ThePlaceWhereThereIsNoLight

The Place Where There Is No Light

NamelessCrow's Celestial Manse. From the outside, it looks like a featureless, windowless, black obsidian cube roughly the size of a city block. From the inside, it doesn't. The interior of the manse consists simply of the "main hall," a frozen lake apparently 100,000 acres in surface area with a single large, empty pagoda in its center; a small (i.e., roughly the size of a house) sitting-room at the entrance designed for meeting brief visitors; and twelve towers, one at each of the other four ground vertices of the cube. (The geometry of the main hall is complicated; see below.) The twelve towers are used for storing various possessions: the armory, the library, another library, prayer accoutrements, Nameless Crow's personal items, musical instruments, and so forth. Nameless Crow himself spends almost all of his time in the central pagoda, and just sends out his golem Engine Of Ineluctable Progress to fetch items from the towers; he even sleeps there. A series of bridges connects the central pagoda to the towers, but it's unclear due to the geometry of the tower which bridges lead where. The ceiling of the manse, apparently a few thousand feet off the ground, looks like (and, in fact is, but also is not; see below) the night sky. It is always night inside the manse, and it is always dimly lit, if not dark.

Stats

Sidereal-Favored

Maintenance (-1 points): The weird time and space inside the manse tends to weaken it structurally if not checked. Engine of Ineluctable Progress recalibrates in monthly, with Nameless Crow performing the procedure instead if he happens to be in Heaven then. The maintenance can be accomplished in an hour by anyone with brief instructions on how to do so. If the maintenance isn't performed for a year, a Power Failure occurs.

Fragility (-2 points): It's made of glass, albeit spooky goth glass. The manse has 6L/9B external soak, 3L/6B internal soak, and can take 30 points of damage before Power Failure.

Attunement Recognition (0 points): Upon sensing them, the manse can tell who's attuned and who bears its hearthstone.

Basic Senses (0 points): If any other power's use requires the manse to target a creature, the manse has the sense to do so. Although it's possible to hide from a manse, it's not easy--- even for magical beings. The difficulty to hide from this manse is 3, and dice pools to do so are reduced to 0 before Charm use. Immaterial beings disturb a manse's geomancy as much as material ons, so manses can sense them too. (Whether the manse can affect such creatures is another matter.)

Cosmetic Displays (0 points): I'm a Sidereal. My house is cool.

Magical Conveniences (1 point): There are three such abilities:

• There's a well-connected PA system throughout the manse, usable only by those attuned to it.
• The library has an extensively cross-referenced, self-updating card catalog listing its contents.
• The library has a desktop publishing setup.

*Well-Flavored Aspect (1 points): The manse's hearthstone's bearer receives +1 to all die rolls while inside the manse.

Bound Servitor (2 points): EngineOfIneluctableProgress

Divine Observatory (3 - 1 = 2 points): Reduces the difficulty of all Sidereal astrology rolls by 1. Adds 3 successes to astrological thaumaturgy performed inside. [but see below]

**Wyld Revocation (4 - 1 = 3 points): One of the roles of Sidereals is to ensure that distinct events are separated in time or space. That condition fails inside the main hall of the manse, which contains a couple hundred twisted spatial dimensions and a few dozen temporal dimensions wrapped around and through each other. Objects appear simultaneously in several locations at once, while also being nowhere at all. Time mostly stays causal; but although time does pass inside the manse, it is always the middle of the night.

• Time inside the main hall of the manse is multidimensional. For every n = 4 hours that pass inside it, only one hour passes outside.

