The Big Dumb Deep Dive into Fate is All Things
This is another one of those.
Today, I'd like to look at another Sidereal Charm: Fate is All Things. This is a fairly late-game Charm, being a Permanent Sidereal Occult 5, Essence 3 Charm. Its effect is simple:
"The Sidereal treats un-Exalted enemies of fate as spirits for purposes of Sidereal Charms. This doesn't apply for Charms that affect specific types of spirit, like gods, only those applicable to all spirits."
…but
is it simple?
This is one of those Charms that is hard to accurately gauge before you've been playing for a while, I think, because you need to know what it will actually apply to. So I'm going to simply go through
every Sidereal Charm in order, and list all those that are affected and how. Hopefully by the end of it we'll know if this Charm is worth its xp!
Also, this Charm applies to 'un-Exalted enemies' and treats them 'as spirits'; but, for instance, a demon is an enemy of fate… but is also already a spirit, meaning it is already covered by Charms which affect those. So is a ghost. Therefore, the only characters actually affected are 'un-Exalted enemies of fate which are not spirits', and that's… the fae, corporeal undead such as zombies, .and unique characters your ST designs that they deem to be so.
For ease of convenience, I am going to refer to such applicable characters - "un-Exalted enemies of fate that are not spirits" as Wretches, because it's fun. It would be a very bad term to use in the actual line but this is just my own post.
That's slim. Right now I'm in a raksha-centric game, so I'd still want it, but it's not a lot.
Without further ado, let's do the rundown.
House of Journeys
Resistance contains no applicable Charms.
Ride
Invisible Spirit Rider: If you're riding a Wretched mount, it gains the ability to dematerialize and to bring you with it into the immaterial. This is an extremely niche benefit unless you have a very specific character concept, but if, for instance, you have a unicorn familiar (fae) or are one of those Plutonian Shores types with an undead horse, then you probably want that.
Sail
Salt-into-Ash Sleight: You can use social influence to remind a Wretch that they have urgent business elsewhere that they must attend to. This straightforwardly expends the range of the Charm and would be useful in any game dealing with fae and sentient, corporeal undead.
Survival
Creation's Subtle Whisper: As a minor benefit, the question "What is the overall mood of the nearby region's spirits?" will also cover Wretches. Great in the Dreaming Sea.
Sky Spirit Demand: This Charm is a 'mutual influence' deal that causes you to inflict an automatically successful intimacy on a spirit in exchange for receiving one of your own, and FiAT expands it to Wretches. Can zombies feel love?
Tomb-Parole Sanction: Astral projection and partial possession (you gain influence on your host, not outright physical control), now expanded to Wretches. Enjoy body-riding that fae Cataphract.
Dreaming the Wild Lands: The ability to communicate with animals and spirits without a shared language at a vast range and to convince them to attack people expands to Wretches.
House of Serenity
Craft
Elemental Vision: To address this immediately; Elemental Vision's various subclauses affect spirits 'associated with the element of your Maiden,' which means they are
specific spirits, which means FiAT doesn't apply. Sorry.
Linguistics
Ice-and-Fire Binding: The first clause, which summons a spirit to bind them, specificies 'god or elemental' and thus doesn't work. The second clause, which applies against a spirit 'of any kind' present in the scene, does. This allows you to lay a powerful binding against the target, so now you can bind Cataphracts as bodyguards and Lorelei as court musicians or whatnot. This is a very roundabout way of getting First Circle [Raksha] Summoning, which doesn't otherwise exists.
Performance
Song of Spirit Persuasion: Straightforward 'apply powerful emotional Intimacy,' now with an expanded target range.
House of Battles
Presence
Water and Fire Legion: Bind a target to protect something you care about, now with an extended target list. Same deal as Ice-and-Fire Binding with a different tone and emotional context.
War
Training Mandate of War-God Puissance: You can now teach Wretches spirit Charms appropriate to their nature. It's not clear what exactly that means - I don't think a raksha can straight up learn an elemental's Charms - but it probably means you can teach them other Charms from their own splat. I'm not sure there are many non-spirit undead that have access to Charms?
House of Secrets
Larceny
Sanctum-Breaching Heist: Theoretically, this would allow you to enter a Wretch's sanctum, if such a thing existed. In any case any such thing would likely come under 'magical barrier or crossing' and the Charm would be usable regardless of FiAT.
