Alternate Story Agent - Pawn

[yackronin]

Alternate Story Agent - The Pawn



It sits there, outside the concerns of time, outside the means of our perceptions, the Ceaseless Watcher. Many remain under its sway without their knowledge. Their lives are hijacked by it’s needs, wants, and desires. A being so beyond usit is completely pointless to even consider opposing it. It’s name is spoken only in the most mad and crazed tomes, with its full name driving men to despair and cosmic madness. It’s title is the only thing standing between us and this enlightening insanity. The Ess-Ehm.

You were a man, and then you saw behind the veil. One of The Ess-Ehm’s foul followers, concubines, companions,(the texts remain unclear), The Plegh-h’yarh, has control over your actions, but in the process of your ensnarement you saw it, the means of their control, and bound it to physicality. Now your simple mortal mind sees it as a piece of paper. Paper that holds you in all your entities. Your strengths, your weaknesses, your derangements and powers. It updates through eldritch means as the Companion empowers you to commit to it’s will. But in binding your ‘Sheet’ you possess limited control as well. The Ess-Ehm pays less attention to you, being under one of it’s Plegh-h’yarhs than it does those under its direct means. Now your encompassed self is in your hands, what will you change? You hold your life in your hand, your very being, and you can alter it to your will, but your Plegh-h’yarh is vigilant, changing it back.

Powers

Power	Replace With
Superposition	The Sheet
Out of Character	Higher than the Gods (cosmetic)
Plot Relavent Capability	Pencil the Sheet (Cosmetic)
Offscreen Capability	Attention to Detail
Haphazard Narriative	Collusion of the Plegh-h'yars (cosmetic)
Climax	Blatant Cheating

The Sheet
You are in possession of an eldritch parchment informing you of your powers and abilities, this sheet is a malleable and manipulatable symbol of yourself. You are always aware of effects you are under, such as poisons and drugs, and you can substitute your Prominence for Arcana when rolling Saving Throws.
If lost or damaged, the sheet reappears near you completely undamaged in a spot you couldn’t see after only a short rest.

Attention to Detail
Your understanding of the arcane rules that operate your form have grown, and as such you can alter more and more without your Plegh-h’yarh noticing. Whenever anyone makes a focus power test within 20 meters, or within any range but targeting you, you may spend any amount of Limelight to raise the TN of the test by 5 times the spent graphite. You must choose to use this power before the target chooses whether to make the test fettered or not.

Blatant Cheating
You can, for 1 Graphite reallocate the dots in a characteristic section (Physical, Mental, Social) up to a maximum of 6 dots per characteristic for the rest of the scene.

Power Stat: Prominence
Prominence is the sight of your Plegh-h’yarh that shields you from the Ess-Ehm’s control. As Prominence grows reality warps around you, becoming less defined and more general and generic as the Esse-Ehm’s primordial control wars with the Plegh-h’yarh’s control over your being.

Resource Stat: Limelight
Your Plegh-h’yarh’s unknowable means of investing in your existence, it’s the grey indenture that reads on your sheet, and the fuel for it’s gifts. Your Limelight is equal to Wisdom + Composure. You regain 1 Limelight at the beginning of each session, and before each scene begins.



Pawn Unknowable Assets
Expanded Backstory
For some reason, your Plegh-h’yarh saw fit to, shall we say, ‘Dramatize’ your past. You gain 4 extra background dots to spread only between Mentors, Fame, Backing and Status.

Always Ready
You know the Plegh-h’yarh saw you for a reason, and looking at your Sheet, that won’t be a peaceful one. Best to stay vigilant. If you roll a natural 10 on Initiative, you may Explode the die

Taking Notes
Your connection to your Pegh-y’arh is stronger than expected, and you can see what other beings have caught the Ess-Ehm’s attention. You gain the Eidetic Memory Feat, and can remember scenes you were not a participant in with a Composure + Forbidden Lore test scaled by the SM.

Write That One Down
Choose a skill, characteristic, sword school, gun-kata, or magic school. Your choice is always considered to be on your class progression, but you can't buy additional ranks in it above your Gaze. Buying the first, or any subsequent rank in it costs 50 less experience, and if you chose a skill, or characteristic you may improve it to 6 at Prominence 5.

Go Mad From the Revelation
Your revelation was harsher than most, driving you to the brink. But once you’re there, you can just keep moving. Begin play with a Minor Disorder. You are not removed from play for having 100 or more IP, though you continue to gain derangement every 20 IP.

[yackronin]

Tell:
The largest tell for a ‘Player’ Pawn is the ‘Sheet’ they carry, which tell them in lovely handwriting exactly what they can and cannot do with skill. However, the ‘Pawn’ has just as much effect as those around them, only enhancing as they gain Prominence. People’s voices seem to blur into a similar tone or standard base. Eldritch sigils come from wounds people suffer, seemingly corresponding to their severity. An order starts to appear from the chaos of battle. And, strangely, dice seem to roll astoundingly better in their presence.

Being a Pawn
The greater majority of Pawns have little uniting them, but all have gained the attention of a being older than the wheel and far beyond its trappings. Often those who would become Paragons are noticed by Plegh-h’yarhs. Some Pawns argue that all Exalts are seen by the Plegh-h’arhs and each of their exalts were a way to drag them away from the Ess-Ehm’s control. Pawns, therefore would be the only ones gifted their ‘Sheet’ and a certain ‘control’ over their own actions. If you could call it control. The very act of editing the ‘Sheet’ is a rebellion that the Plegh-h’yars attempt to rectify post haste, as which your temporary gain is just that, Temporary.

