Writing the Rome MYC was taking too much effort, so I wrote another one instead! 3.4k words.
Ah, you're awake. Or at least aware. I have conjured you here to offer a chance, unexpected and unasked for, for you to stand bestride a world of wonder and magic. The age of Faith is dying, and you will be the last heir of its power, the vessel for everything good about it as an era. Much of what was once good about the age of faith - the iron-clad virtue of the saints, the beautiful grace of heaven, the kindness of those who seek to build heaven together, have withered and the world is ripe for the age of magic. It is up to you to take the stagnant virtues of the church, the martial valor of the paladins, the staid and unimaginative lives of peasants and priests who see the silence of the heavens and dare to think that they might be doing something right, and turn them into something worth permitting to endure.
You will not be alone, however. A hero has been born, one destined to overthrow this world of faith and usher in an Age of Magic. A thousand flowers spring up in their wake, hedge wizards and traditional witches as the hidden places of the world, where the church does not think to tread fill up with wonder and power - not demons or angels, but dragons and elementals, creatures and places of power just waiting to be exploited by those who can approach them with clear eyes and an open mind. This hero, this unexpected genius, will unify the hedge traditions of the world and spread magic to everyone who has the potential.
Unlike certain others, I would impose no particular obligations upon you, no threats or missions. But is it really acceptable, to allow the age that birthed you to end? To let the utopian heavens collapse into ruin and the idyllic forests be torn apart by treasure-seekers, the righteous saints replaced by amoral wizards? Save what you will, with the gift I have given you, of 3 Orbs Of Heaven.
The magics of the new age and the old age are in conflict; you have the potential to master any you can afford.
[] Walk in Grace (1 orb) - Heaven's Grace is unasked for, unexpected, unearned. It is the kindness of the universe made manifest, the knowledge that you will not get what you deserve. But neither is it entirely unpredictable.
For you, heaven's love is a tangible force of destiny. With every step, the world turns its best face towards you. This manifests in two forms. Firstly, you have a destiny of happiness and excellence, and all events will bend towards this in shocking good fortune - the cavalry will always arrive in time, charity will come as you spend your last dollar, and you will find the teachers you need. Secondly, the natural world loves you. Wherever you tread, it is kind and soft and beautiful. You may sleep on a bed of moss and drink from mountain streams, and you will live in greater luxury than any prince.
The one flaw in this power is the Hero, whose study of magic entails profound insight into the character and mechanisms of divine favour, enabling them to break fates and batter down the gates of heaven.
[] Heaven's Gates (3 orbs) - The Gates of Heaven are sealed. The only way to enter Heaven is to build it anew on earth. Once, this was an art well-understood in the age of faith, but now the Saints are sealed away in Heavens of their own making and the remainder of the world is left to manage by itself. With this purchase, you are one such Lord of Heaven.
Your Heaven is a kingdom-sized space, utopic and idyllic, populated with citizens who live rich and excellent lives. The Heaven is heavily flavoured by the character of your virtues; productive as you are diligent, enduring as you are patient, and flavoured in a myriad of small ways by the forms of kindness, love, and curiosity you most prefer. It is interlinked with every other Heaven by divine transit routes, allowing citizens to live where they best prefer, giving you a population both loyal and enthusiastic to serve you - albeit scaled to your ability to make such service desirable both emotionally and practically.
In your Heaven, you have vast powers capable of manipulating both destiny and physical reality as you please, though you must be aware of the possibility of damaging the holy virtue which sustains your realm, but your powers and your loyal and well-trained servants are sealed within, and every intervention in the outside world being costly. Most Lords of Heaven cannot so much as leave their Heavens, but the turning of the age opens your gates a crack, allowing you to send forth a handful of angels or paladins, and allowing you to wander the world, albeit diminished back to mortality.
[] Vial of Virtue (1 orb per vial) - One of but seven remaining from the first days of the church, drink, and be tempered. Each vial will alter your personality to put one of the seven virtues as an ironclad foundation in your mind and soul, and as long as it remains so, you will obtain a corresponding saintly power.
