presents...
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Building BlocksOver the course of Red Ribbons, it became necessary to better define the post-Atropos levels of Sorte that were apparently achieved by Marietta Lorenzo and might be within the grasp of Beatrice Caligari. I looked at some interesting little details:
All this seems to point to a temporal aspect of highly advanced Sorte - something that would allow Marietta to build a palace of the future, and try to undo the workings of the past. The black strands - I assume that Marietta had them, too - are somehow involved.
Working Beyond the NowJust as most strega can see the strands now and manipulate the strands now, the Grand Master strega can see the strands through time, using their black strands. Whereas most strega see a webwork of strands connecting people, the Grand Masters see a tapestry. Each life is a warp thread, running along the length of the fabric. Strands connecting that life to other lives branch out from it, making the weft. Warp threads can come together and touch briefly, creating a new warp thread when someone is born. When someone dies, their thread ends. One's own past is the easiest to see and handle. The more years the strega tries to reach back, the heavier the tapestry - supported by her black strands - becomes. There should be an upper limit to how far back a strega can see using this technique. I had Beatrice Caligari typically use this ability like this: She would begin by pulling up her own life thread and spinning out her connections to any people relevant to her query. Then, in "six degrees of separation" fashion, she would spin out their relationships until she found the thread of the person for whom she was looking. Once that thread was located, she could automatically see the time history of that person's three most important threads, and could look for relationships to any other threads she had in view. It's an important limitation that she had to know, before she started looking, how to trace that "six degrees" tree. If a questioner asked her about "Gianfranco Villanova," she couldn't help you - unless you could tell her that Gianfranco was Principe Giovanni Villanova's cousin and one of his Lord's Hands. She has a strand to her father, Vincenzo Caligari, who she knows is in conflict with Villanova. That gets her to Villanova's strand. She can trace Villanova's thread to where it breaks off from his father's - his father's being the one that ended suddenly when Giovanni was ten. Follow his father's to his grandfather's, and go along grandfather's looking for other sons - that will identify Villanova's uncles. Check the uncle's sons, Giovanni's cousins, until one is found with Rods and Coins strands to the prince, and probably a Swords strand to the questioner. If there is more than one candidate, she may be able to use time-based information - like when Gianfranco first became a Lord's Hand - to distinguish between strands. Like the Clotho abilities of the normal strega, the Grand Master can at first only attempt to see the relationships between people over time. She can automatically see their three most important relationships, and can look for others with a TN of 25. (The strain of holding up the heavy tapestry makes this more difficult.) She can also automatically see the biological events of birth and death. I never developed the idea very much past here, since Beatrice was at this Grand Master Clotho level. Marietta was more advanced, but her most stunning sorceries were the result of mixing Sorte and Porte. I think allowing the use of Lachesis and Atropos Sorte techniques in the past is asking for a GM headache, unless you are already a fan of time travel games. The future is much less well-defined than the past. There is no set tapestry to view. However, the current threads have a certain momentum and, barring sorcerous interference, general trends can be ascertained. This is really no more remarkable than a skilled people-watcher noting that a love triangle is heading for a violent confrontation - the main difference is that the strega can observe this remotely, and is using a different set of information than the people-watcher.
The Black StrandsI envision the black strands that curse Beatrice Caligari as being expressions of the id. If someone angers her or makes her, even briefly, wish them harm, the strands will try to snap out and fulfil this wish. This naturally horrifies Beatrice, and her reaction has been to isolate herself from people (less chance to cause harm) and exercise absolute control over her baser emotions and desires. But by denying that part of herself, she is denying a good deal of the power she could get from her black strands. Marietta Lorenzo had no moral issues with indulging her whims; the Mad Queen had very few moral issues at all. Beatrice continually fights her strands and views them as a curse, something with which she is burdened. Marietta embraced them, and their use came as naturally to her as her own arms and legs. But she seems like the sort of queen who would use her arms to whip a servant to death for displeasing her, so... that's hardly a Good Thing. But it did mean that she was very powerful.