Lore
Of Secrets Yet Untold: The target of this Charm learns a secret about the future which is highly valuable to them and puts them in your debt, but which you will never learn yourself; they must repay that debt by performing a service for you that is chosen by the Storyteller within the broad remit of being beneficial to you. Doing this kind of thing with an undead or a fae is definitely a very, very good idea which you should absolutely do at the earliest opportunity.
Occult
Incite Decorum: I had to read that Charm twice to work out how this would work because there is an order-of-priority thing happening here. The Charm has one clause that affects 'gods and elementals', and one Charm that affects 'spirits who are enemies of fate,' but no clause that affects
spirits in general. But we check for FiAT
before checking for Incite Decorum; so if we meet a raksha, FiAT checks for 'un-Exalted enemy of fate' and says 'this now counts as a spirit,' then Incite Decorum checks for 'this is a spirit who is an enemy of fate,' and applies properly. This is great if you're a diplomatic envoy to the fae courts.
Mark of Exaltation: This one stands out for being the first time FiAT has a
negative effect; Wretches can now see your caste mark when you use MoE, and recognize you as a Sidereal if they have the right background.
Manifestation-Haling Summons: This Charm technically expands its range to Wretches, but almost none of them will have the ability to dematerialize in the first place, so it's irrelevant.
Tell-Tale Symphony: You can now hear dematerialized Wretches. See above.
Official Notice of Alienation: You can now expel Wretches possessing people, which seems like a rare edge case. You can also banish Wretches as if they were spirits, but since the Charm already allows you to banish 'enemies of fate native to other worlds,' the effect is incredibly marginal unless your ST rules raksha
aren't native to another world.
House of Endings
Awareness
Supernal Awareness: With FiAT, when you activate the Charm to sense all activities by spirits in the vicinity, this will also cover all Wretches as part of its effect. You can now easily track zombies bursting out of graveyards and goblins slipping under children's beds. Very useful in particularly miserable areas.
Bureaucracy
Terminal Sanction: Probably the most important combination of the lot. I think raksha permadie when killed by default, but if your particular fae antagonist has Changeling-style Titles bullshit where they burn through their names to come back, this'll put a stop to that. More importantly, any Wretch you kill can be sealed in a rice cooker or bound to your service by a Defining Tie of loyalty for a year and a day. "Kill powerful fae lord, make it serve you" is the kind of thing I'm here for.
Anything Else
I believe this covers the entire native Sidereal Charm set. If I have missed anything, feel free to point it out.
Conclusion
Every House has at least
two Charms which are enhanced by FiAT to some degree. The House of Journeys and Secrets have the most, although they are not necessarily the
best.
All in all, I can see FiAT being an
invaluable addition to your character's Charm in one situation, and one situation alone: you are in a game where the fae are a very important presence and make up a plurality of your allies, antagonists, and neutral third parties. Being in one such game myself, I intend to make FiAT my first E3 purchase and am a bit annoyed I will have to wait that long.
However, it is a bit galling that it is E3, precisely
because it is so limited. Its expansion is lateral, and only partially upwards, in that
some fae may reach the power of a Second Circle Demon or one of the greater dead, depending on your table, but there will always be
few, and Sidereal Charms can already affect high-Essence gods by default.
FiAT seems to me to be written under the assumption that it has a combinatorial risk that warrants putting it fairly high in the game progression, but as far as I can tell it doesn't really. While it would have marginal utility in an Underworld game or a game dealing heavily with the dead, most undead
are spirits. Ghosts are, mortwights are, nephwracks are, deathlords are. Most undead that are not spirits are animated flesh puppets, whether zombies or necrotech horror, and the majority of those are not sapient, and as such a lot of the social or binding effects enabled by FiAT seem irrelevant. Meanwhile, all demons are spirits, and the Liminals, Getimians and Infernals are all Exalted.
This does not make FiAT a 'bad Charm', and I'll happily buy it when the time comes, but it definitely seems like it has a focus that is simultaneously very broad and very narrow: it affects basically everything that comes out of the Wyld, from goblins to raksha to unique horrors to the most warped of Wyld mutants, and that's mostly it. For my purposes, that's great. Some games never deal with the Wyld at all though, and FiAT could probably do with being worded in a way that more strongly emphasize its effective focus.
All that said, I can't wait to murder a raksha and raise it as my bound fae. TDS Sei represent looking at you
@EarthScorpion
