Heroic Souls - Urban Fantasy High Powered Brawler RP - Interest Check

Things are hardly as simple as they may seem at first glance.

There are two sides to every story, people are more complex than first appearances may led you to believe... and even those you love and know the most can always surprise you.

The world we live in is no different.

To most of the hapless souls walking through the wonder that is life the world is simple, solid, unchanging. Reality is built upon rules which cannot be bent, giving human life an ordinary tint and an explanation to everything should you dig deep enough into them.

We know differently.

For reality is built upon layers and only the most elemental of which is the one where most of humanity live and perceive. The rest? Those are the realms of Spirits, of Gods, of Magic. Many speak of them... of Heaven and Hell, Nirvana, Jigoku, Valhalla, the Astral Plane and many others. Many speak of them, few mortals actually are able to see them during their lives. For among the many charlatans, there are those who truly talk with the Spirits, hear the voice of the Gods, make pacts with Devils and wield power Arcane. Some stumble into ancient knowledge, some are of powerful bloodlines, some are visited directly by the occult and yet there are some who were never humans to begin with.

Some merely dabble into the arts, some reach beyond what they can handle and meet grisly ends... and yet, some have the power, luck and will to become something greater. These are who some call... Heroic Souls. However, don't let the misleading name fool you, for it refers to a scale instead of a propensity for acts of selfless heroism. Heroic Souls step beyond the usual, fragile limitations of the Non-Divine, individuals with great power and will who stand above the rabble and whose might is capable of changing the very face of reality with their feats.

On the modern era, these individuals mostly move unseen, wrapped up in their own little stories and struggles. However, something big is stirring in the air... an event whose magnitude has not been felt for centuries. Souls are getting trapped in Purgatory... in the Spirit world. Nobody is flowing naturally into whatever Afterlife they deserve and such an event compromises the balance upon which Gods and Devils have kept the world in peace.

With such a catastrophe hanging over the world, one way or another, these Heroic Souls will have to step forward and shape the events to come. This, is their story.

Hello there! Welcome once again to a new RP. This one I shall be running at the same time as the Survival game given that I've been having enough free time lately for it.

This RP is set in the same basic universe as an old one of mine, Blood of the Divine, though this time we shall be playing slightly behind on the power scale and with a main plot to pursue. You may want to read the sign up there to learn what are Layers of Reality, how do Gods and Deities operate and such.

On this RP you shall be playing Heroic Souls, basically characters on the top power level of non-Divine and mortal species... think Bayonetta, Dante and other such characters. Flair, style, individuality and will is expected of these characters. Witches, Half Demons, Monsters, Sorcerers, Chosen of the Divine, Modern Warriors, all are welcome on the RP.

Now, I'm planning on making character creation be point based as in the last game to somewhat balance players and give meaningful context to the abilities of each character. I'm still refining exactly how many points and what each person will be able to buy and as such I want input and feedback from players to better structure this.

So far I'm thinking of 7 to 10 points to spend on things such as physical ability, magical ability, magical equipment, summons or minions, pacts, vitality, special abilities and sources of power.

...

Looking at that list, we may need a few more points. Let me explain what I'm thinking for each category. Physical Ability, as the name implies, covers your ability to move your body, be strong, resilient, skilful with weapons and the like. I'm thinking of letting you dip points here to be all around better at all these actions or you may spend one point to be drastically better at one of the mentioned above at the expense of not getting the buff to the others.

Magical ability is how good you are at casting, knowing, recognizing magic. At creating magical items, spiritual defences and the like. Like with the above, you may spend points to be altogether better at all aspects of being a magic user or simply dip into one to get a stronger benefit.

Magical equipment are tools and items you wield in battle or as an utility. Magical shields, guns made from hellish ingredients, sacred blades, shoes to run fast and on the air, faerie armor and other such useful items are available dipping points here.

Summons or minions are creatures or spirits under your control which you can bring into battle fully by expending more power or through a medium for less cost. These range from a group of imps, to a trusty magical mount, a companion wolf, a lesser angel, a group of legionnaire spirits and such. Depending on their power or importance they may worth more than a single point or if relatively weak, you may have multiple ones.

