One of my play­ers wants to open Occultism as a skill. His PC is not a sor­cerer, on the con­trary, his pick for magic was F — doomed. The book says it’s impos­si­ble, but the player’s argu­men­ta­tion is not bad: His PC wants to learn as much about sor­cery as he can. He wants to know the enemy and learn how to destroy it.

If you treat occultism as a knowl­edge skill — that’s the way it is described — I see no rea­son to not let him learn it (from a book per­haps). Any thoughts?

Aghori wrote:
Just our rea­sons why Occultism is absolutely lim­ited to sor­cer­ers:

One rea­son has to do with niche pro­tec­tion. We intended sor­cery to be the sole prove­nance of sor­cer­ous char­ac­ters, with all that this means. And it means not only prac­tis­ing sor­cery, but also know­ing hard, true facts about sor­cery.

The sec­ond rea­son is that sor­cery in Blade is pre­sented as decid­edly non-​scientific. (In this respect our sor­cery is actu­ally much closer to how it was per­ceived most of the time in most of Earth’s cul­tures, as opposed to how it is often por­trayed in role-​playing.) Sor­cery is not so much some­thing you study, like quan­tum physics at a uni­ver­sity, but some­thing you prac­tice, like zen bud­dhism, or sufism, or dao­ism. It’s much closer to a mys­ti­cal prac­tice, fre­quently with some degree of reli­gious under­pin­nings, than to an aca­d­e­mic sci­ence. It is not some­thing you know, but some­thing you live. Thus it is obvi­ously only peo­ple who actu­ally prac­tise it who can have any hope of under­stand­ing it.

That said it doesn’t break the sys­tem if other char­ac­ters are allowed access to it, even though I am of course not in favour of it, for afore­men­tioned rea­sons. As allow­ing access to it is not ben­e­fi­cial enough to demand an Asset I would sug­gest allow­ing it only for char­ac­ters whose back­ground strongly sug­gests it, but allow­ing it to them with­out the need for any fur­ther pre­req­ui­site. For exam­ple, if the PC were a sor­cer­ously cre­ated golem, a kind of Frankenstein’s mon­ster, it would make a lot of sense to say that, as sor­cery is his very lifeblood, he may acquire Occultism, even if unable to work any sor­cery.

Under no cir­cum­stances would I sug­gest all­wo­ing it to E or F Sor­cery Pri­or­ity char­ac­ters, though. Vul­ner­a­bil­ity to sor­cery is a cor­ner­stone of their very con­cept, and this has to be viewed like the con­cept of a char­ac­ter in fic­tion. A real per­son with a cer­tain vul­ner­a­bil­ity may well do what he can to lessen this vul­ner­a­bil­ity. A lit­er­ary char­ac­ter for whom such a vul­ner­a­bil­ity is a con­cep­tual pil­lar may likely do the same, but as the very weak­ness is cen­tral to his con­cept all his attempts to lessen his vul­ner­a­bil­ity are bound to be fruit­less and mere colour — were they fruit­ful this would under­mine his very con­cept. In other words, allow­ing an E or F Sor­cery char­ac­ter to coun­ter­bal­ance this Pri­or­ity pick by becom­ing an expert in Occultism inval­i­dates the Pri­or­ity pick.

Thank you Michael for yet another inspir­ing answer. It remem­bered me to do more about his F pri­or­ity pick. So far he got away too easy, killing the one demon which haunted him.

I will talk to the player again. Maybe he realises that the skill doesn’t fit well with his PC which has no only F in sor­cery but also a PA “do any­thing to destroy Magic”.

Aghori wrote:
The F Sor­cery Pri­or­ity is the sin­gle most defin­ing choice of all Pri­or­i­ties a player can make. I wrote about it some­where, but I just can’t rouse myself to search for it right now. But just think about what the word means: “Doomed”. Not “In Grave Dan­ger”, not “Likely To Meet A Vio­lent End Soon”, but actu­ally “Doomed”. Can I spell it out any more clearly? Do I even need to?

A Doomed char­ac­ter is not fac­ing grave peril, a Doomed char­ac­ter is (nigh) cer­tain to go down. That’s an incred­i­bly pow­er­ful nar­ra­tive device. What you are deal­ing with here is the saga of a larger-​than-​life hero or anti­hero going to his end, big-​time, guns blaz­ing and every­thing. That’s some­thing to embrace and cel­e­brate in-​game, not to try to avoid at any cost. It’s a chance to tell a mem­o­rable epic, like rag­narok, where the Norse gods are not in grave dan­ger of dying, but cer­tain to die, des­tined to it – doomed to it. What could be more pow­er­ful? What Pri­or­ity pick be more defin­ing?

