#ceofhid

To cultivate brí requires these things:

Time; to meditate, to train, to travel, to practice, to rest.

Training; mentorship, study of texts, conversation and debate with peers, sparring, duels, Pattern-beast hunts, form drills.

Materials; brí is in all things, and in some things more thickly flavoured. The silver brí of life is in all trees, but one would need to somehow eat many trees to make use of it. Rarer materials like tears of a selkie, the hair of a púca, or the venom of a manticore are more potent. Alchemists can also refine materials to increase their efficacy, and they charge accordingly.

For this reason even though anyone can potentially cultivate their brí, only a rare few have the opportunity. For the most part, the easiest way is initiation into a High Temple, who are always scouting for potential among imperial youth.

Attaining the first level of Alignment with your Pattern typically requires intentional, consistent work for a year and a day. Meditating, practicing form drills, studying manuals or scripture, following the examples of heroes or gods associated with the Pattern you've chosen. If you can get them, consuming refined medicines of Pattern-resonant materials.

And after a year and day - sometimes on that last day, sometimes a few days later - your bri awakens. Mechanically, you receive one bua and increase your Alignment by 1.

Being an initiate to a sect makes this easier, and you receive an additional bua taught by your sect.

Some people also awaken their bri through grace - action without action, a natural personal alignment catalysed by some sublime moment. It's rare, though. It's also rumoured that exposure to thick bri can awaken one's own bri, like catching the fallout from powerful bua or a close encounter with a Pattern-beast.

You learn new buanna with the Ceofhid tag through practice and contemplation. You can learn any bua of your Pattern from a teacher who already knows it as long as you meet the Alignment requirements. A teacher may refuse to teach if you're not in their sect.

Alignment 2 takes six months minimum, generally speaking. You must act on one of your Pattern's Virtues in a situation that could inconvenience you, and meet one criterion in that time:

Consume a resonant material of grade 3 or above.

Encounter a Pattern-beast

Win or lose a duel with a cultivator of your Pattern

Win or lose a duel with a cultivator of a distaff Pattern

Meditate in a locus of your Pattern, a sacred site.

Learn and use 4 buanna

Each time you invoke a Ruin, one of these you've already done is negated and must be repeated.

Alignment 3 often takes around one year, and you must lose a friendly duel to a cultivator of your Pattern at higher alignment, and meet one of these criteria in that time:

Consume a resonant material of grade 4 or above.

Hunt, commune with, or protect a Pattern-beast

Win or lose a duel with a cultivator of your Pattern

Win or lose a duel with a cultivator of a distaff Pattern

Meditate in a locus of your Pattern, a sacred site.

Construct and use a combo

Alignment 4 also takes at least one year and often two. You must win a fight with someone of equal or greater alignment and meet two of the above criteria.

Alignment 5 takes two years, you must consume a resonsant material of grade 6 or above, and you must meet three of the above criteria.

Alright, this is gonna be rough. Just feeling out the design space a bit. I anticipate buanna lists will end up asymmetric and we'll have to live with that. I'm open to idea.

For reference, the purest invocation of the Pattern (which is the to say, the nearest to true understanding a human can achieve, not mediated through a sect philosophy) is:

Lasair Órga - THE PATTERN OF THE GOLDEN FLAME Auspicious Attribute: Bearing Inauspicious Attribute: Guile

Example Sects: Mendicant Knighthood, Ashwalkers, Tinnidhe High Temple

Sing, Dragon-Star, of the righteous woman’s wrath; beset on all sides by iniquity and tyranny, that she in furious anger is driven to wield the axe. Sing, Dragon-Star, of the world aflame; all burnt away and made new again. Sing, Dragon-Star, of the one-within-all; of the many who raise fist before throne, though the heavens may fall.

Virtues:

Punish the wicked

Destroy the tyrant

Clear the dead

Make way for growth

Ruins:

Accept revenge before justice

Exercise cruelty in defiance of prudence

Spend lives not your own

Refuse action

HEARTHLIGHT Internal Bua Golden Flame, Ceofhid, Always-On, Aura, Aligned

Before palace, castle, or house, there is the campfire. The heart of home, where bone and spirit are warmed, and the dark kept at bay. The fire of your virtue burns supernal and extends beyond your frame; to ward, to burn.

