New Aspects for ‘Better Angels’ — An Utmost Foulness, Aqua-Form, and Glory

Better-Angels-cover-v4-front-612pxWritten by Greg Stolze, © 2013

Nine Aspects came in Better Angels, but there’s always room for more, right?

An Utmost Foulness (Cunning)

While many demons’ heritage is reflected with traditional looks like horns and fanged maws and leathery bat wings, some are ugly even by Hell’s standards.  Those are the ones who can take Utmost Foulness as an Aspect.  When relaxed, those with this Aspect look like the aftermath of a fire in a wax museum—melted forms with too many eyes, limbs and mouths, gooified and slagged together wrong.  Except it’s all moving, reforming, like a snail’s eye times a thousand with half-recognized human organs and animal features, rising and falling, much of it stuff on the outside that should be hidden within.  Never still, it’s a stretchy, polyadaptive, gooey mess.

The advantage of being a plastoid mass of ever-changing limbs is that it makes you very versatile.

With Utmost Foulness in play, a character gets points of weapon/tool Advantage for any physical task, simply by making his body into what he needs.  He can exude spikes for striking, make his body a slingshot to hurl a rock at someone, ooze away from injury or whip up a quick plastron to shed unwanted blows.  The amount of Advantage is half his current Cunning score.

It’s up to the GM to offer Advantage (or Difficulty) to social or mental tasks that might be helped or hindered by repulsive, seething mutation.  Spotting that ambush might be easier if you can make your eye telescopic or turn a foot-square surface of your body into an exterior eardrum.  On the other hand, seducing someone while looking like an animate offal pile may be impossible, no matter your Corruption score.  Scaring the crap out of people is definitely easier, though.

Aqua-Form (Sly)

You become a blue-green figure of water and ice, sliding and sloshing around the landscape.  Being made of living water has several advantages.

  • Impact weapons like swords, guns, fists and SUVs no longer give any weapon Advantage against you.
  • When underwater you can move at your running speed without effort, you don’t need to breathe, and you get the advantages of the Invisibility power.
  • You cannot be pushed or pulled.
  • If you can make contact with a wall while falling, you take no damage from hitting the ground.
  • You can pass through a hole the size of a soup bowl in one round.  A hole the size of a dime?  You can squeeze through that in about sixty seconds.  Seeping through something like a door crack could take as long as five minutes, but if water can go through it, so can you… eventually.

That said, there are a few drawbacks.

  • Weapons that explode use their full Advantage and, moreover, have the Height of their attack raised by one when unleashed against those in Aqua-Form.
  • Aqua-Form is vulnerable to extremes of temperature.  Attacks based on fire or cold also use their full Advantage and have the Height of the attack roll raised by one point.

Glory (Devious)

This is not to be confused with Impossible Beauty (though they work really, really well together).  When you transform into a form of Glory, you may look beautiful or terrible or, more likely, both.  You become impossibly imposing, like a thunderstorm or an eclipse—something above human scale, beyond typical lusts.  You become a figure that obliterates reason and self-respect, too vast and real, too much to be dealt with.

At least, that’s the highest form of it.  Demons shy of Devious may just be a bit more dapper.

When Glory is active, every social action you take has its Height increased by an amount equal to your Devious score.  If the Height exceeds 10, the action becomes immune to Gobble Dice.  (This is basically ‘Horned’ for persuasion.)

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