Unnatural Entity: Potemkin
Keeping up appearances is hardly a modern phenomenon, however social media and a shrinking global village exacerbates perception and drives neurosis in a way almost nobody would call healthy or precedented. Even as it is openly decried, curation of a public image has become the expectation in order to get ahead socially and professionally. At least that’s the usual explanation given for the rise in demons and demon-like entities obsessed with personal vanity.
Without access to their old lives and bodies most of them deteriorate quickly, unable to fulfil an obsession whose object is dead and buried. There are exceptions: those with access to magick and abilities that allow them to mimic their old selves or those famous enough to spawn cults of imitators (Elvis would be a good example, but no, he’s dead and gone). For the rest the unnaturally refined craving for the spotlight and validation turns in on itself and recursively twists into a bitter seed that cannot brook any but the brightest and most spotless of images.
Possession by a potemkin is more like having an astral parasite attached to you than a demon. To a certain extent they can be symbiotic by providing you with an illusionary social mien that projects success and desirability. Make an ass of yourself during a meeting? Nobody else sees that, the potemkin covers up your mistake with different words and no one hears you stealing Karen’s idea. You can’t negotiate with it (they don’t talk to their hosts, they don't talk at all except for overriding whatever boneheaded crap you might say or type) but it will do its best to steer your public image towards adulation.
Before you go rushing out to nab one, there is a darker aspect to the relationship that isn’t immediately apparent. Potemkin’s don’t actually care about their hosts. If you slip up and really need aid from someone then tough luck. No one will hear your cries for help behind the illusion. Rather than letting you tarnish their perfection a potemkin would rather its host suffer at the bottom of a gilded cage, even as people love them. Or say they do. So-and-so is probably fine, they're always sooo perfect.
Potemkin, Stepford Masking
Wound Threshold: Same value as their Everything’s Great/Fine identities. Potemkins are immaterial like regular demons and revenants, so you’ll need specific means to deal with them. Alternatively, some of the means for detaching or dealing with astral parasites work on potemkins (not all of them, have fun finding out).
Everything’s Great 20-80%: Substitutes for Connect, Substitutes for Status, Substitutes for Lie. Whenever someone hosting a potemkin fails a roll covered by this identity the potemkin may immediately roll to override the failure and wallpaper over the gaffe. What people see won’t necessarily be what was meant, especially if it would tarnish your image, but it’ll be better than a straight failure. Early in the relationship a potemkin’s Everything’s Great identity starts off towards the low-end (say 20-40%) but as they settle in it grows. 1d10% per week of heavy lifting is fairly standard.
Everything’s Fine 20-80%: This ability conceals anything that might be wrong with a person the potemkin is attached to. People won’t notice if you need medical attention, sobbing to your therapist about how your husband beats you will come across as a cheery facade of good mental health, unemployment and homelessness will be concealed behind a false veneer of respectability. Cue the Isolation, Unnatural and Helplessness checks (at least no one will (probably) see if you fail). A potemkin’s Everything’s Fine identity is equal to their Everything’s Great identity.
Wednesday 31 July 2019
Tuesday 30 July 2019
091 - Echoing Tarantism
Unnatural Phenomenon: Echoing Tarantism
Persistent belief spun into tradition fossilizes as the bedrock on which we build our societies. Even as it is left behind it echoes in the wake of new culture. Below the surface of our lives the invisible ripples of those who come before us sit frozen, waiting to be called up.
Tarantism is a type of mass hysteria localised in southern Italy in the 16th century, the idea that death from spider bite could only be avoided by frantic dancing. It is not the only kind of dancing mania, but it’s prevalence became steeped into local culture and eventually forgotten but persisted in the form of tarantella music. Other buried cultural detritus persists: the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty” hides its origin as the story of a canon defending a town before being lost in a swamp in a story about an egg-king as do many nursery rhymes of the period. Contrary to popular belief “Ring Around the Rosie” is not about the plague but has its roots in earlier pagan traditions, and yet...
These things act as rich veins in the firmament of the collective unconsciousness, hidden beneath the sod laid down in our daily lives and giving shape to what comes after. During periods of upheaval errant (or purposeful) magickal discharge can bring them to the surface. Modern day witch-hunts after political and social unrest are one potential example, the evil ultimately the responsibility of its perpetrators but spurred by careless release of magickal energies. Anti-vaxxing could be another example, the impulse of ancient mistrust lodging itself in a vulnerable mind and resolving as a modern-day superstition. It's more likely that both are tragically mundane in origin but they show what is possible. Negative examples of this phenomenon are far more common than the positive or at least manage to propagate more easily, which probably says something very unfortunate about humanity as a whole.
In practice this effect is a minor compulsion lensed through long lost cultural baggage which manifests as a rank 5 stress check on a relevant meter to push away the intrusive thoughts. People with a stronger and less in-tune sense of identity are less vulnerable: reduce the rank of the check by 1 for those without any failed Self notches and by a further 1 for each relevant passion or obsession that is contrary to the impulse. Additional protection subject to being culturally divorced from the source is up to GM discretion. Typically it scatters randomly among the local population, ricocheting between up to 1d10 individuals before it peters out or until someone fails their check or gives in. Any persistent behaviour after the initial impulse has nothing to do with the phenomenon, it’s just people rationalizing their psychological inertia.
Some cabals will try to take advantage of this effect by deliberately channelling their energies towards causing a cultural landslide to expose what’s underneath, this can be hazardous for them since the techniques usually require you to metaphorically stand directly in the danger zone. It also requires either fortuitous history or the ability to fake it. Deliberately “salting the mine” by spreading urban myths about the antiquity isn’t just a way to give whatever you’re selling a pedigree, false beliefs about the past can be just as virulent as real history.
Persistent belief spun into tradition fossilizes as the bedrock on which we build our societies. Even as it is left behind it echoes in the wake of new culture. Below the surface of our lives the invisible ripples of those who come before us sit frozen, waiting to be called up.
Tarantism is a type of mass hysteria localised in southern Italy in the 16th century, the idea that death from spider bite could only be avoided by frantic dancing. It is not the only kind of dancing mania, but it’s prevalence became steeped into local culture and eventually forgotten but persisted in the form of tarantella music. Other buried cultural detritus persists: the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty” hides its origin as the story of a canon defending a town before being lost in a swamp in a story about an egg-king as do many nursery rhymes of the period. Contrary to popular belief “Ring Around the Rosie” is not about the plague but has its roots in earlier pagan traditions, and yet...
These things act as rich veins in the firmament of the collective unconsciousness, hidden beneath the sod laid down in our daily lives and giving shape to what comes after. During periods of upheaval errant (or purposeful) magickal discharge can bring them to the surface. Modern day witch-hunts after political and social unrest are one potential example, the evil ultimately the responsibility of its perpetrators but spurred by careless release of magickal energies. Anti-vaxxing could be another example, the impulse of ancient mistrust lodging itself in a vulnerable mind and resolving as a modern-day superstition. It's more likely that both are tragically mundane in origin but they show what is possible. Negative examples of this phenomenon are far more common than the positive or at least manage to propagate more easily, which probably says something very unfortunate about humanity as a whole.
In practice this effect is a minor compulsion lensed through long lost cultural baggage which manifests as a rank 5 stress check on a relevant meter to push away the intrusive thoughts. People with a stronger and less in-tune sense of identity are less vulnerable: reduce the rank of the check by 1 for those without any failed Self notches and by a further 1 for each relevant passion or obsession that is contrary to the impulse. Additional protection subject to being culturally divorced from the source is up to GM discretion. Typically it scatters randomly among the local population, ricocheting between up to 1d10 individuals before it peters out or until someone fails their check or gives in. Any persistent behaviour after the initial impulse has nothing to do with the phenomenon, it’s just people rationalizing their psychological inertia.
Some cabals will try to take advantage of this effect by deliberately channelling their energies towards causing a cultural landslide to expose what’s underneath, this can be hazardous for them since the techniques usually require you to metaphorically stand directly in the danger zone. It also requires either fortuitous history or the ability to fake it. Deliberately “salting the mine” by spreading urban myths about the antiquity isn’t just a way to give whatever you’re selling a pedigree, false beliefs about the past can be just as virulent as real history.
Monday 29 July 2019
090 - Jeffrey Go, Magickally-Inspired Writer & Umwelt Scrying
GMC: Jeffrey Go, Magickally-Inspired Writer
Jeffrey is great at plots and themes and incredible details, good tools for an aspiring writer, but he sucks at writing characters. They function as plot devices and tools which are completely subservient to the other facets of what he tries to write. This would be an excusable flaw if he weren’t so hellbent on writing the type of stories that require it.
Profoundly self-centred, Jeff’s deficiency springs from a concrete inability to see things from other people’s perspectives. He’s not a bad person per se, he minds his manners and has learned to be consciously mindful of people most of the time. However he can often be thoughtlessly blunt and selfish as a result. The other students in his MFA writing class find him exasperating or amusing.
The worst part for him is that he can see the blindspot in his finished work. Comparing it to that of others he can see the areas that he lacks in, but how to solve it in process and bridge the persistent cognitive gap was always an exercise in frustration. Until recently.
Jeffrey is an exhaustive researcher when it comes to his work, playing his strengths. Trawling libraries and the recesses of the internet at all hours is his way of compensating for a predictable lack of social contact and his insecurities about his work. It was through this that he discovered the art of umwelt scrying, described in a pamphlet wedged between a book on goetic demons and issues of defunct magazine The Amateur Astronomer.
Part ritual, part cold reading, part exercised psychic ability, umwelt scrying is a sledgehammer solution to Jeff’s problem. Give him a photograph of someone, some hashish (not strictly necessary, but he likes it), an hour of contemplation and he can tell you all about the cornerstones that make up that person’s psyche. It’s a crude and roughshod way to understand a person but it’s exactly what he needed. His writing is vastly improved as a result.
