Ritual: #burnthewitch
Cost: 2 minor charges.
Ritual Action: First you need to be good and mad at the target. Really mad. While in this state of blistering hostility make a "witches cake" (a mixture of rye, ash and the target's urine) while reciting a litany of the reason/s you're mad at them into the batter and glowering at it while it bakes. Feed it to a dog or a pet belonging to you or the target, you need to record it behaving strangely afterwards for the ritual to work (it's entirely acceptable to drug the cake to achieve this, well, not acceptable but you know what I mean...).
Make a public post on a social media platform accusing the target of something unrelated to why you're mad at them. Include a picture or video of the animal, it doesn't have to be related to the accusation or explained.
Effect: People who see the post within three days of it being made believe the accusation on an emotional level. They aren't compelled to act in any way and may feel conflicted if they wouldn't ordinarily believe it. If it's absurd or there's incontrovertible evidence against it then it's they'll likely rationalise these feelings in some way. The magickal component of this belief fades after the three days, leaving people to think whatever they like.
The accused can break the effect by passing any trial historically used to determine evidence of witchcraft. Reciting the Lord's Prayer without stammering is the easiest way but dunking, pricking and bible weighing all work too.
If the animal that ate the cake dies the effect backfires, people who see the accusation believe it about you instead. Any details of the accusation that don't fit are rationalised so it makes sense. This is permanent, so scrub that post (and god help you if it gets reshared).
Sunday 30 June 2019
Saturday 29 June 2019
060 - Jon Hart, Better Reform Through Chemistry & Personality Switching
GMC: Jon Hart, Better Reform Through Chemistry
Think about the secret parts of yourself. The hidden thoughts and ideas you don't have the tools or the wherewithal or the circumstances to express, the idealized version of yourself that isn't really you that you cling to nonetheless. It's an illusion, seen by no one else. They see different yous, fractured and individuated versions of their own perceptions. You are a different person to all of them. No one knows you, not even yourself. What if you could make your you real? What would you be willing to give up for that?
Jon struggled in life. He grew up in a bad home and was treated poorly by people who mostly didn't care. He had some good moments but at the time they only seemed to lay the seeds for greater disappointment and humiliation. Labelled as trouble early on he buried those parts of himself and became what everyone expected of him. He dropped out of polite society, did a lot of bad things and had a lot of bad things done to him. He'd once secretly dreamed of being a doctor. Instead he did the best he could at being the worst lowlife he could be.
Some people in that position turn it around eventually. They might come to rely on a higher power or reach a state of exhaustion where continuing seems more unthinkable than staying the same. Sometimes they won't or fail when they try. Jon didn't do either, instead after his second stint for possession he ended up holding something for a friend. When said friend disappeared and their car turned up in the reservoir he freaked out a little but knew well enough to sit tight. Months passed and no one came looking for the little bag of pink pills that would apparently "totally change your perspective, man, we're gonna be rich!" He thought about throwing it away. Instead Jon got curious, he tried one.
Alt-Jon is everything Jon is not. He's not perfect, in many ways he's weak and unprepared for the world, but he's who Jon dreamt of being. He can do things Jon can't and given the opportunity he started to turn things around, he got a steady job, a new place and started looking at what it would take to get his GED. He bought some mice and experimented on them with the pills. People were alienated by the sudden personality change and, worse, it drew attention. Jon owed people and had enemies that Alt-Jon didn't understand how to deal with. He tried and a pair of guys blacked both his eyes and cracked his ribs. He panicked and, only kind of knowing what would happen, wrote a note to himself and took another pill.
The last thing Jon remembered was taking the first pill. He woke up in a nicer apartment that he apparently had a lease on with a note explaining what he'd been up to the past four months, his new problems and the effects of the pill. Recovering, he put one of those guys in the hospital and squared up some of his debts. He enjoyed the life Alt-Jon had built for him, it was nice. But he slipped into old patterns, lost the job and was about to lose the lease. He needed a solution. So he sat down, wrote a note himself and took another pill.
Jon is effectively two people now. He's stuck shifting back and forth between these alter-egos who correspond through notes and have come to an arrangement. Jon keeps his old life from crashing in and Alt-Jon keeps them in clover and is working his way through pre-med at community college. Some of Jon's old associates have become aware of this last part and Alt-Jon's dismayed at the expectation he'll play mob doctor for them. Jon thinks that's hilarious and encourages it. Alt-Jon would bail if it weren't for Jon's sister, the only family member either of them think is worth a damn. She'd take the punishment if he walks out on Jon's obligations and that's not something they can conscience.
STATS
Personality: In his normal state Jon is smart but angry and limited by the baggage of his past. There are things he can’t get past either because there’s no resolution for them or the facility to do so is out of his hands. He wants the benefits of his improved life but doesn't like that it's really someone else living it. Alt-Jon doesn't have this baggage because at a fundamental level he isn't really Jon. He wants to express the buried positive aspects of Jon's outlook in spite of his circumstances. What bothers him is that he's smothering the real Jon to do it.
Rage: “Karma”. Try suggesting there’s an ultimate fairness to the world within earshot of Jon and watch him spit blood./Alt-Jon can't stand people getting taken advantage of.
Noble: Becoming good enough to justify himself./Second chances. Alt-Jon wants other people to have what he does.
Fear: That he’ll stop being useful and Alt-Jon will get rid of him forever (Isolation)./That he’ll go back to the way he was (Helplessness).
Obsession: Find a way to set his life as it should be.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Sketchy Thug 65/20% (Substitutes for Struggle, Substitutes for Lie, Coerces Violence.)
Gregarious Pre-Med 20/65% (Substitutes for Connect, Substitutes for Knowledge, Medical.)
Personality Switching 35%* (Unique - Switch Personalities, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick. See below for more details.)
Shock Gauges
Supernatural Identity: Personality Switching
Like Jekyll and Hyde, Alt-Jon is effectively a second character occupying the same body as Jon. Only one is present and in control at a time. They don't share memories (Alt-Jon has some from before the split, but they feel like they happened to someone else), passions, shock gauges or relationships (that last one can get a little tricky). Between them they've figured out a system of leaving notes and letters to each other. They do share an obsession and to a certain extent their identities. The entries and values before the slash are for Jon and those after the slash are for Alt-Jon.
Sounds like a pretty sweet deal right? Extra identity points and the ability to swap out your gauges when the heat dials up? What a munchkin! It comes with a couple of catches:
Think about the secret parts of yourself. The hidden thoughts and ideas you don't have the tools or the wherewithal or the circumstances to express, the idealized version of yourself that isn't really you that you cling to nonetheless. It's an illusion, seen by no one else. They see different yous, fractured and individuated versions of their own perceptions. You are a different person to all of them. No one knows you, not even yourself. What if you could make your you real? What would you be willing to give up for that?
Jon struggled in life. He grew up in a bad home and was treated poorly by people who mostly didn't care. He had some good moments but at the time they only seemed to lay the seeds for greater disappointment and humiliation. Labelled as trouble early on he buried those parts of himself and became what everyone expected of him. He dropped out of polite society, did a lot of bad things and had a lot of bad things done to him. He'd once secretly dreamed of being a doctor. Instead he did the best he could at being the worst lowlife he could be.
Some people in that position turn it around eventually. They might come to rely on a higher power or reach a state of exhaustion where continuing seems more unthinkable than staying the same. Sometimes they won't or fail when they try. Jon didn't do either, instead after his second stint for possession he ended up holding something for a friend. When said friend disappeared and their car turned up in the reservoir he freaked out a little but knew well enough to sit tight. Months passed and no one came looking for the little bag of pink pills that would apparently "totally change your perspective, man, we're gonna be rich!" He thought about throwing it away. Instead Jon got curious, he tried one.
Alt-Jon is everything Jon is not. He's not perfect, in many ways he's weak and unprepared for the world, but he's who Jon dreamt of being. He can do things Jon can't and given the opportunity he started to turn things around, he got a steady job, a new place and started looking at what it would take to get his GED. He bought some mice and experimented on them with the pills. People were alienated by the sudden personality change and, worse, it drew attention. Jon owed people and had enemies that Alt-Jon didn't understand how to deal with. He tried and a pair of guys blacked both his eyes and cracked his ribs. He panicked and, only kind of knowing what would happen, wrote a note to himself and took another pill.
The last thing Jon remembered was taking the first pill. He woke up in a nicer apartment that he apparently had a lease on with a note explaining what he'd been up to the past four months, his new problems and the effects of the pill. Recovering, he put one of those guys in the hospital and squared up some of his debts. He enjoyed the life Alt-Jon had built for him, it was nice. But he slipped into old patterns, lost the job and was about to lose the lease. He needed a solution. So he sat down, wrote a note himself and took another pill.
Jon is effectively two people now. He's stuck shifting back and forth between these alter-egos who correspond through notes and have come to an arrangement. Jon keeps his old life from crashing in and Alt-Jon keeps them in clover and is working his way through pre-med at community college. Some of Jon's old associates have become aware of this last part and Alt-Jon's dismayed at the expectation he'll play mob doctor for them. Jon thinks that's hilarious and encourages it. Alt-Jon would bail if it weren't for Jon's sister, the only family member either of them think is worth a damn. She'd take the punishment if he walks out on Jon's obligations and that's not something they can conscience.