But be mindful, acolyte – the fire does not know your heart. The fire does not know man from monster. Who belongs within the circle of the campfire’s light, and who without, is a choice someone must make.

Your Thresholds x2 determine the radius of this effect in meters

For each rank of Alignment, choose one, or increase the power of the effect by 1.

Allies treat the Difficulty of Courage Tests as one step lower.

Allies can ignore one Wound.

Abominations treat the Difficulty of all actions as one step higher.

Stealth effects on Abominations are negated.   

When you take this bua, choose who you call Abomination. You may accept imperial law, your sect's designation, or the custom of your home culture. You can also choose a category of being you like - nothing wrong with putting the Abomination tag on a imperial soldiers.

SURGE OF FLAME External Bua Golden Flame, Ceofhid, One-Turn, Reflex Cost.

The flame burns within, and so you may turn it outward. On activation, conjure flame in your hand or around your body. The duration is equal to your Thresholds in turns, and the damage potential is equal to your Alignment x2. Once away from your body, the flame becomes mundane. You may sacrifice 2 Combat Pool to activate this reflexively. Once conjured, you have to do something with the flame - either integrate into an attack, technique, or throw it as a Ranged Attack.

FIRE, YIELD External Bua Golden Flame, Ceofhid, Instant Extinguish mundane flames with a gesture, at a range equal to your Thresholds x2. For more intense fires this might take a few tries, as your Alignment is used to counteract the Size and Intensity

STEEL BETRAYS External Bua Golden Flame, Ceofhid, Instant, Reflex Cost At a touch, heat something. Typically used to defeat imperial armour, often non-lethally. Alignment 1: If you heat a weapon, the wielder must roll Willpower vs. 9 not to drop in shock. If you heat armour, apply a distraction penalty of 1 to their next action.

Alignment 2: If you heat a weapon, the wielder must roll Willpower vs. 10 not to drop it. If you heat apply a distraction penalty of 1 to their next two actions.

Alignment 3: If you heat a weapon, the wielder takes 1 Condition damage and must roll Willpower vs. 11 not to drop the weapon. If you heat armour, the target target suffers a 1 die distraction penalty for the rest of the Round. If you can do this two Rounds in a row, they gain 1 Exhaustion. Alignment 4: If you heat a weapon, the wielder takes 2 Condition damage and must roll Willpower vs. 11 not to drop the weapon, and if they continue holding it they take 1 Condition damage for the next two rounds, and suffer -3 dice on all actions with that hand. If you heat armour, the target suffers a 2 die distraction penalty for the rest of the Round and immediately gains 1 Exhaustion.

Alignment 5: If you heat a weapon, the wielder takes 4 Condition damage and must roll Willpower vs. 11 not to drop the weapon, and if they continue holding it the hand is treated as destroyed. Any final attack they make before all the meat peels off it is at -5. If you heat armour, the target takes 2 Condition damage, gains the Heatstroke Ailment (see Sickness & Trauma page xx) and the Soak value of the armour decreases by 1

Alignment 6: If anyone is still fighting while holding molten steel, or bathing in it, this was probably not the right bua.

EQUILIBRIUS FLAME Internal Bua Golden Flame, Ceofhid, Sustained

While active, your character cannot suffer Heatstroke or Hypothermia and ignores weather modifiers related to temperature.

PURIFYING BODY FURNACE Internal Bua Golden Flame, Ceofhid, Sustained While active, reduce the intensity of any Poisons in your body by your Alignment. At Alignment 4, this can also be applied to Curses, Corrosions, and The Blood.