Chastity: The ability to continue to take correct and strategic actions no matter how clouded or twisted your mind is, be it by emotions, magic, or drugs.
Temperance: Immunity to poison and disease of any kind, and the ability to function on a tenth of the food intake.
Charity: An unfailing intuition for what someone actually needs, for their own good on their own terms. Also functions on the scale of institutions.
Diligence: The ability to work continuously without physical exhaustion, on but two hours sleep a day.
Kindness: The ability to rapidly heal psychological and physical wounds in those you tend to, permitting healing at ten times the speed of a mundane doctor without any of the equipment. Any psychological wound can be healed in time.
Patience: Unagingness and doubled physical resilience, as long as the world still needs you.
Humility: The ability to pass unrecognised anywhere a member of the public might reasonably be permitted.
[] Hedge Mage (1 orb) - As the centuries pass by, a thousand local arts of magic have formed, the seeds of what will one day bloom into the age of magic. You are a practitioner of one such art, limited substantially by your focused education and specialised resource demands - and by your magic's damnable inability to interfere with the "holy" works of the divine. Pick one tradition - you are able to use its normal arts routinely, with sufficient quantities of its limiting resource, you may perform its grand art, and you are subject to its restriction. The arts described aren't comprehensive lists of the options available to each school, but each school cannot wander afar from its core themes and capacities - these are not the wonder-workings of the age to come.
Vesuvian Mage - Formal ritualist of fire and lava.
Common arts: Lavabending. Firewarding. Fireballs.
Limiting resource: Ability to perform complex and resource-intensive empowerment rituals.
Grand art: Volcanic summoning.
Restriction: Magic is at a fifth of its strength outside range of a suitable volcano.
Holy Necromancer - Priestly practice for eking out maximum value from holy relics.
Common arts: Consult heaven. Empower relics. Summon Church-Grim.
Limiting resource: Relics and corpses.
Grand art: Resurrection of crusaders as einherjar.
Restriction: Closely watched by the church
Mountain Druid - Educated man who has retreated into the furthest wilderness.
Common arts: Command birds. Endure elements. Speak to stone.
Limiting resource: The goodwill of nature.
Grand art: Animate mountain.
Restriction: Cannot train apprentices from uneducated folk.
Village Wise-Woman - The midwife of every village with arts that are useful but underappreciated.
Common arts: Healing. Ease birth. Herblore.
Limiting resource: Precious herbs.
Grand art: Steal bloodline.
Restriction: Untrustworthy practitioners.
Antikythera Clockworker - A skilled metalworker who takes the details of her art to an impossible limit.
Common arts: Automated astrology. Clockbow artifice. Artificial motion.
Limiting resource: Technical skill at clockwork.
Grand art: Automata.
Restriction: Can do no magic without tools designed for the purpose.
Scholar-Cultist - An academic art born of desperate desire and educated cunning.
Common arts: Blessing script. Weighted dice. Ward against detection.
Limiting resource: Scripts for new spells.
Grand art: Total mind reading.
Restriction: All spells end with the destruction of the associated script-talismans.
[] Bonisagus (2 orbs) - You are an unprecedented genius when it comes to matters of magic and mysticism. The operations of magic and wonder come apart under your gaze, surface traits reduced to their underlying phenomena. This allows you in particular to generalise and syncretise, merging different traditions that appear radically distinct into their core underlying principles. You cannot merge magics from different ages this way, but anything else is fair game. This power, while entirely unprecedented, is but a pale shadow of the genius of that of the hero, whose heaven-shattering insight will unify the mages of the world into a single grand order, if you do not stop them.
If you have hedge magic, you may select a second hedge tradition.
[] The Last Devil (2 orbs) - In ages past, before the coming of the saints, the world was ruled by foul Demon-Tyrants, whose personal strength was rooted in the love of devil-scribes whose inhuman affections rewarded violence and melodrama rather than kindness and virtue. Humanity working together toppled each tyrant-king one by one, as unwilling to help each other as they were, and saw each and every devil slaughtered as well. Or that's what you were told as a child.
