Appendix II: Example Descriptors

Exempli Gratia

In case you're having a hard time figuring out what would make a good Descriptor, here are a few lists of some we've come up with. You can also look at the example characters to find more.

Traits

• Keen Sense of Smell
• Looks Good in a Cape
• Looks Good in a Dress
• Can Climb Sheer Walls
• Has the Bible Memorized
• Painter
• Huge
• Former Monk
• Fan of the Theater
• Femme Fatale
• Knows Women
• Keen Fashion Sense
• Knows Classic Literature
• Hopeful Romantic
• Sees the Dead
• Voice of an Angel
• The 4th Musketeer -- Well, I Would Be
• Follower of the Arcane
• Galavanting Cavalier
• Holy Quest
• Orphan Prodigy
• Wonderful Wit
• Master Weaver
• Code of Honor
• Journeyman Shipwright
• Parish Priest
• Feats of Logic
• Leap of Faith
• Elephant's Memory
• Priestess of the Ancient Gods
• Champion of the People
• Culinary Adept
• Culturally Adept
• Tactitian for the 17th Mounted Regiment
• Bound for Glory
• Mercy for the Weak
• Alchemist
• Mind Inside the Enigma
• Heart of a Lion
• Animal Handler
• Knows the Woods
• Knows Nature
• Gives to the Poor
• Vow of Poverty
• Trouble-Shooter
• Family Avenger

Flaw Traits

• Short Tempered
• Huge
• Clumsy Around Knives
• Gets Sick Easily
• Weak Stomach
• Afraid of the Ocean
• Horrible Lack of Manners
• Poor Hygiene
• Poor Gambler
• Perpetual Rebel
• Wounding Wit
• Gives the Plan Away
• Frail
• Habitually Late
• Fear of Birds
• Persistent Failure at Love
• Mistrusted
• Uneducated
• Disillusioned
• War-Torn Homeland