This would be the end of it if he weren’t in the habit of basing his characters on people he regularly sees. Having accidentally targeted a TNI goon who makes regular visits to the same coffee shop, Jeffrey has learned things he doesn’t want to know but can’t shy away from. He intends to follow her and find out more about the horrible, violent impulses he felt the shape of next time he sees her there. It won’t end well.
STATS
Personality: Naive and wooden, but direct and well-spoken. Jeffrey doesn’t lack self-confidence despite the fact that most people find him off-putting but privately resents his own flaws.
Rage: Indefatigable limitations.
Noble: Art that does new things. Jeffrey wants to use his work to explore and share untouched ideas.
Fear: Being labelled as different (Isolation).
Obsession: Become a widely recognised fiction writer and use it to inspire and share ideas with others.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Aspiring Writer 60%* (Substitutes for Knowledge, Evaluates Self, Protects Helplessness.)
Umwelt Scrying 60% (Specific Information - Passions and Obsessions, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick. See below for more details.)
Shock Gauges
Supernatural Identity: Umwelt Scrying
Contemplating someone’s image for about an hour can tell you things their closest friends and family might not know about them. It can be done in person rather than with a photo or video, but usually people get creeped out by extended scrutiny. A successful roll gives your choice of one of their passions or obsession, a matched success gives their obsession and one passion and a crit gives all the sordid details of their drives.
Failure provides no information or penalties but a matched failure or fumble scrambles your sense of self. The perception of these cornerstones risks eclipsing your own. Make a Self check with a rank equal to the tens place of the failed check, on a failure the breakdown manifests as an overwhelming impulse to act on one of the target’s passions or obsession (GM’s choice).
Jeffrey is great at plots and themes and incredible details, good tools for an aspiring writer, but he sucks at writing characters. They function as plot devices and tools which are completely subservient to the other facets of what he tries to write. This would be an excusable flaw if he weren’t so hellbent on writing the type of stories that require it.
Profoundly self-centred, Jeff’s deficiency springs from a concrete inability to see things from other people’s perspectives. He’s not a bad person per se, he minds his manners and has learned to be consciously mindful of people most of the time. However he can often be thoughtlessly blunt and selfish as a result. The other students in his MFA writing class find him exasperating or amusing.
The worst part for him is that he can see the blindspot in his finished work. Comparing it to that of others he can see the areas that he lacks in, but how to solve it in process and bridge the persistent cognitive gap was always an exercise in frustration. Until recently.
Jeffrey is an exhaustive researcher when it comes to his work, playing his strengths. Trawling libraries and the recesses of the internet at all hours is his way of compensating for a predictable lack of social contact and his insecurities about his work. It was through this that he discovered the art of umwelt scrying, described in a pamphlet wedged between a book on goetic demons and issues of defunct magazine The Amateur Astronomer.
Part ritual, part cold reading, part exercised psychic ability, umwelt scrying is a sledgehammer solution to Jeff’s problem. Give him a photograph of someone, some hashish (not strictly necessary, but he likes it), an hour of contemplation and he can tell you all about the cornerstones that make up that person’s psyche. It’s a crude and roughshod way to understand a person but it’s exactly what he needed. His writing is vastly improved as a result.
This would be the end of it if he weren’t in the habit of basing his characters on people he regularly sees. Having accidentally targeted a TNI goon who makes regular visits to the same coffee shop, Jeffrey has learned things he doesn’t want to know but can’t shy away from. He intends to follow her and find out more about the horrible, violent impulses he felt the shape of next time he sees her there. It won’t end well.
STATS
Personality: Naive and wooden, but direct and well-spoken. Jeffrey doesn’t lack self-confidence despite the fact that most people find him off-putting but privately resents his own flaws.
Rage: Indefatigable limitations.
Noble: Art that does new things. Jeffrey wants to use his work to explore and share untouched ideas.
Fear: Being labelled as different (Isolation).
Obsession: Become a widely recognised fiction writer and use it to inspire and share ideas with others.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Aspiring Writer 60%* (Substitutes for Knowledge, Evaluates Self, Protects Helplessness.)
Umwelt Scrying 60% (Specific Information - Passions and Obsessions, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick. See below for more details.)
Shock Gauges
Notches
|
Violence
|
Unnatural
|
Helplessness
|
Isolation
|
Self
|
Hardened
|
1
|
3
|
2
|
4
|
5
|
Failed
|
0
|
1
|
0
|
0
|
2
|
Supernatural Identity: Umwelt Scrying
Contemplating someone’s image for about an hour can tell you things their closest friends and family might not know about them. It can be done in person rather than with a photo or video, but usually people get creeped out by extended scrutiny. A successful roll gives your choice of one of their passions or obsession, a matched success gives their obsession and one passion and a crit gives all the sordid details of their drives.
Failure provides no information or penalties but a matched failure or fumble scrambles your sense of self. The perception of these cornerstones risks eclipsing your own. Make a Self check with a rank equal to the tens place of the failed check, on a failure the breakdown manifests as an overwhelming impulse to act on one of the target’s passions or obsession (GM’s choice).
Sunday 28 July 2019
089 - Iatrogenic Gremlin
Unnatural Entity: Iatrogenic Gremlin
Healthcare costs rampantly inflated by a runaway insurance system, doctors influenced in their choice of prescription by “rebates” from the manufacturers and the additional expenses of unnecessary tests to be heaped onto the insurer, patients transferred or held on the basis of financial cost or benefit rather than medical need. Surrendering excess was once a form of securing future safety by entreating the protection and blessings of gods and spirits. Now done without that direction, medical sacrifice flows out of those universal furrows into the closest approximate shapes dreamed of by the people around them.
Created by perverse excess of healthcare working against its own purposes, iatrogenic gremlins are colony organisms that try to encourage the same foul maladaptation that spawned them. Requiring a significant wellspring of anguish to spawn they usually need the patient density of a poorly-run hospital to spring up, but there’s no limit to how far they can spread as long as they have something to eat. They live to consume the resulting pain caused by the negligent or financial hardship of misapplied medicine.
Iatrogenic gremlins are sneaky creatures. They can’t move or interact with the world when someone is looking at them (under scrutiny they look like giant dust bunnies or puddles of sludge unless they’ve just come out of someone or been injured) but wreak havoc when no one is watching. They meddle with charts, make phone calls pretending to be medical staff and patients and sabotage medication and instruments. They aren’t terribly bright so their mischief isn’t sophisticated, in many cases it has the opposite of the desired effect by driving patients away.
Working or being treated in a facility where one or more is active is disgusting, they leave slimy, little handprints (with four fingers) everywhere they go. With a tendency to move around via ventilation systems, most people think vermin problem before gribbly. People paying closer attention hear the phlegmy chuckling and the whispered schemes and threats echoing through the ducts. As entities created by inadvertent sacrifice you can bargain with the gremlins if you know how, give them opportunities to sicken new people and infest new places and they'll tell you all sorts of things. Mostly secrets about people’s medical conditions and finances, but that’s pretty handy among the folks gross enough to truck with them.
Iatrogenic Gremlin, Imp of the Perverse Incentive
Wound Threshold: Gremlins gain wound threshold based on the damage of medical negligence incentivised by money done to patients on a 1-to-1 basis. They start out at 10 but there’s no limit to how big they can get. More often they’re capped by a tendency to bud new gremlins. Damage one without destroying it and the remaining wound threshold splits evenly between two new, smaller gremlins and skitters away. Unfed, they lose 1d10 points per week.
Mischievous 50%: Substitutes for Secrecy, Substitutes for Lie, Substitutes for Notice.
Chronic 10-100%: Sometimes a gremlin will adopt a person and go home with them by crawling down their throat while they’re asleep. This identity is equal to the gremlin’s wound threshold, it can be rolled once per week or be divided up into chunks totalling its value for the same period. While inside their host they can flare up in inexplicable ways, a successful opposed roll against Fitness or Status causes temporary health or money troubles. Resulting damage, if any, adds to the gremlin’s wound threshold. If their wound threshold ends up exceeding the host’s, it purges itself of them violently and they squelch for the nearest hole or vent they can squeeze through. They look like a bunch of transparent amoeba or heavily magnified skin cells piled together when they do this.
Healthcare costs rampantly inflated by a runaway insurance system, doctors influenced in their choice of prescription by “rebates” from the manufacturers and the additional expenses of unnecessary tests to be heaped onto the insurer, patients transferred or held on the basis of financial cost or benefit rather than medical need. Surrendering excess was once a form of securing future safety by entreating the protection and blessings of gods and spirits. Now done without that direction, medical sacrifice flows out of those universal furrows into the closest approximate shapes dreamed of by the people around them.
Created by perverse excess of healthcare working against its own purposes, iatrogenic gremlins are colony organisms that try to encourage the same foul maladaptation that spawned them. Requiring a significant wellspring of anguish to spawn they usually need the patient density of a poorly-run hospital to spring up, but there’s no limit to how far they can spread as long as they have something to eat. They live to consume the resulting pain caused by the negligent or financial hardship of misapplied medicine.
Iatrogenic gremlins are sneaky creatures. They can’t move or interact with the world when someone is looking at them (under scrutiny they look like giant dust bunnies or puddles of sludge unless they’ve just come out of someone or been injured) but wreak havoc when no one is watching. They meddle with charts, make phone calls pretending to be medical staff and patients and sabotage medication and instruments. They aren’t terribly bright so their mischief isn’t sophisticated, in many cases it has the opposite of the desired effect by driving patients away.
Working or being treated in a facility where one or more is active is disgusting, they leave slimy, little handprints (with four fingers) everywhere they go. With a tendency to move around via ventilation systems, most people think vermin problem before gribbly. People paying closer attention hear the phlegmy chuckling and the whispered schemes and threats echoing through the ducts. As entities created by inadvertent sacrifice you can bargain with the gremlins if you know how, give them opportunities to sicken new people and infest new places and they'll tell you all sorts of things. Mostly secrets about people’s medical conditions and finances, but that’s pretty handy among the folks gross enough to truck with them.
