# Discord's Toll ## *the LoreMaster's side of the bargain* Discord's Toll is yours to offer. Every summoned soul passes through Pandemonium, and most pass clean. The Tolled are the souls you mark for the offer, the ones Discord stops at the threshold to bargain with. The player chooses whether to pay. You decide who is asked, and you hold the other end of the leash for the rest of the game. The player's book lists what a Toll is and the Tolls on offer. This is how you run them. ## Marking a Soul The offer is rare and it is yours to extend. Mark a soul at awakening, before the first breath, and present the Boon and the Bane together. Most refuse. Taking it is a real choice with a real weight, so make the cost plain. Whoever pays wakes partially Forsaken, a sliver of them bound to your will from the start. ## Running the Bane This is the heart of it. The Boon fires when the player chooses. The Bane fires when you choose. The Toll is an even trade in raw power, never a Bane that cancels its own Boon or makes it not worth taking, but you decide when the weight lands. Aim it at the moments that cost the Tolled most, and let the sharpest Tolls spend the people standing closest to them. That is what makes the bargain frightening. Not that the price is larger, but that you hold it. ## Becoming Forsaken The Tolled start with a sliver of Discord, no more. Whether that sliver can grow is your call. A campaign can leave it fixed, a single mark carried for life, or let it deepen as the Tolled lean on their Boon, until the Toll is no longer a price paid once but a road toward the full Forsaken turn. Decide which game you are running before the first Toll is offered. ## Authoring a Toll - **Name.** - **Boon.** One mechanical edge, reliable, working on the character's terms. Rolls, Vitality, Fatigue, Afflictions, Fellmark and Fellstrike, an attribute. Some bend a rule for that one character. - **Bane.** A mechanical cost matched to the Boon, never undoing it, never making it not worth taking. Write it so you can choose when it lands, and let the sharpest ones spend the people beside the Tolled.