Lone Wolf Fists: a FISTMAS miracle, the Content rules!

Merry Fistmas everybody! Let's hope super-ripped Santa-Ken smashes his way through your free-standing brick walls and stuffs your stocking with VIOLENCE on this jolliest of all occasions/attacks!

A Merry Fistmas to all, and to all a good fight!

To start the festivities, I've got a special treat for you all; this little elf has been busily completing the Lone Wolf Fists playtest! As one of our capstone pieces of writing, I present the long-awaited Content rules, so you can prep and run stuff for your very own post-apocalypse!

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Horizontal Content

When players go someplace new, what’s there? Who’s there? What are they doing? Horizontal Content answers this question. When players kick down a door, it tells them what’s in the room.

Elements of Horizontal Content

The Map

As the GM, you’ll need to keep in mind the spatial relationship of different places to one another: that’s where a map comes in handy! This map is only a rough approximation of your game’s world; it shows direction and relative size of areas, for your quick and convenient consultation.

As with your other notes, this map generally isn’t shared with players; the exploration that happens in their imaginations, from your description of the environment, will always be superior to even the most detailed map.

The Key

The descriptions, inhabitants, and other things present in the areas of the of map are all described under the numbered Key. It’s a lot easier to show than tell you how this works:

1. Mountain Pass
2. Narrow Defile
3. Stone Wall
4. Stone Fort
5. Training Ground
6. Wider Pass
7. Hidden Caves
8. Jungle Entrance

The picture on the left is the map, showing the rough shape, relative size, and spatial relationship of the areas. The Key on the right names the numbered areas of the map. In the full key, these names would additionally contain descriptions of those areas and their inhabitants, contents, and any special notes that you need to remember.

Elements of the Key
The key is designed to tell you what’s in a place, how it looks, who’s there, and what they’re doing. It does this with the following entries:

Description: A brief rundown of everything a character sees when they’re looking around the area.  
Elements and Hazards: Things that are present; buildings, flows of lava, trees, radioactive graveyards; whatever’s there.
Inhabitants: The people and creatures in the area.
Status Quo: The typical state of affairs in the area.
Notes: Anything else you need to know.

Let’s go through each in turn.

Description
This entry gives you, the GM, a quick rundown of what’s in an area and why. If there’s something you need to know about this entry, you’ll find it here. The writing blends a description of the area with that of its inhabitants, their motivations, and anything else routinely present and why.

This sometimes includes what a character’s senses immediately tell them about an area. What characters see (or don’t in the case of inky blackness) is always listed; otherwise only the most notable elements are are described. Sometimes these act as a clue to draw a player to further investigate. “Smells sepulchral, like an hot slaughterhouse” is a shocking statement about a temple filled with smiling priests!

The descriptions  are deliberately brief: you’ll be reading them in-play a lot of times, so they’ve got to be punchy! These aren’t meant to be read aloud: they’re just quick notes for your to skim to inform your own descriptions.

And besides, you know what “A dirty kitchen” or “A patch of shimmering desert sand” looks like, and if you’re spouting a small novel’s worth of tedious narration every time players turn a corner, they’ll swiftly begin to tune it out.


Elements and Hazards
Since this is a game about acrobatic combat, any notable pieces of scenery are described in game-terms as Elements or Hazards under this entry. Sometimes their placement is very specific, but other times this is closer to a shopping-list of stuff you can use to create ad-hoc battlefields if a fight breaks out here.

Inhabitants
Although they’re described under the Description entry first, notable inhabitants often need a deeper dive to describe both their rules and their motivations for being present. This is where you’ll find all of that lovely information.

Status Quo
The world of your game is always in motion; its inhabitants don’t stand still, waiting for the player’s characters to show up. They live their lives, scavenging and fighting, making allies and enemies, raising children, gathering food, and everything else you imagine they might do in the post-apocalypse.

If the area is safe and relatively stable, people tend to fall into patterns of behavior; they’re not frozen in time, just generally involved in the same activities on a day-to-day basis. This state of repeating stability is called a Status Quo (“The state in which”), essentially the expected state of affairs in a given place.

Areas are generally in their Status Quo: when players go there, whatever activities are described under the entry is going on. This isn’t universal; a weapon shop’s Status Quo might be to be open for business and bustling with patrons, but if the characters arrive after-hours it’ll be empty. The Status Quo describes the most common and most iconic activities of a location.

Even if shaken up, things tend to return to the status quo. Having a fight in a marketplace certainly disrupts business during the conflict, but after the excitement dies down, the shops open up and customers flood back in.

Really big disruptions can change this; we’ll talk about that in a little bit.

Notes
All the information you’ll need as a GM sometimes doesn’t fit completely in the neat categories we have here; if we need to cram just a little more info in, you’ll find it here. Among other things, you’ll often find bad-guy battle tactics and treasures listed under this heading.

Vertical Content

When players start asking questions about a new place they’ve encountered, how do you answer them? How do you know what motivates an NPC? Or how people react when confronted with the players (or the inevitable violence that trails in their wake)? What situation have the players stumbled into, and how can they turn it to their advantage?

Vertical Content answers this question. When they players ask “Why?”, this gets them an answer.

Elements of Vertical Content

The Elephant Board: A map of an abstract situation, plot, or intrigue.

Phases: The steps a plot goes through as it resolves

The Elephant Board: Mapping intrigue, conspiracies, and situations
Players explore courtly intrigue alongside the courts; they go “deeper” or “higher” into plots and dramas, hence “Vertical”. Although situations aren’t concretely and permanently linked to a physical space, we can still map them after a fashion.

Much like the physical map, the Elephant Board is a rough approximation. But rather than mapping locations, it’s a map of the world’s situations.

Elements of the Elephant Board
Anchors: Clues, places, and characters present in Horizontal Content that act as doorways to an Elephant Board
Squares: Scenes on the Elephant Board, arranged in space and time
Connections: The characters and clues that relate the plot together, allowing movement between the Squares of the Elephant board
Dynamic Content: The movement of content from the Status Quo to a different set of events.
Resolution: The number of Montage Scenes that a Square’s events require before they resolve. Once every Square in a Phase resolves, the plot advances to the next Phase.
Consequences: What events come to pass if the players don’t interfere

The Elephant Board is a somewhat more malleable and less concrete set-up than our more traditional map; it’s useful in that it allows you a lot of flexibility to create dynamic, unique situations, but also an obstacle, because it’s difficult to intuit exactly what each part represents.

