Darth Wiki / Magical Girls In WOD

Magical Girls in The World of Darkness. Basically, post-Madoka's Ascension Puella Magi Madoka Magica that is set in The World of Darkness (mainly with God-Machine Chronicle and Demon: The Descent); plenty of elements in this game is ripped directly from Exalted.

Your magical girl character can be one of the following types:

• Magical Girls: Girls who have made their Wish and now must fight Demons to stay alive. They are generally driven to do good, since their magic are filtered through Virtues. (Example: Mami)
• Dark Magical Girls: Magical girls who have been seriously screwed by the world and decided to turn their back from the Virtues. They are generally driven to do evil, since their magic are filtered through Vices. (Example: Kyouko)
• Machine-Angels: Something completely different. They are artificial magical girls created by glorious Japan^note Or America, or China— the point is that they protect and serve the country to counter the machinations of the God-Machine. Their magic is industrial and cybernetics. (Example: Aigis)
• Demi-Witches: Madoka's Wish causes the magical girl to not turn into Witches when their Soul Gem goes completely dark, but this doesn't mean that Witches stop existing. The Witches are there waiting beyond the Abyss, and they can corrupt 'normal' magical girls into becoming their servants.
• Revenants: Soul of girls who could have become magical girl, but was killed before they can make their Wish. They are given a chance to taste life once again, at the cost of having to carry out the grudge of ghosts who are restless in death. Figures of tragic heroine, they walk the border of life and death. Example: Enma Ai

In addition to those, you can also play as the following types of characters:

• Vigilantes: Mundane humans who were deeply inspired by a magical girl's heroism, to the point that their Virtues are awakened and become capable of magic similar to the magical girl. However, they must avoid getting in contact with magical girls outside the masquerade, because they will be inevitably drawn to the magical girls' Legend, making them second fiddle in their own life. (Example: Tuxedo Mask)

If you're a magical girl, you can join one of the following social groups:

• The Frontliners: Hardened warriors who bring the fight to the enemies. It promises its members nothing but blood, pain, tears, and death— but at least it will be a honorable death at the end of a good fight.
• Libram Puellae: Adventurers, researchers, and diplomats who make good use of magical girl lore. Its members get access to several museums worth of artifacts and knowledge relevant to magical girls. Did you know that Cleopatra was a magical girl?
• The Esoterium: Introspective mystics who try to make the magical girl condition more bearable. Its members are capable of shaping each others Soul Gem (called Layer), defying certain limitations of magical girls. Most famously, there is a Layer that enables a magical girl to bear (or sire) children.
• Circle of the Goddess: A religious movement that venerates a goddess of magical girls, called Unconquered Sun. She may or may not be ascended Madoka. Its members gain the ability to use Rites of the Goddess, Bewitchments granted by the UCS herself.

Glossary:

• Kyubey (more formally, the Incubators): Enigmatic Empowering Entity that grants a would-be magical girl the realization of her Wish. In return to having their Wish granted, the magical girl must deposit Grief Cubes into Kyubey. Due to laws imposed upon them, Kyubey can't do much to reign the magical girls, including stopping a magical girl from going rogue.
• Maeljin: The Demon Princes. They are strengthened by human Vices, and do their best to make sure it's a Crapsack World for everyone. Each demon prince rule over a vast hierarchical majority of demons as well as human cultists, but their real champions are the dark magical girls.
• God-Machine: Extra-dimensional entity that maintain the cosmic order (read: physical law). It's in a damaged state, in no small part thanks to the actions of the Exarchs. It needs to be fed Grief Cubes, or it will be completely broken. An obvious expy of the Gnostic Demiurge.
• Grief Cubes: The remnants of the demons defeated by magical girls. The magical girls (except machine-angels) need them to reduce the Corruption in their Soul Gem. Since Demons are spawned by humanity, the cubes are actually distilled magic of humanity as whole, and is the most efficient fuel for God-Machine.
• Demons: Entities spawned by Vicious^note 'of Vice' action of humans. They begin as Miasma and slowly congeal into distinct individuals with animal-like intelligence. They devour each others and gain increase in intelligence, after which they begin to manipulate humans to act more Viciously to strengthen them.
  • There is also another type of demons that didn't begin as Miasma, but supernatural entity corrupted by Vices— usually former ghosts and former spirits.
• Angels: Components of the God-Machine, they go by many names and might even pose as 'messengers of the Divine' depicted in world religions. They are disturbingly alien, and advances disturbingly alien agenda of the God-Machine. Not to be confused with machine-angels, who are robotic magical girls.
• Charms: The magickal power of the magical girls. These typically takes an instant action.
• Bewitchment: The higher magickal power of the magical girls. These typically takes a long time to cast, but their effect goes far beyond the scope of the Charms. Those who can use Bewitchments are called Bewitchers, and they are afforded great respect because they have passed the Four Tribulations.
• Bedevilment: The higher magickal power of the dark magical girls. In many respect it's a dark mirror to Bewitchment. The Bedevilers are widely feared, because their version of Four Tribulations may involve killing fellow dark magical girls.
• Angel-Machine Query (or just Query): The higher magickal power of the machine-angels. It exploits the God-Machine's systems in order to reprogram reality. Like Demons' Exploits, but more dramatic (and more costly).
• Soul Gem: The container for a magical girl's soul. It's designed by the God-Machine in such a way that the contained soul is capable of focusing its Virtues into reality, known as charms. The officially designated name for soul gem is Monstrance of Celestial Portion.

Charm Keywords:

• Fatal: Charms with this keyword alter the fate of an object or a being. A banana can be given the fate of a hammer, after which it's usable to drive a nail into the wall despite its softness. However, altering the fate of something is taxing for the magical girl, not to mention being a potential Morality violation ('your love with him will crash and burn and in his place you'll love me'). Charms with Fatal keyword causes Persistent Blowback Point(s) for the magical girl who use it for as long as the charm is taking place. We assure you that it has nothing to do with the awful RPG.
• Holy: Charms with this keyword are super effective when it comes to harming Creatures of Darkness. If it inflicts wounds, the wounds are Aggravated damage. If it inflicts loss of Willpower or Vice channel, the target find it near impossible to recover the loss. If it's used to dismantle social machinations, it will seriously hurt the Creatures' conspiracies. Can only be used by magical girls and a few Vigilantes.
• August: Similar to Holy charms, but it targets Anathema. Can only be used by machine-angels.
• Blasphemous: Charms with this keyword draw upon the collective evil of humanity, capable of causing far more terrible effects than what its Legend rating indicates. The drawback is that it supernaturally alerts everyone in the vicinity, potentially drawing unwanted attention from the good magical girls. A good number of charms used by dark magical girls and demi-witches have this keyword.
• Witchcraft: Charms with this keyword are structurally similar to high-magic, be it Bewitchment or Bedevilment, and they can interact with effects intended to interact with high-magic, such as counterspells. Witchcraft charms tend to display passages written in Puella Rune, and it's usually a short, self-contained story that resembles fairytale. Most Witchcraft charms that magical girls and dark magical girls use are high Legend, but demi-witches have the majority of their charms being Witchcraft.
• Spectral: Charms with this keyword taps into the deathly metaphysics of the Underworld, and are difficult to use in places untainted by death (in this world, this usually means everywhere except cemeteries). The majority of Spectral charms require the magical girl to pay 1 point of Willpower when used outside Underworld. These charms are almost exclusively the domain of Revenants.

This game assumes that you've watched Puella Magi Madoka Magica to its conclusion. Spoilers ahoy.

This game may take settings anywhere from the beginning of human civilizations, to days leading to the Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion. The authors plan to release supplements for playing during the time after Rebellion, which will be titled Decretum: Magical Girls' War in Heaven.

