Exile's Cypher: Born of the Vaal

The last couple posts in this vein have been on already-existing Foci and how to fit them to the themes of Wraeclast. Today we'll look at new Foci for the campaign - specifically, ones that relate character to the nightmare ancestral power whose fall condemned the land to be cursed, the Vaal Empire. The creators of the Virtue Gems, masters of forbidden sciences and dark arts, the Vaal today haunt the rest of the world as the darkest of boogeymen.

Touched By the Vaal

You have been touched since you were young with a connection to the mysteries left behind by the Vaal when they once ruled over everything. It manifests as whispering voices that offer insights and advice, not always pertinent to the situation you're in, and a natural instinct for the things the cursed empire left behind. You tend to be drawn to ornate clothing with strange symmetries hidden in the design, in lurid colors that draw the eye to you, and you likely delight in the attention.

While any Type can benefit from this Focus, those who focus on Intellect will find it more valuable than others.

Additional Equipment: You have a compass of sorts; fashioned of faintly luminous metals and crystals of unknown composition, it points to the largest Vaal-crafted relic within a month's walk of you.

Minor Effect: Corrupt energy courses over the area around you out to a short distance, stunning enemies and leaving all rolls against them modified one level in your favor.

Major Effect: An unnoticed Vaal construct surges to life for a moment and lunges at a foe, immbolizing them for a round before it crumbles into fragments.

Tier 1 Whispering Darkness (Intellect 2): You reach out with your psyche to listen carefully, gaining an asset on all initiative rolls and Perception tasks to detect creatures or Vaal relics for the next hour.

Lore of the Vaal: You are trained in all skills related to information about the Vaal Empire and the relics it left behind.

Tier 2 Corrupt Aura (Intellect 3): You channel the corrupt energy of the cursed land, creating a bubble of darkness that grants you +1 Armor and adds 1 point of corrupt damage to your melee attacks.

Tier 3 Army of the Vaal (Intellect 2+): For every two points of Intellect you spend, you animate a level 2 skeleton warrior that claws out of the ground and fights for you for the next three rounds. Alternately, you may spend 4 Intellect from your pool to summon a level 4 skeleton archer or sorcerer who can make attacks out to long range for the same duration.

Tier 4 Malachai's Touch: Your form corrupts and twists as you become closer to the source of your power, gaining an inherent +2 Armor bonus; this results in a visible and disturbing transformation of some kind - scales or chitin covers your skin and your body becomes emaciated and subtly deformed.

Will of the Vaal: You gain +4 Intellect.

Tier 5 Name of the Corrupt: You are considered an Abomination for all effects that enhance or heal such creatures, and they regard you as one of their own, leaving you in peace unless you attack them.

Howl of the Damned (Intellect 1+): You unleash a shattering scream from your augmented lungs and throat, dealing 2 damage to everything out to a short distance from you; every 2 Intellect you spend past this increases this damage by 2 points.

Tier 6 Blasphemous Apotheosis: You are considered a Vaal Construct for purposes of effects that enhance or heal such, and such things will regard you as one of their own unless you attack them. You gain an additional +2 Armor, and your Recovery rolls have a +1 bonus. You no longer even vaguely resemble your birth form.

Malachai's Blessing: You gain a melee attack that functions as a medium weapon of slashing, piercing, or bashing type (your choice), and it deals an additional 2 poison damage on the round following a successful blow.

Blessed With Virtue

You were born with an attunement to the Virtue Gems the Vaal first created; you can wield them adeptly, and have little to fear from the corrupting aspects of their fragmentary forms. You likely favor crystalline appearances, sewing reflective things to your clothing and delighting in gemstone jewelry.

Any Type can benefit from this Focus easily.

Minor Effect: A pulse of energy among your belongings conducts along your touch, augmenting whatever you were doing to be slightly more effective.

Major Effect: One of your Virtue Gems spontaneously activates without a need for a depletion roll, directing its power to best benefit you in the situation.

Tier One Capacity: You may carry an extra cypher safely.

Infused with Virtue: You gain an additional five points to distribute among your stat pools.

Tier Two Gembond: You are considered trained in all tasks relating to cyphers and artifacts.

Virtuous Power: Any Virtue Gems that deal damage deal one additional point when you invoke them.

Tier Three Gemseed: You may pick a single cypher you carry and embed it in your flesh, gaining the effects of it as a personal power. GM discretion on whether or not a cypher can be utilized in this fashion.

Crystalline: You gain +1 Armor.

