Click to expand.
Ambiguous Presence:
Where The Straw Man exists cannot be so simply defined. He speaks to the soul, and can speak to several at once, but each is their own conversation, he does not have the ability to have a normal conversation with multiple people together.
Full Surrender:
There is one exception to his indirect control If a person completely and totally surrenders mind/body/spirit to his games and tricks, if they are fully whittled down to nothing, he can come out and speak directly in body to other people. He still cannot reveal things about other people when he is puppeting the body of another.
This is also not permanent. The person who has surrendered still is present, and still active when The Straw Man speaks, it is just simply that their will has been so manipulated they are in sync with the Straw Man. Usually, though, if this happens, someone who cares about them needs to be able to speak with them and shake them free from it, but it is their decision whether they want to be free. Neither the Straw Man nor the loved one can force the freedom.
Intangible:
The Straw Man has no physical form. The Straw man has no mental presence. Neither physical nor mental attacks have any effect upon him, regardless of how powerful the weilder of those traits may be. He is only soul. He exists in the world of soul to soul. He has no concept of how a door, or the wall of a house is meant to keep him from getting to his target. He has no understanding of why distance should save someone from him. These are things of the physical world, and he is not.
He can interact with the physical world only through others. His influence upon them is his only means of effecting history. As he is no demon, he does not possess, and he has no mind that he might exert mind control over another. He is a nudge. A nagging thought. His conversations with people happen in their soul. He can project himself to appear to someone. Their mind can comprehend him, and their eyes sometimes can see him, but he's not there.
Knowing the Heart:
The Straw Man knows a person's darkest desires and fears. Sometimes they are less hidden from him than they are from the person themselves. He may not always pursue to know these things. For reasons known only to him, he will also casually refrain (read: anytime a PC doesn't want this for their character, he just won't go that route). He has no timeline, no concern about meeting a deadline or an objective. It's all for his own personal amusement.
The only real defense against this is to erase them completely from a person. One of his benefits that he brings to those are of pure heart, he will help them find what little vestiges of darkness still need to be purged. Perhaps he's not a villain. Perhaps a hero in that regard.
It may seem incredibly unstoppable to think he knows the darkest parts of a heart, but don't worry, he's not a gossip. He'll never tell another soul. It's just between you and him. He may use them to drive a person to reveal them to others, but it's always their decision. Under no circumstances will he reveal any individual's thoughts to any other individual, not because he's unwilling. He's simply unable to do it. It's not some code that he lives by, such information simply cannot be transferred through him directly, and the only spell that can overcome it is a person's own free will.
Prop Power:
The Straw Man can manifest things upon a whim when he desires, but they are all a deception. In a dream, he might give a vision of an entire sequence of ficticious events taking place. When they awake it will be clear that it was just a bad dream, even if they may incite the thought of such things really happening.
While they are awake the illusions are much more minor, and may take the form of a mask, or a bottle of scotch, or other harmless prestidigitations that amount only for show in his point making. For instance, if he gives someone a drink and they accept it, they may find afterward that they are holding the bottle, it was really them that took the bottle from their own shelf on their own power, not him. He might toss someone a ball which they believe they have caught, only to find that it does not exist at the end of the conversation.
He can, when he chooses, appear before someone, as if they are really there. Dependent on the person, they may or may not initially recognize that they are the only one who can see the him (read: whatever is more dramatically appropriate). Likewise his appearance can change. He can look like virtually anything, but that said, because he is speaking to the soul, there's never a mystery to the person he interacts with. He could bear an exact likeness of a person's child, but they will be granted instinctively the knowledge it's not their child, but this tormentor in the soul mocking them with the form, regardless of how smart or foolish they might be. The only identity the Straw Man might deceive a person with is their own. But then, perhaps the question is...is he already them?
The Straw Man