Iatrogenic Gremlin, Imp of the Perverse Incentive
Wound Threshold: Gremlins gain wound threshold based on the damage of medical negligence incentivised by money done to patients on a 1-to-1 basis. They start out at 10 but there’s no limit to how big they can get. More often they’re capped by a tendency to bud new gremlins. Damage one without destroying it and the remaining wound threshold splits evenly between two new, smaller gremlins and skitters away. Unfed, they lose 1d10 points per week.
Mischievous 50%: Substitutes for Secrecy, Substitutes for Lie, Substitutes for Notice.
Chronic 10-100%: Sometimes a gremlin will adopt a person and go home with them by crawling down their throat while they’re asleep. This identity is equal to the gremlin’s wound threshold, it can be rolled once per week or be divided up into chunks totalling its value for the same period. While inside their host they can flare up in inexplicable ways, a successful opposed roll against Fitness or Status causes temporary health or money troubles. Resulting damage, if any, adds to the gremlin’s wound threshold. If their wound threshold ends up exceeding the host’s, it purges itself of them violently and they squelch for the nearest hole or vent they can squeeze through. They look like a bunch of transparent amoeba or heavily magnified skin cells piled together when they do this.
Saturday 27 July 2019
088 - Survivors of Nobody
Cabal: Survivors of Nobody
In a city with limited municipal budgets and endemic violent crime (it’s actually low historically, but concentrated in the urban environment) things fall through the cracks. Many violations go unreported because of perceptions that nothing will or can be done to help, exacerbated by low clearance rates and media frenzy. For a group of people who have been subjected to a rash of violence and robberies this has pressed them to find a solution outside of the system. Alienated and terrorised they pull together in their isolation, united by the common thread that keeps them outside the system: none of them can describe their attacker or explain why.
Right now it looks like any support group. Community centre. Folding chairs in a circle. Coffee urn. Although the group is ostensibly open to the public it’s unadvertised, people come by referral. That’s enough to get you access to the outer group, where people share the stories of what they can’t explain. They number about a dozen, give or take depending on the night (there would be more but the experience of being a victim or witness of violent crime leads most to rationalize their lack of recall, only the most egregious examples of memory erasure end up here). Within this exists the cabal, four people intent on doing more than providing support for each other. If they can’t rely on the system for protection, then they’ll have to go beyond it.
Their (local) objective is to discover Nobody’s identity (at 45% right now, there have been some good leads), after that it’s down to their means and consciences.
Rosie Abott, security guard, used to be a cop. It’s not something she advertises, the larger support group have had pretty negative experiences with law enforcement and she uses a fake name anyhow. It makes sense given her history, how she accidentally shot a woman. The way it was handled - excused and downplayed - ate at her as much as the death. The brass and the city wanted it to go away so they jammed her up. To her shame, she capitulated and the family didn’t get justice. It’s a depressingly common outcome. So she quit the job she couldn’t stand anymore and moved away.
Rosie’s experience involved witnessing Nobody savagely beating a man with a pipe at her job, by the time she made it to the bottom of the stairwell Nobody was gone and she was left bewildered at the fact she couldn’t describe them. Hearing other stories it was her who formed the original group but she doesn’t take center stage if she can help it. A nascent and unusual avatar of the masterless man, she eskews the typical violence-as-first-resort of the archetype for a more considered and careful approach to vigilantism.
A heavily-muscled and hard-bitten woman of mediteranean heritage in her early 30s, Rosie cuts an imposing figure. This is at odds with her soft voice and desire to stay out of the spotlight (while paradoxically trying to make sure things steer the way she likes). She’s a reluctant leader who secretly wants to make up for her past by stopping Nobody before someone is killed. The others are getting a bit tired of her sitting half-way in the driver’s seat and it’ll come to a head if one of them tries to challenge her for it.
Lee Meng is here because of his brother. Both of them were international students and now it seems that not only can’t he recall the face of the person who kidnapped Guo from a shopping mall carpark, no one else can remember Guo at all. It’s as though his brother never existed.
Distraught, Lee has latched on to the group like a life raft since they’re the only ones who take him seriously. Highly motivated, he was the first to jump on board with Rosie’s idea that they three (Timothy obnoxiously nosed his way in later) do something more, at odds with his typically reserved and scholarly nature.
Meticulously organised and prone to careful analysis Lee has created the only existing database on Nobody’s activities, trying to find patterns in timing, location and intent. It’s actually thanks to these insights that the cabal have made most of their progress. A tall, skinny Chinese man in his mid 20s, Lee’s now has reason to always look as worried as everyone always said he does. He’s not interested in any sort of vengeance, he just wants his brother back.
Jane T. Waymire is a Sleeper who ended up here by mistake. She was new in town (recent work transfer, she works for a cosmetics distributor as her day-job), called the Hotline and was given the wrong address. It didn’t register right away that she’d come to the wrong place, given the stories people were telling.
She comes across as grounded and coping better than most others (easy to do when the story you’re telling is something you made up to fit in), so people naturally look to her for support. She’s reluctant to stick out but sees herself as custodian of the support group, she thinks it’d make too tempting a target for the occult underground’s predators. Any of them might try to whack a steering wheel on a group of suggestible victims to point them at their personal enemies. To avoid this problem she’s keeping them a secret from the Sleeper community for now.
A short and clean-cut blonde woman in her late 20s, Jane manages to strike a balance between sharply professional and approachably friendly. Few outside of the Sleepers would guess at the collection of firearms and spy gear she keeps in a trunk in her crawlspace or her experience burying something most people would think of as a werebat on vacant land outside of town. She wants to keep it that way. While she’s interested in stopping this “Nobody” she’s more interested in keeping these amateurs out of trouble.
Timothy Cardone is not a mentally well man, some of the others in the cabal - and the broader group - suspect he shouldn’t be here but either lack or have too much compassion to call him on it. It’s not as though they can claim any kind of high ground given their own strange stories. They’re wrong about him anyway.
He was a high-school math teacher, until he had a psychotic breakdown and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. There is nothing unnatural or occult about Tim’s illness, it’s a genetic condition that expressed itself at an inopportune time. He manages it as best he can with medication and metacognitive training and therapy. He isn’t violent or dangerous but it has made him withdrawn. This made him especially vulnerable when Nobody staged a home invasion which culminated with a bound Timothy being quizzed on the theory of de Rahm cohomology - a specialist mathematics field he has no significant knowledge on. He was discovered still tied up several hours later by his girlfriend.
A prematurely grey and slightly overweight caucasian man in his late 30s, Tim’s a bearded, coke-bottle glasses and plaid wearing man who is often mistaken for a hipster. He’s not, he just has little concern for his appearance or dress these days. Right now he’s trying to balance managing his condition with a part-time bookkeeping job and his work with the cabal (which definitely doesn’t help his stability). Frustrated at being marginalised and disempowered by his illness and current circumstances, he’s the most likely to advocate for a violent solution to stopping Nobody (although he has neither the skills or temperament to carry it out personally).
In a city with limited municipal budgets and endemic violent crime (it’s actually low historically, but concentrated in the urban environment) things fall through the cracks. Many violations go unreported because of perceptions that nothing will or can be done to help, exacerbated by low clearance rates and media frenzy. For a group of people who have been subjected to a rash of violence and robberies this has pressed them to find a solution outside of the system. Alienated and terrorised they pull together in their isolation, united by the common thread that keeps them outside the system: none of them can describe their attacker or explain why.
Right now it looks like any support group. Community centre. Folding chairs in a circle. Coffee urn. Although the group is ostensibly open to the public it’s unadvertised, people come by referral. That’s enough to get you access to the outer group, where people share the stories of what they can’t explain. They number about a dozen, give or take depending on the night (there would be more but the experience of being a victim or witness of violent crime leads most to rationalize their lack of recall, only the most egregious examples of memory erasure end up here). Within this exists the cabal, four people intent on doing more than providing support for each other. If they can’t rely on the system for protection, then they’ll have to go beyond it.
Their (local) objective is to discover Nobody’s identity (at 45% right now, there have been some good leads), after that it’s down to their means and consciences.
Rosie Abott, security guard, used to be a cop. It’s not something she advertises, the larger support group have had pretty negative experiences with law enforcement and she uses a fake name anyhow. It makes sense given her history, how she accidentally shot a woman. The way it was handled - excused and downplayed - ate at her as much as the death. The brass and the city wanted it to go away so they jammed her up. To her shame, she capitulated and the family didn’t get justice. It’s a depressingly common outcome. So she quit the job she couldn’t stand anymore and moved away.
Rosie’s experience involved witnessing Nobody savagely beating a man with a pipe at her job, by the time she made it to the bottom of the stairwell Nobody was gone and she was left bewildered at the fact she couldn’t describe them. Hearing other stories it was her who formed the original group but she doesn’t take center stage if she can help it. A nascent and unusual avatar of the masterless man, she eskews the typical violence-as-first-resort of the archetype for a more considered and careful approach to vigilantism.
A heavily-muscled and hard-bitten woman of mediteranean heritage in her early 30s, Rosie cuts an imposing figure. This is at odds with her soft voice and desire to stay out of the spotlight (while paradoxically trying to make sure things steer the way she likes). She’s a reluctant leader who secretly wants to make up for her past by stopping Nobody before someone is killed. The others are getting a bit tired of her sitting half-way in the driver’s seat and it’ll come to a head if one of them tries to challenge her for it.
Lee Meng is here because of his brother. Both of them were international students and now it seems that not only can’t he recall the face of the person who kidnapped Guo from a shopping mall carpark, no one else can remember Guo at all. It’s as though his brother never existed.
Distraught, Lee has latched on to the group like a life raft since they’re the only ones who take him seriously. Highly motivated, he was the first to jump on board with Rosie’s idea that they three (Timothy obnoxiously nosed his way in later) do something more, at odds with his typically reserved and scholarly nature.
