Mystery Slots

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Latest revision as of 17:30, 19 December 2010

Mystery Slots are intrinsic to a character, each character being born with a differnt amount and not being able to gain more later. They represent the character's ability to embrace complex and non-standard principles regarding spellcasting, religious practice, and similar, each such Mystery requiring one or several Mystery Slots of "space".

Deriving the number of slots

During character creation, one starts with 3 Mystery Slots; then free bonus slots are given for high values in the Psyche, Faith and Will attributes, and finally the player or GM creating the character can buy extra Mystery Slots as Advantages, or take one of two DisAdvantages that subtracts either 50% or 75% from the final number of Mystery Slots. See Number of Mystery Slot for more information.

Acquiring Mysteries

Different Mysteries are acquired in different ways.

Some are relatively simple to acquire, in that the character must perform a religious pilgrimage that is in accordance with his religion, e.g. a Christian character travelling to Rome, Jerusalem or Santiago de Compostela, or a Moslem character travelling to Mecca during the last monh of the lunar calender of Islam (performing the Hajj). Such religious physical acts give greater reward (counting as different, stronger, higher grades of Mysteries) the more difficult they are, e.g. a character living 2500 km from Mecca acquires a much higher class of Mystery than someone who lives 300 km away. The mode of travel also has an effect, with the optimal being to walk the entire way on foot.

Another example of relatively easily acuirable Mysteries are self-mutilations. These require various forms of prior knowledge and magical or mystical insight, and typically follow in the tracks of mythology, e.g. a character gouging one of his own eyes out, in imitation of the Norse god Odin, or arranging for himselv to hang on a tree for nine days pierced by a spear, in order to gain great magical insight. Mutilating one self is of course not trivially easy, unless one is clinically insane, but a character with a great thirst for knowledge, and a firm belief (or certain knowledge) that the procedure will produce a this-wordly result, can nevertheless do it.

Another example of that is self-castration, which depending on the way it is done, can lead to heightened Divine religius powers (the character following in the steps of the early Christian Origen; both the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches in the Ärth setting considers the practice to be intensely heretical, but it nevertheless works), heightened magical powers (specifically improved Spirit Travel magic, in the Norse and Finnish tradition), or some other kind of benefit that few if any remember now what is, that were gained by the eunuch followers of the classical age Anatolian goddess Cybele.

The Amazons's procedure of breast-removal was probably also a kind of Mystery, and if so almost certainly what was gained had some kind of martial relevance. One well-known and rather popular Mystery among the Kelts is the Embrace of the Un-Veiled Hag, in which a young male warrior must carry out a full sexual intercourse with a Cailleach (not an actual Hag, thankfully!), with her veil removed, so that her hideous facial scars are clearly visible (doing it in darkness does not count; that has been tried). The ritual where the Cailleach gets her face destroyed is itself a Mystery, and the benefit of that Mystery is that she can cast Body Magic spells on any willing man who have gone through the Embrace Mystery. She also has a way of determining whether a man has carried out the Embrace or not.

It is not known that a female warrior has ever tried to carry out this Mystery. Some Cailleach are bisexual or homosexual, and so have sex with each other, but that seems to not result in Mysticism. The Cailleach also have other Mysteries that allow a limited use of Body Magic on any willing target, but these cost more Mystery Slots, and like most other Mysteries, require the character to go through difficult and time-consuming intellectual process. And since the Cailleach already has gone through the mandatory Scarring Mystery, they're disinclined to go any further.

There is a great variety of less grisly Mysteries, and many tend to enhance spellcasting or other working of magic, for instance by letting a spellcaster specialize further, so that his Fumbles with one class of spells, typically a Realm, will tend to be less severe, or reducing the penalties for non-standard casting methods, that is for Silent Casting or No Gestures Casting, or for Fast Casting. There is also Rote-Casting for amateur mages, and Rote Cantrip for even more amateurish amateurs.

Un-Learning Mysteries

Fortunately, if a character finds he has no more need of a Mystery, he can un-learn it, freeing up the slot or slots that it occupied, so that he can spend those Slots on learning, discovering or developping other Mysteries more pertinent to his current interests. Un-learning a Mystery requires little effort, but is followed by a period of time where the Slot must "lie fallow", that is it cannot be used for a new Mystery before that period of time is over. This period may vary from Mystery to Mystery, but tends to be 6 Moons.

Examples of Mysteries

(This seems to have been done above. Information should be re-arranged to move the Mysteries down here.

Design Notes

The basic idea behind Mysteries is that of limited ressources. Sagatafl's character creation system is such that a player is free to choose to generate hundreds of aDvantage Points, or many tends of thousands of Skill Points, if he so chooses. That's good, in many ways, but it also means that unless steps are taken, it becomes trivially easy to make a do-everything character, for instance a character who can do all the special Spell tricks.

Mystery Slots are one such step. Mystery Slots are, like Essence and Martial Arts Stunts, a limited ressource, something that each characte only has a limited amount of. Also, like Essence, players can make choices during character creation to give the character more of this ressource. As with Essence, there are two ways of doing this, one way being automatic and implicit: by raising relevant attributes, more of the ressource is automatically had. The second way is deliberate, by purchasing more of the ressource directly, in this case by purchasing one or more levels of the extra Mystery Slots Advantage.

This means that characters (and to some extent also players) are forced to make hard choices, about what to specialize in. They cannot specialize deeply in everything.

Unlike the Essence subsystem, the Mystery Slot system is rather forgiving of mistakes. If a character (or player) has chosen the wrong Mysteries, he can un-Learn them, thereby freeing the Slots for some other use. All this takes is time, and sometimes being careful not to utilize the Mysteries that one wishes to abandon. The exception are some of the Mysteries that require an alteration of the character, especially if it is a mutilation, a removal of a body part (eye, testicles) or a trait (scarring which reduces Appearance and also gives a negative FIM). In these cases, the Mystery Slot can still be freed for alternative use, but of course the "surgery" remains. Characters (and players) are therefore strongly adviced to think carefully before undergoing such procedurs. And not only by the GM. In-setting many NPCs will dispense similar advice, to characters openly talking about the possibility of undergoing "surgical" Mysteries.

Note that some extreme Mysteries leave no lasting bodily effect, such as Odin's Hanging Ritual. If you survive it, you're fine. Others have minimal lasting physical impact, such as a Trepanning Ritual. If you survive it without brain damage or other negative side effects, you're pretty fine. At worst you may have to keep the wound clean, if it doesnt heal up of its own (and most trepanning wounds do). In such cases, the only really important concern is the risk of the procedure itself, which may indeed be great. Sometimes, great power comes at a great cost. That's also part of the Mystery mechanics:

How great is your character's thirst for power? To what extremes are he willing to go?

See Also

Number of Mystery Slots