The Human - The clay that promised itself to wake

What Are Humans?

My promise is made partially true to RPG blog carnival. A race based on oaths and promises. Us humans.
You will need to have the character creation post for Victories & Miseries in hand.
Else you won't be able to understand us humans.

For... 

Humans are not the default.

They are not the unmarked center of the world.
They are its most mutable and resilient inhabitants.

Clay that woke and shaped itself.
Clay given voice, motion, and contradiction.
Clay that can be reshaped.
Clay that can shape itself back once more.

What they lack in innate magic, they gain through the will to forge meaning.
Their power lies in the words they swear, the tools they make, the studies they pursue, and the promises they keep.

A human oath can shake kingdoms.
A human love can defy fae logic.
A human grudge can bind a demon as well as any name.

They are relational, ritualistic, and resolute.
What they believe becomes real—through painstaking labor, material cost, and sometimes, transformation.

Humans are dangerous not because they necessarily dominate—but because they persist.

A human. Em Niwa.

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Human Magic: Constructed, Not Inherent

Humans don’t cast spells by blood or whim.
They don’t wield desire like the fae or radiate binding like demons.
Instead, humans build magic.

• Through ritual (words said in the right place, acts done at the right time)

• Through symbolic craft (alchemy, objects, structure)

• Through vows and promises (true words with weight)

• Through exposure (taking in the world until it changes them)

Over time, these practices may shift a human’s form.
A witch who calls moths her sisters may grow paper-thin wings.
A scholar who devours too many truths may forget how to lie.

That is human magic.
Not inherited. Not divine. Earned. Constructed. Risked.

All that a human is reflects the world—and the world reflects them in return. A unique mirror.
If you carry a great black sword that functions as a shield because you are a sword saint, then Sword Saints exist in the world. Are you the only one? Even if there is, other Sword Saints are different, wield different blades. Maybe there are not, but then there are other grand fighters. Someone else might carry the title of Sword Saint with pride, or with bloodied shame, or with a lie on their tongue. Play to find out. The only Sword Saint like you, is you.

I want the human race to have that way of being-different-within-a-category built in.

A human. Pets attracted. Armor crafted. Oaths made. All magic. Mony Pich

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Rituals & Symbolic craft

Ritual is not a spell list. Symbolic craft is not an ingredient list. Both are practice made powerful.

Humans create magic by making meaning visible. It is culture and symbolic undestanding.

Salt circles that bar the demon's passage.
Dragon-tongue distilled into flame-potion.
Ink made from royal bones to sign an irresistible contract.

These magics are about symbol, material, and relation.
They require logic—not realism. Poetic truth is enough.

Why does the salt circle work?
Because salt is the uttermost distillate of earth.
Because demons are from another plane.
Because nothing from outside this world may cross that distilled threshold.
So of course the circle works.

Players are expected to say what the object is, how it works, and why it must work. If the logic sings, it is true.  

A human can use symbolic craft because they understand it, and because their understanding is true in the world.

If the player gets it, the character gets it. If the character gets it, it functions.

Mechanics: How Ritual Becomes Power

Ritual magic and symbolic craft is learned in play - or before play. You need to have something indicating alchemic prowess to be able to make a drakes breath potion without some backlash, poisoning, or worse. (Remember Schrödingers rules of character creation. If you can, you can)

Like flour and water into bread. . Stuff that dragons tongue down into an alchemical solution. Drink it. Now you've made a dragons breath potion.

Was it hurried? was the materials ill-kept? Then there may be consequences. Maybe even chimeric consequences if the material was too strong.  But now you've learned to "bake" a dragons breath potion. Go get some drake-hearts.

Alternatively, rituals may be taught, passed down, or earned through relation. These require a Named person or thing, or a Trait that indicates the bond. you must name the source. You also for sure have the knowledge of where to find it. Its makes sense to be a skill or expertise too. Good questions to answer:

• Who showed it to you?

• What did you give them in return?

• Why do you still do it the same way?

Your rituals tells the world something about you—and about what exists beyond you.

Burn the skull of a beggar, hungry as they died. Draw a circle with the bone-ash heated rod. The hunger-hound shall be drawn from its cave. Only the death-laden branch may command it. John William Waterhouse.

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Studious Expertise

Studious Expertises

When a player invests time in honing a specific aspect of an expertise, the related actions (or the expertise itself) gain magical properties. Say the same thing in the same place for ten years and something begins to listen.

