Re: A Comment on Secrets

From: Chris Lemens <chrislemens_at_z-jaTsgBM2MV6T7IMVtyHx3AmGZ_A8-7aunjZa5G2DmDalXuYMcYDvGVuk8tkPr2>
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2007 07:23:17 -0700 (PDT)

Great Scott says:
> My favourite [secretss] are the ones that allow you character to become part of
> the God and removed as an NPC. What a fantastic culmination of a
> career. I would like to have a more pendragonesque feel to secrets,
> so the more powerful you become (in affinities) the more you want the
> secret, a sort of feedback loop. It would culminate with the
> character transcending from the game. Perhaps that's why so few know
> the secret and are still around.

What I would love is to be able to linger, Buddha-like, on the threshhold of transcendance. It would be the state of one kind of hero that eventually goes on to have a hero cult, become a star, found a dynasty, or whatever. Since there are so many tragic heroes, it should be a morally perilous state for the hero.

I'm not sure that any rule changes are needed, because I've never actually seen a secret used in play.

Example: In Sandy's RQ game, one of our characters had married the bee queen and become king of zombie island. Mine was a white elf who had recovered seeds of the four other genders of white elves (Sandy rolled a die, fortunately not a d20), and was re-growing the race. One or the other of us (I can't recall who -- Guy?) had given up his afterlife during one of our distressingly frequent trips to the underworld. So, the only way for that character to retain his identity after death was to be apotheosized. In HQ, I would think that the route might have been thourgh a secret: learn the secret, don't transcend, use it to create a place for yourself in the cosmos; or alternately, do transcend, since you don't have an afterlife anyway.

Chris