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hasapointAPPLICATION
Player Name/Handle: Joysweeper (Joy, Joys)
Plurk Handle:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
joysweeper
Preferred pronouns (optional): she/her
Player Status: New!
Other characters: Also gonna bring Alloran-Semitur-Corrass
Invited by: I was in wilderlands v1 and p90!
Character Name: Need. (Her long-forgotten old name was Lashan.)
Fandom: This canon does not have a name - let’s go with Velgarth.
Character Journal:hasapoint
OU, AU, CRAU, Canon OC, or OC? OU
Canon point: About the start of the third act in “By The Sword”, before Kerown bears Need into Valdemar.
Age: Old. The earliest events in this setting which have an actual date are the Mage Wars, two thousand three hundred years before this canon point. Need is from an unknown period of time before that, even she isn’t sure. Some of this time she’s spent ‘sleeping’ but not all. Also, she was an old woman back when she put herself into the sword.
I have decided that the sword is in a more archaic style than your standard medieval fantasy blade. The metal is in like-new condition. The belt, scabbard, and the wrapping on the hilt are all very worn leather, and the wood of the hilt under the wrapping is blackened and stained.
SETTING BACKGROUND
Velgarth is a fantasy world with gods, magic, psychic powers, monsters, talking animal peoples, simple morality, and elemental/demonic Planes. Magic is life-energy that flows into ley-lines and nodes, mostly generated passively by living things, with gouts of “blood magic” released by wounding/death. There were once nations with high organization and technology, but a war between great powers ended in a Cataclysm that warped the landscape and left civilization starting over from villages. 2000 years later things are distinctly medieval on the verge of renaissance.
Notable nations: psi-powered Valdemarans with institutionalized angel horses, bird-bonded Tayledras cleansing Cataclysmic wastelands, Goddess-blessed Shin’a’in guarding old superweapons.
Gods are active but not very powerful, and Good ones are all interconnected and don’t fight. Some of their faithful live on in the spirit realm and can manifest briefly in the material plane, or be born as angelic psychic animals, retaining their memories and helping guide the living without taking charge. Most people reincarnate with no memories. Some mages can use blood magic to anchor their spirits to things - a sword, a place, a bloodline - and persist after death for centuries or more, as Need has.
PERSONALITY
Need was ‘born’ in fury to avenge her people’s shame. Anger, grief, and the desperate drives to rescue survivors, stop a powerful murderer, and avenge the dead anchored her when her human body died. When she’s ‘asleep’ that’s just about all there is to her, as she unthinkingly finds people (mostly women) in similar straits and tries to coerce her bearers to help. Otherwise she’s passive and not a person.
Awake, she still harbors great rage on behalf of others but rarely lets it show. Need is pragmatic, cautious, even paranoid. Her risks are calculated and she doesn’t rush into things unless time is critical. It takes a lot for Need to fully trust someone - this isn’t obvious in person, because she’s constantly reading thoughts and intentions. While she rarely outright lies, Need happily misleads or lies by omission and is always holding things back. She works behind the backs of friends and allies and makes no promises unless sure she can deliver.
Need’s often irritable and cynical towards people, irreverent, with a marked distaste for self pity and inflated egos. She calls people children and tests them, sometimes cruelly, without saying so first. And yet, Need cares so readily that unless she braces herself, just realizing someone’s struggling can bring out her kind and supportive side. Other peoples’ causes easily become her own. She likes teaching and watching people heal and flourish, and considers many of her bearers to be her children. While she’s most inclined towards women and queer people she’s not actually against straight cis men. She appreciates people who despite difficult circumstances manage to have ethics and care about others, and likes to encourage independence, critical thinking, excellence, and compassion.
Surface grouchiness aside she has great equilibrium, evaluating and thinking clearly and calmly in bizarre or terrible circumstances. A degree of this is a front, an appearance of strength that she maintains carefully, some is her formidable self control, but she is also just really steady. As she says, when you’re as old and nearly indestructible as she is, very little actually bothers you. Very rarely, given extreme provocation, her volcanic anger on behalf of others erupts; when it does, she doesn’t lash out, but becomes rash and incoherent and cools down over a period of days.
Need appreciates jokes made at her expense and if she actually admits to weakness or fear it’s probably as humor. She’s smart and experienced, knows her capabilities, and is smug when she pulls something off. Her confidence can make her come across as arrogant, but Need also knows her limitations and has no problems admitting she doesn’t know something, admiring greater skill in someone else, or giving way in an argument.
Being so old and removed from her human life, Need has some… odd traits usually moderated by contact with living people. She doesn’t get bored. She doesn’t see people, gods, or countries as permanent; most losses don’t hit hard; she adapts quickly to new people and circumstances and rarely tries to return to the old; she’s forgotten a lot, including her human name, and is only mildly perturbed about it. She’s not against a bearer dying young for their beliefs - they should consider other options and try to be smart about it, but everyone dies and there's a chance of meeting them in some future incarnation anyway. Human lifetimes seem very short. Need focuses on the small picture of individuals and the absurdly large picture of many centuries. If she cares about anything in between it’s usually because someone she’s close to does, or because it represents a new and interesting challenge.
Many spirits in similar positions are evil. Part of Need is parasitic on bearers and always wants to assert control, waving away their feelings to act for their own good or that of others; she wavers between being more and less audacious and has no shame about reading minds. She also likes killing people she thinks deserve it. However, she refuses to take over someone’s life, whether that means making them a puppet, telling them what to want and think, or allowing them to get too dependent on her. She likes people to make their own decisions and mistakes, though she’ll handle a lot herself if she must and will readily give advice. Once a boundary’s stated she respects it. Need was a priest and still has good relations with some gods; their hands off approach to mortals influences her morality. It’s also possible to entirely forget she’s present in a conversation as she often just lets people talk without putting in her nose.
Need’s accepted her own inability to make everything right and the risk of ‘sleeping’ through centuries. She’s also pragmatic enough to turn her back on a big mess to keep her focus on something smaller. Still, she fears becoming truly passive and unable to make a difference - that’s much worse than ‘dying’ at last. Awake, Need doesn’t try to pull her bearers into every nearby problem, but she expects and empowers them to address some of them.
CANON POWERS
Caveats: First, Need is never a POV character and is cagy about her abilities. Second, Mercedes Lackey’s magic system is not organized. Third, Mercedes Lackey also has a loose grasp on her own continuity. I’ve done my best. Psionics and magic are entirely different categories in this setting, so this is divided a bit.
Need is a spirit trapped in an inanimate object, a sword that she made when she was a living human. Everything she does is powers-based, down to having senses and being a person. She doesn’t sleep normally and she can multitask uncannily well, but if she goes too long without talking to people, or if she overexerts herself magically, she falls ‘asleep’ and functions like a cursed/blessed weapon for up to centuries. To people who see magic, she’s as obvious as a beacon unless she conceals it. There are several enchantments she put on the sword before pinning her spirit to it. One keeps the blade like new, one makes it able to kill demons, and there are four “season spells” - Calm, Healing, Warding, and Luck.
Okay. Psychic powers!
Need has empathy especially sensitive to women (and people whose natures include a strong element of the feminine) in distress, with a range of several miles. Her Mindspeech or telepathy has a similar range and she can be in contact with several people at once, including distant ones she’s never met, though that is harder. She taps contacts’ senses, listens to their surface thoughts, and sees what they visualize, all without them knowing. Need can also speak to and share emotions and images with people at this range, and can find and summon animals. Someone with shields can block her from contact partially to entirely, and she can block people out to stop sensing them. She has an ability to form and (gently) break soul bonds with people.
At closer range, Need can probe memories and intent to a degree and compel someone to do simple things like pick her up. If a person’s touching her, including through layers, she has a stronger connection to their mind and body. If Need chooses she can use this influence to overload someone's brain, killing them or rendering them mindless. On a less dramatic note, she can also use it to induce or numb pain, modify memories, and outright possess the person. Her control can be fought, leaving the body frozen and locked up; she usually capitulates quickly instead of fighting back, but if someone’s unconscious she basically has free rein. She can also perform a lighter form of possession that she likens to “my hands on yours, guiding” in order to teach. Need can enhance a bearer’s senses, let them see through illusions, and do HUD style overlays in their vision.
Need is also able to project herself into the Moonpaths, a 'safe' part of the spirit realm in which gods and highly spiritual/religious characters can commune with each other and (some of) the dead. There she can take non-sword shapes and use her psychic powers on anything willing, including living people far outside her usual psychic range. Need can operate on the Moonpaths while simultaneously speaking and acting in the physical world.
She has extremely trivial telekinesis that’s not capable of moving her from a standstill. Basically she can twist and jerk in the hand mid-strike to achieve ridiculous precision, if she’s thrown she flies true, if she’s embedded in something she always pulls free easily, and if she’s falling towards someone’s hand she always lands hilt first and slow enough to grab.
Finally, Need can take her memories, her bearers’ memories, and memories that have otherwise been shared with her, and share them in turn with people nearby. Receivers experience the donor’s perspective, which can reach the point of losing their own sense of self for the duration of the memory. This is very disorienting, especially if the donor and receiver are very different, and best received while sitting or lying down. If the receiver’s asleep their dreams are displaced by these memories, and if their own dreams surface at all they are “less haunted”.
Magic! I’ll summarize more here.
Magic drain: Siphoning life-energy from the environment and other characters to use herself. Feeding magic into other characters, non-mages included, to un-exhaust them.
‘Warding’ against magic - one of the sword spells. Deconstructing magic shaped by others and transmuting it into something she can use. Need’s very good at this, very fast, can no-sell the magic of even demon gods and give this energy to someone else, do things not usually possible at her power level, or ‘ground’ it and let it harmlessly sink into the earth. She can cover a whole mercenary company spread across a battlefield. It’s ridic.