STATS
Personality: In his normal state Jon is smart but angry and limited by the baggage of his past. There are things he can’t get past either because there’s no resolution for them or the facility to do so is out of his hands. He wants the benefits of his improved life but doesn't like that it's really someone else living it. Alt-Jon doesn't have this baggage because at a fundamental level he isn't really Jon. He wants to express the buried positive aspects of Jon's outlook in spite of his circumstances. What bothers him is that he's smothering the real Jon to do it.
Rage: “Karma”. Try suggesting there’s an ultimate fairness to the world within earshot of Jon and watch him spit blood./Alt-Jon can't stand people getting taken advantage of.
Noble: Becoming good enough to justify himself./Second chances. Alt-Jon wants other people to have what he does.
Fear: That he’ll stop being useful and Alt-Jon will get rid of him forever (Isolation)./That he’ll go back to the way he was (Helplessness).
Obsession: Find a way to set his life as it should be.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Sketchy Thug 65/20% (Substitutes for Struggle, Substitutes for Lie, Coerces Violence.)
Gregarious Pre-Med 20/65% (Substitutes for Connect, Substitutes for Knowledge, Medical.)
Personality Switching 35%* (Unique - Switch Personalities, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick. See below for more details.)
Shock Gauges
Notches
|
Violence
|
Unnatural
|
Helplessness
|
Isolation
|
Self
|
Hardened
|
4/1
|
2/2
|
4/2
|
3/2
|
3/3
|
Failed
|
1/2
|
1/1
|
3/1
|
3/2
|
2/2
|
Supernatural Identity: Personality Switching
Like Jekyll and Hyde, Alt-Jon is effectively a second character occupying the same body as Jon. Only one is present and in control at a time. They don't share memories (Alt-Jon has some from before the split, but they feel like they happened to someone else), passions, shock gauges or relationships (that last one can get a little tricky). Between them they've figured out a system of leaving notes and letters to each other. They do share an obsession and to a certain extent their identities. The entries and values before the slash are for Jon and those after the slash are for Alt-Jon.
Sounds like a pretty sweet deal right? Extra identity points and the ability to swap out your gauges when the heat dials up? What a munchkin! It comes with a couple of catches:
- Jon can only change once per day, the transition isn't pleasant (-10% shift for a scene) and is jarring for the woken personality if it succeeds. It causes stress checks depending on unexpected changes, bad situations they're dropped into or just the passage of time ("I've been out for six months!? What the hell!"). If it fails he has to wait another day to try again.
- The change is dependent on taking a pill. He's only got a limited supply and once they're gone he's stuck unless he can get some more. Either Jon would be distressed to learn the active ingredient is human pineal glands.
- Neither of them wants to "die" by being permanently retired by the other. Both of them have hidden a couple of pills away for leverage and try to make sure the other still needs them for something. Other tricks aren't out of the question if things get dicey.
Friday 28 June 2019
059 - Forgetful
Unnatural Entity: Forgetful
Demons who spend extended periods of time possessing animals wind up changed by the experience. Pour water into a glass and it conforms to the shape of the container. Unlike water, demons don’t always spring all the way back. Over time they take on the characteristics of their hosts. Sometimes this manifests as animalistic behavioural quirks and sometimes in transformation into a revenant.
Hosts with brain injuries have a similar effect. Some families are so delighted by grandpa’s restored faculties that they’re willing to overlook the faults he still has in recalling their names and his hoarse demands for Cajun food, so they make easy targets. At first it’s fine, no two brains are ever alike and possession doesn't require an exact match by any means. However in the long-term the serious damage of a CTE or dementia afflicted host rubs off. The demon retains its Urge (mostly) but develops the same issues as the victim.
In some ways this makes them weaker, as the spiritual equivalent of the damage takes hold it erases parts of what has become a Forgetful. Their Urge decreases and the vacuum created by the damage takes on a life of its own. While possessing someone Forgetfuls can’t always recall what they are doing, a successful roll on their Forget identity opposed by their Urge results in a state of fuzzy memory, strange behaviour and lost time. To observers the possessed seems dazed and confused. The Urge still exists and can be acted upon - a demon pining after her dead children might go to their graves - but they might not remember why.
In other ways it makes them more dangerous. As the host's illness rubbed off on the Forgetful their damage rubs off on new victims. Parts of the brain go unused and unstimulated during possession creating symptoms akin to vascular dementia. Repeated exposure to a Forgetful does damage, creating a cumulative negative shift equal to the largest die of a successful Forget roll on future actions related to cognition and recall. In serious cases people lose their grip on themselves and foreign identities start to bleed through. Leftover fragments of their possessor or even the host which passed on the damage in the first place, leaving them acting out poor imitations of other people’s lives.
Forgetful, Demonic Dementia
Wound Threshold: Equal to their Urge stat. Forgetfuls are immaterial like regular demons and revenants, you’ll need specific means to destroy one.
Urge 20-70%: Forgetfuls have an Urge like a regular demon, they just can’t always remember what it is.
Forget 30-80%: Forget is equal to 100 minus the Forgetful’s Urge. If this increases it reduces their Urge by an equal amount. Beyond 80% too little of the original consciousness remains and the demon either discorporates completely or becomes a fragmented revenant.
Demons who spend extended periods of time possessing animals wind up changed by the experience. Pour water into a glass and it conforms to the shape of the container. Unlike water, demons don’t always spring all the way back. Over time they take on the characteristics of their hosts. Sometimes this manifests as animalistic behavioural quirks and sometimes in transformation into a revenant.
Hosts with brain injuries have a similar effect. Some families are so delighted by grandpa’s restored faculties that they’re willing to overlook the faults he still has in recalling their names and his hoarse demands for Cajun food, so they make easy targets. At first it’s fine, no two brains are ever alike and possession doesn't require an exact match by any means. However in the long-term the serious damage of a CTE or dementia afflicted host rubs off. The demon retains its Urge (mostly) but develops the same issues as the victim.
In some ways this makes them weaker, as the spiritual equivalent of the damage takes hold it erases parts of what has become a Forgetful. Their Urge decreases and the vacuum created by the damage takes on a life of its own. While possessing someone Forgetfuls can’t always recall what they are doing, a successful roll on their Forget identity opposed by their Urge results in a state of fuzzy memory, strange behaviour and lost time. To observers the possessed seems dazed and confused. The Urge still exists and can be acted upon - a demon pining after her dead children might go to their graves - but they might not remember why.
In other ways it makes them more dangerous. As the host's illness rubbed off on the Forgetful their damage rubs off on new victims. Parts of the brain go unused and unstimulated during possession creating symptoms akin to vascular dementia. Repeated exposure to a Forgetful does damage, creating a cumulative negative shift equal to the largest die of a successful Forget roll on future actions related to cognition and recall. In serious cases people lose their grip on themselves and foreign identities start to bleed through. Leftover fragments of their possessor or even the host which passed on the damage in the first place, leaving them acting out poor imitations of other people’s lives.
Forgetful, Demonic Dementia
Wound Threshold: Equal to their Urge stat. Forgetfuls are immaterial like regular demons and revenants, you’ll need specific means to destroy one.
Urge 20-70%: Forgetfuls have an Urge like a regular demon, they just can’t always remember what it is.
Forget 30-80%: Forget is equal to 100 minus the Forgetful’s Urge. If this increases it reduces their Urge by an equal amount. Beyond 80% too little of the original consciousness remains and the demon either discorporates completely or becomes a fragmented revenant.
Thursday 27 June 2019
058 - Ellen Messier, Pathologically Penitent Ex-Apprentice
GMC: Ellen Messier, Pathologically Penitent Ex-Apprentice
Ellen just can’t stop beating herself up. It’s the only thing that gives her any relief from the constant anxiety and the constant crushing guilt over the horrible things for which she's responsible. Ordinarily this would manifest as alcohol and substance abuse and other normal kinds of self-destructive behaviour. It has but in Ellen’s case, being who she is, she also has the tools to wreak a special kind of havoc on her life.
She was always worrisome and clingy: with family, with friends, with boyfriends. Ellen needed the direction of others to take any kind of initiative. Coming from an overbearing Catholic home the influence of her parents certainly didn’t do her any favours. Entering adulthood she’d repudiated their religious beliefs in an act of rebellion, but the things we’re raised with never really leave us.
This renunciation was down to the influence of Ada Alvarez, thaumaturge and boogeyman of the local occult underground. No one ever pinned down exactly what Ada’s deal was: adept, avatar, unholy entity given flesh? She staked a claim to all magickal occurrences in her neighbourhood and faced down any dissidents with a ruthless violence and power that meant her reputation was enough to ward off all but the craziest. For a weak personality like Ellen looking to attach itself to someone she was catnip. Part lover, part gofer, part protege she gave herself heart and soul to Ada.
On Ada’s part the relationship was calculatedly abusive. She would give and take, pushing boundaries and demanding more and more from her apprentice, revelling in the transgressions she could force her to commit. There were so many. They were so awful. People died and lives were ruined. To Ellen the harm she did to herself and to others was an ever growing proof of devotion to the monument that Ada had become in her mind. When her object of devotion's head blew apart under demonic possession by a dead congressmen there was suddenly no more idol for her to sacrifice her soul to.
She had nowhere to turn. Ellen was reviled by the occult underground, cut-off from her parents and former friends and felt unwelcome in any church. She spiralled downward and out of control. Drugs, alcohol, anything that would numb the pain and guilt but bounded by the backlash that she could never accept what she had done. She attempted suicide, several times. In between this she found a terrible respite in her dead abuser’s belongings. Ada had been a prolific ritualist and collected dozens of magickal formula, a large number of which were functional. Before the crows could descend to pick over her cooling carcass for mystical gewgaws Ellen did one thing right: she hid them away where they can't hurt anyone. If only she could have resisted temptation herself.
