New Pacts

In the D&D 3.5 book Complete Arcane introduced the Wu Jen class to 3rd edition. It had appeared as subclass option in 1st edition’s, Oriental Adventures and as a class in 2nd edition introduced in Dragon magazine 229, updating the class from the prior edition.

Ignoring the cultural insensitivities of Oriental Adventures and the class, I want to dig into one of the class features, called Taboos. In summary a Wu Jen must abide by a number of Taboos in order to keep their supernatural powers and if they break the taboo they can not cast spells for the rest of the day.

In His Majesty the Worm, characters who take one of the four Wand Magic traits, gain access to pacts. Making a pact allows a player to more easily cast a spell, and breaking it causes complications.

The pacts listed are:

• Devour the living
• Forego armor
• Forego skins
• Forego weapons
• Forego wood
• Gluttony
• Hide your face
• Self-mortification
• Self-mutilation
• Silence
• Verity

Each of these causes problems for the player, for example Verity means you can’t tell a lie, a common thing for a silver tongued sorcerer. Looking back at the list of Taboos there are some interesting ones to draw on:

• Must make a daily offering (such as food, flowers, or incense) to one or many spirit powers.
  • This means the adventurer must pack extra provisions, and spend time making the offering during the camping phase.
• Cannot bathe.
  • Hello disease!
• Cannot touch a dead body.
  • Hard to loot the dead if you can’t touch them, of course you could use your limited magical resources to do it or trust your compatriots to handle your share. What if we take this further and say you can’t use items from the dead?!
• Cannot wear a certain color.
  • This only gets interesting if sumptuary laws, laws banning or restricting certain “luxuries” used to enforce social hierarchies, are both a thing in the setting and important enough that an adventurer might think twice about violating.
• Cannot light a fire.
  • Gets tricky when you have to ask your fellow adventures to light your touch, or maybe you’re willing to resort to Blood Flame

In Exalted Deeds there were the Vow of __ feats, Vow of Abstinence, Chastity, Nonviolence, Peace, Obedience, Poverty, and Purity.

Of these some are immediately interesting, again in the meaning of presenting painful choices to players.

• Abstinence could be depending on from what? If you have two Magic of Talents, abstaining from one would be quite the choice.
• Nonviolence, the players are adventures, while not all situations can or should be resolved with violence, having to step back when the swords comes out is going to led to some interesting party dynamics.
  • Same can be said about a Vow of Peace.
• Obedience could work depending on to who or what you are obedient, my mind immediately goes to one of the many spirits of The Below .
• Poverty, now this is perhaps the best! The whole reason you’re down in The Below is to gain wealth after all, right? Even if you’re foolish enough to venture down without gold in mind, many activities The City require coin.

Putting it all together:

New Pacts, that offer painful choices.

1. Offering

You must make a daily offering to a spirit or deity, it can be:

• Offering of food
  • 1 ration
• Offering of alcohol
  • 1 bottle of something passable, none of this cheap adventurer swill!
• Offering of something delicate
  • Flowers, ornate paper cranes, etc. The Below isn’t kind to delicate things.

2. Cannot bathe

You can not bathe, you can not spread the charges used to cure a stage, of an affliction related to disease or infection, over multiple camp phases.

• Not my best wording, but it gets the idea across… I hope.

3. Cannot touch a dead body.

Just what it says, you can not physically touch a dead body.

4. Cannot/Must wear a certain fashion.

You cannot or must wear a specific fashion, be it a color, pattern, or style of clothing. This fashion MUST bring you into conflict with social norms in a meaningful way.

• This is vague and requires a lot more GM + Player communication than the others.

5. Cannot light a fire

You can not light a fire, be it physically or via magic. This included striking a spark.

6. Abstinence from ____

Pick something of meaningful and of value, be it a path, a talent, going cold turkey etc.

• This is vague and weaker than the others, but with the right group and roleplaying it could be great.

7. Nonviolence

You can not cause physical harm to another through your direct action.

8. Obedience

Your will is not your own, and you must follow the commands of another. Who are they? Why have you agreed to this?

9. Poverty

You may not own anything of value beyond your archwood wand and precious few spell components, rags, and cheap food are your lot.

Is any of this needed?

er… no? probably not.

The pacts as writen cover a wide swath of possibilities, and leave plenty of room for more. With that said, more options are always nice so long as they do not, a. overwhelm or b. put a stop to creativity.

My hope is that in adding these, the players at my table and myself will think of more and weirder ones. Really I should have a list of ones tied more directly to the setting… and on that note I’m off to read more about sumptuary laws and medieval hats!