Healing - another sword spell, works best with physical contact. Need’s best with soft tissue injuries and can keep scars from forming. Bones take her a few days and sometimes all she can do is slow a death. If she’s working with more power she can do more. Can also “counter-heal” a creature, rendering its flesh dangerous to whatever eats it.
Calming - another sword spell, does what it says. Luck - fourth sword spell. Things usually turn out very well for Need’s bearers, though there can be plenty of hardship and difficulty along the way, and initial goals may not be accomplished.
Magic attacks - can fire off lightning, fireballs, similar destructive projectiles. Can sever or break things - all kinds of crystals, intangible magic bonds, shields of every kind, walls - using spells that involve being swung at the air in the direction of the thing.
Enchanting metal - can put short-acting spells on already crafted metal, or permanent ones on metal that’s being worked. Includes preventing breakage/dulling/rust, all her sword spells, and extra harm to demons. Could also make a “leech-blade” that drains life energy from whoever it cuts. Most short-acting spells on weaponry are to make them do more damage/penetrate shields and armor/be on fire without harming their wielders.
Projection spell - can inscribe two circles of the same size and link them. People in the first circle will become invisible/silent in that one and appear in the second, seeing etc as if they truly are there. They can walk, use magic, otherwise act in the first location and affect the second location. If something attempts to harm the projections, or they step out of the circle, the projections vanish.
Mage-Sight: Usually an overlay over a mage’s vision. Can be used for darkvision, outlines all living things and many nonliving things, plus magic. Need can use this while looking through someone’s eyes, but can also call on it without borrowing senses from others to ‘look’ outwards from her blade. It’s a distinct effort, and everything is distorted and dim.
Enhancing abilities - can massively buff someone’s speed, strength, and stamina for short periods, allowing even small non-athletes to perform heroically.
Illusions - several kinds. Can make threatening things out of nothing which vanish if challenged, show scenes, best with more passive illusions like disguise. Includes “reflective” spells that make people seem like part of the landscape, and the ability to make someone move silently.
Shields - agh shields in this canon do everything! Deflect or absorb or resist physical or magical attacks, conceal someone, keep a specific temperature in the shielded area, sense and react to things, prevent minds from being read… No one shield does it all, so a lot of layering happens.
Other - seriously magic just does whatever mages want. Need can summon or create goods (knives, pots, buckets, rope), start fires, rebuild architecture, set alarm spells to go off if criteria are met, learn a new language in a hurry, scry, and probably more.
Final Strike: as a mage, Need can use up every resource available to her at once to die in a massive explosion. Would include fire and tiny particles of molten metal being flung at speed.
Transfer spells - move someone’s mind into a new body, which can be an animal/creature or an artifact such as a sword. Requires the death of the current body and a strong desire to live on in something else. The transferred person gets psychic powers similar to hers, but like her starts off at a much lower level.
Finally, making permanent alterations to someone’s body. Can’t fight the body’s owner on this. It has to be something that profoundly bothers them and that they want changed. On her own this is a series of tiny changes that gradually build up. She’s also able to make larger changes if given more power, but that’s riskier and the chances are good that she’ll have to sleep.
POWER SELECTION
POWER TYPE
Canon Superpowers, and I’ll describe how she’d function as a Magic Weapon while asleep.
FREEBIE POWERS
Being A Person: As a spirit anchored to a sword, Need has to spend a small amount of magic energy on this at all times. Because of that, if she exhausts her magic reserves then she reverts to ‘sleep’, at which point she operates on a sub-sentient level until she can regain consciousness.
Enhanced Senses: Need is able to enhance the senses of someone carrying or touching her, including allowing them to see in low light as if it’s day. She can do the most with sight, but she can sharpen any mundane sense for as long as she’s in physical contact. She can also dull a sense, most notably pain.
Magic-Sense: Just that she can sense magic in someone touching her or someone carrying her, and maybe just a bit about it - demonic or blood magic will feel Bad.
Mindspeech: Need talks in peoples’ heads in a form of telepathy that involves fragments of memory and emotion and is almost impossible to lie in. It's harder to be understood by people who have no psychic gifts and easier if she’s in physical contact or has a bond with someone, but she’s strong enough to manage generally. I wouldn’t mind if she has to talk through someone else now and then and if she can’t speak to someone at all unless they’ve been within sight of her.
Cosmetic thing: Need’s blade can take on a bright glow that twists and writhes into letters reading WOMAN’S NEED CALLS ME, AS WOMAN’S NEED MADE ME. HER NEED MUST I ANSWER, AS MY MAKER BADE ME in whichever language a bearer understands.
Agelessness: When Lashan made the sword she would eventually inhabit she enchanted it to never rust, dull, notch, or break. This is why Need’s in such good condition. Her blade is also strangely easy to clean, but her grip is leather-wrapped wood and that has to be replaced from time to time.
