Posted on December 17, 2010 by Jenna
The Acme Horizon Vulcanizer was in one respect successful: the rubbery horizon bounced back the sun that tried to set, casting the houses of the sky into disorder. In its principal purpose, however, it proved entirely futile: like the devices before it, it did not win for Horace Eunice’s love.
—from Horace’s Exigency, by Keiko Takemori
Difficulty 0: “Claiming an Anchor”
You can use a difficulty 0 miracle to make an ordinary thing into an Anchor — to take something that is bound to you by your Bonds and make it part of your regalia, your iconography, your nature and your destiny.
An Anchor becomes, at your option, one of the best of its kind mundanely available. Your old clunker of a car becomes a Ferrari, or simply runs like one. Your memento wristwatch becomes as durable as a Rolex deep sea watch. That butler you hired — maybe from the papers, maybe by dragging your layabout or unruly cousin into your world — turns out, after a few days settling in, to be one of the best and most loyal butlers in the world.
An Anchor becomes, again at your option, free of charge. A car no longer requires gasoline. A computer no longer needs electricity. Phone and data service for a PDA are free. Even people stop having a resource cost—it’s not that they don’t eat, sleep, shower, or whatever, but that for some reason or another you won’t ever have to worry about it. Depending on the game the HG may play this up for comic, tragic, bromidic, or wondrous effect.
For better or worse, when you’re directly interacting with one of your Anchors, you don’t spend Will and you ignore the whole Intentions system. Your actions through an Anchored tool, or an Anchor’s actions when you’re directly involved, just add a default +3 “miraculous Will” bonus to the highest relevant Passion or Skill.
Finally, an Anchor may always communicate with you — it may call to you with its thoughts and it may hear thoughts you send outwards in its direction. This is most important with people, but the spirit of an inanimate Anchor may communicate with you as well. It is a reflexive difficulty 0 miracle to hear an Anchor trying to reach you or to open a channel of communication with it; you receive free Strike (pg. XX) on this miracle equal to your Treasure rating and can spend MP or invoke a Bond for additional Strike. Actually hearing your Anchor out and replying is a mundane action, so you’ll have to have a free moment to talk.
All of these benefits are essentially permanent; they last as long as you wish them to last and retain an appropriate Bond.