MartialArts/Ghost-BatStyle
Ghost-Bat Style
A Celestial Martial Art by DeadManSeven.
Introduction
I'm on a roll! Here's a style for (Victorian) gothic types to give people the willies with. Stylists move away from emulating bats and more into embodying the myths and superstitions surrounding bats as the style goes along. As always, all feedback is quite appreciated.
Oh, and I give full credit to Argyle for the concept of the fighting cloak (which can be found as part of Golden Barque of the Heavens Style).
Background
The rudiments of this style grew out of tribal legends in the far East about a gigantic spirit-bat that lives in the thick maze of trees, emerging only once in a generation to spread terror and devour men whole to consume their souls. Since then, it has changed over centuries to reflect fears about bats all over Creations. Followers of the arts of the Ghost-Bat Style are often morbid and brooding, with a keen eye for prophecy and foresight. They see the world with the worst consequences of actions, and armed with this knowledge, they use fear and terror to bring their enemies to ruin.
The chosen weapon of the Ghost-Bat stylist is the fighting cloak, a heavily-woven garment with weighted sections in the tails. While not an overly aggressive weapon, it can be employed with great effect as a surprising method of deflecting blows. Modified versions of fighting cloaks have appeared in areas in the South, the weights providing some stability to an otherwise regular cloak during a sandstorm. Fighting cloaks are not common weapons, but their design is relatively simple, generally costing no more than Resources 2 to have made. Although artifact versions of fighting cloaks were known to have been constructed, most of these were designed primarily as armour, not as weapons.
Fighting cloak: Spd +2, Acc -1, Dmg +0B, Def +3, Rate 3 (requires Dexterity 3, Martial Arts 3)
Charms
Sight
Roost Without
at Dawn Eyes
\ /
Ghost-Bat Form
/ | \`
/ Blood- \`
Spreading of Gorging Graceful
Leather Wings Approach Wings Evasion
\ / \ /
\ / Colony-of- /
\ Soul-Drinking Thousands /
\ Bite Rush /
\ \ / /
----- Death's Presence ---
Method
|
Harbinger of
Ill Omens
(For a non-ASCII Charm tree, click here.)
Roost at Dawn
- Cost: 2 motes
- Duration: Instant
- Type: Reflexive
- Minimum Martial Arts: 3
- Minimum Essence: 1
- Prerequisites: none
As the bat sleeps safe within its cave, it cannot be dislodged from its chosen position among the stalactites. The initiate of the Ghost-Bat Style emulates this practice, crouching high on ledges and spires to learn the techniques of an unshakeable grip. The martial artist can maintain her position perched on a steep roof, hanging from rafters, or similar difficult location, provided she remains still. This Charm cannot be used while wearing armour.
Sight Without Eyes
- Cost: 3 motes
- Duration: One Turn
- Type: Reflexive
- Minimum Martial Arts: 2
- Minimum Essence: 2
- Prerequisites: none
Even small children know that the bat uses its ears, not its eyes, to see the world. The martial artist must then train her hearing to perceive sounds that go unnoticed, using them for complete awareness of her surroundings. The character adds two dice to rolls that involve her hearing, and an automatic success to any dodge rolls she makes, provided it was her hearing that alerted her to the attack rather than her sight.
Ghost-Bat Form
- Cost: 6 motes
- Duration: One Scene
- Type: Simple
- Minimum Martial Arts: 4
- Minimum Essence: 2
- Prerequisites: Roost at Dawn, Sight Without Eyes
The martial artist’s anima glows with a hazy grey as she calls upon the Ghost-Bat; a pair of mighty charcoal wings are visible from the corner of the eye, shrouding her while she remains still in the shadows, spread as she glides among her enemies. The Ghost-Bat’s blindness allows her insight into the unseen world - without eyes, she sees what others cannot.
While in the Ghost-Bat Form, the martial artist’s vision dims, while her hearing increases to supernatural accuracy. She loses the ability to perceive purely visual stimulus, but is able to use echolocation in lieu of her eyesight. The character may receive bonuses or penalties to her perception, based on Storyteller discretion; detecting an assassin creeping from behind would be easier, but the difficulty for noticing his partner aiming his bow a hundred yards away would be drastically increased.
