Inspired by this: https://whosemeasure.blogspot.com/2023/05/35-eerie-knight-abilities.html
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| By James Zapata |
Order of the Errant Culver
Officially charged with retrieving the emperor's homing pigeons, and the letters affixed to them. This is a de facto excuse to trespass and spy on his vassals. Interference with your duty is to be seen as treason against the emperor.
Initiate: Be blindfolded and dropped into the wilderness without supplies. Find your way back to the Order.
You automatically succeed at attempts to balance and/or perch on precarious surfaces and objects.
Brother/Sister: Retrieve or deliver a message which no pigeon could, at considerable risk to yourself.
Slit someone or something's throat. Thereafter you can imitate their voice by running the blade that slew them up and down your neck.
Commander: Unveil a conspiracy against the imperial personage.
Arrows fletched with feathers will veer off course rather than strike you.
Grand Master: Maneuver the Order into the full favour of the emperor while undermining the current grand master.
Speak the language of birds - concurrently a fantastical talent with poetry.
Order of the Stonebound Duchess
Within you is a princeling, writhing majestically in your guts. It dreams of a new age, an age of eternal twilight and omnipresent fog, where above is mingled fully with below, and air with water and stone. This age will come, your Order will assure it, with the release of your inner liege's mother, the Stonebound Duchess, from her erstwhile tomb.
Initiate: Accept a princeling-worm with the kiss of shame. Thereafter, if you fail a save against poison, the princeling within you will perish, and you must return to the Order to make penance and receive a new one before you can use its abilities again.
Your body becomes as flexible as a worm's. You can fight with long weapons and rigid armour in enclosed spaces without penalty.
Brother/Sister: Mature your princeling-worm - pass its child to another, and thereafter you require double rations or it starves.
You can eat ghosts and other incorporeal undead, dealing 1d6 damage with each bite. You can vomit out the half-digested remnants of these ghosts, which serve you for 2d6 rounds before dissipating.
Commander: Break a sorcerous seal reinforcing the tomb of the Stonebound Duchess.
Commune with other members of the Order through dreams - however unless they are of your rank or higher you can only send messages, and not receive them.
Grand Master: Reach a point in the earth deeper than any grand master before you managed - dream, and return to the Order with the prophecy revealed to you in this dream. If this prophecy leads to a schism, you must devour the old Order with your new.
Summon a purple worm up from the depths once per month. It won't be hostile towards you, but you can't control it.
Order of the Ringless Finger
There once was a land that enjoyed a golden age of chivalry. That age was tarnished, then broken, by that wretched thing called love. Chivalry will be finally perfected when love is totally subsumed in its code by duty.
Initiate: Sever the fourth finger of your left hand, which bears a vein that runs right to your heart.
-4 to saves against emotional manipulation, magical or otherwise (saves in Many Rats on a Stick GLOG are roll-under - reverse to a bonus if your GLOG is roll-over).
Brother/Sister: Provide unemotional counsel which solves a major problem in some domain.
You are able to echolocate with your heartbeat conducted through your left hand placed on a surface. This is vague by default, being able to detect the presence or absence of things within a container or beyond a door, and whether they are moving. Finer details can be discerned with a wisdom check.
Commander: Find a true love and break it.
If you would strike a mortal blow against a creature, you may instead snap a shard of your weapon off in their heart - so long as the shard remains, the creature's greatest love turns to cold hatred.
Grand Master: Rediscover and return the regalia of that lost land.
Any who've ever loved fight against you as if blind - their eyes clouded by tears.
This is cool. I feel like knightly orders are an underused trope in TTRPGs in general. My favorite is the Order of the Stonebound Duchess. I love the idea of deriving power from some kind of alien parasite/symbiote, and this being enshrined in an official ceremony of sorts.
ReplyDeleteThese are really weird and interesting. I like the gameability implications of the Errant Culver, but conceptually my favorite was Stonebound Duchess.
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