Burden
For today's word, I want to talk about the main theme, aka the gist, of my world.
Nobody in my world got the whole truth, and nobody gets power for free.
Something happened to our world. The once shared, singular version of reality broke, and it turned our world upside down. In the scramble that followed, people reached for whatever they thought would keep them alive and only through trial and error did they learn what those choices actually cost them.
One of my core mechanics is built entirely around that idea. It's a resource every player carries, and it's meant to be the thing that gets you through a fight you'd otherwise lose —for a price. Right now, at the table, my players are still in the "hey, this is cool, what does it do" phase. Not one of them has really pushed it far enough to find out what it costs yet. A binder in my group decided to bind a creature to her pants mid-session and nothing bad happened. A mediator talked a Digosfrag into just...leaving them alone. Both were very confident in their decisions because both were very low on stakes so far. That's on me though. I haven't finished tuning the abilities to explain what happens when someone leans too hard into it. This is exactly what the next expeditions are designed to do.
But the bestiary already knows what it looks like on the other side of that line. Take the Cockatrice Effigial from a few weeks back. Its petrification gaze only fires when it's cornered and completely out of options. It can't control when it happens, and every account of it happening shows the creature just as wrecked afterwards as whoever it hit. My players haven't gotten there yet. Their characters for sure will.
That's the burden this world runs on and it's coming for all of them eventually.
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