Pacts are interesting contracts with beings more powerful than you are, like a Devil, a God, an Archangel, a Faerie Queen and the like. They tend to be the source of power for some characters and may grant aid in the form of minions, special attacks or energy to their contracted... however, this is all at a cost. Unlike summons which are under your control, Pacts are made with beings stronger than you are, who regularly demand some sort of remuneration for their power. This may selling your soul to devils, giving them the remains of their natural enemies as a quota to borrow their powers, fight for their cause or other demands. I'll be keeping a close eye on pacts due to their capability to be a bit stronger than they should.

Vitality is simply the amount of punishment you can take. I wanted to divorce this stat from the physical to give better access to it to both magical and physical users. Instead, physical points give defence against physical damage and magical points give defence against magical damage... and perhaps, with one or two points on either you get a free vitality point reflecting better health for physical users and spiritual health for magical ones.

Special abilities are just what it says on the label. Abilities not covered on the other fields which your character has access to. Each has to be covered on its own and they can come from regeneration, natural flight, increased senses, shape shifting, blood sucking, size increasing and the like.

Finally, sources of power represent ways your character can obtain magical power to fuel their abilities and do some extra cool stunts. Naturally, players would come with one point being their Heroic Souls themselves, though Pacts, Items, some abilities and the like would bring their own points of power to draw upon.

Well, this is the basic idea so far... any comments, interest or help making this work? What do you all think?

Character sheet:

• Name:
• Age:
• Species:
• Gender:
• Appearance:
• Personality:
• Backstory:
• Stats: (13 points to distribute as you wish)
  • Physical Might: Maximum of 6, spending a point here increases roughly all aspects of your physical skills, though you may spend a point and say only, say, speed and get a greater bonus to speed at the cost of not increasing anything else.
  • Magical Skill: Maximum of 6, spending a point here increases roughly all aspects of your magical arts, though you may spend a point and say only, say, evocations and get a greater bonus to it at the cost of not increasing anything else.
  • Magical Equipment: No maximum on the kind of toys you can have with different abilities. A particular item may be worth than one point if its abilities are very strong, but never over 3 points worth. I'll be keeping and eye here.
  • Summons or Minions: No upper bound, you can spend as many points here as you wish and some summons may be stronger than one point worth with no upper limit.
  • Pacts: Pacts bestow upon you a disadvantage and places you in service of a stronger entity. I set the disadvantage and RP the entity, just say what kind of being they contracted and I handle the rest. In exchange, you get two points to spend elsewhere. You get a maximum of 3 points to spend on Pacts. You can have a stronger contract with a single entity or many contracts with different ones.
  • Vitality: Your health and how much you can go on when facing adversity. Physical Might includes defense against physical attacks and Magical Skill includes resistance against magical threats, but when those defenses are broken though this is how much you can stand.
  • Special Abilities: Abilities inherent to your character, no upper limit here. Some skills may be worth more points than others.
  • Sources of Power: The batteries that power your supernatural feats and magic, the more you have the easier you can do various supernatural feats. May also be burned for a day to do an overlimit skill. Everyone starts with the Source of Power: Heroic Soul, by default.
• Other: Something else your character has that is not included anywhere else. Where they live, relationships, some possessions or anything else.

Characters courtesy of Starbound

• Hikari Seijuurou - Auraof Mild Chaos
• Imohael - clawthewolf
• Ulshh Khagruk - goodisgood
• Marcus Karrde - Pblades
• Reinhardt - Rapier
• Bai Wu - RedSavant
• Myrna Piper - Starbound2
• Alexis May - Tricksen

edited 8th Jul '14 10:34:26 PM by daltar

Interest! Once I'm a bit less busy, I'll take a better look at this.

Interested.