The same people who would have looted Ada’s estate while the ink on her death certificate was still wet find themselves in a pickle when it comes to trying to wring anything out of Ellen. Not only is she pathologically opposed to spreading any of it around and armed with god knows what leftover hellfire, she’s worked up a magickal ward over herself that ensures hardly any of them can stand to contemplate her. Charging up with 'Neptune’s Awakening' (pg. 174 of Book 1: Play, she vaguely hopes it’ll kill her one day) she has systematically worked her way through jamming up every subculture she can think of with 'This Is A Bad Idea?' (pg. 88 of Book 3: Reveal). She has deliberately made herself a magickally unthinkable pariah to almost everyone. The result acts as both a shield and cross for her to bear. It’s the only thing that gives her any relief.
STATS
Personality: Neurotically remorseful and apologetic, but also willing to masochistically commit horrible trespasses just so people will be angry at her and reinforce her self-hatred. She desperately wants to be saved but refuses to believe she deserves it.
Rage: People who carelessly handle magick.
Noble: Giving emotional relief to those who deserve it.
Fear: “I’ll never be clean, I deserve this.” (Self).
Obsession: Making up for things she can’t make up for.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Wretched 50%* (Substitutes for Lie, Evaluates Helplessness, Evaluates Isolation.)
Ex-Apprentice 45% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Casts Rituals, Evaluates Unnatural.)
Empathetic 25% (Substitutes for Connect, Evaluates Self, Protects Self.)
Shock Gauges
Ellen just can’t stop beating herself up. It’s the only thing that gives her any relief from the constant anxiety and the constant crushing guilt over the horrible things for which she's responsible. Ordinarily this would manifest as alcohol and substance abuse and other normal kinds of self-destructive behaviour. It has but in Ellen’s case, being who she is, she also has the tools to wreak a special kind of havoc on her life.
She was always worrisome and clingy: with family, with friends, with boyfriends. Ellen needed the direction of others to take any kind of initiative. Coming from an overbearing Catholic home the influence of her parents certainly didn’t do her any favours. Entering adulthood she’d repudiated their religious beliefs in an act of rebellion, but the things we’re raised with never really leave us.
This renunciation was down to the influence of Ada Alvarez, thaumaturge and boogeyman of the local occult underground. No one ever pinned down exactly what Ada’s deal was: adept, avatar, unholy entity given flesh? She staked a claim to all magickal occurrences in her neighbourhood and faced down any dissidents with a ruthless violence and power that meant her reputation was enough to ward off all but the craziest. For a weak personality like Ellen looking to attach itself to someone she was catnip. Part lover, part gofer, part protege she gave herself heart and soul to Ada.
On Ada’s part the relationship was calculatedly abusive. She would give and take, pushing boundaries and demanding more and more from her apprentice, revelling in the transgressions she could force her to commit. There were so many. They were so awful. People died and lives were ruined. To Ellen the harm she did to herself and to others was an ever growing proof of devotion to the monument that Ada had become in her mind. When her object of devotion's head blew apart under demonic possession by a dead congressmen there was suddenly no more idol for her to sacrifice her soul to.
She had nowhere to turn. Ellen was reviled by the occult underground, cut-off from her parents and former friends and felt unwelcome in any church. She spiralled downward and out of control. Drugs, alcohol, anything that would numb the pain and guilt but bounded by the backlash that she could never accept what she had done. She attempted suicide, several times. In between this she found a terrible respite in her dead abuser’s belongings. Ada had been a prolific ritualist and collected dozens of magickal formula, a large number of which were functional. Before the crows could descend to pick over her cooling carcass for mystical gewgaws Ellen did one thing right: she hid them away where they can't hurt anyone. If only she could have resisted temptation herself.
The same people who would have looted Ada’s estate while the ink on her death certificate was still wet find themselves in a pickle when it comes to trying to wring anything out of Ellen. Not only is she pathologically opposed to spreading any of it around and armed with god knows what leftover hellfire, she’s worked up a magickal ward over herself that ensures hardly any of them can stand to contemplate her. Charging up with 'Neptune’s Awakening' (pg. 174 of Book 1: Play, she vaguely hopes it’ll kill her one day) she has systematically worked her way through jamming up every subculture she can think of with 'This Is A Bad Idea?' (pg. 88 of Book 3: Reveal). She has deliberately made herself a magickally unthinkable pariah to almost everyone. The result acts as both a shield and cross for her to bear. It’s the only thing that gives her any relief.
STATS
Personality: Neurotically remorseful and apologetic, but also willing to masochistically commit horrible trespasses just so people will be angry at her and reinforce her self-hatred. She desperately wants to be saved but refuses to believe she deserves it.
Rage: People who carelessly handle magick.
Noble: Giving emotional relief to those who deserve it.
Fear: “I’ll never be clean, I deserve this.” (Self).
Obsession: Making up for things she can’t make up for.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Wretched 50%* (Substitutes for Lie, Evaluates Helplessness, Evaluates Isolation.)
Ex-Apprentice 45% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Casts Rituals, Evaluates Unnatural.)
Empathetic 25% (Substitutes for Connect, Evaluates Self, Protects Self.)
Shock Gauges
Notches
|
Violence
|
Unnatural
|
Helplessness
|
Isolation
|
Self
|
Hardened
|
3
|
3
|
4
|
5
|
5
|
Failed
|
1
|
2
|
3
|
3
|
5
|
Disorder: Obsession - Her Guilt.
Wednesday 26 June 2019
057 - Reynaud’s Alkahest
Artifact: Reynaud’s Alkahest
Power: Significant.
Description: The universal solvent: able to dissolve any substance into its constituent components, therefore uncontainable and one of the theoretical pinnacles of alchemy. Allegedly discovered by Paracelcus and rediscovered by Van Helmont in the 16th and 17th centuries the idea has become symbolically synonymous with acids, alkalines and other corrosive substances. No true universal solvent was ever really created.
Except no one read the fine print, no one but Louis Reynaud. A French narco-alchemist and post-graduate chemistry drop-out who became obsessed with the history of alchemy and a regular abuse of LSD and barbiturates, he was known to pay a pretty penny for original texts from the greats. That those he developed his version of the alkahest from were a blatant forgery written in modern French on a typewriter does little to detract from its remarkable properties.
Reynaud’s Alkahest is a blue honey-like substance with a strong stench of camphor that sears the nose. It’s mostly safe, you can keep it in pretty much anything without causing damage. Hell, smear it on yourself if you want and you’ll be fine. So long as you aren’t carrying any charges.
Effect: The fine print explanation is that alkahest was never intended to work on material substances. Reynaud’s Alkahest doesn’t break down matter, it breaks down magickal potential. Specifically it converts charges into their base.
The exact effect varies and is as idiosyncratic as the magickal practices that generated the charges: hose down a fulminaturge and laugh as handfuls of loose ammunition spill out of her pockets, inject it into a Honeypot and it’ll barf up what’s left of it’s most recent victim and a screaming effluvia, dunk an erotic pastry containing a ghost and cop a spray of tattered funeral wear. If a charge has been moved around, say by Mak Attax with the Ritual of Lesser Correspondence, the effect can provide clues where it came from. The base materials aren't magickal in any way other than their origin. Avatars and their powers, unnatural entities and artifacts that aren't charge dependent and other magickal phenomenon remain unaffected.
A standard amount of Reynaud’s Alkahest will neutralise 2d10+5 minors and a tenth as many significant charges, you can reuse any leftovers if you’re able to scrape them loose of the brown, crusty used up portions. No matter how much you have it won’t do anything more than bubble and churn itself into a useless crisp against major charges.
Power: Significant.
Description: The universal solvent: able to dissolve any substance into its constituent components, therefore uncontainable and one of the theoretical pinnacles of alchemy. Allegedly discovered by Paracelcus and rediscovered by Van Helmont in the 16th and 17th centuries the idea has become symbolically synonymous with acids, alkalines and other corrosive substances. No true universal solvent was ever really created.
Except no one read the fine print, no one but Louis Reynaud. A French narco-alchemist and post-graduate chemistry drop-out who became obsessed with the history of alchemy and a regular abuse of LSD and barbiturates, he was known to pay a pretty penny for original texts from the greats. That those he developed his version of the alkahest from were a blatant forgery written in modern French on a typewriter does little to detract from its remarkable properties.
Reynaud’s Alkahest is a blue honey-like substance with a strong stench of camphor that sears the nose. It’s mostly safe, you can keep it in pretty much anything without causing damage. Hell, smear it on yourself if you want and you’ll be fine. So long as you aren’t carrying any charges.
Effect: The fine print explanation is that alkahest was never intended to work on material substances. Reynaud’s Alkahest doesn’t break down matter, it breaks down magickal potential. Specifically it converts charges into their base.
The exact effect varies and is as idiosyncratic as the magickal practices that generated the charges: hose down a fulminaturge and laugh as handfuls of loose ammunition spill out of her pockets, inject it into a Honeypot and it’ll barf up what’s left of it’s most recent victim and a screaming effluvia, dunk an erotic pastry containing a ghost and cop a spray of tattered funeral wear. If a charge has been moved around, say by Mak Attax with the Ritual of Lesser Correspondence, the effect can provide clues where it came from. The base materials aren't magickal in any way other than their origin. Avatars and their powers, unnatural entities and artifacts that aren't charge dependent and other magickal phenomenon remain unaffected.
