Warrior Guide (Part One)

[Darth Nyrys]

Warriors and Recurring Themes

 

Some people use the Dark Side to pursue ambition and power amidst the elite upper class. Others use it to perceive and twist the fundamental fabric of reality and the laws of nature. Warriors looked at this godlike source of power and said to themselves, “What happens if I use this to cast stab?” It turns out the answer is considerable carnage and lots of trips to the dry cleaner to get all of that Jedi out of their robes. But shockingly, warriors are more than just hitting really hard, although that is something that they excel at. They are duelists, they are artisans, they are keepers of giant murder doggos, they are unstoppable, and they are not to be underestimated.

 

Roleplaying a Warrior

 

Power Structure and Dynamics: Due to a warrior’s straightforward mindset and blunt demeanor, they tend to highlight any power structure and evaluate it on sheer results. Could or should lead are irrelevant concepts to a warrior. Challenges to the structure should be made openly and based entirely on the merit of the two combatants, not prearranged circumstance. Warriors, being mechanically minded, understand the necessity of every gear turning when it is supposed to, and do their best to not let internal power struggles sabotage the order’s overarching goals.

 

Some view their distaste for scheming as a lack of ambition, but the truth is that warriors believe in rule by the strong, and that if you can only win through treachery then you are unfit to lead. Better to ensure the strength of the order than undermine it for personal glory. Additionally, many warriors place personal development over political status, so their ambition is focused on improving their person rather than their place in the order.

 

Directness: What takes an assassin twenty five words or a sorcerer fifty words and five intricately detailed diagrams can generally be expressed by a warrior in five words or less. That’s not to say that warriors are socially inept, just that they choose not to dress up their sentences with flourish or framing. Again this ties in with the objective nature of warriors, with the belief that words should stand on their own.

 

Practicality: Warriors study the interaction between the Force and the physical realm, and this makes them the most grounded of the three types of Sith. Their focus requires that they understand physics, physiology, metal working, and other hard sciences and skill sets. It is through this understanding that warriors fight, applying leverage to existing natural forces to perform preternatural feats. Warriors reduce all things to how they work, and operate off of that basis, eschewing principles of misdirection and whimsical distractions.

 

Honor: To fight unfairly is to deny oneself the learning experience of conquering your opponents through combat. To speak falsely is to diminish the value of your words. To falsely tolerate the weak is to welcome their weakness. To use proxies in an attempt to spare your own honor is only self deception.

 

Growth: Warriors constantly seek to improve themselves through training, refining their weapons and armor, rigorous study, and seeking out and overcoming challenges. Warriors are perhaps the most inwardly focused of the Sith archetypes in how they accumulate power, as they define power on a personal and individual level.

 

Discipline: The intent to grow can only be actualized through intense discipline through rigorous training and hardship. Only the warrior can achieve their own internal power, and the galaxy is full of temptations and distractions.

 

Self Criticism and Objective Identity: Warriors tend to come across as incredibly self assured, mainly on account of identifying and facing down every criticism that they can think of. They are incredibly proud of the power that they have amassed, but in order for that power to be true and meaningful, they must hold themselves accountable to failings realized both by themselves and others. Sure, they might yeet the messenger off of the tower, but they still listen to the message.

 

Respect: Because warriors focus so much on objectivity and evaluation, the notion that there are others that hold power and ability worthy of respect is an inevitable outcome. Warrior apprentices that cling to arrogance in training often have it beaten out of them by their masters to keep it from clouding their ability to size up their enemies. Warriors absolutely can respect people that they want to fight or kill, but off the battlefield they tend to regard those people with acknowledgement or even offers of kinship. People that the warrior respects are people that have lessons to offer the warrior, or traits that the warrior admires and wishes to cultivate, so they treat them as resources to be valued and hoarded.