Powers

With Possible Power Stunt Traits

• Acrobatics: the character is a world-class acrobat and gymnast.
• • Untouchable: she has adapted her acrobatics to martial combat so that she can completely avoid being attacked
  Air Form: the character can become a being made of air, but visually unchanged (except for being transparent).
• Alchemist: the character is an accomplished alchemist.
• • Adjust the Humours: she can create salves and potions that quickly incapacitate people by unbalancing their humours.
  Already Dead: the character has died, but for some reason keeps going.
• Amphibious: the character can breathe both air and water.
• • Human Fountain: she can take in and hold an entire lungful of water, and then exhale it (spit it out) with great force.
  Animal Form: the character can change into the form of some particular animal.
• • Partial Form: she can shift just part of her body to animal form.
  Animate Earth: the character can bring the very ground to life, animating chunks of rock and earth.
• • Local Earthquake: she can use less-precise control over a larger area to cause a minor earthquake in the near area.
  Animate Object: the character can animate a mundane object, much like a marionette without strings.
• Armored Skin:
• Balance: the character has extraordinary powers of balance.
• • Freefall: her balance is so phenomenal that she can twist and turn, using air resistance and landing technique to survive any fall unharmed.
  Battle Armor: the character has a suit of mechanical battle armor.
• • Exo-skeleton: the armor provides a boost to her strength.
  • Spare Sword: the armor has several built-in weapons which can be produced on demand and are not obvious when not in use.
  Beast Speech: the character can talk to all animals.
• Bestow Phobia: the character can make someone afraid of something just by making eye contact.
• • Moment of Paranoia: she can distract someone by momentarily giving them a powerful dose of undirected fear.
  Borrow Powers: with a solid touch, the character can steal another Omega's Power for a Page.
• Cat Blood: the character has many of the qualities of a cat, and is probably somewhat cat-like in appearance (cat eyes, a tail, claws, etc.).
• • Cat Ears: she can hear higher pitches, and better determine direction. She can also pick up very faint sounds.
  • Expressive Tail: she can convey not only her mood, but also simple messages to those who know her well, just with her tail.
  • Lands on Her Feet: she has not only the extraordinary balance of a cat, but the ability to take a fall. Provided she has room to orient herself and her limbs are free, she suffers no harm from falls.
  • Sharp Bits: she has retractable claws that are wickedly sharp. In addition to their obvious uses, they also make climbing easier.
  • Whiskers: her whiskers enable her to sense as well as she would normally see, even in complete darkness, by picking up air movements.
  Chameleon: the character can change her coloration to blend into her surroundings.
• • Something Up My Sleeve: she can extend the chameleon ability to held objects.
  Clairsentience:
• Claws:
• Climbing:
• Control Animals: the character can bend animals to her will, forcing them to do whatever she desires. In general, the further from the animal's normal nature the action is, the harder it is to maintain control.
• Control Plants: the character can make plants move according to her will.
• • Psychic Fertilizer: she can cause plants to grow super fast.
  Control Water: the character can shape water to her will, defying gravity.
• Create Fog: the character can coalesce an impenetrable fog out of even the slightest ambient moisture.
• • Dessicate: she can suck the moisture out of the ground or objects, creating a fog in the process.
  Danger Sense: the character knows it's bad before it's bad.
• Darkness:
• Delicate Touch: the character's touch is hyper-sensitive.
• • Find Angels on the Head of a Pin: her touch is so sensitive that she can feel even non-corporeal things.
  Digging:
• Dimension Door: the character can create a small rift in reality, and step through it to another location nearby.
• • Sudden Fall: she can open the door directly underneath someone else.
  Dimensional Shifting: the character has the ability to shift to other realities. This isn't generally a good power, as it tends to make the game very hard to run. Either the character can take others with them, which makes it impossible for the Storyguide to plan ahead, or she can't, which would either separate the characters or leave the power unused.
• Doesn't Breathe:
• Doesn't Eat: the character has no need to eat, and perhaps can't even if she wants to.
• • Stomach Storage: she can hide objects in her stomach, unharmed.
  Earth Form: the character can suffuse her being with the essence of the Earth.
• • Antaeus' Health: she instantly heals any damage by simply absorbing more earth.
  Elastic Bones: the character's bones can stretch and bend like rubber.
• • Spring-Loaded Punch: she can use her own arm as a giant spring to deliver powerful blows.
  Empathy: the character can sense others' feelings and moods.
• • Say the Right Thing: the character may use her empathic ability super-accurately during a conversation, enabling her to adjust what she is saying word-by-word in order to ellicit exactly the emotional response she wants from someone.
  Energy Absorption: the character can harmlessly absorby electricity, heat, and other forms of energy.
• • The Sound of Silence: she can "suck up" all the sound energy in an area.
  Everybody's Friend: the character is well-liked by everybody she meets.
• • Sure, You Can Do That: people let her get away with things, even things that they're specifically charged to prevent.
  Excalibur: the character owns Excalibur.
• • Favored of Avalon: she is watched over by the Ladies of Avalon.
  Exploding Body: the character may explode her body, causing the effects of a bomb in the immediate area. Her body reforms gradually after the explosion.
• Extra Limbs: the character has more than the usual number of limbs.
• • Confusing Dexterity: she can use her extra arms to distract others during combat or other intense situations from what she's really doing.
  Firestarter: the character can cause objects to burst into flame.
• • The Shakes: cause something to vibrate, but not as quickly, so it just gets shaken up rather than catching fire.
  Flamethrower: the character can shoot jets of flames from her hands.