Train with your sword each night—from when the sun leaves your face to when it returns—and eventually, the blade will answer like a shadow.

These effects emerge slowly, but truly. Not just “flavor.” They are magic.

A midwife who has birthed a thousand children can stave off infection by presence alone.

A butcher who sharpens their knives to a fae lullaby can make meat sing of its life.

A dancer who never repeats a step twice may make time stutter.

Some human expertises become studious, structured by deliberate grammar. The worlds Grammar. The human learns to speak the language of the world - just a tiny bit. This takes time, or letting the world in, to learn:

• Time is marked in Traits (age, obsession, physical signs) or Chimeric marks representing letting the world in (see below). This means also that a human maximum can have one studious expertise from obsession, age and being other. Most have zero or one. Neither is better. Remember, I am not your mother.

Each expertise is a system of components—words that can be recombined into actions. It's creative syntax. Words that are true in the fabric of the world. There are no sorcerers. But there are pyromancers, sisters, magical midwives and shadowblades. 

All studious expertises are Chimeric. What if you don't want to change? Swear an Oath on it. Make a promise to yourself. 

Studious expertises are not better than other expertises, just another way magic more directly expresses itself. This form of magic is just another way to go about reality. There are non-magical electroengineers, and magical electroengineers. They probably view one another with equal degrees of admiration and superstition.

These combinations below are flexible—but the the trappings of the concept must always apply. You can’t cast “Quick cut” without wielding the tools of a midwife, cannot use refuse-peer while surrounded by friends at the end of the argument you end. A dancer needs a new step in their dance, carrying them to a different spot, to work their dance-magic. Possible conditions may arrive by the GM's sight of the world, or from the logic you yourself see.

Example:

Shadowblade

• Base actions: Step, Blur, veil, stab, turn, fold, strike, echo

• Combinations: "veil-step", "blur-strike", "echo-turn", "foldstep", strike-veil
  

A Shadowblade steps through shadows with veil-step. May strike in a flurry with blurstrike". Can even go forth, then back in time with echo-turn. Foldstep carves the geometry of space as long as you could reach there in a held breath, and Strike veil allows a shadow to cut like a blade, as long as you hold your gaze to it.

Midwife

• Base actions: Catch, Name, Still, Bind, Unwind, Cut, Quick, Calm, Soothe, Cord, Breath, Live

• Combinations: Namebind, quick-cut, Cord-unwind, Still-Live, Breathcatch

A midwife rules treshholds. Pushes people in or out of them: Children easily out of wombs. Lives summoned back into those where there is only hope left with still-live. Unwinds the noose with a cord-unwind. stabilizing someone by retelling them their name,

Sister

• Base actions: Hold, Scold, Tease, Cover, Shame, Braid, 

• Combinations: Braid-cover, scold-hold, tease-name, shame-cover, name-braid

A sister doesn’t need to be related. She just needs to know how to bind and break, to protect and provoke, and to speak in the grammar of belonging. Her words stick to others—whether they want them or not. Especially those dear to hear. A name-braid can draw someone into your orbit as long as you speak their name. Braid-cover can let you disguise anothers intention by displaying your own. Tease-name can give another a nickname they must respond to.

Loner

• Base actions: Drift, harden, refuse, vanish, peer, snap, fade, wolf

• Combinations: Refuse-peer, snap-fade, harden-drift, peer-snap, vanish-refuse

A loner does not mean alone. It means you’ve learned to use space as armor. That you’ve shaped your life in negation, edge, and selective presence. The Loner’s words aren’t loud—but they cut precisely where closeness wants to grow. Vanish-refuse holds another near, snap-fade lets you be absent at a moments notice, harden-drift assures safety as long as you move wherever the wind asks you. 

A Human. Maybe a sister. A dragontamer. A royal fledgeling. Bunbunnori

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Chimerism: Saturation, Not Corruption

Humans change.
When the same thing piles up—emotion, ritual, obsession—they take it into themselves.

This is not corruption. It is saturation.
Not poison. Not infection. But becoming.

Affectation. Evolution. A second spine that sings in ritual tongues.
A new glint in the eye that sees too much.
Salt in the blood, bramble at the joints.

Mechanics: How Chimerism Works

• Mark an Expertise and a Trait.
  When a human takes an action using both, and rolls a double, they gain an affect.