To give you a brief rundown: it has boxes, called Squares (like squares on a game board) that represent situations with Connections that represent clues that allow “movement” between them. The Squares are linked to Horizontal Content by Anchors in the game world. The events in the Squares are Dynamic Content and resolve if players don’t interfere; the amount of time this takes is determined by its Resolution. If an entire plot resolves, then it’s Consequences manifest in the game’s world to bedevil the players.

Here’s an example, so you can get the gist of the thing:




Here we see an example Elephant Board plot; a nefarious plan by a trusted but evil-hearted member of the Golden Lion faction, orchestrating a scheme to slay a rival by betraying them in a war with the Shadow Vipers.

Each of these Squares is a Scene; the Anchors tell you where it takes place, what characters are involved with it, and what they’re trying to accomplish. Since scenes aren’t static places on a map, they take place within the conceptual map of an Elephant board. Because of this, they have time dimension lacking in Horizontal Content.

Dynamic Content
A powerful difference between maps and the Elephant Board; the points of a map remain essentially forever (Iron Skin Mountain isn’t likely to pick itself up and go anywhere!) but the points of the Elephant Board are in motion, constantly moving to seek a conclusion. This makes them Dynamic Content.

Think of Dynamic Content as the opposite of the Status Quo. Where the Status Quo makes activities return to a pattern, Dynamic Content forces activities to change.

The Squares of the Elephant Board amend the Status Quo of a location; instead of, or in addition to, the activities detailed in the Status Quo, the activities described on the Square transpire as well.

How long do these activities last? Each Square describes the number of scenes that it lasts in it’s Resolution entry; these may be experienced by players, but might pass while they spend scenes traveling, training, or or otherwise occupied. The type of scene defaults to Montage when players aren’t interacting with them, but is of an appropriate type when they are.

Note the Phases of this Elephant Board are arranged in a rough chronological order (the “steps” to the left of the boxes). Every event detailed within a Square must transpire before the scheme “moves” to the next Phase.

Anchors
What links the points on the Elephant Board to the world the player’s characters inhabit? The answer is simpler than you’d think; Squares are connected to Horizontal Content by clues and characters called Anchors.

Anchors are things already keyed to Horizontal Content: If the players go to Turtle Providence, they will see Golden Lion soldiers recruiting the populace. If they find themselves in Garbage Town, the munitions plant will be running. If they go snooping around Iron Heart Riku’s home, they’ll likely find an incriminating letter from the mastermind behind this plot.

The recruiting soldiers, factory workers, and letter are all Anchors; they’re things keyed to a patch of Horizontal Content that act as clues to get the players investigating the Betrayer’s Plot.

Connections: Moving on the Elephant Board
What connects the Squares of an Elephant Board to one another? And how can players move between them to investigate and thwart it’s plot?

To answer this, let’s return to Garbage Town; the smoke rising from the formerly dormant factory is an Anchor, a clue that some event is transpiring there; following that clue by going to investigate is similar to entering a room by going through a doorway. It “lets you into” the Square: you enter the factory, where scavengers are being press-ganged into workers, creating weapons.

Connections let you keep following that trail: the clues and characters within the Squares act as directions and doorways between them.

One Connections is where the weapons are going: following the weapons along to the army being raised in Turtle Providence connects the players to the Turtle Providence Square ( a lateral move).

Another is who ordered the weapons made in the first place: the players might move downward to the next phase, following the chain of command back to the plots of the scheming warrior and find out what else he’s up to.

Note, this also means that characters can get ahead of the plot; if they investigate this scheme before it comes to fruition, they can trounce the mastermind behind it before it even gets to Phase 2!

Refusing the call
What if the players find the whole affair below their notice? Players are notorious for ignoring the schemes of nefarious NPCs.

The world needs the intervention of heroes; if the players do nothing, then the scenes they choose not to engage with pass, and the villain’s plan continues creeping closer to completion.

When all the scenes called for in the Conclusion of a Square come to pass, it’s described event comes to pass.  If all the Squares in a Phase (one of the tiers of the Elephant Board) resolve, the next Phase begins.

If all of the Phases resolve, then the Consequence comes to pass. This is what happens when the players fail to stop the machinations of evil men; armies and heroes are slain, civilizations burn to the ground, and the forces of destruction grow ever stronger.

Sequential and Concurrent Events
Squares on the same Phase with nothing in common can resolve simultaneously; The factories in Garbage Town can run as soldiers recruit in Iron Turtle, while an enticing offer is sent to Iron-Heart Riku. A sufficiently organized plotter can resolve all these schemes Concurrently and move up to the next Phase of their plot.

However, if any places, characters or other elements are shared between points, they must resolve Sequentially, one after the other. This makes sense; Iron-Heart Riku can’t simultaneously be tempted to lead an army and lead it into battle; he’s got to be swayed first, then he can show up on the battlefield.

Kicking off, moving and stalling plots
When do you put an Elephant Board’s plot into motion? The best time is when players start interacting with it; once they go to Garbage Town and see smoke rising from it’s long-dormant factory, it’s fair game to assume the plot is afoot and starting counting down scenes until it advances.

Players might investigate and get clues that lead them around the plot; as they spend scenes digging into the wicked plans, simply track any full Montage scenes that pass and move the plot along with the players. This gives the impression of a dynamic situation, and puts a time limit on their investigation.

The default assumption is that the clock starts ticking on a piece of Vertical Content as soon as the players interact with any of it’s Anchors.  Of course, you’re under no obligation to further the plot immediately: even the best-laid plans have snags, and it’s completely reasonable to choose not to advance a plot that doesn’t hold any immediate relevance to players.

If the players don’t take the bait and you want to let it wait, you have the right to stall it out until they come back to it.

With such “”stalled content”, it’s fair to simply leave it the way the players found it until (or if!) they ever return to investigating it. It’s also reasonable to advance it a step or more if they take a long time in getting back to it.

You can even declare the whole thing a wash and simply re-cast the whole thing with fresh characters and whatever changes you like. The goal of Vertical Content is to give the players a way to get involved with the ongoing events of the world; if they abandon that chance, you can alter things however you see fit to uphold this goal.

Orthogonal Content

The world isn’t as static as our nice, clean maps would indicate; it’s a basket of snakes, squirming and moving ceaselessly as the players interact with it.

To simulate a living, breathing world of adventure, this game mixes up the elements from the other two varieties of content and delivers it randomly to the players by way of Orthogonal Content.

Elements of Orthogonal Content

Encounter Chart: a list consisting of the most interesting inhabitants and events transpiring in an area. Typically keyed to a Domain.