Magical Girls in The World of Darkness provides copious amount of Angst and examples of:

• Above Good and Evil: The Witches scoff at the concept of good and evil, and teach their slaves to break such illusion in any way they can as part of the initiation to Witch Realm nobility.
  • Machine-angels deep into their Directive (rank 4+) put the well being of the country above everything else, and whether one is using good means or evil means is irrelevant when it comes to serving the state.
  • Some dark magical girls also extol this paradigm, saying that distinction of good from evil is trivial and indefensible. The thing is, they know that they are lying to themselves... because they are still human and capable of telling human values.
• Action Girl: This makes up the majority of player characters (only Vigilantes are open to both gender).
• Action Girlfriend: To a magical girl, having a completely mundane boyfriend/girlfriend is soothing because s/he is the proof that the struggle is worth it. Of course, magical girls can be Action Girlfriend for each others, but that's Battle Couple.
• Action Pet: You can turn a normal animal into a familiar, and then turn the familiar into badass using charms. Very useful for magical girls who don't want to be personally involved in fights.
• Aesoptinum: Magical girl artifacts are made of Orichalcum, to various degree. The only reliable way for Orichalcum to form is when a magical girl use her charms in particularly Virtuous ways, and generally only as dust. And now you know what those magical girls sparkles are!
  • The Grief Cubes are formed from the sentient Vices of humans. As senior dark magical girl Kyouko says, you need to let the demons breed if you want a steady source of Grief Cubes.
  • Vitriol, which is liquified Grief Cubes. It's used to corrupt magical artifacts to be used by dark magical girls— even artifacts belonging to other supernaturals. It's basically corruption given form, and can even corrupt magical girls.
• Affably Evil: When they aren't trying to screw you (or even if they are), dark magical girls are capable of pleasantries.
• Almighty Janitor: The machine-angels. By law, they can't command anyone who is a human, probably to prevent robotic uprising.
• Amazon Chaser: Deconstructed. A Vigilante finds powerful magical girl to be alluring, but it's an unnatural effect that will subordinate his life to her story.
• Anatomy Arsenal: This is the design paradigm of machine-angel charms. Finger Firearms, Blade Below the Shoulder, and Armed Legs are especially common.
• Ancient Tomb: Having one as her home base is a great boon for a revenant. Carrying a Penant from an ancient tomb means that she no longer need to wrap herself in morbid apparel to maintain her deathly nature, plus the Penant itself have deathly power that she can use. Unfortunately, since ancient tombs are usually also points of power, the competition is fierce, even before Sin-Eaters and Vampires are factored in.
• Ancient Tradition: Libram Puellae started as conglomeration of various magical girl secret orders dedicated to stopping the completion of Black-Winged Crane. (See Tome of Eldritch Lore, below.) Over time, they begin to know the value of information and expanded their sphere of influence into anything related to the history of magical girls. The original purpose, stopping that book, is now a secret order amongst the Librarians.
• The Anti-Nihilist: All of the Revenants try to be one. They have spent a long time being bitter ghosts, in company of no one except another bitter ghosts. They know very well that there is no merciful god in the Underworld, so when they get a chance to live, no matter how short and burdened it is, they try to find things that matter to them. It's usually love.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: The machine-angels are especially bad offenders, and deliberately so. The state want them to focus on fighting the God-Machine, and little else. A machine-angel can meet vampires, werewolves, or Sin-Eaters eye to eye and simply dismiss them as "yet another God-Machine's machination" usually followed by them blasting said beings to smithereen. They can't entertain the idea that there are creepy fuckers out there that are independent from the God-Machine.
• Artifact of Doom: The Behelith, created by the most powerful Unchained Ones in order to turn strong-willed humans into Maeljin. It's not known how many of them exists, but the number is as low as nine and as high as six-hundred and sixty-six.
• Artificial Human: The machine-angels are build from scratch to be metal-and-magic entities in the shape of human girl.
• Artificial Intelligence: Surprise surprise, the machine-angels are not one. The machine-angels have soul, and it's close to human soul. Supernatural powers that interact with human souls will interact with machine-angel soul.
• Asshole Victim: Someone who has been Marked for assassination by Revenant is likely to have been a complete asshole during life, resulting in a lot of angry ghosts looking for him to be equalized with his victims. But it could have been misunderstanding, since ghosts are no more omniscient in death as they were in life.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: Amongst the Frontliners, this generally holds true. Amongst anyone else who don't want the Colonel Kilgore to take charge, not so much.
• Assimilation Plot: The goal of Kriemhild Gretchen: smash the God-Machine to bits, absorb all existence into Witch Realm, and eliminate suffering by eliminating the border between individuals. Considering that Witch Realm makes Hell looks like a picnic hill, this is probably not a very good idea. So basically just like Ultimate Madoka, except for absolutely everyone, not just magical girls.
• Aura Vision: Every type of magical girl has one. The color of the aura may indicate the good or evil deeds that color one's soul, although this is not a foolproof method to Detect Evil. The aura of the demi-witches are psychedelic and disturbing to look at.
• Back from the Dead: Revenants can and will come back to life no matter how many times they are killed. However, being killed is a traumatic experience, and if happens too often in rapid succession will cause the Revenant's Humanity to degrade.
  • Came Back Wrong: Each time a Revenant fails in resisting Harrowing as she dies her Wraith-self gets a foothold in her psyche, represented by cap to maximum Humanity she can have. Eventually, the Revenant's final bit of sanity will snap —her Humanity cap is 0, in game term— and she will turn into Living Wraith, who serve the Neverborn most faithfully in hurling the world into oblivion.
• Background Magic Field: The Miasma. They are spawned when humans continuously commits acts of Vice in one place. The thicker the Miasma, the faster demons spawn from it. It can also empower Vicious actions, including dark magical girls' charms. It hampers magical girls' Virtuous charms.
• Badass Biker: The iconic Justice Vigilante, Motoko of the Burning Road.
• Badass Creed: The Frontliners' adage related to how Madoka picks up the soul of dead magical girls.
  "It ain't over 'til the pink lady sings."
• Bad Boss: The Witches. Well okay, Alien Bosses.
  • The Maeljin too, by definition.
• Bad Girl Bar: The court of the dark magical girl typically fronts as Vice-promoting mundane human establishment, such as a brothel or an opium den.
• Battle Ballgown: Armor-granting charms tend to look like this (don't ask). There is also the bewitchment Mail of the Valkyries, which is also part of the Unconquered Sun's repertoire.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: The writer of this game would like to avoid this trope like a plague, but since Puella Magi Madoka Magica explicitly states that if it were not for the magical girls humanity would still live in caves, this is inevitable. Cleopatra, Himiko, and Joan d'Arc were magical girls, and they left Orichalcum artifacts that can be found and used by modern magical girls. (No, Hitler was not a magical girl.)
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Downplayed. A magical girl can be completely battered and her clothes torn apart during battles, but the magical dresses will be fine by the next time she is transforming. Wounds stay, though, and these can leave scars if not magically healed.
• Being Evil Sucks: Revenants who choose the evil path will see her sanity quickly deteriorating, the few people who love her leaving, and her evil self manipulating her to destroy her own (un)life. In short: it's not worth it.
• Being Good Sucks: The World of Darkness is not friendly to good people. Also, a dark magical girls can alleviate their Torment by harming people in way congruent with her Vice, there is no such option for normal magical girls.
• Big Bad: The Maeljin, most powerful Arch-demons from Werewolf: The Forsaken. There are nine of them, with seven being embodiment of Vices and the other two being embodiment of Deception and Violence. Each of them Was Once a Man.
• Big Damn Heroes: A Vigilante who crashes into a battle to save a magical girl ("Look out, girl!") gets all of his Willpower points and Virtue channels back. Of course, he's seriously risking losing control of his life.
• Big Good: For the machine-angels, this would be the current God-Child of Ise Shrine, Koyomi. For everyone else... tough luck.
• Bishie Sparkle: The magical girls when they empower their charms with Virtue. It's justified though, as the sparkles are Orichalcum dust, which can be collected and forged into Virtuous artifacts.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: All of the demi-witches base their morality around the patronage of their Witch mistress. The Witches are nowhere close to human. For example, an Ophelian demi-witch counts corrupting someone from her ideals as Good because that someone will then have less confrontations in her life.
  • The machine-angels also operate in the blue-orange spectrum, but less pronounced. They act based on their Directives, which makes them have about the same kind of morality as the samurai of feudal Japan.
