For the love of Dog, man!
(Inspired by The Demented One’s dog adept, Oliver.)
Most animals don’t have souls, but y’know, most humans can’t get Unfathomable Cosmic Power by slicing themselves up. There are few constants in The Underground, and this one is particularly fragile.
Maybe they’re all Familiars, maybe some Shaman burned some big mojo on it, or maybe we’ve had it wrong this whole time, but a few animals woke up, and this is what we got.
The Faithful Hound
An ancient archetype to be sure. From watch dogs to hunting hounds to the beagle that always gets the morning paper, man’s best friend does his duty without a moment’s hesitation.
Masks: Lassie, Gimork (The Never-Ending Story) Cerebrus (Greek) CuChulainn (Celtic)
Suspected avatars: Every “smart dog” story you’ve ever heard, plus a good chunk of the more heroic police and fire dogs.
Symbols: Collars (especially bearing names), leashes, dog houses and oversized bones.
Taboo: The Faithful Hound may never put aside the needs of its Charge , no matter how trivial the task or how dire the odds.
Notes: All Faithful Hounds must have a Charge. Traditionally, this is the Hound’s master, but it may be anyone the Hound wishes. Once a Charge has been chosen, it may not be changed regardless of anything. If the Hound’s charge dies, the Hound’s connection to the Archetype is lost.
Channels:
1-50%: Unyielding Loyalty
While aiding his Charge, the Hound’s Fear Passion is completely disabled. Stress Checks or Magick that would force him against his Charge may be resisted with an Avatar: Faithful Hound roll.
51-70%: Hound’s Devotion
Once assigned to a particular task by his Charge, the Hound may flip-flop all rolls with an applicable skill until the task is completed. It takes a full twenty minutes to fully absorb the “training”. The Hound must fail an Avatar: Faithful Hound roll to abandon the task before its completion, and doing so is almost certainly a taboo breach.
The task, of course, must be something a dog can reasonably do. Commanding a Faithful Hound to bring about world peace does not compel him to obey.
71-90%:: Man’s Best Friend
The Hound and his Charge develop a mystical bond. The Hound always knows when his Charge is in danger, and they may communicate over any distance. The communication is not overtly unnatural – it comes in the form of curiously accurate “feelings” and daydream-like flashes.
91%: Old Yeller
Throwing himself into the path of certain doom, the Hound may trade his life for his Charge’s. No force, no matter how great, may spare the Hound or harm his Charge once this Channel has been invoked.
This final Channel avoids a single situation, no more and no less. One plane crash, ome assassination and one house fire are all applicable uses. Details are left open to the Gamemaster.
Opposed, naturally, by the feral beast, the archetype of every killer dog that broke its chain and mauled a toddler. Every dingo that ‘ate my baby’. Every pack of strays that plucks a sheep from the herd.
It would be interesting if animals mostly used sort of Ur-achetypes of simplicity that the Human archetypes descended from (Dominance – King, Aggression – Warrior, etc)
The Feral Beast (or some variation thereof) almost assuredly exists sonmewhere up there, yes.
I’ll probably be doing a few more, The Sacred Cat and The Workhorse at least.
It’s also worth noting that humans CAN channel Animal Archetypes, it’s just that most humans (even in the OU) don’t know they’ve Ascended or aren’t willing to devote themselves so.
This “Charge” restriction, where a charge, once chosen, cannot be changed, negates Lassies ability to change charges between movies. Not that that is a bad thing, just saying!
Not necessarily. For Lassie, what APPEARS to be the Charge isn’t. It’s not Timmy, it’s the trainer/handler.
I think that a dog could also have a whole family as the Charge. I don’t know if that makes sense … but dogs *are* pack animals, and an Archetype that doesn’t incorporate that might be more of a human idea than an animal Archetype.
– FAR out
Well, maybe that’s just the thing, isn’t it?
Maybe they ARE human ideas, since the animals in the UA-verse don’t have souls (which is what allows humans to create the Clergy to begin with). A sort of sub-clergy, a spin-off supplementary. I mean, magick and avatars are essentially embodied exhibits of human opinion and the whole of the universe is apparently based on certain key interpretations of the universe before it. So why not have the animals be based primarily on human concepts, with maybe a few… odd animal archetypes here and there actually derived from the collective “beliefs” of animals.
This secondary Invisible Clergy, the Invisible Stable, whatever, could be seen as sort of a “Tool” clergy, full of ascended but not self-aware concepts that are manipulated by the Clergy. For example, the Faithful Hound is backed up (and exploited by) the Necessary Servant, the True King, the Loyal Laborer. The Feral Beast is, ironically, a bigger point of contention, being fought over by at least two Clergy camps. The True King (and other Pro-Civilization archetypes) who seeks to create a villified version with imagery of vicious wild dogs and dangerous predators crazed with unknown disease and thereby so as to have a strong concept to use as a boogey-man counterpoint to the benefits of civilization. Then the Savage (and Flying Woman and other freedom oriented archetypes… with the Ronin types who are apart from but serve order being caught in the crosshairs) who seeks to elevate and ennoble the Feral Beast as an example of what freedom and Nature can best be.
For years, this Tool Clergy was mostly animals (being the only concepts dynamic enough to truly ascend, perhaps), but now there are beginning to be mechanical ones, as well, born from exposure, use, and our tendency to personify. The Badass Muscle Car, the Cranky Crapheap, the Evil AI, etc.
I like that line of thought, Neville. Every Avatar has its iconic masks. Every mask has its tools, just as iconic.
I do like that idea; power *would* build up in the tools as well as the wielders. I was operating under the author’s premise that animals were generating the archetype, though.
– FAR out
I figured the “some woke up” could be read as “some tuned in to the tool archetypes” instead. I mean, not all house pets are the Faithful Hound, just like not all mothers are Mothers.
Just a thought on this last lines of the debate: why couldn’t dogs follow and avatar path? This path here matches (in spirit) pretty well with the Neccesary Servant, and dogs are necessary in several lines of work, from hunting to customs to seeing-eye dogs to security/policing.
Because in the UAverse they don’t technically have souls and therefore don’t get to play in the same league.