Tier Four Virtuous: You gain +2 to each Pool, and a +1 on Recovery rolls.

Tier Five Fueled by Virtue: Whenever a Virtue Gem would be depleted, you may opt to instead move one step down the damage track instead; you cannot recovery from this state until your next ten hour rest. You may use this as many times as you like, but dead is still dead.

Tier Six Gemling: You may choose a single Virtue Gem; it becomes a permanent part of you, never suffering depletion rolls, and you additionally gain +2 to each Pool and +2 Armor.

Exile's Cypher: Modified Focus

Some Foci will fit into Wraeclast just fine with just a little tweaking. Only a few need this tweak to be ready to play, so this will be a relatively simple conversion post. Most of these tweaks will simply be in favor of the flavor of the setting, but a few will be more deeply mechanical in nature. So, without further ado, let's get straight into it.

Channels Divine Blessings

This focus is perfect for those who want to be the rare truly innocent soul cast into Wraeclast by the machinations of a corrupt Inquisition.

At Tier 1, the Focus is modified in that there is, for this world, only one god; all the blessings come from this unnamed divinity. Addtionally, neither the Death/Darkness nor the Trickery/Greed/Commerce Blessings are available.

Tier 3: This tier's power specifically effects the undead (zombies, skeletons, ghosts, and the like) and all Vaal Abominations.

Tier 5: The improved portion of this power is always twisted by the cursed nature of Wraeclast, injecting some unwanted side effect into the result as if a GM Intrusion had been produced.

Tier 6: Vaal Abominations struck by this power act as if they were one level lower on the following round, as the divine power briefly stuns them.

Consorts With The Dead

Cursed Power: At any time that the character has a necromantic effect active, they're surrounded by thin, swirling wisps of dark energy, and they leave bloody footprints wherever they walk.

Necromantic Abilities: In addition to the other effects of this ability, each power so modified is accompanied by the keening wail of cursed souls when activated.

Controls Beasts

Beast Companion: This is a rhoa (an armored, flightless bird that attacks by charging opponents and ramming them, then tearing into them with its beak), giant scorpion, giant spider, sand spitter (a vaguely crablike creature that scoops up rocks and sprays them from its proboscis as a ranged attack), monkey, or large spitting serpent.

Crafts Unique Objects

Replace each reference to 'artifacts' with 'Virtue Gems'. This character has some knowledge of the dark process by which Virtue Gems are crafted, and at Tier 6 may even implant a Virtue Gem safely into a person, transforming them into a Gemling.

Hunts Nonhumans

For the sake of this setting, Vaal Abominations and Gemlings are valid choices as a dedicated foe.

Shepherds Spirits

On a GM Intrusion, the powers of this character draw the attention of the many, many unquiet ghosts that inhabit the land of Wraeclast, and may call spirit-eating cannibals to hunt the character.

Works Miracles

Another good choice for a somewhat pure character unfairly cast into Wraeclast, this one is even more proactive than one who Channels Divine Blessings.

Miraculous Power: All effects the character wields are tinged with a golden or silvery light, blatant evidence of the character's miraculous abilities.

Tier 2: The character gains a Disciple, a level 2 creature who follows the character around and acts as a loyal servant due to the character's miraculous powers.

Tier 4: Casting Out the Unclean - (4 Intellect) - The character radiates sacred energy out to a short distance, inflicting 2 damage to any undead or Vaal Abominations in range.

Tier 6: The character's Disciple become a level 5 creature, ready to defend the miracle worker against most threats.

Exile's Cypher: Focusing In

The Focus is the verb part of the one-sentence summary of a character that sits at the heart of the Cypher System; in adapting it to fit the setting presented in Path of Exile, we're going to have to remove some Foci, change others, and add a few. Given that this could be said to be the meat of the conversion, from a player's perspective, this will like be a series of posts on the subject, along with a look at the 'flavors' offered and how they might fit in. We'll start by looking at the list for those Foci that simply don't belong in the dark fantasy world depicted in Wraeclast.

Battles Robots and Builds Robots are clearly out of place in this, although you could make an argument to convert the latter to something like 'Crafts Golems' or the like. For the purposes of this conversion, however, we'll just mark them both off - the undead, wild beasts, and other exiles amply fill out the options for potential minions, and the undead should satisfy people who want something clearly artificial as a servant.

Calculates the Incalculable, at first glance, sounds like something that might not belong here, but what it describes isn't against the nature of the setting; a character of incredible intelligence has an obvious reason for being exiled, when their intellect results in them noticing flaws between the rhetoric of the Holy Church and the behavior of those who serve it.

