GLOG: Glamour Drowned

You never talk about how you ended up in Faerie.

Did you fall asleep in a mushroom circle, or get taken in by a changeling?

Did you fall down the rabbit hole, or gaze too long at the second star to the right?

Or perhaps you just made a deal that you shouldn’t have?

Whatever the cause, you spent time in the courts of the Fae. Too much time.

And while you did escape their grasp, you didn’t escape unchanged.

Every lie is an act of creation.

If I tell you that I have a sister named Sarah, then I have created a person inside your mind.

At first she is hazy, unformed. But then as I tell you that she has long brown hair, that her favorite food is pepper stew, that she works as a seamstress but is tired of it and is considering a change – she begins to take form.

With each fact unquestioned, Sarah is brought to life. If you believe me, then she becomes more real than every lie left untold.

This, the Fae will tell you, is the process by which the entire world was created – a delusion shared by all of us who live in it.

Glamour is the primordial matter of our delusional world, the lie given form. Just like Sarah above, it is infinitely mutable. Convince others of your truth, and the world will change to reflect it.

To protect yourselves from the belief of others, you mortals encase yourselves in shared lies, lies about souls, about conception, about flesh.

These lies limit you as much as they protect you – they limit what you are, what you believe, what you can become.

The Fae have no such limitations. They are the lie that embellishes itself, and so shape the matter of our world as naturally as you shape the expression on your face.

They can shape anything, so long as they are believed.

But therein lies the fundamental weakness of the Fae: they cannot be caught in a lie. They have nothing shielding their Selves from the beliefs of others, and to be disbelieved is to be destroyed.

And so the Fae do not lie, and rarely do they shape glamour without leaving a tell, some sign that points back to the original form.

The tell makes their shapings brittle, but also makes them a kind of trick, rather than a declaration of truth. To see through an illusion is to still believe the illusion itself existed.

Most mortals don’t accept the nature of our world. They can’t reach past the bedrock of flesh, to touch the primordial clay underneath. They cannot break through the lies they tell themselves.

But not you.

You, after all, have spent time with the Fae. You’ve eaten their food, smelled their flowers, listened to their stories.

Most of it still feels like a dream, burning away like mist in the sun.

Or perhaps it is the mortal world that is the dream, with reality struggling to maintain itself within the perception of others.

Whatever the case, only one thing is sure.

Deep down, you know the truth of our delusional world.

Deep down, you believe me.

Glamour Drowned GLOG Class

Perk

You get three Glamour Dice (d6s) that renew each morning.

You get one additional die per extra Glamour-Drowned template.

Drawback

Telling a lie causes all of your glamour to break in whatever way would be most damaging to you.

Furthermore, any Fae who learn that you lied while shaping glamour will hunt you down for threatening the general perception of glamour.

Templates

A: Glamour-Shaping I

B: Glamour-Shaping II

C: Glamour-Shaping III, Glow Up

D: Glamour-Shaping IV

A: Glamour Shaping I

Start with 1 lie about a material object in the world.

When challenged, add 1 for every convincing reason the lie would be believed, up to a maximum total of 6.

Describe 1 flaw in your shaping, and subtract it from your lies.

Roll a Glamour Dice (D6) – if you roll equal to or under the total number, the shaping holds. Roll over, and it shatters, the world reverting to what it was before.

A shaping is challenged the first time:

1. An observer has a strong reason to disbelieve it, or
2. The shaping interacts with material reality

For example, imagine you, a lowly non-magical adventurer, are in a meeting with the king.

You take a coin from your pocket, seemingly transfigure it into a sword in front of him (1), and then stab him with it (2).

In this example, your shaping would be challenged twice: once from the king’s shock as you conjure up the sword, and then again from the sword interacting with the material reality of his chest.

You could avoid the first by shaping the sword outside of the room – an adventurer having a sword is unremarkable in and of itself.

You could then avoid the second challenge by holding the sword to the king’s throat and threatening him, rather than stabbing him with it.

Think outside the box!

If a challenge is failed, describe how the tell that you included when shaping your glamour causes the observer to break the glamour.

For example, the king notices that the metal of the sword is the same color as the one pound coin. Or the kobold can still feel a draft through the wall that you glamoured to block an open passageway.

What if there is no observer? Could you glamour yourself into a gust of wind and fly up to the dungeon’s cliff-top entrance?

Well, if a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, that tree still interacted with the material reality of the world. The dirt, the birds, and the worms all heard it.

And so, craft your lies (perhaps you spent a day watching how the wind moved around this cliff?), shape your glamour, and prepare to be challenged.

B: Glamour Shaping II (B)

+1 Glamour Die (for a total of 4)

In addition to shaping material objects, you can now shape your own body.

Remember to always leave a tell in your shapings, lest you forget your original form…

C: Glamour Shaping III

+1 Glamour Die (for a total of 5)

You can now also shape other creatures, if they believe it is possible.

This means that they either have to consent, or have to be thoroughly tricked.

C: Glow Up

Whenever you do something remarkable (as judged by the DM and fellow players), you can spend a Glamour Die to mark it down on your character sheet.

You get +1 to any rolls relating to that feat.

If you ever fail a roll relating to that feat, remove the mark.

D: Glamour Shaping IV

+1 Glamour Die (for a total of 6)

Your belief in the delusional world is now so strong, the world so accustomed to your lying, that shaping comes easily to you now, almost as easily as breathing.

You now get +2 when your glamour is challenged, up to a maximum total of 5.

Author’s Notes

Inspirations

Pale is one of my favorite works of fiction, and this is my attempt at translating its glamour into a TTRPG system.

Other inspirations include Blade in the Dark’s flashback mechanic as well as the political commentary in Karin Tidbeck’s dystopian novel Amatka.

Illusions in D&D

This class is also a reaction to my attempts at plying Illusionist wizards in D&D 5E.

Combat spells in D&D, like Fireball, have very clear inputs and outputs. Cast the spell, roll some dice, and you’ll deal X damage to the enemy. It turns make-believe into a quantifiable equation.

Illusion spells on the other hand, such as Minor Illusion, engage with the reality of the game world more ambiguously. They ask the question “does this NPC believe my trick, and if so, what happens?”.

D&D’s attempts to reduce deception into a dice roll often feel cheap to me.

If I have my character say some dramatic speech, and then get told to roll persuasion, and roll poorly – what exactly happened in-universe? The real life players all think my speech was compelling, but the characters don’t?

On the flip side of this, it does allow players to roleplay charismatic or manipulative characters without having to actually act any of it out, which I like from an accessibility perspective.

You just have to say “I want to convince this guy that I’m also a member of the bad guy organization” and then roll a dice.

But still – for me, it often feels unsatisfying.

I like the idea of Glamour Shaping because it melds the meta-game storytelling (convincing the DM that a character would fall for an illusion) with the in-universe magic system. You and your character are both doing the same thing.

Playing a Glamour Drowned Character

I haven’t actually tried this class in a game yet. Depending on the type of game you’re playing, I feel like this could be either widely over-powered or not powerful enough.

For your standard D&D 5E game, I think it’s probably not strong enough – I’d make it an ability a character could get rather than a full class.

As with any ability, glamour shaping should fit within the existing setting. Just like a character with a rocket launcher would feel out of place in a medieval fantasy setting, illusions are much more satisying when characters know they’re a possibility.

Hack whatever you need to make it work at your table!

If anybody makes a Glamour Drowned character, I’d love to hear how it goes :)