I'm posting these character creation topics under your characters, which I thinkhope means you can edit these pages directly. These topics are open, but feel free to request an additional private thread or send a PM if you want to discuss elements of your character you'd rather keep quiet. I'll start it off by copy-pasting the most recent character info I can find from the general purpose thread, and we can go from there.

---

Name: Kassándra
Estate: Hidden Thruths
Origin:
Age:
Gender: Male or female, who knows ? Certainly transgender.







Additional Anchor Notes
Anchor

• Expanded Details

Anchor

• Expanded Details

Gifts
Gift (# CP)

• Expanded Details

Gift (# CP)

• Expanded Details

---

Lifepath Notes

Estate: Hidden Truth

Key: III Acacia. A dangerous secret

• Keeping God's Secret
• More than anything else, I'm just plain weird
• My Estate is from the Dark side of human experience
• (I'm still in Trouble ?)

Shadow. That hurt to keep

• Painfull Silence
• set apart
• (nemesis ?) (an ennemy Excrucian ?)

Key: XI Wild Rose. My Nature

• Freak
• My Estate is something you live
• I lived a troubled life (or extraordinary life ?)
• I sing the song of the Wild

Shadow. My strugle

• Trying to fit in
• self doubt

---

Projects and Destiny

Project : (##/## Destiny)

• Details

This message was last edited by the GM at 01:40, Tue 18 Feb 2020.

I hesitate for some Gift for Kassándra, but I don't know if they will be redundant with his Personna Miracles. Especially Unblemished Guise and Wayfinder. Which ones do you think would be a plus beside his Personna ?

• Elusive (1CP)
• Invisibility (1CP)
• Unblemished Guise (1CP)
• Wayfinder (1CP)

Mysterious is actually really tempting but it's quite expensive…

In reply to Cassandra (msg # 2):

Right off the bat, that will depend on where you decide to put your character points. If you don't put any points into Persona, then the Gifts won't be redundant even if they can do similar things, since your Persona miracles will be comparatively costly to use.

The gift Mysterious (lesser creation of mystery) might, in practice, do the same thing as a lesser Enchantment of Hidden Truths, since that can be used to declare any particular truth to be hidden. Either way, the gift version of the miracle is more potent because it has the "Automatic" Invocation, meaning you don't have to take any actions to use it, and it can cover up your actions and presence much more easily.

If you do take Mysterious, it would probably make Invisibility and Unblemished guise redundant, even if they don't technically do the exact same thing. It's more reliable and broadly applicable than either.

Wayfinder sounds thematically appropriate for your Estate. Elusive seems like it would be thematically appropriate for your character.

To clarify, does Kassandra typically switch back and forth between using "he/him" and "she/her" pronouns, rather than using "they/them"?

To translate the fact that nobody trust his predictions, I think we only have Afflictions. It could be either:

• I'm not as impressive as a power should (quite free of interpretation)
• I'm unable to Shine… (which is a serious handicap, especially with a high Persona Trait)
• No one trusts my words (which is a serious handicap too, but somehow accurate)

Beside this, Kassándra was one of the most beautiful woman of her time, she was the Trojan equivalent of Helen. So a 2 or 3 in Cool could fit, or a Superior Beauty Attribute…

For his divination, is a skill "Divination", as a magical practice playable ? This is something he has before he became a Noble, but it could also be a Gift (like Greater Divination of Fate) granted by someone else than his Ymera.

For now Kassándra's Traits are :

• Aspect 1
• Domain 2
• Persona 3
• Treasure 1

but it's already 21 CP…

An affliction like 'no one trusts my words' puts a sizable burden on the people you're playing with, since they can't ever act like they trust you without risking hurting you by breaking the affliction.

Similarly, you've also got a Shine 5 and a Shine 4 person in your familia, so, while you can't, you know people who do have a ton of shine.

Cool is a good idea at 2 or 3. I'm running Superior Charisma 3 but that's not directly physical beauty.

I also want to at least consider the issue of Divination and the ability of other players to affect prophesy results. A Greater Divination of Fate seems almost like inviting something like an imperial miracle into play regularly? (Since things will try hard to stay on that course) which can be a lot of work if, say, someone doesn't like what's been predicted. I'm not really sure how you see this kind of predictive power at work in play, but my main concern is that it will act to cut off too many options for others. A mortal magic of divination will face obstacles, and miracles can explicitly kind of ignore it, so, there's a bit of a difference of scale, potentially?