 

The Five Warrior Spiritual States

 

The idea behind the five spiritual states is to expand upon the warrior tradition as being a spiritual and philosophical tradition, and not just a hound that Sith loose on the enemy. The five states are explorations of the Dark Side of the Force in the context of conflict and provide mental and spiritual training goals for the warrior to aspire to. They are not things to be mastered in a few posts, but rather ideas to pursue. For obvious reasons, a warrior can only be in one mental state at a time, and must be in the same mental state for the entirety of a duel. 

 

Predator Instinct: The warrior taps into the primal elements of the Dark Side, the predatory and cunning realm of nature’s hunters. In this state, the warrior dominates their surroundings and acts with full understanding of the world around him or her, and those in it. Predator Instinct focuses on using the Force for commanding and using the environment and beasts to overcome enemies, and find the constraints of heavy armor unbearable. Many warriors who become consumed by this path ultimately leave the teachings of armor and blade behind for cunning and stealth of the assassins. It is unwise to shift out of Predator Instinct when using it to control beasts, because Sithspawn absolutely will bite the hand that feeds them, given the chance.

 

Even warriors that do continue to clad themselves in armor often are forced to wear light or medium armor in order to keep up with their bestial allies. While this loses them a great deal of the protection that most warriors are afforded, it also allows them to move far more acrobatically and suddenly than their kin. While they can’t match the versatility and fluidity of assassins, these warriors can close with their opponents with terrifying speed, while their hounds strike at the flanks.

 

The practitioners of this mental state are the most likely to use non-traditional weapons, often emulating the claws of a beast, using a spear to keep themselves out of the way of their bloodthirsty pets, or other more exotic weapons. 

 

Cold Mind: The warrior taps into the most distant and isolated reaches of the mind, cold places that cannot be penetrated by light and compassion. Emotion and warmth are traded for heartless calculation and cold objectivity as the warrior maneuvers the pieces into place for the greatest gain. In this state, the warrior finds fortitude in internal distance, hardening his or her heart against loss and forgoing the usual emotional inferno of the Sith psyche. Cold minded warriors can shrug off emotional and physical wounds, and move with tireless mechanical efficiency as enemies struggle in the face of such icy certainty. 

 

The analytical logic of the Cold Mind breaks down the defenses and actions of the opponent into temporary obstacles to be crushed by the slow but devastating force of the warrior. With a touch they can freeze armor to brittle fragility, still the ground around them into treacherous patches of ice, or conjure simple weapons out of the moisture in the air. With distant malice these warriors can encase their limbs in ice to serve as heavy mauls that can send their opponents flying.

 

Peculiarly, a warrior in Cold Mind still finds themself drawn to close quarters combat, and more than any other philosophy they are compelled to kill their enemies with their hands, or other direct applications of force. With the contrast of their demeanor, the final moments feel all the more intimate and gruesome. Treatises and scrolls on this philosophy are rife with disciplined armor drills, and Cold Mind warriors treat their armor like extensions of their body.   

 

Sundered Heart: The warrior plunges into their own pain and trauma to power their attacks with raw emotion and suffering. In this state, the warrior unleashes his or her inner turmoil in a torrent of powerful and never ending attacks with the intent to overwhelm enemies in a ceaseless storm. In Sundered Heart state a warrior hits harder and faster as long as they can maintain their rage or subsidize it with physical pain. This state is far more effective when combined with lightsabers than Sith steel weapons, on account of the weightlessness of the blades.

 

Warriors of this philosophy burn with terrible intensity, often calling upon spells and techniques that risk harm to themselves so that they may harm others more grievously. Many claim that the ambition of this path is to immolate the galaxy as an expression of the pain within. Others say that these Sith are addicted to pain and the anguish that their actions cause in others, feasting on negativity like tender meat and well aged wine. Whether acting on nihilism or hedonism, the results are always the same, scores of blistered and ashy corpses. 

 

To the horror and confusion of their enemies, these warriors are known to sometimes set themselves on fire, entering a trancelike fever dream of seemingly unstoppable violence. Using their incredible will and focused hatred, they feed off of the pain and amp themselves up to act beyond the limits of their frame, pushing bruised and broken limbs to function with no care for the later consequences. 

