YOU are a Royal - half-magic, half-human.
You're one of the court cards from the tarot deck - the freewheeling Princess of Wands, the calculating Knight of Pentacles, the illusion-weaving Prince of Cups. You use magic like a brick through the window of the world.
THEY are the Arcane - Death, The Hanged Man, The Devil, The Lovers, The Star. They are reality-bending monsters that wear human skin like a suit.
TONIGHT, before dawn, you are going to corner one of them and take their power for your own in a heist the likes of which the worlds have never seen.
The city is going to burn.
It's going to be beautiful.
That’s you. Royals are those blessed with magical lineage, part of four great families which have four positions each. Despite the implied hierarchy, no royal has dominion over any other by default. Power must be earned, and jealousy preserved. You might be part of an actual family or you might now; the blood is strange, and sometimes it sleeps for years, decades, or generations.
As a royal, you can do MAGIC. You can hijack some of the immense power that the Arcane do, but you must use tools to do so. Fetishes, charms, items of power, and relics of historical or cultural weight are all useful. Your magic is JUNK MAGIC, an urban hedge witchery built of necessity, improvisation, grit, and luck.
THE SILVER AND THE BLOOD
Royals are made up of three facets. These are things like traits, relationships, skills, equipment, or favors owed to you.
Silver facets are related to your arcane ancestry: unnatural quirks, uncanny strangeness, and junk magic.
Blood facets are part of the real world: physical talents, money, allies and items.
THE COURT
The court is your domain, an organization you rule over. You could be the CEO of a company, a crime syndicate kingpin, a cult leader, a high society leader. You control a small domain--a sawn-off stub of a thing that will never reach the glamour of the Arcane until you ascend.
That’s them. Once they were like you, but now they are beings of astonishing power. They’re faster, stronger, more experienced, and better prepared than you are. But they’re not smarter, and they’re old, and you want this more.
Where you twist reality and channel the power of your blood, they sit above it; reality is something you wrestle, trick and bluff, dazzle and confuse, maybe even knock senseless and go through its pockets: but it is something they command.
They are monsters, in the old sense of the word, in that they herald the coming of something terrible. They are more and less than human.
Royal Blood takes place in The City; the cards are things of civilization, after all. They are mankind’s attempts to make lenses that peek into something greater and dizzying.
The name of The City doesn’t have a name. It’s high-rises and underpasses, it is the honk of cars and the stink of fumes, it is crowds and lit-up nights and a million tiny lives blurring together.
It is anything you need it to be. Soon it will be yours.
This is ROYAL BLOOD, an urban-fantasy heist game for 3-5 players. It is a cooperative storytelling game using a deck of tarot cards to help facilitate narrative and creativity.
This is currently an interest check, if there is enough of it I will make a new thread sometime after New Years.
THE SETUP
- At the beginning of the game a Major Arcana will be drawn. This is your MARK; your target whose power you will be stealing.
- The MARK has the PRIZE, some sort of object, person, or place that is the focus of the heist.
- 5 other Major Arcana cards will be drawn. These are THE BOX, the obstacles that stand in your way.
- The players work together to describe each obstacle as their character scout them out, with additional input by the GM.
- One the threats are established, scenes are played out as the royals negate or subvert the obstacles before them.
Name: Perhaps your real name, perhaps an alias.
Aspect: King of Cups, Knight of Pentacles, Princess of Cups, what are you?
Reason: Why are you REALLY doing this? Why do you want this power? Is it revenge? Pride? Greed? Loyalty to another?
Court: Describe your domain in the city.
Description: Face claim/etc here. Please use real people/actors.
Facets
+ Blood Facet
+ Blood Facet
+ Silver Facet
*Note: You can have 3 facets total, mixed between Blood and Silver. So you could have, for example, 1 Blood and 2 Silver, or 2 Silver and one Blood.