One devil, it seems, has survived, albeit caged and wounded in some distant cave or mountain valley, and her attention has fallen on you from afar. Her love empowers you, allowing you to grow your attributes - most potently your physical attributes, but your social and mental attributes also to some extent, as you earn her affection and rewards. As wounded as she is, any more complex empowerment is impossible. Existing is sufficient to earn some measure of her affection, a trickle of improvement, but it is undoubtedly the case that she delights in struggle and drama - the more interesting your life, the faster you will grow. A year of idle tedium might see your physical attributes increase by 10% above baseline (and your mental attributes increase by 2%), but a single day of a dozen desperate struggles to survive ending in the fall of a nation would see twice that growth. Sufficiently convoluted and emotionally satisfying romantic drama or exploration would also satisfy her ardour, and if she could be freed and healed, then the diversity of possibilities would increase - but while the church cannot see what she is doing, they have not forgotten her or the threat she poses to them.
Not all power comes from one's own arts. I have gifts for you, wonders you'd be hard-pressed to replicate with your own labours.
[] Perfected Form (1 orb) - Heaven's Grace takes a myriad myriad forms, from the mundanely sublime to the esoterically absurd; some are more literal than others. You benefit from one more literal than most - your baseline agility and appearance, before any training, skill, or accessorization, are increased to a scant notch above the limits of what a mundane human could achieve with every mundane factor working in their favour - an angelic countenance just waiting to be further improved by your own practice.
[] Saint's Relic (2 orbs) - The skull of one of the saints involved in that first great war against tyranny, thought long lost. In fact, it was carved and fixed with gold and jewels to preserve its power, and hidden away until I brought it to light. Held, it permits you to invoke the sterling virtue of that pious martyr - metal of all sorts obeys you over its maker or wielder. It cannot be obliged to betray its purpose, but it can be obliged to fail in that purpose, and metal without a higher cause or existing owner can be controlled (or whose cause or owner would not be contradicted by such control) as though held in the arms of a giant. Even by surprise, no weapon of any metal will ever harm you, or allow you to come by harm, while you openly carry this skull. Additionally, it provides the ability to conjure arms and armour of golden light (including a suitable mounting point for the Relic) and will, once, expend itself to protect a suitably pious wielder totally from any form of harm.
[] Impossible Grimoire (1 Orb) - This tome, locked with an elaborate clockwork mechanism and clearly extremely magical, is filled with seemingly nonsensical illusion-text that constantly changes and shifts. No divination or true-seeing magic yet developed is able to pierce its secrets; the strongest spells reveal that without the illusions it is but a blank (but very expensive tome). With time and careful study, however, the changes can be discovered to be made according to patterns, and the long, slow, process of deciphering the book can truly begin, revealing it inch by careful inch to be the laboratory notes of a future wizard, filled mostly with her paranoid observations of her fellows (including the Hero who seeks to bring you low and many of his allies) and lurid theories on the true nature of time and the universe, and while some value can be gleaned from these notes, the real value is your ability to recreate her experiments on the matter of time magic. Nothing in the notes will allow the recreation of true time-travel - if she ever achieved anything whatsoever in this field, she made no record of it, and time travel is to all appearances entirely impossible. What it will teach you is how to slow time, freeze it, or accelerate it; all difficult arts prone to destroying the subjects of their spells rather than empowering them, but with careful design and experimentation, tremendous advantages can be obtained.
[] Bloodline: Void Deer (2 orbs) - Arcane magic is a fundamentally unnatural contortion of the human soul, and practitioners have forever searched for ways to ease its practice. The incorporation, by hybridization or ritual, of bloodlines from magical beasts is one such method, allowing intuitive and powerful magic at the cost of a permanent portion of the mage's power, creating bloodlines of specialized magi with unique capabilities. The Void Deer is a powerful and enviable such bloodline, descending from a being with the ability to traffic the near void of space for safety and power. It grants substantial control over the direction and magnitude of gravity within tens of meters of the one so empowered, freely redirecting the force while strengthening or weakening it tenfold, the ability to comfortably survive the void of space and any similar dangers, an impeccable intuition for three-dimensional non-oriented motion, navigation by the stars, and relativistic physics and last but not least, a tremendous rack of antlers sufficient to impede entry into many doorframes. None of the abilities so described scale with practice, though gravity control requires practice to use with sophistication and finesse and your abilities will scale somewhat with your power as a mage. They'll also synergise incredibly with any arcane arts of a similar sort, making it much easier to research and perform magic related to gravity or space travel, though you may have some substantial trouble teaching that magic to someone without your instincts.