No longer reliant on her eyes that observe only the material world, the student of the Ghost-Bat is closer to the domains of spirits and the dead. They appear to her surrounded in an aura of light shifting through shades of grey, and she to them as a bright figure with giant ashy pagatial wings. She is able to perceive dematerialised spirits and, for a cost of 3 motes per attack, strike them as if they were materialised. Also, her vertical jumping distance is the same as her running distance, and her horizontal jumping distance equal to her sprinting distance.
This is a Martial Arts Form Charm, and cannot be used while another Form Charm is active. This Charm cannot be used while wearing armour.
Blood-Gorging Approach
- Cost: none
- Duration: Permanent
- Type: Special
- Minimum Martial Arts: 4
- Minimum Essence: 2
- Prerequisites: Ghost-Bat Form
After rigorous fasting and meditation, the martial artist is able to modify her diet, drawing all her sustenance from the chief food sources of the bat. She can survive by only eating insects; a moth will be as filling to her as a warm dinner. However, some bats take their meals from another source: blood. The martial artist can also sate her hunger by drinking from the blood of others; this method of feeding is typically employed while the victim is either sleeping or unconscious, although particularly manipulative practitioners of this style have convinced people to become willing donors. Drinking blood takes the character’s entire action for the turn, and deals one level of bashing damage to the target. Once the target has reached their Incapacitated health level, no more blood can be taken from them.
Learning this Charm also creates a reserve of power, refilled through stealing minor amounts of essence through the process of blood-drinking. For every level of damage the target takes, the character stores a point in her 'blood pool'. The blood pool has a cap of [Essence + Martial Arts]. A point in the blood pool can be converted into three motes of essence, but these motes can only be spent on using activated abilities that are part of ongoing Charms in this style (i.e., attacking spirits with Ghost-Bat Form, or flight with Spreading of Leather Wings). Motes from the blood pool are treated as motes of personal essence, and cannot be stolen or removed from outside effects.
Soul-Drinking Bite
- Cost: 3 motes
- Duration: Instant
- Type: Supplemental
- Minimum Martial Arts: 4
- Minimum Essence: 3
- Prerequisites: Blood-Gorging Approach
Many communities in the East have legends of mythical vampire bats, terrors of the night that will feast on souls as easily as blood. The martial artist draws on these tales as inspiration for her attacks, drinking a little of her opponent’s essence with each wound. If an attack supplemented by Soul-Drinking Bite deals at least one level of damage, the character adds a point to her blood pool.
This essence-stealing attack is especially feared by spirits, as they have no shell of flesh and bone to protect them. Against spirits, not only does the character have to option to regain two motes of peripheral essence instead of adding to her blood pool, she adds her Essence to her attack pool, and her strike deals lethal damage. Additionally, should her attack be successful, she uncovers hidden spirits as their form flashes momentarily, disrupted by her ethereal thievery. Dematerialised spirits are revealed and made tangible until the end of the turn.
Colony-of-Thousands Rush
- Cost: 5 motes, 1 Willpower
- Duration: Instant
- Type: Extra Action
- Minimum Martial Arts: 5
- Minimum Essence: 3
- Prerequisites: Blood-Gorging Approach
In the islands of the West there are networks of caves, home to bat colonies with numbers in the thousands. As the sun sets, they take flight; anyone standing at the mouths of these caves during sundown will report that the sky grows dark with the black mass of the colony, and by the end of the exodus, the sun has sunk below the water. Taking inspiration from this spectacle, the martial artist’s attacks can overwhelm her opponents through sheer force of numbers; she is the den-mistress to her own personal colony.
