Fortune’s Payment

Patrons of Chance do not grant certainty; they grant leverage. Your magic comes in slips, refunds, rebates, and sudden reversals—blessings that arrive like windfall and curses that strike like a bad beat. You pay Gifts to pull power from a spinning wheel of outcomes: a hex that lands perfectly, a shield that blooms one breath before impact, a teleport that escapes the killing blow by a hair. Sometimes the House smiles and your spell hits like a jackpot. Sometimes it collects its due—backlash, debt, or a Complication that turns triumph into chaos. Your casting is a visible gamble: coin-light orbiting your knuckles, phantom cards snapping open like blades, probability lines skittering across the floor like spilled mercury.

In the Velvet Pits of Larkshore

Most Patrons of Chance first took root in places where desperation and hope share the same cup. In the Velvet Pits of Larkshore, warlocks are “made” in back rooms beneath chandelier-glow and velvet smoke—where dealers wear masks of porcelain and the dice are warm, as if still alive. Initiates pay their first Gift at a table etched with names that have been scratched out and re-scratched a hundred times. Some are bound by winning a game they should have lost. Others by losing a game they should have won. The House doesn’t care which—only that you played. Those who survive leave with a brand like a coin-press burn somewhere on the body, and the faint sound of distant shuffling whenever they draw breath.

Doctrine of the Unfair Odds

A Patron of Chance teaches that reality is not law—it is negotiation. Every battle is a ledger, every heartbeat a wager, every outcome a door that can be forced open with the right price. You learn to skim probability from enemy failures, to siphon luck into tokens, to shoulder an ally’s catastrophe and turn it into debt you can later weaponize. You cut the deck of fate with a gesture, nudge a result up or down, and bind a moment to a single chosen number like a trap waiting to spring. Where others seek mastery through control, you seek mastery through risk—living as a walking casino of miracles and misfires, smiling as the world realizes the rules were never fair to begin with.