• • Controlled Burn: she can adjust the nature of the flames so that they only burn certain types of materials.
  Flatland: the character can become two-dimensional, squeezing one of her dimensions (height, width, or depth) out of existence.
• • Invisible Walk: she has great skill at keeping her missing dimension towards observers, rendering her effectively invisible.
  Flight: the character can fly. she may or may not have wings or other obvious means of flight.
• • Easy Fall: she can defy gravity even in areas that don't provide room for flight, thus not suffering hurt from falls.
  • Go with the Flow: can use her knowledge of flight to analyze air currents, and figure out where they're coming from and going to.
  • Lighter than Air: she can extend her density control to people or objects that she is touching, making them super light so that she can toss them about freely.
  • Power Dive: she can make an attack much quicker by climbing to a high altitude and diving. Doing this, she can move much faster than normally, and thus all attacks are harder to avoid and physical attacks are much more devestating.
  Force Field: the character can generate a protective field of pure force around herself.
• • Air Filter: by concentrating, she can make it keep some elements of the air out, as well as physical objects.
  Friend to Animals: the character is well-liked by animals, and they will never deliberately harm her.
• Frog Legs: the character has phenomenal leaping (and landing) ability
• Gadgeteer: the character has a mechanical solution for every problem, and carries many of them with her at all times.
• • Extraordinarily Well-Equipped: she tends to coincidentally have just the right tool for whatever the current problem is.
  • Luckily, I Anticipated That: she has a knack for exploring bizarre possibilities, leading to mechanisms that specifically counter opponents' Powers.
  • Those Wonderful Toys: her mechanisms are extraordinarily versatile, so she tends to carry just a few general ones, rather than barrels full of more-specialized ones.
  Ghost Form: the character can take a visible but intangible form.
• Golden Tongue: the character can persuade someone of almost anything, given enough time.
• Growth: the character can grow as large as a tree.
• • I'm a Jack!: she can use her growth power to lift things that her strength alone never could.
  Healer: the character may heal others of wounds, and possibly even restore life.
• Heart of a Lion -- Really: the character has a greatly enhanced constitution.
• Human Torch: the character can cause her entire body to burst into flame. It is assumed the character is immune to her own flame, and may be immune to flame in general, though perhaps only when she is aflame.
• • Bolt of Fire: shoot beams of flame
  • Cold Feet: the bottoms of her feet can be turned on or off independent of the rest of the body, thus making it possible to walk on wood floors and the like
  • Control Fire: shape and manipulate existing flames, perhaps even making pictures
  • Eternal Flame: keep a fire burning for as long as she is present, even if it runs out of fuel
  • Everything Burns. Everything.: cause normally non-flammable things to burn, perhaps even water.
  • Extra Weight: by removing the (bouyant) phlogiston from an object without burning it, the object is rendered noticably heavier (and possibly non-flamable)
  • Flame Thrower: generate a ball of flame that can be thrown or dropped
  • Got a Light?: can inflame just parts of her body, thus creating a light source or lighting a fire without having to inflame the entire body.
  • Liquid Fire: create blobs of fire that behave like honey, and can be manipulated as a semi-solid (though they'll burn those who are burned by fire, of course)
  • Ride the Phlogiston: use the inherent bouyant qualities of phlogiston, found in all matter, to fly, with about as much control as a large bird
  Hypnosis:
• Ice Generation: the character can create ice at will.
• • Shards of Water: by creating a specially-shaped block of ice and striking it forcefully, she sends sharp shards of ice flying through the air, which melt moments after impact.
  Immortal: the character can't be killed.
• • Unaging: she doesn't suffer the effects of growing older.
  Inventive Genius: the character has a knack for creating mechanisms, realising concepts in material form, and adapting and understanding existing mechanisms.
• • Bird Wings: she is particularly good at making mechanical analogues of animals.
  • Grappling Arm: she has built a mechanical arm mechanism that magnifies the user's reach and strength by many times.
  Invisibility: the character may become undetectable by sight or light.
• • No Scent: the field that blocks light also blocks the passage of scent.
  Know Object: the character can read the aura residues on an object to find out who has touched it and how old it is and where it's from.
• • Read the Past: she can also use the aura residues to reconstruct the history of actions with the object.
  Knows Nature: the character can identify natural plants, animals, minerals, and landforms on sight or by touch.
• Lead into Gold: the character's touch can turn lead into gold at will.
• Lend Power: the character can lend her energy to boost another Omega's Power.
• Light:
• Lightning Control:
• Magnetism: the character can generate magnetic fields.
• • Pinned to the Ground: she may pin someone in place by acting on the iron in their body.
  Man-mountain: the character is big, really big -- 7'/500# at the very least. Her strength and ability to withstand abuse are correspondingly increased.
• Martial Artist: the character is a master of unarmed combat.
• • Everything's a Weapon: she is just as deadly with improvised weapons as with martial weapons.
  Mechanism Control:
• Mental Illusions: the character can cause people to believe they see something.
• • Memories of a Happier Time: she can cause someone to permanently believe some happy memory from their past, regardless of evidence to the contrary.
  Mind Control: the character can directly control the thoughts, and thus actions, of another. This power can be a bad idea in some Troupes, because it has the potential to step on each player's autonomy.
• Mist Form:
• Monkey Blood: the character has many of the qualities of a monkey, and is probably somewhat monkey-like in appearance (long tail, prehensile toes, hairy or furred, etc.)
• • Natural Mimic: she can imitate actions with phenomenal accuracy, even after having seen them just once. This extends to any physical action, including combat maneouvers or operating complex mechanisms. The mimicked actions tend to be forgotten unless practiced.