Threshold: The number of turns the players can take within a scene before Orthogonal Content is triggered

Activity: A number between 1-10 representing how busy a place is. Typically keyed to Tracts.

Triggering Orthogonal Content
Characters travel, events spill out of their borders, and monstrous creatures hunt far from their dens. To simulate these complicated patterns of behavior, when players explore and investigate the Content within a Domain, they risk encountering some of it wandering away from where it’s keyed. 

Every time players:

• Power Up
• Begin a Montage scene
• Move between areas of Horizontal Content
• Enter a new Square of Vertical Content or
• Take an area’s Threshold of turns during a scene

They risk triggering Orthogonal Content.

The Triggering roll: Activity
How likely is it that characters encounter something? That depends on a lot of factors which would be a migraine to track:  patterns of movement, urges, opportunities, traffic density, etc. etc.

Rather than create a detailed map of that mess, we assign a number between 1-10 to the overall density of movement and population called Activity. A low number represents sparse movement and few inhabitants, while a high number represent a large population or high volume of traffic.

When Orthogonal Content is triggered, secretly roll a single d10 and compare it to the Activity score of the area the players currently inhabit: if it is equal to or lower than the score, then something is encountered!

Threshold
Another dimension of encounter density is the Threshold. When players are taking actions in a Real-Time scene, check for an encounter every time this number of rounds of activity conclude. Busier, fuller areas have a lower Threshold, while sparsely populated places have a higher one.

Encounter Charts
But what is encountered? That depends on what’s populating the Encounter Chart of that Domain. Roll a d100 (two d10s; the leftmost is the “tens” and the rightmost is the “ones”, 000 is one-hundred) in secret and consult the Domain’s Encounter Chart: cross-reference your roll’s result with the chart to determine what the players run into.

 An example chart is listed below:

1-20 Waste Mutants
21-40 Hunting outland Barbarians
41-50 Escaped genetic experiments
51-60 Traveling fortune teller
61-75 Corpses of any of the above
76-90 Eerie blue-skinned dwarf (Black Talon)
90-100 Broken-down vehicle


Building the Encounter Charts
Creatures don’t apparate out of thin air; they come from somewhere and there’s a reason they’re moving around.

A Domain’s Encounter Chart is built out of it’s Horizontal and Vertical Content.

Every character, group or other mobile element present in the Horizontal or Vertical Content has an entry on the Encounter Chart. The range which encounters them roughly corresponds to how active or populous the entries are compared with one another.

Note: there’s no formula for this. Just eyeball it when making your own.

What happens in an encounter?
Bumping into a wandering villain doesn’t have to result in a fight; it’s sometimes more interesting if it doesn’t!  There are a few ways you can resolve Orthogonal encounters:

• If you’ve got a great idea for why this person/creature is in this place, go with your instinct! These encounters are an outstanding opportunity to show off your spontaneous creativity.
• If you’re less certain or don’t have any ideas that really grab you, consider linking the purpose of the encounter to the Status Quo or Dynamic element of the Content that spawned it; this gives it a mission, and a reason to be in the scene.
• Finally, if you have no idea what they’re doing, assume that they’re lost, seperated, confused, having a moment of introspection/doubt, or otherwise behaving radically out of character

For that last point, it’s sometimes useful to have a chart of reasons for out-of-character behavior, like this one right here:

Why is this person here?
Roll a d10

1. They’re meeting a friend or lover
2. They’re blowing off steam; something about their situation got under their skin
3. They’re on vacation
4. They’re dunk, on drugs, or having a psychotic episode
5. They’re following a prophecy that they’ll meet the PCs in this place, around this time
6. They’ve trying to collect a bounty on the PC’s heads
7. They’ve got a bounty on their head, and they’re desperate for some help
8. They’ve been disowned, and are on the hunt for allies to help them take vengeance/give them a new life
9. They’ve heard a rumor the PCs are in the area, and they’re huge fans/foes of theirs
10. They’re looking for a new kung-fu master to teach them

Lone Wolf Fists: Redesigning the Kung-Fu (Hokuto-Shin-Ken)

It's easy to love you, Fist of the North Star

You had me at WATAAAA

But it's scary to translate Kenshiro into an RPG. He's one of those protagonists that is like, painfully the protagonist. He's better and stronger and cooler than pretty much everything he encounters. I mean, even in the opening fights he just pokes a dude and this happens:
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(Oh, uh, gore warning)
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Although there is no warning on earth that can prepare you for this

Like, he doesn't even break a sweat; just blows up that poor bastard's head with his finger.

Kenny boy doesn't have much trouble in most fights. Even when he's no bigger than his opponent's face.

Weight class is not a thing in the post-apocalypse

Also, his style has a special circumstantial move for basically everything. Need to cut somebody's arm muscles but leave them just enough strength to work for a living? There's a move for that. Need to twist their arms into pretzels so they never kill again? Hokuto Shin Ken got you covered, Senpai.

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

And the architects of the style saw absolutely no redundancy there.

Another issue that's hard to translate is that it's visual spectacle isn't in the initial attacks: it's in their outcome. Let me show you what I mean:

Behold! I throw... Punches!

Not terrible, but then you look at the result...

HOLY LORD!

The spectacle is clearly in the outcome of the attack. That makes it hard to translate into Technique descriptions, because you're not selling the attack, you're selling a not-guaranteed outcome. This makes it frustrating if the player doesn't immediately get that result, because then they just threw some lame punches or whatever, with no cool payoff.

Finally, there's not a clear tactical dimension to Ken's fighting; he's either way more powerful than his foe, or he's not. Like in his battle with Jagi in the movie, Jagi's lighting stuff on fire and trying to trap him and using hostages and just, using all these super-interesting, weasely strategies to bait and trick and cheat his way to victory.

Our hero Jagi, reciting the Dungeoncrawler's Oath

But Ken just no-sells all that and kicks his ass.

Goodnight, sweet prince

Which is cathartic and awesome for a viewer, because holy hell is Jagi a bastard. But as a player, it's a lot less interesting to just curb-stomp them with what amounts to having a bigger number when you attack.

In his fight with Raoh, he's basically evenly matched. So they play Rock 'em Sock 'em robots for their ultimate showdown in the movie.

Spoiler: Raoh's head pops up first

Again, this is tense and memorable from an audience perspective; the battle hinges on every bloody-knuckled punch, and it's not clear which of the evenly-matched combatants will prevail. But in a game, it translates to taking turns rolling attacks until one of you runs out of HP first. That's very much a situation a game like ours wants to avoid.

