The single occasion on which a deity acts in the world directly, rather than through a mortal or spiritual agent. Every other divine act reaches the world through someone: a priest who speaks an incantation, a servant who performs a rite, a spirit sent in answer to prayer. An intervention has no such hand behind it.
Unlike the divine abilities, an intervention is not performed and not tested. There is no roll, no target, and no success level. It is not something a character does; it is something a deity does, and the gamemaster is the one who decides whether it happens at all.
Deniability
What marks an intervention is not its scale but its deniability. It must arrive in a shape that leaves its own cause in doubt — a slope that gives way at the hour the war-band passes beneath it, a fever that breaks on the morning the rites conclude, a hale enemy who simply falls. Nothing about the event announces itself.
This is a requirement, not a stylistic preference. An intervention that could only be divine is not an intervention; it is a deity stepping into the world in plain sight, which is precisely what does not happen. The event must support both readings at once: to the faithful it is certain proof of their god’s hand, and to everyone else it is a coincidence — a remarkable one, perhaps, but nothing that compels belief. Neither reading is ever confirmed. A gamemaster who cannot describe the event in a way an unbeliever would shrug at should reshape it until they can.
Who may receive one
Grace is the prerequisite. A character with a Grace Mystery has a standing claim on their god’s attention, and it is that claim an intervention answers; a character with no Grace has nothing for a deity to answer and receives nothing. A character may petition — through prayer, through Ritual Action, through a Divine Incantation that goes beyond what the rite alone could achieve — or may receive one having asked for nothing at all.
Grace is never a guarantee. It is what makes a character eligible, not what entitles them.
Adjudicating the cost
Grace is held the way Fate is: as charges on the Grace Mystery. Some Grace is a limited pool, each intervention spending from it; some is an unlimited wellspring that is never used up.
Where Grace is limited, the gamemaster decides both questions — whether the intervention occurs, and what it costs:
- Nothing at all. An intervention that merely nudges — a door found unbarred, a pursuer who looks the wrong way — may cost no Grace, particularly where the character has recently paid in devotion and asked for nothing.
- One point. The ordinary cost. The intervention turns a situation without reversing it.
- More than one. Reserved for interventions that avert what was otherwise settled — a death already earned, a rout already begun. A deity that spends this much has spent the character’s standing with it, and the character should feel the account run down.
Cost is judged against what the intervention achieved, not what was asked for, and it is set after the fact: the gamemaster narrates the event, then removes the Grace it cost. A character who has run their Grace to nothing has not lost their faith, but they have spent the credit it had earned them, and must rebuild it through observance before their god answers so readily again.
In play
An intervention works best sparingly and late — as the answer to a devotion already paid, rather than as a rescue. Because its form is always deniable, it should complicate or redirect a situation rather than resolve one outright, and it should never stand in place of a decision that belongs to a player. A faithful character who survives an avalanche still has to decide what they believe it meant.