• Chimerism may also occur:

  • As part of a consequence

  • As the reward of a powerful success

  • As an offered choice during pressure

Affects and Otherness

An affect is the change you take inward, from something outside.
Only the GM offers the first affect.
The human may spend effort to choose a second affect—still inspired by the outside world.

Three affects in total become an Otherness—a new Expertise, a Feat Heroic, and an Instinct with the same theme.

Chimeric change may alter or refresh existing Feats—if tied Traits, Skills, or Expertises are overwritten. Or, a new Feat Heroic may emerge from the change itself, like a poem spoken by a new body.

Chimerism never grants anyone else control.
Even if you’re touched by vampyr blood you spill for the tenth time, it’s your change. You may gain wings, or white hair, or instinctual terror—but the vampire does not own you.
A human is by their own actions made a mirror—not a servant. 

Example
A priestess of the dead, spending more time with the dead than the living.

• GM-given Affect (from first chimeric trigger):
  Smells faintly of linen, old myrrh, and the hush of unspoken names. 

• Player-chosen Affect (effort spent):
  Right arm loses sensation in heat, but pulses when near corpses. Her touch halts rot.

• Final Affect (third source—consequence or transformation):
  Half her face sloughs away, leaving flensed skin and a bright cerulean eye. She wakes with it intact. 

The Otherness:

The dead now see her as kin. Those near her can be kept at, or pushed over, the veil of death.

Once the third affect manifests, her body and soul accept the transformation. She is not the same—but she is still herself.

• New Expertise:
  Smells faintly of linen, old myrrh, and the hush of unspoken names gives the expertise.
  Corpse-Kin
  Skills: "entreat with the dead", "mummify the soul by mummifying the body", "Scare ghosts with exacting silence", "coax memories from burning bones".

• Feat Heroic:
  Right arm loses sensation in heat, but pulses when near corpses. Her touch halts rot gives the feat
  She Took the Dying Into Her Arms —
  Truth: Death is halted in her presence. When someone is on the brink of death and she holds them, time suspends for a moment. She may ask a final question, offer a last rite, call something back, or keep death at bay for as long as you are in contact.
  Activation: The dead shrivels up, paper-skin, cradled softly. Not dead. Not alive. 

• Instinct:
  Half her face sloughs away, leaving flensed skin and a bright cerulean eye. She wakes with it intact gives the instinct.
  What Is Lost Must Be Witnessed — She cannot look away from death. All death's must be witnessed until breath is no longer drawn.
  
  
  

A Human, made monster to some. Guillaume Duchemin

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Oaths and Vows: Magic Made in the Mouth

Words matter.
Uttered with weight, they become magic.

Humans may swear Vows (covers promises, oaths, and grudges based on wording) which function like Instincts, but with broader power:

• To yourself: to empower or steady yourself. To resist, to shield, to focus. To reject chimerism. 

• To another: It also alters your relationship. They may hold you to it, invoke your shame, or gain leverage.

• With a mark: It is also made visible. Carved, painted, drunk. The mark sustains the vow. the world knows. It feels it. All living, sentient things can sense its weight and emotional content, though they don’t know its precise wording.
  
  A marked oath is the source of chimerism that only grows and shows when following the oath directly, and is a ward against other forms of chimerism. 
  

“I will never lose myself to the beast inside.”
“I will return the breath I took—lest I carry silence forever.”
“I will guard her grave with my name—lest I forget who I am.”

Mechanics: How Vows Work

• A Vow is a statement beginning with “I will…”

• It is tied to an existing element on your sheet.

• When true, it may be invoked like a Trait.

• When broken:

  • If sworn only to yourself: your baseline emotional condition shifts.

  • If sworn to another: they may invoke your shame until you make amends or perform a compensating act.

  • If sworn with a mark: You break as it does. You take on an Otherness. The world knows you as an Oathbreaker. 

Vows are always true until relinquished—and relinquishing costs something.

What Is a Mark?

A mark is the ritual sign that seals a vow. It can be a cut, a tattoo, a painted sigil, a scar, a drink taken under witness, to ritual blinding. 
It may be simple—a tattoo written in chalk— or stark, like ritualistic blinding.
In this world, chalk cannot fade if it seals something true.
The mark sustains itself, because the vow does.
When someone sees it, they don’t know what it means—but they know it means something. It hums with magic.

