The vibrations on the spider’s web mark the impending death of its prey, but that’s only because the spider knows what those vibrations mean. An orator’s words can stir the hearts of a throng of humans to incredible deeds, but without a common base of understanding, she only succeeds in riling up a confused mob. Knowledge of a secret code turns idiotic babbling into revelatory truths. The whole world hums with the transmission of knowledge, and it is up to the Rosetta Society to winnow the meaning out of it all.
Brute-forcing the world’s cipher through learning each and every language is a fool’s game. Even the longer-lived of the Sworn only have so much time and mental storage they can put to the crude task of banking all that data, and there’s no way to guess ahead of time what particular language or code might be vital during an outbreak. Instead, the Society teaches a metaphorical Rosetta Stone of its own to its members — a combination of key semiotics, occult symbols, and meditative practices that connect the member to a kind of Akashic archive, the collective subconscious of humanity. If any human, anywhere, can understand or decipher the meaning of a word or phrase, so can a member of the Rosetta Society.
A werewolf’s keen senses match where ancient fragments
of First Tongue intonation still linger in the languages of the present day. A hunter imagines a mind palace filled with quiet voices that lend her their understanding. A demon calculates the precise way the light will fall on the mural he has painted, knowing that his fellows will see the warning in the angle of that illumination.
System: A member of the Rosetta Society can translate and understand any language also known by at least one living human being, whether in written, signed, or verbal form. It takes an instant action for the Rosetta Society member to reach understanding, slightly delaying any response, but the resulting translation is perfect and no meaning is lost in the process. This includes innuendos, cants, symbolic representations of concepts, ciphered text, and other forms of communication. It does not allow the Exegete to process the information any faster than they could normally if they already understood the language or means of communication in question.
Additionally, any character using Comprehension can communicate with one or more other characters who also have this vector with absolute clarity of intent and meaning, regardless of shared languages, and in a form that can only be understood by the intended recipients. This is not
telepathy; the message is transmitted through the slightest shift of the character’s body and the minute adjustments of their expression, or in the particular words that they haven’t used in an email that appears to be about something entirely unrelated, or even in the way they’ve left a few pebbles scattered seemingly artlessly on the ground. The intended recipients will immediately understand the message and its intent. Exegete agents sometimes use this power to leave long-term warnings or signs for other members, concealing information about a threat in the graffiti outside a dangerous building, or hiding vital secrets in the pattern of the planted roses in an old mansion’s gardens — a message that will continue to deliver for decades or even centuries.
Cost: 1 Willpower; no cost for communicating with other wielders of Semiotics
Requirement: Must be able to perceive the communication to be translated
Dice Pool: Wits + Empathy; no roll needed for communicating with other wielders of Semiotics
Action: Instant Duration: One scene
Edges
Hunters: Already close to baseline humanity and its collective unconscious, these Rosetta members draw deeply from that well of understanding. After a successful Comprehension roll, such a character can spend a point of Willpower to be able to speak or actively communicate back using the deciphered means of communication for the remainder of the scene, not just passively understand it.
Beasts, Demons, Mages, Werewolves: Through the ties that bind them to others or through their inherent capability to comprehend languages already, an oracle with this edge suffers no delay in Comprehension’s translation. Furthermore, they can grant the understanding of the language to other characters of up to their Semiotics dots in number.
Sin-Eaters, Mummies, Vampires: Just because knowledge passes beyond the grasp of the living, does not mean it is lost forever. Death has its own echo that lingers in the world. An oracle with this edge can also understand languages that are no longer known to any living human. As long there was, at some point, a human who understood the language, the character can comprehend it.
Changelings, Deviants, Prometheans: Among the Sworn are those whose instincts or nature let them disentangle or purify the Contagion’s corrupting influence from words and expression. A character with this edge can trans- late a Contagion-infected message or transmission without also conveying the infection on into the new form, but this does not purify the original infected communication.
Specializations:
Elodoth: Negotiators, diplomats, and fierce speakers, the Elodoth werewolves of the Society possess nuance and skill with language. They can start speaking in a completely fabricated tongue, communicate only with their hands or claws, or simply with body language alone, and the other members of their faction understand and can communicate in the exact same way. This skill in cryptic communication lasts only for the scene in which this vector is used.
Tammuz: For the Tammuz, language is more than just the foundation of how they communicate with others; it’s something fundamental to how they came to be in the first place. A Tammuz neither needs to spend time reading a whole text nor listening to an entire speech to translate it; all they need is the single Instant action to use the vector itself to achieve full comprehension.