Underlying Arcs for High-Level Play

There is much of the dark divine madness. What of the light?

—

You have been adventuring for some time. 

        What is revealed about you?

d20

1 You are monster-adjacent; your mother was mothic, magnetically-entrapped electricity immanentized as information in text and pictures. You gradually manifest related text and powers (ie moth wings/eyes/metabolism, you become magnetically-entrapped electricity with a mutable form (ie capable of taking human shape and huge)). Purpose of your mother’s crossbreeding with humans: gathering information/energy by consuming offspring at a ripe age, simple lust fulfilled by perverse interaction, seed of rebirth like a dragonfly’s shell

2 Actually not a human. You appear to be a human and were gestated in a human’s uterus but are technically a different species for a variety of reasons, and as a result your neurology and physical processes begin to diverge as you are exposed to extreme environmental stressors. Your humanlike form is like a tadpole for what will come.

3 You are a sage from the distant imperial past or the savant-educated future; mind rewritten for safe transport. Capable of etching energetic-manipulation engines into surfaces, like computer programs that affect realspace around them. You have many such latent etchings in the reverse-surface of your skin

4 You are some kind of immanentized spirit, entity, ghost; you may periodically become ethereal (and death-wail with grief etc), and may shade into the spirit realm to deal with ongoing magical effects a la Shadowrun hacking

5 There is an interest in your birth by an exocosmic divinity or extragalactic intelligence because you are some kind of deity projected into this world with your memory compressed for transport or safekeeping, and it is now beginning to unpack itself. You have a sort of save game power; place a savepoint in spacetime and you have 2 minutes until calcification of quantum superposition prevents you from restoring to your point without fracturing or corrupting existence at both your savepoint and the point of departure. Be warned: this can happen anyway.

6 You are meant as the interface for some kind of stone battlemech or other great project (flying submarine / air submarine, coral/kelp superstructure, a class of underworld creature waiting for you to find them) like a tager from CthulhuTech. You can find your ultimate exoskeleton where it waits beneath the earth or stands exocosmically entrapped, and in the meantime you can begin to develop physical elements that microreplicate the power you may one day assume 

7 You are an entity that was immanentized or exiled into human form by rivals or peacekeepers; this was the best they could do, as they were incapable of killing you, and you are now bleeding back into existence and are still bleeding through, giving you purchase on both existential paradigms.

As such, your sense data can be used to build a hypothetical but physical exocosmic representational space where postulates can be tried; it’s like a demiplane where things you have encountered can be generated and experimented with, people spoken to, but nothing can leave and is locked away from the timespace continuum; developments in the meta-reality are not reflected in the dreamspace until you encounter them again.

In short, elements of your experience can be brought together and they can be questioned, dissected, observed, and their interactions can be ascertained.

8 No secret; the PC can be the founder of a lineage rather than its inheritor

9 You are some kind of area-manipulation GUI for a demiurge, the way a level editor in a video game might use a character as a paintbrush for the player to work through; the meta-functionality has lapsed or is not being paid attention to, and you begin to be able to access the functions attached to you. 

Existential Abolitionism, an thought among certain entities; stop the arbitrary possession of humans, which in the case of area-manipulation GUIs renders their consciousness inert. An entity steps in and severs your ties to that demiurge, or makes it seem like you’re corrupted and unsuited for use 

This GUI takes careful focus for a PC to take control of and work through, or some take focus, others emotion, others desire, others mere intent (but intent is the marker of a highly developed connection to the underlying state); others become facts of biology with their own rules.

10 You are a registry for souls; either a kind of refugee system or a natural web that catches them. Their powers can manifest, or the PC can make the powers function so as not to steal the player’s thunder. For very social roleplayers the process can be more conversational.

Screaming soul, battle power, you can have a soul that inhabits you possess someone else as your ally (but not directly under your control). Must remain near you or perish

11 You are a blood disease with utility effects; a giving disease. Your human form is incidental and the circumstances of its acquisition are foggy to you. In the long term you are also a superweapon and existential suicide time bomb, you will unleash havoc on this existence in increasingly severe forms as the weapon charges up, even if you die; it will be disseminated from marked atoms, thus blowing you to smithereens or dissolving you in magma isn’t necessarily a great idea, as you will simply be disseminated more broadly without defusing the weapon

12 You can copy and append occult/animal systems to your own existence in an energetic format; for example, electromagnetically replicating a jumping spider’s hemolymph hydraulic system in your legs (or anywhere, really), or replicating an ant ecosystem with tiny nuclear motes and your heart as the queen (watch for spreading), or modeling the world machine as an electroetheric orrery around your heart, allowing you to plug into latent occult structures and ancient megaprojects like a universal lockpick and cardiac electrode. You cannot, however, easily remove these structures, and they may begin to interact in unexpected ways. 

