any way.
When you phase out, you may bring up to 1 additional target in arm's reach with you.
Vel reaches into the air and winds a spectral key against the back back of a toy, or similarly human representing golem. The toy animates and grows in size to a friendly helper of Vel.
If there is no toy, starting the process as if there were one will slowly make a basic enlarged teddy bear.
This artifact relies on the cultural idea of toys, and the cultural idea of wind up toys, especially in the minds of children. The basic idea of these wind up toys is that you wind them up, then let them go and they move around doing toy things, seeming almost alive. This artifact takes that idea, and merges it with a few other ideas of ways to create useful servants to make an artifact capable of making a useful friendly minion.
Specifically it creates the unique minion Mr. Bear who animates a toy of Vel's choosing
The ritual to create this artifact relies on a ritual involving
- A variety of children's toys which are popular in the shared imagination
- A collection of stories and myths about the Hebrew golumn
- Mary Shelly's frankenstein
- Carefully shaping the pattern of a wind up key while reading various relevant parts of these stories
Exert your Mind and spend an Action.
Summon the one and only Sapient Animate Teddy bear at your location. They last until they move more than 150 feet from you or are destroyed They are controlled by you. You may have at most one minion active at a time.
If killed, you cannot re-summon your minion until after your next Contract.
Sand blows around David as he dips into the Realms of Death, and a dark, person sized shadow slips from those sands to fill his eyes as black as night.
David in his many travels through Realms of Death, encountered a nameless and sensation starved shade. A ghost, trapped amidst the great sands, that longed to experience life again. The wraith could see echoes of the living world through its reflections in the after and it craved to be able to see again. So David struck a deal with it—in exchange for sharing its longing sight when called for, he would let it possess and share his body. For that brief couple of hours, the wraith could share in his sense of taste, and smell, and touch, and all the other sensations of what it is to be living.
Exert your Mind and spend an Action.
Your senses are enhanced in the following way. Lasts for three hours.
A technique using a loophole within the CrossEye allows it's user to now attack at close range with a blade. However, this technique only works if the eye registers it as an attack from a sniper rifle, so the blade must be integrated with the gun to truly get the benefits.
You gain the following benefits as long as The weapon is spliced with rifle and you are engaged in combat with swords.
Your attacks with swords deal +3 Bonus Damage. Armor is reduced to 1/2, rounded up against this damage.
You also gain the following effects:
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You gain the following benefits at all times.
You may move easily and without a roll in any of the following situations.
You only gain the benefits of this effect if you are in forest.
The musician pours their heart and soul into their music, giving others some much needed perspective and solace and all around good vibes. This can be a temporary easing of the mind, but with prolonged music therapy it can even permanently cure psychic damage.
Exert your Mind to activate. Select a Living target within arm's reach. You cannot target yourself. This Effect cannot be used unless you continuously play music for your target during the activation. Over the course of one Downtime, your patient must communicate with you and reveal at least one of their Traumas to you, including the details of those Traumas and the circumstances of how they were acquired. After the full treatment time has elapsed, roll Charisma + Performance at Difficulty 6.
Your target may Resist. If your treatment is successful, you may remove one of the patient's revealed Traumas without incurring any Experience cost.
Once per day per target, you may choose to use this Effect to stabilize the Mind of a target within arm's reach. Treatment takes 30 seconds but will not remove any Traumas. If you are successful, restore 2 Mind damage.
You may choose to use this Effect to temporarily relieve any number of the patient's Traumas (including mental Conditions). In this case, Treatment takes an Action and the effect lasts two hours. If the Patient is currently experiencing an episode, Difficulty is increased by 2.
The aristocrat knows a ritual that allows them to rent the best version of any item. They set $10,000 worth of cash on fire and place the item to be upgraded in the fire as well. While in the flame, the item morphs into a high-end version of itself. After a while, it reverts.
Exert your Mind and spend a minute. Select a non-Alien Device within arm's reach. You must use up $10,000 cash (or equivalent) in order to activate this Effect. Cannot be used to improve Armor.
Lasts the next two hours. Your target receives 3 extra dice to all actions taken for its intended use. Attacking with an upgraded weapon grants +3 Weapon Damage instead of additional dice.
Come one, come all! Stand in amazement and behold as the Fire Eater consumes a flame as if it were cotton candy! Gasp with fright as they breathe a plume of fire a great distance! And yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is quite dangerous.
Exert your Mind (unless you win a coin flip) and spend two Actions performing the following ritual: perform a fire-breathing trick. Select a target within 20 feet which has both fuel and oxygen available (if you are starting a new fire). Roll a single D10 as a critical failure check. If you roll a 1, the Effect fails, and you take a Severity-4 Injury as the fire burns your throat. You must maintain Concentration while activating this Effect, and it fails if you are interrupted.
You may start or extinguish a fire as large as a firepit's fire at your target. Extinguishing a fire does not cost Exertion. You may create or extinguish fires the size of a lighter or candle flame without Exerting your Mind. Your fires require fuel and oxygen in order to continue burning.
Lighting a target on fire deals 4 Damage each Round on your turn, starting in the Round after the one in which they caught fire. This Damage is reduced by Armor, but the target’s Armor rating will be shredded by any Damage dealt, destroying material Armor once it reaches 0.
You may extinguish flames as a Reaction. This does not extend to explosives.
The Necromancer may exert their will on any undead creature, forcing it to act as they desire. The Necromancer's eyes turn completely black, and they speak a command to the creature in the language of the dead.
Exert your Mind and spend an Action. Select a Non-Alien, Non-Sapient, Animate target within 20 feet. This Effect cannot be used unless the target is undead.
For the next day, you may issue specific commands to your target which they will be compelled to follow.
Your commands must be relatively simple and within the target’s intellectual grasp. You cannot make them obviously endanger themselves or violate their instinct for self-preservation. The effects of the command will fade after a day has passed.
The influencer knows just how to-- well-- influence people. By following a suggestion with a wink, smile, or a look of astonishment, their target is sure to be swayed. Is it any wonder they have a following of such incredible fans? Hit like, smash subscribe, and for the love of all that is holy, don't forget to retweet.
Exert your Mind and spend at least one Action. Select a Sapient target within 20 feet. Your target cannot be engaged in Combat. Communicate a command to your target. Roll Charisma + Influence at Difficulty 6. The target may resist by rolling Mind at Difficulty 7.
If the contested Outcome is positive, your target will be compelled to follow your command to their best understanding of the letter and spirit of the command until they have completed it or for your Contested Outcome in minutes. You cannot issue another suggestion to the target until 10 minutes after they have completed the first command or 10 minutes after a failure.
The target is unaware that they are under supernatural influence and feel they are acting of their own free will. If you fail, they realize that you were attempting to influence them supernaturally with your command.
Your command can be an order to take an immediate Action. You cannot order a target to "do nothing," and they are free to take other Actions as they fulfill your request. Your command cannot be obviously self-destructive. The Effect ends if following your command would cause a target to cross one of their Limits in a way that would necessitate a Trauma roll.