Tempest

Internalising the wild power of a storm is no small feat, but it’s not impossible - either through technological application or obscure arconautic methods, tempests have managed to embed the essence of lightning within themselves.

Holding onto such raw power is difficult even for the most disciplined, and many find themselves the subject of wild moods and sleepless nights as thunder roams their minds. Only the most dedicated tempests manage to typify that dangerous, deadly calm of thunderheads massing on the horizon.

A Fragment of Storm

The most common road to becoming a tempest is to hunt down a living storm and capture some of its lightning for yourself, but it’s far from the only way. Some tempests pierce themselves with the spines of an ironjaw ray, or cultivate colonies of voltaic moss along their arms, or befriend a potently electric wildsea creature in order to borrow its puissance. Whatever the precise method, one fact holds true in all cases - a tempest’s own body is the host of their power.

Lightning Without Thunder

… Well, almost all cases. It’s extremely rare, but there are tempests out on the waves whose mastery of electricity comes from purely technological means (as a result of accident, endeavour or self-experimentation). These artificial tempests are often more akin to rattlehands in their approach to the art, treating voltage as a resource for crafting and repair rather than a source of combat prowess, but they’re no less powerful than their storm-blooded kin.

Questions to Consider

When you incorporate elements of the tempest into your character, consider the following questions…

• How did you attain the power of storms? Through theft, alchemy, injury or some other wildsea weirdness?
• To what extent are you in control of the lightning within you? In what ways, if any, have you unintentionally released it?
• Do you resonate with the world around you, and if so how does this manifest? Crawling sparks, misfiring engines, gathering striations of cloud far above?

Alternate Presentations

The easiest non-standard interpretation of the tempest is as some kind of elemental magic user, a mage-type with power over lightning drawn from nothing but training. Altenratively, the mesmer aspects can be adapted mechanically to represent other wildsea damage types - an arconautic user of frost, for example, or even (and this is definitely not recommended) flame.