Playing a Pawn
Playing a character is an exercise in Meta-Rebellion. Your character is literally making changes to their own character sheet against the will of the ‘you’ at the table. The ‘Plegh-h’yars’ from the character’s perspective are unknowable beings that guide them, but to the player, the sheet just changes for no reason sometimes. What’s eldritch knowledge to the character, is the character’s HP total to the player. While, yes, you could play this character humorously like, say, Red-Mage from 8-bit theatre. You could just as easily portray them like a crazed cultist or a rebel against fate. It was also suggested that you could double down on the theme as a player. Make comments after using abilities about the sheet changing, about the character acting differently.
As always, it’s up to you how you play your character. 

Pawns in Game:
Pawns look for more truths. They gravitate to extremes, seeking to bring more to the light in hopes of creating more of themselves or to hide it and let others live in ignorance. This makes them wonderful sages and seekers, as well as leaders and guides over explicitly combat oriented roles. The element of order explicit to a Pawn is more likely a signifier of a solidified reality around them where things retain their meaning. Others will likely fail to understand your view or wholly reject it in favour of others. Alignments are also guiding factors in a Pawn's life less so as a divine host, but as a guide to life and a code of conduct. The fact is that Pawns need these alignments to ground them. Holding quite literally forbidden knowledge in your hands weighs on someone, let alone altering them. It doesn’t have an overt effect of otherworldly degradation, rather the psyche simply can’t cope. Many become demoralized, Many more become self destructive, exploding against any cause they can find. Some more isolate, and become mad hermits. But none give up,as if they are unable to.

Pawn Culture:
Pawns are unnerving. They either stick together in groups or spread out like hermits with very little in-between. To those on the outside, it is like watching a colony of madmen, or a strange cult with fervent, if strange, beliefs. Those of near any alignment feel little but pity, assuming this cult-like mentality has led them to forsake traditional Gods, but this is not the case. Pawns are just as likely to follow Nurge, Tiamet or any other god, but see them in the same way one would see a sentient hurricane. It is bound to reality as much as not and is as immutable as fluctuating, as is the nature of chaos. The relationship with the Ess-Ehm is non-existant. The Ess-Ehm exists outside both traditional reality and the Warp. to this end, the Gods are as much guides and ethos as much as being higher as opposed to the top of the celestial totem pole.

Adapting Pawns:
All Pawns have attracted a higher being’s attentions, but this needn’t be the Plegh-h’yars. This could just as well be something eldritch beyond yourself. If you were a traditionalist, Yog-Sothoth the Key and the Gate works just as well for something unknowable that you have caught the attention of. One could stat it is one of the existing Gods, and that the Sheet is a contract of sorts for short term benefit. Perhaps the Sheet is a dataslate modulating your own abilities after one has been infected by a nanite culture attempting to expand your capabilities.

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[Author’s Notes]
Ok, while at the core of this Exalt is the joke ‘The Character is aware they’re being controlled’ what i want to get across is an actual Cosmic Horror aspect of knowing that you’re being observed by something that is so far above you that you are less than nothing. ‘The Sheet’ isn’t just a meme-y way to change stats, it’s a responsibility and reminder that you’re never alone anymore, and that your place in the universe is intrinsically under question. That you’re always under evaluation by something more ‘Other’ than you'll ever know. That’s why the Adaping Pawns section gives examples of just being traditional cosmic horror rather than the joke-y elevator-pitch.

[Amanojyaku]

Mar 14, 2020 14:00:57 GMT -6 yackronin said:

Power Stat: Gaze
Gaze is the sight of your Plegh-h’yarh that shields you from the Ess-Ehm’s control. As Gaze grows reality warps around you, becoming less defined and more general and generic as the Esse-Ehm’s primordial control wars with the Plegh-h’yarh’s control over your being.

Resource Stat: Graphite
Your Plegh-h’yarh’s unknowable means of investing in your existence, it’s the grey indenture that reads on your sheet, and the fuel for it’s gifts. Your Graphite is equal to Wisdom + Composure. You regain 1 Graphite at the beginning of each session, and before each scene begins.

If these are different from the parent, it's not an alt.

[yackronin]

I would argue that Doomed has different Power and Resource stats to Perpetual (Kenning + edge and Eternity + resolve respectively) to fit with the theme, but even then, Gaze and Graphite are just cosmetic re-skins along the same line as renaming powers to fit with the scheme. Even then they can easily be changed back because, again, Graphite and Limelight are functionally the same, only re-flavoured.

i could have written it as

Power Stat: Prominence Gaze
Resource Stat: Limelight Graphite

and it would be the exact same, only re-imaged to fit closer to the theme.

[GuardianTempest]

You're wrong, solely because Doomed is an Alternate of a different Perpetual.

whitewizardsworkshop.proboards.com/thread/480/perpetual-die

Originally by Kwak, reposted by Traskus. It still uses Eternity and Resolve. The pattern still holds truen the Power Stat and Resource are consistent.

The one you're referring to is the second one by Weredrago2, reposted by Amanojaku.

[yackronin]

there, changed Gaze to Prominence and Graphite to Limelight.