In the show, he punches Raoh's fingers off, which is briefer but way more visually interesting. Again, though, we're seeing the interesting element of the attack in the result (the strike is visually "just a punch"; nothing noteworthy about it).

So how the hell did I translate this style into the game?

Well, there were a few little handholds they gave me to scale this particular cliff. First, there are plenty of visually interesting attacks in the show. Check out my boy Rei:

Who's signature attack trails whisps of razor-wire behind his fingers:

YOU DONE GOOFED BEARHAT

Technically he's using Nanto Suichō Ken, but Hokuto-Shin-Ken has it's share of "Your fist is a weapon" style attacks:

"I said no to playing doctor, Shin"

Linking weapon bonuses to unarmed attacks was a fun way to sell this aspect of the style, while providing a versatile (and stackable!) base. It's also a good way to simulate some of the more creative and brutal attacks that Kenshiro and his fist-pals unleash; I'm a big proponent of giving players an excuse to get creatively violent.

Another important thing to realize is that Kenshiro constantly takes his foes by surprise. He's this tiny little dude in a jacket and he mows down armies, warlords, giants and tanks by himself, with no weapons. Make no mistake; it is cool to be that guy.

This is not the face of a man who saw it coming

Having a grab-bag of awesome, weird, and powerful techniques that aren't flashy is essentially the thesis of being Kenshiro: he keeps cool as a cucumber as he dismembers your sad ass. Hence the impact of his catchphrase:

Fool didn't know he was dead. God damn you savage, Ken.

That angle essentially gave me license to keep the attacks themselves mostly low-key. I just had to communicate to the player: "Look, these aren't visually apoplectic, but the payoff is going to be fucking sick"

Worth waiting for!

Another hidden benefit of the attacks remaining visually grounded is that they're also visually unified; Kenshiro smoothly transitions from defense to offense, from attacks to pressure-point strikes, and from flurries of motion to badass one-liners with this silky grace that infuses the fights with this fantastic verisimilitude.

Shonen shows often pause the action to let a character power up or launch their special move, which abruptly draws the viewer's attention to the attack's spectacle. This is fine and fun, but is easy to mishandle and makes fights feel more show-y and artificial. Fist of the North Star never did that for me; all the fights felt like ugly street brawls with real physical injury on the line.

This gave me the idea to use the Infuse and Versatile keywords throughout the Techniques; this captures that slick, casual flow of special maneuvers as move flows into move. It also turns masters of the style into these never-ending onslaughts of deadly secret moves, which felt very right.

Another thing is just how goddamn tough Kenshiro is. Like that one time a building fell on him and he was like "Yeah, whatever."

Using the power of not giving one single fuck, Kenshiro cuts a building in half with his head

Then after seeing this, some dumbass still has the cajones to shoot him with a crossbow. So naturally, Ken just pulls it out without batting an eye.

You... You saw the building thing, right?

Again, there's nothing visually spectacular about this; it's just awesome to be this nonchalant about the crossbow thing. Simply making techniques that let you tank this kind of damage is cool; you've just got to sell that angle.

As I was monkeying with these elements, the style's strategy emerged. At it's core, Five Gateways became about two things; synergy and status effects. The moves combo'd and combined in unexpected and advantageous ways. Rather than having a few stand-out Techniques, it instead has a quiet efficiency that arises as you continue to master the style.

Status effects share this quietness; they're designed to creep up on you, starting as little 1-and-2 Rank Imbalances but quickly escalating into a total lockdown that feels like it comes out of nowhere.

The Ultimate Technique gave me migraines for a while; Kenshiro's ultimate move is similar to the Kaio-Ken in that it "unleashes your full potential" and kind've just makes you into a glowing, stronger version of yourself.

I'll let you be the judge

I decided to link the somewhat generic power-up more specifically to the cosmology of Tian Shang, so you ascend into a "higher" state of being. This is a little closer to becoming a Super-Saiyan by way of Asura's Wrath:

Pictured: you!

In addition to some weighty powerups, it also has a powerful synergy with the other Techniques, turning you into a one-man war machine, strong enough to punch through armies and dismantle cities.

So, not a precise translation. Nonetheless, I'm happy with it!

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Five Gateways

The following Imbalance is created by many of this style’s Techniques.

Bodily Paralysis

Physical Imbalance

Mechanical: Effort
Dramatic:  Your body is completely paralyzed, your muscles tensed into unresponsive lumps. Your limbs act as though you’re catatonic, remaining as they’re posed by others. You may still utilize your Effort, but not towards any physical activity more demanding than speech; uses of Power, Agility, and Endurance are strictly prohibited.

When directed against structures or machines, this Imbalance is called Negative Vibrations. It paralyzes moving parts on machines, manifesting in a machine-equivalent way. Although structures and terrain are not generally affected by paralysis, the dangerous energy infused in them may be triggered to become damage at the practitioner's touch.

Novice

All Weapons Fist

• Cost: 1
• Rank: -
• Facing: -
• Effect: You harden your fingers into knives; your kicks fall with the weight of melon-hammers. Choose a weapon: add its power to an unarmed strike. You must pay the weapon’s evocation cost in addition to the Prana cost for this Technique.
• This Technique cannot further empower an action already enhanced by a weapon.
• Keywords: Infuse
• Skill: Power

Three Gates-Closing Finger

• Cost: 3 (1)
• Rank: 1
• Facing: 6-9
• Effect:  The feather-light touches from this attack belie a horrifying power. Rather than damage, this strike builds Aggravation towards a Bodily Paralysis Imbalance.
• For the cost in brackets, you may Infuse any attack with harmful vibrations, converting it’s damage to Aggravation for Bodily Paralysis. This includes the Prana River Redirection ability outlined below.
• Prana River Redirection: You may “program” the Imbalance’s paralysis to selectively apply, targeting the foe’s limbs, sense organs, or body. Among other creative uses, masters often use this to punish a transgressive ruffians by paralyzing their weapon-carrying limbs.
• Keywords: Offensive, (Infuse)
• Skill: Agility

Skin-Hardening Defense

• Cost: 3
• Rank: 1
• Facing: 0-3
• Effect: You shrug off damage, weapons shattering over your iron-hard skin. If you fail to completely defend against an attack with this Technique, reduce any Physical Imbalance resulting from it by 1d10 Aggravation.
• Keywords: Defensive
• Skill: Endurance