BURNING INTENSITY Internal Bua Golden Flame, Ceofhid, One-Turn Your attention is terrifying, or captivating. Your words are impossible to ignore. When making a Persuade action against a single interlocutor, use this bua to add your Alignment in bonus dice. You can also use this bua to negate the Tack Change effect of failing a Persuade roll. Virtue: Convince someone of a just cause Ruin: Lie

WORDS LIKE WILDFIRE Internal Bua Golden Flame, Ceofhid, One-Turn When you speak truth, people share it. When you raise an axe against the wicked, gazes turn to face it. When you give a Speech that defines a goal, even somewhat vaguely, this bua grants your Alignment in bonus dice. Success spreads; anyone in the crowd at the time will feel compelled to convince on other person of your argument. At Alignment 3, everyone who heard the speech counts their Willpower as +1 if they act against the target of your ire. Virtue: Convince the crowd of a just cause Ruin: Lie

A THOUSAND BURNING TREES External Bua Golden Flame, Ceofhid, Sustained This bua must be used when you fight alongside allies. As long as you remain alongside your allies, each ally counts their Willpower as 1 higher for each member of the group.

BESTOW THE FLAME External Bua Golden Flame, Ceofhid, Sustained Give allies the benefit of your flames to carry into battle. Targeted ally group adds your Alignment to Willpower rolls.

BRIGHT EMBER Internal Bua Golden Flame Ceofhid, Sustained. You cannot fall here. You must not fall here. There is too much left to be done. Negate Wound Penalties up to your Thresholds, and add Alignment to Willpower rolls to keep fighting when you're badly injured.

UNBURNT Internal Bua Golden Flame, Ashwalker, Sustained

How burns the flame? The fury of your inner fire dwarfs all others. While active, you cannot be harmed by mundane flames of an Intensity equal to your Alignment, and reduce the damage anything greater by your Alignment. You also double Alignment value when resisting the flames of other Pattern buanna.

CAUTERIZE External Bua Golden Flame, Mendicant Knighthood, Instant Deal 1 Condition damage to a wounded target, then multiply their Natural Recovery by your Alignment.

MOLTEN EDGE External Bua Requires an edged, Attumed weapon. Golden Flame, Mendicant Knighthood, Attuned, Sustained Superheat the edge of an attuned weapon, adding your Alignment in Penetration to all attacks.

Also called The Path of Nights Neverending.

There are three ways to begin the Gloaming Path, the twilit way between the World Under Sun and the World Without Sun.

The first is a terrible act of love and grief; a Leaden Skull cultivator searches the World Without Sun for your ghost, and takes it back to your corpse. With an infusion of deathly bri, they rejoin spirit and body. Without the harmony of body, spirit, mind, and bri together, the process is traumatic and laboured. The bri floods the bones and forces them to fill the corpse with blood, then the bri lives in the blood as the most potent medium in the corpse. It anchors the spirit to the flesh and provides animation. This fresh vampire is driven to psychotic disassociation by the uneven joining of body and spirit, the wrench of passing from one world to the other, the improper configuration of bri in the blood instead of holistically suffusing the body.

Many slay their reviver in a frenzy of pain, hunger, and confusion. It can takes days, and many deaths, for the vampire to come back to themselves.

The second way is in service to a mature vampire, a master-student relationship that forms a number of highly secret sects. If one grows sufficiently in power, one can impose their will on the blood-which-knows. Whether the master treats this as graduation or betrayal varies.

The third and rarest way is intentional cultivation. To infuse your blood with your own bri through sensuous indulgence. Food, drink, sex, violence, sensory excession - combine these with meditative techniques and one can simply become a vampire, their bri thickest in their blood. The blood-which-knows.

Some believe vampires need to drink blood to live, but this is not strictly true. Until they master their bloodborne bri, they need the blood of others to dilute it. If they do not, the pure appetite, the meaning of hunger in the blood takes hold and the vampire becomes feral, violent, a void impossible to fill. Some claw their way back from such a state, more are lost in perpetual animal instinct, and most are slain by vampire hunters.

Your advancement in this path is measured in Mastery. There are three ways to improve it:

Bite other cultivators and steal their power.

Give your blood to students, and siphon off some of their progress. This can be consensual.

Pattern of the Leaden Skull Auspicious Attributes: Guile, Intuition Inauspicious Attribute: Composure

The flutter of a lover's breath upon your cheek is a new green leaf breeze-shivered against the skin; curls golden-brown the leaf to fall, and breezeborne brushes your brow, like the lover's final sigh. First kiss and last gasp - where did beauty die if you yet live?