A standard amount of Reynaud’s Alkahest will neutralise 2d10+5 minors and a tenth as many significant charges, you can reuse any leftovers if you’re able to scrape them loose of the brown, crusty used up portions. No matter how much you have it won’t do anything more than bubble and churn itself into a useless crisp against major charges.
Tuesday 25 June 2019
056 - Louise Naquin, Searching for the Spotlight
GMC: Louise Naquin, Searching for the Spotlight
Not everyone who uses magick understands what they are doing. People drift onto the path of avatarhood all the time, only occasionally noticing bizarre synchronicity and confluence before the eddies of fate dislodge them back into their mundane world none the wiser. Louise was a child when it happened to her, so with a child’s tenuous, undeveloped grip on reality she can be easily forgiven for not having connected the dots.
Louise grew up on the child beauty pageant circuit. Her mother instilled a ruthless sense of competition in her from an early age on top of the glorification of attention and adoration as the be all and end all. Louise learned to equate the success of her performances with mother’s love and affection, molding her into an avatar of the star. With the single-minded guidance of her sole parental figure and the uncluttered lifestyle of a kid she made it far along the path. Not godwalker or a contender for godwalker, not even in the top 100 candidates, but close.
Not everyone who uses magick understands what they are doing. People drift onto the path of avatarhood all the time, only occasionally noticing bizarre synchronicity and confluence before the eddies of fate dislodge them back into their mundane world none the wiser. Louise was a child when it happened to her, so with a child’s tenuous, undeveloped grip on reality she can be easily forgiven for not having connected the dots.
Louise grew up on the child beauty pageant circuit. Her mother instilled a ruthless sense of competition in her from an early age on top of the glorification of attention and adoration as the be all and end all. Louise learned to equate the success of her performances with mother’s love and affection, molding her into an avatar of the star. With the single-minded guidance of her sole parental figure and the uncluttered lifestyle of a kid she made it far along the path. Not godwalker or a contender for godwalker, not even in the top 100 candidates, but close.
She felt it during the middle of a talent routine in Miami, FL on August 9th, 1996, when the then godwalker fell. She and hordes of others felt the bottom fall out of the world and saw the stage it rested upon. Brightening its darkened floorboards, a spotlight. It was her’s, it was meant for her, she knew it but it was so far away. There were so many people between her and the light. She fought and elbowed to press her way through the crowd, deliriously afraid that someone would take it from her. And as she reached the edge of the stage someone did, as though it were the most natural thing in the world one of them stepped calmly into the light and raised their arms to cheering and thunderous applause.
When Louise woke up in hospital she was heartbroken. She only vaguely heard the doctors and her irate mother explain that she had collapsed on stage. That she had struck her head but the scans indicated she would be fine, they just needed to keep her here a few days to be sure. It didn’t really register, she’d had a religious experience and the loss had left her devastated. When she walked out of the hospital four days later she abandoned her old life and went out into the world at sixteen years old. She never saw her mother again.
Louise lived an ordinary life for a while. Waitressing and getting her GED. She flirted with live performance since singing had been her talent, but her heart wasn’t in it. She slipped from the path of the star. She married a man named Michael who ran a chain of car washes, had two daughters and assumed a quiet family life in spite of her own upbringing. They were looking at buying the diner where she worked so she could run it when Michael was sideswiped and killed by a semi on the highway.
Louise did her best to shelter her children from the loss of their father while hiding her own hurt. Financially they were okay and they had the support of their friends and Michael’s parents but this second loss dredged up the first and for a time Louise was emotionally adrift. It’s unfortunate that a pageant flyer, depicting a girl under a spotlight, is what brought her back.
Louise still doesn’t fully understand what happened in 1996 and thinks she lost a once in a lifetime chance, but that doesn’t mean her children are out of the running for the big prize. Filled with a religious certainty that she is setting them up for the greatest possible reward she has transformed into a parody of her own mother. Billing pageantry as a way to build their self-confidence and start a new chapter in their lives the trio travel the country just the way she did, vying for the adoration of judges and accolades of the sub-culture. Glimmers of synchronicity dog her steps and she takes these reappearing coincidences as an indicator she is on the right track. An occasional voodoo doll twisting the ankle of the competition doesn’t hurt either.
STATS
Personality: Louise has become the archetypal stage mother, living through her kids, just like her own mother. The only difference is the self-assurance that her motives are spiritual. She accepts basic superstition as prosaic reality - casually working gutter magick as a matter of course - having never known a world in which it wasn’t the case.
Rage: People who deny how special her children are, and by extension herself.
Noble: Excellence as inspiration. Louise teaches her girls that what they do is important to making sure others reach for their dreams.
Fear: Dying alone (Isolation).
Obsession: Find the spotlight again.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Former Avatar 70% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Evaluates Unnatural, Use Gutter Magick.)
Stage Mother 50%* (Substitutes for Notice, Coerces Helplessness, Coerces Isolation.)
Shock Gauges
When Louise woke up in hospital she was heartbroken. She only vaguely heard the doctors and her irate mother explain that she had collapsed on stage. That she had struck her head but the scans indicated she would be fine, they just needed to keep her here a few days to be sure. It didn’t really register, she’d had a religious experience and the loss had left her devastated. When she walked out of the hospital four days later she abandoned her old life and went out into the world at sixteen years old. She never saw her mother again.
Louise lived an ordinary life for a while. Waitressing and getting her GED. She flirted with live performance since singing had been her talent, but her heart wasn’t in it. She slipped from the path of the star. She married a man named Michael who ran a chain of car washes, had two daughters and assumed a quiet family life in spite of her own upbringing. They were looking at buying the diner where she worked so she could run it when Michael was sideswiped and killed by a semi on the highway.
Louise did her best to shelter her children from the loss of their father while hiding her own hurt. Financially they were okay and they had the support of their friends and Michael’s parents but this second loss dredged up the first and for a time Louise was emotionally adrift. It’s unfortunate that a pageant flyer, depicting a girl under a spotlight, is what brought her back.
Louise still doesn’t fully understand what happened in 1996 and thinks she lost a once in a lifetime chance, but that doesn’t mean her children are out of the running for the big prize. Filled with a religious certainty that she is setting them up for the greatest possible reward she has transformed into a parody of her own mother. Billing pageantry as a way to build their self-confidence and start a new chapter in their lives the trio travel the country just the way she did, vying for the adoration of judges and accolades of the sub-culture. Glimmers of synchronicity dog her steps and she takes these reappearing coincidences as an indicator she is on the right track. An occasional voodoo doll twisting the ankle of the competition doesn’t hurt either.
The spotlight was hers by right and stolen by vicissitude. If she can’t have it she’s going to make damn certain her girls get it for her.
STATS
Personality: Louise has become the archetypal stage mother, living through her kids, just like her own mother. The only difference is the self-assurance that her motives are spiritual. She accepts basic superstition as prosaic reality - casually working gutter magick as a matter of course - having never known a world in which it wasn’t the case.
Rage: People who deny how special her children are, and by extension herself.
Noble: Excellence as inspiration. Louise teaches her girls that what they do is important to making sure others reach for their dreams.
Fear: Dying alone (Isolation).
Obsession: Find the spotlight again.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Former Avatar 70% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Evaluates Unnatural, Use Gutter Magick.)
Stage Mother 50%* (Substitutes for Notice, Coerces Helplessness, Coerces Isolation.)
Shock Gauges
Notches
|
Violence
|
Unnatural
|
Helplessness
|
Isolation
|
Self
|
Hardened
|
2
|
4
|
3
|
3
|
4
|
Failed
|
0
|
3
|
1
|
2
|
1
|
Monday 24 June 2019
055 - Tyler Woodard, Optometrical Despot
GMC: Tyler Woodard, Optometrical Despot
Millbrook is a quaint little town spared the rural decay of rampant poverty and urban migration. If anything more people move here every year, charmed by the rustic wholesomeness of the community. Good schools, a hospital, a feted local baseball team, everyone knows each other and rarely has much bad to say. It’s idyllic. Tyler Woodard, the town optometrist, has lived here his entire life and wouldn’t have it any other way.
People like and respect Tyler. He’s a broad-faced, grey-haired old man, mild and friendly but wind him up and he’ll stand against anything that threatens his town. He’s led the charge in council meetings and citizen initiatives against mass real-estate development, waste dumping and the destruction of historic landmarks. Ask anyone about him and they’ll have some story of neighbourly grace and charity. Not everyone agrees with him but he’s the public figure that represents keeping Millbrook’s small town charm and lifestyle the way it is.
There’s a pedigree to this attachment, the Woodards have provided seven generations of optometry to Millbrook. Before that they did the same in the town of Adelswig in their native Germany, where they went by the name of Vogt. The Vogts had always been lenscrafters and magick-workers, their secrets and their craft passed down from generation to generation. Tyler was told stories in his youth about fantastical telescopes that could pierce the veil of heaven and see the angels, the secret family origins of the Nimrud lens, and the mass-blinding of their enemies. He doesn’t know how true the tales are but one surviving practice was passed down alongside them.