Porte/Sorte SynergyAnother list of interesting details:
What if time as well as space could be warped or suspended in the Walkway? What if the different Bargainer's Arts could be combined for more spectacular (and destructive) effects? Temporal Pulley System I never developed a full rules set for using Porte and Sorte in combination, but only ideas for how Marietta might have done what she did. First and most simply, a Grand Master strega can use a Portal as a pulley when looking into the past. A Portier is needed to open and hold a Portal between two nearby points. The strega reaches her black strands through the Portal and out the other side before attempting to construct the temporal tapestry. The Portal, being of no particular time as well as no particular place, reduces the load she feels when she reaches farther and farther into the past. I never assigned a particular risk to this technique, past the ususal possibility of Fate Lashes, but either more Lashes or Lashes inflicted on the Portier as well seems reasonable. Retrieving Items with Strands through Portals Moving on, the Portier can open a Portal to a location he currently has blooded and which was also once (or currently is) home to something which was important to him. If the strega can see this strand (automatic if the strand is current and one of the Portier's top three; TN 15 if the strand is current; TN 25 if this is a strand existing only in the past and the strega needs to call up the Portier's tapestry), she can trace it with her black strands through the Portal and feel it on the other side - even if it exists only in the past. She can enwrap the item in black strands and pull it through the Portal into the present. I only ever used this once, in-game: Beatrice Caligari, working with Vincent Gaulle dul Motte, retrieved a sentimental token the duke had lost years earlier. Beatrice, deeply interested in the research, suggested that they next try the duke's dead wife - to return her to life. Gaulle dul Motte excused himself from further experiments shortly thereafter, recognizing something Wrong when he heard it. It would be at the GM's option if using the black strands in this fashion would kill a person. I elected to rule that it did not - running them through a Portal seemed to prevent that. To denote that, strands emerging from a Portal through time were black but sparkling, as if they contained tiny stars. It would be easy enough, though, to say that the Duchess Gaulle dul Motte died precisely because she got hit by a time-travelling black strand. In the epilogues, I suggest that Beatrice (who survives the sinking of Caligari Island in my game) might try and use this method to pull an intact version of her home from the past into the present. This would surely have all sorts of unpleasant unintended consequences. Stealing from the Future Even more outrageously, I allowed long-dead Queen Marietta Lorenzo to perform a similar feat, but reaching into the future. She resolved that she would cause a palace to be built that was ages ahead of its time. She made sure the strands to the future were tending toward her success in the endeavor, and then reached forward through a Portal, following her own Coins strands to the palace in which she was heavily investing. She found other versions of Lorenzo Palace in the future, but nothing of help to her until she also felt someone's Queen Coins strand similarly attached to a version of the palace. This was a Mondavi nobleman in 1668, tasked with the restoration of the family manorhouse. I was still tinkering with the workings of this incredibly strange Sorte, and (honestly, because it was a cool visual effect) described that her black strands more or less infected his Queen Coins to the palace. When the entire webwork of the Queen strand had turned black and starry, the unfortunate Mondavi was pulled back in time when he chanced too close to the tiny pinpoint Portal in the palace courtyard. He, and an architect working on the project similarly captured, re-created the Lorenzo Palace they knew, way back in the 1050s or so. (Why their continued presence in the past did not further affect history was simple - the Lorenzos killed them as soon as the palace plans were done. People with future knowledge are too dangerous to let live!) This must've had some major repercussions, because Marietta did not apparently continue to steal technology from the future. Perhaps the effort of it nearly killed her and discouraged her from further future meddling. The Disappearance of Lorenzo Island Finally, her greatest attempt was to remove the Cresent people from history. That was in the past, and rather safer to deal with than the future. I believe, rather than undo or rewrite history, she intended to pull the ancient progenitors of the Cresent people into the Walkway and strand them there. This time, she overreached herself. The combined "temporal weight" of the Cresents was far, far greater than the leverage Marietta could exert, even with the Portal acting as a pulley. Like the unfortunate Inish construction worker, she discovered that they outweighed her. Desperate to anchor herself, she dug in with her strands to everything nearby to which she had a connecting strand - including her home and base of power, Lorenzo Island. It was to no avail - rather than pull the Cresents into the Walkway, she and the island went.
It Goes Without SayingThis is all non-canonical. This is all crazy. This is most definitely not for PCs unless you are running a hell of an epic game. This is presented only as one possible framework for giving consistency to any "super-Sorte" that may occur in a game. I understand that some GMs prefer their "super-Sorte" to be individual and quirky, with Grand Master strega learning unique tricks and abilities that they do not share with others. This will certainly keep the PCs on their toes, and allows for much flexibility. Me, I like a consistent underlying set of principles. I'm an engineer, after all. Your mileage may vary, and if this tickles your fancy, I'm happy.
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