 

Darkest Self: The warrior puts aside all distractions to focus on the Onyx Mirror, a mental construct that warriors use to reflect on past fights, current needs, and future paths to improvement. This allows the warrior to scour him or herself for weakness, quiet the inner spark so that he or she can learn from training, and commit themselves to long and difficult tasks such as weapon forging without succumbing to impatience and restlessness. This philosophy is not meant for combat, and does not carry with it any advantages to use on the battlefield.

 

Wisdom of the Blade: A virtually forgotten fighting art exclusive to Sith warriors, this spiritual trance unifies warrior and weapon into a singular force of destruction. Using the Force to command obedience from the physical world, the warrior finds a perfect communion with his or her weapon, and uses it to demonstrate preternatural prowess. These blade arts can only be used with weapons possessing a physical blade, such as Sith swords, with the advent of the lightsaber largely being the reason why this collection of techniques died out. 

 

While this may seem like a case of the relentless march of progress towards more technologically advanced weaponry replacing inferior but traditional weapons, even the most pragmatic and forward thinking Sith warriors at the time regarded lightsabers as cheaply made, mass produced alternatives of inferior quality. A Saint of Blades would argue that because a lightsaber is deadly in spite of the wielder rather than because of the wielder, it propagates a mindset of relying on brute force to smash through an opponent’s guard, rather than competent bladework. 

 

Despite the protests of the warriors, the Sith Empire chose to embrace lightsabers and the ability to arm entire armies with an easy and cheap to build weapon. While this allowed them to mobilize greater numbers, it cost them the superior fighting skills that they had developed with Sith swords. Many Sith warriors went to their graves believing that this decision lost the war against the Jedi.     

 

A warrior who is in the Wisdom of the Blade state channels the Dark Side through their body and weapon as a unified circuit. The weapon almost gains a sense of buoyancy in the warrior’s hands, innately knowing its place in the galaxy, cutting lightly and falling down on enemies with meteoric force. The warrior also finds equilibrium, his or her balance becoming unbreakable and his or her weight fluctuating between airy insubstantiality and bone shattering heft. While this philosophy lacks the flashiness of conjuring great lances of energy or weaving illusions, it is no less Force intensive and effective. 

 

Another name for this mindset is the Eye of the Inner Storm, as its practitioners are known to weave elements of the storm into their attacks, and the relationship between warrior and weapon is said to cause an eerie calm within that deeply contrasts the chaos and slaughter that surrounds the warrior.

 

The Three Circles

 

The Warriors are trained to visualize three circles when in combat, each one analogous to the striking range of a weapon, to better understand the range of their abilities. The Circle of the Sword is used to communicate the most local and often most powerful techniques and abilities. The Circle of the Spear denotes attacks that have some measure of range, similar to a fully extended spear strike, but are still most potent when the distance is marginal. The Circle of the Lanvarok is associated with powers that are often tied to fear, battlefield dominance, and commanding troops; powers of this circle often affect the whole battlefield.

 

Warrior Powers

 

These are suggestions for some powers that expand the warrior’s toolkit and exemplify the warrior’s focus on direct and overwhelming power, and establishing dominance over everyone around them. 

 

Mantle of Warriors: Warriors can subconsciously use the Force to assert their dominance over others, subtly altering perceptions to appear taller, conceal wounds, darken the light around them, and make their voices sound more menacing. A Sith warrior inspires allies and terrifies enemies through sheer force of presence. 

 

Dominance: A blunt form of mental control, Dominance inspires blind faith and loyalty in the warrior’s soldier allies, and crushes the will of cowards into subservience. Allies affected by Dominance treat the Sith Warrior like something between a pack alpha and a war god, instinctively following his or her lead, and treating their orders like holy writ. Dominance turns a non combatant into a thrall whose life is dictated by mind shattering fear and a desperate hope that they can appease their master enough to not kill them. These thralls are too broken to serve as infiltrators, and generally serve their master performing simple tasks like cleaning weapons and seeing to his or her chambers.