• Despite its TARDIS effects, the manse's space is twisted through itself enough that the actual distance between any two points is much less than it appears. Any two points in the manse are no more than about an eighth of a mile apart. In addition, he extreme multidimensionality of space inside the manse makes it difficult for people to whom the manse is not attuned to get around inside it. Mechanically, this is represented similarly to the Minor Tricks and Traps 1-point manse power:
  • The manse is complicated. A successful (Intelligence + Investigation) roll, difficulty 5, lets a character navigate within it. Every successful roll adds 1 success to this roll in the future; each attempt takes a full hour, since the manse is huge. Success with a threshold of three successes indicates that the character has figured out the warped perspectives of the manse and can find her way through the manse without impediment.
  • Directions in the manse are non-commutative; reversing your path doesn't lead you back to the same place you started. It's possible to get stuck in an apparent dead end; when that happens, a roll of [Perception + Larceny] with difficulty 5 is needed to find a way out.
  • The manse is non-orientable. The central pagoda is rigged with a trap that, when sprung, everts space so that the intruder is kicked outside the manse (more specifically, about ten feet above the ground outside the manse). Characters can spot the trap with a successful (Perception + Larceny) roll, with a difficulty 2 if they think to look for traps and difficulty 5 otherwise. A successful (Wits + Ride) roll, difficulty 4, lets a character evade the sprung trap in some manner. [I have no idea what sort of ability would give any sort of advantage in escaping a universe unraveling itself. Ride seems as good as any.)

Hearthstone

Gemstone of Spoken Language (rank 3): Automatically speak and understand any spoken language (but does not give literacy in it).

* Well-Favored might make more sense here.

** There aren't any mechanics given or suggested for Wyld Revocation, so I tried to make up some that seemed appropriate. Please sanity-check them; I have no idea how to balance anything in this game.

tmack: What effect, if any, does reducing the difficulty (as opposed to the target number) of Sidereal astrology rolls by 1 have on effect rolls? I'm already going use Fateful Performance Excellency to turn every die in the prayer roll pool into a success, and World-Shaping Artistic Vision is good enough for the miscellaneous ancillary rolls (writing or cosigning a petition, for example). It's a cool idea, and it's completely in line with the character, but I'd rather pick up another ability for the points if that's all it does. Any ideas for modifying it to make it not suck? Here are some I've come up with, some of which would be better suited to 4-point abilities instead of 3 (which I could manage by adding another point of maintenance):

• Adding +4 dice to the prayer roll
• Reducing the target number of all astrology rolls by 1

• Reducing the effective scope, duration, xor frequency of a destiny by 1 for purposes of cost, paradox, and censure if it's above some fixed number n

• Contributing an extra endurance point to any RD
• Contributing an extra effect die (or two?) to any RD
• Contributing two extra effect dice to any RD in a particular college
• Rerolling all 1s in the effect roll (I don't actually roll prayer rolls) for +1 paradox, or some other cost. (Cf. the Jewel of the Rabbit's Sword, a 2-dot Lunar hearthstone that has this effect for any roll at the cost of 1 wp. But note that World-Shaping Artistic Vision lowers the target number of effect rolls as well as prayer rolls.)
• Reducing the paradox dice associated with a destiny by 1, to a minimum of 1.

All of the above apply to astrology rolls performed in the Observatory by the manse's owner.

• AT: -1 difficulty is basically equivalent to +1 success. That's useful on the Prayer roll even after with the Fateful Excellency. I'm not sure exactly how well it maps to the Effect roll, which is Difficulty 1, but I'd tend to just treat it as +1 success in that case too. I'm not sure if should apply to ancillary rolls or not - like petition-writing, horoscope calculation, etc. The person who wrote that effect in Oadenol's Codex probably hadn't seen the 2E Astrology mechanic and was thus vague.

  • tmack: That is useful on the effect roll, but it's totally useless on the prayer roll; extra prayer successes map to extra effect dice at a rate of 4 to 1, and I already Fatefully Succeed on all prayer rolls worth bothering with. It makes sense in terms of flavor for the lab for it to give -1 difficulty on any astrology-related rolls in the lab, and I think the conversion rates on extra successes to effect dice is poor enough to make it sane, if still not particularly useful; but I have no idea how to balance any of the mechanics in this game, so I'm not going to try to tweak it myself.