The more depriving the mark, the more power it holds. A sense removed, a likeness changed, a past forgotten, is worthy of all the effects of immediate chimeric otherness, which only shows when called upon under the oath. A human made chimeric from an oath is oathsworn.

Two Humans. I swear to be your eye and mind when you cannot. I promise that my arm is yours in times of need. The Blind Archer and the Eye - working in concert. Smut-like. Ami Thompson

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Playing a Human - play-aid

You are the mutable race.
You do not cast magic. You build it.
You change the world—and let the world change you.

Ritual

• Do something repeatedly, or with meaning. Over time, it becomes true. Keep reforging that sword.

• If taught or inherited, name who or where it came from.

• You may begin with rituals already practiced, and power already gained.

Symbolic Craft

• Create objects that work because you understand them.

• If the logic makes sense, it functions.“Salt keeps out demons—because salt is the earth’s distillate.”

• If you get it, your character does. If your character gets it, and is a position to get it in the world (a smith working with metals) it works. Or anyone having seen a dragonheart, who eats it. It may also just burn you up from the inside. Don't be an idiot.

Vows

• Begin with “I will…”

• Tie them to something on your sheet.

• May be sworn to yourself, to another (they write it too on their sheet - and can hold it against you), or with a mark (cut, paint, drink).

• May be invoked to strengthen your resolve, or turn back specific consequences that would unmake the vow.

• A marked vow sustains itself—chalk won’t fade if it’s true.

• If actively broken or relinquised: something in you must change.

• You may begin with one or more vows already sworn.

Chimerism

• A trait, instinct or expertise may be marked as chimeric. It has otherness and innate potential for change. Obsess over something, and a GM may freely determine it chimeric.

• When you use chimeric Trait and Expertise together and roll doubles, gain an affect (a physical or symbolic change). 

• Affects are offered by the GM. You may spend effort to choose another.

• Three affects = a new chimeric skill, Feat Heroic, and also an always chimeric Instinct tied to the chimeric trait of expertise. This otherness makes you visible different: To some, a beauty. To many, a monster. To all, other. 

• You may begin play with something chimeric already. How is it the object of your obsession?

Rules That Apply to You

• You do not begin with innate or passive magic. (Other races are good for that. More to come)

• You do not cast spells by emotion.

• You must construct power—through time, cost, or relation—or begin having already done that.

• Everything you carry tells the world what exists:

  • If you are a sword-saint, sword-saints exist.

  • If you speak midwife-words to name and cut, those words are real. Others use them too.
    

Remember

• Rituals become magic through practice or inheritance.

• Symbolic items function if your logic holds in the world.

• Vows are true until broken—and breaking them hurts.

• Chimerism happens when you are saturated with something. It is the outside leaking in.

A human, marked and sworn. Maxim Bazhenov

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Possible Character Creation Questions - for Victories & Miseries

... If you are that type, that is! I prefer to work from a cool picture like all those linked in my posts, and work backwards. 

• What tool, book, or object do you hold sacred?
• Who or what do you study, and why? What do you carry from it?
• What promise have you made, if any, that now guide your path?
• What part of the world lives in-on-or-near your body now?
•  What have you sworn never to do again? 
• What might you become, if you let yourself?

A good way to arrive at Traits is to then ask yourself, once per relevant question answered "What mark did it leave on my body and mind?" If an answer pops up, use it!

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SO HOW DOES THIS SMUT?!

It is hidden there in between the lines.

The potential for smut in the human race is not just sexual—it is transformative.
It is sacred self-fetish turned ritual.
It’s the oath sworn in a moment of heat, sealed in spit, tears, or something darker.
It’s the vow screamed into a pillow or carved into flesh.
Paladins swear their oaths in chapels. A harlot swears hers with thighs parted and candles lit.
Same power. Same weight. 
There are Paladins of Lust.

To craft meaning from desire. To find divine logic in kink, in longing, in hunger.
To wear a garland with flowers shaped like cock and cunt at once, so that it makes you irresistible to all.

To study seduction with the same rigor as swordplay, and let it change you.
To wield rejection like a blade.
To make the erotic a sharp expertise.
It is Buckle-lust, Pain-coax, climax-gaze.

To make promises you’re not sure you can keep—and live with what that makes you.
To be human is to make your body an altar built from longing.
To be human is to be a litany of scars and half-held breaths.

That is humanity.

Humanity. Yashiro Nanaco