Combat

All things are possible in the Delirium, with a strong Gift and enough passions. When shapers fight, anything can become a weapon: their clothing, the island beneath their feet, even the air they breath. According to legend, whole shards have been destroyed by the clash of reckless armies.

Over time, the Passionate have developed several measures to prevent conflicts from escalating into cataclysmic, shard-destroying passion storms. The Dream Monarchs have learned to limit the possibilities on their shards, like restricting the use of advanced technology or the summoning of dangerous creatures. With their control over local reality, they can also make it easier to shape certain effects.

For example, on some shards, it's easy to deflect projectiles with a simple shaping trick. The trick itself is also easy to learn. This renders projectile weapons almost useless against a shaper. However, this is not the same as making something Vulgar. Gunpowder still works and explosives still detonate. A gun will still kill an unGifted person, and Engineers can still launch rockets into the untamed Vapor. While restricted to melee combat, shapers still find extraordinary ways to inflict hurt with engineered and arcane weapons and devices, and metamorphic enhancements (e.g., exoskeletons, claws).

Between the shards, neither the Monarchs nor anyone else can limit shaping. Pragmatic considerations usually limit outlandish shaping. For example, pirates want to take passengers alive for enslavement and take cargo intact for selling. So when they prey on Vaporships, pirate shapers exercise relative restraint. On the other hand, Vaporships are seldom used for military campaigns, since troopships make easy targets with little risk of collateral damage.

A Gifted being is hard to kill in the Delirium. Shapers have extraordinary power over their forms, including changing their appearance, recovering quickly from an injury, and resisting attempts to shape their forms against their will. So one shaper can't simply create a blood clot in another shaper's brain, or otherwise instantly slay another shaper. Even a being without the Gift can resist direct shaping, although far less effectively.