Storypath Ultra and Curseborne

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Venator is just Latin for Hunter, so that one is fairly tame ; )

Coming from a Hunter: The Vigil the mindset, I have a hard time imaging someone saying "OK, we're pretty sure the 'abandoned' house down the street and all the disappearing kids in our neighborhood are connected. Now, the first thing we need to do in order to stop any more kids from dying is to find an English-to-Latin dictionary."

 

[TheHand]

Now if you're mostly talking about just equivelent characters, I can see that.

Er, yes. I should have been more clear. I meant in terms of finding similar enough powers and capabilities. Using the families as presented really didn’t match up that closely to the Fae; so I expect we’d need to do some heavy re-writing there if we I really were going to move forward on that. The Outcasts families remind me a lot more of Demon the Fallen, though I never played it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Coming from a Hunter: The Vigil the mindset, I have a hard time imaging someone saying "OK, we're pretty sure the 'abandoned' house down the street and all the disappearing kids in our neighborhood are connected. Now, the first thing we need to do in order to stop any more kids from dying is to find an English-to-Latin dictionary."

Most of the people doing that would likely never hear the term "venator"; if I recall correctly its primarily used among the Curseborne groups.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Er, yes. I should have been more clear. I meant in terms of finding similar enough powers and capabilities. Using the families as presented really didn’t match up that closely to the Fae; so I expect we’d need to do some heavy re-writing there if we I really were going to move forward on that. The Outcasts families remind me a lot more of Demon the Fallen, though I never played it.

Yeah, that's about right. If you read enough of the setting, far as I can tell the Fae proper are, well, out of play at the current time (as in they're apparently hibernating or something).

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Er, yes. I should have been more clear. I meant in terms of finding similar enough powers and capabilities. Using the families as presented really didn’t match up that closely to the Fae; so I expect we’d need to do some heavy re-writing there if we I really were going to move forward on that. The Outcasts families remind me a lot more of Demon the Fallen, though I never played it.

It depends a bit, I get big fae vibes from the Keepers of the Vine (who are very forest witch coded) and from the Prenderghasts (which are in the Player's Guide, they feel very 'loyal and mysterious fey butler who serves you for his own purposes' to me) with the outcasts themselves getting it from the 'if i let the mask slip you'll meet something alien and unknowable' but in terms of capability, I think that's also coming from the Primals in the sense of quasi elemental and mythical creatures.

There's a bit from the Scions (the reptile/bird shifters) where they suggest that there's a 'big secret reason' that some of the sphinxes (who are cat people) grow wings, and the fish shifters have a bit of a hoarding motif, which makes me think they're going to turn out connected to like, dragons (but that's my cultivation link coming back to me, I was reading a story that featured a homage to a carp jumping over a waterfall to become a dragon around the same time I was absorbing the core book.)

What's more interesting, is the suggestion that fae might be part of the origin of curses or deeply related to a lot of the families, looking over at the author list, there's a cute sense in which all of the accursed might be changelings, forced to reenact an archetypal morality play by the fae defined by their curse, but that is very much conjecture on my part.

 

[TheHand]

@The-Magic-Sword I was wondering if you could share a little about Venators from the preview. I’m not sure how much they’ve teased yet, but do you know how Damnations and Torments will work for them, since ostensibly they’re still human?

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

@The-Magic-Sword I was wondering if you could share a little about Venators from the preview. I’m not sure how much they’ve teased yet, but do you know how Damnations and Torments will work for them, since ostensibly they’re still human?

Yeah, although it may change a lot in the final version, but we have the whole chapter on them from the draft manuscript that comes with pre-order/pledge!

To make a long story short, they don't have damnations and they have some 'hard-coded' torments that aren't referred to as torments, basically they take an action to expose themselves to the supernatural or they fulfill an obligation to their path or a contact. That's in addition to some of the ways you would generically get curse dice (when the crew comes together to solve a problem, entering a loophole) that apply to everyone.

In place of a damnation (to my eye) and some of the benefits accursed get, Venators have this:

Every Venator is directly bound to an Accursed through a curse. It could come from something the Accursed did directly to the Venator or it could just be the happenstance of being too close to a cruel failure, a Damnation triggered, or a spell cast without a controlled sacrifice.

The Venator has a level 5 bond to her Accursed that does not count against her normal bond limits. While bound, the Venator gains a +1 Enhancement that stacks on all actions to track, trap, ambush, or attack her bound Accursed. While the Venator is bound, she must hunt the Accursed or fulfill a duty to satisfy the curse.

She can satisfy her duty by doing one of the following things:
• Kill, imprison, or otherwise neutralize an Accursed.
• Kill or imprison a non-Accursed supernatural.
• Save an innocent victim (or victims) from an Accursed or other supernatural.
• Close a door to a liminality.

If a Venator doesn’t make strides to fulfill her duty each session, she suffers the Obsessed status effect at the start of the next session targeted at her bound Accursed. The Venator knows the moment she gains a bond to an Accursed, and feels compelled to seek them out. She knows the general direction and distance to the Accursed until she gets within the same city. Then, her sense of the Accursed is drowned by the intensity of the duty.

So I decided to quote this directly because there's something really interesting about it, is that making a level 5 bond with a creature means that you get a bunch of bonuses in the base system, now the obvious utility of this is to fulfill your duty by hunting the thing you have a bond with, and use the bond on it, which does yield bonuses.

But what they did here is actually pretty cute, you can play a Venator that has a duty oriented to an allied Accursed, and that free level 5 bond will offer you a huge 'teamwork' bonus as per the normal rules on bonds.

The clauses that don't involve taking out your accursed let you basically play your hunter as a kind of 'chaperone' for an accursed buddy, sometimes blocking them from hurting someone, and/or taking on other accursed/supernatural creatures/occurrences (which is big in this game) to stave off the obsession pseudo-damnation.

 

[TheHand]

Thank you for sharing! That’s a pretty fascinating way they handled it.

Yeah, although it may change a lot in the final version, but we have the whole chapter on them from the draft manuscript that comes with pre-order/pledge!

Oh! Does that include preordering? I thought they were only sharing previews for those who pledged.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Thank you for sharing! That’s a pretty fascinating way they handled it.



Oh! Does that include preordering? I thought they were only sharing previews for those who pledged.

it does yeah, pre-ordering should trigger an email to go out with a copy of the draft manuscript shortly thereafter, as per discord discussion.