 

Rapacious Pursuit: The warrior uses the Force to enhance their mobility, allowing them to jump impossibly far, run on walls, fall lethal distances without harming themselves, and users of the Wisdom of the Blade philosophy can use this to traverse the surface of liquids and over snow instead of through it. Further training in this skill can make the pursued hallucinate the Sith around every corner they turn and blocking every doorway they try to walk through, as the prey’s imagination is turbocharged by fear. It is important to note that this power is based on interaction with physical objects, and does not allow the use of midair redirects like assassins can do.

 

Blood Pack: Warriors who focus on the Predator Instinct state of mind often hunt their prey with the assistance of hunting hounds, such as Tuk’ata. The beasts are not mindless suicidal attackers, instead acting with bestial cunning and flanking their prey to limit its mobility and strike when its back is turned. An apprentice can bond with a single beast, and a lord can with two, while a master imparts a measure of improved strength and endurance through the Dark Side.

 

Break the Balance: Alternatively, at Lord rank, a warrior using Predator Instinct can alter an animal to become an abomination so deadly and ravenous that if left to its own devices it would tear through its own ecosystem. Such creatures, with the patronage of master level warriors, can even develop primal expressions of the Force. A warrior can never control more than one of these creatures at a time, nor can they control both the abomination and the blood pack at the same time. 

 

Fetch: Sometimes enemies are no fun and don’t come out to play. When that happens, a Sith’s best friend from Blood Pack or Break the Balance can be counted on to find them, and drag them to the warrior for mandatory play time. They are the best boys and girls. Yes they are.

 

Shatter: No physical barrier or obstacle can hold a master warrior back for long as they use raw blasts of the Force to obliterate walls and crumple doors like paper. Warriors can also channel this destructive power through gauntlets and physical weapons to sunder armor that would otherwise be impervious. In such situations blunt attacks serve as the best medium. When used as a blast attack, this power is considered part of the Circle of the Spear. This power specifically focuses its damage output on obstacles rather than the people behind them, as warriors have a distaste for striking down enemies through the Force alone.

 

Reservoir of Rage: The warrior can imbue the crystal of his or her lightsaber with emotional energies, allowing them to call upon this hidden reserve should a cowardly enemy resort to mental or emotional attacks. Once called upon, the energy is spent until the warrior can renew it out of duel combat.

 

Immolating Presence: During combat the warrior seems to superheat the air around him or herself, to the point that being near the warrior subjects enemies to sweltering heat that drains their endurance and makes armor and weapons start to burn uncomfortably with skin contact. Masters can outside of duels cook NPCs inside their armor by glaring at them until they succumb to the heat. This power’s area of effect is Circle of the Sword at Lord rank. Warriors of the Sundered Heart can focus this energy around the blade of their weapon so that even strikes that are blocked or near misses become taxing from the oppressive heat, and extend the range of the power to Circle of the Spear. This power cannot be used in conjunction with Frigid Demeanor for obvious reasons. (The actual damage from this power can be considered "nuisance damage", especially in small doses. Only if an opponent chooses to remain in range for the majority of the duel do they risk true physical damage. Instead, the true danger of this power is in depleting an opponent's stamina.)

 

Frigid Demeanor: During combat the warrior seems to still the air around them causing the temperature to plummet. Limbs tremble, mechanisms seize, and hope dies with the arrival of the warrior. Enemy movement for both organic and mechanical creatures is slowed, and the armor of enemies grows brittle and weak as it loses its flexibility. Masters can outside of duels freeze NPCs from the inside out with a dismissive glance. Warriors using Cold Mind can focus this energy around the tread of their boots to freeze ground, making it more treacherous for their enemies, and extend the range of the power to Circle of the Spear. This power cannot be used in conjunction with Immolating Presence for obvious reasons.