  • Prehensile Tail: her tail functions as a 5th hand, and can do anything a normal hand can, provided individual fingers aren't needed.
  Multi-form: the character can temporarily split into multiple bodies. This might be several duplicates of the original, or they might all "add up" to make the original body.
• • Mind of the Ant Colony: her bodies can operate independently yet in coordination, even out of communication range.
  Night Vision:
• Not All There: the character has the ability to become less solid, or perhaps completely intangible.
• • Choking Presence: she can become just thick enough to suffocate someone by blocking their lungs.
  Out-of-Body: the character has the ability to leave her physical body and travel in some sort of incorporeal form.
• • Body? Body? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Body!: As long as she's not in her body at the time of death, she doesn't need her body to live.
  Paralysis: the character can make a person go limp with a touch.
• Placebo-tech: the character can make almost anything happen, provided she can create a plausible technological object to facillitate it. She may or may not know that the technological items are just a placebo.
• • Jargon: she can persuade others that her tech works, so it does, at least for a while.
  Plant Form: the character's body is plant, rather than animal.
• • Healing Blood: her sap is a powerful curative.
  Poison Touch: the character sweats poison.
• Possession: the character may leave her body and possess another's.
• • Ventriloquism: by concentrating, she may send just a tendril of her lifeforce and use another person like a ventriloquist's dummy.
  Power Drain: the character drains energy from other Omegas, preventing their Powers from working.
• Precognition: the character can see into the future. This power is generally a bad idea, as it either ruins too many plots by making them predictable, or isn't accurate and thus becomes useless.
• Radar Sight: the character can "see" via radar waves, so she is unhindered by darkness or low-density obstructions.
• Read the Past: the character can find out what happened in the past of a location.
• • Know Object: she can also find out the history of an object.
  Regenerate:
• Sees the Dead: the character can see the spirits of the dead.
• Shadow Form: the character can transform her body into a shadow.
• • Flickering Shadows: the character can make part of herself shadow, and then manipulate that part to alter existing shadows.
  • Shadow Travel: she may disappear into any shadow, and then reappear at any other shadow, provided they are connected by shadows.
  Shadow Manipulation: the character can animate existing shadows, causing them to change shape or move.
• • Living Shadow: she may bestow a semblance of life on a shadow. It can understand simple commands and act on its own, and otherwise behaves like a simple animal. Light hurts and eventually kills it.
  • The Shadows Have Ears: she may use shadows to transmit sounds, allowing her to hear anything that is connected to her current location via shadows.
  Shadow Travel: the character may disappear into any shadow, and then reappear at any other shadow, provided they are connected by shadows.
• • The Shadows Have Ears: she can stay within the shadows and thus eavsdrop.
  Shapeshifting: the character may change into any shape she can conceive of, though generally not something with moving or seperable parts.
• • Organ Modulation: she can shapeshift her internal organs, thus affecting their function, without changing her extrenal form.
  Shocking Touch: the character can deliver electrical charges with a touch.
• • Electric Loadstone: she can temporarily magnetize iron with a quick shock.
  Shrinking: the character can shrink down as small as an ant.
• • Subtle Escape: she can shrink parts of herself just enough to escape any bonds without visually changing size.
  Size Change: the character can change her size with a moment's thought, from dwarf-like to giant.
• • Vanish: she can shrink so fast that she appears to just blink out of existence.
  Sonic Blast: the character can generate a powerful blast of sound that deafens people and pummels objects.
• • Vibrational Release: she can set up resonances in objects to shake things loose without otherwise damaging them.
  Speedy: the character is phenomenally fast.
• Super Sight: the character's eyes are far beyond human norm, able to see with much greater clarity and at much greater distances.
• • Microvision: her sight is so good that she can make out normally-microscopic details.
  Supreme Self-control: the character can use her phenomenal willpower to control normally-subconscious body functions, such as breathing, heart rate, pain receptors.
• • Visage of the Corpse: she may completely stop all life functions for a few minutes.
  Telekinesis: the character can move objects without touching them. Generally, she has no more strength than if she were moving them physically.
• • Through-and-Through: she can launch small objects at speeds to punch through almost anything.
  Telepathy: the character can read others' thoughts, and possibly probe into memories. Generally this is a bad power, because it tends to make too many plots too easy, and annoy other players.
• Teleport:
• Time Travel: the character can shift herself through time at will. This is a power to be avoided. It undermines too many plots, and the modifications and limitations necessary to keep it under control tend to stretch disbelief too far, and/or make the power useless.
• Tool-hand: she can change the form of her arm into anything of roughly the same mass.
• True Sight:
• Unaging: the character doesn't suffer the effects of growing older.
• Unbreakable: the character can't be wounded or killed. She might still feel pain.
• • Cannonball: jump from a great height, and strike the ground with such force that the blast will knock out those nearby, and cause a great deal of shrapnel damage if the surface landed on can shatter.
  • Group Parry: using herself as a human shield, intercepting as many attacks as possible.
  Voice of an Angel: the character speaks with a voice that has the authority of God.
• Weather Control: the character may control the weather in the immediate area (no further than the horizon).

Mastermind Traits

• He Who Fights and Runs Away...:
• Contingency Plans:
• Suicidally Loyal Minions: