Rival: Soma Sinaros, Prince of Gems


Rank 3: Gentlewoman.

It’s good to be a prince. Life is a song. Theft is sport. Soma has trouble understanding why everyone is so eager to overcomplicate things, but it certainly makes her career easier. Princes crowd around darkened tables in secret cellars, all guttered candles and twisting plots and furrowed brows. Soma is upstairs, stealing their candelabras.

A songbook’s worth of ditties have been composed about Soma Sinaros. Gems in her Pockets; The Laughing Prince; When Soma Came to Astrabek; and the unspeakably tawdry taproom hit Polishing Gems, which would leave an orthodox prince flushed and furious.

Soma has memorized all of them.

Her carpet-draped, redolent home in Fallaburg is full of uneaten grapes, half-tuned lutes, and a magpie melange of stolen shit. Some of it is useful, some frivolous, some from lordly manors and some from commoner businesses. If you give her a few minutes she could probably remember which is which. She hosts smoky, musical soirees every week for delighted Fallaburg lowborns, who consider nicked silverware a worthy trade to puff purloined cigars and rub elbows with the Soma Sinaros.

Practice and mythologizing. Growing the fable, befriending the commons. Soma tries to hide it behind the scattershot life she lives; but she has her eye on something.

Beliefs

  • If you can replace it, I’m not sorry for taking it. All princes steal. I’m just honest about it.
  • What do I care what my fellow princes think of me? They backstab friends all the time.
  • You can take nothing with you into the dirt but your legend.

Traits

  • Roofrunner: Soma is an excellent thief.
  • Door Mage: Soma is a really excellent thief.
  • Musician: Soma’s talent with a lute is remarkable. Her head is a catalogue of Fallaburg favorites.
  • Fence: Soma is a really, really excellent thief.

Soma's designs

In order of priority, Soma wants to do the following.

  • Steal Man with Plow. This is a painting by the celebrated abstractionist Gyorky Soz, currently hanging in the Meditaea Gallery in Blood Ward. The Man in question is possessed by a devil, 86, who delights in suddenly animating to scare children. 86 has seen the inside of the Voigaro vault. 4-in-4 chance.
  • Steal the lockbox of the Prince of Robes. The Prince of Robes has been dead for a decade, his house subsumed. The Voigaro Bank, a forbidding Balogsburg exchequer, contains his lockbox all the same, forgotten in its vault. The lockbox contains a sheaf of financial records, a copper key, and a vellum scroll. The scroll has a hatched drawing, in ox blood, of a bolt of lightning forking into seven padlocks, as if opening them. 2-in-4 chance. 4-in-4 with Man With Plow.
  • Break into Great Lord Renato’s shrine. There is a door in Great Lord Renato’s Dragon Roost tower. Beyond is a small private shrine to the Water Crone. The statue within has a removable face and a hollow head. There is something inside that Soma has wanted for a very long time. If she obtains it, the city will be changed irreversibly. 1-in 4 chance. 3-in-4 with the copper key from the Prince of Robes

Soma's knights

Soma has one knight.

  • Chandrick: Soma’s cousin. An uncomplicated soldier, with cropped hair and a re-set nose. A city watchman currently in the Dragon Roost garrison. His superiors do not know he’s a knight. The Renato job was his idea and he regrets sharing it. He frets about her constantly. Prince of Pikes, Vizier.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

VICIOUS PRINCES Alpha 21

Image
Two princes in a vicious fight about where to order takeout You know the drill: new update, new notes, new effusive thanks for the interest. This one is mostly here to include a big ol' example of play. Check it out on the carrd!  Here's an incomplete list of changes in  Alpha Version 21: A new section, 24: Example of Play , walks you through part of a day of action at the table--it's more or less the cliffs notes version of a session I had just the other day. New art for Section 17! An overhaul to the SCHEMING section--same rules, just a different attempt to tackle the language. Next time I'll hope to have the final example rival, and then the core book is basically feature complete. I'm also hoping to take one last pass at the traits...
Read more

Rival: Arpad Budai, Prince of Amber

Image
Rank 5: Lord The House of Amber Arpad Budai’s mother was gentle and kind. But she dreamed too often, and too boldly, and Zarkany is no place for the dreams of a glass-blower’s daughter. When his fellow nobles make awkward conversation with him at the parties into which the Prince of Amber muscles his way, they hazard sometimes a guess that Arpad–risen as he is from the deprivations of Chalktown into the halls of the princes–is living a dream come true. But Arpad Budai is not his mother; he is not gentle or kind, and he never dreams. Arpad Budai’s father was tall, broad, and strong. Arpad would be, too, if his father had lived, and if his mother hadn’t taken the bottle as her consolation. But he didn’t, and she did, and Arpad Budai is not his father; Arpad’s physical heritage was overwritten by the starvation’s stunting quill. Hunger robbed him of at least a foot. He walks like he's as tall as nature intended. Arpad became the Prince of Amber two weeks ago, by slitting the throat of...
Read more

Translate this dungeon

Image
I've been using the splendid MRMOTEXT lately alongside Playscii to make dungeons. The character set is supreme stuff for quickly making some beautiful dungeons, but it lacks letters in its character set. Any that I understand, at any rate. I invite you to take this map and use it in any way you see fit--it just needs a little bit of translation first. What you come up with is bound to be more interesting than anything I could have written. @ me on Twitter or on Discord (I'm in the usual stomping grounds there) with what you come up with!
Read more