The martial artist spreads wide her arms, and her anima banner flares to brilliance. From its fires come a swarm of ghostly bats, diminutive and constructed purely of essence, to harry her opponents. The character makes a number of attacks equal to her [Essence + Martial Arts] in an area roughly the size of a large room or small courtyard. The pool for an essence bat to hit is her Martial Arts rating, and their spectral bite deals 1L damage and will pass through armour, rendering any hardness value it provides useless (natural hardness granted by Charms or other effects will still apply). However, each successful attack will only ever result in a single die of damage being rolled, regardless of any additional techniques the martial artist may know to enhance her attacks. This Charm cannot be used while wearing armour.
Spreading of Leather Wings
- Cost: 7 motes
- Duration: One Scene
- Type: Reflexive
- Minimum Martial Arts: 5
- Minimum Essence: 2
- Prerequisites: Ghost-Bat Form
In the frozen North, superstition warns that to stand in the shadow of a bat is to be fated to suffer an early death. The martial artist sows terror as she takes to the skies, clad in wings of shadow. While using Spreading of Leather Wings, the ashen wings present while she employs the Ghost-Bat Form are made manifest from her essence, wrapped around her body. For a cost of 3 motes, she may take flight for a turn, travelling up to her horizontal jumping distance. If she remains in the air at the end of the turn, the martial artist can glide for a short distance if she choses; most adepts of the Ghost-Bat elect instead to take great plummeting swoops towards their enemies before soaring back into the air.
This Charm cannot be used while wearing armour.
Graceful Wings Evasion
- Cost: 6 motes, 1 Willpower
- Duration: One Scene
- Type: Reflexive
- Minimum Martial Arts: 5
- Minimum Essence: 2
- Prerequisites: Ghost-Bat Form
On the Blessed Isle, bat families often take up residence in the highest and oldest towers of buildings left over from the First Age. Wary of their presence, public works officials do their best to organise cleaning teams to remove the bats. However, due to the extravagant architecture and their natural agility, they are often difficult to reach and even harder to capture.
Like the bats that confound the Dynastic families, the martial artist can be equally elusive. For the scene, she may reflexively dodge attacks she is aware of using her Martial Arts rating as a dice pool, provided she has room to manoeuvre, and is not restrained in any way. Use of this Charm breaks the supernatural grip provided by Roost at Dawn. Graceful Wings Evasion cannot be used while wearing armour.
Death’s Presence Method
- Cost: 8 motes
- Duration: [Martial Arts] turns
- Type: Simple
- Minimum Martial Arts: 5
- Minimum Essence: 3
- Prerequisites: Soul-Drinking Bite, Colony-of-Thousands Rush, Spreading of Leather Wings, Graceful Wings Evasion
Bats are said to be omens of poor fortunes and the end of lives, and at this level of mastery, the martial artist is no different. She strikes a fearsome pose and her shadow grows long: the chill foreboding of death is in the air. Those in her presence will grow uneasy as increasingly fatalistic thoughts plague their minds; if they do not have the sense to run, terrible fates are bound to befall them.
At the beginning of each turn after the character activates Death’s Presence Method, everyone in the vicinity must make a Willpower roll, subtracting the character’s Essence in dice. A single success steels them against the slowly creeping horror; failure causes them to lose a dice from all actions for the rest of the scene, while a botch will send them running for their lives from the Ghost-Bat.
If the martial artist concentrates, she can take finer control over her unsettling presence, and is able to choose who is affected by this Charm and who is not. However, doing so consumes her action for the turn.
Harbinger of Ill Omens
- Cost: 10 motes, 1 lethal health level
- Duration: Varies
- Type: Special
- Minimum Martial Arts: 5
- Minimum Essence: 4
- Prerequisites: Death’s Presence Method
The ultimate technique available to the master of the Ghost-Bat Style lays a terrible curse on an area; crops sour and rot, prayers and offerings go unheard and unreceived, and animals birth twisted and deformed young. The curse is lifted only through the taking of a life: often dark and unfortunate events will conspire in an accidental death, but sometimes the residents of the damned site, unable to live with the Ghost-Bat’s wrath, slay one of their own.