• Blue-Collar Warlock: The majority of magical girls come from less wealthy home (or even plain broken home), mainly because they are the most willing to spend a lifetime of suffering if they will get to make this one Wish. This is probably the reason why a lot of magical girls are over-compensating once they are able to work magic.
• Body Surf: The machine-angels can project their consciousness across computer networks (including the internet) and hijack the device that her consciousness inhabits. She can't hijack 'sentient devices' such as fellow machine-angels and the God-Machine's agents, though. Usually.
• Boisterous Bruiser: There is an Oktavian charm that lets you gain bonus in combat situation as long as you proclaim your badassery out loud. It doesn't have to be physical combat, being in a heated debate or fighting off an attempt to mind control counts as combat.
• Brain/Computer Interface: Since they are robots, the machine-angels have one and it can be used for quick sharing of intel. To avoid physical mind-jacking, the interface is located in their very private part.
  • Directived Vigilantes can also emanate Brain/Computer Interface, but this is more along the line of Body Horror.
• Break the Cutie: The world itself will screw a magical girl over when her Blowback explodes. No wonder a good number of them decided to become dark magical girls.
  • All demi-witches are broken due to the treatment they receive from their Witch mistress.
• Byronic Hero: Any type of magical girls (including the Vigilantes) can be played like this: they know human flaws, and they themselves are deeply flawed, but these are no reason to not be heroic. The revenants have chronic Byronism: they are empowered by sins of humanity and must punish those sins lest those sins consume them.
• Came Back Wrong: Every time they experience death without having shored up their psyche by Intimacies, a Revenant find a little bit of her sanity eroded and she slowly move toward Wraith-dom. When her Wraith side completely takes over her mind, the next time she come back to life she's going to become Living Wraith, a wretched being who thinks of nothing but dishing out pain to the world.
• Celibate Hero: Akemi Homura. She doesn't love anyone other than Madoka, who is beyond dead: she's gone in a metaphysical way. However, sometimes Madoka will order Homura to love someone else, always a magical girl, in order for Madoka's plan to work. Homura is not exactly anguished by such orders, but she won't able to wholeheartedly love that girl.
• Chronoscope: There's an Archangel-Machine Query that works like this. The catch is, it only shows what will happen if no supernatural shenanigans happen; even the slightest touch of the supernatural^note Not including viewing the future with this Query, thankfully may cause the future to be wildly different from the one in the vision. Considering that the WOD is chock full of supernaturals, this is far less useful than it seems.
• City Noir: The atmosphere of the game. The darkness of the city and the light of the magical girls' Virtues makes for great contrast.
• Clone by Conversion: This is a Kriemhild Gretchen's Assimilation Plot charm, and it's every bit as horrifying as it sounds. The only remotely good application is to save someone who is dying with no other way to survive (e.g. someone who is Half the Man He Used to Be).
• Combining Mecha: Difficult but possible with machine-angels, it allows a group of machine-angels to overcome the limitations of their current paradigm. It's possible to combine even at Gunstar Paradigm.
  • The involved machine-angels must have intense bond with each others, or the combining will fail. Also, combining flood the machine-angels with a sensation that is as much intense as it's enjoyable as they come to know each others on a level impossible for other beings.
• Conspiracy Placement: Magical girls write Puella Runes as a sign to indicate the nearby existence of something that might be of interest to the magical girls. A charm allows you to make the runes invisible except to people that channels Virtues (the dark magical girl version of this charm makes the runes invisible except to people that channels Vices).
• Cool Starship: The final paradigm shift (Legend 10) of the machine-angels, the Gunstar Paradigm.
• Corrupt the Cutie: Ophelian demi-witches have this as their Hat. They revel in being she-devils.
• The Corruption: As demi-witches tap further into their mistresses' collection of charms, they begin to resemble their mistresses, at least in their transformed state. This can be something as mundane as hair turning pink for Kriemhild Gretchen, to becoming 5-meter tall human-fish monstrosity in case of Oktavia von Seckendorff.
  • The machine-angels have their own form of corruption known as Biometal Syndrome, which causes them to graft human organs to their own body, turning them into flesh-machine abomination. The awful part is that all machine-angels are suffering from this syndrome due to an esoteric flaw in their design. This flaw is important to make the machine-angels behave like humans.
• Cosmic Keystone: Unusually, the good guys are the one trying to destroy them: the Cosmic Keystone are part of the God-Machine's plan and destroying them will thwart it. Meanwhile, Kriemhild Gretchen's plan is to destroy the vital keystones keeping the Witches from entering reality.
• Crapsack World: Ensured by the God-Machine as part of its plan to harvest Grief Cubes from humanity.
• Creative Sterility: A Witch can't comprehend anything that does not fit her Legend. They will only ever have charms that are in-character of them. Because of this, a demi-witch need to have charms from multiple Witches if she wants to get anything done. And she can use it in ways that her Witch mistresses never expect.
• Creepy Cemetery: If you're a revenant, you will pass through it many times. Not just through the cemetery gate, you actually claws your way out of the soil when you leave the Underworld and into the world of the living!
• Cult: Ubiquitous, and the majority of them are up to no good.
  • Cargo Cult: If there is a machine-angel cult, it's likely that there is a piece of God-Machine technology as their center of worship.
  • Apocalypse Cult: Where dark magical girls champion Religion of Evil, the demi-witches champion this sort of faith. They believe in the coming of Kriemhild Gretchen to liberate humanity from the iron grip of the evil God-Machine, in which case the world will become a heaven where people are in the eternal bliss of having their true form (read:everyone is a witch).
  • Mystery Cult: The Esoterium is often accused of being this, and not without basis. It's true that they are founded based on mysteries, but members discover mysteries of each others in order to be able to reshape each others' Soul Gem, there's no 'higher truth' to be revealed other than the art of Soul Gem shaping. Since the personal mysteries can be quite embarrassing, it's understandable that the members don't like others prying into their practice.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Inverted in case of machine-angels. Increasing the amount of organics in their body have very detrimental effects for their mental stability. A machine-angel that has been seriously inflicted with Biometal Syndrome is a walking incarnation of terror.
  • Played straight in case of Directived Vigilantes. A Vigilante that set a Directive as his primary Virtue will be able to emanate machine charms that he integrate with his body. The more such charms he integrate, the more alien his way of thinking is.
• Dare to Be Badass: How otherwise ordinary people become Vigilante.
• Dark Is Not Evil/Light Is Not Good: Neither 'light' nor 'darkness' hold moral connotations here. The Witch Realm is an extraordinarily bright place, it's always day there, but you most definitely don't want to end up there. On the other hand, some Vigilantes only do their work at night because it makes concealing their identity easier.
• Dark Lord on Life Support: Prof. Miyanokouji has been unable to leave his life support system since he was near-fatally wounded by the traitor machine-angel, Koharu. Even if everyday is a living hell for him, he refuse to depart this world because he's the only one who can animate machine-angels.
• Deal with the Devil: Certain aspects of this trope has been neutered, compared to Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Due to laws imposed upon them (most likely caused by the Wish of other magical girls), Kyubey must state in no uncertain terms the condition of magical girls to the would-be Wisher. If the girl decide to make a Wish anyway, she's either desperate or actually Virtuous enough to choose such a life.
• Death Is Cheap: For a Revenant, no, it is not cheap. You have to pay for it with your soul (read: Humanity dots). But at least they are offered a bargain, unlike other kinds of magical girls.
• Deflector Shields: Magical girls have the version that defend against Demons and demon-magic. Machine-angels have the version that defend against anything, or at least anything that has physical existence. Demi-witches have the version that defend against Fate.
• Demon Lords and Archdevils: The Maeljins. Notably, they are not the only big players in Inferno, as other demons are constantly jockeying for more power. Only the Maeljins can stand on top of the infernal pecking order though, because each of them Was Once a Man, and it takes someone who is a human to become the axis mundi of Inferno. Without real humans at its core, Inferno will vanish in a puff of logic, for it's a work of Vices in the same sense that magical girl charms are works of Virtues.
• Demon Slaying: If a magical girl is to write a resume, she might as well put this into it.
• Depleted Phlebotinum Shells: Orichalcum dust, mostly made into bullets. It's the only material in the world that is capable of permanently destroying demons and turning them into Grief Cubes. Even a completely mundane human can use it.