Being very obviously super magic: Need is very old, very powerful, very feminine magic and to those who can sense it this is obvious from a great distance - a decoy of her has to give off magic in a spectacular display to mimic her presence. She can draw a lot of attention, including from monsters keyed in to magic. Usually she’s shielded so well it rarely shows, but she’s no longer conscious of those shields, so she won’t realize how obvious she is initially.
Made Of Iron - Need is almost indestructible. In canon she’s magically unbreakable by main force but could be destroyed with the help of intense heat or a powerful enough mage, at which point she goes up in fire and molten metal. I’m not against making her breakable, but being stabbed or hit by an arrow won’t harm her, because she has no organs or moving parts.
GAME POWERS
Canon superpowers:
PSYCHIC POWERS: This one's the most important and mostly intact. Limits: No soulbonding, no animal summoning, no astral projecting into the spirit realm. Someone must have either seen Need or been within a hundred feet of her for her to be able to tap their senses/read their surface thoughts/talk to them for the first time, and they have to be within ten for her to probe them. Her memory sharing can make someone unaware of what's happening around them and is disorienting but they can surface at will and be more distantly aware of how the memory goes instead of waiting for her to end the experience.
HEALING: Injuries to skin and muscle heal more easily, infection gets burned out, bones are just set and held in place. Being healed is itchy, uncomfortable, and tiring. Full healing of extensive injuries can take multiple sessions over several days. Doesn’t affect old scars. With terrible enough injuries all she can do is stop the pain and slow dying. Requires physical contact (through fabric is fine) for as long as an hour for larger wounds; if she's removed before then, much of the healing is undone.
ENHANCING ABILITIES: Can make someone stronger, faster, more dexterous, and indefatigable, an ability level above normal human but below the game’s strength/speed limits. Requires physical contact. Five minutes for a momentary touch, if she’s strapped to the person being buffed it can last longer, but the longer it's in effect and the more they do the more tiring the comedown is.
CONCEALING SHIELD: Can create an invisible barrier around herself up to the size of a small room. This keeps anything inside from being visible to magic and paranatural senses. Has a much smaller effect on mundane senses, people who are quiet and still and not wearing bright colors are less noticeable from a distance but a determined searcher will still see through it. People and things can pass in and out without obstruction. It can be maintained indefinitely until she’s moved from inside it.
BEARER MANIFESTATION: When there are no living characters available, an ethereal projection of one of Need's bearers may appear and take her up. There have been many of these with many different skillsets, but the manifestations are functionally identical, each with the same athletic-human levels of ability and human senses for her to tap, and don't come with powers or (useable) additional weapons. They may fight using her or move her from one place to another, but except when she takes direct control they will only vaguely do what she wants. The manifestations don't speak or display a whole lot of intelligence but do reflect individual bearer's personalities and regard of Need - some are more expressive, others aloof, some clearly resent carrying her. Manifestations can seemingly get injured, though they don't spill any real blood and can't be healed (or buffed). If one takes a mortal wound it vanishes and won't return to rotation for a month. Need will dislike creating unthinking manifestations of people she cares about and won't use this power unless she has to.
ABILITIES
Need lived into her old age as a human, learned quite a lot of things in that time, and picked up more afterwards. All of these require a body to work through, but she does have the skills and can and has worked through other people (regardless of handedness) to use them, and with her ‘guiding’ possession can teach them thoroughly and with uncanny speed. Training that usually takes years can be compressed into weeks and months.
Blacksmithing and swordsmithing - Given the right materials and a forge with fuel, and time to adjust bc it’s probably not the same as the forge and tools she knows, Need can make and mend things from metal. Don’t expect a lot of proficiency with delicate work like small keys and fine tools, let alone jewelry, and I don’t imagine she could make armor easily. If you need heavy chains, horseshoes, or blades, though, she’ll do fine. She’s also got more limited wood and leather working skills.
Swordfighting - she’s right up there with the best in the setting, better than any living human, though this is a case where Mercedes Lackey novels hew closer to low fantasy than high (or to, say, anime). However, her fighting styles also tend to leave her bearer open to injury.
Slings, archery, and associated skills - she can make slings, bows, and arrows given a knife and raw materials, which she can just collect. Need can also use the sling and the bow pretty well, and throw knives accurately.
Hunting, tracking, and wilderness survival. Need can use stars to navigate, set traps, skin animals and tan their furs, make fires, tend and ride and train and shoe horses, recon, and do all your general set up and maintain camp stuff.
Some more refined skills: Various forms of etiquette, rituals, priest stuff, herblore, bookkeeping and logistics, detailed calculations, the byzantine ways magic works in Velgarth, how the human body works. She’s unwilling to lead but knows a lot about leadership and strategy/tactics.
SETTING/SUITABILITY
Need’s from the sword and sorceress/romantic fantasy genres. The main issue with playing her in any game is how she’s such a support character that she all but can’t act alone, but there’s already a few different characters inclined to carry her around.
SAMPLES
TDM toplevel!
Player Name/Handle: Joysweeper (Joy, Joys)
Plurk Handle:
Preferred pronouns (optional): she/her
Player Status: New!
Other characters: Also gonna bring Alloran-Semitur-Corrass
Invited by: I was in wilderlands v1 and p90!
Character Name: Need. (Her long-forgotten old name was Lashan.)
Fandom: This canon does not have a name - let’s go with Velgarth.
Character Journal:
hasapointOU, AU, CRAU, Canon OC, or OC? OU
Canon point: About the start of the third act in “By The Sword”, before Kerown bears Need into Valdemar.
Age: Old. The earliest events in this setting which have an actual date are the Mage Wars, two thousand three hundred years before this canon point. Need is from an unknown period of time before that, even she isn’t sure. Some of this time she’s spent ‘sleeping’ but not all. Also, she was an old woman back when she put herself into the sword.
I have decided that the sword is in a more archaic style than your standard medieval fantasy blade. The metal is in like-new condition. The belt, scabbard, and the wrapping on the hilt are all very worn leather, and the wood of the hilt under the wrapping is blackened and stained.
SETTING BACKGROUND
Velgarth is a fantasy world with gods, magic, psychic powers, monsters, talking animal peoples, simple morality, and elemental/demonic Planes. Magic is life-energy that flows into ley-lines and nodes, mostly generated passively by living things, with gouts of “blood magic” released by wounding/death. There were once nations with high organization and technology, but a war between great powers ended in a Cataclysm that warped the landscape and left civilization starting over from villages. 2000 years later things are distinctly medieval on the verge of renaissance.
Notable nations: psi-powered Valdemarans with institutionalized angel horses, bird-bonded Tayledras cleansing Cataclysmic wastelands, Goddess-blessed Shin’a’in guarding old superweapons.
Gods are active but not very powerful, and Good ones are all interconnected and don’t fight. Some of their faithful live on in the spirit realm and can manifest briefly in the material plane, or be born as angelic psychic animals, retaining their memories and helping guide the living without taking charge. Most people reincarnate with no memories. Some mages can use blood magic to anchor their spirits to things - a sword, a place, a bloodline - and persist after death for centuries or more, as Need has.
PERSONALITY
Need was ‘born’ in fury to avenge her people’s shame. Anger, grief, and the desperate drives to rescue survivors, stop a powerful murderer, and avenge the dead anchored her when her human body died. When she’s ‘asleep’ that’s just about all there is to her, as she unthinkingly finds people (mostly women) in similar straits and tries to coerce her bearers to help. Otherwise she’s passive and not a person.
Awake, she still harbors great rage on behalf of others but rarely lets it show. Need is pragmatic, cautious, even paranoid. Her risks are calculated and she doesn’t rush into things unless time is critical. It takes a lot for Need to fully trust someone - this isn’t obvious in person, because she’s constantly reading thoughts and intentions. While she rarely outright lies, Need happily misleads or lies by omission and is always holding things back. She works behind the backs of friends and allies and makes no promises unless sure she can deliver.
Need’s often irritable and cynical towards people, irreverent, with a marked distaste for self pity and inflated egos. She calls people children and tests them, sometimes cruelly, without saying so first. And yet, Need cares so readily that unless she braces herself, just realizing someone’s struggling can bring out her kind and supportive side. Other peoples’ causes easily become her own. She likes teaching and watching people heal and flourish, and considers many of her bearers to be her children. While she’s most inclined towards women and queer people she’s not actually against straight cis men. She appreciates people who despite difficult circumstances manage to have ethics and care about others, and likes to encourage independence, critical thinking, excellence, and compassion.
Surface grouchiness aside she has great equilibrium, evaluating and thinking clearly and calmly in bizarre or terrible circumstances. A degree of this is a front, an appearance of strength that she maintains carefully, some is her formidable self control, but she is also just really steady. As she says, when you’re as old and nearly indestructible as she is, very little actually bothers you. Very rarely, given extreme provocation, her volcanic anger on behalf of others erupts; when it does, she doesn’t lash out, but becomes rash and incoherent and cools down over a period of days.
Need appreciates jokes made at her expense and if she actually admits to weakness or fear it’s probably as humor. She’s smart and experienced, knows her capabilities, and is smug when she pulls something off. Her confidence can make her come across as arrogant, but Need also knows her limitations and has no problems admitting she doesn’t know something, admiring greater skill in someone else, or giving way in an argument.
Being so old and removed from her human life, Need has some… odd traits usually moderated by contact with living people. She doesn’t get bored. She doesn’t see people, gods, or countries as permanent; most losses don’t hit hard; she adapts quickly to new people and circumstances and rarely tries to return to the old; she’s forgotten a lot, including her human name, and is only mildly perturbed about it. She’s not against a bearer dying young for their beliefs - they should consider other options and try to be smart about it, but everyone dies and there's a chance of meeting them in some future incarnation anyway. Human lifetimes seem very short. Need focuses on the small picture of individuals and the absurdly large picture of many centuries. If she cares about anything in between it’s usually because someone she’s close to does, or because it represents a new and interesting challenge.
