Essence of theSystem Administrator

This Essence comes in a light blue bottle with black labeling, and tastes like tears and rage and salt.

• You have at your disposal a System, a non-physical system with rules for empowering and interacting with a large number of people.

  • You may add individuals as users to your System, and can do so en masse with no cost. Targeting can be by any objective standard.

  • Adding someone as a user will automatically add any traits, skills, and abilities to your System’s library so you can work with it easily.

• Your System works according to a rule framework designed by you. These can resemble video games of various sorts, or follow other frameworks.

  • You start with a library of common applications, like displaying information to a user or letting a user give inputs to the System.

  • Due to the nature and structure of this power, you gain a great ability with regards to understanding, analyzing, and designing rules. You are so good that five minutes of your work is equal to a thousand years of crunch-level work from the fifty best lawyers (sorted by that skill) chosen from across history.

  • You also gain an equal understanding of formal logic and game design to help you.

  • No System rule may single out or reference a single individual. Implementations of rules can (for example, a quest can list specific people with certain roles.)

• While the rule framework will be applied equally to all people, you have some power to interfere with this. This can’t affect how the rules are implemented but can mess with the inputs to those rules.

  • For example, if your System has stats, you can lower them to zero for one specific person. You may also add parameters that have other negative results. This direct, single-target editing does not have to provide compensation.

  • You cannot kill someone through the System directly.

  • You can assign someone with certain parameters that means that they follow an effectively different set of rules, but those parameters must be theoretically possible to achieve without you directly affecting the values.

• You may create assistants and AIs to help you manage the System.

  • Such created beings will always be loyal to you and cannot be subverted.

  • AIs exist within the system only and can be copied. For example, you can create AIs that answer common questions about the System and copy them to each user.

  • Assistants exist in the real world. When created, their power cannot exceed yours.

• In order for a user to gain something from the System, something must be sacrificed. This can be something as simple as effort, or it can be physical objects or whatever else you desire to implement with a framework.

  • The ratio of sacrifice to gain is not fixed and can vary across the population of all users and between different types of sacrifice.

  • When adding someone as a user, you may provide an initial set of gifts. This applies even to bulk user creation.

  • While you may alter the rules of the System at will, any subject of the System will receive some compensation for most nerfs you apply. The compensation doesn’t have to be perfectly equal in value but should be comparable.

• Your System has different effectiveness depending on what it is trying to manipulate.

  • Your System has a great deal of power when it comes to working directly at people, or animals or other “individuals.”

  • Producing or modifying physical objects or equipment for a user is easily possible, only slightly more expensive than just modifying the user if producing equipment. Personal property not intended to be on someone’s person is slightly more expensive than equipment.

  • All other changes require a sort of “juice” that comes from people actually using the System. If you want to create a dungeon to grind in, an island to be a nation, or completely rearrange the globe you need to have enough juice to do so.