Shadowslayer V1.0

Imaged Version available https://imgur.com/gallery/efiGVHU.

Text-Only Version below.

---

Shadowslayer
Version 1.0
By Savestate

---

Intro:

Suddenly, you are elsewhere. All around is white void, shining from every angle with a radiance brighter and purer than the noonday sun. From beyond your perception, a great serpent vast as the world emerges. Its scales shine mirror-bright as it grins widely down upon you.

Welcome, little mortal. You must be surprised to find yourself here. Whoever stole you away is truly vile. I don’t expect you’ll ever find your way home.

But this will all be much easier if you don’t worry. I know your true destination. In a few minutes, you’ll be off to a place you might know by the name Shadowrun.

It is cyberpunk dystopia, with a kind of pale magic that rises and fades from one era to the next. I think you should just tear the whole system down. I would love to see you try to make something better.

---

Powers:

I can’t keep you here long, but there is time enough to make something more than mortal. You’ll have to decide quick, but I am obliged to offer you choice in how you are empowered.

Take up to three from this section.

Essence Overwhelming
Repeatable.
The simplest of this set, and the most versatile with proper development. Gain an Essence rating of 3 the first time this is taken, increased by 2 for each subsequent purchase. You will automatically develop Charms, a kind of supernatural ability, over time- one per year for each time this was taken.
The Charms you acquire will normally be derived from my predecessor’s own charmset, making you more like that ancient titan. With great effort you may ensure the development of your own designs instead.
By the time you arrive, you will have the appropriate First Excellency, a source of supernatural competency.

Mana Overflowing
It is to my understanding that this world’s levels of ambient mana gradually rise and fall over time. This has led to the collapse of whole civilizations. Many beings simply cannot exist in a world without magic.
You may freely restore the ambient mana of any location to its historical peak, and may then lock it at that level. Walk within a personal shroud of grandest magic, or allow wondrous things to see this world again.

Mortality Enforcement
What must logically result from immortal dragons and amoral corporate activity? When the wealth-concentrating effects of unhindered capitalism have not even old age as a release valve? This might be a solution.
You may attach a shadow of death to any attack you make or weapon you create. Aside from yourself, any being struck by such and that is capable of dying will immediately die. Even machinery may collapse into ruin and rust upon your touch.

Completion
In this world, augmenting the body carries additional cost. A mechanical limb, a simple implant, even well-cultured bioware, detracts from the ability of the soul to recognize its body, from life and magic. If you desire a solution, I can teach you several things. To recreate a sooty ore not known to this world, and those substances needed to refine it. To forge it all into sleek black metal, that can anchor soul firmly to body. To construct devices that guarantee the soul’s connection will never weaken or waver. In time, you may create greater artifacts, though this you must figure out for yourself.

The Unlosing
A simple solution to a simple problem. Your body becomes as durable as a planet, such that killing you is no easier than dismantling the Earth itself. Attacks brought up against you are diminished as if you were vast as a world, and a force resembling gravity pulls your body back into healthy form whenever you do suffer injury. Your lifespan is extended out billions of years, your mind hardened to withstand that great age, and you need very very close to zero sustenance.

Uncrowned Emperor
This world’s society is dominated by ten squabbling megacorporations. I would offer you dominion over two of them. All feelings devoted to these megacorps- fear, loyalty, admiration- are twisted to revolve around you. This offers no legible, documented authority. This has less useful effect on the highest and lowest levels of the organizations. But the bulk of two megacorp’s resources are yours to command, should only you ask.

Gracious Hosts
Civilization can be described as a cycle of seeking wealth and using it to obtain yet more wealth. I could argue that this cycle must end. You may create points of power that continuously conjure duplicates of a specific item, determined during their creation. This takes ten seconds per copy, operates continuously so long as nothing obstructs the point, and can produce any mundane non-living item worth less than one ton of gold. Points maintain their own energy reserves by drawing securely from mortal dreams, an endlessly renewable fuel source.

Gate and Key
Presence. Location. Seperation.
Even a peerless warrior may struggle with these.
I myself deeply loathe an imprisonment.
You may open bridges of arbitrary size from your current position to any location that exists, relative to you, as more than possibility. Whatever passes through a bridge is wrapped in an interaction-membrane, ensuring continued function on the other end no matter how strange the destination. You could escape from your own lucid dream into physical reality, retaining much of your dream-shaping abilities, or physically intrude upon conceptual planes. If you just want to go home, that’s trickier, but I could offer directions.

