Cross Thy Blades!

After the Rift tore through reality, it permanently altered every living thing on the planet. The most affected were those in North America, but even those in six other continents became connected to it. Allowing people to learn magic.

Within the United States the Heart of the Rift still beats, you can hear. Magic is the art of tapping into the veins of the rift that have spread throughout the world. Using the life force or blood of these veins it allows a mage to alter reality. This life force is often called Mana. With it those that practice magic can summon fire, talk to the dead, enhance their abilities, commune with nature, and all other manner of tricks.

Those that practice this are called many things. All of which are valid. Mage, wizard, sorcerer, witch, warlock, druid, thaumaturge. They're all flavors of the same basic principle. And all are feared for their abilities.

Granted the way that these abilities are granted are not always the same. Some are born with innate magical abilities, while others have to spend years studying the basics, and some are given the abilities by some form of higher power such as a spirit or god.

Psionics on the other hand are harder to define.

Some mages state that Psionics is just another expression of this principle. This will more often than not make an actual psychic mad. Especially if that psychic practices both magic and psionics. Because they're not.

No one is entirely sure what psionics actually is or how it functions beneath the surface. But all psychics are connected to the same field of energy that is seperated from the Heart. Potentially the Brain of whatever the Heart belongs to. In doing so they can connect their minds to the physical world and the minds of others. Allowing them to lift objects with their minds, see into the past, read minds, manipulate kinetic energy, and much more.

Upon connecting to this energy their eyes glow in range of colors, each determined by the individual psychic. No two blues are the same. One study in Manhattan determined it wasn't just their eyes that glowed. Eyes were the only organ that could be seen. Their entire nervous system and even brain would light up an entire room. Whereas none such thing would happen to a mage.

Though both types of practitioners are sought after as mercenaries and bodyguards. The Warlords of the Heartland will hand over plenty of coin to have a regiment of Mages or Psychics in their armies.

That could potentially be you.

Hello again! If you were wondering why this blog might have been so semi-dead for so long, it’s because I’ve been working on a particularly gigantic update to Duels on top of the still unfinished narrative systems. Duels have been updated to version 0.5. More information/summary of changes under the cut.

Learned how to use the Heading system on google docs after an embarrassing amount of time without knowing about it, you can click through and skim the rules much faster now

Various editing passes changing the grammar/formatting, especially under Armor

Added Escape and the Chase

Added Tension

Added Environment Generation (Unfinished, use your imagination for table results until I get that bit ready)

Bleed now only begins ticking up each round after reaching Bleed 2