The Northern Star
Role Play of the Seas
Tribal Gifts:
Rusalka:
Basic:
Awe:
Cost: One Gnosis
Effect: Your beauty is undenyable and this in turn offers you an enjoyable bonus of three social traits when in contact with other beings, from the mundane to the supernatural. These traits add to your appearence making you desirable to the minds of your lessers.
Duration: One Scene.
Heightened Senses
Activation Time: At will
Effect: All your senses become keen to an astonishing degree. In Homid or Hybrid shape, you have senses as sharp as a Fish, gaining a two-Trait bonus to all Perceptive challenges (or synonymous), and you may make Mental Challenges to perform tasks like tracking that would ordinarily only be possible to fish. In Nereid and Piscine forms, you gain a three-Trait bonus to Perceptive challenges and a one-Trait bonus to challenges of the Primal Urge Ability. If you experience any sudden blasts of sensory information while this Gift is active, like seeing a camera flash, hearing a klaxon or getting sprayed by a skunk, you will be stunned for two rounds, and you may lose that sense completely for an hour at the Storyteller's discretion.
Duration: One Scene or Hour
Purify:
Required: Touch the water with your head or your hand.
Challenge: Mental vs. Storyteller difficulty based on the potency of the toxins in the water
Retest: Occult
Effect: Your touch purifies water of all contaminants. This gift effects one day's worth of drinking water per use.
Command:
Challenge: Mental Vs. Opponent
Retest: Intimidation
Effect: Give a simple one word order that a target must obey. Using a mental challenge you may give this order but the user must meet the eyes of the target and must speak in language that is clearly heard and understood by the target. This cannot force someone to be self-destructive or defy their Nature.
Song of the Fallen:
Challenge: Social vs. target
Retest: Enigmas
Effect: You lure a target into sorrow, setting their mind wandering down memory lane of lost loved ones and times gone by. For a short while they have difficulty focusing on their tasks, taking a two-Trait penalty to all Mental Challenges.
Duration: Five minutes, or until a loud noise or attack jolts them out of the effect.
Call of the Siren:
Initial Cost: One Gnosis
Challenge: Gnosis vs. everyone within 50 feet (or further, at Storyteller discretion); creatures without Gnosis use their Willpower stat instead; all your allies have a two-Trait bonus to resist
Retest: Expression
Follow up cost: 1-3 Social
Effect: You unleash a howl of eerie portent, inspiring a soul-deep terror in those who hear it. All those you defeat in the challenge must pause their actions, though they may defend themselves normally. The caster must be focused however on her scream and if she take damage during this time, the scream ends and as does the effect.
Duration: A number of rounds equal to the Social Traits you spent
Sense of the Catch
Required: Knowledge of your target; the target is in the same realm as you
Challenge: Mental vs. target if they are actively hiding; automatic success if they're not
Retest: Enigmas
Effect: If you're target is in the same realm as you (Earth, Sea, the Penumbra, a particular Umbral Realm, etc.), then you gain an unerring sense of which direction you must go to find them. You can move directly towards them as fast as you are able to travel.
Poisoned Flesh:
Cost: One Rage
Effect: Your blood becomes a black acid, searing anyone who touches it. Anyone who bites you or tastes your blood takes a level of Aggravated damage.
Duration: One Scene
Lover's Kiss:
Cost: One Rage
Effect: The name my imply something far more desirable than the actual effect, but the reality is far more gruesome. You are able to grow long and terrifying fangs in any of your forms, they will inflict 1 level of AGG damage to your target.
Duration: One Scene
Intermediate:
Consume Taint:
Challenge: Physical Vs. Storyteller
Retest: Survival
Effect: This Gift allows a Rusalka to deal with the refuse too often dumped at sea by eating anything from oil spills and chemical waste to organic and inorganic garbage. The tainted materials consumed do not harm the Rusalka, nor do they endanger Sea. Needless to say, as necessary as this Gift may be, it is far from pleasant. Rusalka forced to enact it too often generally set their sights on bloody vengeance soon afterward.
Poisoned Talons:
Required: Nereid Form
Cost: One Rage
Effect: Your claws transmute into wicked poisoned talons, making their strike difficult to avoid by inflaming your target's current wound penalties. Your target suffers a two-Trait penalty against your next attack if they are Bruised, or a four-Trait penalty if they are Wounded. If they are somehow ignoring wound penalties, then instead they suffer normal wound penalties during your attack.
Duration: Your next attack -- if the attack fails, the gift's benefits are lost
Lover's Pulse:
Required: Basic Gifts - Lover's Kiss
Cost: One Rage
Effect: As the Lover's kiss brings you a mouth of terrifying fangs to any form, this added gift works in giving a dose of deadly poison to the one your kiss is bestowed upon. You must make a bite challenge, declaring the Lover's Pulse before you make the challenge. Burning the extra rage and enacting the Lover's Pulse you are able to give a venomous bite that works it's poison into the veins of your victim with devasting effect. The Target will take 2 levels of AGG Damage (in addition to the 1 level already created by the bite itself from Lover's Kiss) and must seek an antivenom or supernatural healing before the damage can be healed. Normal medical means will do nothing against this vicious attack, the wounds will rot and reopen if they are left.
Broken Heart:
Challenge: Willpower vs. target
Retest: Intimidation
Effect: Bearing down on your target with an irresistible force of will, you compel them to submit. For the duration, your target may take no action other than submission to you unless they are directly endangered.
Duration: One scene or hour
Lustful Madness:
Required: The target must be able to see you (although there's no need for eye contact)
Cost: One Gnosis
Challenge: Social vs. target
Retest: Subterfuge
Effect: You reach into the target's psyche and twist, reducing them to a twitching ball of insanity. They are unable to act for the duration of the gift.
Duration: A number of turns equal to your permanent Gnosis, or until the target takes damage.
Advanced:
Water's Doorway:
Required: You must be in contact with a body of water at least a drinking glass full.
Initial Cost: One Gnosis
Effect: You travel through the Umbra along the Gauntlet as if it were a moon bridge. It takes one percent of your usual travel time to use this bridge (so if you can run a six-minute mile, you can travel a mile by Pattern Web in three seconds). You will always come out in the sea, normally near a place of meaning for you. (for example your home under the waves.)
Drowning Pool:
Required: You must be able to see your target.
Initial Cost: One Gnosis
Challenge: Social Vs. Target Physical
Follow Up Costs: 1-3 Social Traits
Effect: You sing a song of terrible drowning death, letting your voice become the reality for your target. Their lungs will fill with water, cutting off breath and breathing for as long as you sing, They will take 2 levels of lethal damage per round of activation. Coughing and spitting out water will not help them until your voice is silenced. If the caster takes damage during her song then the effects will end and the target may cough out the water filling his lungs.
Duration: A number of rounds equal to the Social Traits you spent
Siren's Rage:.
Cost: Two Gnosis
Effect: Drawing upon the astonishing power of your tribe to defend the wild waters of the world, you become an unsurpassed sea-queen. You gain +10 Traits in ties and overbids on all challenges involving clawing attacks. You may also spend one Rage per attack after striking a foe to deal an additional level of damage.
Duration: One Scene