@Kassandra, @HG, how do you two each envision implementing prophesy, especially with Kassandra's 'people don't believe her' and whether that's also true of fellow PCs? Similarly, is this 'people don't believe him' thing something that can hurt him if it's proven untrue in play, because, well, IMO it might be hard to 'always disbelieve whatever you say'  so a requirement to do so or else we hurt you could be difficult. (which is what an affliction implies)

Also, I second the HG's question here: To clarify, does Kassandra typically switch back and forth between using "he/him" and "she/her" pronouns, rather than using "they/them"? I'd like to have a better idea of what gender expression you're leaning toward, for the character, or are you alternating, ect?  (I definitely can imagine a few interactions we may have had, but it really depends on having an accurate picture of how Kass presents themselves :D)

I have some thoughts on Kassandra's gifts and such that I will post later today. But I did want to comment on what you guys are talking about with her divination and affliction.

For her divination skill...I am actually very supportive of this. I think it can work just fine. I think Luna's concerns are met if you understand that wondrous level effects are always trumped by miraculous ones and as a player you need to be open and flexible about it.

So what this means is for the divination insights that they are, on the mundane and supernatural level, true. However, if a miracle somehow comes into play that contradicts the divination prophecy, that you have to understand the divination may not come fully true. A way to look at this is that the divination skill is not "this will definitely happen for sure no question" so much as "there are multiple paths that destiny and fate can take, and time is like a flowing river that sometimes ebbs and flows or has sudden twists or unforeseen tributaries. And that this prophecy is the most likely course of events to happen, but the future can be changed by the action of men or the will of gods." When it is viewed that way, then her divination is just fine. Hence why I'm supportive of it.

As for the affliction...I think it should be something like one of these:

*Affliction: No one trusts my predictions

NOTE: This allows us to still trust you overall, just not your predictions.

*Affliction: Non-miraculous beings do not trust my predictions.

NOTE: This means that 99% of the beings in the universe won't trust your prophecies, but things like nobles and such will if they choose.

*Allocation: People always seem to find some excuse to not follow my advice.

NOTE: This isn't about trust or what not. It's about people being pig headed and stupid. The classic Cassandra didn't have trust issues, they just never believed her prophecies specifically.

----

So I'd structure the affliction a bit differently from "Nobody trusts me" to "for some reason when I speak true prophecy no one (or perhaps non-miraculous beings) take heed for some reason"

Hey Kass...ok I had time to siet down now after work and go over what I'm seeing about your stats and your gift concerns, etc, and wanted to weigh in too. I think you should definitely consider the following gifts as they go great with your concept. After a point, it is worth it to trim back stats in exchange for gifts...especially if they support your concept. Reyfus has 9 points in gifts himself, for example, and each one is very strongly tied to his background.

For Kassandra, I say go for it! I say take the gifts and run with it. They will let you do things that may be technically outside your own normal abilities either for cheap or for free, and like I said I am a big fan of using gifts to support a concept and yours really works. And automatic gifts like mysterious and elusive don't require you to sustain a miraculous action which is great!

You can trim invisibility since a persona miracle can hide you if you need it. Unblemished guise is actually good in that it cloaks the fact you're a miraculous being at all...but I think your own miracles could pull that off just fine too. So it could be trimmed. Now mysterious, wayfinder, and elusive though I think are core to your concept. Not to mention auto gifts which rock. So that's 7cp. You have 25-7=18 points to play with. So you can take 6 attribute points total for 3 cp each. So basically, I think you should trim aspect down to 0. It still will let you do lots of cool things, but I think domain 2 persona 3 treasure 1 will really let you sink your teeth into hidden truths.

I'd like to propose the following:

Mysterious 5cp
Elusive 1 cp
Wayfinder 1 cp

Aspect 0
Domain 2
Persona 3
Treasure 1

To HG : How will we play hir oracular capacities ? Gift ? Skill ?

In a French Game called Les Milles Marches, the author find an elegant way to play it :

• First, the player tells her character use her power.
• Then we play as usual. Until the end of the prediction.
• Then, the GM ask if the characters would have done differently if they knew what happened.
• If so, we go back to this point and play from then to change the future…
• If not, that's ok, we're fine, but the character knew it all along.

It's elegant on tt-rpg. But maybe in PbF it would slow the pce of the game too much. What do you think ?

I don't even know myself yet. What are the neutral pronoun and so on invented for trans ? Hir ? Hem ?

In reply to Kassandra (msg # 9):

Xe. Hir. Xer.

I've seen different individuals prefer different things, as that goes. Better to ask.

Kass...please read message 7 in this thread and let us know what you think.