The Essence ofTTRPG Self-Insertion

This Essence tastes like the imbiber's favorite power fantasy.

• At a base level this Essence grants you biological immortality and enhanced creativity. This is universal.

• What this essence is meant to do is reward people who've played collaborative TTRPGs, particularly collaborative and creative players who've done so for long periods of time, or have just had the luck to play high level one shots. You gain the ability to shift into and take on the powers of any player character you've ever made using a TTRPG system, be it Cthulhutech, GURPS, Pathfinder, D&D, or any other such system, and actually played a session with. So you can't cheese this by creating an old school D&D home-brewed deity and, having never actually played them, for immediate omnipotence.

• You gain a mental archive of every single such character you've ever made. This mental archive perfectly captures every detail related to the characters in it, from their backstories, to their tools, to their level at the time of your last session with them. This also remains true for living campaigns that are done through alternative means such as text-based campaigns.

• You can conjure portals to the settings where your TTRPG characters live and enter them. If you do, you'll either enter where the last session involving this character ended or you can enter at an earlier point in the campaign's timeline. You will enter AS your character, and can only take on your base human form with training and effort, and initially temporarily. Taking on the traits and appearances of your other characters takes further training, with how much training it takes depending on powerful, complex, and different the character is compared to the native form you've taken on in whatever setting you're currently in. You instinctively know what kind of training works best, as it depends in part on the forms you're training for, but it will never be truly dangerous to you. Eventually though you will be able to pull off hilarious feats such as creating a level one character and nearly instantly switching to take on the form of an archdeity, provided you eventually create one.

• Once per decade you can "attune" to a system and create characters using that system's rules, but at first you can only create level 1, or the equivalent, characters. Further more, at first you'll only be able to create a small number of characters per year, less than a handful. As you adapt to this power and gain experience with it you'll be able to create more and more characters in the same timeframe.

• You gain intimate knowledge of any system you attune to, allowing you to know just how best to create fun, creative, and yes, even cheesy characters. You have masterful knowledge of the lore, of internal mechanics, and of strategies related to said systems. This alone won't let you be a level one human fighter and tackle Ao or 1v1 Tar-Baphon, but it's a good headstart for any adventures you boldly embark on.

• You can level or otherwise progress your characters in two ways: continuing your regularly scheduled adventures the old-fashioned way, with some friends, some dice, and either a computer or pen and paper, or you can dynamically and boldly enter the actual campaign setting and BECOME your character. If you want you can even have multiple timelines and thus explore different possibilities and different avenues to power. Do you have a barbarian that you want to hit level 20, but also want to use as the base for a barbard? Well now you can do that, while reaping all of the benefits for it, provided you're willing to take the risks that come with adventuring. Do you have a human paladin who is currently in Numeria but you want them to visit The Shackles? Timelines buddy! This essence will reward your creativity, if you're willing to take risks and work for the rewards.

• There is a curious sort of fiat-backing affecting your powers. If you're a force-sensitive from some sort of Star Wars TTRPG, once you've trained those powers appropriately you'll be able to use them in Azeroth. If you're a Warhammer 40K psyker, you can still use your psychic abilities in places other than the grim galaxy of 40K, once you've trained your powers enough.

• Any TTRPG character you create and actually use in a session, including after you drink this essence, becomes stored in your mental archive. You can also train individual powers to be universally applicable, not just the forms you have stored away in your brain, and that traits of those forms. Training individual powers will, more often then not, require training done in the form that has them and in other forms.

• Once you've spent long enough in a setting you begin to be able to do things like take friends from there out of that setting and into your native world, or even other settings, but doing so is exhausting and will remain exhausting until you've trained this power sufficiently.