• Deus est Machina: The God-Machine. People who are capable of seeing it see it as an infinite number of gears. Those people don't stay sane for long.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The machine-angels works around the clock to thwart the God-Machine and its agents. They have 'punching cthulhu' as part of their job description, and it's position that is held for life.
• Digitized Hacker: Machine-angels' Computer charms are built around this concept. Rule of Cool, that's why.
• Divine Ranks: The existence of divine beings are subject of debate, but Legend acts like this for anyone who care to be worshiped.
• Do Androids Dream?: The machine-angels do, and if they are being inhabited by the kami, the dreams might be prophetic. As for the question whether machine-angels fit the criteria to be considered as humans, the legal answer is "yes, as long as such consideration doesn't pose legal quandaries". Convenient, that.
• Do-Anything Robot: The machine-angels have vast array of charms, but only a handful can be installed at any time. If a machine-angel want to, she can do anything, just not at the same time.
• Doomed by Canon: Downplayed. The authors suggest that ST allow the player characters to influence the way Rebellion plays out, up to and including preventing it from happening. The game itself treats Rebellion as never happened, and creates Decretum to accomodate those who want to play in Homura's new world.
• Dragged Off to Hell: Retreatment works like this for demi-witches. When they have pissed off their Witch mistress too much, they will be dragged to the Witch Realm for reeducation. Furthermore, because their body is a conduit of the Witch Realm, they can't run and they can't hide.
  • Ironically, it's unlikely that a dark magical girl will ever suffer this fate. Their Maeljin bosses know that magical girls feed upon demons, and they keep them in the material world to control which demons they can cook into Grief Cubes.
• Dying Moment of Awesome: How Miki Sayaka died.
• Dynamic Entry: The Vigilantes get significant reward if they aid a magical girl who is in a pinch, leading to this trope. There is even a Vigilante charm, Barrier-Busting Boots that can potentially smash a concrete wall as though it's window glass, if it would lead to helping people who are in trouble.
• Dystopian Edict: While Japan is not a dystopia in this settings (maybe), machine-angels are capable of issuing supernaturally enforced law if it's designed to target Anathema, typically upon an area no larger than a ward. Local law enforcers become aware of that law and must spend Willpower if they want to avoid enforcing it.
• Dysfunction Junction: Pick a dark magical girl court. Any dark magical girl court.
• Easily Detachable Robot Parts/Detachment Combat: Machine-angels not only use this approach to great effect, they are even built around it! Modularity at its most elegant.
• Eating Optional: Averted in the case of machine-angels. They need to eat to maintain the organic parts of their self, though they eat somewhat less than ordinary humans. Furthermore, it has been noted that machine-angels that doesn't eat normally (perhaps they consume nutrient slurry) are usually less human than those who do.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: As Revenants lose Humanity (whether permanent or temporary), they become paler and what colors they have become more diluted. Notably, while the Revenants themselves remain beautiful if they were beautiful to begin with, the beauty is anything but natural.
• Elaborate Underground Base: Machine-angel maintenance/manufacturing facility are typically underground, to make it harder for God-Machine's surveillance and to control who goes in or out.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Witches... just the Witches. They don't operate with human morality, and their goal involving destroying the current cosmic order.
  • The Neverborn, Underworld entities that empower the Revenants. They are strongly implied to never have been alive, and their very mindset is inimical to life. They see living existence as a pointless race to send each others to Underworld, and thus to them the Grudge spawned from such constant atrocities is the only enduring truism. They aren't trying to destroy the world, at least not aggressively— they know that ultimately, the red string of fate will entangle the entire universe in a web of vendetta, at which point the world will implode upon itself and join the Underworld forever, a time the Neverborn will be the supreme ruler. For this purpose, the Neverborn give power to the Revenants to reinforce the cycle of revenge.
• Electric Instant Gratification: There is at least one machine-angel charm that makes good use of this phenomenon. Apparently, the idea emerged when some machine-angels who were off-duty were fooling around with each others. Power Perversion Potential at its most useful.
• Electronic Eyes: Technically speaking, all machine-angels have electronic eyes, but it's only obvious if they activate eye-mounted charms (usually Investigation charms).
• Evil Costume Switch: A magical girl who turns into dark magical girl has her costume change accordingly, representing the darkening of her Legend. For example, if said magical girl used to have rose theme, her roses change from red to black^note It doesn't imply that black roses are evil, only that said magical girl believe that it does.
• Empowered Badass Normal: The Vigilantes are, for all purpose, normal people who just happen to have a few magical trinkets that they can use to fight badness. They still bleed and die like normal humans, unlike the magical girls.
• Evil Makes You Monstrous: Whenever someone makes a Dark Wish to the Behelith, he or she gains the form befitting both their Dark Wish as well as the Vices they represent. They can still shift back to human form, but even that will have certain 'tells'.
  • As a dark magical girl rise in Legend, her transformed form become more and more disturbing in appearance. It won't ever cross into inhuman monstrosity, but it certainly gives off the vibe of 'a dark mistress'. For reference, they may gain the appearance of the Witches in Final Fantasy VIII.
• Evil Sorcerer: Anyone who have learned Bedevilment, by definition. The iconic Devil, Lady Lucifuge, is a notable exception: she knows enough Bedevilment to maintain Investiture over the 666 members of the Lucifuge, but she's doing this to fight capital-E Evil.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: The Demon side of things does not want the world to end (you can't rule a world that doesn't exist), while the Witch side of things see nothing worthy of saving in the current order of the God-Machine.
• Extra-Strength Masquerade: The government of Japan ensures that no matter what spectacular havoc a machine-angel can wreak, it won't cause the world to discover the existence of the God-Machine and the brave mechanical girls who fight against it.
• Fallen Hero: Dark magical girls.
• Fairy Companion: The Incubators act as one for normal magical girls. Dark magical girls may have an Imp provided by their Maeljin Liege. The demi-witches have familiars that are part of their mistress' "soul". Machine-angels have companion AI that can be installed into robotic platform.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: The game is quite blatant about this. If there is a supernatural being who is considered a Demon, then it probably exists somewhere in the world advancing its nefarious agenda (and the magical girl can defeat it for its phat loot o' Grief Cubes). Since one man's deity is another man's demon, the list of 'things that can be considered demon' is a ridiculously Long List.
  • The game cannibalize elements from other New World of Darkness gamelines. Its Big Bad are the Maeljin from Werewolf: The Forsaken. Lady Lucifuge from Hunter: The Vigil is a Legend 8 dark magical girl. The God-Machine was broken by the Atlantean from Mage: The Awakening, requiring constant supply of Grief Cubes. The Unchained Ones from Demon The Descent are responsible for the existence of the Maeljin.
• Fate Worse than Death: Demi-Witches have this as their back-story. They were kidnapped, Mind Raped, and then enslaved by the Witches.
• Faustian Rebellion: Just like the anime this game is loosely based on, every single type of magical girl is capable of going against the shitty deal that put them where they are. Magical girls can realize that they have been duped by the God-Machine and fight it back so that it can't enslave more little girls. Dark magical girls can achieve full atonement and become a good girl again. Demi-witches can turn against their Witch mistress if they know how to stave off their wrath. Machine-angels can betray the country that created them and go full rogue (read: in control of their own destiny).
• Feel No Pain: The machine-angels don't feel pain as long as they are not in their humaniform. Wound penalties simply don't apply to them.
  • Oktavia von Seckendorff charm, Stalwart March of the Dead, render its possessor permanently immune to pain. I hope you notice that you've sustained enough wounds to make you look like a rotting zombie...
• The Fighting Narcissist: Oktavia charms revolve around being one. LOOK AT ME!
• Fights Like a Normal: When magical girls can't avoid fight, they fight like normal: they Take Cover! and attack the Demons from range. Considering the Mundane Solution (see below) is the most cost-efficient method, there is not really a point for not fighting like the mundanes do.
• First-Episode Resurrection: Their splat suggest that revenants be played this way.
• Flawed Prototype: According to the official history of the machine-angels, the first generation of machine angels were "fraught with errors and had to be withdrawn from duty". One may wonder what happened to those girls.
• Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: Magical girls share living space with other World of Darkness creepy crawlies. Being able to differentiate the nice supernaturals from the not-so-nice supernaturals make things a lot easier. Of course, if you're a Frontliner, skip this step and jump straight into the ass-kicking.
