If Nobilis taught me anything, it was that it’s very interesting to see what ends up exploding when you give PCs the ability to make their dreams come true.
Destinium
Various Hells think that Destinium is an overbearing tool of the hated Creator Who first forced demons into their exile. Various Heavens think that Destinium is a foul concoction brewed by the very Adversary himself in order to more easily destroy mankind. Various organizations aware of the supernatural, the metaphysical, parallel dimensions, alternate timelines, the spirit world, the Great Old Ones, primal energies, tears in reality, the collective tangible unconscious, the ongoing manifestation of the Plane of the Dreamers upon this one, or the Just Plain Weird simply ban Destinium on sight. And why does everybody hate it so much? Because it messes up everybody’s plans, very much including the people it infects.
Destinium is a not-quite-real substance that warps reality around the person it’s currently infecting, the better to suit the desires of whoever it is infecting. In GURPS terms, Destinium gives the PC a pool of experience points that can be temporarily and freely assigned to whatever characteristic, advantage, skill, or disadvantage that the PC chooses: each ‘drop’ of Destinium is equal to one experience point. This explicitly includes temporarily giving the PC a skill he hasn’t had before, or temporarily reducing a disadvantage’s potency, or even using and reusing one point to quickly generate money (that’s how most people hooked on Destinium start out actively using it, in fact).
However, every day that a PC uses his Destinium, he must make an 3d6 roll. On a 3, he gains another drop of Destinium. This roll is modified by +1 for every full two drops of Destinium that the player possesses: it may take a while for the drops to start building up, but once they do they accelerate pretty quickly. And the process only ends when the infectee is dead, or somehow manages to stop using Destinium for a number of days equal to triple his current Destinium pool.
So, that’s pretty much it. Get infected with Destinium, and eventually you will start tapping into pretty blatantly godlike power. Power that most humans, frankly, cannot really handle. Even twenty or thirty drops of Destinium can make you an expert in any skill, charm your way into and out of any situation, laugh off the dagger in your back; simple prudence can make you unaging, give you status and respect, or draw upon allies limited only by your imagination. And the more Destinium people get, the more they can do, and the more they can do, the more they start to think that they deserve to do whatever they want. It’d be a short road to Megalomania, except of course that Destinium can easily mitigate the effects of that disadvantage, too.
And that’s why everybody in the know jumps with both feet on every known appearance of Destinium in their particular plane of reality, and as soon as possible. Jumping on it early saves valuable time, effort, and lives later: it’s much easier to knock out somebody with two drops of Destinium than it is to take out someone with, say, five hundred. At that level you end up with someone who can, if he really wanted to and was willing to put all of his effort into it, one-shot Superman. Fortunately, people infected with Destinium rarely get to that high a level. Or unfortunately, if you happen to be the one infected by it.
The material presented here is my original creation, intended for use with the GURPS system from Steve Jackson Games. This material is not official and is not endorsed by Steve Jackson Games.
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