 

Awaken Weapon: The warrior uses a ritual involving a Sith victory crystal and a favored weapon to awaken a sentience within the object. It could be a hated enemy, valued teacher, challenging rival, or a loved one that the warrior failed to protect. Awakened weapons can channel the warrior’s power more effectively and serve as advisors or sources of rage and anguish, depending on who the warrior placed in the weapon. Sundered Heart and Cold Mind cause the weapon to burn or freeze enemies that make physical contact with it, Predator Instinct goads the warrior’s allies to attack with renewed vigor, and Wisdom of the Blade channels electricity through the weapon.

 

Skin of Steel: The warrior ritually binds armor that he or she has made or killed the owner of to him or herself, allowing the warrior to channel energy into physical attacks like a Sith blade. Additionally, the armor no longer encumbers the Sith’s movements, although supremely heavy armor sets would still eventually tax the wearer on a spiritual level.  

 

Monstrous Bulwark: The warrior leverages the weight of his or her armor to resist external forces trying to move the warrior about. Upon using this power, the warrior’s armor becomes excessively heavy, allowing them to mitigate the effect of blasts that might otherwise toss them off of their feet. Cold Minded warriors can conjure ice to increase their bulk and temporarily affix themselves to surfaces.

 

The Indifference of Titans: Cold Minded warriors can envelop their senses and pain receptors in a bitter numbness that bathes them in a chilling agony but makes them numb to all other sources of pain, instead feeling like a sense of pressure, if anything at all. Severe wounds are clotted with icy rime to stop the warrior from bleeding out, although this is by no means a form of healing, and even if the warrior does survive they suffer from massive scarring.

 

Ecstasy of Fire: Sundered Heart warriors are known for their fever dream fighting style, and many seek to accelerate it further by lighting themselves on fire to feed their hunger for pain and rage. The flame persists beyond the need for fuel with this ritual, and allows the warrior to strike with amazing speed and strength, at the cost of being on fire. While in this ecstatic state, the pain of enemy strikes is blunted by sheer adrenaline, and severe wounds like dismemberment are stopped from bleeding out by cauterization. As with the Indifference of Titans, this is not in any way true healing, just the ability to act beyond what pain would normally allow.

 

Apex Predator: Predator Instinct warriors use Sith alchemy, poisons, and natural drugs to enter a frenzied berserker state where they exist somewhere between sapient and beast. Pain supercharges their adrenaline, and their minds teeter between preternatural awareness and insane otherworldly visions. This makes these warriors a jittering ball of nerves and paranoia, which in turn makes them incredibly hard to pin down or strike directly. They have less at their disposal to deal with severe wounds, but are also less likely to receive them than their more enthusiastic philosophical cousins.

 

Saint of Blades: Wisdom of the Blade warriors focus on precise bladework to prevent damage, rather than giving in to sloppy emotion fueled temptations or overextending in a pyrrhic trade of blows. By using their already ambiguous relationship with gravity, the warrior can ride the wave of momentum from enemy strikes until the strike’s power is exhausted, giving them an ethereal and otherworldly sense of motion. No momentum is challenged, it is all redirected in a surreal dance. That being said, even to a Sith the constant repositioning can be jarring, and doesn’t always result in the best footing or positioning. As eternal students of the duel, Wisdom of the Blade warriors take loss of limb as a lesson to be studied, and are more likely to withdraw than try to push through should they sustain such an injury.    

 

True Self/This is Who I Am: A Sith warrior and master is always prepared for war, and can call forth their bound weapons and armor in a grotesque manner similar to a werewolf transformation scene. The armor emerges underneath the flesh, tearing through violently and painfully as the man is replaced with a monster. The agony of the transformation can then be called upon to help power the Sith’s abilities. Use of this power leaves the Sith’s skin bloody and raw underneath the armor, so the Sith could not be undercover, use the power, remove the armor, and then go back to being undercover without some form of tricky explaining to do.

 

Tear at the Wound: The warrior seizes a memory from the past and relives it with all of its emotional intensity as if it just happened. What others see as a Sith’s inability to move on is in fact the Sith renewing the hatred and suffering that fuels their powers. Extensive use of this power can however leave a Sith trapped in a hellish cycle of their own making.

