Anathema
is a tabletop RPG by End Transmission Games.
You play as a Shroud, a ghost tasked with indiscriminately culling the human population to maintain balance and avoid the extinction of mankind. The main driving question of the game is: "Can you do that and maintain your humanity?"
This game provides examples of:
- Achilles' Heel: Shrouds can't be killed by any human weapons, can fly as fast as a commercial jet, move through walls, become invisible, and have magic powers, but they can be killed by other shrouds and will be utterly destroyed if their will drops to 0.
- Ambition Is Evil: The Violent gain will from being exceptionally good at what they do and may approach their task with a disturbing level of gusto.
- Asshole Victim: A common way for shrouds to morally square their actions - focusing their murders on specific types of people, usually awful ones who deserve death.
- Blank Slate: The Lost. All that they know about their husks is that they were average people.
- Call a Hit Point a "Smeerp": You don't have "hit points", you have "anathema".
- Came Back Strong: Shrouds are much stronger and faster than they were in life.
- Came Back Wrong: Shrouds are resurrected by the Balance as monstrous creatures with terrifying powers who are tasked with murdering the entire human race.
- Cast from Hit Points: Dominion spells require Anathema to cast. This is also the health stat - while they don't die if reduced to 0, it's possible for spell use to incapacitate a Shroud enough to be finished off.
- Crapsack World: The world is dark and overcrowded, riddled by despair and corruption. It's also run by an amoral god who's sending murderous angels to kill half the world's population.
- Death of a Child: Many of your victims can be children, and there's even specific stats for them
- Determinator: A game mechanic - Will can be used to reroll failed dice. However, enough failures and moral compromises can break the shroud's will. As that's the only reason
- The Dragon: While the Balance never shows up in person, save for issuing commands, if shrouds actively give up on the genocide mission, it sends the Furies - a pair of incredibly powerful shrouds tasked with destroying the rebels.
- Driven to Suicide: Shrouds with the Despair dominion can decrease a target's will. If a human's will drops to 0, they become suicidal. If a shroud's primary dominion is Despair then it means that their husk committed suicide.
- Everyone Has Standards:
- All shrouds have a type of person that they're particularly averse to killing. Doing so causes them to lose will.
- Cold and Amoral it might be, the Balance doesn't want to wipe out everyone. It's implied to have created the Kindly to ensure that the shrouds don't just lay waste to the world, and the game mentions the option of an end game where the shrouds are killing too many people and the Balance is trying to stop them.
- Fear the Reaper: While of the Well-Intentioned Extremist variety, the game makes it clear that by being agents of Death, the Shrouds are mass-murdering monsters, and those with any trace of humanity are likely to try and revolt against their master.
- Flight: All shrouds have the ability to fly.
- Full-Body Disguise: Shrouds can disguise themselves as humans, but it's difficult and being touched by a human destroys the effect.
- Ghostly Chill: If a Shroud chooses to be invisible, even successful attempts to detect its presence only notice an unnatural chill in the area.
- Good Wings, Evil Wings: As murderous forces of death, the Shrouds have wings that typically resemble ravens, bats or wisps of shadows. That said, there's nothing technically stopping them having multicoloured parrot wings or the like.
- The Grim Reaper: A shroud's default closely resembles the Grim Reaper - a shadowy figure in a long hooded cape that shows only darkness. However, the games makes it clear they're not the Grim Reaper - he takes the souls of the dead. They kill people.
- High Turnover Rate: If your character is upset or horrified at being turned into a shroud, at least they probably won't be one for very long. Failure and disobedience both lead to rapid dissolution.
- Identity Amnesia: All shrouds lose access to all but a few distorted memories of their previous human lives. The Lost have this worse - they lost almost all memories, and are driven by the need to learn who they are.
- Intangibility: Shrouds are incorporeal unless they choose not to be.
- Invisibility: Shrouds can make themselves invisible whenever they feel like it.
- Ironic Hell: Kindly shrouds see their situation as this - having lived their lives helping others, they're now condemned to spend their afterlife slaughtering them.
- Jumped at the Call: Played for horror with The Violent. They were murderers of various stripes in life, and most of them see no particular issue with continuing their job in death - indeed, their punishment mechanics occur when they go too far.
- Mercy Kill: Players can attempt to limit themselves to this as much as possible. Technically, all of the murders are this, since the only other option is to let the world be rendered uninhabitable.
- Necromancer: Shrouds don't naturally occur, the Balance creates them out of dead humans. The setting also contains liches, who keep themselves alive with magic and summon armies of zombies.
- Nice Guy: The husks of Kindly shrouds were dedicated to helping others.
- Person of Mass Destruction: At high level, dominions can spark city wide riots, crash planes, unleash super-plagues, drive thousands of people to suicide, age people to death in seconds and desiccate whole regions.
- Plague Master: Shrouds with the Pestilence dominion can shut down people's immune system at lower levels, and can unleash deadly and contagious plagues at higher ones.
- Punch-Clock Villain: The Balance doesn't enjoy what it does and neither do most shrouds. It just does it.
- Rabble Rouser: One of the war dominion powers allows you to cause people in a given area to riot. It can affect up to ten square miles.
- Rapid Aging: The effect of Atrophy dominion powers. At top levels, a shroud can easily case a baby to die of old age with a single touch.
- Refusal of the Call: The Kindly are the souls of the peaceful and the compassionate, and thus rarely take well to their new life as mass murdering demons. They're the most likely to actively refuse the Balance's commands.
- Seekers: All shrouds wish to learn who they were, but The Lost are primarily motivated by trying to learn about their past life.
- Undeath Always Ends: Depending on what kind of shroud you play as, certain actions will decrease your shroud's will to live. When will hits 0, the character is annihilated.
- Unfeeling Heavens: The Balace is the Monotheistic God of the setting, and is a completely amoral being who cares only for the long-term fate of the world, not individual lives. It's coldly murdering half the population, simply because that's the most efficent solution to our current problems.
- Walking Disaster Area: Shrouds with the Misfortune dominion can cause disasters with a glance - at low levels, they can simply kill individual people in precarious situations, but in higher levels they can make power plants go critical and planes fall from the sky.
- Walking Wasteland: Players with the Famine dominion can pollute water sources, destroy nearby food and drink, and make people become fatally dehydrated.
