FIGHTER

FIGHTER

Death's Head, by craww

You can feel it. Something is stirring in the night over the earth. Something out of the place beyond persona. There are omens if you know how to look for them. Secret signs in the wings of birds, nightmares of pursuit. This hateful world cannot last much longer. The clouds will part and her armies will come down to scour it clean again. The carrion birds will turn in open sky until the fields are empty. The world has forgotten you. It hates you, like it hates everyone. The Queen of Air and Darkness will make it better.

Starting Equipment: An extremely visible scar that’s somewhere between dashing and disfiguring. Too much makeup, which isn’t helping. An outfit that looks like a costume. Any four weapons.

Skills: 1) Disgraced Nurse 2) Mercenary Deserter 3) Birdwatcher 4) Occult Dabbler 5) Avant-Garde Artist 6) Discarded Courtesan

Templates:

A) The Full Dark World, The Killing Moon

B) Butcher Bird

C) Death Song of the Eumenides

D) Société des Sadiques

THE FULL-DARK WORLD

BLACK SUN by Søren Solkæer

A sacred fear lurks in you, like static in your spine. You're an antenna for ghostly transmissions, for white tatters of surrendered memory, for the hollow voices on the radio. You can tune yourself, if you try. Close your eyes, bear witness. They sound like cold air.

In the biting of the wind, in the teasing glitter of distant lights, in the cold hours before dawn, she waits for you. Once per session, feel the cold on your skin, open your eyes to the sky, and shudder. Her voice will find you, a dread omen of coming danger– whatever is closest, and most likely. It's something you can sense– the sound of an armored car in the distance, the smell of smoke on the wind. A single awful impulse will rise from the churn of your soul to attend her– DROP. RUN. KILL. These omens are always true, but sometimes the most imminent danger isn't violent, or sometimes it's days away. You can't know that.

When a peaceful situation escalates to violence, you are never caught by surprise.

If you're the one to escalate it, you always catch your enemies by surprise.

The fear tells you other things, too.

To rest, roll 1d4. On a 1, you can't. Be vigilant. Watch the skies.

To entrust something to a stranger, roll 1d4. On a 2 or below, you can't. Trust no-one. Watch the skies.

To lay down your arms, roll 1d4. On a 3 or below, you can't. They'll kill you. Watch the skies.

Nothing will ever change these odds. There is a bone-deep dread in you where most people make their blood.

THE KILLING MOON

Jeanne d'Arc, by Anato Finnstark

It's going to happen soon. All the lights will go out. All the locks will open. The little mice are cozy in their numbers, flooding through the streets like hot summer rain. They think the slaughterhouse tracks go on forever. When your predator shadow touches them their tiny souls will curdle.

When you miss with an attack, loathing rises in your throat like bile. You can choke it down, or use it, burning away 1d4 of your HP to strike again (and again, and again, until you hack into their flesh at last or fall to your knees, choking on bloody froth).

When some fool attacks you, or an ally in your weapon's reach, you can attack their attack and try to strike it dead. If your attack roll beats theirs, you parry the attack. You can deflect bullets with a riding crop, or fangs with a rotary saw. You burn 1d4 HP of pain and exhaustion every time you try, but it's worth it for the look on their face. You are Her soul, Her daughter, Her messenger. Adversary of the world.

BUTCHER BIRD

by Paneos1

Your skull is full of birds. They bring you terrible things, dripping in their beaks– tribute, or prey. They tear things out of you, but you don't remember what. They leave the terrible things behind.

Over the course of a couple hours, given the tools and materials, you can convert any melee weapon (sewing needle, bone saw, trepanation drill) into a wicked trick weapon of some kind.

When you do, you can pick a special property from the list below, and combine it with something else– another weapon, a tool, or an ordinary accessory (utterly innocuous without close inspection). This is the weapon’s second form: you can snap it from one to the other with a nasty flick of your wrist. To anyone else, they’re ordinary weapons- they don’t have the knack to use them right.

Wicked Little Tricks:

1. Baleful- Something at its core is weeping. When you brandish it, it drools. Anyone you strike must save against poison, or be unable to think of anything but fighting you. This ends if anyone else attacks them, or if the fight does.
2. Tangled- Knotted like witch's briar, bursting with jagged little thorns. Parrying with this costs 1d6 HP, but a successful parry splinters and breaks mundane weapons.
3. Longing- Shudders like you do. Every time you spend HP to re-roll an attack with this, the critical range of that attack grows by 1.
4. Vomitous- Gets +1 to Attack and Damage for each of the following you've confessed to your victim: a murder everyone's forgotten, a murder you still delight in, a murder that disgusts them, a murder that secretly entices them. The same murder can fit multiple categories.
5. Gnashing- On a hit, snaps its jagged jaws shut on them like a bear trap, grappling instead of dealing damage.
6. Whispering- If you have them grappled with this against their throat, they're silenced, and you can speak with their voice.
7. Bare- Decides damage from personal cruelty. 1d4 for a sword. 1d8 for strangling them with their mother's necklace. 2d6 if it still has their son's blood on it. 2d10 for their dead son's thigh bone.
8. Visceral- Beats in your grip. Thump thump thump. When you strike a killing blow with this, you recover any HP you spent to re-roll that attack in a flood of warm and richly textured blood.
9. Aching- Keens in the cold, nuzzles in the dark. On a successful parry, riposte with the parry roll.
10. Hollow- Chemical reek. Holds a single dose of anything. Injects on a hit. They get a save.
11. Trespassing- Gets +1 to Attack and Damage for each of the following– you're in their house, you're wearing their clothes, you're holding something they love, you're voicing their secret shames.
12. Foregone- If you drive this through your own heart, you fight relentlessly, unstoppably, and to the exclusion of everything else until it is removed. When it is, you're gone.