Here’s what you should do (and I’m not jok­ing but dead seri­ous):

Flip a coin. If it comes up heads, you have to kill the char­ac­ter within the next five ses­sions. Not endager him, not chal­lenge him, but kill him, no mat­ter what he does to avoid the Grim Reaper. If the coin comes up tails, you play nor­mally the next five ses­sions, and then flip the coin again. And so on, until the character’s Doom finally runs his course.

You think your player is going to com­plain? Remind him that he cre­ated a Doomed char­ac­ter and have him reread the entry on p35 and expalin to him that the “Doomed” choice is not about the lit­er­ary trope of over­com­ing insur­mount­able odds — that’s stan­dard adven­ture fare. The “Doomed” pick is specif­i­cally about cre­at­ing a char­ac­ter who will be destroyed by insur­mount­able odds, and the lit­er­ary trope of telling how he will still not be bro­ken in spirit but go down glo­ri­ously.


(Me per­son­ally, I just love Doomed. Once a player and ref­eree real­ize the power inher­ent in this Pri­or­ity pick, espe­cially with the Karma mechanic, where dying just means that your next char­ac­ter is going to be more pow­er­ful, it is incred­i­bly lib­er­at­ing. You can play a char­ac­ter who is spit­ting in the eye of the Devil – or equiv­a­lent – even as the Devil is finally squash­ing him.

You don’t nor­mally have this kind of free­dom, as you will usu­ally try to avoid being squashed by the Devil. The Doomed char­ac­ter will also try to avoid it, but as the player knows that he ulti­mately can’t avoid it, he can have his char­ac­ter act much more ballsy when it comes to the final con­fronta­tion. Instead of try­ing to squirm out from under the Devil’s cloven hoof, you can cock­ily and ballsily give him the lip and show him the fin­ger while he crushes you. He may crush you, but in spit­ting in his eye while he does I’d say you score at least a moral vic­tory – and cre­ate a truly mem­o­rable scene you will likely cher­ish for­ever.

The Devil may – will, actu­ally – take me in the end, but he will find me defi­ant. He may drag me to Hell, but he can­not defeat me.)

Hm. Lots to think about. As we were new to Blade nei­ther I nor the player realised how grave this deci­sion has to be. Now I have to come up with an idea for a heroic death. Maybe it helps that his char­ac­ter destroyed the altar of a demon god the last ses­sion (Naveh, if you are still famil­iar with the Hârn set­ting). And there’s still the arch­mage that destroyed his home­land and wants to bring him — the son of the emperor — down. Maybe he has to sac­ri­fice him­self to kill the mage. I will think of a way to bring him on that cli­matic road. And I have some time, I really threw a coin — and he is save for another five ses­sions. Thank you again.

Aghori wrote:
Sure I remem­ber Naveh. And all of Hârn, very fondly so.

Aghori wrote:
Yes! That’s the — or at least one – way to go!

Doomed can come in many shapes and guises, I was just talk­ing about hav­ing the Devil out to drag you scream­ing down to Hell as this seemed appro­pri­ate for your case. And as the PC had already scored some vic­to­ries I was not talk­ing about avoid­ing the doom – I felt he has already have had enough suc­cess – but only about dying, for sure.

When you have the Devil, or Naveh, as it were, out to get you, you don’t play for killing Naveh, that’s just a pre­pos­ter­ous idea. The Devil™ sim­ply is not killed, and when your Doom is of that kind you strive to avoid the Devil and run from the Devil and some­how appease the Devil or hide from him per­ma­nently, but that’s as good as it gets. And the Devil may well destroy you before you man­age any of those goals – but when he does, you can go down glo­ri­ously, defi­antly. I’d say that the chance for being undone by this kind of Doom should be no less than 50%, the ref­eree should really not just make it hard for the PC to evade the Devil, but hard to an unfair, over­whelm­ing degree.

Another kind of Doom, and related to that and your idea, may be sac­ri­fic­ing your­self to achieve some­thing. Like any kind of Doom, this needs to be dis­cussed at char­gen between player and ref­eree. You can reach an under­stand­ing that the char­ac­ter has a decent chance to achieve some nor­mally impos­si­ble task – say, killing, for­ever and for good, Sauron –, but that he will not sur­vive it. Then you play with this ulti­mate goal in mind, guid­ing the plot com­mu­nally to this oppor­tu­nity to sac­ri­fice your­self to slay Sauron.

One player of mine had a some­what lame Doom, but as it sprang from a cool back­story I’ll share it nev­er­the­less: He was inspired by Elric of Mel­ni­boné, and like Elric, his char­ac­ter had played a (the, actu­ally) key part in com­pletely oblit­er­at­ing his native nation and cul­ture and peo­ple. About 1% of his peo­ple had sur­vived and those ten thou­sand or so sur­vivors were now scat­tered in a dias­pora all over the world, and howl­ing for the PC’s blood. Cool back­ground, but lame Doom, but an exam­ple for a Doom that is sur­viv­able, even though with dif­fi­culty.

