Facade from 'Mask of Humanity'

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Christopher R. Rice

I gave the PCs Illuminated as a 0-point feature for all starting PCs. Since otherwise everyone has Mundane Background (also as a 0-point feature) it meant that they were in the know and not affected by the Mists (my name for the Facade in my Ceteriverse). Starting back up in Season 3 one of my player characters is "halfway" between Mundane and Illuminated, while another is straight up Mundane and been making his rolls. He'll be Illuminated soon enough if he keeps up those rolls.

In my campaign, PCs still make checks against the Facade, even though they know about the supernatural. It's a feature of the campaign world that even experienced occultists often have problems remembering exactly what happened when they encountered powerful paranormal phenomena.

The PCs have extremely high Will, as one of the main things that distinguishes them from ordinary mortals and makes them capable of being the protagonists, so failing the rolls is rare. However, this provides a narrative justification for the players to have incomplete information about events in their own character's pasts and some of them have traits that reflect that their characters believe incorrect information about past events.

I want to to be able to introduce meaningful Reveals in the style of Jim Butcher's elaborations on protagonist backstories in the Dresden Files, where the information that the reader was previously presented with is revealed to be incomplete or false in crucial ways.

Originally Posted by Christopher R. Rice

I would. I do. I use my rules from Impulse Control with a special twist: in addition to the regular refresh for points, it's possible to earn up to +3 points - working together, working in genre, and excellent interplay role playing. These extra points stay with the PC until upgrade time. If they aren't used by then they get converted into character points to spend on stuff.

That's very nice of you.

I avoided Wild Card skills or other traits with narrative-shaping powers*, as reality was supposed to be extremely hard to change with supernatural powers and the PCs were supposed to be able to fail or even die. However, I note that I allow spending character points to get extra uses of Luck and I allow Serendipity, and that these are very similar traits, albeit ones that exist on a meta-level more than inside the world of the setting.

Given the fact that most of the PCs are, in some way, figures of destiny**, allowing traits that give points for Impulse Buys might not do too much violence to the campaign. I'll have to consider it carefully.

*One of the things that served to distinguish events in the Dreamworld from the real world is that the PCs had a pool of Destiny Points there which could change reality in quite dramatic fashion, reflecting a Neo-like understanding that they were in a lucid dream-like shared delusion and that what the saw was, to some extent, under their control.
**Albeit with that destiny yet to be revealed, in each case, as some of them could equally well be destined to be tragic Greek heroes or even Woobies, Destroyers of Worlds, as they could be the Big Damn Heroes.