• Friend to All Living Things: Animal-related charms of the virtuous magical girls are designed like this. This means the magical girl generally can't send the animals to their death. Animal-related charms of dark magical girls on the other hand are designed to piss off PETA in every possible way (seriously, remotely-detonated mind-controlled exploding puppies?!).
• Frilly Upgrade: The increase in your Legend causes noticeable change in your magical dress, and it can be represented this way, amongst other things. The frills themselves don't mean anything.
• Ghost in the Machine: The game's view on souls. Notably, the ghosts can migrate between different machines, and not just because they are ghosts of machine-angels. A normal magical girl can ride an advanced robot using a Layer called Face of the God-Machine.
• Glacier Waif: Most magical girls are like this. Due to the way Excellencies work, even a starting magical girl can survive being hit by a truck despite her small build.
• Glamour Failure: A machine-angel must spend a few hours each day in their metal form. Any normal people catching a machine-angel reverting to their metal form might experience the shock of his life.
  • The reflection and the shadow of the demi-witches show aspects of their Covenants. At low Legend they are barely noticeable, but at high Legend, people wonder why your shadow always look like misshapen, restless monstrosity.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: The kami that can inhabit the body of the machine-angels will lay dormant if no one worship them, though total dissolution is unlikely. Machine-angels reinforce the kami by acting according to their nature, and since all machine-angels are Shrine Maiden, simply being an observant vessel is a powerful prayer.
• Good Is Not Nice/Good Is Not Soft: The Frontliners live and breathe these tropes.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: Depending on the politics in the city, magical girls and dark magical girls can socialize with each others just fine. Even if the tension is particularly high, there is always a neutral ground where they can chill together.
  • Character-wise, Tomoe Mami and Sakura Kyouko are known to be in good terms. Tomoe Mami is The Paragon of Mitakihara.
• Gone Horribly Right: Some Unchained Ones were once Incubators themselves, and they want to provide humanity their own version of Contract Wish. To this end they created Beheliths based on the concept of Soul Gem to empower "human with great motivation". Unchained Ones being Unchained Ones and humans being humans, the only humans those with enough potential for the Behelith to work are very evil individuals and they end up becoming Maeljin, the axis mundi of Hell, the guarantee of demonic existence. Sure, the teeming mass of demons being (unknowingly) under control of 'humans' means that God-Machine think twice before screwing humanity thoroughly, but was it really worth turning the world into such a crapsack place?
• Good Girl Gone Bad: Every single one of the dark magical girls know that feeling, sis.
• Good Hurts Evil: The magical girls possess Holy charms, charms designed to seriously harm Creatures of Darkness. Recognized Creatures of Darkness include Demons, the Undead, True Fae, and anyone with Morality score of 2 or less. It also harms anyone who are "tainted" with the essence of said creatures, so good luck being a Friendly Neighborhood Changeling when The Frontliners have set up outpost in your city.
  • Blue Hurts Orange: The equivalent concept for the machine-angels are August charms, charms designed to seriously harm Anathema. An Anathema is something that threatens the order of the country of the machine-angels. It includes the God-Machine and its minions/components including magical girls, True Fae, and demons. It does not harm Morality 2- creatures, because an order can always use those who will do the dirty works.
• Halloween Episode: Any deathly celebration^note Dates that the local culture consider related to death or the macabre, not an event where people are slaughtered in a Fête Worse than Death is an easier period of time for a revenant to get into and get out of the Underworld. In Japan, this is usually the date of the Obon festivals.
• Heaven: According to the most fervent members of the Circle of the Goddess, this is the place where good magical girls go when they depart from this world.
• Hell: Inferno is not Hell as described by real world religions, but you'll be very forgiven to think that it is. It's the domain of the Maeljins, and it's ever-shifting to fit the sins committed by humanity.
• Hell Gate: Some Miasma are thick enough to allow someone to cross over into the actual Inferno and vice versa. It makes summoning a Demon easier, especially if there is a human willing to be possessed nearby. Magical girls do their best to close those Hell Gates and cleanse the place. Dark magical girls do their best to keep their Hell Gate open, mainly because they build their stronghold around it for easy access to Grief Cubes.
  • The thing is, magical girls usually can't tell whether something is a Hell Gate to Inferno, or to the Underworld, or to Arcadia. To them, any Hell Gate is dangerous and must be closed, even if they will come to a head with the local Friendly Neighborhood Sin-Eaters.
• Hell Invades Heaven: The Witch Realm plan to crash open the gates to the God-Machine and kills it from inside, bypassing Madoka's anti-Witch mechanism. And after they have done that, they will invade Madoka's magical girl Valhalla and takes back the soul every magical girl that she 'stole' from the rightful possession of Kriemhild Gretchen.
• Hell on Earth: The ultimate result of the Witch Realm's plan.
  • The demons are not trying to bring literal version of this trope, they 'only' want humanity to be so depraved that it's nothing more than a miserable giant Miasma factory.
• Holier Than Thou: How the Circlemembers are often perceived by outsiders. It's not an unjustified perception.
• Hollywood Satanism: Particularly savvy dark magical girls create this kind of cult, just so they can recruit people who are receptive of evil to begin with. Hey, at least you can honestly say that you're the real deal and Crowley was a poser.
• Homosexual Reproduction: The Layer Spirit of the Living Humanity allows a magical girl to either bear child, or sire child. Notably, the siring part is the easier one to achieve.
• Housewife: See the Spirit of the Living Humanity above? An Esoterium member decided to take it up to eleven and become a loving housewife. The husband know of her situation and take it like a man. There are several other problems: magical girls don't grow old, and with each passing year, this married couple seems more and more... age-dissonant. Also, the kids (two boys, one girl) must be kept away as much as possible from their mother's magical girl life.
• Humans Are Bastards: And how! In a long forgotten age, a number of them broke God-Machine in order to ascend to the Supreme Reality, causing the world to become significantly less splendorous and magic becoming difficult to use for just about anyone. It's strongly implied that before said catastrophe, any Virtuous-enough human is capable of charms.
  • The distant successors of the aforementioned bastards deliberately break into the Witch Realm in their power bid to also ascend to the Supreme Reality. The result? The Witches gain the ability to kidnap magical girls and turn them into brainwashed slaves, in order to break the God-Machine even harder.
  • This is also witnessed everyday by the rank-and-file magical girls. They know that humanity far outnumber them and thus there won't be an end to the demons. One of the theme of the game is how the magical girls are constantly besieged by evil.
• Humongous Mecha: A machine-angel who reach Legend 6 or 7 turns into a huge robot the size of a G*ndam. This is known as Colossus Paradigm Shift.
• Immortal Life Is Cheap: Machine-angels can't die unless their Heart Drive is shattered, so they got sent to missions that are either plain suicidal, or requires degrading treatments of the body. as long as the Heart Drive survives, the only downside is harsh reprimands for destroying expensive high-tech body.
• Immune to Bullets: The body of a magical girl is not a normal human body. It's animated by the magical girl's sheer will emanating from her Soul Gem, and can take far more punishments than normal humans. In game terms, certain damage that should cause Lethal wound will only cause Bashing wound. (For reference, the other WOD entity that shares this peculiarity are vampires, and they are undead.)
• The Imp: If a Maeljin send his/her agent to work with a dark magical girl, it typically take this form. They are different from dark magical girl familiars, who are typically more badass.
• Impossibly Graceful Giant: The Colossus as well as other more advanced forms of machine-angels are as graceful as their human counterpart. If the machine-angel is a Social-centric character, her massive forms will reflect her physical awkwardness; if she's a martial artist, the Colossus might as well be a giant Bruce Lee.
• Infernal Paradise: The more fucked-up kind of demi-witches genuinely believe that the reign of the Kriemhild Gretchen will be a significantly better one than the God-Machine's. They will gladly explain to you the "wonders" of the Witch Realm that must be shared with everyone, such as losing your individuality or being turned into a gear in the machine.
• In the Name of the Moon: A magical girl who do this as part of her Transformation reduce the risk of Blowback from being outed.
• Interdimensional Travel Device: There are machine-angel charms that allows going into Underworld, or Arcadia, or Inferno. Since the government doesn't want the machine-angels to think beyond their role as anti God-Machine super soldiers, these charms are not deployed without due considerations.
• Intimate Healing: Being a Revenant is a very harrowing experience that quickly wear down your sanity. But you can redouble your battered psyche, the fastest and surest way is having sex with your lover(s). It doesn't matter whether it's gentle or rough, hetero or homo, young or old, as long as the love is there.
