TITLE:
Hand-Me-Downs (42k words) — Six dead heroes left you their powers. All of them are useless. Maybe.
Every twenty years, a hero is summoned to save the Hearthlands. Every hero gets a Skill. Every hero dies. And every hero leaves a residue in their bloodline.
You carry six.
Your skin is a little harder to bruise. Your palms run warm. Sometimes a pen rolls uphill toward your hand. These aren’t the powers of a hero — they’re hand-me-downs. Leftovers. The scraps nobody wanted.
Then a new hero arrives with the power to command reality itself, and your six useless inheritances start doing something nobody expected: talking to each other.
Demo: 42,000+ words | 6 chapters | 24 chapters planned
Romance Options (all gender-selectable)
The Seventh — Summoned from Earth with godlike power and no idea where the bathroom is.
Riven — Border soldier with no bloodline, no patience for politics, and a report that changes everything.
Sable — Voidstep scion who folds through space uninvited and carries a secret that could topple the hero houses.
Features
Six bloodlines — choose your two strongest and discover what they become together
15 hybrid powers built from bloodline combinations
A distinguishing mark on your body that NPCs react to differently
Touched creature companions shaped by the world’s magic
A household that feels lived in — a cook, a steward, a groundskeeper who remembers your mother
Weapon and fighting style trained since childhood
A mystery: the Blight isn’t what they told you it was
Full LGBTQIA+ inclusivity — gender-selectable ROs, custom pronouns
Im still working on what comes next but I hope you all enjoy.
Great potential this one . can’t wait for more. also it possible further along the story to able to wield all the powers at full strength, not just the hybrid of Two?
I feel like that would be OP and mess with the integrity of the story.
Full strength in all six would break the story.
Three reasons:
It kills the theme. The entire identity of Hand-Me-Downs is that you’re NOT a hero — you’re something “different”. Something built from pieces. If you end the game as basically six heroes stacked in a trenchcoat, you’ve just written a standard power fantasy with extra steps. The reader who fell in love with the mediocre heir who makes hand-me-downs into something new gets a protagonist who… became the thing they were told they couldn’t be. That’s satisfying for five minutes. What’s satisfying forever is becoming something “nobody predicted”.
It erases the Seventh. The Seventh has one full Skill. If you end up with six full Skills, the power dynamic that drove the entire story — collapses into “MC is just objectively stronger.” The Seventh becomes irrelevant. Their arc dies.
It removes choice consequence. The reader chose a primary and secondary bloodline. If everyone ends at full power in all six regardless, those choices were cosmetic. The reader who picked Graviton/Embercrown should have a fundamentally different endgame than the reader who picked Whisperwind/Bloomtide.
Cool. Broken MC that wasn’t really broken, just something that was erased from records on purpose. Really enjoyed the transformation from pity project to someone worth looking at. Looking forward to more
Thanks! I appreciate all you readers. I have a fundamental question that I would like all of your help in shaping for my book. The bloodlines talk to each other in resonance, should I create actual entities for the shards of each power that the MC has that after a while, actually start communicating with the MC or would that be dumb? Like they would have actual personalities, not like the original inheritors of them but maybe like slivers of their personality or entirely brand new personalities?
Also is the mc supposed to be female? Cuz at the start of the book there a letter form the MC mother that was supposed to be sent to a daughter and in the seen were the MC meets the seventh, I forgot what the full scene was but it said that a daughter lost a mother due to the price the hero’s payed when the MC was giving the seventh advice on if things got easier or somthin
I personally like the idea of the slivers being more abstract and inhuman in their communications. Like a sensation or sixth sense at the back of your head of one of them tugging you in a certain direction, or two of them resonating together like two harmonic sounds or clashing like nails on a chalkboard. It gives more space to the MC and less to the ancestors/powers themselves, it gives more agency to the readers as to how they interpret each ‘stimulus’ they receive from the the fragments, and it has a lot of potential for an overstimulation plotline, or as an additional unexpected factor the MC has to learn how to manage and live with–both as a positive and negative.
The slivers having outright personalities is more straightforward, but it’s also more… boring, imo? If they can just talk to you as people, there’s no need to try and understand and interpret what they’re trying to communicate between you or each other when they “speak”, you just know because they’re just talking. It can also feel a bit invasive to have outright people or voices in your head commenting on what you do/have done when you’re going about your day-to-day life, interacting with the people around you and potential ROs.
I agree with having a more abstract presence for the shards rather than giving them straight up personalities that talk. Maybe something like a “spidey sense” but like more original and catered to each power, if that makes sense? Like a feeling/sensation or a nudge in the right direction type beat, like @Sally_Forth said
Yooo I definitely appreciate all the feedback from you guys. I’ll definitely experiment with the “nudges” from each bloodline and harmonic clashes. That definitely sounds more promising.
I’m really enjoying the prose and world building so far, but as far as customization, I think it’s kinda strange that your hair color also determines your hairstyle . I think it would be better if the style/way it’s presented wasn’t mentioned at all, of course only if it being it’s own choice isn’t an option.
I’m liking this a lot so far! The combinations are neat and I’m curious to see what they become. The worldbuilding feels very good. Agreed that the more abstract bloodline resonance is probably more interesting, as it gives you an opportunity to have the PC interpret it instead of just having them come out and say “this is what this is”.
. can’t wait for more. also it possible further along the story to able to wield all the powers at full strength, not just the hybrid of Two?
I’ll give it a read later
. I think it would be better if the style/way it’s presented wasn’t mentioned at all, of course only if it being it’s own choice isn’t an option.