What about a weak but skilled Geomancer who's usually very calm and stoic who has a Humonculus bonded to him that typically acts as a shape-shifting weapon for him? The Humonculus herself would be considered to be a Metal/Materializing (as in making swords pop from thin air) elemental entity, and whenever "killed" is reduced to a card which anyone with magical power can activate (doing so creates a new persona for the Humonculus if its a new master).

I'm interested.

So what's the plot? Is this Pv P freeform, or "You all meet in a bar"?

Kkutwar: See no problem with that concept, sounds good.

KSPAM: It's kinda Sandbox free form, with possibility of Pv P. You guys have whatever relationships, alliances or conflicts as you desire, heroes doing their own stuff. You can be involved in a quest, a fight, trying to become more powerful, find comfort and riches or whatever. Still, the current events with the afterlife being closed is something you all should dig into... if you have a Pact, you may required to do so. There may be good opportunities for those seeking to profit from this.

Anyway, even if you don't care at all about what's happening, the events eventually will find every single hero one way or the other... you may oppose one another in seeking what is happening or you may all team up. It's rather open ended but it shall all be driven by the calamity about to occur.

Interest! I'll likely be a bit slow on posting a signup for a bit, though.

If I went in more detail on the Humonculus' origin, would that be acceptable? Because the short version is basically this: She, and several others, were created by a powerful magic user and this particular bunch are basically self-contained worlds for all their previous personas. Not very large worlds, more like a mindscape in behavior.

Besides that, what would you consider a weak but skilled Geomancer?

Self contained worlds? You kind of lost me there. Basically a hive mind inside the homunculus of people sacrificed to make them?

As for Geomancer... It's one of the kind of magic users I know the least about or at least it's kind of hard to picture. Basically a magic user that tried to use weather effects?

Fullmetal Alchemist, while influential in me using the term, doesn't actually affect much else. Regarding their mind world, its where all their past personas dwell and where the newest persona is made. Besides rare events of psychological instability, too frequent master changes in a short period, deliberate actions of past personas, the master having magic or an idealized form/love that ends up affecting the mind world, or their actual stability as an entity being threatened... Then only the current persona has control and will be oblivious to the fact of their predecessors. Overall, the individual personas have zero reason to work together and technically are their own people than variations of one. However they weren't designed to account for the possibility of being reclaimed by an older master, which results in that persona resurfacing.

I take it you know about Disgaea, that is awesome. Though from now on I'll have to be precise, as I figured you would associate Geomancer with someone who controls stone. My character(s) sound a lot less awesome and interesting now right? Regarding Hal, I kind of saw the "weak but skilled" as nifty stuff like Tales Artes (like Jude Mathias' Quake) and Kingdom Hearts Commands (like Geo Impact) with a pinch of inFamous rounded up with finesse (like using a large number of small individual stones to make a floating disc he can stand on).

However, the majority of his moves would be relatively weak or short-ranged with the more powerful displays being more tiring. However I also figured he'll be rather energy efficient with the tricks he does have. I also considered him getting these powers from a crystalline hammer (demonic-ish entity wanting to take over his body and go on murderous rampages optional), thus making it be that he can't actually improve his geomancy and only get better at using the power it gave him.

So you cite Dante and Bayonetta as good examples, but there are some major differences between those two (i.e. Bayonetta having traditional RPG-style summons that blow up mountains, moons, and even Jupiter sized planets, from what I hear, and Dante with his various abilities related to the manipulation of time and space). To get a clearer picture, would Asura from Asura's Wrath qualify as a Heroic Soul? What about Raiden (MGS 4 and MGRR Raiden, not MGS 2 Raiden), Jetstream Sam or Senator Armstrong? Matoi Ryuuko? Emiya Shirou?

This looks like it could be fun.

Also interested. Now all's I need is a concept and time.

Interest

Ok, so basically the Homunculus develops a new persona each time they get a new Master and the past personas all live in a mind world hidden inside of it. No problem there. As for the rest of the earth based powers, I have no problem with them, go for it!

