carstenHi folks,
at the moment I am preparing a new UA campaign. So far I decided that all players should choose adepts or avatars because it fits the style of the campaign and especially the first scenario.
But what if someone does not find a suitable character and actually we probably don’t have the time and leisure to make up a new school.
So I thought of “magical skills”, i.e. unusual skills a person may have that are “magical” in a way without making that person a real adept. Does that make any sense?
I thought of stuff like “Aura seeing” as an example.
Can you guys think of similar stuff? Any suggestions for rules on that?
Cheers,
Carsten
LORD CJust Like Sherlock: The player can look at a person and make logical deductions based on physical evidence. (You’re married. You’re a lawyer. You have two children.) This would seem like some kind of clairvoyance to the person on the receiving end. On a failed roll the player would make a logical deduction that was wrong but wouldn’t necessarily know it.
Of course, it could be possible that the player character would be doing this unconsciously. He might think that he was really clairvoyant.
Artifact Magnet: At the end of an adventure the player makes an Artifact Magnet roll. If he is successful, any ownerless artifacts
from the adventure just happen to wind up in his possession. (This actually happened to one of the characters in my campaign. He wound up with the artifacts so often that we deceided to make it a formal skill for him.)
Greykevfirst group of skills:
Mechanical knack: pick up something you’ve never seen before, shake it, blow the dust off, whack it on the side, and Hey! It’s working again! For a little while: successful roll
= minutes of function or seconds if it’s really complex, hours for matched success…
Information font: Phoenician pottery? Mesoamerican tribal customs? Where to eat at 2AM in Davenport Iowa? The info font (might) know. more for the erudite or scatter-brained, this is a cool thing since it lets you give hints & misinformation.
Where it’s at: whether dowsing for water or knowing where that lost tennis bracelet got to, the player has a direction & distance impression about where things are. Might need a physical prop, or only work on things they’re familiar with, with a photo, etc.
Doom sayer: the gloomy coworker whose worst fears about things come true more often than not. Harks back to knocking on wood, but a great skill for players who speculate about what might be going on or happening behind the scenes.
What you need: Talk to people, get to know them, and what they need just comes to you. It may not turn their life upside down, but it might just cheer them up. Use the tens digit of successes as an indicator or how important the identified need is to the person. Failures use the ones digit for how far off the player is in his/her assessment.
Greykevsecond group of skills:
Understood by animals: They may not do what you ask, and you have no idea what they’re saying, but house pets and wild creatures certainly understand you! Whether you can convince the guard dog to be quiet, or the pigeons not to anoint your car depends on how well you can appeal to an animal intellect.
Lucid dreamer: as in our world, the ability to be aware one is dreaming and affect the content. In UA perhaps the dreams can come true, or the places the dreamer visits are eerily accurate in their wakening-world details. Perhaps the dreamer can pull other sleepers into the dream… Depending on which way you take it could forward many plots.
Crap magnet: Not literally, but for some reason if something bad is going to happen to a random PC it happens to the magnet unless he rolls a success to avoid it. Matched success yields a “danger sense” which lets him try to do something as everything hits the fan. Matched failure, well, maybe everyone in the party gets some.
Magic pockets/purse/backpack/trunk/etc: for the packrat in the party, unless finding t’s a plot point the person with magic pockets can turn up on short notice just about anything that would fit in their magic receptacle. Alternatively, assign size categories to the tens digit, number of minutes to find the thing to the ones. Ludicrous things on matched successes only: “why yes, I *do* have a Geiger counter in my backpack, why do you ask?”
The gist of things: you may not speak Burmese, but you have a good idea what the second mate off that tramp steamer you were at last night was trying to say. Generally this is better for a family of languages than a specific one, the weirdness comes from never having studied or heard a word of it before.
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These are mostlu common-day magics, but they’d wet the apatite for more out-there things.
cheers,
Kevin
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