Wushu Skidoo
"You must stop this," the dangling tulpa pleads. "You're not mad. People are dying."
"They're already dead," the yogi screams. "We all are!" He swings his creation under his heel and, by force of concentration, makes himself as heavy as a mountain. They plummet through the temple's roof, shattering the few engravings that haven't already turned to dust. The thought-form contemplates his options as he rushes towards his destiny: crushed to illustrate a philosophical point.
You are a tulpa. Created by a power-mad yogi, given form through the sheer power of his will, your purpose is to serve and protect him as he works in secret to expand his powers. His victims and his rivals will come seeking revenge when he is weak, and the volatile powers of his own mind will run amok when he is strong. All will be yours to defeat, beguile, or contain.
And if you fail him, he can unmake you with a thought.
The Long Road to Enlightenment
India has a vibrant history of con men who claim to possess all manner of spiritual powers. The Buddha said that these "siddhi" are distractions on the path towards enlightenment, that righteous behavior is the true mark of spiritual development. That's what puts the power and madness in "power-mad yogi."
One of the charms of this riff is that it draws from source material that is sorely under-used: Buddhist and Hindu mythology. Siddhi aren't all the same, warmed-over kewl powerz you know and loath. Mixed in with clairvoyance and levitation, you get wacky things like changing your size, making yourself unmovable, or transmuting substances through the power of solar rays. The folklore is deep and often self-contradictory, so do some digging. What follows is just one interpretation, one designed for a role-playing game.
Lesser Siddhi
Before your yogi gains the power to bring forth living beings from his imagination, he has to master the basics. You can assume that they can ignore the effects of deprivation (feels neither hunger nor thirst), are immune to the elements (feels neither heat nor cold), and possess clairvoyance (when they're not distracted, anyway). These powers are all fair game for tulpas, too.
Greater Siddhi
Now for the fun stuff. If you like, your yogi may already possess a few of these. (If you want a tulpa to have one, the yogi must also have it.) However, most of them are far more fun while being developed. That's when they're most likely to get out of control.
Access to All Places - Levitation is only the beginning. Those who master this siddhi realize that distance is an illusion and location merely a matter of perspective. They can skip from place to place with but a thought. The true master is everywhere at once and nowhere at all.
All Things Are Relative - Similarly, size and mass depend on one's frame of reference. Through force of concentration, the yogi can become infinitely large or infinitesimally small, incredibly heavily or virtually weightless. (This is a fun one to use in combat.)
Transmigration of the Soul - This siddhi is the ultimate victory over the illusion of separation. The yogi's mind can now inhabit other bodies: animals, plants, people, even inanimate objects. Particularly unscrupulous yogis have cheated death by taking over the bodies of unborn children.
Unlimited Wealth - The internets are frustratingly vague on how this one works, but it's an easy answer for anyone who asks how these yogis can afford to meditate for weeks while supporting a staff of tulpas and their insatiable appetites for ammunition (or whatever).
Absolute Lordship - The yogi's will is now so powerful that weaker minds bend to its every wish. Unfortunately, any lingering conflict in the yogi's psyche can produce psychotic and self-destructive behavior in their telepathic pawns. With great power comes great personal jeopardy.
Solar Transmutation - Turn one substance into another, you know, via solar rays. (In my playtest game, I used this power to transmute a city block into a pit of rancid decay in order to prove a point about the impermanence of all things. See above.)
Turning Back the Wheel - Resurrecting the dead isn't just a matter of breathing life into a corpse. It requires turning back the wheel of karma, ripping a soul out of its new body, and dragging it back into a past life. There's just no two ways about it: this siddhi is evil.
Tulpas & Shadows
Technically, there is no siddhi for creating tulpas. That's more of a Tibetan mysticism thing. There's also nothing in the relevant folklore to justify what I'm about to borrow from Jungian psychology, but it's a very cool idea. (Actually, Chad Underkoffler already did this in Dead Inside, but as long as I'm borrowing great ideas...)
One of the last steps in a yogi's spiritual development is confronting their fears about themselves. To do this, they create a tulpa who's basically their evil twin. If the yogi's greatest fear is that he will ultimately be corrupted by the siddhi, then his Shadow will be a super-powered, egomaniacal villain. If the yogi fears that he isn't ready for enlightenment, his Shadow will be a weak-willed eye in a hurricane of uncontrolled siddhi. Shadows are always bad news for a yogi's other tulpas. If they destroy it, the yogi will never reach enlightenment. Instead, they have to help their master resolve his fears.
Power-Mad
Every Tulpa game, just like every Tulpa, begins with a yogi. If the GM doesn't have one in mind, the group should brainstorm a quick backstory and a motivation for walking the path of enlightenment. Make your yogi brilliant or talented, but also make them flawed. The game may revolve around the yogi's quest, but they are not the protagonist of this story and past sins are the stuff from which excellent villains are made. I'll give you a few examples...
The Untouchable Yogi
This idealistic revolutionary harbors a deep and unrelenting hatred for the social system that branded him an "outcaste" before he was born. He rejects the notion that his social status is punishment for past lives lived poorly. He seeks the power to overturn the caste system and remake society as he sees fit.
Brought up by a band of fakirs, he learned early on that his talents were more intellectual than physical. He taught himself the secrets of meditation and, by the time he was a teenager, he had unlocked his first siddhi. Unfortunately, his new powers often got away from him and it cost his adopted father his life. The fakirs are still looking for him, thirsting for revenge.
The Entitled Yogi (see below) considers him a dangerous upstart and would love to send him to his next life. His Shadow is filled with self-loathing; it is so physically and spiritually polluted that it poisons everything around it. It will embark upon a killing spree, targeting the rich and powerful, then try to end its own existence by murdering the yogi.