There’s a room in the back of Tyler’s business, hidden behind the office bookshelf and locked with three deadbolts. Inside is an old metal desk pushed against the near wall - stationery and stamps, a stack of magazines and two duffle bags carelessly stuffed with cash on arranged on top - and a reclining chair in the centre of the room. Lining the walls of the place are spectacles, arrayed around the chair like artwork. Each of them is a labelled copy of a pair Tyler has made for someone and allows him to see through the ‘eyes’ of the original.
Historically the Vogts/Woodards used this power to spy on the well-to-do patrons who could afford their services, amassing a wealth of information and blackmail material that allowed them access to money and social power beyond their humble origins. Unfortunately they made the same mistake most wizards do in their position, they underestimated the ability of normal people to hurt them. Their retreat to America was tinged with bitter revelation. The story twisted over generations until it became a noble choice, a flight not from people who would harm them but from a decay of culture and society. The Vogts were right to move away from their enemies and as the Woodards would strike new ground in a frontier where virtue and community mattered. At least that’s how Tyler sees it.
Tyler doesn’t want money or power for himself. He only ever asks for cash to conceal the real motive of his blackmailing and uses the panopticon to monitor and put the fear of god into those who violate his small-town values. Half the local council and a pair of sheriff's deputies are only a fraction of the people that have been threatened by his anonymous notes at one time or another. Some don’t pay but almost all of them have swayed their course based on the secrets he knew about them. He sees the moral disintegration of the refuge his family took here as the last straw, if they were pushed to flee to this place then no one can be allowed to take it from him. He won’t stand for it.
STATS
Personality: Grandfatherly, in both the soft and hard aspects of the term. Tyler sees the entire town as his family and can’t stomach the idea of anything bad happening to it, the individual people in it not so much.
Rage: Transgression. It’s like littering, once it starts it’s harder to stop and signals to everyone else that it’s okay to do the same.
Noble: Manners. The benchmark of civilised living is minding your p’s and q’s.
Fear: Being cast out of his community (Isolation).
Obsession: Keep Millbrook "safe".
Wound Threshold: 50.
Pillar of the Community 60% (Substitutes for Status, Protects Self, Protects Isolation.)
Blackmailer 40%* (Substitutes for Lie, Coerces Self, Reads Fear.)
Panopticon Lenscrafting 40% (Specific Information: Eyeglass Scrying, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Millbrook is a quaint little town spared the rural decay of rampant poverty and urban migration. If anything more people move here every year, charmed by the rustic wholesomeness of the community. Good schools, a hospital, a feted local baseball team, everyone knows each other and rarely has much bad to say. It’s idyllic. Tyler Woodard, the town optometrist, has lived here his entire life and wouldn’t have it any other way.
People like and respect Tyler. He’s a broad-faced, grey-haired old man, mild and friendly but wind him up and he’ll stand against anything that threatens his town. He’s led the charge in council meetings and citizen initiatives against mass real-estate development, waste dumping and the destruction of historic landmarks. Ask anyone about him and they’ll have some story of neighbourly grace and charity. Not everyone agrees with him but he’s the public figure that represents keeping Millbrook’s small town charm and lifestyle the way it is.
There’s a pedigree to this attachment, the Woodards have provided seven generations of optometry to Millbrook. Before that they did the same in the town of Adelswig in their native Germany, where they went by the name of Vogt. The Vogts had always been lenscrafters and magick-workers, their secrets and their craft passed down from generation to generation. Tyler was told stories in his youth about fantastical telescopes that could pierce the veil of heaven and see the angels, the secret family origins of the Nimrud lens, and the mass-blinding of their enemies. He doesn’t know how true the tales are but one surviving practice was passed down alongside them.
There’s a room in the back of Tyler’s business, hidden behind the office bookshelf and locked with three deadbolts. Inside is an old metal desk pushed against the near wall - stationery and stamps, a stack of magazines and two duffle bags carelessly stuffed with cash on arranged on top - and a reclining chair in the centre of the room. Lining the walls of the place are spectacles, arrayed around the chair like artwork. Each of them is a labelled copy of a pair Tyler has made for someone and allows him to see through the ‘eyes’ of the original.
Historically the Vogts/Woodards used this power to spy on the well-to-do patrons who could afford their services, amassing a wealth of information and blackmail material that allowed them access to money and social power beyond their humble origins. Unfortunately they made the same mistake most wizards do in their position, they underestimated the ability of normal people to hurt them. Their retreat to America was tinged with bitter revelation. The story twisted over generations until it became a noble choice, a flight not from people who would harm them but from a decay of culture and society. The Vogts were right to move away from their enemies and as the Woodards would strike new ground in a frontier where virtue and community mattered. At least that’s how Tyler sees it.
Tyler doesn’t want money or power for himself. He only ever asks for cash to conceal the real motive of his blackmailing and uses the panopticon to monitor and put the fear of god into those who violate his small-town values. Half the local council and a pair of sheriff's deputies are only a fraction of the people that have been threatened by his anonymous notes at one time or another. Some don’t pay but almost all of them have swayed their course based on the secrets he knew about them. He sees the moral disintegration of the refuge his family took here as the last straw, if they were pushed to flee to this place then no one can be allowed to take it from him. He won’t stand for it.
STATS
Personality: Grandfatherly, in both the soft and hard aspects of the term. Tyler sees the entire town as his family and can’t stomach the idea of anything bad happening to it, the individual people in it not so much.
Rage: Transgression. It’s like littering, once it starts it’s harder to stop and signals to everyone else that it’s okay to do the same.
Noble: Manners. The benchmark of civilised living is minding your p’s and q’s.
Fear: Being cast out of his community (Isolation).
Obsession: Keep Millbrook "safe".
Wound Threshold: 50.
Pillar of the Community 60% (Substitutes for Status, Protects Self, Protects Isolation.)
Blackmailer 40%* (Substitutes for Lie, Coerces Self, Reads Fear.)
Panopticon Lenscrafting 40% (Specific Information: Eyeglass Scrying, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Notches
|
Violence
|
Unnatural
|
Helplessness
|
Isolation
|
Self
|
Hardened
|
1
|
3
|
1
|
3
|
4
|
Failed
|
0
|
0
|
1
|
1
|
1
|
Sunday 23 June 2019
054 - Counter Coercion & Giving Coercion Fangs
Optional Rules: Counter Coercion
Risk freaking out, be traumatised enough to take it in stride, or roll over. Those are the three current reaction options under Unknown Armies’ coercion rules when threatened. However an alternative resolution when someone backs you up against the wall and things turn ugly is to make threats of your own.
When confronted with a coercion attempt if you have means to coerce that person in turn you can invoke the doctrine of mutually assured destruction to short-circuit their threats. Your estranged sister shows up at your wedding and threatens to ruin the day with tales of your sordid past if you don’t lend/give her a bunch of money? You’ve got grandpa’s ear and if she wants a snowball’s chance of any inheritance when he dies she’ll keep it to herself. You’re standing on the brink of respective Isolation and Helplessness checks but if you both back down things can proceed undisturbed, uneasily.
A tense situation in which the threats go unresolved is probably worth a rank 2-4 stress check on Self, Isolation or Helplessness depending on the circumstances. It’s a stop-gap solution in which both parties have tipped their hands and are left uncertain about whether the other will be able to seize the advantage (or blow up and wreck the whole thing in which case everyone gets to face the consequences).
Optional Rules: Giving Coercion Fangs
A standard success on a coercion check yields a rank 1 stress check (assuming no passions come into it). Everyone has at least 1 hardened notch in every meter (unless you hold GMCs to a different standard) and given how gauges and core abilities work in 3e it’s not unreasonable for them to be much higher, so is the juice worth the squeeze?
One interpretation is: yes, absolutely, if you want to ding someone’s meters you need to put the work in and find a way to incorporate as many of your and their passions as possible and if that doesn’t work then up the ante. Escalation is entirely possible, you just have to be willing to actually go through with it. That works and is well in line with the game’s themes. It’s also a fact that imposing a stress check on someone whether they succeed or not has ongoing consequences to their gauges and may be worth limiting.
On the other hand it’s important enough to merit an identity feature per gauge all to itself and you may feel that threatening someone with a gun is worth more than the rank 1 violence check which everyone can pass by default. Social combat might also be more important to the themes you and your players want to run with, higher powered coercion encourages it over other forms of conflict resolution.
If you find coercion lacking consider bumping the base ranks up a point or two for each tier of success (ie. success 2, matched success 3, crit 4) plus the default 1 rank per passion of the involved parties invoked. Alternatively (or concurrently) grant circumstantial boosts of 1-3 ranks: a gun is more threatening than a knife and photographic evidence of infidelity pushes home the point that someone could wreck your marriage over just mentioning that they know about your affair.
Risk freaking out, be traumatised enough to take it in stride, or roll over. Those are the three current reaction options under Unknown Armies’ coercion rules when threatened. However an alternative resolution when someone backs you up against the wall and things turn ugly is to make threats of your own.
When confronted with a coercion attempt if you have means to coerce that person in turn you can invoke the doctrine of mutually assured destruction to short-circuit their threats. Your estranged sister shows up at your wedding and threatens to ruin the day with tales of your sordid past if you don’t lend/give her a bunch of money? You’ve got grandpa’s ear and if she wants a snowball’s chance of any inheritance when he dies she’ll keep it to herself. You’re standing on the brink of respective Isolation and Helplessness checks but if you both back down things can proceed undisturbed, uneasily.