• It's All About Me: The mindset of every dark magical girls, ever.
• It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: The per-chapter fiction of the revenant splat opens like this, as the iconic anti-Pride revenant, Chikage, claws her way out of the ground. She even lampshades it!
  Chikage: It's a great start.
• Jekyll & Hyde: A revenant and her Wraith-self. When her Agony explodes, the Wraith-self takes over, most likely to ruin everything that the revenant have built so far in order to break the revenant's mind.
• The Juggernaut: The Revenants. Kill them, and they will just go Back from the Dead until they succeed in offing their Marked. And they get more and more unhinged each time they crawl out of the Underworld. If you're a Marked, there is no escape from The Juggernaut.
• Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: Double Subverted. A magical girl can and will end up with tattered magical dress if she goes to physical combat, but the next time she transforms, the magical dress will be just fine. The offered explanation is that magical dress being an emanation of the magical girl's Legend.
• Killed to Uphold the Masquerade: What would a WOD gameline be like without this one.
• Knight Templar: Any magical girl with a Virtue rated 3+. They must fight back against violation of said Virtue that happens in their presence, or suffer Blowback.
• Kung-Fu Wizard: The magical girls, by default. A starting magical girl know how to hurt demons, while also have several charms that looks and act like classical idea of magic. Exaggerated with magical girls who know both Bewitchment and Magical Fighting Style; there are only a handful of such individuals in the world, and Akemi Homura is not one of them!
• Lady of War: A significant number of the machine-angels, and nearly every Frontliners.
• Legacy Character: Some Vigilante Masques are like this. They have been passed down from one Vigilante to another. In a few cases, those Masques can awaken someone who never see a magical girl in action. The downside of legacy Masques is that the Vigilante can't develop his own charms until he is on the the Masque's Legend level. Since Masques that survive the trial of time are usually above Legend 5, this can become an unrealistic proposition.
• The Legions of Hell: The teeming masses of the demonkind. They all want to get out of the Inferno, not to destroy humanity like some alien locusts, but because they want to corrupt everyone into becoming Miasma factory. Dark magical girls loyal to a Malejin can take part in this invasion, and there is tangible benefits in doing so (represented by Infernal Liege merit).
• Lesbian Vampire: There is a specific dark magical girl cult that exploit this trope for all its worth. They are not actually lesbian vampires, but they can reduce Corruption by organizing an Orgy (shivers!) where they act like ones. Iconic Defiler, Izumi Utano, is a passionate runner of this cult.
  • In the splat that explains how magical girls deal with the other denizens of darkness, sample Ventrue vampire Matsurizaka Michiru certainly looks and acts like a stereotypical Lesbian Vampire. She's taken 'an intense liking' to magical girls, even though magical girls blood are not real blood and provide no nourishment to vampires.
• Les Yay: Invoked. The way Bewitchment is learned requires the learners to form a pair and resolve things between themselves to pass the stages. By the time they graduate from the Four Tribulations, the pair of Bewitchers would have known each others veeery intimately.
  • It doesn't help that the stages of Four Tribulations itself sounds like a list of things that a bride need to have: Something New, Something Old, Something Borrowed, and Something Symbolic.
  • Invoked inversely with Bedevilment: because you need to undermine your pair to pass a stage (and form new pair after), it's highly unlikely that everyone involved in learning Bedevilment will have good opinion of each others. If your ex-pair don't have bad opinion of you, it's most likely because you killed her to pass the stage.
  • Members of Circle of the Goddess are capable of a few Bewitchment. The rationale of this is because all of them are considered spiritual mate of the Goddess. It implies that each Circlemember is married to the Unconquered Sun.
• Level-Up at Intimacy 5: A variation in the case of Revenants. A Revenant can level up in Legend as much as she wants, provided she has experience point. But an increase in her dark Legend means she become significantly less human and more like a vengeful spirit, unless she shore up her mental defense with Intimacies. You don't level up just because you have Intimacies at 5 or more, but it certainly makes leveling up a less suicidal option.
• Lunacy: There is a specific kind of magical girl decorum that can only be taken by girls who were Wolf-blooded prior to the moment of exaltation, and the phase of the moon affects their power. No other magical girls are affected by the moon phase.
• Machine Empathy: All machine-angels are capable of this to some level, but if they want to make good use of it they need to have certain charms installed.
• Magical Girl: What the player characters are.
  • Magical Girl Warrior: Any magical girl is capable of fighting, even the Mental-centric and Social-centric ones.
  • Magic Idol Singer: The machine-angel Koikawa Hinata is an example, she's infiltrating the entertainment industry to weed out God-Machine's influence.
  • Dark Magical Girl: This term refers magical girls who have turned their back from Virtues, but technically any magical girls are capable of doing seriously evil things. Also, Revenants are undead magical girl with macabre imagery, but they are more often than not nice people.
  • Cute Witch: Some of the demi-witches are like this, particularly if they are in Covenant with Homulilly.
• Magical Girl Queenliness Test: Deconstructed. The only ones who get queenliness tests are demi-witches, and while they do involve "bettering" people, the criteria for betterment is decided by the demi-witches' mistress, who are Eldritch Abominations. If you actually pass the test, your soul is remade even more thoroughly so that you can be a noble in Witch Realm.
• Magical Society: The gathering of the city's magical girl, called the Societe. If you're from another city, you're expected to at least drop by and say hello.
• The Magic Goes Away: The splat for Libram Puellae notice how in the past, the magical girls were more powerful than they are today. Joan d'Arc was a magical girl and she was a literal One-Woman Army, something unthinkable today. The more optimistic Librarians believe that the power of the magical girl is cyclical, there are cosmic highs and cosmic lows. The less optimistic ones... believe in this trope.
  • The Magic Comes Back: The demi-witch try to force magic back into real world, one building at a time. After all, that's how their prestige classes work: wrest control of reality from the God-Machine and into the Witches.
• Man in the Machine: The eventual form of a machine-angel as she evolves through the Paradigms. It's not necessarily a case of And I Must Scream, because said machines are capable of deploying humaniform drones.
• The Masquerade: Due to phenomenon known as Shroud Over Arcane^note From Saki meme, sonna okaruto ariemasen — the occult does not exist, it's hard for mundanes to connect the identity of a transformed magical girl to her mundane form. Paradoxically, the Shroud gets stronger as a magical girl rise in Legend. The magic of magical girls goes against the rule of reality as defined by God-Machine, and mundanes who see them in action will quickly forget them: even storing the memory of the event goes against the rule.
• Mecha Expansion Pack: Some of the machine-angels bulkier charms, they typically takes more than one Charm Slot. Best known amongst them is the Swallowtail Butterfly, which allows a machine-angel to fly freely and resembles M*teor upgrade from G*ndam series in appearance.
• Meta Mecha: What the machine-angels will eventually become, but this is done in a way that is an inversion of how it's usually done. The Paradigm Shift of machine-angels make them grow huge from a Humongous Mecha to an aircraft carrier to a space fortress, after which they can deploy drone-body outside themselves. Inside a space fortress machine-angel there is an aircraft carrier drone, which is capable of deploying HumongousMecha drone, which is capable of deploying humanoid drone.
• Mundane Solution: The Demons are permanently destroyed and drop Grief Cubes if killed with a Virtuous weapon, which includes all the attacks of the magical girls. Rather than creating Corruption-hungry charms to create magical weapons with more dice for damage, a magical girl would do better using Imbue with Virtue to machine guns, grenades, or just plain steamrollers. Bonus point for those weapons then can be used by complete mundanes.
• Murderous Malfunctioning Machine: When a machine-angel has been pushed a bit too far, she may experience Zero Tolerance mode in regard to fulfilling their duty. If she has Sword 3+, this is exactly what will happen.
• Naïve Newcomer: Even though the Incubators must state the state of living of a magical girl, a few wide-eyed girls make their Wish anyway, resulting in this trope every now and then. They either lose their naivety quickly, or still holding to it into their early grave. In the per-chapter fiction in the core book, Chitose Yuma grow from Naïve Newcomer to badass, following the footsteps of Miki Sayaka.
• Naked on Revival: The revenants come back to life fully clothed, but the cloth is part of her magical girl dress. If she then transform into her mundane form, she would be naked. This embarrassment typically only happen once, unless the revenant is impossibly dense and/or has no taboo against nudity.
• No-Sell: Certain high-level charms (Legend 5) allow a magical girl to be completely invulnerable if she's currently being the shining exemplar of her Virtue and her adversaries are currently violating that Virtue. Those charms inflicts Willpower Burn to you so they can only be used sparingly, but you can potentially survive a nuclear blast.
