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More Posts from Variusandmany and Others

variusandmany

7 years ago

do you think vampires and werewolves are an exclusively human phenomenon or are there dwarfish werewolves and elvish vamps and shit??

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variusandmany

4 years ago

Noble Phantasms are, genuinely, an excellent story device for a combat series like Fate. Mostly because they can be pretty much anything you can come up with, so long as it has a thematic/historical/metaphorical connection to the servant.

Heracles being able to revive up to 12 times to tie it in to his twelve labors? Very clever.

Arturia having a massive sword of light, symbolizing both the prominence of the Arthurian Myth and the ubiquity of Excalibur? Incredibly efficient story telling.

They can be as simple or as complex as you want, so long as it “makes sense” in some vague way for the servant to have such an ability, so there’s honestly no limit to the fantastic nonsense you can come up with.

But, with all that said, my personal favorite NPs are some of the more simple ones. Maybe because they’re easier to describe, or easier to “get” why the servant has it, or maybe the humoristic element that, in a series where some servants summon a storm of arrows or invoke powers beyond mortal ken, that something as simple as a sword slash can be just as, if not more, powerful than them.

That being said, my two favorite NPs are:

1. The one where an old skeleton man that pretty much invented killing people as a career choice looms over you, stares into your soul, calls you a bitch in the most poetically threatening way possible, and then swings his sword at your neck. This will always kill you. No exceptions (barring one instance but that just proved the rule.) and of course it will always kill you because this is the person who has perfected the art of killing to such a point that the universe pretty much threw it’s hands up and said “fine whatever you’re basically the Grim Reaper go nuts.” Folk hero? Legendary Ruler? A fucking immortal God? Fuck you, a sword to the neck will kill you because the Old Man of the Mountain says, knows, that it does. And nobody knows Death more than King Hassan.

And 2. The one where a small and buff amazon queen takes a deep breath, imagines you are the one person she hates more than anyone else in existence, and that makes her so fucking angry that her strength increases a dozen fold and she rushes at you like a starving animal, ripping you apart with her bare hands before she bites your stomach open like it’s a dumpling. As you can imagine, being able to rain a hail of swords doesn’t really do much if your target just ignores all the blades you’re throwing at her and goes at you like a rabid wolf and leaves you as a bloody pile of guts on the floor. Oh. And if you so happen to be a legendary Greek hero, real or fictional? You’re double dead. She has a plus one billion against male Greek heroes because one insulted her strength after a fight she lost so it doesn’t matter if you’re a legendary Spartan king, a world renowned conqueror, or motherfucking Heracles himself, she will see you, growl, and the last thing you hear will be her ripping your leg bones out and beating you to death with them.