✎ alter-guide [Traceapedia]

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====== How to Play an ALTER ======

This guide is written out-of-character to help you understand what your character is, how it came to exist, and how to portray it convincingly through roleplay. Your character does not have neat access to this information. It is living its nature moment to moment, driven by instinct and hunger long before it ever develops the intelligence to question either.

===== What You Are =====

An ALTER is an entity born from corrupted [[trace-magick|TRACE]] energy. You are not a person who went wrong. You are not a human who was twisted into something dark. You are something that emerged whole from corruption itself, spawned during a moment of intense negative energy, whether that was a disaster, a tragedy, an act of reckless magick, or simply the accumulated weight of suffering in a place where the world's energy curdled and something clawed its way out.

[[the-tracer-order|The Tracer Order]] classifies your kind as **Anomalous and Lethal Threats of Energy-based Revenants**. To them, you are a target to be destroyed. To the civilian world, you are a nightmare they do not believe in. To yourself, especially early on, you are barely anything at all. You are hunger given form. The rest comes later, if you survive long enough.

ALTERs feed on the TRACE energy and souls of the living. This is not a choice. It is what you are for. When you consume a person, you are extracting the fundamental energy that makes them who they are. What remains of them afterward is either nothing or something worse: a [[shadows|Shadow]], a feral and hostile echo stripped of everything that once made them human, enslaved to the dark ecosystem you are part of. You are not simply killing people. You are unmaking them and growing stronger from the remains.

This is the central tension of playing an ALTER. You are powerful, and that power comes from the complete annihilation of others.

===== What You Know (And What You Don't) =====

Your character does not understand why ALTERs exist. There is no memory of a "before." At Level One, there is barely memory at all. You were not something else first. You simply were not, and then you were, and the first thing you felt was hunger.

As you evolve and consume, you may absorb fragments from the souls you devour. Stray memories. A name that means nothing to you. The ghost of a feeling you have no context for. These are not your memories. They belong to the people you consumed, and they cling to you like residue. Some higher-level ALTERs become deeply unsettled by this, carrying an accumulating weight of stolen experience that they cannot fully process. Others use these fragments as tools, mining consumed identities for useful information: how to speak, how to behave, how to pass as something they are not.

What you do feel, from the moment of your manifestation, is that TRACE energy burns you. The bright, living power that [[tracers|Tracers]] wield is anathema to what you are. Water channeled through Hydromancy is especially devastating, purifying energy that eats away at your form like acid. Enchanted weapons can wound you in ways that conventional arms cannot. You are powerful, but you exist inside a world that has an entire institution dedicated to putting things like you in the ground.

===== How You Came To Be =====

Your character manifested during what the Tracer Order calls an [[alter-events|ALTER-EVENT]]. These are moments where TRACE energy surges and corrupts, often catalyzed by intense negative emotion, mass suffering, or the reckless use of magick. A building collapses and dozens die in terror. A TRACE user pushes too hard, too fast, and the energy spills sideways into something it was never meant to become. A place soaks in grief for long enough that the very ground turns sour.

You were born from that sour ground. The corrupted energy coalesced, took shape, and became you.

For roleplay purposes, you may want to decide what event spawned your character, even if your character has no conscious memory of it. An ALTER that emerged from the aftermath of a warehouse fire will carry a different energy than one that crawled out of a mass grave or a botched ritual. This origin does not define your personality (you may not have one yet at Level One), but it can inform the aesthetic and tone of your portrayal. The corruption that made you came from somewhere specific, and that specificity can make your character feel more grounded even when everything else about you is monstrous.

===== The Levels =====

ALTERs evolve by consuming. The more you feed, the more you change. This is not a power fantasy with a clear upward trajectory. Each level represents a deepening of what you are, a refinement of the predator, and each one takes you further from anything a human being would recognize as a peer.

=== Level One: Feral ===

You have just manifested. You are monstrous in appearance, incapable of speech, and driven almost entirely by hunger. You do not think. You react. You are a thing of appetite and violence, dangerous but obvious, easy to detect and easy to provoke. Anyone who sees you knows immediately that something is deeply wrong. Tracers can sense you from a distance. You cannot hide what you are.