Many spirits in similar positions are evil. Part of Need is parasitic on bearers and always wants to assert control, waving away their feelings to act for their own good or that of others; she wavers between being more and less audacious and has no shame about reading minds. She also likes killing people she thinks deserve it. However, she refuses to take over someone’s life, whether that means making them a puppet, telling them what to want and think, or allowing them to get too dependent on her. She likes people to make their own decisions and mistakes, though she’ll handle a lot herself if she must and will readily give advice. Once a boundary’s stated she respects it. Need was a priest and still has good relations with some gods; their hands off approach to mortals influences her morality. It’s also possible to entirely forget she’s present in a conversation as she often just lets people talk without putting in her nose.
Need’s accepted her own inability to make everything right and the risk of ‘sleeping’ through centuries. She’s also pragmatic enough to turn her back on a big mess to keep her focus on something smaller. Still, she fears becoming truly passive and unable to make a difference - that’s much worse than ‘dying’ at last. Awake, Need doesn’t try to pull her bearers into every nearby problem, but she expects and empowers them to address some of them.
CANON POWERS
Caveats: First, Need is never a POV character and is cagy about her abilities. Second, Mercedes Lackey’s magic system is not organized. Third, Mercedes Lackey also has a loose grasp on her own continuity. I’ve done my best. Psionics and magic are entirely different categories in this setting, so this is divided a bit.
Need is a spirit trapped in an inanimate object, a sword that she made when she was a living human. Everything she does is powers-based, down to having senses and being a person. She doesn’t sleep normally and she can multitask uncannily well, but if she goes too long without talking to people, or if she overexerts herself magically, she falls ‘asleep’ and functions like a cursed/blessed weapon for up to centuries. To people who see magic, she’s as obvious as a beacon unless she conceals it. There are several enchantments she put on the sword before pinning her spirit to it. One keeps the blade like new, one makes it able to kill demons, and there are four “season spells” - Calm, Healing, Warding, and Luck.
Okay. Psychic powers!
Need has empathy especially sensitive to women (and people whose natures include a strong element of the feminine) in distress, with a range of several miles. Her Mindspeech or telepathy has a similar range and she can be in contact with several people at once, including distant ones she’s never met, though that is harder. She taps contacts’ senses, listens to their surface thoughts, and sees what they visualize, all without them knowing. Need can also speak to and share emotions and images with people at this range, and can find and summon animals. Someone with shields can block her from contact partially to entirely, and she can block people out to stop sensing them. She has an ability to form and (gently) break soul bonds with people.
At closer range, Need can probe memories and intent to a degree and compel someone to do simple things like pick her up. If a person’s touching her, including through layers, she has a stronger connection to their mind and body. If Need chooses she can use this influence to overload someone's brain, killing them or rendering them mindless. On a less dramatic note, she can also use it to induce or numb pain, modify memories, and outright possess the person. Her control can be fought, leaving the body frozen and locked up; she usually capitulates quickly instead of fighting back, but if someone’s unconscious she basically has free rein. She can also perform a lighter form of possession that she likens to “my hands on yours, guiding” in order to teach. Need can enhance a bearer’s senses, let them see through illusions, and do HUD style overlays in their vision.
Need is also able to project herself into the Moonpaths, a 'safe' part of the spirit realm in which gods and highly spiritual/religious characters can commune with each other and (some of) the dead. There she can take non-sword shapes and use her psychic powers on anything willing, including living people far outside her usual psychic range. Need can operate on the Moonpaths while simultaneously speaking and acting in the physical world.
She has extremely trivial telekinesis that’s not capable of moving her from a standstill. Basically she can twist and jerk in the hand mid-strike to achieve ridiculous precision, if she’s thrown she flies true, if she’s embedded in something she always pulls free easily, and if she’s falling towards someone’s hand she always lands hilt first and slow enough to grab.
Finally, Need can take her memories, her bearers’ memories, and memories that have otherwise been shared with her, and share them in turn with people nearby. Receivers experience the donor’s perspective, which can reach the point of losing their own sense of self for the duration of the memory. This is very disorienting, especially if the donor and receiver are very different, and best received while sitting or lying down. If the receiver’s asleep their dreams are displaced by these memories, and if their own dreams surface at all they are “less haunted”.
Magic! I’ll summarize more here.
Magic drain: Siphoning life-energy from the environment and other characters to use herself. Feeding magic into other characters, non-mages included, to un-exhaust them.
‘Warding’ against magic - one of the sword spells. Deconstructing magic shaped by others and transmuting it into something she can use. Need’s very good at this, very fast, can no-sell the magic of even demon gods and give this energy to someone else, do things not usually possible at her power level, or ‘ground’ it and let it harmlessly sink into the earth. She can cover a whole mercenary company spread across a battlefield. It’s ridic.