13 You are descended from some kind of concept; pain, rust, entropy, eros. This does not necessarily mean that these concepts are entities with a metaphysical link between instances; chances are you are the product of xenocosmogonic manipulation, as in you were blended with the meta-traits of some phenomenon observable in this cosmos by outside forces. The effects of your phenomenological origin will begin to reify in and/or through your physical body or the dimensions of your consciousness.

14 You are a supergenius who previously had constricted oxygen flow; when this is resolved you begin to discover new mental pathways and qualify for the harry potter school in the merc contract generator through mathematical savantry (theoretical, not yet applied)

15 You are a xenostygian prince produced as part of an occult experiment or xeno/neobiological breeding program, then cast out due to prodigy/oracle that you would become a prophesized/hypothesized prophet, redeemer and destroyer. Some in your true domain would want an outsider like you to come home, others do not. You have special extended family and a forgotten alliance

16 You are a reservoir for a universal energy source, it glows like a firefly with your emotions and your blood gives power to anything

17 You are a psychic or have some other channeled warping or concentration of forces developed due to a confluence of such forces at your conception; perhaps you control this through focal attunement disruptable by distactions, or you are something like a D&D sorcerer where you can entrap and apply existential forces empirically derived in formulaic constructions which you learn and then apply (to your exhaustion, starvation, or Vancian memory-erasure so that forms must be rediscovered or reintuited)

18 You are a deity-demigod made involuntarily of the stuff of the divine, for example the fusion beams of the Burning Eye. Your true form manifests when you encounter elements of your parent’s portfolio

19 You are a fey; from a slightly alternate dimension, slightly underlying the strata you know, and your people (and their rivals) begin to speak to you and invite you and your friends onto their secret paths and into their secret courts

20 You stole your powers from an entity but lost your connection with that time or reality. You begin to make them your own, metabolizing them, and in the process you attract the attention of the entity’s rivals and lovers who treat you as if you were the entity itself

        What is the catalyst for this revelation?

d30

1 Fusion disintegration by exocosmic pretender followed by quick reintegration due to your body’s hitherto-unknown atomic magnetism

2 Occult possession

3 Exposure to extreme mutagenic agent

4 Leukemia

5 Sacrificed, the light of your bones poured as milk into a chrysalis, twiceborn

6 Resuscitated after heart stoppage

7 Lightning strike

8 Spiritplane quest

9 Seaplane crash

10 Lost in the green realm or outer highway

11 Nervous breakdown

12 TBI

13 TMI

14 Immolation, previous body burnt away

15 Wake up gestating in chrysalis

16 Discovery of an obligation to cosmic fire

17 Devoured by animal

18 Sacrifice yourself to yourself 

19 Water filled with lungs

20 Born of your parents, born in death, born in fire, and born the fourth time, your nature then becoming clear 

21 Cathartic glossolalia after existential dysphoria

22 Eyeless hermit-sage in impossible domicile reveals the truth

23 Ground crumbles into pit of gamy black liquid

24 Lost underground, wander into a cavern that serves as an earth elemental’s brain

25 Seem to wake up in home, actually in exocosmically-handled cryptostygian intelligence blacksite, megadosed with hormonal neuroticizer and debriefed about your strange activities

26 Accidentally sealed in a brazen maiden, layer of retroparticles carrying the seed of your transformation seared into you at the atomic level

27 Blessed by a deity, struck by wide angle sanctification beam

28 Choke on something, have strangulated vision of an angel ramming a sword hilt-first down your throat and into your heart 

29 Match pattern with echoes from previous cosmos, see forms and materials that are possible given our physics but totally orthogonal to any known arrangements, see patterns that are dormant in your body but ready to spring into previous arrangements

30 Lose virginity

What adventure could be undertaken to awaken your potential?

d8

1 Soak in the vitiating energy of an underworld energy stream pretending to be ore but is actually tendril of otherworldly force sinking into this world like the claw of a satisfied cat or something erotic

2 Ascertain whereabouts of true parentage and enact reunion in a form acceptable/recognizable to them

3 Destroy cosmic chains linking your condition to the causality of disaster; free yourself and local spacetime by disrupting prearranged plans of an only partially-ascertainable provenance

4 Find catalytic entity who can awaken full potential for a price (resources, sacrifice, conduct that is anti-human or pro-human)

5 Assassinate cosmic monitor controlling your condition on behalf of pseudointelligent forces so physically and psychologically distant that they could not perceive you without intermediation

6 Destroy self in a particular way at a particular time to as to hoodwink and slip perceivers that may be degrading, speculating on or keeping in check the material of your underlying nature

7 Must undergo extreme protracted stressor to activate relevant epigenetic triggers; intense warfare, underworld sojourn, psychogonic spirit-quest

8 Usurp cryptostygian megaproject, a nightmare immanentizer underlying a city-state (which was built as their laboratory, anyway), warping local space to the dimensions of the horrors of your consciousness and dealing with the outcomes until you can find the dream-machine lucidifier at the core operated by a kind of faceless blue-smoke djinn