Meticulously organised and prone to careful analysis Lee has created the only existing database on Nobody’s activities, trying to find patterns in timing, location and intent. It’s actually thanks to these insights that the cabal have made most of their progress. A tall, skinny Chinese man in his mid 20s, Lee’s now has reason to always look as worried as everyone always said he does. He’s not interested in any sort of vengeance, he just wants his brother back.
Jane T. Waymire is a Sleeper who ended up here by mistake. She was new in town (recent work transfer, she works for a cosmetics distributor as her day-job), called the Hotline and was given the wrong address. It didn’t register right away that she’d come to the wrong place, given the stories people were telling.
She comes across as grounded and coping better than most others (easy to do when the story you’re telling is something you made up to fit in), so people naturally look to her for support. She’s reluctant to stick out but sees herself as custodian of the support group, she thinks it’d make too tempting a target for the occult underground’s predators. Any of them might try to whack a steering wheel on a group of suggestible victims to point them at their personal enemies. To avoid this problem she’s keeping them a secret from the Sleeper community for now.
A short and clean-cut blonde woman in her late 20s, Jane manages to strike a balance between sharply professional and approachably friendly. Few outside of the Sleepers would guess at the collection of firearms and spy gear she keeps in a trunk in her crawlspace or her experience burying something most people would think of as a werebat on vacant land outside of town. She wants to keep it that way. While she’s interested in stopping this “Nobody” she’s more interested in keeping these amateurs out of trouble.
Timothy Cardone is not a mentally well man, some of the others in the cabal - and the broader group - suspect he shouldn’t be here but either lack or have too much compassion to call him on it. It’s not as though they can claim any kind of high ground given their own strange stories. They’re wrong about him anyway.
He was a high-school math teacher, until he had a psychotic breakdown and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. There is nothing unnatural or occult about Tim’s illness, it’s a genetic condition that expressed itself at an inopportune time. He manages it as best he can with medication and metacognitive training and therapy. He isn’t violent or dangerous but it has made him withdrawn. This made him especially vulnerable when Nobody staged a home invasion which culminated with a bound Timothy being quizzed on the theory of de Rahm cohomology - a specialist mathematics field he has no significant knowledge on. He was discovered still tied up several hours later by his girlfriend.
A prematurely grey and slightly overweight caucasian man in his late 30s, Tim’s a bearded, coke-bottle glasses and plaid wearing man who is often mistaken for a hipster. He’s not, he just has little concern for his appearance or dress these days. Right now he’s trying to balance managing his condition with a part-time bookkeeping job and his work with the cabal (which definitely doesn’t help his stability). Frustrated at being marginalised and disempowered by his illness and current circumstances, he’s the most likely to advocate for a violent solution to stopping Nobody (although he has neither the skills or temperament to carry it out personally).
Friday 26 July 2019
087 - The Lights of the City
Artifact: The Lights of the City
Power: Significant.
Description: A wall-spanning, high-resolution panorama photograph of a city skyline, taken in the early evening or dead of night and artfully framed. The streets and buildings twinkle and glow under artificial illumination washing out the constellations above. Light pollution means that celestial bodies are invisible to people to people in urban environments. The auguries and astrology of our forebears hidden not just by time and the march of material empiricism but the construction of our own constellations, closer to home.
At least that’s how the typical wankerish spiel given by people who own it goes. Either they’re so deeply entrenched in its effect that they mistake their servitude for power or they’d like you to be so they can get a free lunch.
Effect: The Lights of the City give clues as to what the future holds by pirating the free will of those who submit to it for the advantage of others. Using the artifact takes at least an hour of careful observation for someone who’s well practised at it, if you’re new you could be there all night. Scour the cityscape for little details, let your mind wander and patterns emerge, they’ll guide you towards a system of interpretation. Generally it takes a successful Secrecy roll to get the hang of it but people with supernatural identities or a pile of Unnatural notches tend to get waved through.
The net result of your divination is something resembling a set of instructions (it could be elaborate and precise or as simple as a place and a time to be there) and a floating hunch roll. The hunch roll gets saved until you choose what to do about the information you’ve received. If you go along with it, the roll gets used to your advantage. Even a fumble, that just means it gets applied to someone opposing you. On the other hand if you ignore or oppose it the result of the roll gets used against you.
These instructions are always relevant to an objective. Not yours. If you follow through and reap the reward of the hunch roll then that cabal gets +1d10% towards it due to your actions. Usually you won’t know who or what until you do it, if ever, absent some other magick power. That’s what happens when you follow the light of someone else’s star.
Usually you can get one hunch a week out of the photo. Repeatedly going back to the well just spoils your ability to see new details. Give it a rest and come back with fresh eyes. Or give someone else a turn.
Power: Significant.
Description: A wall-spanning, high-resolution panorama photograph of a city skyline, taken in the early evening or dead of night and artfully framed. The streets and buildings twinkle and glow under artificial illumination washing out the constellations above. Light pollution means that celestial bodies are invisible to people to people in urban environments. The auguries and astrology of our forebears hidden not just by time and the march of material empiricism but the construction of our own constellations, closer to home.
At least that’s how the typical wankerish spiel given by people who own it goes. Either they’re so deeply entrenched in its effect that they mistake their servitude for power or they’d like you to be so they can get a free lunch.
Effect: The Lights of the City give clues as to what the future holds by pirating the free will of those who submit to it for the advantage of others. Using the artifact takes at least an hour of careful observation for someone who’s well practised at it, if you’re new you could be there all night. Scour the cityscape for little details, let your mind wander and patterns emerge, they’ll guide you towards a system of interpretation. Generally it takes a successful Secrecy roll to get the hang of it but people with supernatural identities or a pile of Unnatural notches tend to get waved through.
The net result of your divination is something resembling a set of instructions (it could be elaborate and precise or as simple as a place and a time to be there) and a floating hunch roll. The hunch roll gets saved until you choose what to do about the information you’ve received. If you go along with it, the roll gets used to your advantage. Even a fumble, that just means it gets applied to someone opposing you. On the other hand if you ignore or oppose it the result of the roll gets used against you.
These instructions are always relevant to an objective. Not yours. If you follow through and reap the reward of the hunch roll then that cabal gets +1d10% towards it due to your actions. Usually you won’t know who or what until you do it, if ever, absent some other magick power. That’s what happens when you follow the light of someone else’s star.
Usually you can get one hunch a week out of the photo. Repeatedly going back to the well just spoils your ability to see new details. Give it a rest and come back with fresh eyes. Or give someone else a turn.
Thursday 25 July 2019
086 - Garbage Sandcastles
Unnatural Phenomenon: Garbage Sandcastles
In an unremarkable small-town landfill - the final resting place of a detritomancer crushed by a collapsing mound of garbage as he discovered a major charge - is a graveyard which foretells the collapse of civilization. Refuse scattered here spontaneously forms models of the monuments of humanity slated for destruction. When they crumble to the elements, so do the originals.
It’s uncertain whether this effect is predictive or causal or a bit of both (so far only one person is really aware of the phenomenon and he’s not the type to consider it). The buildings depicted tend to be based on cultural, or at least public, recognition rather than financial value or size. If the Eiffel Tower were under threat, a forest of replicas made of tin foil and twisted TV dinner boxes would sprout and then be rent apart. Some gaudy, expensive and nameless skyscraper, not so much.
Georgie Huber is a 13 year-old kid. He hates school, is neglected by his family and loves dirt bikes and plinking at rats. He knows he’s not allowed at the dump but it’s unstaffed most of the time and gives him an escape from the yelling and throwing things when he’s in trouble for ditching class. Skulking around the mounds of rotting trash with his .22 one late-afternoon he came across a sea of collapsing cathedrals as Notre Dame burned. While he didn’t catch the significance it left quite an impression. Georgie has come back dozens of times since and watched the rise and fall of humanities’ hubris without really comprehending. Vaguely remembering fairy tales about elves cobbling shoes he considers the models to be the work of “junk fairies”. He’s ready for the next time they build something, he’s going to carefully pry it up and take it home in a box.
Whether the haphazard preservations of a teenager half a world away will do anything to protect the Louvre, the Great Mosque of Mecca or the White House when they are in peril remains to be seen.
Of course, digging around in the trash mounds with a shovel risks unearthing the lost adept who birthed the garden. If Georgie or some curious sanitation worker were to have the major charge grounded through them then it would end the effect but there’s no telling what else might happen. To say nothing of the priceless artifact clutched in the corpse’s right hand.
In an unremarkable small-town landfill - the final resting place of a detritomancer crushed by a collapsing mound of garbage as he discovered a major charge - is a graveyard which foretells the collapse of civilization. Refuse scattered here spontaneously forms models of the monuments of humanity slated for destruction. When they crumble to the elements, so do the originals.
It’s uncertain whether this effect is predictive or causal or a bit of both (so far only one person is really aware of the phenomenon and he’s not the type to consider it). The buildings depicted tend to be based on cultural, or at least public, recognition rather than financial value or size. If the Eiffel Tower were under threat, a forest of replicas made of tin foil and twisted TV dinner boxes would sprout and then be rent apart. Some gaudy, expensive and nameless skyscraper, not so much.
Georgie Huber is a 13 year-old kid. He hates school, is neglected by his family and loves dirt bikes and plinking at rats. He knows he’s not allowed at the dump but it’s unstaffed most of the time and gives him an escape from the yelling and throwing things when he’s in trouble for ditching class. Skulking around the mounds of rotting trash with his .22 one late-afternoon he came across a sea of collapsing cathedrals as Notre Dame burned. While he didn’t catch the significance it left quite an impression. Georgie has come back dozens of times since and watched the rise and fall of humanities’ hubris without really comprehending. Vaguely remembering fairy tales about elves cobbling shoes he considers the models to be the work of “junk fairies”. He’s ready for the next time they build something, he’s going to carefully pry it up and take it home in a box.
Whether the haphazard preservations of a teenager half a world away will do anything to protect the Louvre, the Great Mosque of Mecca or the White House when they are in peril remains to be seen.
