Hunters: Tamers

Hunters: Tamers Oct 3, 2018 21:45:44 GMT -8

Quote

Post by Admin on Oct 3, 2018 21:45:44 GMT -8

One of the five hunter faith powers, and a natural 'talent' few possess, taming is a shadier ability used to summon, control, and draw strength from otherworldly beings.

Tamers are tied closely to the spiritual world. They walk hand in hand with madness and catastrophe, with only faith and discipline for protection.

Frowned upon by many even within the Hunter society, tamers are distrustful of non-tamers and shroud their ways in secrecy.

Tamer Information

Appearance	Mostly human, a wide range of physical oddities mark them as abnormal.
Quirks	See & hear things that others do not, distracted & influenced by spirits, wide variety of abnormal behaviors, carry strange tools
Strengths	Summoning, exorcising, hosting, & manifesting spirits, certain superhuman abilities, arcane & spiritual knowledge, sixth sense, close knit to other tamers
Weaknesses	Disliked by normal humans, mental instability, debilitating physical oddities, easily possessed, affected by spirits, can become 'infectious', being exorcised
Inspiration	Power Inspiration --- Design Inspiration ^{(Please do not conflict with existing RP rules if using inspiration.)}
List of Tamer Characters	Tamers

Taming

Taming

Tamers make pacts with spirits, calling them to their aid and hosting them within their own body and soul

Calling on spirits comes at a high cost- allied spirits influence a tamer, and calling on their powers heightens their sway. A tamer must maintain balance between their own personality and goals versus those of the many spirits they host within themselves; if balance is lost, the tamer can lose themselves and become a monster far more dangerous than any one spirit they contain.

Controlling Spirits

Summoning

Tamers are natural summoners. Their connection to the spiritual world allows them to contact beings on other planes of existence. Unlike normal humans who can only blindly summon, tamers have the unique capacity to choose exactly what they summon, and for how long.

When many tamers act in unison, they can combine their strength. In large-scale battles, tamer groups are used to summon otherworldly armies and control potentially world-ending beings.

Summoning comes at a high cost, and can vary anywhere from mild hangover, personality shift, to coma. Summoned spirits will influence the tamer- for example, summoning a fire spirit may make the tamer hot tempered, or unable to stay warm once it leaves. Recovery comes with time.

Hosting

While tamers summon for limited periods of time, they will also contain, or host, groups of spirits within themselves long-term in a symbiotic form of possession.

Skilled tamers can acquire and manage a group, known as a ethereal host. Hosted spirits can be summoned to fight, but their presence also protects and enhances the tamer themself. Staying 'full' of carefully curated spirits also prevents unwanted possession, a risk even for experienced tamers.
In return, spirits receive a human body and soul to reside within and influence. They can also grow far beyond their potential by experiencing humanity and collaborating with different spirits.

Hosted spirits have far more influence over a tamer than a temporary summon, and tamers consistently manifest outward signs of the creatures within. Keeping this less pronounced requires discipline, as well as maintaining a good relationship between tamer and spirits.
A skilled tamer is picky about what they allow residence, choosing the most useful, or best suited to their personality, or having new qualities they wish to acquire (i.e., a coward may choose a spirit of bravery).

Taming Spirits

Tamers use will, cunning, and charisma to earn cooperation. Once earned, they must care for their allied spirits. Each has different needs; to experience love, to drink blood, etc. An unfulfilled spirit is very dangerous.

Tamed spirits are more powerful and complex than 'wild' ones. The difference widens the longer they are tamed. Tamers shape their spirits as much as the spirit shapes them. Growth is guided by the tamer's will, personality, desires, shared experiences, and other spirits influence. The best tamers try to plan the shape their spirits grow into, but not everything can be planned for. A spirit of love that experiences intense grief may become a spirit of heartbreak.

For spirits, the opportunity to experience nuanced, varied, and complex humanity and the power and knowledge that comes with that is one of the main draws to allowing oneself to be tamed.

Manifesting

When summoning or hosting spirits, a tamer's appearance, abilities, and psyche grow to resemble them.