 

To the Bone: If a warrior seeks out tutelage from a sorcerer, or attains the services of one to assist in the ritual, the warrior can tap into the pain and suffering of events from the past that are tied by blood or creed to him or her. This is a more dangerous version of Tear at the Wound, because it is essentially tantamount to possession by a large number of angry Force echoes that can overtake the warrior’s will and leave them a puppet to the forces that they sought to control. If the warrior manages to ride the wave, they will have access to a wellspring of rage when fighting the persecutors of the dead, but straying from that path risks possession or the ghosts returning to their graves.

 

Sawblade Strike: The name of the attack is more of a reference to the mental process used to fuel this power than any physical traits of the attack. The warrior begins a barrage of blows that builds in intensity the longer that the target remains not dead, the Sith’s rage and frustration creating a self sustaining loop of attacks fueled by the emotions of the previous attack failing to be lethal. To an outsider, this generally looks like a relentless series of hacking attacks where form is sacrificed for power. Even though this maneuver looks unskilled it should never be treated as easily defended against, as the attacks carry with them preternatural momentum and force, with each successive blow striking heavier.

 

Chwit’Jen’Itsu: A collection of short ranged telekinetic grapples and throws that Sith warriors have developed in lieu of physically grabbing their opponents. As much fun as breaking an opponent’s body is, too many combatants these days possess powerful short range attacks that the warrior is vulnerable to by committing to a grapple. Unlike the infamous Force Choke, Chwit’Jen’Itsu is composed of rapid joint hyperextension and lightning fast TK throws, but the joint attacks require that the target is mentally vulnerable, whether by extreme pain, Dun Möch, overextension of their own efforts, or mental attacks.

 

Fist of the Mountain: A Cold Minded power that allows the warrior to encase their fist and forearm in ice to increase its mass and protect their hand and finger bones from breaking too prematurely. It can also be used to help armor resilience when taking hits on the bracers. The ice tends to shatter and melt after a solid hit or two, but even the detached Cold Mind warriors draw great satisfaction from the visceral experience of delivering such a blow. Masters of the technique enhance the blows not just with the mass of the ice, but by also imbuing the attack with power from the Force itself. Such strikes can send the unprepared and sometimes even the prepared flying.

 

Morbid Curiosity: A Cold Minded power that allows the warrior to slowly conjure weapons of ice. This technique came about from warriors of this philosophy constantly breaking their weapons or leaving them behind after dispatching opponents with their hands. There is nothing particularly special about these weapons, other than that they can be called upon when the warrior would otherwise be unarmed. They generally take the form of hammers, mauls, and cudgels, in keeping with the Cold Mind preference for blunt weapons. The power gets its name from warriors who used the power to experiment with various weapons on prisoners before forging their own pieces.

 

Rise and Fall: Wisdom of the Blade warriors use verticality extensively to overwhelm and outmaneuver their opponents. This technique is one such example, in which they use a specialized form of Force Jump to gain height before crashing down with meteoric force.

 

Blade Dance: With otherworldly grace, a Wisdom of the Blade warrior moves in circuitous patterns without losing their forward momentum. The steps of the warrior are counterintuitive and dreamlike to observers, bewildering their opponents before they strike with seemingly sourceless momentum. Masters almost seem untethered from gravity, drifting across the battlefield like a memory of sorrow and loss.

 

Legacy Reborn: Technology is not the path to salvation, it’s a crutch, and Wisdom of the Blade warriors have no qualms about kicking out the crutch from underneath their opponents. The warrior can create an extremely localized burst of electrical energy that can damage or outright fry circuits. Masters can project the energy in a short range cone at Circle of the Spear range.       

 

Tremor Impact: Warriors from every path are taught to embrace this power, the use of a Force enhanced strike into the ground to shatter the earth beneath the feet of their enemies and interfere with their footing. Apprentices tend to be able to accomplish this at sword range, Lords at spear range, and masters can cleave a directed line at lanvarok range. The attack itself does not do physical damage, instead it should be used as a set up for other attacks.

