Tezcatl

Tezcatl

Tezcatl
Clans	Titlacauan
Bloodlines	Nahualli
Sects	Teteoh
Rituals	None
Combination Disciplines	None
Rarity	Rare
Play Status	Closed

Tezcatl is an ancient discipline that claims to draw from the powers of the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror. Its practitioners are able to work with their selves and also their shadow selves, their Beasts and the dark mirrors of morality that exist in every living being, and can achieve effects of subtle emotional manipulation and shifting of reality that can fool even the most perceptive of seers.

Basic Powers

Conciliation

You may mask your undead nature even from other supernatural creatures. Mortals perceive you as if you had a normal amount of Humanity, regardless of your actual morality, while animals do not fear you, shapeshifters do not smell the taint of the Wyrm on you, and Kuei-Jin see no reason to notice you above any other human being. Only the most powerfully perceptive of supernatural creatures (or someone who witnesses you use visible supernatural skills) are able to recognize you for what you are

Reflection

This power allows you to appear as you did in life: in every way, you look exactly as you did before you died, including physical appearance and scent, the warmth of your flesh, bodily fluids and hair, and even medical conditions. Others not only can't tell you're supernatural, they actively have trouble believing you are anything but the most mundane and normal of humans. A vampire using this power also exudes an almost touchable aura of calm and peace, making others innately want to respect and trust them no matter what they might be doing.

Intermediate Powers

Focus the Aspect

By touching someone, you may choose an element of your target's personality to highlight, temporarily changing their priorities and emotions without them even realizing it. You choose one of their Virtues to become ascendant; they suddenly begin to act in keeping with that as their new highest driving goal and priority, and continue to do so for the rest of the night.

The Smoking Mirror

You may choose to unleash your bestial opposite self: the Beast, savage where you are human, monstrous where you may still cling to life. You immediately enter rage Frenzy, and while you cannot prevent yourself from being violent and dangerous, you have just enough control to decide who to turn on first, allowing you to make sure that your rage-fueled strength is used against enemies rather than friends.

Advanced Powers

Shadow Self

By touching someone, you may actually bring their shadow self to the surface, reversing their usual priorities and emotions and making them act temporarily as what they would probably consider their worst self. Their Virtues immediately become the opposite of their usual ones: if they had Courage, they now have Cowardice, or if they had Conviction, they now have Ennui. Your victim retains free will and can do whatever they wish, but is likely to behave very differently from usual, and may do things that shock and appall others (or themself, when they look back later). The reversed personality remains ascendant until the sun rises.

Elder Powers

Deep Belief

You may now meddle with the most fundamental beliefs and worldviews of others: by touching someone, you can change their morality path. You immediately convert their current path into another at the same rating, causing sudden, violent shifts in belief and behavior. This power can only change someone to a path that you are aware of and have encountered before. Once someone has been converted to that path, they may still change it to another with hard work and dedication as usual; in fact, they are able to relearn their way toward their original path twice as quickly as they could normally, although they must work at the normal pace if they try to move to any other path instead.

Sacred Emotion

You may engender a completely new, custom emotion in someone by touching and speaking to them. The details are up to you; whether you invent a new quality of despair tailored to the current situation or invent an absolutely alien emotion to inflict on someone, they experience something like nothing they have ever felt before. They instinctively recognize you as the author of this emotion, though they may not be able to say why and are likely to invent justifications such as being in love with you or intimidated by your powers. Once a victim has felt this unique emotion, using this power on them to make them feel it again always causes them to become much less capable of resisting your powers or even disagreeing with you for the remainder of the scene.

Parallel Self

You may now directly meet your own shadow self and even help curate them a little bit. You may choose a second morality path to permanently take on; this morality path affects you and is active alongside your usual one, giving you twice the moral guidelines (but also twice the opportunity to regain Willpower and fight through outside effects). This power can be used multiple times, but doing so too often may lead to a vampire who is so paralyzed by conflicting moral imperatives that they go mad.

Mask of Tezcatlipoca

By highlighting one of your current emotions and drawing it out to its peak, you can project it to everyone around you. Everyone who beholds you perceives you as a sort of avatar of that emotion, a walking Lord of Joy or Mistress of Rage, and not only feels it powerfully but recognizes you as a dominant, overpowering source of it. Rumors exist of elders who had only to use this power and walk through a city to create unstoppable rebellions, wild orgiastic celebrations, or screaming mob panics that reduced everything to rubble.

Dark Mirror

This power allows you to fully transform into your shadow self, becoming a completely different, mirror-image version that is still nevertheless wholly you. Your skills, powers (with the exception of Tezcatl), and paths all immediately invert; if you were good at a skill, you no longer are, and if you were poor at a skill, you are now a master. Your morality path (or paths, if you have used ) also changes to one of your choice that you do not have.

Once this power is used, you may remain your dark self indefinitely; they are you, after all, and many elders claim that there is very little difference in the experience of being one or the other. You may swap between your selves with this power whenever you choose, although most avoid doing so often as it is difficult and exhausting to marshal the resources to completely reinvent an entire person.

Important Things to Keep in Mind

Because Tezcatl literally changes peoples' personalities, it is often perceived by others as a close relative of Dementation, a set of powers that drive people mad with little nuance. Of course, this is inaccurate, but it can be useful when it comes to blaming the local Malkavians for any ill effects that might have upset someone.

Tezcatl users are always walking a fine line between their different passions and personalities, and the more they fracture themselves by switching between them or adding new moralities, the harder it can become to remember who they originally were or what exactly they care about. Others often compare frequent users of Tezcatl to those with dissociative identity disorders, and they are likely to gain a reputation for being untrustworthy, as no one can be entirely sure that the person they're talking to now will still care about what they say tomorrow.