here is an ability i'm quite proud of from sunblack:
THE GLEY
Cover yourself in shadows and replace your cursed shape with the form you've woven from unreal soil. Your Gleyshape is overflowing with whatever it is your curse has taken from you (if you lost your mouth, then it’s covered in fanged maws; if your eyes then it’s got dozens; etc.) The form is conspicuously superhuman; take advantage on Rush, Scrap, and Hustle checks, but disadvantage on Twist, Charm, and Fade checks while you're in it.
You can take your Gleyshape whenever you like. When you choose to return to your human shape, you take 3 SHAPE or SOUL strain, player’s choice.
- MINOR: ROLL WITH THE PUNCHES. Once per session, when you would take any fallout while in your human form, ignore it and immediately take your Gleyshape instead.
- MINOR: IN HUMAN CONDITION. You're braced against the strain of returning to your human form.
- MINOR: READY FOR THE MONSTER. Choose one of the skills normally disadvantaged by your Gleyshape and permanently eliminate the disadvantage. Explain how your Gleyshape changes to reflect this.
("braced" is a new sbr/sunblack keyword i made up that means "take the strain but don't check for fallout")
this, from the phantom playbook, was originally about having a cursed werewolf-esque shape, but the more i thought about it the more i thought "most of the queer people i know would be thrilled to turn into a giant inhuman monster. many of them reject the very notion of being human itself." so i polled some folks for what appealed to them about monstrosity as identity and spent a lot of time thinking about how i could make this ability line up with that.
the hardest part was balancing the ability while also allowing easy access to it—i didn't want to make it hard to reach, because i don't want to make it cost players to invoke this shape as self-expression, but i couldn't make switching literally free because otherwise it would just be advantage on three stats with no downside. i considered time-gating the transformation but realizing that it should cost strain to get back to human was the flash of insight i needed. it makes the masking-as-neurotypical aspect of the ability work especially well, i think. being yourself is easy; what's hard is finding the right set of masks to pass as "normal."
i'm also proud of "in human condition" as an upgrade name. i think that's very funny