Immortals - Player Rules
Title
Power
Permanent
Expendable
Expendable Experience Points
Aspect
Trump
Order - Chaos
Astral - Abyss
Initiations
Initiating generally happens at the end of a story arc as directed by the GM. It is the major mechanism by which an Immortal advances in power and/or gains new major abilities.
An Immortal requires a house in which to carry out the process of initiating. There are several things which the Immortal does as part of initiating. These are:
- Choose what the Initiation is
- Ranking skills, spells and characteristics (Agents too?)
- Investing items
Ranking
Ranking is the process of developing a skill/spell/ability. It usually involves the sacrifice of permanent power.
NOTE DQ spells, skills and characteristics MUST be raised to the maximum rank allowable, for the Immortals race, before they can be further raised using Power. Thus, most spells will only be raisable, via sacrificing power, once they have been raised to rank 20 using the DQ rules first.
At the time of Initiating, an Immortal can choose to sacrifice 1 point of power to:
- Raise the rank of a skill, spell or characteristic
- Lower the cost of casting a spell
When raising the rank of a spell, they may optionally sacrifice another 1 point of power to reduce the cast cost of the spell.
Investing
Investing is the process of sacrificing power to improve an item.
Normal items are non-magical in nature. In order to add an ability to the item, the item must first be improved to allow it to hold/bind the ability. I will call this *Expanding*. Each ability you wish to add to an item will require that the item is Expanded further. This is an ever more difficult task and requires 1 more point of power each time. So, to add 1 ability to an item will require the sacrifice of 1 point of power. Next time you wish to add an ability, you will need to spend 2 points and the next time 3 points and so on.
Once an item has been Expanded an ability can be bound to it, which I'm going to call *Binding*. This might be something relatively mundane, like increasing the amount of damage a sword does or enhancing a piece of armour to absorb more damage. Or it could be something more interesting, such as adding the ability for a carpet to fly. I would imagine that the sacrifice cost for different effects varies. For instance, increasing the damage of a sword might be 1 point, whereas making a carpet fly might be more like 5 points (or more).
Power can be sacrificing to the item to enhance an ability. This is called *Ranking* due to its similarity with Ranking skills and spells etc.
Expanding can only be done at the time of Initiation or creation of an item. Jim Arona - you might want to verify that. Binding and Ranking can only be done at the time of Initiation.
An item cannot be Ranked more than once at the time of Initiation unless the Immortal in question has a particular means of achieving this.
An item *can* be Expanded and Enhanced at the time of Initiation (and maybe at creation). But it cannot ALSO be Ranked. Thus, I could Enhance a weapon and add a Binding to make it do more damage, resulting in a weapon that has Rank 1 damage enhancement. But I could NOT then Rank it to Rank 2 until my next Initiation.
Special mentions
Some abilities deserve special mention here.
Power Storing
The ability to store/hold temporary power. For each Rank of this ability, the Immortal can store 5 points of Expendable Power. Immortals may sacrifice up to 2 points at each initiation to raise this ability by 1 point for each point so sacrificed. Thus, they can increase the size of their Expendable Power pool by 10 each initiation. If they so choose.
Houses
Building a house takes a year and a day. This time takes <how many?> tracks for training purposes.