Немного спойлеров - Голодные Призраки (черновик).
Hungry Ghost
Kina of Swanmare served as a soldier for most of her adult life. Her superiors found her ideally suited to atrocious tasks, for while she lacked the desire to commit such acts—making her unlikely to develop a taste for them on her own time—she could be relied upon to do her duty. Now, with her sword set aside and her health broken by age and illness, Kina’s flesh cannot keep a firm grip on a lower soul bloated from decades of death. It oozes from her body in the night and creeps through the town, committing the killings that Kina herself no longer performs.
As with the more typical hungry ghosts that rise from improperly buried corpses—or from those ritually tortured to death by necromancers for this purpose—Kina’s lower soul appears as a smoky, translucent image of herself as a young warrior. (This youthful manifestation is unrecognizable to her neighbors.) Its buff jacket and polearm are merely cosmetic. The trappings of armament and mortality fade when it attacks, revealing a leathery, vulpine body with enormous talons and slavering jaws.
The lower soul thirsts for living blood, fleeing only from overwhelming force and turning aside only from unbroken lines of salt or germinated grain, which it cannot cross. It dematerializes at sunrise to return to Kina’s body, as other hungry ghosts would return to rest in their improperly- interred corpses, for the light of the sun would blast it to ash. If it drinks mortal blood, Kina awakens refreshed and in rare good health. But wounds delivered to the thing are reflected on her body, and she dies if it’s destroyed.
Essence: 1; Willpower: 3; Join Battle: 4 dice
Health Levels: -0/-1x2/-2x2/-4/Incap.
Actions
Disguise: 4 dice
Feats of Strength: 9 dice (may attempt Strength 5 feats)
Senses: 5 dice (see Blood Scent below)
Tracking: 6 dice (see Blood Scent below)
Appearance 3 (Hideous)
Resolve 2
Guile 1
Combat Attack (Bite): 6 dice (Damage 17)
Attack (Claw): 10 dice (Damage 13)
Combat Movement: 5 dice
Evasion 4, Parry 3
Soak/Hardness: 3/0
Merits
Blood Scent: Hungry ghosts adds three successes on any Perception-based roll to sense the presence of spilt blood, and can smell battles or massacres from five miles away. If it is specifically attempting to track or detect a character who is bleeding, it adds an additional success for each point of wound penalty that character is suffering.
Earthbound: At night, hungry ghosts will naturally materialize upon sensing potential prey (see Blood Scent, above). They become immaterial when no prey is present, and may pass through solid obstacles in order to flee back to their corpse once the light of dawn begins to brighten the horizon, even while materialized. The touch of sunlight inflicts 3 automatic levels of lethal damage to a hungry ghost per round, unless the hungry ghost is resting in its corpse.
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Hungrier Ghosts
Hungry ghosts that arise from the lower souls of potent humans such as the Exalted or who have amassed power through ages of existence are more puissant than their common kin. A hungry ghost born from an Exalt or who has spent over a century in existence might have Essence 3, a pool of eighty motes, and knowledge of several Charms possessed by other undead creatures in this section. Most relevant dice pools are increased by two from the base traits, and they may have other pools at five to eight dice reflecting skills of the Exalt they arose from or talents they have cultivated over the span of a long unlife.
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The hungry ghost is presented in EX3’s “quick character” format, rather than given a full character sheet. Quick Characters are designed for usability, giving Storytellers simple dice pools and important information in a condensed package. The hungry ghost pretty much just appears and kills—you don’t need to know how good it is at Bureaucracy or Sail, so that information is omitted. We’ve also just given you raw dice pools, so you don’t have to math together anything—it’s as plug-and-play as we can get it.
(A note: This is the version of the QC block that got sent to Stephen Lea Sheppard for editing. He’s since designed a way of presenting the QC actions that uses up less page space while remaining easily readable, but that format isn’t reflected here because I don’t have his post-edits file yet. If there are any typos I missed, he’ll have also caught them by now as well.)
QCs are also designed to be very easy to modify—for example, if you want a hungry ghost that doesn’t deceive its prey to get close, but instead creeps in shadows until it is ready to strike, just ignore the Disguise pool and give it a Stealth pool according to the general QC dice pool guidelines, matching how stealthy you want the unquiet shade to be.
The Hungry Ghost’s write-up reflects the method we’ve used for many (not all, but many, where it makes sense) Antagonist chapter write-ups. Rather than just saying “this is X, here are stats,” we’ve tried to have our antagonists pull double-duty as both a roster of ready-to-use opponents or supporting characters, and as a library of potential plot hooks. Kina of Swanmare is a very unorthodox hungry ghost, but she demonstrates the flexibility of Exalted Third Edition and hopefully signals to Storytellers that the material in the books is intended as a starting point to work from, not a set of walls and barriers to constrain their creativity.
Собственно, учитывая что укус и когти скорее всего летал, весьма неслабый выходит призрак. Человека должен рвать достаточно легко.
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Тема: О механике Возвышенных (Прочитано 92644 раз)