Oathbound

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Oaths

Your character can make a vow so powerful that it has supernatural consequences. She makes the vow more important than herself, down to her most trivial or powerful personal desires. Her oaths influence all of her thoughts and actions. Some Arrows discover inner peace in service, but most battle with their vows.

This Merit does not represent a specific oath. Instead, this Merit measures the mage’s psychic capacity for keeping oaths. Arrows train to increase this by meditating, practicing ascetic discipline and the studying the order’s secret philosophical texts. Each dot in the Merit provides the capacity to retain (or “bind”) one point’s worth of oaths. The Arrow can fill some or all of her capacity with one especially intense oath or a number of minor ones, as long as their point values don’t exceed her total Oathbound Merit dots.

Calculate the cost of the oath by adding its binding strength to the listed additional costs. Oaths have an effect based on their binding strength alone; do not count additional costs.

Drawbacks: If the character binds an oath during the chronicle, doing so requires one point of Mana (regardless of the oath’s point total) and 16 hours of secluded, uninterrupted study and meditation. A new character can fill her capacity at no cost, but doesn’t have to. In the latter case, the mage is assumed to have bound these oaths before play began.

Bound oaths are public matters. Order mages do make secret vows from time to time, but they aren’t covered by this Merit. The Arrow has 24 hours after taking the oath to tell others about it. The Arrow cannot ask or imply that witnesses should keep the oath a secret. If the Arrow doesn’t meet these conditions, the oath doesn’t bind to her soul, and she loses it.

Losing an Oath

Arrows lose bound oaths in one of three ways: completion, rejection or violation.

• Completing the oath occurs whenever the oath’s conditions can no longer apply. Her liege dies, for example, or she completes a quest. The oath is no longer relevant, and dissolves at no penalty to the mage. Arrows can also specify that an oath end after a preset time (such as a year and a day) or event, but must include such conditions when they publicly declare their oaths.
• The mage can reject the oath, but it isn’t easy. This requires 16 hours of uninterrupted contemplation and one point of Mana per binding point of the oath. The Arrow finalizes the rejection by spending a Willpower point and informing others that she’s rejected her oath.
• Violating a bound oath can have devastating effects. The Arrow immediately loses a point of Willpower and suffers a point of resistant lethal damage. This happens every 24 hours until the mage has lost Willpower points and suffered lethal damage equal to the oath’s binding point total +1. The mage looks weak and sick. Violating an oath is also a tremendous dishonor. The order lives and dies on its word. If a mage makes that meaningless, she endangers her comrades.

Types of Oaths

• Oaths of Allegiance
• Oaths of Principle
• Questing Oaths

See Also Adamantine Arrow • Adamantine Arrow Sourcebook • Adamantine Arrow Titles • Awakening Gambit • Brotherhood of the Demon Wind • Circle of Creation • Devourers of the Flesh • Oathbound • Perfected Adept

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