Essence ofThematic Builds

This essence looks like three different things, tastes like three different things, and conjures three different dreams of power. Drinking it grants you the following:

• You may select three ‘Themes’ to apply to this document, in the following order:

• A Racial Theme: a mythical beast, race, species, or generic form of life, as general or specific as you desire. Examples include: Dragons, Dwarves, Kaiju, Aliens, Robots, Humans, Sharks. Something specific like a Xenomorph works too.

• An Object Theme: a weapon, tool, or object of choice, as general or specific as you desire. Examples include: Crossbows, Guns, Shortswords, Hammers, Shields, Wands, Amulets, Armor, Missiles, Boats.

• A Concept Theme: a concept or element, as general or specific as you desire. Examples include: Speed, Entropy, Gravity, Fire, Creation, Lightning, Destruction, Building, Adventure, Nomadism, Piloting.

• At base, you possess an unrivaled affinity for your chosen Themes. You receive a 50% discount on any future purchases in CYOAs or Jumpdocs that cater to those Themes. If the entire document caters to that Theme, you receive this discount on all purchases. It applies before any other discounts you can access.

• Energy expenditure (actual bodily energy, mana costs, etc.) for abilities related to those Themes is reduced based on their specificity. Destruction, being extremely broad, would be about 35% reduction. Piloting, being extremely specific, would be about a 90% reduction. 30% off is the least the discount can go for the most broad topics, but regardless of specificity these discounts can actually grow with time.

• The potency of your use of your chosen Themes is double that of even a specialized master. If you took Armor as an Object Theme, any armor you built or wore would be 2x in all its beneficial capabilities compared to the same or similar armor made by a master armorer, and take half the time and resources to make. If you took Human as a Racial Theme, you would be double the peak of human, and with other Racial Themes you would stand out as an extremely powerful example of them. This pattern applies to all your chosen Themes.

• Your Themes and associated abilities are uncapped in their potential growth as well, and your skill in wielding or training abilities associated with your Themes can grow with insane speed. This is a 10x learning/training booster at base that can, itself, grow.

• You possess some means of traveling to new universes or settings based on your Object and Concept Themes. An Object Theme for swords could allow you to learn an extremely precise method of cutting that slices portals between universes, a Concept Theme for lightning allowing you to travel to new universes harmlessly by being struck by lightning. It can only be performed once every ten years per Theme at first, but you can reduce that timeframe by making more frequent jumps.

• You possess a few new alt-forms based on your Racial Theme, and you can express parts of your lineage in any other form as well. A dragon Theme would, if you began in normal earth, grant you a four-legged, hulking dragon form that without training could take a shot or two from a modern tank, a middle bipedal form that could stand up to machine gun fire, and you could express horns, scales, wings, claws, tails, and fire-breathing even when otherwise human. A shark Theme would grant you a huge megalodon-like form covered in thickly armored plates, a large but mostly normal shark form like Jaws, an anthropomorphic shark form capable of surviving on land, and the ability to express a tail to boost swimming and shark-like teeth. These forms are largely of your choice of design.

• Members of these races weaker than you will generally see you as a physical manifestation of everything good about them, and bow before you (or at least are instinctively awed). Examples of these races that are stronger than you will also see you as examples of their own purity, and will never be hostile to you on first meeting. You can also communicate with any of them flawlessly.

• You are not a deity of your Themes, at least not yet, but have some dominion over them to start even without other powers you might achieve later on. You have a wide array of starting abilities based on your chosen Themes, with the most easily definable ones being some way of manipulating your Concept Theme, like a low-level magic system, bonuses to all actions made involving your Themes, a summonable example of your Object Theme that you can import future examples into to access all their features from a single Object, or racially appropriate bonuses like smithing for dwarves or a natural form of element breathing for dragons.

• You possess Thematically appropriate forms of immortality and healing, and have immunities or resistances to your chosen Themes. A broader Theme like destruction might only grant resistance to being physically destroyed rather than immunity, but could also give you a form of resurrection that ‘destroys’ nearby material to fuel your return, or healing that ‘destroys’ wounds. Fire might let you expend nearby sources of fire to resurrect or heal, a dragon might have accelerated healing and be reborn through an egg, a dwarf could forge a rune on their body that restores them when it's broken, a lich might have a phylactery, that kind of thing.

• Every time you use your aforementioned multiversal travel ability, you can access the local source of powers for the purposes of adding to your own repertoire. Most easily, this will be Thematically appropriate things, such as access to the local fire magic system in a fantasy setting, or pyrokinesis as a superpower in a superhero setting. This will give you access to three starting branches in the local power system, one apiece for your Themes, which cannot be drained, copied, removed, or altered in any way you do not want even by that setting’s strongest power manipulators. Even in settings where you should only really have one power (such as Worm’s typically singularly focused power system) you will receive one power for each of your Themes. They run off a separate, internal power pool compared to locals, but interact normally with them otherwise.

• You can incorporate aspects of the local example of your chosen race purely by exposure. Your generic alt-forms will evolve over time to be able to achieve any ability or feat the race can perform, which is massively sped up through witnessing them perform those feats and abilities. Your versions of these abilities will eventually be double in every respect as the same ones wielded by the peak of the local species, and then from there can be trained past them.

• You may grant others access to your Themes or more specific/lesser Themes under the purview of your chosen ones. For example, with a fire Concept Theme you could grant them an Ash Theme, with a dragon Racial Theme a Wyrm Theme, with a sword Object Theme a Shortsword Theme. They will start with much, much lower strength versions than yours, but could eventually reach your level of skill… and at any point you may retract these Themes from them.

• Of course, this is all toggleable, or a sliding scale adjusting to your liking, so long as it stays at or below the original stated strength.

• Optionally, be inserted into a specific or generic setting that focuses heavily on one of your chosen Themes, including fanfiction or non-canon media.