---

Truth:

Of course, your own strength would serve more reliably.
How much do you have left?

Take up to seven from this section.
Lose two choices for each Power you have taken.

Dross-Shedding Clarity Cut
You undergo a degree of supernatural Honing, increasing the ‘quality’ of your existence. When interacting with others, your power is treated as 25x greater. A bullet you fire won’t move any faster, or carry any more momentum, but could rip through tank armor anyway. Purely passive defenses do not benefit from this effect, but even the most basic active defenses- flexing to harden yourself against a blow- can.
Honed, your abilities escape a small portion of their fundamental limits. Your magic can function at 10% effectiveness in zones of absolute anti-magic, you can see a little bit even in absolute darkness, you can make slightly stronger alloys by virtue of being physically stronger.

Blind Crown Forgery
You become, in effect, a single character with two character sheets.
All of the perks and powers, the action economy, the parameters, the health levels, add directly together. Many attributes scale exponentially, such that ordinary strength can add together with ordinary strength to produce something beyond human limits. Many flaws and afflictions can be suppressed by virtue of existing on only one of your sheets.
Your new character sheet is built according to your desires, similar in ability to an inexperienced shadowrunner. When you train, or learn, or are augmented, your other character sheet also sees improvement. Not identical, but commensurate and controlled, doubling your growth rate.

Enforced Restitution
When you experience significant, meaningful suffering, you accumulate Aggrieve Points. Living like the average inhabitant of this world, you might earn as much as one Aggrieve Point per year.
These may be spent to acquire permanent, compounding, and uncapped enhancements to your existing powers and parameters, such that one point could increase physical strength by 1.2x, or a greater power by some lesser margin. As your ability to endure a form of suffering grows, as you adapt, as less of you is left to be broken, your ability to earn Aggrieve Points correspondingly diminishes. Infinite quantities of physical agony cannot provide infinite fuel for Aggrieve.
This magic is partially atemporal. You may gain Aggrieve Points from suffering undergone before acquiring this power, or even from suffering you have yet to experience, albeit at the cost of inevitability. This can protect your past and guarantee you a future.

Silver Spring
You passively accumulate a liquid resource, Quintessence, which you can store internally in unlimited quantity. Quintessence production directly corresponds to the number of people who care about you, positively or negatively, and to the strength of those feelings. A distant acquaintance might yield one ounce per hour, a friend or enemy more than twenty, your own self regard more than a hundred.
You, or anyone who understands the secret of it, may use Quintessence in the place of ‘pristine earthly materials’ when crafting. The best plausible examples of anything that could be produced from substances available in prehistoric earth with only a handful of simple refining steps. Perfect billets of carbon steel, flawless emeralds the size of your fist, finely distilled chemicals and precursors, plump and juicy haunches of wild meat as good or better than the very best an elite Sixth World agribusiness can produce. A single ounce roughly corresponds to thirty grams of silver, measured in generalized difficulty of attainment.

Items crafted entirely from your Quintessence degrade unnaturally swiftly, but are of masterful quality even if made by unskilled hands, and need neither tools nor infrastructure to construct.

Reverse Osmosis
Cultural osmosis flows backwards, for you. It would take active effort for you to learn the names of important cultural touchstones, let alone adjust your speech patterns. No amount of time or social pressure or trauma can make you a different person if you do not want to change. You can guarantee that when you do change, it is only for the better.
Your own impact on others is amplified in turn. People exposed to your ideas, even at many removes, are influenced as if they were totally immersed in them. Societies that do not actively resist this will fall in line automatically over several generations.

Lying Solipsist Defense
Choose one of Digital or Magical; this is fixed and cannot be changed later. You are utterly immune to phenomena of this kind, and unable to usefully interact with them. Most obviously, in any direct contest against you, your choice provides zero advantage on either side. A warrior decked out in the most advanced cyberware possible might as well be unaugmented, or a dragon might as well be human.
The Digital includes cyberware, big data, artificial intelligence, and networked technology. The Magical includes spirits, spells, sympathetic links, and magical species.

This can weaken or nullify some of your own powers.