• Omnicidal Maniac: The Living Wraiths, Revenants who have had death one time too many. They exist for no purpose other than perpetuating cycles of revenge, and make sure that as much people as possible die in the process. One of the iconic Living Wraiths is implied to hold a key position in the American's military-industrial complex.
• One-Winged Angel: Demi-witches' shintai charms. It turns them into the embodiment of their Witch mistresses' respective concept. Kriemhild Gretchen turns you into a very Biblical angel, Homulilly turns you into ever-turning clockwork monstrosity, Oktavia von Seckendorff turns you into enormous sea monster, while Charlotte turns you into a huge worm made of worms.
• Our Souls Are Different: The game takes the stance that you're a Soul and you're currently experience being a Human (or Vampires, or Werewolves). Souls can be developed, and such is the case with people who can channel Virtues or Vices. While souls can be dramatically different from each others, machine-angel souls are not very different from human souls.
• Perky Goth: Revenants with high Humanity and/or lots of Intimacies tend to live like this. They have morbid sense of fashion, but they are very warm to everyone.
• Power Level: Here they are called Legend. It measures the extent a magical girl can force the world to behave according to her personal story. Akemi Homura is Legend 8, while all Witches are Legend 10.
• The Power of Love: This is explicitly how the Revenants can endure the pain of dying repeatedly. Each Intimacy she possess result in more dice to resist the Harrowing, the flooding of her Wraith-self into her mind as she dies. Failure to resist the Harrowing means the Wraith-self gets a firmer hold into the mind, which might result in eventual Face–Monster Turn.
• Power-Upgrading Deformation: All of the more powerful demi-witch charms are like this, and the deformation is not limited to her transformed form. The horror, man.
  • For machine-angels, charms developed around the Directive of Tumor makes them cyborg monstrosity.
• Prepare to Die: And if you're a revenant, Prepare to Die Repeatedly. The revenant splatbook actually has a section aptly titled Prepare to Die Less.
• Prestige Class: For magical girls, there are the Decorum. These are not just class, they are basically virtuous way of life for magical girls to adhere. Decorum allows a magical girl to reduce her Soul Gem Corruption through ways other than using Grief Cubes, and also give the magical girl a few useful Charms. Also, a Decorum is basically a social club, it's also useful in making like-minded friends. In short, practicing a decorum is worth it.
  • The dark magical girls doesn't have Decorum, but if they set up Vicious Cult with them as the central figure, they can reduce their Corruption by being prayed to and/or organizing an Orgy^note An Orgy is a collective activity of excesses, such as over-eating. It may include excessive sex, but it's by no means a must-have.
  • The demi-witches' Prestige Classes are something completely different. A demi-witch reduces her Corruption by maintaining a Witch Barrier ('Coven'), a site (from a small room to an entire skyscraper) in which the laws of her Witch mistress is the physical law. The demi-witch must arrange for the Witch Barrier to interact with mundanes, or the place lost its power because it's "not real enough". And yes, a Witch Barrier of Charlotte can be a Gingerbread House.
  • The yorishiro (vessel) of the machine-angels is quite different. The body of a machine-angel is a consecrated ground in the same sense as Japanese shrines, and it can host Japanese kami. The kami shifts the way the Directives work making them slightly resonant with him/her/it; in exchange the kami shoulder some of the machine-angel's Strain. War deity Hachiman is popular among the machine-angels who do the fighting, while Omoikane is popular among the machine-angels in the intelligence role.
  • The revenants are quite similar to the machine-angels. Their prestige classes, called Lacryma, are based on vengeful dead found in world cultures. The agony of the vengeful dead shifts the way the revenants carry their anti-vice, sometimes in the blue-orange way. There are Lacryma based on the concept of murdered brides, human sacrifice, and even disturbed mummies.
• Rage Against the Heavens: The only ones who don't do this are magical girls, because they are useful idiots to the God-Machine. Dark magical girls want to destroy magical girls and in doing so they are the unwitting pawns of the Unchained Ones^note The player characters in Demon The Descent. Machine-Angels want to shake off the dominion of the God-Machine over humanity (or at least, over Japan). The Demi-Witches are the foot-soldiers of the Witches in their holy crusade to destroy God-Machine's reign and let them walk the earth once again.
• Reality Warper: All people who can channel their Virtues or Vices or Directives or Covenants are technically reality warper. They force reality to behave like they want it to behave by filtering it through the channeled trait.
  • Another step up from it are the charms with Fatal keyword. They force Fate to alter its working, and Fate bites back at the charm-user by forcing her to take Persistent Blowback Point(s). Fate is a very real force in the settings, a working of the God-Machine to enforce causality, which is perceived by mortals as law of physics. In places where the grip of the God-Machine is weak such as the Layers of Inferno, Fatal charms are easier to use. You can warp reality if it doesn't have much mettle.
  • A major step-up from charms are the high-magic: Bewitchment, Bedevilment, and Angel-Machine Interface. They tell Fate to shut up, step aside, and watch as the high-magus rewrite reality to her whim.
• Redemption Earns Life: Literally! The culmination of a Revenant's Redemption Quest require her to commit Heroic Sacrifice for either great justice or great love, and if her heart is true, she will come back to life truly living, instead of being half-alive half-undead.
• Redemption Quest: This is one possible way to play the story of a dark magical girl.
  • All of the Revenants are technically moving toward Redemption. If they achieve it (and there were a few that have achieved it), they will become a special kind of magical girl: those who can't ever fall and become dark magical girls or demi-witches.
• Reforged into a Minion: A high-level dark magical girl charm allows her to drown a magical girl in boiling Vitriol, and give the victim two option: to become dark magical girl, or die. Notably, this is the only way a magical girl can involuntarily turn into a dark magical girl. The newly-emerged dark magical girl also gain penalties to all attempts to fight back the order of her new master.
• Religion of Evil: The Demons encourage creating them to reinforce the strength of Inferno. Since those religions are championed by dark magical girls, they are difficult to stamp out. Doubly so because they typically masquerade as offshoot of benign religions.
• Resurrected for a Job: This trope is the revenants' raison d'etre. One or more ghosts wanted someone dead, and the Neverborn want to grant their wish in order to ensnare the world into a cycle of revenge. The Neverborn then recruit a dead teenager with attitude, and send them to the world of the living for a wetwork.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: The machine-angels, and ridiculously so. As long as she's not currently being affected by Limit Break, she's a human in every way except actual bodily composition.
  • Inverted for God-Machine worshippers: they are slowly becoming Ridiculously Robot Humans.
• Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: The game outright suggests that the ST sics Akemi Homura to a misbehaving Circle. Akemi Homura's stat block only says "You Lose".
• Robot Girl: The machine-angels.
• Spaceship Girl/Cyborg Helmsman: Gunstar Paradigm machine-angels, must be Legend 10.
• Science-Related Memetic Disorder/The Spark of Genius: How the machine-angels came into being. A certain Miyanokouji Mitsuhiro was there when the A-bomb was detonated over Nagasaki, and in the brief flash he saw the God-Machine in its full glory, and it was not pleased. That very same moment also turned him into a Techno-Mage, and for the next 20 years he turned all his efforts into the creation of machine-angels in order for humanity (read: Japan) to have a fighting chance against the God-Machine. Notably as far as this trope is concerned, only Prof. Miyanokouji can "give" soul to machine-angels, and he's pushing nineties these days...
• Shrine Maiden: Conceptually speaking, the machine-angels' body is as consecrated as a Japanese shrine, making them walking, living shrines capable of housing the gods (which is how they gain their Prestige Classes). Even a recently-named machine-angel is capable of placating the gods, on the same level of skill as a human Shrine Maiden who has been training all her life.
  • On the human side there is Kagura, who had significant involvement in the development of the machine-angels. Namely, she was the one who designed their Directives, it's a small wonder that the machine-angels inherit her talents.
  • Machine-angels who possess the Directive of Tumor at 3+ become capable of spiritual contact with the dark gods of Japan, at the cost of incapable of contacting the more normal kind of gods. They are effectively become 'desecrated shrine', something only the dark gods find pleasant.
• SNK Boss: All of the Maeljins. To begin with, they are completely immune to any action that is not enhanced by Virtues (i.e. actions in which you don't spend your Virtue channels). They have hundreds of health boxes and ridiculous rate of health regeneration. If you somehow kill them, they will simply reform in Inferno unless you destroy their Behelith, which is difficult to find. And they will never fight alone, for they own The Legions of Hell.