DEATH SONG OF THE EUMENIDES

by Oliver de Sagazan

When someone hurts you, physically or emotionally, you must save against The Dolor. You may fail this save on purpose.

The Dolor is in the static and the air and the cold light of the moon. It's thing in you that's in the Queen of Air and Darkness too. It is the twin of your sacred fear, the holy burden of the Adversary, which the mice, together at their warm hearths, believing against reason that they are loved, could never understand. It is sacred misery. It wants to make a temple of your heart.

While you are in the Dolor, you are isolated from emotion, sensation, and empathy. Pain cannot touch you, and you can go on fighting while wounded without issue, even at 0 HP (When you would take damage at 0 HP, roll for Death and Dismemberment instead.) 

Here in your temple of suffering, pain seems pitiful, contemptible. The places your attacks will hurt most are obvious to you- the leg they don't favor, the sister they don't speak of, as is precisely how hurt they are. When the Dolor passes, this does too. It's an instinct, not a knowledge.

In the Dolor, you cannot retreat or surrender, and it will not let you go until anyone who hurts you is fleeing or kneeling or dead.

It is possible that a powerful enough love might breach the Dolor, and reach your heart. If someone does this, your hearts will tangle into a single miserable thing. Each of you will feel what the other does, like pus-soaked sickness between your ribs. You'll know if the other is close– they'll fog your brain like a fever. They will be your NEMESIS, and if they die by anyone's hand but yours, the grief will kill you.

SOCIÉTÉ DES SADIQUES

by Roland Topor

After the evening is the end of the world. The lights in the sky will blink out, one by one. We will all go blind. The factories will go silent, and the streams and rivers. Our throats will close, and only birds will sing.

You have the dream tonight. The Queen of Air and Darkness comes over you. The shadow of the moon follows close behind her, like a maid or a murderer. Her owlish talons spread you open, peeling away the husk of you, spreading your bones like fingers to caress your heart and lights. Her wide pale eyes shimmer in the moonlight. Her gaze caresses you like the wind. She anoints you in the ruby froth that gathers on her lips. She leaves gory marks on the shuttle and the weft of you when she sews you shut again.

Others who have heard Her will know you now. Your voice in the static, your bloody hands rising over the butcher's block in an inescapable nightmare. You are a secret special kind of thing. Soul, Daughter, Messenger. You haven't escaped. Not yet. But when the armies of the Queen of Air and Darkness ride the gloaming to kill the world, you will at last be free.

Roll three times to build your Coterie:

1-4. Sycophant. (Should have been a dentist like mother wanted. Murdering them gets you an extra save against any ongoing effect, and some peace and quiet.)

5-8. Supplicant. (Hermitage in a skeleton house, far away from everything. Has 1 MD. A spell called Darkness lives in their empty heart. Sacrificing them adds their MD to an ally spell, but the dark gets all over everything.)

9-12. Vagabond. (Felt the gloaming on the evening wind. Good at gathering gossip and navigating the city unseen. Can be sacrificed as an effective scapegoat in a murder investigation.)

13-14. Pawn. (Works behind a desk somewhere for another member of your coterie. Sacrifice them and you can make an attack roll to cut through red tape.)

15-16. Surgeon. (Ghoulish and obsessive, can sew up wounds, dismantle corpses, or be sacrificed to appease an angry mob.)

17-18. Gourmet. (Languid oily chatterbox with horrible breath. Knows a single Butcher Cut, and can make a human corpse into a delicious meal that grants its effects. Murder them, and the detective on their trail will owe you a favor.)

19. Fashion Designer. (Delicate and shy. Takes photographs of the things you do. Moves in elite circles, can secure invitations to galas and masquerades and runway shows. Their murder will make front page news.)

20. Hitokiri. (Voiceless implacable masked killer. Writes you pathetic love poems and follows you like a puppy dog. Can kick down doors without breaking stride and always crits against surprised or helpless victims. Will sacrifice themself to save you from a fatal blow, if you pretend to love them back.) 

New members of your coterie will come to replace the dead ones after 1d6 days in any city.

The Full-Dark World is coming over the horizon soon. Watch the skies and see.