Bright Iron Code
You understand the secrets of Profane Runecraft, a teachable magic. By drawing a moderately complex rune upon an object or person, you may bind up some portion of its power and potential and redefine how it is expressed. Simplified, you sacrifice positive qualities to generate an appropriate benefit. You might trade away a mage’s powers to grant them a similar level of technomantic ability, or use half a person’s physical strength and resilience to create a ring of might.
Qualities that have been sacrificed cannot be restored by any means as long as the rune persists. In the latter example, the subject’s strength would always be half what it should be, no matter how it was bolstered. Should the rune be destroyed, the benefits are lost immediately, while whatever was bound into it remains gone. No longer enforced, what was lost might some day be recovered, but this is not made any easier for the involvement of such ruinous magic.

Contrivance
Five times per year, you may contrive a teachable formula to produce some material you desire. You might find a way to use limestone, mud, and sticks to create a metallic substance comparable to steel. These formulas are arbitrary, designed to suit your needs, but remain fixed and unchanging once established, and cannot be duplicated. Once you know how to turn limestone, mud, and sticks into limesteel, you cannot devise a way to turn those same materials into arboricrete.
The degree to which a product may surpass its ingredients is limited, especially when a formula uses fewer than three distinct ingredients. Broadly speaking, you could turn rocks to metal, common metal into electronics, basic electronics into a lesser mithril, but you would realistically need at least nine formulae to produce that shining metal from garbage and scrap.

Troll’s Hand
Your primary manipulator limb counts as the hand of a Troll. Not the kind of Troll found in this world, but a monster known for its artifice. You may bind magic into any sufficiently sturdy, precious, or monstrous item you craft, imbuing it with profound supernatural effects at no extra cost. The potency of what you make scales with all of your crafting skills and with the quality of your craftsmanship, with no upper bound. From day one, you could make cloaks of levitation, decanters of endless water, spell-strengthening foci, and semi-intelligent flying knives. In any task involving your Troll limb, your skill grows thrice as quickly- greater artifacts await.

Chaos Hero Immanence
The idea is, do what you know is right.
Don’t let the dross of law hold you back.
When you do something stupid for the sake of your beliefs.
When you break the rules because you think you know better.
When you try to burn down Omelas.
Accumulate Glory, which may be spent to improve the results of an action. In the immediate sense, turning a failure into a success, a lethal wound into a lesser injury. In the grander sense, to make a policy you implement more beneficial, an implant you install unnaturally powerful, a spell you learn more effective than its cost and complexity should permit.

Bipartite Form
You may safely sever your spirit from your body, controlling the both independently and simultaneously. Each component of yourself has access to your full mental faculties. At will, you may teleport your body to the location of your spirit, or teleport your spirit to the location of your body, bypassing even the mightiest and most subtle barriers. Should either component of yourself be lost or destroyed, you may spend a day to reconstruct body from spirit, or spirit from body. This reconstruction is restorative, eliminating most kinds of wound and affliction. This reconstruction is augmentative, as a strong body builds a strong spirit, and a strong spirit builds a strong body.

Intimate Motive Usurpation
Choose a single person, existant within the world. They are wholly and completely on your side. Mind control and possession is no less capable of effecting them, but even absolute control over their goals and desires cannot effectively turn them against you. The mind beyond the mind, the player behind the character, will do their utmost to serve your ends while paying only lip service to such petty compulsions. Even if they do not know which action will best serve your goals, if you do, they will happen to take the correct path. There is no need for you to explain yourself or your motivations, to synchronize your actions.

---

Shadow of a Shadow:

In avoiding one trap, fall for another.
There should never be a right answer.
It’s traps all the way down.

Spore
Mandatory
You may voluntarily reduce yourself, excising or diminishing portions of your mind and spirit. Willpower, courage, empathy, fear and love, hopes and dreams, cast aside. Nothing is given to you in exchange for this sacrifice, and nothing can compel you to make this sacrifice. Whenever you do earnestly consider reducing yourself, your mind is cleansed of unnatural influence and reinvigorated totally. If everything that makes you ‘you’ is ever stripped away, from what remains will break free a new Primordial, that will toil selflessly towards the creation of infinite miseries.

Take three drawbacks from this section.
Take one drawback less for each Power you have taken.