Healing - another sword spell, works best with physical contact. Need’s best with soft tissue injuries and can keep scars from forming. Bones take her a few days and sometimes all she can do is slow a death. If she’s working with more power she can do more. Can also “counter-heal” a creature, rendering its flesh dangerous to whatever eats it.
Calming - another sword spell, does what it says. Luck - fourth sword spell. Things usually turn out very well for Need’s bearers, though there can be plenty of hardship and difficulty along the way, and initial goals may not be accomplished.
Magic attacks - can fire off lightning, fireballs, similar destructive projectiles. Can sever or break things - all kinds of crystals, intangible magic bonds, shields of every kind, walls - using spells that involve being swung at the air in the direction of the thing.
Enchanting metal - can put short-acting spells on already crafted metal, or permanent ones on metal that’s being worked. Includes preventing breakage/dulling/rust, all her sword spells, and extra harm to demons. Could also make a “leech-blade” that drains life energy from whoever it cuts. Most short-acting spells on weaponry are to make them do more damage/penetrate shields and armor/be on fire without harming their wielders.
Projection spell - can inscribe two circles of the same size and link them. People in the first circle will become invisible/silent in that one and appear in the second, seeing etc as if they truly are there. They can walk, use magic, otherwise act in the first location and affect the second location. If something attempts to harm the projections, or they step out of the circle, the projections vanish.
Mage-Sight: Usually an overlay over a mage’s vision. Can be used for darkvision, outlines all living things and many nonliving things, plus magic. Need can use this while looking through someone’s eyes, but can also call on it without borrowing senses from others to ‘look’ outwards from her blade. It’s a distinct effort, and everything is distorted and dim.
Enhancing abilities - can massively buff someone’s speed, strength, and stamina for short periods, allowing even small non-athletes to perform heroically.
Illusions - several kinds. Can make threatening things out of nothing which vanish if challenged, show scenes, best with more passive illusions like disguise. Includes “reflective” spells that make people seem like part of the landscape, and the ability to make someone move silently.
Shields - agh shields in this canon do everything! Deflect or absorb or resist physical or magical attacks, conceal someone, keep a specific temperature in the shielded area, sense and react to things, prevent minds from being read… No one shield does it all, so a lot of layering happens.
Other - seriously magic just does whatever mages want. Need can summon or create goods (knives, pots, buckets, rope), start fires, rebuild architecture, set alarm spells to go off if criteria are met, learn a new language in a hurry, scry, and probably more.
Final Strike: as a mage, Need can use up every resource available to her at once to die in a massive explosion. Would include fire and tiny particles of molten metal being flung at speed.
Transfer spells - move someone’s mind into a new body, which can be an animal/creature or an artifact such as a sword. Requires the death of the current body and a strong desire to live on in something else. The transferred person gets psychic powers similar to hers, but like her starts off at a much lower level.
Finally, making permanent alterations to someone’s body. Can’t fight the body’s owner on this. It has to be something that profoundly bothers them and that they want changed. On her own this is a series of tiny changes that gradually build up. She’s also able to make larger changes if given more power, but that’s riskier and the chances are good that she’ll have to sleep.
POWER SELECTION
POWER TYPE
Canon Superpowers, and I’ll describe how she’d function as a Magic Weapon while asleep.
FREEBIE POWERS
Being A Person: As a spirit anchored to a sword, Need has to spend a small amount of magic energy on this at all times. Because of that, if she exhausts her magic reserves then she reverts to ‘sleep’, at which point she operates on a sub-sentient level until she can regain consciousness.
Enhanced Senses: Need is able to enhance the senses of someone carrying or touching her, including allowing them to see in low light as if it’s day. She can do the most with sight, but she can sharpen any mundane sense for as long as she’s in physical contact. She can also dull a sense, most notably pain.
Magic-Sense: Just that she can sense magic in someone touching her or someone carrying her, and maybe just a bit about it - demonic or blood magic will feel Bad.
Mindspeech: Need talks in peoples’ heads in a form of telepathy that involves fragments of memory and emotion and is almost impossible to lie in. It's harder to be understood by people who have no psychic gifts and easier if she’s in physical contact or has a bond with someone, but she’s strong enough to manage generally. I wouldn’t mind if she has to talk through someone else now and then and if she can’t speak to someone at all unless they’ve been within sight of her.
Cosmetic thing: Need’s blade can take on a bright glow that twists and writhes into letters reading WOMAN’S NEED CALLS ME, AS WOMAN’S NEED MADE ME. HER NEED MUST I ANSWER, AS MY MAKER BADE ME in whichever language a bearer understands.
Agelessness: When Lashan made the sword she would eventually inhabit she enchanted it to never rust, dull, notch, or break. This is why Need’s in such good condition. Her blade is also strangely easy to clean, but her grip is leather-wrapped wood and that has to be replaced from time to time.