• Soul Jar: Soul Gem, the container for magical girls' soul. It's officially called Monstrance of Celestial Portion. The Soul Gem are no ordinary jar, conceptually it's also a lens that allows the soul to focus its Virtues to effect change in reality. Both the God-Machine and the Witches can create Soul Gems, the difference in the number of magical girls they own is a matter of recruitment drive.
  • Heart Drive: Machine-angels have special component in which their soul is concentrated the most. A machine-angel can get totaled in duty, but as long as this component is unharmed they can rebuild her. It's a small crystalline lattice where the heart would be located in normal people, and it's difficult to target by attackers.
• Straw Feminist: The book strongly implies that one can quite easily find them among magical girl in both light and dark side. Their view is not mainstream, mainly because the magical girls are too busy fighting the darkness than accusing anyone of being patriarchal pigs.
• Supernatural Martial Arts: Magical Fighting Style. They are based on Skills instead of Attributes, and anyone who can channel Virtues can learn them, not just magical girls. This is a great investment for Vigilantes who want to up their game to the level of the magical girls.
• Super-Powered Robot Meter Maids: The machine-angels can be assigned to any duty that a human can carry. If she's assigned to protect a VIP she might take the role of a personal maid, which results in literal version of this trope. (Seriously man, do you expect a cop to be equipped with not just a bazooka, but a bazooka that is stored in her own body?!)
• Swiss-Army Appendage: There are more charms that can be installed in appendages than charms that can be installed anywhere else. As a result, a machine-angel's appendage might include machine-guns, swords, surgeon's kit, and (for those with espionage mission) sex toys.
• Technopath: All of the machine-angels.
  • All Stigmatics, such as the machine-angels creator, Prof. Miyanokouji.
  • Vigilantes who have had their Directive Trinkets crafted for them can emanate machine-charms the way they do for normal charms. At very high level, they can beat the Stigmatics in their own game. It's probably not worth the sacrifice that must be made.
• That Man Is Dead: A revenant is forbidden to answer to her name from before she was a ghost, except to proclaim that she no longer than person. She can't even answer to names that are in any way similar. If she violates this rule, she incurs great displeasure from the Neverborn— she immediately experience Dark Miracles. Since such 'Miracle' can result in mass miscarriages and infant deaths (amongst other things), the revenant want to avoid using her old name.
• To Become Human: A machine-angel may have this wish from time to time, but if she's seriously attempting it, she will be considered a traitor to her country. After all, a machine-angel is damn near worth her weight in gold.
• To Hell and Back: In particularly extreme cases, magical girls must go into the local Inferno, kick the ass of whoever is causing the problems, and get out. Some magical girls powerful enough that they can do this on regular basis, they are very powerful allies.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: There are so many of them it's not even funny.
  • Der Walpurgisnacht. It's a tome created by the mages of ancient ages to facilitate the exploitation of Witch powers. It's written entirely in Puella Runes, and any magical girl who read it will be kidnapped to the Witch Realms to be remade into the Witches' slave. Notably, the book is only fatally Eldritch to magical girls, but not to the Awakened.
  • Black-Winged Crane is an obvious expy of the Broken-Winged Crane. It foretells the entire events of Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion in a very cryptic way. Perusing it allows you to learn the Clara Dolls charms, which is not good for anyone's sanity. The catch? The book is not complete yet— it's written in the future, and it's only written to completion the day the world come to its end. Various magical girl secret orders have risen through history to prevent the book from ever being completed, and they aren't reluctant to kill hundreds of puppies to achieve that objective. The book spontaneously come to its complete form as part of Homura's transformation into an akuma, so there's no hope in preventing its completion. All the incomplete copies are reverberation of her Evil throughout the fabric of space and time.
• The Scores of Oktavia von Seckendorff is a collection of diverse musical scores which can influence various Eldritch Abominations. While some scores can keep the monsters out (ala The Music of Erich Zann), some will actually invite them and make it easier for them to come in. It's not obvious which one is which...
• Apocalypse of Ophelia, or: Crucible of The Damned is alleged to contain enough information to rebuild a new and improved Behelith Forge. Mr. Yamada actually had a minor Freak Out when a Dark Magical Girl presented him with one, and he was one of the original creators of the Forge.
• Transformation Is a Free Action: Not quite. Transforming takes a Major action to do, so you can't transform and then attack during the same turn. You can still take a Move action, though. Using the charm Quicksilver Flow makes you close enough to this trope, in that transforming become a Minor action and can be done during Initiative.
• Transformation Sequence: All magical girls must transform from their mundane form into their magical form in order to make good use of the majority of their charms. It looks different for each magical girl, depending on what Wish she made.
  • Inverted with the machine-angels, whose natural form is their techno-magical form. They transform to become human, and when their powers are needed, they experience Reversal Sequence.
• Transformation Trinket: Soul Gems for magical girls, dark magical girls, and the demi-witches. The Soul Gem can be shaped into something wearable, typically small accessories such as hairpin or ring.
  • The Vigilantes also have the trinkets, and it's required to be something that at least cover some part of the face. The Vigilante splat give an example of mundane eyeglasses, for reverse Clark Kenting.
  • Other people's trinkets are typically objects more lavish than its mundane counterpart, but machine-angels invert this paradigm: since they transform into a mundane human, their trinkets are something mundane that is associated with the role of that human. A machine-angel that mundanely goes as a burger flipper might have one of those stupid hat that all fast-food employees wear.
• True Companions: A magical girl Circle is expected to be one. And as long as it doesn't consist of a bunch of dark magical girls, it most likely is one.
• Unfazed Everyman: A completely normal people (or at least someone with no full-fledged supernatural template) can take the Abmundane merit, which means that he's immune to the Shroud.
• Violence is the Only Option: Zigzagged. While magical girls have to defeat demons in combat to obtain Grief Cubes and survive, demons are spawned by humanity and it "only" takes a change of heart in the affected humans to render the demons powerless. Social charms exist to facilitate this change of heart. It's very feasible to make Social-centric character, and if you live in a stable magical girl society, there is a Grief Cube welfare system to make sure non-combatants are thriving.
• Virgin in a White Dress: How the Unconquered Sun is most often depicted. Homura find it very amusing, because she and Madoka repeatedly took each others' virginity for who knows how many times due to the time loop.
• Was Once a Man: All of the Maeljins. They are meant to be dark mirrors to the magical girls: each of them were a person with potential for great Vice, and they made a Dark Wish to the Behelith to become immortal spirit of evil in exchange of having their Dark Wish granted.
  • They are also meant to be dark(er) mirrors to the Uratha: each Maeljin, no matter how disgustingly inhuman they look, is part human and part spirit of evil. They do have five forms, which ranges from fully-human to fully-spirit of evil.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Frontliners, more often than not. To them, the only solution to a demonic infestation would be a raid on the demons' nest, innocent bystanders (if there are any) be damned. This often shuts down any avenue for peaceful resolution, and have caused countless city-wide conflict between the magical girls and other supernaturals desperate to maintain masquerade.
• Witch Hunt: Interestingly, the magical girl has been at both end of this trope. Canny (read: utilitarian) magical girls piggyback on witch-panic to wipe out dark magical girls. The other times, other people orchestrate witch-hunts against the local magical girls.
  • Burn the Witch!: How said Witch Hunt typically ends, regardless of who is the star of the show. In-story, this was the fate of the magical girl Joan d'Arc.
• The Witch Hunter: Some magical girls specialize on rooting out demi-witches, sometimes using techniques that even dark magical girls find appalling. There is even a decorum that specialize on hunting demi-witches: The Witchbane. These are supposed to be the good guys.
• World of Chaos: The Witch Realm. The only physical law there is the whim of the Witches, who are the Realm. Features you might find in the Witch Realm include: mountains made of cakes that try to stuff themselves down your throat, vast barren expanse full of perpetually weeping angels extolling the name of Gretchen, and a roaming Circus of Fear made of living shadows that drag everything it can catch with it.
• You Are Not Alone: A machine-angel is never alone. Her crews are her family— the mechanics, the officers, even the janitors. She stands for the citizens and the citizens stand for her.
• You Lose at Zero Trust: If as a Revenant you have not even a single Intimacy as you die, it's highly unlikely for you to survive the Harrowing with your mind intact. If that's the last bit of your sanity that you lose, then that's that— you're now a Living Wraith, doomed to perpetuate cycles of revenge. (Your character become an antagonistic NPC.)