Expert

Wilderness Wind Strike

• Cost: 7
• Rank: 1 (X3)
• Facing: Random
• Effect: You attack in a flurry of blows. Roll 3d10s; each forms the base of a single attack. These may combine with Effort, Focus, Weapons, or other modifiers like any attacks created by Techniques.
• If used as Rank 1 attacks (in other words, not combined with Effort or other powers), then these attacks deal a maximum of 5 damage. They are thrown too quickly to have a stronger impact.
• When used to boost Power, counts as Rank 2 and combines with any Facing.
• Keywords: Offensive
• Skill: Power

Prana Puppeteer Manipulation 

• Cost: 7 (3)
• Rank: 2
• Facing: 6-9
• Effect: Pressing the foe’s Prana meridians in a precise sequence, you twist their vital essence to your command. As Three Gates-Closing Finger,  this Technique builds Aggravation towards the Bodily Paralysis Imbalance.
• For the cost in brackets, you may Infuse any attack with harmful vibrations, converting it’s damage to Aggravation for Bodily Paralysis. This includes the Prana Puppet ability outlined below.
• Additionally, you program the foe’s Prana to obey your directives. This allows you to exercise the following power when they suffer the Dramatic Penalty:
• Prana Puppet: Rather than remaining paralyzed, you exercise complete control over the foe’s muscles and bodily movements. Their actions are taken at Effort 0, but are otherwise identical to those performed by a healthy and capable human.
• Keywords: Offensive
• Skill: Agility

Invincible Body Balance

• Cost: 7
• Rank: 2
• Facing: 0-3
• Effect: You draw your inner power to the surface, repelling and nullifying injury. If you fail to completely defend against an attack with this Technique, reduce any Imbalance resulting from it by 1d10 Aggravation.
• Additionally, you completely nullify any additional detrimental effects from the attack. You neutralize poison, resist curses, and otherwise reduce the attack to it’s raw physical component. 
• Against purely Aggravation-building attacks, this Technique is Rank 3 and reduces the Aggravation dealt by an additional 1d10 (for a total of 2d10 reduction).
• Keywords: Defensive
• Skill: Endurance

Master

Fourteen Thousand Ways

• Cost: 13
• Rank: 3
• Facing: 4-7
• Effect: The ultimately versatile fighting arts of the Five Star Spirits are embodied in this elaborate, dance-like set of perfect motions. Beyond it’s incredible utility, it needs no further power.
• Keywords: Versatile, Counterattack
• Skill: Spirit, Power

Open the Killing Gate

• Cost: 13 (7)
• Rank: 3
• Facing: 6-9
• Effect: Apex of the killing arts, this pressure point strike throws open the body’s Chakra, swelling the fragile physical form until it explodes in a fountain of viscera. As Three Gates-Closing Finger and Prana Puppeteer Manipulation, this Technique builds Aggravation towards the Bodily Paralysis Imbalance.
• Because of the intensity of the harmful vibrations filling the foe’s body, the Imbalance inflicted or worsened by this Technique is Deadly.
• For the cost in brackets, you may Infuse any attack with harmful vibrations, converting it’s damage to Aggravation for Bodily Paralysis. This includes the Prana Catastrophe ability outlined below.
• Prana Catastrophe: Instead of paralysis, the foe’s body violently ruptures and explodes. When manifesting the Dramatic Penalty, the foe suffers 1d10 Damage per Rank of the Imbalance unless they use an Endurance or Spirit action (equal in Rank to their Imbalance) to either endure the hideous bodily malfunction or counter the harmful vibrations by diverting the injured flow of their Prana.
• This damage triggers at a time of your choosing in any round they suffer the Dramatic Penalty. When combat ends or they leave the range of your senses, it triggers relentlessly until they heal the Imbalance or explode.
• Keywords: Offensive, (Infuse)
• Skill: Agility

Mirage God’s Footsteps

• Cost: 13
• Rank: 3
• Facing: 0-3
• Effect: The opponent attacks where they think you’re standing: an heartbeat later, you’ve vanished, moving faster than the eye can follow. You choose the target for the balance of the foe’s strike that you successfully defend against with this Technique.
• For example, if they struck with a 48 and your total was 36, you would redirect those 36 damage as a new attack at another target, taking the remaining 12 Damage.
• A keen-eyed foe can counter this redirection ability: they must use a Senses action of Rank equal to your total defense to track your blinding movement.
• Any additional harmful effects aside from damage are redirected at the new target.
• As the origin point of the strike, the opponent who launched the initial attack can never be the new target for the redirected strike.
• Keywords: Defensive
• Skill: Endurance

Ultimate

Samsara Ascendence

• Cost: 56
• Rank: (6)
• Facing: -
• Effects: Your perfectly align your Chakra with the Cosmos, transforming into a godlike being. The has the following benefits:
• Hour of Greatest Need: This Technique may be activated without Prana Cost if the survival of a great destiny is threatened. Such destinies typically apply to entire civilizations, but may be possessed by a single, all-important individual. If, in the estimation of the GM, the continuance of such a critical Dharma faces extinction, this Technique activates and maintains for one Action Scene without cost.
• Many Limbs of God: Your godly form requires many hands for it’s divine work: you sprout 4 additional limbs, granting you the ability to take up to three 1-die actions during your turn.
• Higher-Order Being: Increase the Rank of all of your actions by +1. This includes all attacks and defenses. While transformed, the Rank of your actions is unrestricted; you can achieve up to Rank 8 without further magic.
• Heavenly Sanction: You are Holy; all of your actions, attacks and defenses carry this keyword.
• Divine Skill: Your once-per-round diceless action is performed at a Rank of 6.
• Shrivatsa Halo: At the end of every round, regenerate +1d10 of your Aura. Ignore any amount in excess of its maximum. Additionally, your very skin grants Armor 5.
• Prana Libation: This form lasts for 1 round: however, if fed enough magic, it may be Sustained. This requires 12 Prana at the end of every turn it is sustained.
• Keywords: Transformation, Holy
• Skill: Power, Agility, Endurance, or Spirit

An identical but opposite Technique, the Punarmrityu Descent, is instead learned by those with wicked souls. It grants the Unholy keyword, rather than Holy. Additionally, replace the Hour of Greatest Need Effect with the following:

Tempt the Appetite of Hell:  This Technique may be activated and/or maintained for one Action Scene by devouring the still-beating heart of a foe of at least Degree 1.  

Lone Wolf Fists: Redesigning the Kung-Fu (Fire and Psychic styles)

Both of this post's styles are nakedly inspired by media of enormous quality. The fire-aspect style, here renamed Atomic Dragon Fist, owes its existence to the Firebenders of Avatar: the Last Airbender.