Of course, digging around in the trash mounds with a shovel risks unearthing the lost adept who birthed the garden. If Georgie or some curious sanitation worker were to have the major charge grounded through them then it would end the effect but there’s no telling what else might happen. To say nothing of the priceless artifact clutched in the corpse’s right hand.
Wednesday 24 July 2019
085 - Claire Marr, The Product
GMC: Claire Marr, The Product
Claire Marr’s ambitions outstripped her ability and opportunities. Material obsession and poverty shaped her first into a would-be financial wunderkind and plutomancer then, when she failed at that, into a magickal Frankenstein built specifically to be used for the advantage of the kind of people she holds responsible for that failure.
She was a mediocre student, average at best, but incredibly motivated. Where she watched others get by on talent or social connection Claire was hellbent on succeeding by sheer willingness to put forth more effort than anybody else. This worked to an extent in the educational microcosm of high school but faltered when it came to college and beyond. She needed better placement and scholarships than her situation could afford her to realize her dreams, so she bought it from the woman who employed her father.
Amelia Eckhart is the kind of person who deliberately props herself up with the work of others. In part, the plutomancer’s effective use of what is essentially indentured servitude is what has allowed her to amass her significant fortune. The poverty of Claire’s family was a product of her encouraging Claire’s father into a situation where he owed her more than he would ever be able to pay without recognising it. Claire was blind to this or she never would have taken the offered devil’s bargain.
Seeing Claire as a potential protege, Amelia tested the younger woman and responded to her willingness to take on a bottomless workload by trying to find its limit. Refusing to capitulate Claire instead performed and then crashed, spectacularly. Limping through graduation with a cratered academic record and spotty opportunities she still relentlessly tried to make a go of things. Predictably Claire’s effort did not pay off and Amelia had her distraughtly disappointed student-debtor in a tight spot.
Wheezehounds (pg.102 of Book 3: Reveal) are sorry creatures, tortuously twisted people reduced to little more than animals with the power to smell magick. Claire’s own transformation was less traumatic (no soul transfers but she does have a magickal compass lodged between her liver and lungs), but in return for the treatment she now owes Amelia an almost insurmountable debt. Claire can scent the trail of money.
Able to track debt, hard cash and accounting with a co-opted sense of smell, Claire is the perfect tool for furthering Amelia’s ambitions. Magickal compulsion of her debt keeps keeps her in line when preying on her dreams and desires isn’t enough so she bides her time and quietly resents her servitude. She catalogues weaknesses and builds toward escape even as Amelia exploits her and peddles her abilities to others.
She can’t wait for the chance to turn the tables.
STATS
Personality: Intense and hungry, like a dog that would happily slip its chain and chew on you because its owners starve and tease it. Claire barely bothers to hide her naked ambition which means people underestimate her ability to get away with other deceptions.
Rage: The Indolent Successful. People who got where they are through happenstance and luck rather than effort get Claire’s goat. Doubly so if they credit their luck as effort. Triply if they did it on other people’s backs.
Noble: Hard work.
Fear: Sacrificing things important to her for nothing (Self).
Obsession: I’m going to make it after all.
Wound Threshold: 50 (Claire must make a Fitness roll each morning due to her implanted artifact, failure does a single wound.)
Ambitious Failure 60%* (Substitutes for Lie, Substitutes for Notice, Protects Helplessness.)
Moneyscent 60% (Specific Information - Money, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Claire Marr’s ambitions outstripped her ability and opportunities. Material obsession and poverty shaped her first into a would-be financial wunderkind and plutomancer then, when she failed at that, into a magickal Frankenstein built specifically to be used for the advantage of the kind of people she holds responsible for that failure.
She was a mediocre student, average at best, but incredibly motivated. Where she watched others get by on talent or social connection Claire was hellbent on succeeding by sheer willingness to put forth more effort than anybody else. This worked to an extent in the educational microcosm of high school but faltered when it came to college and beyond. She needed better placement and scholarships than her situation could afford her to realize her dreams, so she bought it from the woman who employed her father.
Amelia Eckhart is the kind of person who deliberately props herself up with the work of others. In part, the plutomancer’s effective use of what is essentially indentured servitude is what has allowed her to amass her significant fortune. The poverty of Claire’s family was a product of her encouraging Claire’s father into a situation where he owed her more than he would ever be able to pay without recognising it. Claire was blind to this or she never would have taken the offered devil’s bargain.
Seeing Claire as a potential protege, Amelia tested the younger woman and responded to her willingness to take on a bottomless workload by trying to find its limit. Refusing to capitulate Claire instead performed and then crashed, spectacularly. Limping through graduation with a cratered academic record and spotty opportunities she still relentlessly tried to make a go of things. Predictably Claire’s effort did not pay off and Amelia had her distraughtly disappointed student-debtor in a tight spot.
Wheezehounds (pg.102 of Book 3: Reveal) are sorry creatures, tortuously twisted people reduced to little more than animals with the power to smell magick. Claire’s own transformation was less traumatic (no soul transfers but she does have a magickal compass lodged between her liver and lungs), but in return for the treatment she now owes Amelia an almost insurmountable debt. Claire can scent the trail of money.
Able to track debt, hard cash and accounting with a co-opted sense of smell, Claire is the perfect tool for furthering Amelia’s ambitions. Magickal compulsion of her debt keeps keeps her in line when preying on her dreams and desires isn’t enough so she bides her time and quietly resents her servitude. She catalogues weaknesses and builds toward escape even as Amelia exploits her and peddles her abilities to others.
She can’t wait for the chance to turn the tables.
STATS
Personality: Intense and hungry, like a dog that would happily slip its chain and chew on you because its owners starve and tease it. Claire barely bothers to hide her naked ambition which means people underestimate her ability to get away with other deceptions.
Rage: The Indolent Successful. People who got where they are through happenstance and luck rather than effort get Claire’s goat. Doubly so if they credit their luck as effort. Triply if they did it on other people’s backs.
Noble: Hard work.
Fear: Sacrificing things important to her for nothing (Self).
Obsession: I’m going to make it after all.
Wound Threshold: 50 (Claire must make a Fitness roll each morning due to her implanted artifact, failure does a single wound.)
Ambitious Failure 60%* (Substitutes for Lie, Substitutes for Notice, Protects Helplessness.)
Moneyscent 60% (Specific Information - Money, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Notches
|
Violence
|
Unnatural
|
Helplessness
|
Isolation
|
Self
|
Hardened
|
1
|
4
|
3
|
2
|
3
|
Failed
|
0
|
1
|
2
|
0
|
1
|
Tuesday 23 July 2019
084 - Blinding Justice
Ritual: Blinding Justice
Cost: 3 minor charges.
Ritual Action: Take official paperwork detailing some form of exoneration: court records of a not guilty verdict or a health inspection certificate with a passing grade. Wrap it around a piece of evidence that contradicts the paperwork, be it a murder weapon or a dead rat dug out of the restaurant’s deep fryer. Seal the parcel with freshly harvested pine sap in a porcelain sink that’s older than you are while reciting the Zoroastrian prayer for peace. Leave it in a public place. Once you have put it down walk away and do not return for at least 3 and a half hours. Don’t not look back. If the parcel is gone when you have returned the ritual has succeeded. Do not ever repeat it again.
Effect: Authorities are at a -30% shift to rolls to associate you with the last legal infraction or crime you committed. This includes jaywalking and other minor infringements so if you’re looking to misdirect something serious you’ll have to watch your interim behaviour. Any roll that fails because of this penalty instead points towards whoever removed the parcel from where you abandoned it, no matter how absurd the connection.
If you ever try a second time, regardless of the success of the first attempt, the penalty instead becomes a bonus for authorities. Should you come to their attention, other crimes or infractions you could have conceivably committed but didn’t become associated with you by coincidental means. This secondary effect provides no concrete evidence of links but is circumstantially compelling.
Cost: 3 minor charges.
Ritual Action: Take official paperwork detailing some form of exoneration: court records of a not guilty verdict or a health inspection certificate with a passing grade. Wrap it around a piece of evidence that contradicts the paperwork, be it a murder weapon or a dead rat dug out of the restaurant’s deep fryer. Seal the parcel with freshly harvested pine sap in a porcelain sink that’s older than you are while reciting the Zoroastrian prayer for peace. Leave it in a public place. Once you have put it down walk away and do not return for at least 3 and a half hours. Don’t not look back. If the parcel is gone when you have returned the ritual has succeeded. Do not ever repeat it again.
Effect: Authorities are at a -30% shift to rolls to associate you with the last legal infraction or crime you committed. This includes jaywalking and other minor infringements so if you’re looking to misdirect something serious you’ll have to watch your interim behaviour. Any roll that fails because of this penalty instead points towards whoever removed the parcel from where you abandoned it, no matter how absurd the connection.
If you ever try a second time, regardless of the success of the first attempt, the penalty instead becomes a bonus for authorities. Should you come to their attention, other crimes or infractions you could have conceivably committed but didn’t become associated with you by coincidental means. This secondary effect provides no concrete evidence of links but is circumstantially compelling.
Monday 22 July 2019
083 - Varúlfursuit
Artifact: Varúlfursuit
Power: Significant.
Description: A high quality fursuit, probably hand-made given the lack of manufacturer’s markings. Inside are a series of frenetically inked entreaties to various lunar deities - Selene, Hors, Tu’er Ye - others are likely given that the markings continue down further inside the suit than casual observation would allow, but most owners are loath to risk wrecking them to find out. That said, some older suits tend to be a bit banged up and show signs of careful repair given the recharging method.
Effect: Donning the varúlfursuit after either consuming fly agaric or applying henbane salve produces the effect of vestimancy formula spell “Loup Garou Couture” (pg.166 of Book 1: Play). Those without a vestimancer identity to substitute for animal abilities may either use another relevant identity or roll at 50%, whichever is better. Different types of suit produce different transformations than the normal spell which depend on the animal represented. These grant distinct levels of wound threshold, damage bonuses for natural weaponry and animal talents depending on the form, but all other aspects of the magick remain the same.