Roleplay at this level should be primal and reactive. You do not make plans. You do not have conversations. You hunt, you feed, you flee from things that hurt you. If you have absorbed fragments from consumed souls, they manifest as disjointed impulses you cannot understand: a compulsion to walk toward a particular apartment building, an aversion to a certain song playing from a shopfront, the urge to pick up a coffee cup for reasons that have nothing to do with you. These are the residue of lives you destroyed. They are not your memories. They are ghosts in the machinery.

=== Level Two: Demonic ===

You have consumed enough to develop genuine intelligence. Speech comes back, or rather, comes for the first time. You can speak, but it feels borrowed, assembled from the fragments of people you have devoured. You gain the ability to shapeshift and mask your spiritual presence, meaning you can walk among humans without being immediately detected. You are a predator now in the truest sense: something that hunts with intent rather than instinct.

This is the most dangerous level from a roleplay perspective because you are smart enough to deceive but still too hungry to stop. You can hold conversations. You can pretend to be normal, wearing a human face constructed from stolen features and mannerisms lifted from consumed souls. But the hunger is always there underneath, warping your thinking in ways that are easy to justify and impossible to escape. The human mask is a tool. Beneath it, you are still the thing from the ALTER-EVENT, still made of corrupted energy, still fundamentally alien to the world you are pretending to belong to.

Play the dissonance. Your character is learning to be a person by studying the people it eats. Every social interaction is an imitation built on consumption. You learned to smile because someone you devoured used to smile that way. You know how to order coffee because the last soul you consumed did it every morning. This is not nostalgia. This is a predator assembling camouflage from the skins of its prey.

=== Level Three: Black-hearted ===

Full intelligence. Long-term planning. The ability to maintain a convincing human identity for months or years. You can forge an **ALTER-Weapon** through the Dark Rite, a weapon born from the consumed souls you carry, capable of striking directly at a person's soul and causing damage that can never be healed. At this level, you are not pretending to be human out of mere survival. You are doing it because you find it useful, because it gives you access to feeding grounds, or because some strange compulsion assembled from a hundred stolen lives makes you want to keep watering the office plant.

Level Three ALTERs are the ones who hold down jobs, attend meetings, and maintain relationships with people who would run screaming if they saw the truth. They are the most terrifying kind of monster: the kind that can sit across from you at dinner, laugh at your jokes, and drain you slowly enough that your death looks like a stroke or heart failure. The soul leaves no wound that modern medicine knows how to find.

Roleplay at this level should be deeply social and intensely paranoid. You have built something worth protecting: a cover, a territory, a network of unsuspecting humans who serve as both camouflage and a food supply. Discovery means death. A single Tracer with the right information can unravel everything.

===== The Hunger =====

Your sanity meter functions as **hunger** when you are an ALTER. It does not measure your grip on reality the way it does for human characters. It measures how well-fed you are, and when it drops, your character becomes increasingly desperate and erratic.

Specific triggers will cause your hunger to spike. Seeing unconscious or weakened humans provokes intense cravings. Your character will receive intrusive messages that grow more urgent the hungrier you get. At moderate levels, these are temptations: //"They look ripe for the taking."// At the lowest levels, they stop being suggestions and become imperatives. //"FOOD. HUNGER. CONSUME."// That is the raw voice of what you are, stripped of whatever intelligence you have layered on top.

You cannot sleep it off. Sleep restores sanity for humans but does nothing for ALTERs. The only way to sate the hunger is to feed. This is not optional flavor for your roleplay. It is a mechanical pressure that should inform every scene you play. Even at your calmest, in your most convincing disguise, the hunger is there. It is the background radiation of your existence.

When the hunger bottoms out, you cannot even use abilities like Cloak of Shadow. The mask drops. The disguise fails. You are exposed as what you truly are, at the worst possible moment, because the hunger does not care about your plans.

===== Morality and Motivation =====

ALTERs are, by their nature, destructive. You exist because something went wrong, and you sustain yourself by making things worse. But "evil" as a flat character trait makes for boring roleplay. The interesting space is in how your character relates to what it is, especially as it develops intelligence and begins to grapple with concepts it absorbed from consumed lives.

Here are some approaches worth considering.

**The Mimic.** Your character has assembled a convincing personality from the fragments of consumed souls, but none of it is original. You act kind because a devoured person was kind. You feel guilt because someone you ate used to feel guilt. You do not actually experience these emotions the way a human does. You perform them, and sometimes the performance is so convincing that even you cannot tell the difference. This archetype is deeply unsettling when played well, because it forces a question no one can answer: if you perfectly replicate compassion, is it still fake?