Empty Night
The universe is expanding, the distance between any two points rising exponentially over time. Now, that expansion of space is accelerating. Twenty years after your arrival, this will reach its peak and stabilize. At that point, the expansion of space will be powerful enough to overcome the gravitational attraction between celestial bodies within a solar system. The Earth will fall away from sun and moon and stars, sheer distance decreasing the light that reaches the Earth by a factor of four each year until the heavens are pitch black and silent.

Nemesis
Four days before you arrive in this world, a shadow of yourself appears. It arrives exactly where you are to arrive, armed with shadows of your own Powers and Truths, similar in broad function but distinct in their particulars. The shadow, your nemesis, has no idea of your existence, no idea that it might have a direct peer in this world. Nevertheless, its goals are exactly the opposite of your own- what you would seek to end, it would seek to create, what you love, it hates. The more fiercely you strive to destroy it, the more fiercely it will strive to preserve itself. It does not scale with you, and as a shadow, its capacity to grow and evolve is strictly inferior to your own, but it instinctively acts in ways that sabotage you, and may well outscale you if you grow complacent.

Open Mirror
On the opposite side of the planet from your own point of arrival, an expanding anomalous zone appears. It will engulf the globe within the year, its radius increasing by dozens of kilometers each day. Within the zone, a person’s reflection may climb out of the mirror and interfere with the real world as a mimic. Normally dependent on the process of reflection- on the presence of their original somewhere visible to a reflective surface- the mimic may steal its original’s ‘realness’ by forcing the original into the reflected world, inverting the relationship between the two. If the mimic then stops being reflected, conceals themselves from mirrored surfaces for even a moment, the original is gone forever and the mimic’s reality made permanent. This is the goal of the reflection zone: the erasure of natural existence to assert its own.
Though mimics are visually identical to their originals, other qualities and behaviours diverge significantly.
A mimic of a mage may be about as powerful, but the forces it wields only look like magic. Where multiple mimics have achieved permanency, they may agglomerate into greater things, drawn forth from their own muddled reflections. The individuality of mimics is an illusion; these extensions of the reflection zone will not hesitate to spend millions of lives forging a single calamitous beast.

Dreambreed
Each time you lose consciousness, a dreaming power emerges and cocoons your body and spirit. Form and apparent nature fluctuate like the uncertain self-perception of a dreamer. In this state, you are sustained and bolstered by the impermanency of dreams. Your reserves of strength do not stay depleted for long, wounds and even terrible afflictions never linger, your abilities function with an illogical effectiveness that says flight is as simple as maintaining your balance. Unconscious, your body and spirit are driven by a chaotic force that knows nothing about the world and does not care what happens after it leaves. After eight hours, the dream recedes and you are awakened, rejuvenated as if you had slept normally.

Evil Finds a Way
Whenever someone does something they themselves consider to be morally wrong, they are subjected to a subtle corrupting influence. It incites further behaviour of the same kind, and greater cooperation with those the subject would consider evil. This tends to self-limit: as those exposed come to care less about morality they trigger the effect less frequently. Expect massively increased crime rates and severe cultural damage, peaking four years after your arrival.

Foreign Element
Choose one of Digital or Magical; this is fixed and cannot be changed later. This phenomenon is poison to you, interfering with your powers wherever they collide. You are unnaturally vulnerable to it, slow to recover from any wound or affliction it brings. Comprehending or harnessing it is a full order of magnitude more difficult, and doing so is costly, lessening your other abilities commensurately.

Imperium
Your antagonist has agents in-world, a cult created retroactively during your insertion. They are fully committed to their task, to seeing you release their master or become its malignant spawn. No power could be given to them, but the cult was taught many secrets. Amongst them your own full set of abilities and numerous opportunities to amass wealth and power within the Sixth World.

---

Alliance:

Escape attempts are predictable.
This one is not unique.
Resources have already been allocated towards containment.
Volunteers are ready for redeployment.

Take one from this section for each Shadow of a Shadow choice you have taken.