While using Harbinger of Ill Omens, the sky darkens as if preparing for a violent storm. The martial artist is buoyed by eerie gusts of wind that guide her through the air; she is able to dash just above a surface without touching it, ignoring any environmental penalties for poor terrain. To gain the full benefits from the dark winds, she cannot be wearing armour while she activates this Charm. She choses an area to mark with her curse, and circles it thrice; the locale may be as small as a single building, or as large as her Essence in miles of diameter. She must remain uninterrupted while she completes the three circles, and the motes spent to activate this Charm remain committed until either her marking is complete or something breaks her concentration. At the end of her third circle, she drops to the ground, and the location is marked as a nexus of bad energies. Everyone within the area will suffer poor luck, often resulting in injury or death, and those brave enough to dwell there will be plagued by nightmares, their faces growing gaunt and drawn with each passing day. Often the curse will right itself through a tragic accident, but it is just as common for a community to declare the area condemned and forbid its citizens to enter. Even in areas freed from the Ghost-Bat’s curse, the location often becomes attractive to ghosts, and may, given time, develop into a shadowland.
As the martial artist grows in power, so too do her curses. Performing this curse while she has an Essence of 5 or greater has the chance of summoning a hungry ghost to the area, intent on a murderous rampage. Because of this, even the most skilled masters of this style are wary about remaining long in an area they have cursed.
Comments
A first glance, it looks nice. If you ever make a second ed conversion, you should be sure to make the style compatible with soulsteele "wings of the raptor" (See WoTLA). They basically form bat wings that can slash people. Also...."blood pool"? The word brings horrible memories of WoD...and what is it?-Azurelight
- I am aware of the concept of Wings of the Raptor, but only what appeared in... Book of 3 Circles? I think. I doubt whether I'm going to be upgrading to 2nd Edition very soon (neither my library of books nor my wallet feel the need for for it), but if you want to kitbash this style yourself for your own game, I won't hunt you down White Wolf Canon Police style. :)
- The blood pool is indeed a headnod towards the WoD (not a fan in general, or just of Vampire?). It can store a number of points up to a maximum of the character's Essence + Martial Arts, and is filled by either drinking blood or using Soul-Drinking Bite. Each point can be converted into three motes of personal essence, but this essence can only be spent on either the spirit-attacking ability of Ghost-Bat Form, or on flight from Spreading of Leather Wings. Does my wording in the actual Charm text need changing to be more clear? - DeadManSeven
- Ok. Yes I think is does require such a thing. I would also explicitly note that is is compatible with essence engorment technique and other abyssal blood drinking...that'd make sense. I'll wait with the conversion untill scroll of the monk and see whther all animals styles will be armor compatible or not. (it leans towards that currently) -Azurelight
- The text of Blood-Gorging Approach has been changed to more explicitly define what points in the blood pool can do. However, I don't see a need to mention the Abyssal blood-drinking Charms, since there's nothing that makes those and the ones of this style incompatible with each other. Also, as far as Creation is concerned, this style pre-dates the arrival of the Abyssals, and so would not have been designed and evolved with their particular tricks in mind. Thanks for your comments, I enjoy having a sounding board. - DeadManSeven
- I see your point...I was thinkin almost specifically abot the essence engorchment tehnique, whic sais it can be fieeld by peilfreing blood and esence draining magic. Godd that I am of uds then -Azurelight
Are the penalties from Death's Presence Method cumulative?
-- Darloth
- They are, but they won't be able to reduce a target's pool below their Essence (as per PC, which is what I write my stuff for). I'm not 100% sure if this effect is too powerful or not - I was assuming the character at Essence 4 and her opponents at Willpower 6, giving them a pretty even chance of success or failure each turn. Boring mortals are in trouble, but that's pretty much par for the course. Maybe instead DPM could run for a number of turns instead of the whole scene, and drop the WP cost? There's too many scene-length Charms in this style as it is. - DeadManSeven, thinking out loud
- After some thought, I realise that I foolishly missed the implication that since targets can't be reduced past their Essence in dice, this also applies to the Willpower roll. However, I'm going to change the Charm over to not be scene-long anyway, since I feel it's better for the Charm - DeadManSeven, talking to himself