 

Shatter the World: A tool of the most powerful Sith masters or groups of Sith lords working in tandem that is often mistaken for Sith sorcery, a rupturing wave of destructive energy surges over the battlefield. On natural worlds, dust and debris fill the air across the field, limiting line of sight drastically, and great schisms score the ground like a spider web of trenches. In constructed locations, pipes rupture, lights fail, and internal fires spread smoke everywhere. People hit by the wave of devastation feel and look battered and bruised, but are otherwise unharmed, the point of this power is to give warriors cover as they advance, not to kill enemies at range.

 

Advance of the Conquerors: Sometimes enemies that have no respect for the glory of melee combat use the totally unacceptable tactic of gunlines. The Sith warriors have invented and refined a very appropriate response to such cowardice, shouting so loud that their hated enemies’ eyes burst. Granted results may very, and most combatants feel more of an uncomfortable pressure on their eyes that distorts their vision temporarily(Or temporary ocular malfunctions in the case of droids), but the Sith certainly like to remember it as being super effective and gore inducing. This power is extremely taxing to maintain, and is generally reserved for charging entrenched gun lines rather than use for single combat, where ranged attacks can be overcome with deflecting weapons.

 

Warchant of Glory: An aggressive and piercing warchant where each syllable pierces like a spear thrust, this Sith incantation penetrates resolve and courage with verbal lances of doubt and fear. The weak willed are more inclined to hide or run under this hex than stand and fight.

 

Warchant of the Chain Breakers: A low and sonorous warchant that resonates with disruptive power. Concentration becomes increasingly difficult for nearby enemy Force users to maintain as the Dark Side clouds their minds. Jedi have described the warchant as feeling like a pressure probing their aura, looking for cracks to ensnare their will. At range they described it as more like a nuisance similar to a buzzing mosquito, but face to face it felt smothering.

 

Warchant of Hatred: A loud and brief warchant, the Warchant of Hatred spits out each word like the fall of a hammer. Each line is meant to challenge a Jedi’s power directly, like a battering ram of will at the gates of the enemy’s resolve. Like Warchant of the Chain Breakers, this curse functions best at short range, but it targets a specific power rather than the Jedi’s focus.       

 

Bound By Blood: A ritual of binding between warriors, this power allows each bound warrior to share the pain of their wounds with each other to feed their powers. Outside of the spiritual effects of this ritual, it is generally treated as a recognition of respect and kinship between warriors. Warriors do not always fit well in the political machinations of the assassins or the academic vacuum chambers of the sorcerers, and so often tend to stick with others of their kind. It is, however, worth noting that the ritual is not in fact limited to warriors, and on very rare occasions assassins or sorcerers have been included.

 

A Mind for Metal and Mirrors: Meditation and Sith Warriors

 

 

Meditation is often considered a Jedi thing, a healthy act of mental cleaning and mindfulness, but I felt like we could take a healthy concept and apply it in the most unhealthy way possible that showed the sacrifice of humanity for power to get truly Sithy style meditations (methitations?). 

 

Forging the Way: Commonly tied to the action of forging (surprise, surprise) but also achievable through things like weapon and armor maintenance and katas, this form of meditation uses repeated simple actions to enter a disconnected mental state where the warrior can let their mind wander, or confront the Onyx Mirror. Forging the Way is always focused on achieving an end, pursuing the future. While in this meditative state the warrior, if sufficiently trained, can channel emotions or etch memories into whatever they are working on.

 

Boundless Slaughter: Sometimes a warrior must deal with people that they hate, but for various reasons cannot kill. This meditation exercise allows them to subvert their homicidal inclinations by vividly imagining the graphic murders of everyone in the room. Underlings never know whether the warrior is smiling because they are pleased with their performance or because they just visualized popping the underling’s head like an overripe grape. Players using this meditative style should denote heavily what is fiction to avoid misunderstandings.