Conducts Weird Science, on the other hand, has too much of a modern/sci-fi flavor to really fit; we'll revisit it as one we can revise to make it 'Conducts Strange Sorcery' for people who want a half-mad arcane savant, as the other options along that vein are more controlled than the way this focus feels.

Fuses Flesh and Steel and Fuses Mind and Machine are both out; the fantasic setting doesn't really half half-constructs aside from a few Vaal-era abominations that are dangerous as much for their absolute madness as for their power, and the bias is toward magic that destroys those who treat it as a science, rather than forms of science that can make magic safer.

Interprets the Law is out simply because, in Wraeclast, the only law is that of survival; likewise, the desolate nature of thing discards Is Idolized by Millions, while the fantasy setting sets Is Licensed to Carry aside. On the other hand, Metes Out Justice remains because the search for justice is a thing that exists even when there is no law to describe it.

Operates Undercover is out; it implies a form of society exists that Wraeclast just lacks. Pilots Starcraft is out for obvious reasons, as are Talks to Machines, Travels Through Time, Works the Back Alleys, and Works the System. Of those, the only one that could be argued in favor of is Works the Back Alleys, but the Stealth flavor covers it well enough that no need really exists for a thief-like Focus.

The last one that we could easily discard, Would Rather Be Reading, will remain - stories of this kind are full of the irreverent scholar who learned things and asked questions that those in charge of dogma would prefer remain unknown and unasked. This kind of like scholar-hero can make quite an interesting experience, and easily fills a role for the kind of person who likes to be a clever supporting-role tactician kind of character.

Some other Foci will need modified, even if they seem to fit just fine at first glance; we'll cover those in the next Exile's Cypher post.

Exile's Cypher: On Descriptors

Descriptors - the 'adjective' part of the one-sentence character description at the heart of an Cypher System character - come in a wide range of flavors and effects. They can be positive - things like Charming, Fast, Intelligent, Perceptive, or Tough - negative - such as Craven, Doomed, Impulsive, Mad, or Tongue-Tied - or simple flavorful - Exiled, Jovial, Mystical, or Weird. All of them have statistical impacts that help define the way your character is unique in contrast to a 'basic' version of whatever Type you choose.

Descriptors can impact whether you have training or an inability with a kind of skill, modify your stat pools to some degree, grant some small but helpful ability or a lasting effect the GM can use to invoke to bring your character into problematic situations, grant extra equipment or remove resources, and - perhaps most importantly - suggest ways to tie your character to the initial events of a game session or campaign.

As such, it might be helpful to touch on a few additional Descriptors (and modified versions of the core book ones) that are particular to the lands of Wraeclast. Modified descriptors are Doomed, Exiled, Spiritual, and Weird; additional ones are Cursed, Forgotten, Outcast, Pious, and Touched. As you might expect, given the cursed nature of the world these are helping describe, each one has downsides to go along with the benefits they offer.

Modified descriptors will just have their differences from the core versions noted, while new ones will be detailed in full.

Cursed

You're condemned and you know it. You were born under an ill sign, touched with dark powers and fated to come to an ill end of some kind. Your entire life has been lived under this cloud, leaving you waiting for the other shoe to drop. Of course, there's always the danger that the curse doesn't mandate a bad end for you, personally, but for those who'll have to deal with what you may become.

Fatalistic Reserve - You gain a +2 bonus to your Might Pool.
Dark Lore - You are trained in religious knowledge, history, and knowledge related to Virtue Gems and magic.
Inability - Your resignation makes you slow to react to threats; all initiative and Speed Defense rolls are modified by one level to your detriment.
Condemned Fate - Every other time the GM uses an Intrusion on you, you gain one XP to give away to someone else, but none for yourself. You are allowed to spend XP to refuse the intrusion still.
Burdened - Your curse takes precedence over all other ills against you; any time something attempts to place a long-term negative effect on you, rolls involved in it are modified one level in your favor.
Cosmetic Effect: You have some visible mark or item you can't be rid of that signifies your curse.

Doomed

Inability - Effects that would grant you a lasting benefit have all their rolls modified one level to your detriment.
Voices - You hear the call of the closest voices of death; you can spend a minute studying a choice ahead of you to sense which one has the stronger taste of doom about it (in game terms, the GM gives you a vague idea about what way ahead of you leads to the highest-level opponents.)