I don't talk about what a watershed series that was often enough. If you're not familiar with it, I won't sell it short by merely summarizing it here. There's really no substitute for watching the whole show, and seeing as it's the holiday season, I suggest you treat yourself.

The Firebenders are "the bad guys" for pretty well the entire run, with a few notable exceptions towards the end, and they're fantastic. First, even their foot soldiers are living flamethrowers with genuinely creepy armor.

I know it looks like old boy is about to get wrecked but... Trust me, totally opposite situation

Second, they manage to put every conceivable spin on "controls fire", including but not limited to:

Rocket feet

Fire coming out of both ends. Strangely craving curry now...

Fire Breath

Told you old boy was fine

Whatever the hell this is

Funny, "Fire Sprinkler" didn't sound like a very intimidating attack

And of course, the power to shoot bolts of freaking lightning

This isn't even as scary as she gets

Granted, I moved that last one into the Golden Lion's arsenal. You'll note it was their Ultimate Technique though.

The Fire Nation, however, offered a more diverse threat than just their living flamethrower army. You didn't think our 12 year old protagonist was going to get off that easy did you?

(Seriously, this kid deals with some shit in the course of this show)

Because I'm leaving out the really great stuff, like this one girl Ty Lee who can punch your superpowers away by blocking your chi meridians

Believe me, that is extraordinarily painful

Or the counter to the lightning-move, which redirects the fool's own bolt back into their smug face

But for real though, you need to watch this show

Or the guy that shoots strings of explosions from his third eye

Where's your god now?!

I wanted to capture as much of that beautifully animated fight choreography as possible with the mere written word. So I added a touch more "punch" to the descriptions to really drive home how awesome they looked and felt, and just how big and explosive an impact they had

As far as the strategy of the style, I had to dig into one of the best-designed games ever made, Magic the Gathering, and pull out some concepts that made the fiery Red colored cards so much fun to play.

Red is an interesting color in magic; it's got a lot of cheap, fast little creatures (goblins are the popular choice), combined with beefy flying creatures (dragons). It tilts crazily towards offense; many creatures have 1 Toughness, or die at the end of the turn they're summoned. It's spells are largely direct damage, which deal (you guessed it) damage directly to creatures or players, and land/artifact destruction.

It struggles with enchantment removal, drawing cards, or the more esoteric elements of game control. But it excels at speed and control through destruction.

The Sligh deck is where Red first really came into it's own; it cemented the idea of the "mana curve" in tournament strategy by creating a deck that curb-stomped you before most decks got going. Although "quick kills" existed before Sligh, it was the first deck to routinely get the coveted "five turn kill". It achieved this with a quick rush of small, efficient creatures, coupled with direct-damage spells aimed at removing defenders. It was a deck made of otherwise sub-par commons which, because of it's skillful design and superior strategy, became a hyper-efficient killing machine.

So what do you get when you combine Sligh's lightning-fast killing process with the flashy, explosive and fire-spready attacks of the Fire Nation up there? Well, you get a style like this one; specializing in gaining environmental control of the battlefield by setting it on fire and drinking the resulting chaos to fuel it's arsenal of cheap, broad-Facing attacks.

It's Ultimate Technique is another "Weird Ultimate"; the idea is that it closes the foe's Chakra and opens a corresponding Chakra on you, although it's a bit less clean than that. It's super cheap, and you can tack it's power onto any other attack in the style, making it a strange and powerful tactical toolkit that adds a new dimension of value to every other Technique in your arsenal.

Atomic Dragon Fist

Novice

Fire Discipline Motion

• Cost: 3
• Rank: 1
• Facing: 6-9
• Effect: Blast a gout of flame from your striking limb. Creates a Rating-1 Fire Hazard at the point of impact. Note that this will set a struck foe on fire.
• Keywords: Offensive, Ranged, Element Control (Fire)
• Skill: Power

Burning Piston Strike

• Cost: 3
• Rank: 1
• Facing: 0-5
• Effect: You move with startling speed; blocking, dodging, throwing leg-sweeps or punching with machine-gun swiftness.
• Keywords: Versatile
• Skill: Agility

Fire’s Friend Attitude

• Cost: 3
• Rank: 1
• Facing: 0-3
• Effect: Your flesh hardens into pliable armor, blunting attacks. If used to increase Endurance or otherwise defend against Fire-based dangers, increase the power of this technique by 1 additional Rank.
• Keywords: Defensive, Element Resistance
• Skill: Endurance

Expert

Dragon’s Breath Attack

• Cost: 7
• Rank: 2
• Facing: 6-9
• Effect: Blast a searing stream of fire from your striking limb; or breath it out like an exhaling dragon. In addition attacking, spreads a Rating-2 cloud of cackling of Fire onto up to (Rank achieved) Elements or Characters.
• Keywords: Offensive, Ranged, Area Attack, Element Control: Fire
• Skill: Power

Afterburner Fist

• Cost: 7
• Rank: 2
• Facing: 0-5
• Effect: You hit with inhuman speed; the impact can crack concrete. You can further empower this strike: for 2 additional Prana, it ignites the foe with a Fire Hazard equal in Rank to your blow.
• Keywords: Offensive (Element Control: Fire)
• Skill: Agility

Fire God’s Hunger

• Cost: 7
• Rank: 2
• Facing: 0-4
• Effect: Your soul attunes to the primal element of fire; your skin hardens into a malleable shell, and your motions move with the fluid grace of flame. If used to increase Endurance or otherwise defend against Fire-based dangers, recover (Rating of the Hazard d10) Prana in a Pool of your choice and increase the Rank of your Endurance against that Hazard by an additional +1.
• Keywords: Defensive, Element Absorb (Fire)
• Skill: Endurance

Master

Comet and Volcano Attack

• Cost: 22
• Rank: 4
• Facing: 6-9
• Effect: Launch a sparking stream of pure energy from your extended limb or from any of your Chakra. In addition to the strike, creates a (Rating=Rank achieved) Explosion disaster at the point of impact. The intense heat of this blast sets the entire Battlefield and everything in it aflame with a Rating 4 Inferno Hazard.
• Keywords: Offensive, Ranged, element Control (Fire)
• Skill: Power

Soul-Irradiating Strike

• Cost: 13
• Rank: 3
• Facing: 0-5
• Effect: Your strikes glow with lurid neon as you twist your Prana into toxic patterns. If you damage the foe, you can further empower this strike: for 3 additional Prana, it poisons their Chakra, causing 2d10 Prana to drain from their bodies in ribbons of multicolored energy.  
• Keywords: Offensive
• Skill: Agility

