[Curseborne] The Sorcerers #3

This is the last of the Sorcerer previews, so I wanted to share with you one of the Families I spent a long time thinking about and trying to wrap my head around it. Some backstory on this family is that the original pitch for them was as a biker gang who bloodied other people to fuel their magic. When I started digging down into the question, “What really makes a Sorcerer a Sorcerer?”, I hit upon the concept of sacrifice/addiction as my model. I really liked the idea of a criminal gang of Sorcerers though, so how do you fit that in?

I took that biker gang, and wondered what their sacrifice really was? Sure, they could steal things to sacrifice, making their addiction everyone else’s problem, which sets them up as a pretty neat antagonistic group. But what if there was something more there? What if the theft itself was the sacrifice, all the risk, none of the reward? Let’s take a look.

The Faceless

The Faceless are a criminal organization as much as they are a family. They call themselves the Faceless because that’s what they remain to everyone, even some of their own members. They are criminals, vagabonds, law breakers, line steppers, and anything in between you’d want to imagine. Why do they do it? Because it serves a niche no one else was serving, and it is better than losing something they truly love.

It works like this. You perform the perfect crime. You get in, you do the job, and you leave with none the wiser. And at the end, you have whatever it is you stole free and clear. Except you don’t. Because the sacrifice is in the risk, it’s in the taking, and it’s in making sure there is zero reward for what you’ve done. Let’s hear from Cousin Pala:

Where there’s people, there’s crime. And why not take what you want when you have an unlimited amount of power at your disposal? Why not take from those who have wealth to supplement those who don’t? Sorcerers work under their own set of rules, so why should we abide by mortal laws? If they catch you, you can just magic your way out. In the end, you can be the most notorious criminal who stumps the law at every turn.

That’s not us.

We are the Faceless, and we call ourselves that because no one knows who we are, what we do, or even that we exist. No one except other Sorcerers. We are the farthest-reaching criminal organization in the world that no one’s ever heard of.

The sacrifice is in the risk. If you need evidence that your curse doesn’t give two shits what you sacrifice so long as it has meaning, we’re it. The physical items we eventually sacrifice don’t even belong to us. But the meaning behind it is everything. We don’t keep anything from the taking, not even the credit. Our sacrifice is the risk we take to commit the crime. We sacrifice the safety and security of ourselves and our families every time we act.

And yes, while the Faceless perform a ritual sacrifice by stealing something, then destroying it or giving it away, they are really good at what they do. So not all crimes they commit are in service to the curse. Sometimes you want to keep a little something for yourself, as long as you don’t get caught.

The Faceless Inheritance helps keep them hidden, giving them the perfect ability to disguise themselves against mortals, and giving them Enhancement to resist magic that would see through their disguises.

The Faceless make good use of Acquisition that lets them take things without notice, Illusions to escape observation, and Elementalism to remove any unwanted evidence (or witnesses).

Play a Faceless if you want to…

… be a criminal who doesn’t do it for fame. 
… steal from the rich and give to the poor.
… act as a mercenary to ensure you don’t lose your humanity.

Cousin Pala

They call him Cousin Pala, and he is our Faceless signature character in Curseborne. He has another name, the name he went by before becoming a Sorcerer and joining the Faceless, but no one uses it anymore. Even he barely remembers what that name was, as time and sacrifice has worn it away. Just another lost relic from a time before he was part of the Family.

Cousin Pala knew what he was getting into. He chose this life, and the curse, thinking that it was a better way to get a grip on his life than the alternatives. At least he has a support network. At least he has peers who understand him. He has cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, all who look out for him. What more could he want in this world? His alternative was not much different. A life of crime born of desperate need. He turned to criminal activities first to feed himself, then used a con or two to get an apartment and a job. Then stole from that job, and everywhere else. It was less a compulsion than the realization that he was good at it.

That is until someone caught him. Not the police — he was too good for that — but instead his uncle Frank. His actual uncle, who Pala had no clue was a Sorcerer doing the exact same things as him for far different reasons. Frank warned Pala that the rest of his Family were not pleased with Pala’s actions. He was cutting into their territory, too sloppy to be allowed to stay. If he didn’t stop, they would deal with him one way or another. But Cousin Pala didn’t stop. Instead, he fucked around and found out. They didn’t kill him. Of course, that would be too obvious, too messy and might draw attention. Instead, they pointed the police in his direction, and pinned a lot of big crimes on him with a lot of irrefutable evidence Pala was too perplexed to even consider how they created.

Uncle Frank came to him and offered him a last ditch hope. Join the Family, accept the curse, or go through the system and be a petty criminal all his life. Pala gladly accepted and has never looked back.