VIRTUES
By any human standard, executioners are terrifying living weapons: able to kill with a gesture or bend the laws of reality to their whim. However, as the fiendish and abominable power of their quarry usually vastly exceeds their individual capabilities, the organization is well known internally for having a high fatality rate. The attrition of junior executioners, recruited from the population at large on short notice, and usually criminally underprepared for their mission, is extreme. To certain factions of CAIN’s senior leadership, this brutal reality is convenient: it has the dual purpose of culling potential threats to the organization, and also weeding out the weak from the strong.
Many survivors of this grueling process collapse under pressure and find it impossible to make it to high category before the mental and physical burden becomes too much to bear, but a tiny minority of executioners snap, break, and reform - becoming something stronger and more terrifying. These make up the senior ranks of executioners, those that have advanced to category 4 or higher. Efficient and ruthless hunters, these prized tools of CAIN are informally nicknamed ‘Blackcoats’ for the long ‘Well’ overcoat they typically wear.
The blackcoats are a tiny minority of CAIN’s main force. Yet from a tiny minority of their ranks comes something entirely else. Something verging on the inhuman - those that have faced horror time and time again and survived where dozens or scores of their comrades were cut down and devoured. These executioners of category 6 or above are exceptional throughout history and number only a few.
Deemed Virtues, they are treated as weapons of last resort by the organization, dispatched to deal with threats that would mean the deaths of thousands or even hundreds of thousands. They are kept in reserve on CAIN’s orbital rail facility, SERAPH, on strict three part rotation cycles of highly supervised shore leave, training, and cryogenic freezing so as to extend their lifespans, hone their powers through mental conditioning and dreamspace training, and heal their injuries. Well known throughout the organization, they are in turn idolized and feared by its ranks at large and have outsize influence on the rank and file of CAIN, even if they have no official power, and are in the end, merely the sharpest sword the organization has in its sheath.
USING THE VIRTUES
This is an optional game system for campaigns of CAIN, intended to offer an NPC-centric alternate progression path for characters. If you wish to include Virtues in your game, you can choose to include any or all of them. There are 6 in total. Virtues are never intended to show up in a mission (most of the missions player executioners embark on are too small scale, even the high threat ones!), outshine the player characters, or undertake actions that would undermine the player characters.
Instead, they are intended to play a role of a background mentor character that the players characters might interact with, idolize, emulate, or study under during their time between missions.
Similar characters from fiction:
Kishibe from Chainsaw Man
Kakashi Haitake from Naruto
Satoru Gojo from Jujutsu Kaisen
There are examples given here for the personality and appearance of Virtues but you can tweak or change their personality, gender, or appearance for your own game, as long as you keep the parts of their bond intended for gameplay consistent. I use third person gender neutral pronouns for them since I have a ‘canon’ idea of who they are in my version of CAIN, but I want you (the players and Admin) to figure who they are for your table.
VIRTUE BOND
If you include Virtues in your game, characters can bond with them during the course of their CAIN career. This could take the form of studying under them or getting to know them in their off time.
Alternately, player characters might never interact with a Virtue, but might choose to emulate them and their values instead, in an effort to follow in their footsteps, or even surpass them.
A character doesn’t have to bond with a virtue, but if they do, they can pick which virtue they are bonding with at the start of any mission. They immediately get the benefit of the level 0 bond with a virtue. If they survive the mission, they can increase their bond with the virtue by 1, up to a maximum of 3, and gain each correlated bond ability as they do. A character will therefore have to run three missions and survive to finish a bond.
A character can bond with different virtues each mission if they so desire. These bond benefits remain even if the character isn’t currently bonding with that virtue (or any virtue), and become a permanent part of the character.
STRICTURES
During the mission, a character that’s attempting to increase a bond with a virtue must follow that virtue’s strictures. A stricture invites a penalty or restriction on a character’s actions. A character can ignore a stricture when making an action roll by taking 1d3 stress, which cannot be reduced in any way, but cannot cause injuries.
HIGH DEFIANCE
At certain levels of bond, characters can gain access to unique defiance powers, weaker versions of the extremely powerful and unique high defiance manifested by the virtues.
Any defiance power gained as part of a bond with a virtue still counts as a defiance, but doesn’t increase a character’s XP cap or reduce their strain overflow cap, or count against their defiance known (it’s ‘free’ so to speak).
High defiance typically require spending all your remaining mental bursts, with a minimum of 1. Strain cannot be used to compensate for these bursts.