Lightning Charming Maneuver

• Cost: 13
• Rank: 3
• Facing: 0-4
• Effect: You absorb the kinetic force from strikes with fluid movements and precise redirection of force. In addition to the defense provided by the Technique, if used against an attack using Prana blasts, lightning, fire, or other pure expressions of energy, you may totally absorb the blast’s energy into your body and redirect it.
• Roll 1d10 per Open or Awakened Chakra: this determines how skillfully you redirect the flood of magic coursing through your body. If your total equals or exceeds the Cost of the redirected Technique, you perfectly harmonize the energy and may unleash the Technique once this round.
• Such pure energy attacks are completely absorbed, even if your defense is otherwise inadequate to stop it.
• There is tremendous danger if you don’t perfectly redirect the stolen energy: If you roll less than the original cost of the Technique, it erupts from your body in a sizzling explosion of discordant Prana. You suffer any remaining cost beyond your result as damage. 
• Keywords: Defensive
• Skill: Endurance

Ultimate

Drawing from Hell’s Cistern

• Cost: (4+)
• Rank: -
• Facing: -
• Effect: You charge your body with discordant vibration. When you infuse an attack with this Technique, if it damages the foe, it inflicts an additional 1d10 Aggravation per 4 Prana spent towards a Spiritual Imbalance.
• The Imbalance’s Mechanical penalty targets a Chakra. It’s Dramatic penalty is based on that Chakra’s negative emotional association.
• For every point of aggravation you generate, they lose an equal amount of Prana from the targeted Chakra’s Pool.
• More than merely damaging the foe’s flow of Prana, this Technique draws it into your body, empowering you with their stolen magic.
• If the Chakra you targeted corresponds to one you possess which is slumbering, it Awakens at Refresh 2, Pool 10 and fills with the Prana you stole.
• If you have a corresponding Awakened or Open Chakra, it is filled with the stolen Prana.
• If the amount of Prana you stole exceeds your Pool’s capacity, or if you rob a Chakra that is Closed on your meridian, then you’ve got a choice to make; allow the stolen Prana to dissipate, or stuff it into an underdeveloped Chakra and suffer from an Imbalance.
• The force-fed Chakra has Pool 10 and Recovery 0; while Prana remains within it, you suffer a Rank 2 Imbalance corresponding to it’s negative emotional association.
• Keywords: Offensive, Infuse
• Skill: Agility

...

Obviously, the newly-christened Unearthly Gift style is based on that titan of influential anime/manga works, AKIRA

Perfectly summarized in the above image

Again, this is best experienced for yourself. The movie is a breathtaking piece of animation, and the manga is a feast of visual storytelling. Both were created concurrently under the creative genius of Katsuhiro Otomo and will melt your face off the first time you experience them.

I steal from Otomo's masterpiece a lot actually; the Radioactive Scorpions owe a lot to Kaneda's bike gang, just to give one example. But nowhere do I steal as brazenly and thoroughly as with this style.
One of the narrative hinges of AKIRA is the slow realization of power by the fledgling psychic demigod Tetsuo. He's captured by a shadowy government organization in the opening scenes and experimented on to unlock his psychic potential, freeing himself in a spasm of creepy telekinetic powers after they manifest.

His powers, and ambition, grow through the story. Unfortunately, godhood takes an awful toll on him, and his body begins to mutate uncontrollably under the strain of his newfound power. I won't spoil it completely, but it begins with this and just ratchets up the body horror from there:

Reminder: this is as tame as it gets

For Unearthly Gift, my first run at the style had every Technique unleashing mutative psychic feedback on the user, almost guaranteeing that they'd mutate unless they stuffed themselves with body-shriveling drugs. The redesign instead offers the mutations as the "undisciplined" way to access the style's powers; a secondary costing Technique for those that learn the style, or a primary for weird outland mutants with unstable psychic gifts.

The style does more than mirror Tetsuo's powers in the film: the tiers reflect the order in which they manifest as his gift begins to consume him. Just in case you thought I was slouching through this robbery.

Strategy-wise, the style is extremely defensive, with a powerful element of control. All the Expert-level Techs use control rather than offense, meaning you starting character's defining power is about how they manifest battle control, rather than how dangerous an attack they can launch.

There are alarmingly dangerous offensive Techniques, but they're higher on the cost curve than their equivalents in other styles; this style plays best at a long game, building and charging the game-changers for the mid to late rounds as your counter and resist the foe's early offense.

Unearthly Gift

Note: the Techniques of this style can manifest as psychic powers to non-martial artists. When used as psychic powers, they generate Aggravation towards a Hideous Evolution Physical Imbalance. The amount generated is as follows:

• Novice-1d10
• Expert-2d10
• Master-4d10
• Ultimate-7d10

In order to access powers higher than Novice, you must have the Hideous Evolution Imbalance at ever-higher Ranks:

• Expert: Rank 2
• Master: Rank 4
• Ultimate: Rank 7

Hideous Evolution: Physical Imbalance
Mechanical: Focus
Dramatic: Your flesh rebels, evolving in hideous and stomach-churning ways. Horns of bone rupture from your skin, your muscles knot and swell into distended nodules, sense organs sprout from your corrupted flesh like daisies. These changes are rapid, turning your body into a churning mass of weird tissues and sickening growths.

While so mutating, your Effort reverts into Ferocity; no higher functions are possible while your form writhes in bodily chaos. At the GM’s option, tool use is limited or impossible. You can still use Techniques or psychic powers, as your instinct to power is uniquely preserved by this nightmarish new form.

Training: Characters who manifest psychic mutations may train themselves in their proper use, if they can acquire Kharma and purchase them (the mutation’s access acts as a sort of teacher). These characters may choose to accept aggravation in lieu of empowering these Techniques with Prana, granting them a dangerous secondary well of power.

Transformation: If both you Focus and Effort would be reduced to 0 or below from penalties, you transform irrevocably into an Artificial Demiurge. The power of this Demiurge is derived from the final Rank of the Imbalance which annihilated your humanity.