Freshly acquired varúlfursuits have a variable number of charges (1d10-5 with a minimum of zero), however there is a grisly method of bolstering reserves. Once per month an additional charge can be added by killing the animal it is styled after, barehanded, while wearing the suit. The animal cannot be incapacitated or restrained beforehand. Some versions incorporate weaponry into their design in the form of fangs and claws (dealing +3 damage), these don’t seem to violate the barehanded requirement. People who own these tend to be pretty circumspect about it given the reputation this creates, whether they do it or not.
There is also the horrible story going around that varúlfursuits can be recharged with people. That murder might be even more effective than the normal method. Most in the occult underground pshaw this as baseless gossip. Certainly no one has tried it yet. At least, no one who’ll admit to it.
Description: A high quality fursuit, probably hand-made given the lack of manufacturer’s markings. Inside are a series of frenetically inked entreaties to various lunar deities - Selene, Hors, Tu’er Ye - others are likely given that the markings continue down further inside the suit than casual observation would allow, but most owners are loath to risk wrecking them to find out. That said, some older suits tend to be a bit banged up and show signs of careful repair given the recharging method.
Effect: Donning the varúlfursuit after either consuming fly agaric or applying henbane salve produces the effect of vestimancy formula spell “Loup Garou Couture” (pg.166 of Book 1: Play). Those without a vestimancer identity to substitute for animal abilities may either use another relevant identity or roll at 50%, whichever is better. Different types of suit produce different transformations than the normal spell which depend on the animal represented. These grant distinct levels of wound threshold, damage bonuses for natural weaponry and animal talents depending on the form, but all other aspects of the magick remain the same.
Freshly acquired varúlfursuits have a variable number of charges (1d10-5 with a minimum of zero), however there is a grisly method of bolstering reserves. Once per month an additional charge can be added by killing the animal it is styled after, barehanded, while wearing the suit. The animal cannot be incapacitated or restrained beforehand. Some versions incorporate weaponry into their design in the form of fangs and claws (dealing +3 damage), these don’t seem to violate the barehanded requirement. People who own these tend to be pretty circumspect about it given the reputation this creates, whether they do it or not.
There is also the horrible story going around that varúlfursuits can be recharged with people. That murder might be even more effective than the normal method. Most in the occult underground pshaw this as baseless gossip. Certainly no one has tried it yet. At least, no one who’ll admit to it.
Sunday 21 July 2019
082 - Bailey McCoy, Serial Subway Jumper
GMC: Bailey McCoy, Serial Subway Jumper
Cities are living things the same as people. Both are made of a panoply of systems and organs all working in unison to create something greater than their parts. The heart pumps blood as the industry of urban living pumps traffick. We are the cells that make up the organs that give it life and like the cells that make up our own organs we are entirely fungible as individuals.
Bailey learned that the hard way as a kid, his mom (he’s never known his dad) was hit by a subway train when she accidentally slipped from the platform. It happens dozens of times a year. What really struck Bailey was the thoughtless outrage from people who’d been inconvenienced by the delay. Didn’t they realise the world had just ended? It didn’t take him long time to internalise just how disposable the mass of humanity is to each other. To the city at large.
Raised by his childless aunt, Bailey never caused any trouble. He barely seemed troubled by what had happened. Internally he was building a story about the city as an animal and the way that the parts of it operated unconsciously and ignorantly of their ability to be summarily replaced. His grief was sublimated in trying to understand, trying to find a lever or yoke for the beast and put himself above its casual violence. He wandered the city for hours, precociously read Hans Reichow and Jean-Marie Pelt, scoured city plans and crime statistics. It never came to resolution but he couldn’t stop trying.
In the second year of a political science degree he started having fainting spells. Diagnosis: an aggressive brain cancer, life expectancy: about two years. Treatment was expensive and knocked him from his path. If something so random could take it all away then what was the point? He spent months in a depressed haze, until he slipped in front of a train.
Looking back, Bailey isn’t sure it was unintentional, he’s still not really sure of anything. All recollections of the event are eclipsed by the epiphany. The train screeching to a halt less than a foot away and the adrenaline pounding through his system. A single damaged cell could cause a cascade that would, untreated, destroy an entire system. Reaching into the beating heart of the city and placing the illness of himself at its crux, Bailey could harness its resilience for himself. Sprinting away down the tunnel unseen he felt better than he had in years. The next time it happened it was definitely on purpose.
Bailey tells himself he’s not really in danger and that he’s not really hurting anyone. That he’ll always be able to time it right so that his faux-sacrifice hits the right sympathy and he gets to live longer by siphoning it off. He’s almost got himself fooled.
There’s a dedicated police detail after him, getting away with this kind of disruption a dozen times was bound to draw that response. He’s careful and his ability to read and sway the city, to blend invisibly with the crowds, has frustrated them so far but the noose is inexorably tightening and he can feel it. Complicating his problem is the backlash of having the immune system of the city clean up his illness, his face magickally appearing on bus stop advertisements and structural defects wreaking havoc as architectural elements malignantly duplicate themselves. What happens when a city gets cancer?
STATS
Personality: Bailey is insightful but has trouble openly articulating his thoughts, which makes him seem stupid. Having discovered what he thinks is the way the world works he’s willing to stake everything on using it to take control of his life. He’s meticulous and dangerously obsessed.
Rage: Tacit assumptions of safety and security. The world’s a far more dangerous place than most people give it credit.
Noble: The people worst off in the city. He thinks their position is a necessary one but Bailey wishes it didn’t have to be and uses his powers to cut them a break when he’s flush with charges.
Fear: Being cut off from his magick (Unnatural).
Obsession: Give me an egregore big enough, and a place to stand, and I can move the world.
Wound Threshold: 50 (sometimes lower depending on how he’s doing healthwise and injuries from his ...vocation).
Urbanomancer 70%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Subway Jumper 50% (Substitutes for Dodge, Substitutes for Secrecy, Protects Violence.)
Shock Gauges
Cities are living things the same as people. Both are made of a panoply of systems and organs all working in unison to create something greater than their parts. The heart pumps blood as the industry of urban living pumps traffick. We are the cells that make up the organs that give it life and like the cells that make up our own organs we are entirely fungible as individuals.
Bailey learned that the hard way as a kid, his mom (he’s never known his dad) was hit by a subway train when she accidentally slipped from the platform. It happens dozens of times a year. What really struck Bailey was the thoughtless outrage from people who’d been inconvenienced by the delay. Didn’t they realise the world had just ended? It didn’t take him long time to internalise just how disposable the mass of humanity is to each other. To the city at large.
Raised by his childless aunt, Bailey never caused any trouble. He barely seemed troubled by what had happened. Internally he was building a story about the city as an animal and the way that the parts of it operated unconsciously and ignorantly of their ability to be summarily replaced. His grief was sublimated in trying to understand, trying to find a lever or yoke for the beast and put himself above its casual violence. He wandered the city for hours, precociously read Hans Reichow and Jean-Marie Pelt, scoured city plans and crime statistics. It never came to resolution but he couldn’t stop trying.
In the second year of a political science degree he started having fainting spells. Diagnosis: an aggressive brain cancer, life expectancy: about two years. Treatment was expensive and knocked him from his path. If something so random could take it all away then what was the point? He spent months in a depressed haze, until he slipped in front of a train.
Looking back, Bailey isn’t sure it was unintentional, he’s still not really sure of anything. All recollections of the event are eclipsed by the epiphany. The train screeching to a halt less than a foot away and the adrenaline pounding through his system. A single damaged cell could cause a cascade that would, untreated, destroy an entire system. Reaching into the beating heart of the city and placing the illness of himself at its crux, Bailey could harness its resilience for himself. Sprinting away down the tunnel unseen he felt better than he had in years. The next time it happened it was definitely on purpose.
Bailey tells himself he’s not really in danger and that he’s not really hurting anyone. That he’ll always be able to time it right so that his faux-sacrifice hits the right sympathy and he gets to live longer by siphoning it off. He’s almost got himself fooled.
There’s a dedicated police detail after him, getting away with this kind of disruption a dozen times was bound to draw that response. He’s careful and his ability to read and sway the city, to blend invisibly with the crowds, has frustrated them so far but the noose is inexorably tightening and he can feel it. Complicating his problem is the backlash of having the immune system of the city clean up his illness, his face magickally appearing on bus stop advertisements and structural defects wreaking havoc as architectural elements malignantly duplicate themselves. What happens when a city gets cancer?
STATS
Personality: Bailey is insightful but has trouble openly articulating his thoughts, which makes him seem stupid. Having discovered what he thinks is the way the world works he’s willing to stake everything on using it to take control of his life. He’s meticulous and dangerously obsessed.
Rage: Tacit assumptions of safety and security. The world’s a far more dangerous place than most people give it credit.
Noble: The people worst off in the city. He thinks their position is a necessary one but Bailey wishes it didn’t have to be and uses his powers to cut them a break when he’s flush with charges.
Fear: Being cut off from his magick (Unnatural).
Obsession: Give me an egregore big enough, and a place to stand, and I can move the world.
Wound Threshold: 50 (sometimes lower depending on how he’s doing healthwise and injuries from his ...vocation).
Urbanomancer 70%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Subway Jumper 50% (Substitutes for Dodge, Substitutes for Secrecy, Protects Violence.)
Shock Gauges
Notches
|
Violence
|
Unnatural
|
Helplessness
|
Isolation
|
Self
|
Hardened
|
4
|
3
|
5
|
2
|
3
|
Failed
|
2
|
0
|
2
|
0
|
2
|
Saturday 20 July 2019
081 - Mavis Davis, Botanist, Plant-Psychic and Misanthrope
GMC: Mavis Davis, Botanist, Plant-Psychic and Misanthrope
For as long as anyone has remembered Mavis was a weird old lady. She once had a dog she insisted was the reincarnation of her dead husband, Baxter. She keeps a greenhouse that takes up so much of her backyard it violates zoning laws and council ordinances. When she got a little drunk you could sometimes get her to open up about an alleged fling with Richard Nixon in the late 1930s.
