Mortal+

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Mortal & Mortal+

"I've said many, many, many unkind things about Philadelphia, and I meant every one."
- David Lynch

 The city of Philadelphia is home to over one and a half million individual souls. The region as a whole houses twice again that figure. It's a mammoth amount of humanity relative to the land that contains them, all crammed together in a region full of urban sprawl, dotted with clustered suburbs, and peppered with curious expanses of green space. The city's supernatural denizens no doubt fancy the city to be their own. Vampires have their Princes, the Changelings anoint their crowns, werewolves name their alphas, and the Mages appoint their Hierarchs; but they all pay property taxes to the City of Philadelphia's Treasury Department.

 The mortals of Philadelphia are incorrectly viewed by some as the battlefield, or sometimes as chess pieces to be maneuvered across the board in cynical games of one-upsmanship with brutal rules and esoteric prizes going to the victor. In truth, they are the beach obstacles and tank trenches of that metaphorical field. They are in the way. They have lives and desires all their own, drives and impulses impossible for even the most dedicated of sociologist to predict. This is a city that once threw batteries at Santa Claus, a city where they grease the light posts when they anticipate a mob forming, a city where visiting sports fans wipe off their face paint and hide their jerseys to avoid getting rolled into a gutter and tossed into a dumpster.

 Philadelphia will strip a car with a Cowboys bumper sticker down to its roll cage in twenty minutes. What do you imagine it would do if they knew the shadows contained creatures bent on controlling the course of history?

 The creatures of the night aren't in charge. They're surrounded.

Staff

Rules and System

 A full accounting of the game's houserules can be found here.

Character Creation

  • We use the optional character creation rule which allows Mortal+ characters to take 10 merit dots at character creation.
  • We do not permit "vanilla mortals." All characters must be from a permitted Mortal+ type and affiliated with one of the open PC Supernatural spheres (Changeling, Geist, Mage, Vampire).
  • Your character must be an active part of the affiliated Supernatural sphere upon approval.

Custom Virtues & Vices

You can find these custom items here.

Merits

Biomimicry

By changing their eyes into a cat's eyes, a Biomimic may eliminate negatives imposed by Environmental Tilts for natural darkness. Darkness imposed by magical shadows or Contracts/Disciplines/Magic whose effects remove sight still affect the Biomimic.

By growing gills and webbing between fingers and toes, a Biomimic may breathe freely while underwater and remove movement/action penalties for underwater actions. While active, the Biomimic is unable to breathe above water without 'holding breath' as one would normally do underwater, with the same rolls.

Deadpan

This merit impacts magical fear and revulsion imposed by sources as various as the Nightmare Discipline, Autumn Contracts, and even the Nosferatu Curse with the same caveats as Awakened magic.

Death Sight

The conversion of this merit from 1e to 2e is as follows:

Effect: Your medium can see dead people. The psychic may perceive and communicate with any ghost she encounters. The power allows only perception of and communication with ghosts in Twilight — ghosts tied to the material world and not to any otherworldly spirit world. The power affords no ability to contact spirits in Twilight. This Merit does not permit the psychic to aid ghosts in manifesting in the physical world. Most ghosts instinctively realize when a mortal can perceive them, and psychics who possess this power are often inundated by requests from desperate beings seeking help to resolve their earthly affairs.

Cost: None to sense the presence of ghosts. One Willpower to see or initiate communication with them.
Dice Pool: Wits + Composure
Action: Reflexive

Dramatic Failure: The medium is unable to use this Merit for the rest of the scene. Alternately, she may attempt to use the power again but also suffer horrific visions of some hellish underworld, inflicting either Spooked, Dissociated or Paranoid, which must be resolved and do not fade at the end of the scene.

Failure: The attempt to activate Death Sight is unsuccessful.

Success: Your character can perceive and communicate with any ghost in her vicinity for the remainder of the scene. Such ghosts remain intangible to her, however.

Exceptional Success: The medium gains a +2 bonus on all rolls made in dealing with ghosts during the scene.

