Shapes How Others See
Your particular working is on perception, memory, and the stories people tell themselves about what they have encountered. You do not change what is there; you change what is seen, remembered, and believed. The distinction matters legally, philosophically, and in terms of the specific nature of what you owe for what you do. The Sanctuary has complicated feelings about glamour practitioners, because the skill is genuinely useful and the ethics are genuinely difficult to verify from the outside.
What you produce feels, to those inside it, like ordinary experience. That is the point and the problem. The residue it leaves is readable to anyone with sufficient sensitivity, and what is readable can be followed back.
Connection: Choose one of the following.
- Pick one other PC. You altered their memory of an event, with good intentions, without asking first. You have not told them.
- Pick one other PC. They are, for reasons you have not been able to determine, immune to your perceptual workings. You have not told them you tested this.
- Pick one other PC. They know what you are capable of and have asked you, specifically, never to use it on them. You have honoured this. So far.
- Pick one other PC. They were present when you used this ability in a situation where the question of consent was genuinely murky. Whether they judge you for it is up to them.
Additional Equipment: Your appearance has been curated with care: clothing, grooming, and deliberate presentation that carries a social weight beyond the ordinary. Once per day, this functions as an asset to one task involving making a first impression on a creature capable of perceiving you.
GM Intrusion: The glamour breaks at exactly the wrong moment. Someone who should have been affected was not. Someone who was affected remembers the alteration wrongly, and the discrepancy creates a complication. A practitioner reads the residue of your working and follows it back to you.
Geas: The perception you shape leaves a signature. Other practitioners can read your mark in it; anyone sensitive to magic can detect that something in the area has been altered, even without knowing what or how. Additionally, you cannot glamour yourself into an entirely different person: your fundamental nature remains visible to anything that can see past surfaces. You have an inability on tasks involving concealing the fact that a perceptual working has occurred in a location where you have recently used one.
Minor Effect Suggestion: The glamour holds longer than expected, with a precision and vividness that suggests the target is actively supplying detail to fill in what you provided.
Major Effect Suggestion: The glamoured perception is so complete that the target will recall it as a core memory, with full confidence, for up to a month.
Tier 1
Alter the Surface (2 Intellect points): You alter how one creature you can see within short range perceives a single object, person, or detail for up to ten minutes. The object might appear to be something else entirely, the detail might seem to vanish, or the person might appear as someone different. The substitution must be plausible given what is actually present; you cannot make open space appear to be a wall, but you can make a door appear to be one. Intellect defence resists. Action.
Smooth the Memory (2 Intellect points): You gently blur or redirect a creature’s recollection of a specific event that occurred within the last hour, which you have witnessed. The creature does not lose the memory entirely but recalls it as less significant, less detailed, or slightly different in a way you specify. Intellect defence resists. Action.
Unassuming: You are difficult to notice and harder to describe accurately. You are trained in stealth tasks that rely on being overlooked rather than physically hidden, and any attempt to identify or describe you from memory is hindered. Enabler.
Tier 2
Woven Presence (2 Intellect points): You project an impression — calm, threatening, authoritative, insignificant, or another quality you specify — that is felt rather than analysed. For one hour, all creatures within short range that can perceive you treat the first task you make that involves that quality as if you were trained in it, even if you are not. Intellect defence resists for creatures with reason to be suspicious. Action.
Tier 3
Ability Choice. Choose either Shared Glamour or Lasting Impression as your tier 3 ability.
Shared Glamour: When you use Alter the Surface, you may apply the effect to all creatures within short range simultaneously rather than just one. The difficulty is the highest Intellect defence among those present. Enabler.
Lasting Impression (3 Intellect points): You extend the duration of any perceptual working you create to 24 hours rather than its standard duration. The glamour remains coherent and internally consistent throughout. Enabler.
Tier 4
Alter the Memory (4 Intellect points): You reach into a creature’s memory of a specific event you know about and change one detail: who was present, what was said, what was seen. The alteration is complete; the creature believes the revised memory without question. Intellect defence resists. Once altered, even you cannot easily distinguish the revision from an unaltered recollection. Action.
Tier 5
Crowd Glamour (4 Intellect points): You extend a perceptual working over a large group: all creatures within long range simultaneously experience whatever alteration you specify. The difficulty is the highest Intellect defence among those present. Action.
Tier 6
Ability Choice. Choose either The Forgetting or Mirror Image as your tier 6 ability.
The Forgetting (6 Intellect points): You erase a creature’s memory of a sustained period, up to 24 hours of experience. The creature retains nothing of that period: no impressions, no knowledge gained, no relationships formed or altered within it. Intellect defence resists. The memory cannot be recovered without a working of equal or greater power. Action.
Mirror Image: You can apply a glamour to yourself that makes you appear, fully and convincingly, to be a specific other person you have observed closely. The disguise is complete at all sensory levels that ordinary perception can reach and holds against mundane scrutiny indefinitely. Practitioners with sufficient sensitivity can still see through it. Your true name remains yours regardless of what face you wear. Enabler.