Mavis is the authority on weird, exotic plants, especially those with magickal properties. She also wants nothing to do with the occult underground and for what it’s worth they let sleeping dogs lie.
It wasn’t always this way, once upon a time she was about as gregarious a lynchpin for the local weirdo community as could ever be reasonably expected. No one was ever showing up on her doorstep with scraped knees expecting to be taken care of by Mama Davis, but she was congenial and didn’t take sides. Anyone who wanted to trade rituals and magickal services for mandrake or western underground orchids was welcome to call on her for tea and biscuits.
That changed about 9 years ago. “Paracelcius”, brash newcomer and a biker/alchemist obsessed with using mithridatism as a way to transcend his mortality was at a party bragging about having scored a rare variety of virulent wolfsbane from “that cranky, old bitch”. Half an hour later he was dead. It was a motorcycle crash exacerbated by the briar bush that had started to claw its way up his oesophagus. Turned out he hadn’t taken Mavis’s initial refusal to sell him poison kindly, she was in the hospital and her dog Baxter hadn’t been so lucky.
That experience was enough for Mavis to wash her hands of dealing with the magickal community. She returned home and curtly cut ties with those she was in regular contact with, telling them she was out of the business. Not everyone properly understood the finality of her intentions but her resolve sent them packing along with nasty rashes and plant-based curses for those who couldn’t take a hint.
She’s still pottering around town and resolute in snubbing the occult scene who in turn feel awkwardly embarrassed at having lost a pillar of their community who they still run into at the supermarket. Some have tried to reach out over the years to no avail. Occasionally a bonehead brings her up in the context of trying to source some rare ingredients only to be reminded that it isn’t an option and no one wants to talk about why.
Like old recluses the world over, Mavis is the subject of a lot of rumours among those who don’t know any better. The common threads revolve around disappearances of people who have allegedly tried to burgle her for magickal goodies. Most people think that’s pretty tasteless given the circumstances. It’s only actually happened twice. Mavis has a Honeypot (p.48-49 of Book 3: Reveal) in her greenhouse in the form of the hoaxical Man-eating Tree of Madagascar, which is all too happy to gobble up intruders.
STATS
Personality: Old enough to be beyond fear but not bitterness. Mavis intends to live out her remaining years doing what she loves most and never again inviting the occult underground into her life. She’s vicious enough to be prepared for anyone who tries anything.
Rage: Disturbing her peace and quiet.
Noble: Patience. Mavis always admired the kinds of long-term work that takes dedication.
Fear: Losing her independence (Helplessness).
Obsession: Plants. Mavis gloried in discovering her psychic connection to the world of flora and dedicated her life to cultivating her menagerie.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Botanical Genius 65%* (Substitutes for Knowledge, Protects Unnatural, Unique - Has a huge collection of exotic plants.)
Agropath 50% (Versatility, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Crotchety Recluse 40% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Protects Self, Protects Isolation.)
Shock Gauges
For as long as anyone has remembered Mavis was a weird old lady. She once had a dog she insisted was the reincarnation of her dead husband, Baxter. She keeps a greenhouse that takes up so much of her backyard it violates zoning laws and council ordinances. When she got a little drunk you could sometimes get her to open up about an alleged fling with Richard Nixon in the late 1930s.
Mavis is the authority on weird, exotic plants, especially those with magickal properties. She also wants nothing to do with the occult underground and for what it’s worth they let sleeping dogs lie.
It wasn’t always this way, once upon a time she was about as gregarious a lynchpin for the local weirdo community as could ever be reasonably expected. No one was ever showing up on her doorstep with scraped knees expecting to be taken care of by Mama Davis, but she was congenial and didn’t take sides. Anyone who wanted to trade rituals and magickal services for mandrake or western underground orchids was welcome to call on her for tea and biscuits.
That changed about 9 years ago. “Paracelcius”, brash newcomer and a biker/alchemist obsessed with using mithridatism as a way to transcend his mortality was at a party bragging about having scored a rare variety of virulent wolfsbane from “that cranky, old bitch”. Half an hour later he was dead. It was a motorcycle crash exacerbated by the briar bush that had started to claw its way up his oesophagus. Turned out he hadn’t taken Mavis’s initial refusal to sell him poison kindly, she was in the hospital and her dog Baxter hadn’t been so lucky.
That experience was enough for Mavis to wash her hands of dealing with the magickal community. She returned home and curtly cut ties with those she was in regular contact with, telling them she was out of the business. Not everyone properly understood the finality of her intentions but her resolve sent them packing along with nasty rashes and plant-based curses for those who couldn’t take a hint.
She’s still pottering around town and resolute in snubbing the occult scene who in turn feel awkwardly embarrassed at having lost a pillar of their community who they still run into at the supermarket. Some have tried to reach out over the years to no avail. Occasionally a bonehead brings her up in the context of trying to source some rare ingredients only to be reminded that it isn’t an option and no one wants to talk about why.
Like old recluses the world over, Mavis is the subject of a lot of rumours among those who don’t know any better. The common threads revolve around disappearances of people who have allegedly tried to burgle her for magickal goodies. Most people think that’s pretty tasteless given the circumstances. It’s only actually happened twice. Mavis has a Honeypot (p.48-49 of Book 3: Reveal) in her greenhouse in the form of the hoaxical Man-eating Tree of Madagascar, which is all too happy to gobble up intruders.
STATS
Personality: Old enough to be beyond fear but not bitterness. Mavis intends to live out her remaining years doing what she loves most and never again inviting the occult underground into her life. She’s vicious enough to be prepared for anyone who tries anything.
Rage: Disturbing her peace and quiet.
Noble: Patience. Mavis always admired the kinds of long-term work that takes dedication.
Fear: Losing her independence (Helplessness).
Obsession: Plants. Mavis gloried in discovering her psychic connection to the world of flora and dedicated her life to cultivating her menagerie.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Botanical Genius 65%* (Substitutes for Knowledge, Protects Unnatural, Unique - Has a huge collection of exotic plants.)
Agropath 50% (Versatility, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Crotchety Recluse 40% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Protects Self, Protects Isolation.)
Shock Gauges
Notches
|
Violence
|
Unnatural
|
Helplessness
|
Isolation
|
Self
|
Hardened
|
1
|
4
|
2
|
4
|
2
|
Failed
|
1
|
0
|
1
|
0
|
1
|
Friday 19 July 2019
080 - Death of the Author
Ritual: Death of the Author
Cost: 3+ significant charges.
Ritual Action: Pick a work of art: painting, song, movie, book, whatever. It helps if it’s well known. It’s not necessary per se, but the value of performing this ritual on an unknown work is questionable.
Spend a complete lunar month - new moon to new moon - in complete seclusion recreating it over and over. These "studies" don’t have to be good by any standard, but they do have to be unmistakable as copies (and later, interpretations). As the month and your “studies” progress skew them towards a desired subtext which gradually becomes more and more explicit. In the final version it shouldn’t be equivocal, characters should bluntly state your message and paintings resemble the most unimaginative political cartoons. If you communicate with another person during this month you have to scrap everything and start over, you need to be cut-off. This makes for some interesting logistics if your target art is a film.
Once you’ve finished that stage take the brain of the original creator and a department store mannequin that matches their gender orientation. Secure the brain to the head of the mannequin and showcase the artwork to it in the place you’ve been working. Have a one-sided argument with it about various established interpretations of their work, making strong points against them that favour your interpretation (if you’re convincing and/or succeed at a roll on a relevant identity take a positive shift to your ritual roll). Get angry, really work yourself up and then storm off. On your way out burn the place and everything in it to the ground. Spend a minimum of 3 significant charges.
Variant: Trick someone into performing the ritual on you, but before they do make preparations. You only need to make one “study” of your work, what would be the final version if you were performing the ritual on someone else. Once you’ve finished get it gold-plated and stash it somewhere. If it remains undisturbed until someone tries the ritual on you then you get to co-opt their attempt with your own (you don’t even have to supply the charges if they do it, but if you do yours are added to the effect).
Despite the name you don't necessarily have to be dead although that's academic. Probably. Arguably there may be a charger out there somewhere who could survive having their brain removed.
Effect: You have decided what the prevailing interpretation of the selected artwork is from this point onwards. This reorientation is a one-time thing, the zeitgeist continues to move forward. It’s not a retcon or mind control either, more like a sourceless rumour that most people take seriously without examining.
There is one other lingering effect that gives it some punch. Anyone openly and publicly opposing your magickally-backed interpretation gets smacked around by unnatural phenomenon. Each significant charge beyond the base 3 invested in the ritual is good for one significant unnatural phenomenon. They tend to be violent and heavy on the dramatic irony.
Cost: 3+ significant charges.
Ritual Action: Pick a work of art: painting, song, movie, book, whatever. It helps if it’s well known. It’s not necessary per se, but the value of performing this ritual on an unknown work is questionable.
Spend a complete lunar month - new moon to new moon - in complete seclusion recreating it over and over. These "studies" don’t have to be good by any standard, but they do have to be unmistakable as copies (and later, interpretations). As the month and your “studies” progress skew them towards a desired subtext which gradually becomes more and more explicit. In the final version it shouldn’t be equivocal, characters should bluntly state your message and paintings resemble the most unimaginative political cartoons. If you communicate with another person during this month you have to scrap everything and start over, you need to be cut-off. This makes for some interesting logistics if your target art is a film.
Once you’ve finished that stage take the brain of the original creator and a department store mannequin that matches their gender orientation. Secure the brain to the head of the mannequin and showcase the artwork to it in the place you’ve been working. Have a one-sided argument with it about various established interpretations of their work, making strong points against them that favour your interpretation (if you’re convincing and/or succeed at a roll on a relevant identity take a positive shift to your ritual roll). Get angry, really work yourself up and then storm off. On your way out burn the place and everything in it to the ground. Spend a minimum of 3 significant charges.