This can be involuntary, as with possession, and is exacerbated by strong emotion or lack of control. Manifesting spirits is often a sign that spirits are taking over the tamer's body and mind. However, very skilled tamers can carefully and purposefully manifest their spirits to temporarily increase their own prowess.

This comes at a cost similar to or worse to a summoning hangover.

Working with Different Spirits

Each tamer has a predisposition to certain kinds of spirits. Some may get along well with fae, while others may be instantly overwhelmed by angels. Here are some of the quirks that come with certain spirits (feel free to add to/change these guidelines)

Angels: Can be bossy and overwhelming, particularly if the tamer's personality isn't 'morally good'. They can perform heavenly miracles, such as healing and seeing through illusion. Usually require hosting demons simultaneously to balance out the pure righteousness.
Demons: More subtle in trying to get what they want than angels, demons are familiar with working with human sin. They may try to 'enhance' sinful urges, particularly if the tamer is easily fooled or acts too good for the demon's liking. Hosting angels simultaneously can help keep their tricks in check.
Fae: More complex than angels and demons, and more complicated to host. Unlike angels or demons who can generally be predicted to act by their black or white nature, fae are morally grey. Fae have their own unique desires and goals, and may act outside a tamer's goals more frequently. Keeping fae appeased and predicting their whims is difficult enough to deter many tamers; Fae are high risk, but with the potential of powerful fae magic, high reward.
Ghosts: Tamers can becoming haunted by storing human souls within them, including those of other tamers, becoming the ghost's new anchor. Ghosts are less powerful than most other spirits, but can carry traces of memory, skills, and powers of the mortal they once were. Ghosts often carry longing or unfulfilled desires that tethered them to the mortal world. Unless riled up, they exert less influence than most spirits.
Other Spirits: Some spirits may not fall into any of these categories. Maybe it's an elemental, or the embodiment of specific emotion. That's ok! (Tamers are not set in stone. Feel free to step outside these guidelines!)

Removing Spirits

Exorcism

Tamers excel at exorcism and banishment. However, exorcising a tamer is perilous for both the tamer and the exorcist, and should only be attempted by experts (ideally another tamer).

Removing spirits recently acquired will not cause much trouble, but long-time residents may be deeply embedded in a tamer's heart, mind, memories, and soul. Removing the spirit will take pieces of those things with it. (i.e. exorcising an old spirit of anger may render the tamer unable to feel angry over anything. The tamer may also forget things associated with the emotion, including enemies, or things that they once hated.)

Additionally, powerful spirits may not be contained easily on forcible removal. They may try to return to the tamer, or even become hostile.

A tamer will recover from a partial exorcism slowly as they gain new spirits, memories, and emotions, but some things will never quite be the same.
A tamer that is completely exorcised will become a husk, and very susceptible to possession. Some recovery is possible with close care, attention, and time to form new memories and gain new spirits, but the experience will leave lasting scars. Fully exorcised tamers forget even their own name, and are referred to with placeholder names (John/Jane Doe, Ivan Ivanovich, ect) until/if they remember.

Sealing

A spirit may be too dangerous to set free, too powerful to be banished, or cost too much to exorcise, and an alternative is needed. Sealing rituals allow a spirit to be trapped within a tamer.

Sealed spirits exert far less influence than normally hosted spirits. They can result in repressed memories, subdued personality/abilities relating to the spirit, strange manifestations, and will cause the tamer difficulty in understanding or remembering things related to the spirit, including that it still resides within, even if frequently reminded.

A tamer can still experience feelings and thoughts related to the repressed spirit, but doing so frequently or strongly may weaken or break the seal.

Appearance

Appearance

Tamers appear mostly human, with a wide range of physical oddities marking them as abnormal. The intensity of these manifestations will fluctuate, but strongly depend on the particular spirits the tamer harnesses & the tamer's level of control. However, even a master tamer will carry some signs. (Example Reference)

Physical & Mental Quirks

Tamers frequently see and hear things on different planes of existence, or which may not exist at all. They host spirits within themselves, which can influence their body and personality, and create distractions that only those with spiritual connections can even notice. Tamers exhibit a variety of abnormal behaviors and ticks, and most carry occult tools to help control their 'powers'.

