Hey there, so I’m going to be in a campaign where sorcery per BWG is going to be available, along with enchanting and death art, as we don’t have the MaBu but we have downloaded those PDFs…put that out there since I’m sure to get MaBu related answers that I may simply not have the context to understand…
Anyway, player wants to pursue the path to becoming a liche with his character…given the issues with preserving the Gifted trait, we’ve come up with an alternative path, but I wanted to actually see if it’s allowed.
Human sorceror, with orcish blood, has Fey Blood, Void Embrace…secretly prostrates himself to the god of darkness and blood and learns the forbidden magics of the orcs…has the gifted trait as well, but to get death art…goes through the process of becoming a Liche…uses enchanting to make a phylactery that preserves the void embrace trait (and maybe cold black blood as well so he can still do Death Art once he’s a liche)…possible?
Reason I ask, that while fey blood states you can purchase special traits if you pay the full cost + the fey blood trait cost, Void Embrace states that it turns Hatred into Void Embrace…and depending on how that’s interpreted that could mean that only if you have Loathsome and Twisted, which provides Hatred, can you get Void Embrace…
So anyway, looking for an official ruling here if possible…can you take Fey Blood, Void Embrace? If not, the Liche could always just get it to replace his gifted trait and begin learning a new type of magic in his unlife…it’s not like he won’t have time to study
I would ask a related question. “What does the character want with lichedom?” There is a reasonable default desire, in the D&D sense, to get more “spells” and to “level up” sorcerery, but is that the goal of unlife? I could understand the desire for an eternity of knowledge, to level up sorcery as a study (which doesn’t require gifted), a liche in eternal research and study doesn’t require flashy spells per se.
Is the Liche’s goal power and conquest and domination? I can certainly see the want for retaining gifted! but I think the default gifted-liche idea perhaps is a meta player goal. It can become circular. “I want more power, therefore I need power for more power”. What does the liche want gifted sorcery–which many spells are not much more than parlor tricks to the undead, for that he can’t achieve with ungifted sorcery. Sorcery wouldn’t be wasted without gifted, still useful as a FoRK in death art and enchanting for example. Afterall, his goal was immortality, which was achieved. What is the goal after immortality?
Technically, Void Embrace is not the equivalent of Gifted. Orcs can learn Rituals of Night and Rituals of Blood without ever learning Void Embrace. What Void Embrace does is allow you to recover from The Sickness. Humans can do this with their Forte. Orcs can’t.
Orcs are able to learn their rituals by nature of what they are – the text doesn’t spell it out, but I’d assume it is Hatred that allows them to use these Rituals. So if the liche had access to Hatred, it could learn to invoke orcish Rituals of Blood and Rituals of Night (but not sorcery), assuming it had someone to teach it. It would still need Void Embrace to recover from The Sickness though.
Except Void Embrace means you don’t have Hatred, so presumably either one works. I think Void Embrace works in the place of Gifted reasonably well.
Really, the important question is whether you think it should be allowed. It doesn’t break anything that I can think of. It’s crazy expensive at 8 trait points. (You’ll probably have to tone that down, honestly.)
Sure, but in the weird world of Fey Blood, you take Void Embrace and I think you just get that new emotional attribute. And you don’t get Sorcery, but you sure do have whatever it takes to use Rituals of Night/Blood, in my opinion.
This is the crux of the character, and the greatest question. If it’s just a mechanic for power gaming, it’s boring, breaks games, and ends up not being fun for the player, the other players, or the GM. It has to be driven by something certainly. The interesting part about fey blood AND having to take life paths that could potentially generate enough trait points to buy Void Embrace (8 points!) means the combination of outcast/servitude/arcane lifepaths and, orc heritage. That’s somebody who is going to have a lot of self hate and hate for society. In our campaign, which is a highly religious setting and where “gods” are basically just extremely powerful beings who have an influence over the world and can do “supernatural” (if that means anything in a fantasy game) things, his background would be essentially a man who is lifelong persecuted, especially by the religious aristocracy and plagued by dreams, dark impulses and even otherworldly messages from the god of darkness and blood who is trying to push him towards succumbing to his hate.
The beliefs would be something along the lines of:
“The gods are not our salvation. Either they damn your soul for eternity or ‘reward’ your servitude in life with eternal servitude in the afterlife.”
“The only escape from the tyranny of the gods is to escape death and to become our own salvation.”
“I will show the world that the gods are our enemies and only through undeath can we escape their yoke.”
Something along those lines…
So if it was a ‘human’ (or rather used to be human) Liche, with Hatred…say has loathsome and twisted vs void embrace…learns rituals…could it then use Forte to deal with tax and the sickness?
I don’t know…I think a non orc getting void embrace for 8 points makes a lot of sense…it shouldn’t be easily achieved by a human character right?
So if you don’t have hatred in the first place…can you take Void Embrace?
I don’t know about ripped off…like I said, we’re talking about a human stock attaining magic of the orcs that he can potentially use enchanting to take into the unlife…seems appropriately expensive…in fact…I don’t think it’s attainable with 4 LPs…I don’t know of any lifepaths in BWG (maybe in MaBu?) that offer Fey Blood as a LP trait.
hmmm…yeah I had a feeling, it makes sense. Maybe loathsome and twisted to start with the Fey Blood (which gives hatred and also explains why the character is persecuted, removed from society and would go down this path), learns but doesn’t cast the rituals during life, maybe uses sorcery to get death art and then during unlife, uses enchanting to put cold black blood and void embrace in the phylactery to be able to use and recover from the rituals and get death art back…
Or take Fey Blood and Loathsome and Twisted, then find a Servant of the Dark to induct you into their blasphemous mysteries and get Void Embrace. That’s fodder for a few Beliefs there.