Novice

Destructive Force

• Cost: 4
• Rank: 1
• Facing: 4-9
• Effect: You extend your killing intent into the world, the invisible force causing sudden and eerie destruction. This manifests as an invisible ranged strike, crushing or lacerating the foe.
• For the additional cost of 5 Prana (or +1d10 Aggravation) you can extend this telekinetic shockwave to encompass everything in the same battlefield, applying the result to every foe, element and even the terrain. 
• Keywords: Offensive, Ranged, (Area Attack)
• Skill: Agility

Telekinesis

• Cost: 4
• Rank: 1
• Facing: 0-6
• Effect: This power allows you to grab and lift objects and persons with the power of your mind alone. The default use of this Technique is defensive; you puppeteer yourself away from attacks, floating with an alien grace.
• If used purely for movement or lifting, counts as a Power action when lifting or an Agility action when moving yourself.
• Keywords: Defensive (Ranged)
• Skill: Power (Agility)

Prana Leak

• Cost: 3
• Rank: (1)
• Facing: (4-7)
• Effect: You twist you foe’s Prana into worthless patterns, disrupting and annulling it’s power. This cancels a foe’s Technique, wasting the Prana invested in it, unless they spend an additional 3 Prana to re-focus it’s integrity against your interference.
• The values in brackets are for using this Technique as an Endurance action.
• Keywords: -
• Skill: Endurance

Expert

Telegraphic Reflexes

• Cost: 7
• Rank: 2
• Facing: 0-3
• Effect: You twitch and pull your body out of harm’s way in unsettling spasms, responding to the foe’s strikes with an unnatural instinct. The defense offered by this Technique is Sustainable.
• If this defense is overcome by an attack empowered with Prana, you absorb 1d10 Prana per Rank of the Technique. These are captured from lingering expended Prana and do not reduce the foe’s Pools. They fill any available Pool.
• Keywords: Defensive, Sustainable
• Skill: Agility

Psychometric Harmony

• Cost: 0/(7)
• Rank: -/(2)
• Facing: -/(3-6)
• Effect: You attune your mind to the world’s spirit, drinking in it’s ambient Prana. This has one of the following effects:
• For the non-bracket cost (0): Once per turn, you may absorb ambient magic from your surroundings. For each Open or Awakened Chakra, if there is a corresponding abundance of it’s associated element in the surroundings, immediately gain 1d10 Prana in that Chakra’s pool as you sympathetically attune to its energy.
• “Abundance in the surroundings” is up to GM discretion, but if the description of the Battlefield or it’s Elements clearly contains the elements under consideration, then this should be sufficient to qualify.
• This cannot harmonize with corrupted, toxic, cursed, or unholy elements. 
• For the cost in Brackets (7): it can instead act as a Senses action; this manifests as a kinesthetic feeling of connection with your surroundings. Additionally, you can read the memories of the surrounding Battlefield as you would your own, up to (your lifespan) backward in time.
• If used to hide in your surroundings, you tend to simply inhabit areas where others fail to notice. This allows you to be selectively visible and audible to only those of your choosing.
• Keywords: Element Absorb (Fire, Water, Earth, Metal, Air, Wood, Holy)
• Skill: Senses

Snuff the Flame

• Cost: 7
• Rank: (2)
• Facing: (4-7)
• Effect: You smother the foe’s sorcery with your superior will. You utterly cancel a Technique you perceive, rendering it’s Prana investment wasted.
• Master level Techniques sear against this Technique, requiring an additional 5 Prana to cancel.
• Ultimate Techniques burn through this power; they cannot be canceled.
• The values in brackets are for using this Technique as an Endurance action
• Keywords: -
• Skill: Endurance

Master

Beckon Steel

• Cost: 13
• Rank: 1
• Facing: Any
• Effect: Your psychic gift bends electromagnetism to your whims, summoning a mass of nearby metal to surround you in a glistening halo.
• This Technique is more powerful with abundant metal to control. Increase it’s Rank by 1 (up to a maximum of Rank 4) for every Element or Vehicle composed primarily of Metal in the Battlefield as scraps and plates are wrenched off to answer your summons. (The initial Rank of shield is in a metal-poor environment: it represents a nebulous aura of ambient psychic energy and charged metal particles)
• The metal acts as a Shield of the final Rank: this effect is Sustainable.
• At your command, pieces branch off into missiles: when launching an attack, you may convert any number of Ranks of your shield into an equal-Ranked Offensive boost to your strike. These attacks are Ranged.
• Finally, you may focus the full might of this Technique on the surrounding metal instead (with an equal Rank boost, as described above). This levitates and reshapes it to your whims; count this as an Intellect action to create any mostly-metal tool of your choosing. You could transmogrify a length of rebar into a machine gun, or a pile of broken motherboards and metal scraps into a sophisticated cybernetic limb. 
• Keywords: Element Control (Metal), Shield
• Skill: Intellect

Ghost’s Claw Grasp

• Cost: 13
• Rank: 3
• Facing: 6-9
• Effect: You reach out with the power of your mind and throttle a foe. This manifests as a Ranged Grab attack; you grab the foe with your telekinesis and can maneuver them as you please. As with all holds, this is Sustainable. Note that your limbs are completely free, as you’re holding them with psychic force.
• When used as a Power action, levitates or shapes objects at range with sheer psychic force.
• Keywords: Offensive, Grab, Ranged
• Skill: Power

Power Quash

• Cost: 13
• Rank: 3
• Facing: 4-7
• Effect: You disrupt and annihilate the foe’s magic, unmaking their maneuvers with invasive psychic force. This totally cancels a single Technique you can perceive.
• You must win a war of wills against the user of an Ultimate Technique to cancel it. The foe chooses between paying an additional 2d10 Prana or beating the Rank of the Technique with a Spirit action to overcome its effects.
• Keywords: -
• Skill: Endurance

Ultimate

Breath of God

• Cost: Variable
• Rank: 1+
• Facing: 8-9
• Effect: You tap into the universal generative breath; the first explosive act of creation in the cosmos. This manifests as an orb of shimmering blue energy; the Rank of the effect is based on your Prana investment, as below:
• 3 Prana: 1
• 7 Prana: 2
• 13 Prana: 3
• 22 Prana: 4
• 38 Prana: 5 (This is the power level when used as a Mutation)
• 68 Prana: 6
• 126 Prana: 7
• At the point of Impact, the orb explodes in a blast of incandescent light. This manifests as an Explosion Disaster, with a Rating equal to the Rank purchased (but not further modified by Effort, focus, Weapons or other modifiers, as the attack itself is).
• Rank 1-3 are Battlefield scale. 4-6 are District scale, blowing up entire neighborhoods. 7 Is Domain-scale, enough to level a city.
• As a strange benefit, any lingering toxic, cursed, polluted or otherwise harmful Elements or Hazards are wiped away in the destructive radius, effectively cleansing them.
• Keywords: Offensive
• Skill: -