 

The Onyx Mirror: The Onyx Mirror is a mental construct in which the Sith turns their eye inward to focus on every weakness and failure they can find. Young Sith hunt for weaknesses that keep them from achieving greatness, while powerful Sith search for vulnerabilities that could be exploited to bring about their downfall. No matter what form the Mirror takes, it loathes the Sith and takes great pleasure in pointing out his or her failures.

 

The Hunt: The Sith abandons the madness of society and civility to run amuck as an apex predator devoid of higher reason. This cathartic “meditation in motion” allows the Sith to reconnect with the more primal aspects of the Dark Side, and is vital for learning Predator Mind. Sith entering this state can be lost to it for hours, days, weeks, or even months.

 

The Obsidian Razor: The inverse of the Onyx Mirror, the Obsidian Razor is a meditation exercise where the Sith contemplates how everyone in his or her life could betray or fail them, to prepare him or herself for that eventuality. This concerted effort to see the worst in people leads to distrust and loneliness, but it helps keep the Sith from failing at a critical moment due to the weakness of lesser individuals.

 

Profane Tryst: A means for which the warrior can learn the limits of the body, of other people, and of themselves, the Profane Tryst is a violently intimate form of physical exploration. The meditation requires at least one other person, willing or not, and the Sith needs to have dominance in some sense over them (Trying this on an unwilling Force user would essentially be the start of a mental duel, and while a great story arch, it’s not the purpose of this exercise). The Sith tears down the walls both on him or herself and the other participants, and then surges the Dark Side through everyone involved, heightening all emotions to a fever pitch and leaving no resistance to acting upon them. Fear, anger, lust, selfishness, every powerful emotion is magnified exponentially while an unnatural adrenaline surge rips through everyone’s veins. It’s the closest that a non Force user will ever get to feeling the Dark Side of the Force, and so for some it’s terrifying and others it’s addicting. Provided they survive. Since the Sith is also unbound by inhibition, the exercise can turn into a murder. 

 

An inferno minded Sith can tear apart the focus of their ire in a blind rage. A cold minded Sith might dissect someone that bores them to see how they tick. A hungry Sith in predator mind may consume the person raw. A deep minded Sith may confront the Onyx Mirror while using the Obsidian Blade for the most brutally honest and mind shattering heart to black heart ever. The risks are immense, and often not even voluntary. So why do it? Those who survive the Profane Tryst are often indelibly marked by the Sith, inextricably connected through a horrifying understanding of the Sith’s truest nature. And like watching a train wreck they can’t look away. The Sith becomes a fascination for the person, and they feel like they have an understanding of the monster behind the mask, as warped as it may be. In return, the Sith feels accepting of the person’s presence, perhaps because they sense some of their own nature infecting the person now. People that attain this dubious honor don’t register as targets during a Sith’s blind rages or during the primal mind state of the Hunt meditation, read as Sith to Sithspawn and artifacts, and are more easily altered through Sith alchemy.

 

Seize the Wisdom of the Past: Half meditation, half invocation, this ritual allows the warrior to attempt to learn from long dead Sith warriors at their tombs. Theoretically this can be done at any rank, but unless an apprentice is invoking the warrior Bob’ert who tripped and accidentally stabbed a Jedi to death, the invocation will not go well, and even then, there’s little to gain from such a pathetic creature’s experience.

 

The invoker must prove him or herself in a mental battle against the spirit where each combatant must fathom their next move at the speed of thought, and success is usually measured by survival rather than overcoming the spirit. After all, if you can already best them what do you have to learn from them? Should the warrior survive the spirit’s trial, the warrior will usually find them worthy of receiving instruction on fighting techniques. If a sorcerer is on hand or the warrior has training in necromancy, a Mors Lapis (Death Stone) can be created to invoke the spirit away from the tomb for further tutelage. Remember when writing this one out that attempts to make your character look super awesome by being the first to overcome some great warrior well beyond your skill range just mocks our shared heritage and makes your character look like a Mary Sue/Gary Stu. In fact, the beatings these spirits can dish out should be a sobering experience that shows how far the Sith still has to go.