[] Fake Priest (1 orb) - You may be worried about the trials of being a person of various vices and a shady background unused to living in a world where the church is constantly working to ensure that each and every soul reaches its full potential of virtuous living. Fear not; just sign this contract, and your entry into the world will involve substantial edits to both the world and your person to give you the life and memories of a recently ordained minor priest of no particular note, ensuring that your habitual virtue is sufficient to avoid suspicion. You'll also be given wards and blessings sufficient to ensure that your true nature, and your less accidental forms of vice will not be revealed to any arcane or divine force lesser than the hero.
[] Ten-Horned Dragon (3 orbs) - The Demon-Tyrants of the days before the earliest church records were terrible things, each capable of warring with entire angelic hosts alone, but in taking the field alone they were still defeated. A shard of one such tyrant, the war-form of the great slayer Bellerophon, can be yours. Assuming this form requires a substantial exertion, taking a few seconds and much of your magic, and will occur automatically if you take any serious injury; it lasts always at least 600 seconds and thereafter as long as you can slake its terrible thirsts.
The actual form will vary slightly to match your other abilities, scaling with your general combat capabilities, but it is always radically a inhuman combination of influences and monstrous parts - multi headed and increasing your multitasking ability correspondingly, possessed of natural weapons and armor equal to most relics, increasing all of your physical attributes far into the superhuman, and allowing for attacks with fire and poison in quantities sufficient to slay hundreds of foes in a single gout. Despite its toughness and strength unequaled, it lacks regeneration - for all that you might not take large wounds, you must still beware of the small wounds, as old Bellerophon was not.
If you require more power, I can think of a few ways to get it for you. At a price.
[] Vice-Ridden (+1 orb) - Sin is not a path to power, which is why we have so much of it lying around. Take on the vices of some previous appointee of mine and while you will never be a saint, I'm sure you will have a pretty great time. One deadly sin will rule you emotionally, its manifestation the tragic flaw of an otherwise epic hero; willpower having little power against that which you truly and wholly desire to do. Perhaps, in the turning of ages, you could overcome this flaw, and then, oh what a saint you'd be, for having overcome it.
[] Warden (+1 orb) - In the world there is a community, either a single rural town or a small neighborhood in a larger city, which suits you as well as any community in the Age of Faith can. If you have Heaven's Gates, then this community is your entire heaven rather than a local community of a few thousand souls. Your fate is bound to this community; every wound to it, economic, cultural, or literal, is a wound to you as well, forever diminishing your powers. What's more, you must defend not only the people of this place but the feel of the community - you will be just as diminished if your idyllic town is replaced by a bustling city as if it is burned to the ground - either fate will bring you to the brink of death with little to no hope of recovery. As a slight mercy, at least, the community is not the land it's built on; if you need to pick everyone up and move, you may do so.
[] Ungifted (+1 orb) - To be a mage and partake of the wonders of the new age, one must have the gift, an essential spark possessed at varying levels of strength by nearly everyone. You are one of the ones who do not have this power, and the chance to use arcane magic (including bloodline powers) and be part of the new age is forever lost to you.
[] Stalked (+2 orb) - An ancient horror, one of the demon-tyrants of ancient days, is informed, rightly, that you have within you the power which doomed its long days of lazy luxury. After aeons of hiding, this nameless shadow hunts once again. An assassin of ancient and peerless skill, with skills at avoiding divination and mundane scrutiny sufficient to survive millennia of active pursuit by a worldwide church, it will lurk and sabotage and not strike until it is certain of success - in combat, it is merely moderately superhuman, focused in speed and dexterity, with arms and armor well-suited to the defeat of holy defenses and a myriad of poisons whose names are lost to history. If you are well-prepared for this fight, then it should be easy - but it will not choose to strike when you are well-prepared.
