CallMeCanon/PastLives
New Background: Past Lives
(Based on the official Infernal canon, but is available for anybody)
Lytek cleans the Exaltations of all their memories when he receives the shard before passing it on to the next incarnation. However, sometimes some memories slip through the cracks, and the overall patterns etched by the memories will always remain. With dots in Past Lives, you are able to draw on those memories, or see into those patterns, and remember things from your previous incarnation(s).
x None. You have no knowledge of any of your prior Exaltations.
• You remember the Motivation of a single prior Exaltation.
•• You remember two Motivations and three Intimacies, spread across a maximum of three prior Exaltations.
••• You remember three Motivations and four Intimacies, spread across a maximum of five prior Exaltations. You also have a single more detailed memory of one scene from a past Exaltation's life.
•••• You remember five Motivations and ten Intimacies, spread across a maximum of fifteen Exaltations. You also have three more detailed memories of scenes from past Exaltations' lives.
••••• You can, if pressed, recall all the Motivations and Intimacies of any and every of your prior Exaltations. You also have up to ten more detailed memories of scenes from past Exaltations' lives.
(Note: The "prior Exaltations" need not be the most recent ones)
The memories left in an Exalt's Shard are not easily found; they escaped detection by Lytek, after all. Their influence is felt subtly over time, and specific recollection of them is a tricky process. If an Exalt has one or more dots of Past Lives, she may roll (Past Lives + Essence) when she goes to sleep, a maximum number of times per Chapter as her Past Lives rating, to see if the memories influence her dreams that night. On a success, she gets an ambiguous unsettling feeling upon waking, as though the past has something to tell her but is unable to do so. Threshold successes add information to the dream, but recalling it in any useful detail requires a successful roll of (Past Lives + Occult), Difficulty (7 - Threshold Successes on dream roll). Even succeeding on this only allows her to perceive and remember the dream, it does not reveal its source; to see it as more than just a dream requires a successful (Perception + Essence) roll, Difficulty (7 - Past Lives rating). Succeeding on this roll reveals to her that what she is seeing in these dreams are echoes of her past Exaltations; determining which Exaltation a given memory comes from requires a roll of (Intelligence + Lore + Essence), Difficulty (10 - Past Lives rating). Succeeding on that roll gives both the name of the relevant Exalt, as well as how many incarnations back she lived. It does not reveal specific times, dates, or locations not already present in the memories themselves; such information must be found externally through research. Note that each roll described here requires a success on the roll described before it to even attempt.
Dots in Past Lives can be bought after Character Creation. Story-wise, this change is retroactive; the memories she now has access to have been in her Shard all along, but only now will they begin to surface. Mechanically, the new information she now has available to her may now begin appearing in her dreams; all rolls and rules apply as per usual.
