Essence of thePoker Night

This essence tastes of strong alcohol, with a hint of cigar smoke, and a hint of coffee.

• You gain the ability to snap your fingers to freeze time in place and teleport yourself to a small pocket-space roughly the size of a single-family house, with a good sized dining room with a table to play around, a comfortable living room with some large couches around a coffee table in the middle, and a dedicated gaming room to step in to play games at.

  • You can decide the decoration and style of the place when you first enter it, and can declare you want to change things once a season, so four times a year at most. Exceptions can be made for holidays that hold at least some meaning to you, so a Halloween you enjoy can feature Halloween decorations for a day, but if you don’t give a crap about a holiday, such as Valentines Day to a single grumpy guy, then you cannot alter the place to suit that style unless you genuinely feel you at least want to give it a try. Holidays you are ambivalent about don’t allow any decoration changes, you will need to make them matter to you first before you can make use of them.

    • If you try and force a holiday you dislike or feel ambivalent to make a change, it is possible to pull it off once, but if you genuinely do not either like the day or really care for it, the decorations will be half-hearted at best, and likely to bring down the mood to begin with.

• The house will feature sufficient facilities to refresh yourself and any guests, the fridge and pantry are stocked with common food and drinks that could be made use of, and will replenish daily at midnight. Clean-up is not necessary, the place looks perfectly clean once you leave and return, even if you left it a horrible mess last time around.

• You gain the ability to summon individuals you would want to play with into the place, though this power will not have the means to force them to stay if they do not want to play. It will leave them initially curious, but if they feel uncomfortable, they may leave, and will not be possible to summon again until the next season if this happens.

  • This can bring in people you know in real world, pulling them away from the time-frozen state, returning them back to where they were once you all leave this place. They too can leave early if they so choose, in which they cannot be brought back, even if they were willing, until the next season has started.

  • Any fictional characters you bring in will be at least mildly predisposed to like you and listen to you, but if they really couldn’t be bothered to take part in things, it will take some glib tongue to convince them to stay and play.

  • Any such characters will appear as real as anyone else, cartoon characters will become people that look like they’re very good cos-players, more exotic appearances will look like they’re depicted in whatever media they’re from, assuming they can fit inside the building to play. Over-sized characters may appear on the lawn outside, but are unlikely to be able to participate to play unless they can have someone helping them out, and even in such a case, it might be awkward at best.

• Any people gathered at the table to play gain an equal amount of tokens to play with, and can try and bargain for access to more tokens with you, as the game’s host, if you are willing to accept any particular house-rules for a particular setting.

  • These may include options like adding in copies of a particular item they have in their own world, putting down some cold hard cash or valuables from their world, accepting to owe a favor, or agreeing to make the game into strip-poker and bet pieces of clothing for additional tokens.

    • For strip-poker option, a group could even agree to skip tokens and make pieces of clothing part of a pot by default.

    • Any objects bet this way will be duplicated, they will retain the original, but it will become inactive and refusing to work properly for roughly a week at minimum, up to a month, depending on how powerful the item is, while the duplicate gains its powers in the meanwhile. Once the period of time passes, the duplicate will either break and vanish, or lose a portion of its power but remain a potentially still very handy item to have. Some items may be empowered through repeated poker-games and duplications to match their original item’s power permanently, but will not be able to surpass this cap.

• When the game ends, whether by total loss of all other players or remaining players calling it quits and withdrawing what chips they have left, a tally is made. Anyone holding more than their starting total of tokens before them at such a time will find their starting pool of tokens vanish, the remaining tokens being converted into golden tokens that can provide a number of boons.

  • Tokens can be snapped with your teeth to gain a temporary large boost to your health, physical abilities, or mental abilities, chosen at the time of consumption, or a minor, but stacking boost to any of the above mentioned options that will last for weeks or even months. These stack up, and regular consumption of tokens in this manner can lead to permanent gains and changes in physique even once tokens power runs out.

  • Tokens can be converted into the cash of the world that a character originates from, adding to their personal wealth, with a temporary baffling effect to make people ignore someone’s sudden windfall and not question its source, as well as making sure it will not have any negative impact on the economy of their world on short-term at least.

  • Tokens can be exchanged for an item, consumable, or power-up available from one of the worlds of other people around the table playing, at a noticeable mark-up to the prices, if such would theoretically be available in that world. Having Mario at the table might allow tokens to be spent to acquire temporary buffs from different Mushrooms and other power-ups, held in physical token form ready for consumption and the temporary boost, but the price of these can grow quickly.

    • Acquiring a 1-Up token this way will allow an instant revival in a nearby safe location in the event of death, consuming such a token automatically.

• After a game has ended, the party can disperse returning back to their original worlds, or choose to hang out up to 24 hours after a poker game together just chilling. If some agreements were made for additional tokens, said characters will have to stay for up to 48 hours to carry out agreed upon tasks, dares, challenges.

• If people are summoned but no poker game is initiated within an hour of calling everyone together, or taking more than 20 minutes between summoning new players together, the house will send everyone home and close itself to everyone, including the Host, until the next season has started.

• No items supplied by the meeting place for the Poker Night can be brought out from it intact. Items won in a game or acquired through tokens are an exception to this, but you cannot empty a fridge to a bag and take it home with you to replace groceries. You can still eat yourself full to the point of bursting and leave with the meal inside of you.

  • Attempts to smuggle out supplies or game the system of the house can result being locked out until next season, and any items not approved to be removed from the house being vanished from the person that took them.

• After playing with someone several times, winning against them at least three times, it is possible to try and convince someone to take you along with them to their world instead of back to your own. Likewise, it will be possible to try and convince someone to leave their own world temporarily to join you in your own current world.

  • Such ‘vacations’ are temporary, and can last at most 1 week each season for a character, after which they will be unable to take a vacation in your world until the next season. Likewise, you will be unable to enter their world until next season if you have already visited it before. Multiple characters from the same world may vacation in your world, but you will still only be able to vacation in their world for that 1 week in total per season.

    • During such vacations, your own world remains time-locked while you are away, and similarly any characters taking a vacation in your own world will find their own to be time-locked until their return.

• While inside the house, or on a vacation, you do not age.

• It is possible to challenge an Incarnation of Death to a Poker Game, one on one, where you will face a difficult game. Victory here will allow you to gain Black Tokens that can be spend to regain your health or health of anyone else you give a token to break in their hands or in their teeth. Five such tokens can be crushed together to halt your aging for a year outside of the Poker Night’s meeting place or vacations.

  • Death will only agree to play poker at Midnight under Full Moon of your Original World. You can only win up to 10 Black Tokens from death per Poker Night. If you lose against Death, you will feel frail, feeble, tired, nauseous, and wishing for death for a period of 3 days and nights as Death claims some of your life-force as payment. This will not affect your lifespan negatively, but can leave you sick for the stated period of time.

  • Death is fair, but difficult opponent, and if Death catches you cheating (they always seems to know), then Death will end the game, claim some of your life-force as if you had lost the game, and will refuse to answer your summons for an entire year.

    • It is possible to get death Drunk, and improve your odds, but it will require specific, rare and expensive liquor. Death may hint at their tastes, but it may take a lot of expensive trial and error to get it right. Regular tokens may be converted to purchase more of this after acquiring a sample of it through normal means, but the price of it will be heavy.

• You can always conjure a deck of playing cards from any pocket you have at any time, if left unattended for more than half an hour, such a conjured deck will vanish without a trace.