The Entitled Yogi
The flip side to the Untouchable Yogi's coin is a brahmin who believes spiritual perfection is his birthright. He knows that the siddhi are distractions best avoided, but he lacks the discipline to keep his subconscious under control. Plus, he's kind of a self-important jerk.
Case in point: He's personally offended by the Untouchable Yogi's quest for enlightenment. He's given his tulpas orders to find him and end him. His untamed siddhi have attracted the attention of a Bodhisattva who hopes the yogi will accept him as a teacher. If not... well, there are ways to neutralize him without murder.
What this yogi fears most about himself is that he's just a man, like any other. He fears that the caste system is a lie and that he wasn't born with any inherent, spiritual purity. His Shadow is a self-centered, wrathful bastard whose siddhi are barely restrained under the best of circumstances.
The Reluctant Yogi
This yogi is no yogi, he's a scientist. Raised by his godman uncle while his father worked overseas, he learned to regard the supernatural with extreme skepticism. As a young man, he came to the United States to study physics and engineering at CalTech. While there, he fell in love with a terminally ill co-ed. It was a brief but passionate affair.
After she died, he returned to India and made a small fortune. He then turned his attention to debunking mystics and cult leaders. He considers it a public service. Eventually, he came across a legitimate yogi and set out on his own quest for enlightenment. His path is dark and fraught with peril, because his motives are unclean... he wants to bring his lost love back to life.
His first tulpa is a malformed, sickly, dimunitive creature that somehow escaped his control. He feels sorry for it, so he lets it hang around, but it torments him. His Shadow thinks it's gone insane, that all this supernatural crap can't really be happening. Of course, that doesn't stop him from making them happen. Finally, all those gurus he discredited would love to rob him blind and light his carcass on fire.
The Reborn Yogi
In his last life, this yogi was a Bodhisattva. He had come to the edge of Nirvana and turned back to guide others along the path. Then, he was cut down by a Rakshasa's poison talons. In this life, he is a ten year old boy with a brain full of strange memories... and crazy powers.
His tulpas are whimsical creations: idealized parents, fairytale creatures, pets with human intelligence, etc. Being a child, he does similarly childish things with his other siddhi: terrorizing villages as a 12-story giant, transmigrating into the monkeys at the zoo, transmuting statues into Jell-O, etc.
Naturally, it falls to his tulpas to clean up the mess. Despite the distractions, they must remain ever vigilant for the Rakshasa and any other enemies from the boy's past life. His Shadow appears has his father, but seen through an infant's eyes: a towering mountain of authority and disapproval. It gives voice to the boy's fears that he is moving too quickly along the path, that he is giving in to temptations of the siddhi. It will try to browbeat the child into destroying his tulpas and returning home; if that doesn't work, it will try to destroy the tulpas itself.
Thought-Formed
The power-mad yogi community is a small one, rife with petty jealousies and old grievances. Seeking enlightenment is an arduous process that often leaves the seeker vulnerable: meditating for weeks on end, projecting outside one's body, accidentally transmigrated into a goldfish, and so on. Sooner or later, some other yogi is going to send his perfectly-imagined assassins to strike while the iron is hot. Plus, there are all these half-enlightened do-gooders (Bodhisattvas) and cannibal sorcerers (Rakshasas) running around, positively salivating for a chance to send a yogi to his next life.
Yogis have needs beyond protection, of course. They also need proxies to conduct their business while they're incapacitated, companions to keep them company when they're not, and legmen to do their dirty work. Tulpas are extremely hard to kill and some have kewl powerz of their own, but their real strength is that they are perfectly designed for one purpose. They are the best at what they do, whatever that may be.
A tulpa's purpose should always be their primary (5) trait: Bodyguard, Concubine, Stealth, Persuasive, etc. As usual, their secondary (4) trait should be action-oriented: a fighting style, chase skill, etc. If your tulpa has a special ability (flight, hypnosis, whatever), that should be their tertiary (3) trait. If not, consider making it an incongruous hobby or personality trait that the tulpa is developing to assert their individuality: Woodworking for a combat monster, Razor-Tongued Harpy for a consort, and so forth.
Examples:
- A dog with human hands. Could be a bodyguard or a companion.
- A proxy who looks and sounds exactly like the yogi who created him, but has hyper-acute senses that give him an edge in negotiations.
- A beautiful concubine who acts as companion and bodyguard.
- A vanara legman built for stealth and agility; he might have Hanuman's talent for changing size at will.
Pick Me Ups
The Entitled Yogi learns to impose his will on others and decides to turn his city into a peaceful utopia. His tulpas can only stand by and watch as he makes himself a king by turning others into slaves. When a Bodhisattva shows up to stop this madness, he offers to help the tulpas achieve free will. If they try and fail, the yogi will certainly unmake them. If they succeed, his thousands of thrall will surely tear them to pieces.
The Reluctant Yogi's Shadow starts raising the dead, but as mythological monsters bent on revenge. (See Sanctum: Untouchable for examples.) As he spirals ever downward into grief and desperation, his siddhi remake the city to reflect his madness: crumbling ruins, deadly plagues, apparitions of his lost love, etc. If the tulpas can help the Shadow accept the inevitability of death, their master can finally achieve enlightenment.
The Untouchable Yogi orders his tulpas to take down his Entitled rival; let's call it pre-emptive self-defense. They have to tangle with the Entitled Yogi's tulpas, protect their master from counter-attack, and find a way to defeat a mind with more spiritual power than even it can handle.
The Reborn Yogi is hunted by a Rakshasa that impersonates his parents, promises his tulpas free will, and tricks him into abusing his siddhi. The tulpas have to unmask the fiend while cleaning up after their master... or side with a cannibal sorcerer and buy their freedom with their master's life.
Next Up: Scavages, Reapers, and Gremlins... in spaaaace!