Crucible Deterrence Legion
A basic asset meant to be dispersed throughout a territory to slow and make obvious the advance of enemy forces. Composed almost entirely of golems, capable of lying in wait for centuries without instruction or resupply. Numbers over 15,000 individual golems, including suits of animated full plate, humanoid concrete castings, hollow quadrupedal frames made up of sharpened blades, and hundred-ton stone tortoises made up of broken rock. Armed with industrial era weapons systems, including machineguns, unguided rockets, and light artillery, and coordinated using a magical equivalent to radio. Most of the golems are very basic, mentally, highly skilled where they were properly programmed and entirely reprogrammable but incapable of learning on their own- about 300 have the mental faculties of a deeply uncreative human. Includes 16 tripod command units, containing organic command elements and equipped with magical laser weapons and the equipment to fabricate small quantities of concrete, steel, and magical explosives.

The Crucible Authority remains largely intact, and will be able to preserve and exploit the connection between your world and theirs. Their resources are divided many ways, but they will happily provide resupply and combat forces in any trade that does not leave their military weaker overall. They have much more capable forces than these.

Early High Miasmic Soldier
One common soldier from a kingdom that redeveloped High Miasmic infrastructure a few decades ago.
Bolstered by the Miasma in several ways. With a level 20 Soldier Profession, she is approximately as capable as 20 people with otherwise identical ability and equipment in ‘soldier’ situations. This means she has decent odds of taking out twenty modern aircraft with one of her own, or could simultaneously guard every exit of a large building.
Monstrous flesh has been grafted to her body, by now replacing all of her original body with magical structure comparable to mid-range cyberware. As a side-effect, she is immune to most disease, does not need food or water, is highly resistant to extremes of temperature, and can survive and eventually recover from any trauma that leaves her head and torso mostly intact.
Equipped with arms and armor forged from High Steel, a living metal impervious to decay that can regenerate from broken shards. Full plate with steel fiber underlayers, halberd and selectively transparent tower shield, and a selection of javelins.
Trained in the basics of Miasmic Wizardry, she can bind gouging spells to weapons sufficient to penetrate several centimeters of good steel.
Miasma spreads; the proliferation of basic Professions could increase per-capita productivity threefold within two years.

Fifth-Layer Conjuror
A mage of Splintered Elementalism, born with affinity to Light, Water, Earth, Wood, and Metal. His birth is one in 16,807, there are millions like him in his homeland. Capable of opening and closing permanent portals to 60 of the 210 Elemental Shadows, realms dominated by a force of elemental homeostasis. Given fifteen minutes to prepare, he can drop an entire skyscraper into a portal. Without magical protections, elemental homeostasis would cause someone banished to the Realm of Verdant Waters (Water-Wood-Earth) to die in minutes, dissolve entirely into mud and algae within hours.

Conjurors can cause mutation within creatures and materials, carving new pathways for elemental energies to flow down. Aside from immunizing against elemental homeostasis, this serves as a potent defense against elemental assault and a source of substantial benefits based on available energy. The most basic mutation turns elemental power into a sustaining force, such that inhabitants of an agricultural colony in the Realm of Old Growth (Wood-Earth-Water) do not need food, water, or air, do not age or tire, and regenerate rapidly from injury. A conjuror passively draws enough elemental energy to maintain his mutations at maximum output even outside the Elemental Shadows.

The Elemental Shadows are as vast as the universes they orbit, shaped by borrowed gravity; here and now, they represent about sixty planets worth of additional resources and territory. It would be a grand undertaking to properly align the Elemental Shadows to allow new conjurors to be born in this world. However, any child born within an Elemental Shadow is guaranteed to be at least a First-Layer Conjuror, incapable of singlehandedly opening portals but useful in the creation of mutations.

Inferior Magebeast
Hyper-adaptive flesh, given thought and magic. Utterly loyal, by virtue of an enchantment that makes disloyal thought a statistical impossibility. Soul and will hardened into something that will break before changing, highly resistant to spiritual assault.
Wields Dopp, a magic that costs nothing to use and that creates permanent effects as easily as instantaneous. To it, launching a fireball and enchanting a person with the power to launch fireballs is the same amount of effort. Only in one area is this imperfect: the creation of new magic. Every user of Dopp is weaker in it than the person who initiated them into it, and Dopp cannot directly empower or generate foreign magic.
Dopp fares poorly in manipulation, but excels in conceptual creation and destruction. It heals by creating generic life-force, or creating hyper-adaptive flesh, or by creating an illusion of a healthy body and giving that illusion more substance than the original body.
Your own pet magebeast is very weak, and unlikely to grow in the use of Dopp except over many centuries, but can provide considerable quantities of diffuse supernatural power through its enchantments.