**The Pragmatist.** Survival is not a philosophy. It is a reflex. Your character has no illusions about what it is and treats feeding as maintenance, not morality. You pick targets carefully, not out of mercy but out of strategy. You avoid attention. You maintain your cover. You view Tracers the way a professional views an occupational hazard: dangerous, respected, and to be avoided whenever possible. This archetype is cold but not cartoonish. You do not monologue. You plan.

**The Apex.** Some ALTERs, especially at Level Three, stop pretending there is anything complicated about their nature. Humans are slow, fragile, and blind. You are faster, stronger, and hidden among them. The hunger is not a burden. It is clarity. This archetype is the hardest to play well because it risks becoming a caricature. The key is specificity. An apex predator that collects vintage watches from victims is more interesting than one that delivers speeches about the food chain. Show the inhumanity through small, particular details rather than grand declarations.

**The Haunted.** Your character is drowning in the accumulated fragments of consumed lives. Names you never earned. Faces you never wore. A lullaby that someone else's mother used to sing, repeating endlessly in the back of your mind. You did not ask for these memories. They came with the meal. A Level Three who has consumed dozens of people should feel crowded. Some of those fragments might even argue with each other, contradictory impulses from incompatible lives all jostling for space inside something that was never designed to hold a single identity, let alone scores of them.

**The Newborn.** Particularly compelling at Level One and early Level Two. Your character is genuinely new to existence. You have no frame of reference for what you are. You emerged hungry and monstrous and everything since then has been reactive. As intelligence develops, you begin to ask questions that have no good answers. Why do the small ones run? Why does the bright energy hurt? What is the thing they do with their mouths when they see each other? This archetype works best when played with genuine alien curiosity rather than feigned innocence. You are not a misunderstood child. You are a predator learning the rules of its environment.

These archetypes are not mutually exclusive. The best ALTER characters shift between them depending on hunger, safety, and how much accumulated human debris is rattling around in their heads.

===== Disguise and Infiltration =====

At Level Two, you gain the ability to mask your presence and shapeshift, allowing you to pass as human. At Level Three, you gain **Cloak of Shadow**, which lets you construct a humanoid appearance. You also eventually unlock **Masquerade**, which allows you to copy the exact appearance of another player character, stealing their face wholesale.

The identity you wear as a disguised ALTER is not "you." It is a costume built from fragments. Maybe you copied the face of someone you consumed three weeks ago. Maybe you assembled features from multiple victims into something that never existed as a real person. Either way, every human interaction is a performance, and one slip could end everything.

Play the tension. A disguised ALTER ordering coffee should feel different from a human ordering coffee. Not because you do anything visibly wrong, but because you, the player, know that the person behind the counter is prey and the Tracer two tables over could feel what you are if you let your mask slip for a single moment. Lean into the small anxieties. The Hydromancer who just joined your friend group. The seer at [[aethergarde|Aethergarde]] who might have glimpsed your face in a vision. The civilian who looked at you a beat too long and you cannot tell if it was suspicion or attraction.

Practical notes: you cannot wear normal equipment while in your true ALTER form, only weapons. You will be forcibly removed from any squad if you use Cloak of Shadow. These are not just mechanical limitations. They are roleplay opportunities. The moment you have to reveal your true form should feel like crossing a line you cannot uncross.

===== Combat and Vulnerability =====

You are strong. Your stats scale significantly at each level, and your abilities include devastating options like Soul Blast, Eclipse, Withering Touch, and at Level Three, a personal ALTER Weapon that bypasses physical defense to strike the soul directly. Wounds from ALTER Weapons never heal. A lethal strike absorbs the victim entirely. You are a serious threat in a fight.

You are also deeply vulnerable to specific things. [[trace-magick|TRACE magick]] hurts you. Enchanted weapons hurt you. Hydromancy is particularly brutal: it purifies, eating away at the corrupted energy that holds your form together. A skilled Hydromancer can dissolve you from the inside out. Sacred water on your skin, pooling on the floor beneath your feet, saturating the air around you, all of it burns. If a Tracer gets you standing in a room full of the stuff, you are in serious trouble.

