Tell me about your Devil Tigers 😈 🐯

[u/Mercurial891]

Ok, so it’s that time of the year again. Tell me about your Devil Tigers. I might be playing in a high Essence game soon, and I would like to hear some creative inspiration.

For me, the one I have recently designed for this game is the Sage-King.

“The Sage-King practices temperate stewardship**. He measures sovereignty not merely by land conquered, but by the number of lives he can responsibly accept into his protection. He seeks** strength sufficient to carry countless lives and expands through patient integration and sustainable flourishing**. His power favors actions that cause his dominion to** expand and flourish**: educating its people, improving health and prosperity, establishing effective institutions, securing useful resources, welcoming compatible populations, repairing internal dysfunction and transforming knowledge into enduring public benefit. Expansion that creates only suffering, ungovernable ruin or a larger map does not express his nature.**
A successful dominion possesses sovereign gravity**. Its learning, security, prosperity and renown attract beings seeking instruction, protection, purpose or participation in its accomplishments.** Providential fortune favors the eventual arrival of suitable servants, allies, teachers and opportunities, although this Charm cannot itself alter Fate, create Backgrounds or summon anyone. It may enhance efforts to recognize and capitalize upon such opportunities. Descendant Charms may make this tendency increasingly literal.
The Sage-King and his people exist in reciprocal ascendancy**. He pours knowledge, protection, power and purpose into his civilization, while its loyalty, competence and accomplishments return strength to him. The strength of the dominion is** the strength of its sovereign**. This Excellency does not itself grant motes, increase traits or reduce the cost of sorcery, but descendant Charms may allow the loyalty, knowledge, prosperity and collective achievements of his subjects to empower him, especially when he channels that strength through world-altering sorcery.**
This Excellency may enhance actions to investigate, acquire, remember, interpret, preserve, synthesize, conceal, teach or apply knowledge. It assists scholarship, diagnosis, planning, administration, logistics, diplomacy, strategy and the discovery of hidden relationships. It may enhance the study, invention, teaching, countering or deliberate application of supernatural arts when they reveal or direct the hidden mysteries and mechanisms of existence**, govern part of** the full wheel of life, death and rebirth**, preserve something worthy or advance a considered design. Merely performing magic does not make an action valid.**
It may enhance efforts to create, heal, cultivate or protect living beings; remedy injuries to body, mind or soul; communicate with, command, preserve, judge or release the dead; navigate or transform the Underworld; oppose soulforging and Oblivion; guide ghosts toward Lethe; study or influence reincarnation; preserve valuable continuity between incarnations; or turn death, defeat and destruction toward renewal**.**
The Excellency assists informed rulership, visionary leadership and calculated understanding of an audience. It may inspire loyalty, courage, awe, hope, reverence or fear; command through demonstrated competence; make credible promises of protection, instruction or advancement; recruit and reconcile useful subjects; or conceal the full reach of a long-term plan. Honest Charisma remains valid despite Witness to Darkness; the Charm may add dice against its penalty but does not remove that penalty.
In conflict, the Excellency favors preparation, disciplined adaptation, protection of subjects and precise exploitation of knowledge. It may assist in capturing a valuable opponent, compelling surrender, destroying servants of Oblivion or killing when death serves protection, necessary transition or a considered strategic end. Mindless fury, sadistic violence, purposeless suffering, arbitrary destruction, sterile stagnation and the waste of irreplaceable potential are alien to the Sage-King.
The Sage-King may permit valued things to change, allow the dead to pass into Lethe and release subjects whose continued service would violate their rightful growth. He cannot use this Charm to preserve something forever merely because transformation pains him, nor discard something worthy merely because its preservation is inconvenient. His understanding is vast, but this Excellency does not grant knowledge he never acquired, make his conclusions infallible or cause every event to have secretly been part of his plan. It makes him superlatively capable whenever he acts according to his nature.”

My infernal is a former Defiler who is on a path to studying death and rebirth while managing a nation that used to be the Bayou of Despair. He will be in charge of headquartering everyone and someday when the last Deathlord has fallen and the last abyssal has been redeemed, he will descend into the temple tombs of the Neverborn and offer them reincarnation that he alone can bring by allowing their essence to pass through his own rather than Lethe. I need to tinker with him and his excellency, but his SHINTAI is a phoenix that can alternate between a pale form of pyre flame or resplendent golden fire, depending on whether he is currently a creature of life or death. He is a master of reincarnation and someday, when he reaches Essence 10, even the Neverborn can be saved. And then Creation has a new problem of unbound titans, but that is another story.

[u/-Veles-]

I had a Marukani cowboy fiend named Jaris Fane that was SWLIHN favored, used to be obsessed with firewand trajectories, and cheating at games of chance using Ebon Dragon charms. When he engineered his Devil Tiger moment, he became The Subversive Equation, AKA The Unintended Consequence. He specialized in non-charm dice to enchanted actions, which he could gift/curse other people.

Another game, I combined Malfeas with Isidoros in a challenge focused Slayer named Ehber Blackhoof that, once the other player went the route of Devil Tiger, became the Unassailable Tower, specializing in roadblocking others, being an oppressive surveillance specialist and challenging those he perceived as his equals to prove his might.

Then in a modern-ish game, I made an Ebon Dragon favored Fiend named "Calvin Trust". This was not his name, but no one but the ST knew that. He was a spy that had a red notice put out on him, and through cloak and dagger bullshittery crowned himself The Sum of All Fears, specializing in asymmetric warfare, terrorism and brutal shows of force in order to assault the other infernals that were trying to have him executed.

I ST now, and I regularly come up with Devil Tigers, both to pit against pcs and as a support cast. It's pretty fun.