Virtues: Celebrate life Love without attachment Laugh at the hubris of permanence Disdain wealth

Ruins: Deny personhood Attempt resurrection* Ignore the needful dead Embrace nihilism

The Road:

If a stranger approaches your camp, allow them to sit with you.

If a stranger shares your camp, offer them food, even a crumb.

If a stranger shares your camp, offer them water if you can spare it.

If a stranger shares your camp, offer them strong drink if you have it.

If you share a camp, you must refuse food twice.

if you share a camp, you need not accept water.

if you share a camp, you must accept at least a sip of strong drink.

If you share a meal, you may not raise a hand to each other for a night and a day, except in sparring or the duelling rite.

If you would speak to a stranger, first tell a story, then they must tell a story.

If you come to a stranger's camp following a battle, be sure to stand at the edge and spit away from them to banish wicked spirits.

The House:

If a stranger passes or approaches your home, you may deny them entry.

If a stranger approaches your home and they are sorely wounded, grant them shelter.

If you approach a home, you must not enter without permission.

Hosts must offer food, water, and strong drink if they can.

Guests must refuse food or strong drink twice.

Neither guest nor host may raise a hand to each other for a night and day, except for sparring or the dueling rite.

Guests may raise a hand to each other by the leave of the host.

Always offer gratitude to host or guest that offers your a courtesy.

If you would visit a home a second time, you must bring a gift.

You can only activate as many buanna in a turn or scene as you have Alignment. This means if you have two buanna but one Alignment, in theory you can only use one bua at a time. This is intentionaly to try and generate interesting decisions - you should want to use at least two buanna in any scenario, so the choice becomes compelling.

However, this also limits your ability to Cool Shit, and you can't have a good mystic wandering warrior duel without Cool Shit.

And so you build combos - fluffed as specific, practiced, and often personal alignments of body and brí where you flow between buanna in rapid sequence. You can have a number of combos, but they're made up of Alignment x 2 buanna.

This means in theory you have 12 combo slots at Alignment 6, which feels proper for a character at max progression but is also perhaps unwieldy.

And so, some angles I'm considering:

Buanna tagged Combo Neutral don't interact with a combo - they don't add to or interrupt it; often internal bua.

Buanna have combo values tags; combo-1, combo-2, etc.

Alternatively! Buanna have sequence tags. Combo-1 means you have to start a combo on this bua.

Or! You have to chain bua together going up or down - if you use a combo-1 bua, the next link in the combo must be combo-2. If you use combo-2, the next bua must be combo-1 or combo-3.

Any of these could be awful at the table. Once I've written enough buanna to start assembling combos I'll test it out.

Another consideration; we never want a perfect synergy. There should never be a combo that is the obvious and absolute optimal choice. This is player expression. Of course some players will always optimise the fun out of any system, but I'd like to try and discourage that.

Brí is the essential energy of the cosmos, within all things, composing the world and things within it. It is easy, and also mistaken, to understand it as vitality - it is also meaning. Indeed, the Sidhe word for themselves has been translated roughly as 'meaning which knows itself' and 'that which means itself'. Brí composing a Pattern, therefore, might be understood not only as elemental and vital, but also interpreted. There is undifferentiated brí, and there is flavoured brí. The brí which is in the body, and the spirit, and the earth, and the brí of flame, of life, of love, of death. In this way, brí is considered the substance of the Patterns, the pillars of the cosmos.

Thus almost any being can learn to feel and define their brí, and so control it, refine it, grow it.

The practice of cultivation is one of spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and physical self-refinement, and this is most powerfully expressed in the intensification of brí, and often focused on it by proxy. A being is a whole; one cannot neglect the body for the mind, neglect the mind for the body, or either for feeling - and certainly not feeling for the others. All things also exist in proportion and balance, in tension and friction. Who does not lean more one way than another? And so the first step to cultivation as calling is in personal Alignment with one of the 12 Patterns, and often understood through emulation of a god or hero, or both. This is a choice, but often also not a choice; the choice the heart makes before the mind recognises it. The choice the body makes before the intellect catches up. One makes the choice, but perhaps one would never have made a different choice.