Sunday, 20 November 2016

Sister Nina, Haunted Nun


Sister Nina leads primarily a solitary life at a church. Ever since she was young, she's been a spiritual nexus, something that the spirits of the dead are attracted to. Sister Nina can't see them, but she can hear them, and it's worse when she sleeps. Sometimes she hears the voices of angels or demons, but mostly it's the unhappy dead. Living on hallowed ground helps, but not by that much. To counter the effects of her curse, Sister Nina was taught two of the Seven Bells of Pharasma: the Bell of Disruption and the Bell of Compulsion, to dismiss and control spirits. Her skills have caught the eye of The Order of the Broken Bell (coincidence?), an organization that deals in putting down hauntings, curses and monster infestations, who use her on a freelance basis. Sister Nina is a meek soul and is generally no good in the situations that require force of personality or combat, but that's what Katya, Bogdan and Dr Henkelberger are good for.

Nina's the character I'm playing in Ben's latest campaign. It takes place in the same world as the campaign where I played Renata in. That particular campaign was played using the Pathfinder system, but for this campaign we're experimenting with Fate, which is a good deal more streamlined. I'm always interested in trying new systems, though I always found it a bit odd looking through the Fate book because where are the pages and pages of lists I need those lists. It's a system where your character is defined by a group of simple sentences which are quite open to interpretation. I like it in some ways, how much faster and looser it is than the other RPGs I've made and how it doesn't punish failure -- and that failure can be a reward sometimes. The looseness can be problematic sometimes though, since in more rule-heavy systems it's easier to look up what you can and can't do.

Nina ended up being a little like the kid from The Sixth Sense if he could use the bells from Garth Nix's Old Kingdom series. If we'd been playing Pathfinder she probably would've been an Oracle, or maybe a Spiritualist from the Occult Adventures rulebook.

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3 comments:

  1. Why hasn't your compatriot posted since May? Are they okay?

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    1. He's fine, just busy on lots of other things so he doesn't often have time for Dungeons & Drawings anymore. He does something for the blog when inspiration strikes him hard enough to rouse him from his other projects.

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  2. I'm personally a big fan of Fate, though it's certainly not perfect. Its flexibility and relative simplicity make it a great choice for one-shots or short campaigns in many different settings, particularly because it's so easy to build extra mechanics on top of it. The main downside is that combat tends to get boring fairly quickly, unless you make extra effort to make each combat radically different.

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