Being very obviously super magic: Need is very old, very powerful, very feminine magic and to those who can sense it this is obvious from a great distance - a decoy of her has to give off magic in a spectacular display to mimic her presence. She can draw a lot of attention, including from monsters keyed in to magic. Usually she’s shielded so well it rarely shows, but she’s no longer conscious of those shields, so she won’t realize how obvious she is initially.
Made Of Iron - Need is almost indestructible. In canon she’s magically unbreakable by main force but could be destroyed with the help of intense heat or a powerful enough mage, at which point she goes up in fire and molten metal. I’m not against making her breakable, but being stabbed or hit by an arrow won’t harm her, because she has no organs or moving parts.
GAME POWERS
Canon superpowers:
PSYCHIC POWERS: This one's the most important and mostly intact. Limits: No soulbonding, no animal summoning, no astral projecting into the spirit realm. Someone must have either seen Need or been within a hundred feet of her for her to be able to tap their senses/read their surface thoughts/talk to them for the first time, and they have to be within ten for her to probe them. Her memory sharing can make someone unaware of what's happening around them and is disorienting but they can surface at will and be more distantly aware of how the memory goes instead of waiting for her to end the experience.
HEALING: Injuries to skin and muscle heal more easily, infection gets burned out, bones are just set and held in place. Being healed is itchy, uncomfortable, and tiring. Full healing of extensive injuries can take multiple sessions over several days. Doesn’t affect old scars. With terrible enough injuries all she can do is stop the pain and slow dying. Requires physical contact (through fabric is fine) for as long as an hour for larger wounds; if she's removed before then, much of the healing is undone.
ENHANCING ABILITIES: Can make someone stronger, faster, more dexterous, and indefatigable, an ability level above normal human but below the game’s strength/speed limits. Requires physical contact. Five minutes for a momentary touch, if she’s strapped to the person being buffed it can last longer, but the longer it's in effect and the more they do the more tiring the comedown is.
CONCEALING SHIELD: Can create an invisible barrier around herself up to the size of a small room. This keeps anything inside from being visible to magic and paranatural senses. Has a much smaller effect on mundane senses, people who are quiet and still and not wearing bright colors are less noticeable from a distance but a determined searcher will still see through it. People and things can pass in and out without obstruction. It can be maintained indefinitely until she’s moved from inside it.
BEARER MANIFESTATION: When there are no living characters available, an ethereal projection of one of Need's bearers may appear and take her up. There have been many of these with many different skillsets, but the manifestations are functionally identical, each with the same athletic-human levels of ability and human senses for her to tap, and don't come with powers or (useable) additional weapons. They may fight using her or move her from one place to another, but except when she takes direct control they will only vaguely do what she wants. The manifestations don't speak or display a whole lot of intelligence but do reflect individual bearer's personalities and regard of Need - some are more expressive, others aloof, some clearly resent carrying her. Manifestations can seemingly get injured, though they don't spill any real blood and can't be healed (or buffed). If one takes a mortal wound it vanishes and won't return to rotation for a month. Need will dislike creating unthinking manifestations of people she cares about and won't use this power unless she has to.
ABILITIES
Need lived into her old age as a human, learned quite a lot of things in that time, and picked up more afterwards. All of these require a body to work through, but she does have the skills and can and has worked through other people (regardless of handedness) to use them, and with her ‘guiding’ possession can teach them thoroughly and with uncanny speed. Training that usually takes years can be compressed into weeks and months.
Blacksmithing and swordsmithing - Given the right materials and a forge with fuel, and time to adjust bc it’s probably not the same as the forge and tools she knows, Need can make and mend things from metal. Don’t expect a lot of proficiency with delicate work like small keys and fine tools, let alone jewelry, and I don’t imagine she could make armor easily. If you need heavy chains, horseshoes, or blades, though, she’ll do fine. She’s also got more limited wood and leather working skills.
Swordfighting - she’s right up there with the best in the setting, better than any living human, though this is a case where Mercedes Lackey novels hew closer to low fantasy than high (or to, say, anime). However, her fighting styles also tend to leave her bearer open to injury.
Slings, archery, and associated skills - she can make slings, bows, and arrows given a knife and raw materials, which she can just collect. Need can also use the sling and the bow pretty well, and throw knives accurately.
Hunting, tracking, and wilderness survival. Need can use stars to navigate, set traps, skin animals and tan their furs, make fires, tend and ride and train and shoe horses, recon, and do all your general set up and maintain camp stuff.
Some more refined skills: Various forms of etiquette, rituals, priest stuff, herblore, bookkeeping and logistics, detailed calculations, the byzantine ways magic works in Velgarth, how the human body works. She’s unwilling to lead but knows a lot about leadership and strategy/tactics.
SETTING/SUITABILITY
Need’s from the sword and sorceress/romantic fantasy genres. The main issue with playing her in any game is how she’s such a support character that she all but can’t act alone, but there’s already a few different characters inclined to carry her around.
SAMPLES
TDM toplevel!
