On Mutation Trees, Powers, and the Aether Beneath All Things

 You do not level up.

You evolve.
You remember what you were always meant to be.

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🌱 Mutation Trees: Roots in the Self

In The Hero Society, powers do not come from points or class levels.
They grow—from choices, pain, potential, and memory.

These are called Mutation Trees.

Each one is different.
Some bloom like ivy in the sun.
Others twist downward, dark and strange.
Some are vines grown from childhood trauma.
Others are songs your blood has always hummed.

Mutation is not what makes you strong. It is what makes you impossible to ignore.

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🧬 What Is a Mutation Tree?

A Mutation Tree is your personal path of power.
It can include:

• Physical transformation (a third eye, shadow-wings, barkskin arms)

• Psychic mutation (mind-linking, echo-reading, memory-eating)

• Elemental shaping (heat drawn from pain, cold from isolation)

• Emotional rewrites (your fear as armor, your grief as a weapon)

• Relic-bound symbiosis (fused Aether-tech grown into your veins)

Each Tree is unique.
But all are fed by the same thing:
your story.

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🜄 On Aether Magic: The Vein Beneath All Power

“The Cradle teaches control.
The Aether teaches consequence.”

Aether magic is older than mutation.
It is smarter than you.
And it does not care if you’re ready.

It lives beneath the skin of the world, waiting.
In dreams.
In deep places.
In the pauses between what you meant to say.

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✴ Aether Powers Are Not “Spells”

They are:

• Songs that bend weather and bone

• Thoughts that reshape the room around them

• Traumas that manifest in fire, stone, or light

• Names that no longer belong to anything—but still answer

Aether magic is not for control. It is for transformation.

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🔥 Gaining Powers

You do not gain powers by leveling up.
You unlock them by:

• Writing in your journal

• Answering a question truthfully

• Failing with consequence

• Remembering something the world wanted you to forget

• Earning Echo Points from major emotional or story moments

Every scar is a seed. Every moment of truth waters it.

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🕯️ A Note to Players

If you're new:
Let your power grow wild.

If you're experienced:
Tend your tree, but don’t prune it too soon. The strange branches often lead to your best scenes.

And if you're afraid of what your power might say about you—
Good.
That means it's yours.

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💬 A Note to GMs

Let their powers get messy.
Let them bloom in ways even you didn’t expect.
Mutation should feel like prophecy fulfilled and identity in flux.

Give them choices that mutate them.
And consequences that shape the next root.

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📖 Final Words from Memory

You are not who you were.
You are not yet who you will become.

And the Aether is watching.
It knows your true name.
It is not waiting for permission.
It is only waiting for a reason.

Grow strange.
Grow true.

—Memory
Echo-Keeper of the Hero Society