Artifacts/Katamari
Back to Artifacts
Back to Gayo
Katamari
The world pitches and rolls with the ages; mountains rise and fall, lakes dry into deserts, and rivers change their course. Countless gods participate in this shifting -- the gods of the land itself play politics, and heaven's host shapes the ground with storms and earthquakes. Sometimes the slow pace of geological change stands in the way of progress, however, and then the katamari come in handy.
Each katamari is a sphere of solid white jade studded with gems and covered in elegantly scribed prayers dedicating it to the earth. Individual specimens can be as small as a pebble or as vast as a mountain When a user commits motes to the katamari, it generates a localized field of attraction like that which draws objects to the earth. If rolled along the ground, it will quickly pick up small objects until the inner sphere is hidden beneath a thick layer of miscellaneous junk -- only the user is immune to the attractive force. Legend has it that when the world was young, the Elemental Dragon of Earth distributed katamari to lesser gods to aid them in the construction of mountains. In later eras, they were deployed when major geological reconstruction was needed, but as the Celestial Bureaucracy decayed, many of them found their way into the hands of Dragon-Blooded, collectors and petty magicians. Few of these have experimented with them enough to know their potential, but a select few are used for clearing land and raising fortifications in the distant Threshold. Many more are buried at the centres of the great mountains of the world, there to rest eternally.
Powers
The power of a katamari lies in its capacity for growth. As it accumulates detritus, the artifact's attractive power increases, so a patient user can eventually create a truly massive trash ball around a small core katamari. An attuned user can roll a katamari of any size with ease, but must rely on his own strength when lifting it; as children of the earth, katamari prefer to be in contact with a solid surface at all times.
There are seven classes of size for katamari. Both the core artifact and the ball as a whole have size ratings -- the core's size determines the mote commitment and artifact level, while the ball size determines bulk and attractive force. A katamari bolus can easily pick up objects of size one dot smaller than itself, including other katamari, and has a chance to pick up anything up to half its size. If no one is attuned to a katamari, it does not immediately fall apart, but it cannot accumulate more objects and can easily be disrupted, knocking pieces off of it. This is the easiest way to retrieve the core from a ball, though it may still involve many days' work.
||Size||Artifact||Lift/Throw||Commitment||
|[Pea|[X||0/0||1||
|[Tennis Ball|[•||0/0||1||
|[Human Head|[••||1/2||2||
|[Cow|[•••||4/7||4||
|[House|[••••||15/19||8||
|[Village|[•••••||30/35||16||
|[Mountain|[N/A||50/60||32||
Artifact: The Artifact rating for a katamari with a core of this size.
Lift/Throw: The Strength + Athletics rating required to lift and throw the a ball of this size, respectively. The size of the artifact core is irrelevant. An unattuned character attempting to roll a katamari or pull an object off of it also tests versus the lift value.
Commitment: The commitment cost for a katamari with a core of this size.
A character who is rolled over by a four-dot katamari can make a Dexterity+Athletics roll *or* a combat defense at difficulty 1 to avoid sticking to it. For a katamari of five-dots, the difficulty is 3, and for a six-dot katamari, the difficulty is 5. Being attached to the katamari offers some protection from crushing force -- characters who are rolled up take only a single automatic level of bashing damage. It is more likely for a person attached to a katamari to starve or suffocate as things are piled on top of him than to die from the impact.