Exiled

Bond of Wraeclast - You are trained in all tasks related to Virtue Gems.

Forgotten

Your exile included a condemnation from the Arch Inquisitor himself, commanding that your name be struck from all records and that all who knew you must never speak of you again. Your deeds are gone, your past erased, your course wrenched from the path that fate had laid in for it. Even the auguries of your birth no longer apply to you.

Flexible - You gain +2 to a Pool of your choice.
Raw Talent - Your newfound freedom has forced you to become better at looking after yourself. You become trained in running, jumping, and survival.
Inability - Being wrenched out of the world has wrenched it from you, as well; everything outside your life since the condemnation is a blur. Any rolls involving lore and history not directly related to you is modified by two steps to your detriment.

Outcast

Your crimes, whatever they were, are the stuff of whispered legend; where others were condemned to exile or cursed to be forgotten, you have been cast out. In the eyes of those who once knew you, you are no longer human - no longer anything but a terrible beast, a danger to all around you. Perhaps the crimes you were cast out for were true, perhaps not; it doesn't matter. On the cursed shores of Wraeclast, you have no choice but to become what you have been accused of being, if you want to live to see another day.

Enduring - Add +2 to each Pool.
Survivor - You are trained in all survival skills.
Outcast's Mark - All social skill are modified by two levels to your detriment.

Fallen Virtue - All tasks involving resisting temptation are modified by one level to your detriment.

Hunted - Even in Wraeclast, your past haunts you. Someone has followed you to these cursed shores, or another exile has decided you are too dangerous to let live. GM Intrusions involving you will sometimes involve this foe's appearance, or at least indirectly be the work of their hands. If another player is also Outcast, this may be the same foe or two different ones who may work together or be at odds.

Pious

Even in Wraeclast there is grace and glory, and you know that you have been touched by it. Whether you came here voluntarily to see to the needs of the exiles or you were unjustly exiled by rivals jealous of your blessed state, you are one of the few that the land's stain cannot tarnish. Of course, this makes you a magnet for the corrupt minds that linger in the darkest parts of the continent, as your grace is a burning light to them.

Piety - Add +4 to your Intellect Pool.
Purity - You are wholly unable to use any item of Vaal origin, as the corrupt nature of it burns you.
Sanctity - Any attempt to deceive others is modified by one level to your detriment.
Sacred Ward - The blessed nature of your being gives you +1 Armor.

Spiritual

Spirit-Talker - You are trained in all social interactions with ghosts and other spiritual beings, including the strange things raised by the Vaal.

Touched

While not exactly stained by the curse of Wraeclast, since you woke up on the beach there's something not quite right about the way your mind works. You know you think differently than others, but whether or not you try to hide that fact is up to you. It does give you some small advantages on these shores, even if you've got a hard time trying to understand the concerns of other exiles.

Flexible Mind - Add +2 to your Intellect Pool.
Distracted - You have trouble picking up cues of danger; initiative rolls are modified one step to your detriment.
Scrambled Thoughts - All skills related to knowledge are modified one step to your detriment, as you can't collect your thoughts into a form that you can express.
Altered Insight - You are considered trained in all perception actions.
Causeless Effect - You have trouble connecting effects to causes at times; whenever a GM Intrusion would be triggered by something you directly did, you can't spend XP to refuse it. You do gain XP as normal, however.

Weird

Rather than an affinity for the supernatural, you are attuned to the presence of the Vaal; replace all mentions of the supernatural with Vaal.
Gemling - You are considered trained with all Virtue Gems and Vaal items.

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Next time we visit Exile's Cypher, we'll start looking at Foci, seeing what existing ones will work in Wraeclast, which need tweaked, which need removed, and what new Foci might be available.

Exile's Cypher: Welcome to Wraeclast

The cursed land of Wraeclast changes somewhat when put through the lens of the Cypher System; where Fate focuses on how to render it into a story-format that provides everyone with building blocks to create the story, the Cypher System tends to be more freeform; outside of the characters and their defined abilities, everything in the Cypher system comes down to a thing's level and the set dressing hung on that detail.

Characters in the Cypher System are comprised of three parts - an adjective (descriptor), a noun (type), and a verb (focus) that are strung together to form a description of the character. For Exile's Cypher, there's a need for special attention to the first and last of those components, to allow for the nature of the setting to be played out as players see fit. Interestingly, while each of Path of Exile's character classes has a decided flavor, you can thematically construct them with any of the Cypher System's four character types, even though the flavor varies significantly with each.

