Skip to main content

Witch-Sight

Francesco Goya obviously had witch-sight.
Over on Roles, Rules, and Rolls, Roger the GS was describing a particular novel's depiction of elves, dwarves, and other faerie whazits, and said this:
They are normally invisible except to those humans who have been granted "witch-sight" through sorcery. However, their deeds sometimes manifest as omens, portents and misfortune for humans.

(As an aside, this would be a great campaign rationale. Ever wonder why the king with his retinue of knights can't go after those goblins threatening the village? They need the adventurers, witch-sighted all, to actually see the goblins.)
Aw, man. Wouldn't be a gorgeous bit of color for, say, Beyond the Wall? Or any folkloric campaign?

Everybody knows that there are beasties lurking about, and blame them for everything that goes wrong. Sometimes they're even correct. Everyone has a story about seeing a sprite when they were a child, or a kelpie in the swimming hole, and obviously that barn didn't catch fire by itself, there must have been a dragon! But the PCs were born with a caul over their eyes, or under a shooting star, or something. They are the real deal.

If you have non-human characters, and you didn't want them to be invisible bystanders during all in-town interactions, you might need a complimentary trait for them,where they can appear to humans. Probably in a human guise. Dwarves would appear to be short humans, elves as pretty youths, and satyrs seem unusually hirsute.

Maybe the visible fey are changelings who were raised by humans. Or they're wearing a glamour. Or they are somehow tied to the earth that brings them closer to humans, but causes them to be ostracized by their own people.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Knave 2e Alternate Attributes

Sometimes, I'm exactly in the mood for the classic simplicity of defining characters entirely by D&D's six attributes, as Knave does. But sometimes, I want the players have have just a little smidge more to fiddle with.

Lasers & Feelings, RetroRocket

 Necro-Cavaliers of the Astral Galaxy reminded me of just how much fun John Harper's Lasers and Feelings is. So I made a hack. Like so many others have. There's no new titular dichotomy for my hack, even though lasers aren't so much a part of the 30's era, Buck Rogers-style, planetary romances I wanted to emulate. Something like "Rockets & Romance" would have been entirely genre appropriate, but there's no improving on the geek poetry of declaring "I rolled LaserFeelings!" Anyway, I hope you like it. Let me know if you play it! LASERS & FEELINGS, RETROROCKET (pdf) Here's some of my previous noodlings along the same retro-futuristic lines: Ray Guns Food Pills Strange Powers An Exaltation of Rockets

Knaves, fancypants

I've prepared a new layout document of Ben Milton's Knaves . Knaves is a great, light rules set that has an extremely elegant core mechanic while retaining total compatibility with OSR material. It's pretty much the rpg of my dreams. This document contains the complete rules, plus a bunch of useful hacks from the community, plus a few of my invention, plus some useful resources from Ben Milton's previous effort, Maze Rats . EDIT: I've updated the layout to fix errata and make a few tweaks. Further, I've made 3 variations: KNAVES TABLET LAYOUT The Tablet Layout is meant for scrolling on screens, and contains hyperlinks. KNAVES SPREAD LAYOUT The Spread Layout is set up to print on Letter-sized paper. KNAVES A4 LAYOUT The A4 Layout is set up to print on A4 paper, and is probably the most elegant of the three versions. This is presented with generous permission from Ben Milton, and should in no way be an excuse for not purchasing a copy of Knav...