Option [Permanent Death Sight]: The medium’s ability to see the dead is always active. The stress of constantly being surrounded by spectral beings inflicts a Persistent Condition -- choose from Addicted, Madness, Chronic Agony, or another appropriate Persistent Condition with ST approval. The player must still roll Wits + Composure in order to communicate with ghosts, but with this option, such rolls gain a +3 bonus.

Mind of a Madman

This merit is now called "Holmesian Insight" to eliminate ableist language. Please put in a ticket to have staff change this if you have this merit on your sheet.

Psychokinesis

When using the attack form of Psychokinesis, the attack functions like a ranged attack. This means that unless the target has some method of dodging firearms or similar attacks, they do not receive their defense against Psychokinetic attacks.

Sleepwalker

In Mage 2.0, any Mortal+ with a merit or power which is something inherent to or installed in themself (a Lost Boy's upgrades as opposed to a Relic, for example) counts as a Sleepwalker in that the Curse does not affect them. We do not approve any character without such a power anymore, so there is no need for the Sleepwalker Merit.

Sojourner

When using this power, objects still take structure damage and characters receive one bashing per mile of distance traveled rather than for each yard.

Universal Engineer -

Prerequisites: Wits or Dexterity 4+, Crafts 3+, At least one crafting spec

Throughout the course of human (and supernatural) history, there have been innovators and thinkers who have been immortalized in time for their feats of technical, mechanical and mental prowess. From the Ionians of ancient Greece with their marvels of antiquity, to Eratosthenes determining the circumference of the Earth, to the modern day and it's vast, technological achievements, there have been those who seemed to have an almost innate, semi-mythical understanding of how mechanisms, engineering and physics all work together. While these technological wunderkin devised where perhaps not outright magic, but in the times which they were built in likely seemed so, and perhaps still do to this day. While a PC may not be able to actually create a truly magical machine, her understanding of science, technology, engineering and creation are such that there may not be much difference either way. Equipment, gear, vehicles, weapons... whatever she makes, the Universal Engineer produces such advanced works that they stand above and beyond their nearest counterparts, leaving anything but the most bespoke of purchased items in the dust.

Effect: Crafted items the PC makes are of a quality far above any purchased version of the same thing, and may even exceed what their peers can produce. For each dot in this merit, any crafted item gains one additional offset to be spent on improving it, before additional offsets are added via increasing strength, availability or initiative penalty. These additional dots still follow all crafting rules and limits (Damage or Armor rating cannot be raised past double their base amount, speed, defense or perception penalties can only be negated rather than turned into positives, etc), and must still be crafted by the PC in question, rather than simply purchased.

Drawback: Such impressive, cutting edge technology has a tendency to attract attention, not all of it worthwhile or healthy. Whenever she uses her personally crafted gear, any witnesses during the scene (PC or NPC) get a +2 bonus to remembering said technology, and possibly the person who created it.

Universal Translator

Prerequisites: Protocol at Rating, Implanted Interface, The Devil In the Detail Status

Originally a side project turned custom upgrade by a Detail associate doing research into the Protocol and the Serum, this implant upgrades the Implanted Interface with a combination of specialized neural net centered hardware designed solely to run an advanced real-time translation algorithm. It is currently unavailable outside the members of The Detail, with even the exact method of installation remaining a secret, for now.

Effects: Through a comprehensive database of languages combined with an advanced translation algorithm, the Universal Translator Protocol allows a user to understand and speak any language known to man (effectively granting the benefits of Multilingual to all Human languages.) It does not, however, enable the use of Spirit Speech, High Speech, or any other language of supernatural origin, including contextual languages created by subgroups such as Winter Cant and Guardian Doublespeak.

Deprived: You gain the effective use of the Language Merit, instead of Multilingual, allowing you to also fluently read and write all human languages subject to the restrictions above.

Joining the Sphere

 We try to make life easy. Here are some basic guidelines. The full application guidelines can be found here.

Formatting Your Approval Ticket

  • Use the formatting here -- it is required and we will return your ticket to you if you don't use it. This makes sure we don't forget anything.