Descriptors are essentially single words that serve as an adjective to make a given character more unique, modifying the basic statistics of a given character by providing extra skills, equipment, features, and flaws to shape how the character interacts with the world. A Brash character who has the same Type and Focus as a Quiet one will interact with the world very differently, much less in comparison to one who is Cursed or Forgotten.

Types are one of the four things that function as the closest thing the system has to a character class. Coming in flavors of Warriors, Adepts, Explorers, and Speakers, each one can offer something as the base for building a PoE character; some obviously make more sense than others (a Marauder makes more sense as a Warrior than as an Adept, at first glance), odd-looking combinations can be fruitful ground (a Speaker built as a Marauder may persuade the spirits to aid them, and talk the more intelligent foes down from hostility, while a Warrior built as a Witch may be an elemental force of destruction, smashing through all who oppose her in wrathful fury.)

Foci are the real workhorses of the game system, providing a tremendous amount of flavor and specialized capability to each character; this is where the power of a given class will come into play, and is the component most likely to have several posts fleshing out versions for use n Wraeclast; each of the varieties of character can be described through Foci in the form of a verb statement such as Communes With Spirits or Commands The Elements.

Put together it forms a complete one-line description that gives a concise feel for what the character is like; a Brash Warrior who Commands The Dead is a warlike Witch who wades into battle alongside their raised minions, heedless of personal danger, while a Cursed Adept who Fires Runed Arrows is a Ranger whose very existence draws the attention of the lands of Wraeclast.

The next post in the Exile's Cypher line will look at Descriptors, and how much the existing ones need added to or modified for the purposes of this campaign.

Game Conversion: Path of Exile - Beginning

One of the wonderful things about modern video games is how easily some of them convert to tabletop purposes. The downside to this is that many of them either give you a world and no useful plot-related material, or such a narrow band of plot that there's no world to go and explore. Middle ground, where a solid plot exists but is fluid enough to leave room for exploration in other forms without too much effort on the part of a GM, is relatively rare to find.

Thus why this conversion comes to Path of Exile, a massively multiplayer instanced online game where players take the role of people exiled from one land, cast ashore on a continent that actively hates all who walk upon it. With seven classes each with three thematic branches, there are a lot of options for converting the game to a dice-using format. I'll be focusing on two specific game systems in this conversion effort - Cypher System and Fate Core.

I'll be doing this in two sets, one for each system; posts for Fate Core will be tagged with Fate of Exiles and Cypher Systems posts will be tagged as Exile's Cypher.

We'll look at converting classes; With Fate, the posts will have suggestions on building the various classes in ways that both fit their themes and also harness the flexible power of the Fate system, then Cypher, with a look at how each Cypher class aligns with the classes of PoE and a selection of Foci for each class to reinforce the thematic aspects of the available selections on the skill trees.

Further posts will look at the primary NPCs and the roles they occupy, and how they can tie in for a tabletop RPG experience; I'll provide a system conversion for each such NPC in the relevant post, as neither system is the sort of heavyweight mechanically that a D20 system is. Also included will be some suggestions on how to work plot hooks into each of them to lure players in.

We'll also look at locations around the land of Wraeclast and how to use them for game purposes, ways to detail the eerie and hostile nature of the land, and the ways to introduce the things that each region holds for itself. Special detail will be given to the three hub areas and how to turn an encampment of reluctant exiles and suspicious natives into a base of operations for player characters without falling back too much on the digital game's structure. The hideouts available as part of the game will be looked over, giving an idea of how to let players create their own personal base of operations, letting them stake a permanent claim to a portion of Wraeclast itself.

Attention will be given to the enemies of Wraeclast, covering them in rough detail and giving suggestions for how to use the basic creature types and how to modify them to give an increasing level of threat and danger as exiles explore deeper into the ruins of the Eternal Empire and the nightmarish ruins left behind by the Vaal. A special series of posts will cover the bosses and elites, with suggestions on ways to vary each to ensure they provide a challenge to players. Other Exiles - the tabletop equivalent to the named enemy Exiles who appear in the game - will be covered in posts similar to those on the primary NPCs, with notes on their personalities, motives, and tactics.

Throughout the entire series, there will be a series of posts on the items and powers of Wraeclast, on ways to codify things like the Virtue Gems and the various unique and exotic items in the world, plus posts on the lore of the game relevant to a given section.

By the end, playing in this world via either the Cypher System or Fate Core will hopefully be easy for any experienced GM, and provide a framework for converting the game to any other systems they might desire.