A tense situation in which the threats go unresolved is probably worth a rank 2-4 stress check on Self, Isolation or Helplessness depending on the circumstances. It’s a stop-gap solution in which both parties have tipped their hands and are left uncertain about whether the other will be able to seize the advantage (or blow up and wreck the whole thing in which case everyone gets to face the consequences).
Optional Rules: Giving Coercion Fangs
A standard success on a coercion check yields a rank 1 stress check (assuming no passions come into it). Everyone has at least 1 hardened notch in every meter (unless you hold GMCs to a different standard) and given how gauges and core abilities work in 3e it’s not unreasonable for them to be much higher, so is the juice worth the squeeze?
One interpretation is: yes, absolutely, if you want to ding someone’s meters you need to put the work in and find a way to incorporate as many of your and their passions as possible and if that doesn’t work then up the ante. Escalation is entirely possible, you just have to be willing to actually go through with it. That works and is well in line with the game’s themes. It’s also a fact that imposing a stress check on someone whether they succeed or not has ongoing consequences to their gauges and may be worth limiting.
On the other hand it’s important enough to merit an identity feature per gauge all to itself and you may feel that threatening someone with a gun is worth more than the rank 1 violence check which everyone can pass by default. Social combat might also be more important to the themes you and your players want to run with, higher powered coercion encourages it over other forms of conflict resolution.
If you find coercion lacking consider bumping the base ranks up a point or two for each tier of success (ie. success 2, matched success 3, crit 4) plus the default 1 rank per passion of the involved parties invoked. Alternatively (or concurrently) grant circumstantial boosts of 1-3 ranks: a gun is more threatening than a knife and photographic evidence of infidelity pushes home the point that someone could wreck your marriage over just mentioning that they know about your affair.
Saturday 22 June 2019
053 - Chalk Fairy
“This photo shows evidence that the crime scene had been visited by a "chalk fairy" — a term used to describe mysterious police officers who feel the need to draw lines around the body and then disappear when investigators attempt to find out who contaminated the scene.” - Vernon Geberth, Practical Homicide Investigation
Artifact: Chalk Fairy
Power: Minor.
Description: A vial full of chalk dust, either yellow or white. Gathered from a crime scene contaminated in error by well-meaning first responders or bystanders and itself contaminated by oil of wormwood - the adulterant responsible for absinthe’s hallucinogenic reputation. It sparkles softly when it catches the light. It takes effect when consumed or blown into someone’s face.
Effect: People believe all sorts of incorrect things. Sometimes these false ideas are passed around and take on a life of their own, transmuting through the gravitas of propagation into stubbornly persistent urban myths. In some ways the internet era has quelled this phenomenon by providing easy access to information, in others it has exacerbated it by creating echo chambers and polarization.
To someone under the effects of a chalk fairy the next one of these memetic tripwires presented seems entirely truthful, no matter how nonsensical (“Yeah but Big Al says dogs can’t look up!”). It won’t force them to do anything they ordinarily wouldn’t especially in conflict with their other beliefs, but false certainty can be a hell of a thing when it comes to arguments and drunken bets. Being presented with incontrovertible evidence of the mistaken belief typically prompts a rank 2-4 Self check depending on how they’ve handled it (“...but I was so sure”).
A chalk fairy lasts 12 minutes from the time it is consumed/inhaled. Arguments can go on much longer, people dig their heels in on principle about stupid things all the time.
Artifact: Chalk Fairy
Power: Minor.
Description: A vial full of chalk dust, either yellow or white. Gathered from a crime scene contaminated in error by well-meaning first responders or bystanders and itself contaminated by oil of wormwood - the adulterant responsible for absinthe’s hallucinogenic reputation. It sparkles softly when it catches the light. It takes effect when consumed or blown into someone’s face.
Effect: People believe all sorts of incorrect things. Sometimes these false ideas are passed around and take on a life of their own, transmuting through the gravitas of propagation into stubbornly persistent urban myths. In some ways the internet era has quelled this phenomenon by providing easy access to information, in others it has exacerbated it by creating echo chambers and polarization.
To someone under the effects of a chalk fairy the next one of these memetic tripwires presented seems entirely truthful, no matter how nonsensical (“Yeah but Big Al says dogs can’t look up!”). It won’t force them to do anything they ordinarily wouldn’t especially in conflict with their other beliefs, but false certainty can be a hell of a thing when it comes to arguments and drunken bets. Being presented with incontrovertible evidence of the mistaken belief typically prompts a rank 2-4 Self check depending on how they’ve handled it (“...but I was so sure”).
A chalk fairy lasts 12 minutes from the time it is consumed/inhaled. Arguments can go on much longer, people dig their heels in on principle about stupid things all the time.
Friday 21 June 2019
052 - Home Is Where The Heart Is
Ritual: Home Is Where The Heart Is
Cost: 5 significant charges.
Ritual Action: You’ll need a place you’ve lived for at least 10 years (making it your true home rather than just somewhere you keep your stuff) and it needs to have a brick hearth. Find someone with the expertise (or a compensatory bloody enthusiasm) to perform a heart transplant, the catch being that you’re exchanging your heart for a house brick.
The transplant needs to be conducted at home. When complete your old heart is placed in the hearth where the brick was taken from and submerged in concrete. In addition to an extremely difficult and uncertain surgery in a less than ideal environment (seriously, even with a Cardiothoracic Surgeon identity involved you’re looking at a significant negative shift) the ritual involves a number of restrictions and additional actions.
Cost: 5 significant charges.
Ritual Action: You’ll need a place you’ve lived for at least 10 years (making it your true home rather than just somewhere you keep your stuff) and it needs to have a brick hearth. Find someone with the expertise (or a compensatory bloody enthusiasm) to perform a heart transplant, the catch being that you’re exchanging your heart for a house brick.
The transplant needs to be conducted at home. When complete your old heart is placed in the hearth where the brick was taken from and submerged in concrete. In addition to an extremely difficult and uncertain surgery in a less than ideal environment (seriously, even with a Cardiothoracic Surgeon identity involved you’re looking at a significant negative shift) the ritual involves a number of restrictions and additional actions.
First, your blood must remain pure: no alcohol, no drugs, no toxins. An excess of any (enough to impose a mechanical effect) breaks the ritual. Second, no child must ever be conceived in the house before or afterwards. Third, the ritual must take place on entirely on the morning of December 3rd.
The ritual intertwines with the surgery: suspension from an ash tree, the constant burning of silphium incense (difficult to get a hold of since the needed variety is apparently extinct) and lengthy prayers and offerings to Anubis culminating in weighing the heart against the brick.
Effect: You don’t die from having a lump of stone replacing a vital organ. No heartbeat either, but somehow it all runs fine.
You gain a permanent vital connection to your home and it to you. If you get stabbed, a pipe bursts in the laundry. If some kid puts a baseball through a window you pop a blood vessel in your eye. Consequently an identity like Carpenter effectively gains the Medical feature for you (handy since an x-ray or MRI scan will raise a lot of questions) or if you’re willing to get some stitches and rest up you can avoid calling a plumber. You don’t want to see what happens if someone burns the place down.
Part of this connection allows you to place gutter magick effects on yourself without a proper ritual, you can gain the same results by making changes to your home. Slap on a coat of fresh paint and gain a sticky +20% bonus to acing that job interview or making a good first impression with the in-laws. Fastidious upkeep and renovations are a good way to keep the benefits rolling in. Others can do this to you too if they know about it.
You’re also housebound. Make a Fitness roll with a cumulative -10% shift for every day that you don’t spend at least 12 hours at home or travel more than 33 miles away from it. If you fail, take the sum of the roll as damage which cannot heal until you return and get some rest in your own bed. Interestingly this damage is the only type not reflected in your home’s condition and it’s not like medical science can help you with it either. Recovery is as per normal outpatient convalescence (see page 74 of Book 1: Play).
Lastly, if your old heart is ever removed from the hearth the ritual effect ends and the coroner will have an interesting time explaining the state of your corpse.
The ritual intertwines with the surgery: suspension from an ash tree, the constant burning of silphium incense (difficult to get a hold of since the needed variety is apparently extinct) and lengthy prayers and offerings to Anubis culminating in weighing the heart against the brick.
Effect: You don’t die from having a lump of stone replacing a vital organ. No heartbeat either, but somehow it all runs fine.
You gain a permanent vital connection to your home and it to you. If you get stabbed, a pipe bursts in the laundry. If some kid puts a baseball through a window you pop a blood vessel in your eye. Consequently an identity like Carpenter effectively gains the Medical feature for you (handy since an x-ray or MRI scan will raise a lot of questions) or if you’re willing to get some stitches and rest up you can avoid calling a plumber. You don’t want to see what happens if someone burns the place down.
Part of this connection allows you to place gutter magick effects on yourself without a proper ritual, you can gain the same results by making changes to your home. Slap on a coat of fresh paint and gain a sticky +20% bonus to acing that job interview or making a good first impression with the in-laws. Fastidious upkeep and renovations are a good way to keep the benefits rolling in. Others can do this to you too if they know about it.
You’re also housebound. Make a Fitness roll with a cumulative -10% shift for every day that you don’t spend at least 12 hours at home or travel more than 33 miles away from it. If you fail, take the sum of the roll as damage which cannot heal until you return and get some rest in your own bed. Interestingly this damage is the only type not reflected in your home’s condition and it’s not like medical science can help you with it either. Recovery is as per normal outpatient convalescence (see page 74 of Book 1: Play).