Role in Society

Role in the Church

Until recently, tamers were routinely burned as witches and heretics for their ties to the occult. As the potential for walking armies has begun to be realized, they have slowly become more tolerated by the church.
Still, there are many who do not believe a tamers usefulness outweighs the danger and blasphemy of their existence.

Tamer society is close knit as a result. Even new tamers are treated as close family. While the Church does it's best to keep these kinds of dangerous people separated, tamers have many private rituals and customs between one another. One such ritual: Tamers in close proximity often interact with each other's hosts. Saying hello is a basic courtesy, but extreme situations can result in a sort of hive-mind. Tamers may also exchange spirits, which is by far the gentlest way to gain or lose a new spirit.

Outside of the Church

While human faith can help control the spirits drawn to a tamer, the belief does not need to be in Christ. Some cultures have a very different view of spiritual possession, and tamers from non-Christian cultures often have a better chance of survival, as well as more prestigious place in society. (Reference for taming in other cultures)

Becoming a Tamer

Becoming a Tamer

This information is NOT common knowledge to anyone but tamers and the higher up Church officials. If your OC knows anything about this, please make sure to give them a reason.

Becoming a tamer is not a choice as much as a mandatory step for survival. Taming is an inborn 'talent'; tamers are humans abnormally connected to the spiritual world, and who attract infesting spirits. Untrained, they are easily and frequently possessed, and many spend their (quite often) brief lives as involuntary puppets for whatever beings they run into. These early possessions are usually malevolent in nature, and many potential young tamers are captured or slain to prevent the spread of supernatural death and destruction.

Those who are fortunate enough to survive usually have a mentor to thank, or else are incredibly lucky. Human faith can prevent random possession, and with practice, strong will, discipline, and diplomacy, a tamer can learn to turn the spirits that would control them into servants and allies.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Strengths

Summoning & Exorcising: Tamers gain a mastery of controlling spirits born out of necessity and constant practice.

Superhuman Abilities: A tamer benefits from each individual spirit they host, gaining a wide variety of knowledge and superhuman abilities, including heightened faith powers. Mastery of many classes is common among tamers.

Arcane & Spiritual Knowledge: Tamers regularly interact with beings that even some of the most scholarly can only hope to read about. Tamers learn many secrets and rare knowledge through their work. However, due to their isolation and distrust in/by society, most only freely share it with other tamers.

Close-Knit: Tamers almost always treat each other like family, even if they are strangers. Tamers are quite good at spotting one another, and it is nearly impossible to pretend to be one. Tamers have their own private rituals and customs, though it is rare to find more than one or two together, in large part due to their rarity, but also intentional efforts of the Church.

Sixth Sense: Tamers are far more attuned to the supernatural than most mortals. The can see, hear, and otherwise sense otherwordly things that normal humans cannot.

Weaknesses

Isolated from Human Society: Even well-disciplined tamers are seen as extremely odd by other humans, if not outright evil heretics & witches. Distrusted by most humans and even their fellow hunters, the class is generally very isolated.

Madness: Tamers are often half-mad from the strain of taming, hearing voices, strange emotions, seeing and hearing what others cannot... Tamers without thought/personality disorders are unheard of.

Debilitating Mental & Physical Oddities: The spirits a tamer summon and host will influence their body and mind. Spirits will transform a tamers body to resemble their own preferred form more closely, or to better perform their miraculous abilities. Personality will be affected as well. Poor control or simply relying on their spirits at all heightens these influences, which can eb and flow.

Possession: Susceptible to possession from unwanted spirits. Slip-ups may leave even a skilled tamer vulnerable to their own hosted spirits' control. A tamer without a full host is a walking target for malevolent spirits.

Contagion: Those with little training or whose control slips may become 'infectious' to other tamers especially, and even non-tamers, drawing infesting spirits to those around them.

Exorcism: Being exorcised is complicated, and will take far more than just the spirit from the tamer.

Streitstadt

title

Post by Admin on Sept 30, 2018 23:09:39 GMT -8

Post by Admin on Oct 3, 2018 21:45:44 GMT -8

Quick Reply