Gifts of Death

Alignment Trait: Primal Urge (Death Crow Morrigans)

Cold Embrace

With this Facet, the shifter embraces the chill of the grave to still the beat of her heart. Her flesh grows cold. To all intents and purposes, she appears dead.

• Cost: 1 Essence
• Action: Instant (Stamina + Medicine + Alignment Trait)
• Duration: 1 hour per success

Roll Results

• Dramatic Failure: The shifter brings herself too close to death, and suffers one point of aggravated damage.
• Failure: The shifter fails to still her body’s vital signs.
• Success: The shifter successfully stills her body’s vital signs. She appears to be freshly dead, displaying no pulse or respiration, and her natural regeneration ceases for the duration. Wounds clot and the body displays all the signs of being a corpse. A shifter can act while affected by Cold Embrace. Any being with the ability to detect pulse and vital signs will likely interpret her as being an undead creature, perhaps a vampire or other revenant. Acting while the spark of life has been quenched imposes a penalty on all actions equal to (5 – Alignment Trait).
• Exceptional Success: The shifter’s morbid flesh also becomes more resilient, reducing all damage she suffers by one.

Barghest

Merely being dead is not enough to save prey from the hunt.

• Cost: None
• Action: Innate
• Duration: Permanent

The shifter can perceive ghosts and other disembodied undead or death-infused beings in Twilight. While in non-human forms, she is able to attack such Twilight beings and damage them by spending 1 Essence per scene. She adds her Alignment Trait to Perception and Empathy dice pools against undead of any kind and, if she damages a corporeal undead while in the above forms, she may reflexively spend 1 Essence to drain it of a single Willpower point. Prey with no Willpower points remaining suffer two additional points of lethal damage instead.

Memento Mori

Life is fleeting. Hold on tight to what matters right now, the burning ties of life and blood that make up the pack.

• Cost: 1 Essence
• Action: Reflexive
• Duration: 1 scene

For the Gift’s duration, the shifter is aware of exactly how much damage her packmates have suffered and can, as a Reflexive action, transfer wounds onto herself. Each turn, she may absorb up to her Alignment Trait in points of bashing or lethal damage from packmates who she can perceive, or a single point of aggravated damage. The wounds immediately open up on her own body, and it is quite possible for a foolish or desperate shifter to kill herself in this way.

Bone Gnaw

Crack the bone, eat the marrow, and chew the splintered fragments down. There’s power to be had there.

• Cost: 1 Essence
• Action: Instant
• Duration: Instant

By devouring or gnawing on human or shifter bones, the shifter can use this Gift to gain one of the following benefits. It doesn’t matter how old the bone is, but it must be relatively intact, and it is consumed or destroyed in the process.

• Basic knowledge of the dead: name, age, sex, if he was ill or poisoned or drugged when he died, the broadest strokes of his life. The shifter also becomes aware of the rough time and date of his death, although the older the bones the more vague it gets.
• Secret: A single secret or piece of knowledge that the dead deemed important in life. This requires the shifter to succeed at a Presence + Empathy + Purity roll to discern a specific piece of desired information. If the dead left a ghost and it is present, it may contest this roll with its Resistance.
• Skill: The shifter may temporarily gain one dot in the highest Skill possessed by the dead, lasting for one scene.

Eyes of the Dead

The last moments of life reflect in the eyes of the dead.

• Cost: 1 Essence
• Action: Instant (Wits + Occult + Alignment Trait)

Shifters can use this Gift on any remains — human or otherwise — that still possess eyes. The eyes do not need to be totally intact, but they must be present. The state of the rest of the corpse is irrelevant. The shifter gains a +2 bonus to the roll if she actually consumes the eyes.

Roll Results

• Dramatic Failure: The shifter is overwhelmed with the cold touch of death and gains the Ban Condition. She cannot look directly into the eyes of another for the Condition’s duration.
• Failure: The Gift fails.
• Success: The shifter gains a vision of the last thing the victim saw before he died in clear detail. She also gets an impression of what he was feeling at the time (pain, fear, confusion etc.). If she sees any people in the image, she gets a sense of how the victim felt about that person in general and the person’s name, if the victim knew it.
• Exceptional Success: The shifter gains the victim’s memories leading up to his death, imparting a vision of the shifters’s Alignment Trait in minutes’ length.