Lastly, if your old heart is ever removed from the hearth the ritual effect ends and the coroner will have an interesting time explaining the state of your corpse.
Thursday 20 June 2019
051 - Naegleria Fowleri
Unnatural Phenomenon: Naegleria Fowleri
The infamous brain-eating amoeba, an evocative and grisly critter that normally feasts on bacteria but has an unfortunate sweet-tooth for human grey matter. Found in warm, poorly or unchlorinated water sources like swimming holes or neti pots it enters the nasal cavity of its victims and - attracted by the chemicals nerve cells use to communicate with each other - climbs into the brain via the olfactory nerve. It’s fortunately rare, less than a thousand cases have been reported globally. Unfortunately it’s also highly lethal with a 97% mortality rate. An average of five days after exposure symptoms appear: headache, fever, nausea, vomiting, stiffness, then become more serious as hallucinations, ataxia and seizures take the stage. Sufferers typically don’t last more than a week or two.
What does this horrifying and utterly mundane condition have to do with the unnatural? In the case that this rare and grim fate befalls an equally rare (and sometimes grim) type of person something unusual happens. Adepts don’t die of it, in a manner of speaking. It’s only happened once and the woman afflicted is locked up in a Lubbock psychiatric hospital for stabbing a bunch of people on account of she couldn't handle the changes, but she's still kind of alive. When N. fowleri chows down on the twisted, charged-addled material of a willworker’s brain the pale waste product left behind is an almost carbon copy of the original grey matter.
It’s not a material copy, a coroner or a surgeon digging around in the brain pan would be left scratching their heads at the smooth, white undifferentiated mass, but it’s functionally close. You can think with it just like you would your old brain. The replacement process isn’t much fun though, in addition to all the symptoms a normal person goes through adepts develop transient behavioural tics since the new wiring doesn’t line up perfectly with the slow erosion of the old brain. Temporary foot fetishes would be common if it happened enough. This all resolves itself after a full conversion with some side effects.
The new material reacts to trauma differently than a normal human brain, it keeps ingrained behaviours but can’t adapt to new ones. This is specific to trauma. You can still form new memories and take an art class, but being shot at by a sniper either will or won’t mentally effect you depending entirely on who you were before you got pod-personed. In game terms your shock gauges are locked in place. You still make stress checks and suffer the immediate effects of failing a roll but you can’t gain or lose notches no matter how many ordeals or therapy sessions you go through. If you’ve got an associated disorder you’re stuck with that as well.
Full conversions can’t do magick either. Sorry, the you that is you now isn’t really human anymore. That may or may not bother you until you die depending on what your self gauge was looking like beforehand. Given an adept’s obsession, finding themselves cut off from their one-and-only goes down poorly and won’t stop going down poorly because they can’t get used to it. There is a way that skirts this problem, notice how I said full conversions?
Theoretically if an adept was infected with N. fowleri and were to somehow halt the process part way through they could get a measure of both worlds. For every 20% of your grey matter replaced one random gauge is frozen forever, disorders and all. You also get a cumulative -20% shift to all magick, be it gutter magick, avatar powers or adept reality-bending. If it isn’t mundane, you get penalized. Plus you’re stuck with whatever transient tic the sloppy interface between old and new brain puts on you. There are hospital treatments that could manage something like this, but you’d draw a ton of heat as a medical marvel to emerge seemingly unscathed.
The infamous brain-eating amoeba, an evocative and grisly critter that normally feasts on bacteria but has an unfortunate sweet-tooth for human grey matter. Found in warm, poorly or unchlorinated water sources like swimming holes or neti pots it enters the nasal cavity of its victims and - attracted by the chemicals nerve cells use to communicate with each other - climbs into the brain via the olfactory nerve. It’s fortunately rare, less than a thousand cases have been reported globally. Unfortunately it’s also highly lethal with a 97% mortality rate. An average of five days after exposure symptoms appear: headache, fever, nausea, vomiting, stiffness, then become more serious as hallucinations, ataxia and seizures take the stage. Sufferers typically don’t last more than a week or two.
What does this horrifying and utterly mundane condition have to do with the unnatural? In the case that this rare and grim fate befalls an equally rare (and sometimes grim) type of person something unusual happens. Adepts don’t die of it, in a manner of speaking. It’s only happened once and the woman afflicted is locked up in a Lubbock psychiatric hospital for stabbing a bunch of people on account of she couldn't handle the changes, but she's still kind of alive. When N. fowleri chows down on the twisted, charged-addled material of a willworker’s brain the pale waste product left behind is an almost carbon copy of the original grey matter.
It’s not a material copy, a coroner or a surgeon digging around in the brain pan would be left scratching their heads at the smooth, white undifferentiated mass, but it’s functionally close. You can think with it just like you would your old brain. The replacement process isn’t much fun though, in addition to all the symptoms a normal person goes through adepts develop transient behavioural tics since the new wiring doesn’t line up perfectly with the slow erosion of the old brain. Temporary foot fetishes would be common if it happened enough. This all resolves itself after a full conversion with some side effects.
The new material reacts to trauma differently than a normal human brain, it keeps ingrained behaviours but can’t adapt to new ones. This is specific to trauma. You can still form new memories and take an art class, but being shot at by a sniper either will or won’t mentally effect you depending entirely on who you were before you got pod-personed. In game terms your shock gauges are locked in place. You still make stress checks and suffer the immediate effects of failing a roll but you can’t gain or lose notches no matter how many ordeals or therapy sessions you go through. If you’ve got an associated disorder you’re stuck with that as well.
Full conversions can’t do magick either. Sorry, the you that is you now isn’t really human anymore. That may or may not bother you until you die depending on what your self gauge was looking like beforehand. Given an adept’s obsession, finding themselves cut off from their one-and-only goes down poorly and won’t stop going down poorly because they can’t get used to it. There is a way that skirts this problem, notice how I said full conversions?
Theoretically if an adept was infected with N. fowleri and were to somehow halt the process part way through they could get a measure of both worlds. For every 20% of your grey matter replaced one random gauge is frozen forever, disorders and all. You also get a cumulative -20% shift to all magick, be it gutter magick, avatar powers or adept reality-bending. If it isn’t mundane, you get penalized. Plus you’re stuck with whatever transient tic the sloppy interface between old and new brain puts on you. There are hospital treatments that could manage something like this, but you’d draw a ton of heat as a medical marvel to emerge seemingly unscathed.
Wednesday 19 June 2019
050 - Angela Demoss, Pragmatic Shaman
GMC: Angela Demoss, Pragmatic Shaman
Magick isn’t worth it. That’s the big reveal, sorry. Anything worthwhile you can do with it is better done through mundane means and the things you can’t do through mundane means aren’t worth the sacrifice. It’s a narcotic, it’ll feel wonderful and secret and powerful and suck you into a spiral of addiction and self-destruction if you don’t turn away. It’s a curse.
People still do it, Angela Demoss is one of them as much as she laments the fact. She serves her local community from her musty walk-up apartment in much the same way as village witches, tribal shamans and wise men have done for centuries. A disenfranchised group left behind in a society where it isn’t profitable enough to cater to them still needs medicine, hope and opportunity. If she doesn’t do her magick they’ll try to reach for it themselves, or worse, do without. To her it’s better that she occupy that space and make the sacrifice for all of them.
The experience didn’t break her but it did make her weary. Rather than completely retreat she now shoulders the burden of magick for as many of the underprivileged as possible. Where possible she’ll dress mundane solutions up as magick, it’s less complicated and the placebo effect of some herbs and ground up viagra is a better cure for marital difficulties than any fertility charm she knows. When she doesn’t have a choice she’ll pull out the big guns: a pair of ex-Sleepers who took her for a charlatan are locked in perpetual nightmares for trying to turn her corner of the city into their personal fiefdom. A detente with the rest has earned her enough respect from the underground that now she can pull the same wizard-of-oz shtick on the clued-in folks too.
Getting on in years Angela has taken on an apprentice, a teenager who came to her begging for a solution to the violence at home. She sees the same hungry desire to change the world of her youth in her protege and to her student’s chagrin her lessons are often cautionary tales, hard work and study, like a magickal Mr. Miyagi. Moretails - her rat-king spirit guide - pshaws this approach as unnecessary hardship. More than one late-night debate between them has centred on the trope of mastery coming full circle and her response that she might just as well take its disdain as an indication she is on the right path. To its credit Moretails hasn’t yet brought up that the looped garoo is still out there, that the wards she wove to lock it away won’t last forever. That if she doesn’t face her past then who will?
STATS
Personality: Enigmatic but practical. Angela will put on the act and woo the rubes because half of her magick is selling people on her reputation to peddle mundane solutions as magickal. The other half is knowing when to actually use her power to push back the darkness.
Rage: Magickal abuse. It’s all the more insidious because ordinary people can’t see or do anything about it.
Noble: Equality through unequal means. Putting her thumb on the scale in favour of people at a disadvantage is Angela’s bread and butter.
Fear: Calling up something she cannot put down (Unnatural).
Obsession: Magick is a horses ass, people could get what they want without the danger if they weren’t so fixated on the quick-fix.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Wearily Insightful 50% (Substitutes for Notice, Substitutes for Knowledge, Therapeutic.)
Practical Witch 55%* (Substitutes for Lie, Medical, Coerces Unnatural.)