KSPAM: In my system I'd qualify Bayonetta as a mixed Physical Power/Magical Power fighter with some strong summons, some the strength of which I believe players won't have access to. Dante would be a primarily Physical Power fighter with high vitality, magical weapons and some added special abilities due to his demonic heritage. That's in general, I haven't finished playing most of the DMC games so I don't know the top line attacks that he may have in some instances. Asura would not qualify as a Heroic Soul, he's much higher up the totem pole... By sheer amount of power, he'd be a Deity at the least, even if he doesn't show much versatility in what he can do. Have not played Revengeance enough to get to Jetstream Sam or Senator Armstrong so no comment there, Raiden could be a Heroic Soul from what I have played. Matoi Ryuuko could be a Heroic Soul though I haven't reached the end of the series. Still, up until when Satsuki betrays Ragyo and seemingly 'kills' her, I haven't seen anything that would be too hax, so Ryuuko qualifies. Emiya Shirou would not qualify during the events of Fate/Stay Night, he would merely be a highly optimized mage, but Archer would qualify

Hmmmm... I don't know much about Bayonetta besides what I've seen on Youtube, but I'd think Bayonetta w/ Queen Sheba would be an equal match for Asura in every form except the one he used to fight Chakravartin. Thankfully though, the game literally measures the power of Bayonetta's combos in Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure, so I suppose we can draw some useful conclusions from that which would put her at about Eo S Ryuuko's level without her best summons, which as you said, players in this RP would not have. Raiden and Armstrong are a bit more mundane than that though. They're more of Dante's tier except without all the magical hax, and just a bit below Archer in terms of physical firepower (which is impressive considering magic vs. NANOMACHINES, SON).

I'm just trying to get a relative sense of scale here, like if we are Earth-bound or if this is gonna eventually escalate to giant boss battles IN SPACE! I already see we're going to be dipping into the Crazy Awesome sauce if we're modeling our characters after the aesthetics Japanese hack 'n slash games, but knowing what is and isn't too much is always helpful.

Moving aside from that, the idea I'm currently rolling with is a Lunarian (or whatever name you choose to describe Kaguya-hime's moon-dwelling species from Japanese myth) living on Earth as an Ordinary High-School Student who ends up getting suckered into playing host to an exiled angel of death who was stripped of her (or their) angelic status and cast out of Heaven for... reasons. Her one chance to avoid being sent to Hell (which I'm depicting as more of a prison than a kingdom of the damned, let me know if that contradicts your canon) is to regain her status as a full-fledged angel (of death) by reaping the souls of the damned still wandering on Earth. In order to do this, she has to use his body to fight, which results in a mahou shoujo-esque transformation complete with genderbending, something he is not happy about.

So it's a trigger-happy angel of death posing as a demon hunter posing an alien posing as an Ordinary High-School Student.

edited 16th Jun '14 12:48:18 PM by KSPAM

We're not going to space on this one. Heaven and Hell on the other hand...

Oh also, Alucard without that being everywhere and nowhere nonsense would be a Heroic Soul.

Updated my post to include my working concept. Kind of convenient that you're already planning on factoring Heaven and Hell into this....

Let me know if I'm contradicting any of the rules of the verse pls

No problem with your concept KSPAM! As for your definition of Hell... lets just say that there are numerous 'Hells' ruled by different demonic entities and such. Indeed, in this Verse Lucifer, Satan and the Snake are all different entities. The Heaven of the followers of Abrahamic religions as well is a big sprawling place which is somewhat divided in many sub realms by the beliefs of all the numerous religions and sects following it.

Makes sense to me.

So, no advice from anyone on how to balance my stat based character creation :p ?

Well, how many stats do you want? What do you want to be the average in them for us? Give us points to reach average in everything or maybe a little extra.

edited 16th Jun '14 1:38:28 PM by clawthewolf

Interest, and a character idea. I'll wait for a sign-up.

Well, what does each category scale from in terms of points? 1-5, 1-10 etc.? Another good question to ask is whether you're aiming for people to be more specialized and fill distinct roles, or if they should be Jacks of All Stats.