Memento Mori (Exalted/40k)

Character Creation Pt 2 - Runoff

The three options with the most votes are the Penitent Gunslinger, the Contemptuous Scribe, and the Forsaken Templar. These three are now advancing to a runoff vote. In order to help voters decide between them, more information on their unique advantages, methods of advancement and starting locations are provided below.

Anima Powers are innate qualities of a given type (or 'caste') of Exalt, and cannot be duplicated or otherwise learned. There are always three levels of anima - the first is an always-on passive, the second is typically an active ability that they can choose to use, and the third is an iconic ability only available when pushing the very limits of their power.

Exalt Milestones are a means of growing in power unique to a specific caste. Each describes a particular situation or achievement - whenever this condition is met, the protagonist will learn a new charm or repurchase one of their existing charms for greater effect.

The Penitent Gunslinger

As one of the Dusk Caste, the Gunslinger has inherited the most brutal and personal aspect of the Emperor's martial might. This is the aspect that slaughtered armies and shattered the bones of monsters, that made him personally equal to all the horrors of Old Night. The Gunslinger begins the game as an astartes-level combatant, and may grow stronger with time and practice.

The Gunslinger's anima powers are as follows:

• Death is Inevitable: You may automatically slay an insignificant target (defined as anything without combat-relevant augmentations or supernatural abilities) once per round without a roll, and against significant targets will always deal at least one level of damage, regardless of armour or other defence.
• Fear Made Flesh: You may terrify targets normally immune to or incapable of feeling fear, and reduce the multiple-action penalty on fear-based social influence to a single dice. Note that as an Abyssal, terrifying your foes restores the essence that powers your supernatural abilities.
• Walking Apocalypse: When at iconic anima, you may respond to hostile actions with a free counter-attack once per turn. Any foe struck by such an attack takes additional damage from your next attack against them.

You gain an Exalt Milestone whenever you engage a significant foe in combat. Friendly spars do not count; at least one of you must be seriously attempting to harm or kill the other.

The Gunslinger begins the quest in Gunmetal City, an industrial megapolis of four billion people living in the crater of an active volcano. Metals dredged up from the molten core fuel great foundries that produce a significant percentage of the sector's munitions, and the lower levels are perpetually at risk of toxic gas and errant lava flows. Clean air is a luxury here, and the wealthiest dwell atop needle-thin towers of steel many hundreds of metres high.

In Gunmetal city, everyone from the highest noble to the lowest of gutter trash carries a gun and knows how to use it. Gunfights are public entertainment, marksmanship an art form, and the choice of one's sidearm a statement as much political as practical.

The Contemptuous Scribe

As one of the Moonshadow Caste, the Scribe has inherited the Emperor's taste for diplomacy and organisation, the veiled glove of conquest-by-word. This is the aspect that told people whatever they needed to hear in order to bend them to his will, that wrought the totalising system of imperial rule which aimed to bind the stars themselves in rational, ordered hegemony.

The Scribe's anima powers are as follows:

• God of the Ashes: You may learn the powers of gods, daemons and other supernatural beings (such as ghosts or machine spirits) through tutelage or study, and may seal agreements between two or more parties such that any oathbreaker is automatically revealed to all other parties.
• Speaker for the Dead: When negotiating with supernatural beings of any kind, they are obligated to do you and your companions no harm and offer full hospitality. Deals or promises made during such negotiations are sanctified, and any who break their word are accursed, generally suffering immediate physical peril or the loss of whatever would hurt them most.
• Gates of Death: At iconic anima, you may open a warp portal that remains open and stable for the scene. This portal may lead to any safe location over which you hold at least implicit authority, or any significant location gleaned from the Emperor's tormented memories.

You gain an Exalt milestone whenever you make a deal with a significant character or group, or whenever you sow discord between two or more of the same.

The Scribe begins the quest in Hive Tarsus, the commercial and religious heart of Scintilla and thus the entire Calixis Sector. Here lies the Goldenhand, where brass-skinned functionaries officiate deals between ten thousand bickering financiers, and where investment bankers exchange volleys of lasfire to secure primacy for their transactions in the name of their noble patrons. Here too lies the Cathedral of Illumination, seat of the Sector Synod, as well as the headquarters and primary barracks of the Scintillan PDF.

Built in the very centre of the planet's least hospitable desert, and thus directly underneath the primary orbital docks and shipyards, Hive Tarsus is socially inverted; the nobility dwell in pitch-black subterranean mansions, where the air is cold enough to freeze a man to death in moments, while the poor and outcast are forced into the outer skin of the hive and must cope as best they can with searing heat and light that can blacken flesh in moments.

The Forsaken Templar

As one of the Daybreak Caste, the Templar has inherited a fragment of the Emperor's own mystic might and esoteric understanding. This is the aspect that peered unflinching into the abyss, that stole fire from the gods while denying their very existence, that forged demigods as others might make a sword and mastered such arcane might men called it divine. The Templar begins as a trained battle-psyker, with access to sorcerous rituals alongside personal skill with a blade.

The Templar's anima powers are as follows:

• Dark Inspiration: You may complete downtime activities and ventures based on craftsmanship, medicine, academic research or occult pursuits at twice the normal speed.
• Otherworldly Lore: You add your essence in automatic successes to all rolls based on craft or sagacity. This explicitly includes working sorcery and wielding arcane might in battle.
• Gruesome Epiphany: When you reach iconic anima, you may intuit, reveal or create a vital weakness in a person, object or structure that you can perceive. This weakness may be physical, spiritual or emotional, and you and your allies gain double successes on any attempts to exploit it for the scene.

You gain an Exalt milestone whenever you use your knowledge to provoke a conflict or undermine a significant foe, such as by revealing blackmail or using Gruesome Epiphany.

The Templar begins the quest in Ambulon, a mobile hive city mounted atop the back of an ancient pre-imperial machine that endlessly wanders the rocky expanse of Scintilla's primary continent. The city never stops moving, migrating steadily from one resource deposit to another at the direction of the secretive engineering guild, extracting and exploiting each in turn before sending refined wealth and finished products off to markets across the world and beyond.

Unemployment is illegal in Ambulon, and those who cannot provide proof of their labours at one of the many resource extraction facilities or industrial workshops are flung from the side or exiled to the shanty towns that hang from the city's great belly, many hundreds of metres above the ground. Nobody is sure what would happen should the city stop moving, though theories abound, with some suggesting that it would collapse into a rusted heap and others insisting that it would come alive to devour the human parasites upon its enormous back.

Article:

Which of these three archetypes do you choose? Vote for one option only.

[ ] The Penitent Gunslinger

[ ] The Contemptuous Scribe

[ ] The Forsaken Templar