27 XP
Sometimes Zagreus likes to have a challenge. He expends effort to put things in motion: he makes promises, brokers deals, dangles the carrot or lashes out with the stick. Truth is, though, his seemingly endless Requiem has left him more than a little lazy. Complacency is king, here, and with this Devotion, Zagreus needn’t put forth all that pesky effort. With his potent tongue, he merely needs to demand what will happen—and the world will conspire to make it happen.
Cost: 3 Vitae
Dice Pool: Resolve + Expression + Dominate
Action: Instant
It is, in a way, a curse. The vampire using this Devotion speaks aloud that which he wishes to happen (“The Prince will be dispatched by his childe,” or “The Third Tradition will be broken three times”), and the warp and weft of fate twists in the loom and works to weave this decree.
Successes gained on this roll each count as one “story element” or “conflict” that manifests to make this happen. For example, four successes on the “Prince will be dispatched by his childe” puts into play four story elements into the game that will lead up to that very occasion occurring. The Storyteller determines these elements, and in this case they might be:
The Prince drops a casual insult regarding his childe during Elysium (1); the Harpies blow that insult way out of proportion to the point where it begins to haunt the childe (2); the childe receives a packet of evidence under his haven door that reveals a number of the Prince’s indiscretions over the last decade (3); when the childe confronts the Prince about this, one or both of them enters frenzy (4).
These elements lead to the childe having to put down the sire—in this case, the Prince. The curse has come true. But the die is not ineluctably cast. Characters may work to undo or prevent these story elements and conflicts, though simply stopping one such point doesn’t necessarily halt the coming event. (It’s like a table—remove one leg, and it may still stand.)
This Devotion has limitations. For one, the decree cannot be bound by a timeframe. The decree may demand that the childe dispatch his sire, but it can’t be made to happen in two nights, two weeks, two years. Now the Devotion puts the story elements into play as soon as they can happen—but this cannot be a fixed timeframe.
Also, the decree cannot rewrite the past. While Zagreus is fond of lying and rewriting the past by dint of nobody knowing the truth but him, he isn’t supernaturally changing what has already come to pass—he’s just telling stories. Here, the Devotion cannot rewrite history; it can only put in motion future events.
Those “marked” by a decree (like the childe or Prince in the above example) may feel as if they’ve been targeted by an unseen hand. Success on a Wits + Occult roll gives them the feeling that someone just walked over their grave. If they possess dots in Auspex, they may add those dots to the roll and success becomes a little more meaningful: now they sense they have been cursed (or blessed) from afar, though they have no more information than that. (An exceptional success may provide clues, though.)