Quick hack based on the amazing Straits of Anian blog:
Battle Scars
Sometimes you lose more than just your flesh and blood.
Any time you’d normally take a debility you instead choose one:
Language You can no longer speak language, nor can you read or write. You may still moan & holler unintelligibly if desired.
Civilization You can no longer use tools or weapons and must perform all actions directly, with your body.
Skill You lose a move of your choice.
Passion You become depressed and lethargic, unable to perform any significant actions not in response to a direct threat, immediate danger, or basic survival.
Humanity You becomes perceptibly but indescribably inhuman, reducing you Charisma score to 3 (Cha -3). Animals growl or otherwise act hostile in your presence, and hirelings will not follow them. Even old friends may turn against you.
Each can be marked only once. If you’d mark a debility but have none remaining, you are no longer alive. Your body may still move about, but there is no spirit in it.
Mark of Death
Nearing death always leaves you changed.
Whenever your total damage taken is greater than your Constitution score, you take a debility.
Note that this hack totally messes with the Paladin, because Bloody Aegis will be much less useful.
Inspired by http://straitsofanian.blogspot.com/2014/10/we-are-eaten-forever.html
Anthony Picaro ?
soul chewing spirits! I like it. As for the hack, I don’t think you need to change a player’s CHA, it can be all in the fiction.
Yeah, Anthony is awesome.
Cool. The question then is how the effect might be removed.
Some spirit thieves are collectors, and becoming whole again might mean tracking down the creature that stole from you and taking it back by force or bargaining or otherwise.
Others simply eat them, and naturally the only solution is to eat their ghost right back.
Some souls when removed flee into the wilderness, often making it all the way to the lands of the dead, and getting them back means hiring a medium to travel there and find them amidst the ghosts of the lost.
Anthony Picaro Very nice. Also, have you noticed that when your avatar is displayed small it looks like a crazy guy with a dark moustache?
That is also exactly how I look from far away.
😳
And up close.
Commenting to save
Dang, loosing your passion sounds like the worse thing that could possibly happen to your character 🙁
I can’t imagine why anyone would pick that choice unless they didn’t have any others left.
Or is just a tweaked version if every D&D character I’ve ever played.
Doctor Starky, sure, that’s the point. It’s like Marks in Night Witches: the first few choices are easy, some are even positive. Then all the good things are gone and you’re in trouble.
It is very interesting to me that Passion would be the most debilitating in this context whereas Skill was in my opinion by far the worst in the original OD&Dish context. (Though a big part of the difference is that Dungeon World has a more mechanically universal but also more discrete approach to character capabilities than OD&D does.)
Yeah, Anthony Picaro, I kind of gave Skill a pass here. I like your version better, but you’re right, the same hung just doesn’t quite come across.