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) Police Detective 2) Anarchist Bomber 3) Birdwatcher 4) Mercenary 5) Taxi Driver 6) Politician's Daughter

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 lives in you, like static in your soul. You can tune it, if you try, listen for the ragged drifting signals, ghostly transmissions, lost and alone. Close your eyes, bear witness. They sound like cold air.

Once per session, close your eyes and shiver, and receive a dread omen of coming violence– whatever is closest, and most likely. It's something you can sense– the roll of an armored car in the distance, the smell of smoke on the wind. And a single instruction, in a voice behind your own– DROP. RUN. KILL. This omen may not come to pass, or it may be farther away than you think. Interpret it as you will.

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.

It 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

The Queen of Air and Darkness isn't real, exactly. She's a dream, a ghost of the moon. But she can protect you from the world that hates you so dearly: she can make you imaginary too. You don't have to be a person any longer. You can be a fairy-tale villain, a toy soldier, a sword. You can be hers.

When you miss with an attack, you can spend 1d4 HP of pain and exhaustion to attack again.

When someone attacks you, or an ally in reach, you can spend 1d4 HP to contest their attack roll with your own– if you succeed, you parry the attack. 

It might wear a person down, to be the relentless adversary of a hateful world. But you aren't real, so you must bear it.

BUTCHER BIRD

by Paneos1

Your head is full of birds. They come in with terrible things in their beaks– tribute, or prey. They take 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 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.

Nasty Fighter Weapon Properties:

1. Envenomed- 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. Serrated- Not like a shark tooth, like a steak knife. Deals an additional 1d4 damage when it tears into bare flesh.
3. Magnetic- Can be used for anything you’d use a big magnet for. Shorts out in water. Counts as a shield against metal weapons, but attacking anyone wielding a metal weapon or wearing metal armor with this thing is a fool’s errand.
4. Spring-Loaded- Jumps out when you attack, so you don’t need to draw it first.
5. Biting- On a successful hit, you can snap its jagged jaws shut on them like a bear trap, grappling instead of dealing damage.
6. Hooked- Not like a sword hook, like a meat hook. Instead of dealing damage you can yank them towards you.
7. Barbed- When you skewer somebody with this, it stays stuck in them. Roll under strength to pull it out, which deals damage again.
8. Detonating- You can arm this and toss it to someone nearby instead of attacking. It self-destructs in a round, dealing triple its normal damage.
9. Integrated- Attached to your clothes or armor. Can’t be disarmed, but anyone willing to grab the bad end gets advantage on starting a grapple.
10. Returning- When you throw it and miss, it comes back to you at the start of your next turn.
11. Mirrored- You can parry spell attacks with this. Failing to parry a spell destroys the weapon, and you get hit with the spell too.
12. Foregone- If you fully impale yourself with this, you drop to 0 HP and get +5 to Death and Dismemberment Rolls until you heal back up. 

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 field mice, together at their warm hearths, believing against all 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 and her pale eyes dance on your play-pretend heart. You don't remember what comes next.

You are a secret special kind of thing. 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. 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.)
2. 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 will get all over everything.)
3. 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.)
4. 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.)
5. Surgeon (Ghoulish and obsessive, encyclopedically knowledgeable on murders and plagues. Can sew up wounds and dismantle corpses. Can be sacrificed to appease an angry mob.)
6. Gourmet (A languid, oily chatterbox with horrible breath. Knows a single Butcher Cut, and can make a human corpse into a delicious meal that grants that cut's effect. Murder them, and the detective on their trail will owe you a favor.)
7. Fashion Designer (Delicate and shy, takes photographs of the things you do. Moves in elite social circles, and can secure invitations to galas and masquerades and runway shows. Can be murdered to make front-page news.)
8. 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.