Avatar: The Shaman 80% (Avatar, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
People still do it, Angela Demoss is one of them as much as she laments the fact. She serves her local community from her musty walk-up apartment in much the same way as village witches, tribal shamans and wise men have done for centuries. A disenfranchised group left behind in a society where it isn’t profitable enough to cater to them still needs medicine, hope and opportunity. If she doesn’t do her magick they’ll try to reach for it themselves, or worse, do without. To her it’s better that she occupy that space and make the sacrifice for all of them.
When she started on her path 40 years ago it was an entirely different story. Angela was headstrong and wilful, diving into a secret world that would grant her knowledge and mastery over the universe. She and her friends were going to change the world, one spell at a time. She couldn’t have been more wrong. It took two of them getting killed by the third - possessed by a thing calling itself “the looped garoo” - in the bowels of a shattered shopping mall to prove it to her and the sleepless nights won’t let her forget it.
The experience didn’t break her but it did make her weary. Rather than completely retreat she now shoulders the burden of magick for as many of the underprivileged as possible. Where possible she’ll dress mundane solutions up as magick, it’s less complicated and the placebo effect of some herbs and ground up viagra is a better cure for marital difficulties than any fertility charm she knows. When she doesn’t have a choice she’ll pull out the big guns: a pair of ex-Sleepers who took her for a charlatan are locked in perpetual nightmares for trying to turn her corner of the city into their personal fiefdom. A detente with the rest has earned her enough respect from the underground that now she can pull the same wizard-of-oz shtick on the clued-in folks too.
Getting on in years Angela has taken on an apprentice, a teenager who came to her begging for a solution to the violence at home. She sees the same hungry desire to change the world of her youth in her protege and to her student’s chagrin her lessons are often cautionary tales, hard work and study, like a magickal Mr. Miyagi. Moretails - her rat-king spirit guide - pshaws this approach as unnecessary hardship. More than one late-night debate between them has centred on the trope of mastery coming full circle and her response that she might just as well take its disdain as an indication she is on the right path. To its credit Moretails hasn’t yet brought up that the looped garoo is still out there, that the wards she wove to lock it away won’t last forever. That if she doesn’t face her past then who will?
STATS
Personality: Enigmatic but practical. Angela will put on the act and woo the rubes because half of her magick is selling people on her reputation to peddle mundane solutions as magickal. The other half is knowing when to actually use her power to push back the darkness.
Rage: Magickal abuse. It’s all the more insidious because ordinary people can’t see or do anything about it.
Noble: Equality through unequal means. Putting her thumb on the scale in favour of people at a disadvantage is Angela’s bread and butter.
Fear: Calling up something she cannot put down (Unnatural).
Obsession: Magick is a horses ass, people could get what they want without the danger if they weren’t so fixated on the quick-fix.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Wearily Insightful 50% (Substitutes for Notice, Substitutes for Knowledge, Therapeutic.)
Practical Witch 55%* (Substitutes for Lie, Medical, Coerces Unnatural.)
Avatar: The Shaman 80% (Avatar, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Notches
|
Violence
|
Unnatural
|
Helplessness
|
Isolation
|
Self
|
Hardened
|
3
|
6
|
2
|
1
|
4
|
Failed
|
0
|
1
|
2
|
1
|
1
|
Tuesday 18 June 2019
049 - The Truck Stop
Paragon Place: The Truck Stop
Everybody who’s made their life on the highways winds up there eventually. It’s the kind of middle-of-nowhere, beacon of respite that truckers, roadtrippers and holidaymakers all come to associate with the open road and long journeys. It’s the modern oasis, making impossible journeys into something probable. That place of safety and comfort far from the fruits of civilization. And yet, unlike civilization no one settles there. It’s a place with people, but not for people. Somewhere to be visited, but not a destination.
Taboo: Nobody lives at the truck stop (I mean, I guess you could but that’s not what it’s for). Staying longer than overnight is taboo. So is making it a destination, always be passing through on your way to someplace else. Employees occupy a weird liminal space, they’re excluded from a lot of the benefits even as caretakers.
Associated Avatars: The Masterless Man, the Outsider, the Salesman, the Solid Citizen.
Resonant Avatars: The Charioteer, the Explorer, the Guide, the Loyal Labourer, the Pilgrim, the Unsung Champion.
Symbols: The squeegee for wiping windshields (and you know some prick has wrecked one by wiping down their entire filthy vehicle), air fresheners and the stink of spilled gas and oil, food that’s either been sitting under a heat lamp all day or really good.
Adjuncts
1%-50%: Need to plot out the next leg of your journey? Gain a hunch roll to figure out where you’re going while drawing on a road atlas with a marker or fiddling with google maps in between scarfing down questionable sandwiches. Alternatively use it to pick up information about where you’re going by eavesdropping on conversations, noticing discarded tourist brochures or hearing voices from that inexplicable concrete dinosaur sculpture by the roadside.
51%-70%: Gain your choice of the Medical feature for performing first aid or the ability to flip-flop a roll to make temporary repairs to a vehicle at the truck stop. Temporary being the operative word, any benefits only last until you get to where you’re going. Go to the friggin’ hospital for your snakebite already.
71%-90%: The truck stop is a place to rest, wool-gather and marshal your resources before plowing on. It’s a bulwark against the long distances people have to travel and comforts them like a watering hole in the desert.
91%+: Everyone’s passing through on their way to something. If you’re stuck or lost you can stick your wagon wheels into these universal ruts and let the cosmos take you where you need to go. Go through the motions of purposeful travel: gas up, eat, play at having a destination and then drive on out with a careless, automatic-writing sort of vibe. If you have an objective it’ll put your on a synchronous path to whatever the GM thinks is the most convenient petty milestone. You just won’t know it until you get there.
99%: Whatever their differences all truck stops look the same in certain ways: that flickering fluorescent tube in the overhead lights outside, the one wrecked bathroom stall that you don’t want to know what happened to, the food, the graffiti, the people. Part of this is a frequency illusion, you see and remember the things that you expect. Part of it is that they’re all the same place. Make a roll, cutting the length of your journey by the resulting percentage. It only happens when you’re not paying attention, go into the bathroom or sleep in your cab and come out or wake up in a different stop. It’ll be obvious later, like when you drive someplace and suddenly realize you have no memory of how you did it.
Everybody who’s made their life on the highways winds up there eventually. It’s the kind of middle-of-nowhere, beacon of respite that truckers, roadtrippers and holidaymakers all come to associate with the open road and long journeys. It’s the modern oasis, making impossible journeys into something probable. That place of safety and comfort far from the fruits of civilization. And yet, unlike civilization no one settles there. It’s a place with people, but not for people. Somewhere to be visited, but not a destination.
Taboo: Nobody lives at the truck stop (I mean, I guess you could but that’s not what it’s for). Staying longer than overnight is taboo. So is making it a destination, always be passing through on your way to someplace else. Employees occupy a weird liminal space, they’re excluded from a lot of the benefits even as caretakers.
Associated Avatars: The Masterless Man, the Outsider, the Salesman, the Solid Citizen.
Resonant Avatars: The Charioteer, the Explorer, the Guide, the Loyal Labourer, the Pilgrim, the Unsung Champion.
Symbols: The squeegee for wiping windshields (and you know some prick has wrecked one by wiping down their entire filthy vehicle), air fresheners and the stink of spilled gas and oil, food that’s either been sitting under a heat lamp all day or really good.
Adjuncts
1%-50%: Need to plot out the next leg of your journey? Gain a hunch roll to figure out where you’re going while drawing on a road atlas with a marker or fiddling with google maps in between scarfing down questionable sandwiches. Alternatively use it to pick up information about where you’re going by eavesdropping on conversations, noticing discarded tourist brochures or hearing voices from that inexplicable concrete dinosaur sculpture by the roadside.
51%-70%: Gain your choice of the Medical feature for performing first aid or the ability to flip-flop a roll to make temporary repairs to a vehicle at the truck stop. Temporary being the operative word, any benefits only last until you get to where you’re going. Go to the friggin’ hospital for your snakebite already.
71%-90%: The truck stop is a place to rest, wool-gather and marshal your resources before plowing on. It’s a bulwark against the long distances people have to travel and comforts them like a watering hole in the desert.
- Better: Truck stops offer more facilities and travel-oriented products to smooth out the stresses of the road than ever these days. By taking advantage of them gain a hunch roll for your next stress check, if it winds up passing you can use it while you’re still travelling. Otherwise disregard it and roll normally.
- Faster: Just a little shut-eye and then back on the road. A 15-minute kip counts as a full night’s sleep, once per journey. Pushing the envelope again unravels the effect without you realizing it, as many have fatally learned.
- Cheaper: On your last legs, broke and your vehicle won’t run? This one’s good for one freebie that will get you out of here but only if you’re truly desperate, there’s no guarantee it’ll get you where you’re going but finding a discarded half-full fuel can in the bushes is better than a kick in the teeth.
99%: Whatever their differences all truck stops look the same in certain ways: that flickering fluorescent tube in the overhead lights outside, the one wrecked bathroom stall that you don’t want to know what happened to, the food, the graffiti, the people. Part of this is a frequency illusion, you see and remember the things that you expect. Part of it is that they’re all the same place. Make a roll, cutting the length of your journey by the resulting percentage. It only happens when you’re not paying attention, go into the bathroom or sleep in your cab and come out or wake up in a different stop. It’ll be obvious later, like when you drive someplace and suddenly realize you have no memory of how you did it.
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