Alternate Corruption

[lvalero]

I am curious about if somebody has developed alternate corruption mechanism, rules or house rules.

For example. For my DF Campaign, for the "Sorcerer" class I want them to have a flavour like "Pathfinder" or "D&D" where the sorcerer get their powers from his blood legacy. The sorcerer can be dragonborn, angelic, demonic or faericborn. He can add the Corruption limitation for any advantage/ability that is earned because of his ancestry. By using this advantage he becomes more similar to their ancestor by accumulating corruption points.

Corruption in this setting is called "Disruption" but the mechanism is the same. However, depending on the ancestor, the effects of the disruption is different. For example "angelic" corruption could give you "Honesty" or "Intolerance: Evil religions" and Faeric corruption could give you "Kleptomania"

I am not very sure about the different "corrupting" effects of the different ancestors and I plan to develop them during the campaign, IF some player decides to make a sorcerer.

Has anybody developed alternate corruption rules/settings, either with this idea or with another one?

[johndallman]

Do you have a copy of the In Nomine RPG? That has a set of mechanics for angels and demons getting "out of tune" with the ways they're supposed to behave, called Discord, which are quite like what you seem to be driving for.

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by lvalero

Corruption in this setting is called "Disruption" but the mechanism is the same. However, depending on the ancestor, the effects of the disruption is different. For example "angelic" corruption could give you "Honesty" or "Intolerance: Evil religions" and Faeric corruption could give you "Kleptomania"

That sounds almost perfectly tailor-made for the "Assisting Spirits" rules, found in Thaumatology, pp. 90-94. In particular, the "Spiritual Distortion" rules, which increasingly bend a character who draws too heavily on aid from spirits into something that the spirits like to see, sounds pretty much perfect. Of course, the Assisting Spirits rules assumes that you're using it with a magic system that costs FP, so you'll have to tweak it a bit for this build with advantages. My suggestion would be that if a character can just use the advantage itself without significant corruption, but getting fancy or pushing the limits starts to get more corruptive, then make it effectively a 0% modifier on whatever power modifier you put on the advantages, and say that basic usage doesn't corrupt you, but a user always has the option of drawing on the spiritual power to push themselves, allowing them to do various things like power stunts or increasing their effective level, and they can partially or completely cancel the penalties and FP cost of doing so, but every point of penalty cancelled, or every FP removed, is treated just like a "borrowed" FP from the Assisting Spirits rules, with the attendant corruption.

On the other hand, if you want any usage of the ability to be corrupting, I'd call that a -20% limitation (this parallels the Corruption modifier from Horror, which uses a different corruption system, but is, I think reasonably close to the spiritual distortion rules. In this model, every use of the modified advantage would be like "borrowing" 1 FP from an assisting spirit (and for abilities with a duration, it would give you 1 minute of usage, after which you'd have to pay more corruption). I'd still allow users to negate penalties and pay FP costs for stunts with more corruption - this stuff should absolutely be tempting!

[Flyndaran]

Gurps Horror has the Corrupting limitation which can be applied to advantages that don't cost energy when used.

[dataweaver]

GURPS Horror also has a section at the start of its Corruption material explaining how to adapt things like Spirit Assistance to systems that don't cost FP. The whole point of that opening section is to provide advice on building your on Corruption system.