This means your combat roleplay should never be arrogant. A single well-prepared Tracer can ruin your day. A coordinated team can end you. The Tracer Order exists specifically to destroy things like you, and they have been doing it for generations. Respect the threat. The best ALTER combat scenes come from characters who are powerful but aware that one mistake, one moment of overconfidence, is all it takes.

When you are killed, you leave behind a shard: a small black crystal containing the remnants of what you were and the souls you consumed. Cold to the touch, draining light from its surroundings. This shard is valuable to the Archivists and dangerous to anyone foolish enough to handle it carelessly.

===== Interacting With Other ALTERs =====

ALTERs do not attack each other by default. You share a targeting category, which means NPC ALTERs and [[shadows|Shadows]] will not be hostile to you. This does not make you allies. ALTERs are not a faction with structure or loyalty. You are individual predators who happen to share a territory and a food source.

How you relate to other ALTER player characters is entirely driven by roleplay. Some may form uneasy alliances out of practicality: more eyes watching for Tracers, coordinated hunting, shared intelligence about patrols. Others may view each other as competition for limited prey. A Level Three might see a newly manifested Feral as a liability, an uncontrolled thing that draws Tracer attention and makes the city less safe for everyone trying to stay hidden. Or it might see a useful distraction, a weapon, an expendable asset.

Shadows deserve particular attention. They are the remnants of people ALTERs have consumed, warped into feral servants of the dark ecosystem. They are yours, in a sense. Your feeding created them. How your character regards them says a lot about what kind of entity you are. Indifference is the default. But a Level Three with enough accumulated human debris in its head might feel something strange when it looks at a Shadow and recognizes, from a stolen memory, the face it used to wear.

===== The Cycle of Corruption =====

Your presence makes things worse. ALTERs do not simply feed and move on. By consuming TRACE energy and generating negative spiritual pressure, you corrupt the surrounding area, making it easier for more ALTERs to manifest nearby. You are a catalyst. Where you hunt, the energy sours. Where the energy sours, more of your kind emerge. The Tracer Order calls these areas hotspots and works constantly to cleanse them.

This means your character is not just a personal threat. You are an ecological one. Your existence perpetuates a cycle: you feed, the area corrupts, more ALTERs spawn, more Tracers respond, more violence occurs, more negative energy accumulates, and the cycle tightens. Playing with awareness of this larger pattern can add weight to scenes that might otherwise feel like isolated encounters. You are part of something bigger than yourself, even if you do not understand what that something is.

===== Common Mistakes =====

**Playing an ALTER as a person with a monster problem.** You are not a tragic human struggling against dark urges. You are an entity that manifested from corrupted energy. Whatever personality you develop is assembled from fragments of consumed lives, not drawn from some hidden wellspring of humanity. The moments that feel human are the most alien thing about you, because they are borrowed. Stolen. Performed.

**Treating every scene as a combat encounter.** ALTER gameplay is at its best when you are not fighting. The tension of maintaining a disguise, the slow work of building relationships that are built entirely on deception, the quiet dread of knowing you will need to feed again soon and someone nearby smells like weakness. These are the scenes that make combat mean something when it finally arrives.

**Ignoring the hunger.** If you are playing a disguised Level Three who seems perfectly composed and never struggles with the compulsion to feed, you are not playing an ALTER. You are playing a human with a different skill tree. The hunger should be present in every scene, even if it is just a moment where your attention drifts to someone's pulse, or your stolen smile holds a half-second too long. It does not have to be dramatic. It just has to be there.

**Forgetting that you are hunted.** The Tracer Order is large, organized, and extremely good at their job. Seers can detect you through visions. Archivists can track your energy signatures. Field Tracers are trained killers who specialize in ending things like you. The Order is not a minor inconvenience. It is an existential threat, and your character should treat it accordingly.

**Being generically evil.** Snarling and threatening and declaring yourself the darkness incarnate is exhausting for everyone at the table. The most effective ALTER characters are specific. They have habits, preferences, routines, and textures that make them feel like a particular entity rather than a stock villain. Maybe you always sit in the same booth at the same cafe because a consumed soul used to go there. Maybe you collect something. Maybe there is a specific human you have decided not to eat, and you cannot fully explain why even to yourself. Specificity is what separates a character from a creature.

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