Another basi­cally lame Doom is the mor­tal sick­ness. It becomes truly lame when the PC is rac­ing against time to find a cure for it, even though this would still qual­ify as a Doom, if the ref­eree plays it really mer­ci­lessly. Bet­ter is the ver­sion where the PC races to accom­plish some other task before he dies, and I have had a very suc­cess­ful game like that, that revolved not around escap­ing death, but about using the remain­ing time well. The way I run some­thing like this is like that: After the third and every sub­se­quent ses­sion I openly roll d12, inform­ing the player what it is for. If it comes up 12, the PC will die the next ses­sion.

The coolest Doom I came about ever was when one player really wanted to play a truly vile bas­tard, the rightly infa­mous cap­tain of an infa­mous mer­ce­nary com­pany, a bas­tard stand­ing out even among other bas­tards. As play­ing a vile fleck of phlegm might be fun for a time but isn’t in the long run the player made the most of it by “Doom­ing” the char­ac­ter. He wanted a Doom where the PC would be killed by a sur­vivor of an atroc­ity he had com­mit­ted, and stip­u­lated that the killer either had to be a crip­ple, a per­son in his dotage, or a child or young teenager – in other words some­body who is no match for the PC. And so the big bad bas­tard whose name was used by moth­ers of dis­obe­di­ent chil­dren all over the world as the bogey­men was undone by a thir­teen year old girl, and we all thought that it was no more than he deserved – and that, too, was an appli­ca­tion of “Doomed”.

I might steal one or two of your sto­ries in the future. The prob­lem with my sac­ri­fice idea is, the game is under­way for some time and we haven’t dis­cussed such an end at char­ac­ter cre­ation. But maybe I find a way to con­vince the player that a cool end can be a good way to become a n immor­tal hero — at least in the sagas.

Aghori wrote:
I under­stand. And would in that way advise to not even bring up the idea, unless you judge the player to be the kind of guy who’s really going in for some­thing like that. If you bring it up and he refuses and you later kill him off, he might hold it against you as killing him arbi­trar­ily. Which you will of course have done, but only because he has specif­i­cally been ask­ing for it with his Sor­cery Pri­or­ity.

Once again, “Doomed” doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily equal auto­matic death, but it means that death dur­ing the first ten ses­sions is more likely than see­ing an eve­lenth. It is only with your player, who has had it too easy for too long, that I am push­ing for cer­tain, unavoid­able char­ac­ter death. So set up his death as spring­ing directly from “Doomed”, and make it good. Heck, have Naveh show up in per­son to kill him!

On an entirely dif­fer­ent note: When you were fresh to this forum and talked about set­ting your game on Hârn I advised you using the oppor­tu­nity to make your group blaze a trail all over Lythia in a way that would nor­mally go entirely agains the spirit of the immensely detailed set­ting and Hârn­mas­ter. May I ask if you did? Have you had them vis­it­ing some of the exotic places that are lit­tle more than names on the map?

Michael wrote:
Well, yes and no. We started the game in Chelemby, which ist not on Harn, but an island in the gulf of Shorkyne. They had a com­mon PA which had to do with a spe­cific clan. We had some adven­tures there and at nearby Har­baal. The time we spend in the viking Land of Har­baal was longer than I’d expected. Because they had set a whole port on flames and fled across the coun­try to the moun­tains. They made a new mor­tal enemy, stopped the Inva­sion of their home­land and aquired some new PA — and while it was not exotic it was great fun.

Right now the com­mon PA has played its course and the team is going south. Last ses­sion we spent a lot of time dis­cussing where the group wants to go. There is no com­mon goal any­more and a lot of dif­fer­ent PAs lead­ing in dif­fer­ent direc­tions. They decided for Emel­rene which is a very old and leg­endary land full of mon­sters and dark magic. One of the play­ers hopes to find clues here about his past. He is the one who lost his mem­ory.

The “doomed” guy hopes to gather knowl­edge about the mage which enslaved his peo­ple. I think it is here that he learns about the only way to kill that mage: sac­ri­fice him­self. After Emel­rene more exotic lands will be on their way. The desert con­ti­nent of Hep­ekaria likely is next. Here the mage awaits the doomed PC.

As you see, we haven’t been too far around. I some­times wish to speed up the game. But my play­ers seem to enjoy the game as it is. It is way more heroic and exit­ing and quicker than our aver­age Harn game was. But, with four play­ers and 16 PAs you can some­times be sidetracked…