Sheet

  • Chronicles of Darkness 2.0 core rules + 275 xp
  • Civil Society Status can be purchased multiple time for different sections of Civil Society. One may be as high as 3 at character creation, one may be at 2, and your third or more may be no higher than 1.
  • You do not need to set your Aspirations as we do not utilize Beats for XP.
  • Mortals receive 10 merits at character creation, rather than seven.
  • Use the character sheet template.

Backgrounds

  • Bullet points are fine; please just give staff enough to work with on crafting stories
  • Please explain your Civil Society status as requested in each group's 'Joining' section. (Usually it's 'what I do, what I did to get here, and where I want to be'.)
  • Want ties to NPCs? Talk to staff! This is encouraged, as is looking for ties with existing player characters on-server. You may not purchase True Friend for Setting NPCs. You may purchase Mentor for Setting NPCs with staff approval.
  • You may be a newcomer or a longtime resident. Longtime residents
  • We do not permit "vanilla" Mortals. They simply won't be able to get involved with plots or RP without blowing up the theme of the game or becoming Mortal+ by dint of being Sleepwalkers at the very minimum.
  • All Mortal+ characters must be affiliated with a Supernatural community: Sleepwalker, Ghoul, Fae-Touched. If you need assistance in figuring out links with an appropriate Supernatural community (Changeling, Mage, Sin-Eater or Vampire), please reach out to staff.

Wiki

  • Please make one, they are mandatory for final approval! Your wiki must contain basic biographical information and at least 3 RP hooks by which other characters can involve you in scenes and/or plots.
  • If you need help, please ask on Discord! We can set up a very basic wiki for you to fill out if you need help.

Theme and Society

 Mortal concepts-- that is to say, concepts that intentionally avoid any sort of supernatural merits --are no longer permitted on From Dusk Till Jawn. We at one point included these character types, but not only did we not have any active Mortals who were not also Mortal+, we decided to close out this line for characters as it does not fit with the way the server has developed.

 For Mortal+ concepts, the occult underbelly of Philadelphia opens itself up for examination. Philadelphia is home to numerous supernatural societies within the mortal populations. One of them, The Plain, even originated here in Philadelphia proper. Each Mortal+ template has a local society in place as a framework for interaction. While no characters are required to partake in their society, iconoclasts may find themselves wanting for friends and support. So it's certainly worth considering how your character relates to others that share their condition.

Mortal+ Secret Societies:

 Please note that all Mortal+ must also be affiliated with an active PC Supernatural society: Changeling, Mage, Sin-Eater or Vampire. The point of this is that a supernatural community takes responsibility for the Mortal+ in some sort of tangible way. The issue that we run into with unaffiliated Mortal+ is "you're not the boss of me," basically, and because we want to play cooperatively as much as possible, this puts us into a situation where someone knows that a particular society Exists, let alone their Secrets, and by the basic theme of all of the CofD games, that makes that Mortal+ a threat which the Threatened Society would have to Deal With.

 Don't like that, personally, doesn't sound fun! But that makes it impossible for us, as staffers, to deal with any sort of... thematic consequences... for the whole Loose Lips Sink Ships jawn. And in a game where, like, the agents of the Exarchs knowing things about you is one of the ways that they come for you, and concealing information is one of the main things that Mages have to do in order to protect themselves (and Winter with the Fae, and the Masquerade, and so on), that... really limits the possible reactions in a way that is super un-fun, and which I don't think anyone wants or likes?

 So, like, if Supernatural Society X of Philly says 'yes, This Mortal+ is one of Ours, and we'll take care of their fuckups in-house,' and there's someone that like... you can go to? Sure!

 Right now, if a Mage takes out a billboard on Girard Avenue saying 'this vampire lives here and if you want to put holes in his roof and let sunlight in,' there's someone in a hierarchy that can be Gone To About That, and that simply doesn't exist for unaffiliated Mortal+. What ends up happening is that rather than the Mortal/Mortal+ choosing the supernatural society which has a say over what happens to them, it will simply be whichever Supernatural society is on the opposite side of that interaction. This gives the Mortal+ sphere structure and gives Mortals a say in which Supernatural structure they are answerable to in the event of a conflict.

Hobbyist Cliques:

  • Please consider making one yourself! It just requires 3+ PC members.

Current Plots

TBD