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.
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