Patreon Post: Rethinking Communion

It's another Patreon post, and this time, I look at Communion.  I've collected all of this material into the Iteration 5 final documents (available already to my $3+ patrons), but if you want a preview, or you want to see the design rules behind them, check out my patreon! This material is available for $1+

Social Psiences

This iteration has dealt extensively with social engineering, and someone once asked: What if you use propaganda to interact with Communion?  What indeed?  So, I start with a brief look at Propaganda, it's costs and how best to go about ruining (or improving) someone's standing with a Path just by changing how people think about him, plus I take a look at how the concept of a "public persona" might interact, simply, with social engineering.

You don't know the Power of Communion!

The Iteration 4 playtests showed what I felt were some flaws in my design of Communion. My initial intent was to offer some guidelines and to assume that the GM would fill in the blanks on the fly, but I found, in practice, that I, at least, did not do that.  Instead, I looked at the paucity of miracles and said "I dunno!"  This was especially true of combat.  So, while Vesper Tane rocked in combat, Novina and Rafari were less impressive.

In part, this is intentional as Dark Communion should be more directly and obviously useful in combat.  But that doesn't mean the other forms of Communion should be useless?

Once again, Pyramid to the rescue!  Two articles particularly helped me, including Auras of Power from Pyramid #3-19, and Blessed Be from Pyramid #3-78.  Furthermore, this Iteration has introduced a few new options (They'll drop next week) that I wanted to address, namely how to deal with ghosts and Broken Communion as a form of "haunting."

So, I create new Miracles: 26, to be precise, but to be fair, some of them are references to existing abilities or powers found in Pyramid articles

Thus, True Communion saw expansion of its paths with additional Aura miracles (representing the fact that True Communion tends to assist others around it), and new, combat-related miracles, including the ability to mystically avoid incoming fire and Clarity, a form of Blessed that temporarily improves your ability to fight by giving you a clear head and greater insight into the fight itself.

Dark Communion focused on temptation and survivability, by gaining some charismatic bonuses, a form of blessed that makes the user temporarily (seemingly) invincible, and the ability to heal by harming others.

Finally, Broken Communion offers miracles that obscure the insights and vision of others and offers the GM a grab-bag of cool, spooky miracles that GMs can inflict on players in a place of Twisted Psionic Energy, or players can use to be particularly, lethally, ghost-like.

Finally, and most importantly, I've expanded Communion to use "History-Shaking Miracles," and placed the Avatars in this final tier, making them even more powerful, and also more rare, and I've added the "Moment of Truth" miracle, for trusting in Communion when you need to make a one-in-a-million shot.