Variant: Trick someone into performing the ritual on you, but before they do make preparations. You only need to make one “study” of your work, what would be the final version if you were performing the ritual on someone else. Once you’ve finished get it gold-plated and stash it somewhere. If it remains undisturbed until someone tries the ritual on you then you get to co-opt their attempt with your own (you don’t even have to supply the charges if they do it, but if you do yours are added to the effect).
Despite the name you don't necessarily have to be dead although that's academic. Probably. Arguably there may be a charger out there somewhere who could survive having their brain removed.
Effect: You have decided what the prevailing interpretation of the selected artwork is from this point onwards. This reorientation is a one-time thing, the zeitgeist continues to move forward. It’s not a retcon or mind control either, more like a sourceless rumour that most people take seriously without examining.
There is one other lingering effect that gives it some punch. Anyone openly and publicly opposing your magickally-backed interpretation gets smacked around by unnatural phenomenon. Each significant charge beyond the base 3 invested in the ritual is good for one significant unnatural phenomenon. They tend to be violent and heavy on the dramatic irony.
Thursday 18 July 2019
079 - The Hungry Dark
Artifact: The Hungry Dark
Power: Major.
Description: A large mason jar covered in black house paint inside and out, obscuring its contents. The lid is sealed with wax and someone has daubed a crude, angry skull and crossbones on top. It rattles when you shake it.
If opened there is darkness inside, darkness and the burned out remains of a small lightbulb wired to a corroded 9 volt battery. If opened in the wrong circumstances there’ll be nothing but darkness outside too.
Effect: The hungry dark is the remains of a long disbanded cabal’s attempt to deal with a swath of darkness that made their town unnavigable by night. The person who preyed on their community is still around, a reformed tenebrae breeder who now drives an ice cream van and tries to live a quiet life, and would frankly be shocked and dismayed to learn they failed. And maybe a little intrigued.
The hungry dark consumes artificial light. Opened under any illumination other than sunlight (moon and starlight doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, maybe they’re not strong enough) it plunges the lit area into darkness. The stronger the artificial light the stronger the effect, the hungry dark lurches out of confinement and latches onto the source and converts its output into inky blackness that effectively blinds anyone in the area.
It won’t stop there. If another source of artificial light is within sight of the magickal darkness it too is consumed and converted, then sources within range of that and so on. It would be an apocalyptic situation if not for the fact that it requires ongoing sustenance from these light sources and is burned away by sunlight. Nevertheless, rooting out and destroying hidden patches of a widespread hungry dark in the daytime would be a tremendous and potentially sisyphean feat. Any one of them could lead to a new outbreak.
If completely destroyed the hungry dark reforms around its last active food source and lays dormant, waiting for another chance to spread.
Power: Major.
Description: A large mason jar covered in black house paint inside and out, obscuring its contents. The lid is sealed with wax and someone has daubed a crude, angry skull and crossbones on top. It rattles when you shake it.
If opened there is darkness inside, darkness and the burned out remains of a small lightbulb wired to a corroded 9 volt battery. If opened in the wrong circumstances there’ll be nothing but darkness outside too.
Effect: The hungry dark is the remains of a long disbanded cabal’s attempt to deal with a swath of darkness that made their town unnavigable by night. The person who preyed on their community is still around, a reformed tenebrae breeder who now drives an ice cream van and tries to live a quiet life, and would frankly be shocked and dismayed to learn they failed. And maybe a little intrigued.
The hungry dark consumes artificial light. Opened under any illumination other than sunlight (moon and starlight doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, maybe they’re not strong enough) it plunges the lit area into darkness. The stronger the artificial light the stronger the effect, the hungry dark lurches out of confinement and latches onto the source and converts its output into inky blackness that effectively blinds anyone in the area.
It won’t stop there. If another source of artificial light is within sight of the magickal darkness it too is consumed and converted, then sources within range of that and so on. It would be an apocalyptic situation if not for the fact that it requires ongoing sustenance from these light sources and is burned away by sunlight. Nevertheless, rooting out and destroying hidden patches of a widespread hungry dark in the daytime would be a tremendous and potentially sisyphean feat. Any one of them could lead to a new outbreak.
If completely destroyed the hungry dark reforms around its last active food source and lays dormant, waiting for another chance to spread.
Wednesday 17 July 2019
078 - Romana Kolar, Fear Hungry Mak Attaxer & Fear Eater
GMC: Romana Kolar, Fear Hungry Mak Attaxer
Fear is a form of power. It is a gene-deep engine which strips away the dull cow conditioning of a soft society to reveal the animal underneath. It protects, it warns, it compels. It is a hungry energy that kept us safe from predators and starvation in our species’ infancy. Today it pushes us to compete and analyse against falling behind in a hyper-individualistic society. Romana can no longer feel her fear, she sought after it too much and burned herself out.
But she can take yours.
Romana was the awkward, smelly kid growing up so she didn't have a lot of positive social reinforcement. She also essentially raised herself and her younger brothers, her parents too busy working or too exhausted and disinterested to do the job themselves. Like some in her situation she developed poor coping mechanisms for the kind of pressure and uncertainty that a child really shouldn’t have to shoulder. Self-harm, acting-out, the works. Their reaction wasn’t exactly ideal either, so she learned to hide it instead. She adopted a psychological form of self-harm, one that involved subjecting herself to her greatest fears.
Predictably Romana’s life hasn’t been all roses, without other outlets her coping mechanism bloomed into a full-blown, romanticised obsession. It led her to the dark corners and depths that polite society pretends don’t exist. Eventually she broke through her ability to feel fear or much of anything to her regret. Robbed of the emotional highs of danger and self-destruction she tried to find another way.
She won’t tell anyone where she got her ability (why create competition?) but her travels had taken her around the edge of the occult underground before, so she wasn’t a stranger to the weirder things in life. Romana can take your fear from you (for a while) and keep it for herself. It’s not an easy thing to do, she has to draw it out of you first. For that reason she figured she’d need help and/or protection, that’s why she’s in Mak Attax.
To her credit she’s reliable so long as she gets what she wants. Romana works night shift without complaint, handles the most disgusting bathroom messes without pause and has twice been robbed at gunpoint and not missed a step. She has no social life outside of work or her cabal and sleeps her days away in her poorly kept trailer.
Speaking of her cabal, Romana mostly grudgingly tolerates them. Even the more jaded members seem like excitable puppies to her, just waiting to get themselves slapped down. In turn they see her as a mystical, take-no-shit badass who they can point at any problem and watch it crumple. On an organisational basis Romana gets visits from Mak Attax members from other branches who want some emotional shielding when they’re expecting trouble. She’s careful not to seem too eager on the boards but makes her ability well known to take advantage of this.
The fears she takes from people lose their power over her too quickly for her liking but she can still feel them jostling around in her head. A mountain of terror, the panicked power of multitudes. She’s building something inside of her, she just doesn’t know what it is yet.
STATS
Personality: Stoic and sleepy-eyed, people regard Romana as either unflappable or a psychopath. She’s neither, she’s just beyond the threshold of what most people would consider normal tolerance. The only thing she has any intensity about is her obsession, everything else is done with implacable, mechanical duty. Romana behaves fearlessly, even when she’s terrified.
Rage: People who look down on her.
Noble: Sharing what she has with the people who need it most.
Fear: Too many to count at this point. If Romana ever recovers from her burned out state she is unlikely to remain functional for long.
NOTE: In her current state Romana cannot use any of her passions to flip or reroll. She is burned out, having accumulated 30 hardened notches. Her Fear Eater identity allows her to partially overcome this.
Obsession: Gain more “power” by consuming more of other people’s fears.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Fear Eater 60%* (Unique - Steal Fear Passion, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick. See below for more details.)
Creepy Fast-Food Worker 60% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Coerces Helplessness, Reads Fear.)
Shock Gauges
Disorder: Addictive Behavior - Experiencing consumed fears. Given a chance to use a fresh stolen fear passion Romana must take it. If she does not it sinks beneath the surface of her accumulated trauma and she loses access to it, like her other passions.
Supernatural Identity: Fear Eater
In order to consume someone’s fear you have to tease it out of them first. The target must experience a stress check related to their fear passion. The result doesn’t matter so long as they aren’t too hardened to have to roll. While the frisson is being processed a successful Fear Eater roll scoops out the emotional impetus of their terror and gobbles it down. For a number of days afterwards equal to the tens place of the roll (or the sum of the roll on a matched success, 20 days on a crit) the target effectively has no fear passion, no rerolls or flip-flopping and they can’t be coerced with it. They don’t have to make stress checks for anything related to it either, even things that would scare an ordinary person. Eventually the form of their personality reasserts itself and the passion reemerges.
You gain that fear passion permanently, along with everything that entails. In Romana's case she can use it despite being burned out until her disorder paves over it.
Fear is a form of power. It is a gene-deep engine which strips away the dull cow conditioning of a soft society to reveal the animal underneath. It protects, it warns, it compels. It is a hungry energy that kept us safe from predators and starvation in our species’ infancy. Today it pushes us to compete and analyse against falling behind in a hyper-individualistic society. Romana can no longer feel her fear, she sought after it too much and burned herself out.
But she can take yours.
Romana was the awkward, smelly kid growing up so she didn't have a lot of positive social reinforcement. She also essentially raised herself and her younger brothers, her parents too busy working or too exhausted and disinterested to do the job themselves. Like some in her situation she developed poor coping mechanisms for the kind of pressure and uncertainty that a child really shouldn’t have to shoulder. Self-harm, acting-out, the works. Their reaction wasn’t exactly ideal either, so she learned to hide it instead. She adopted a psychological form of self-harm, one that involved subjecting herself to her greatest fears.
Predictably Romana’s life hasn’t been all roses, without other outlets her coping mechanism bloomed into a full-blown, romanticised obsession. It led her to the dark corners and depths that polite society pretends don’t exist. Eventually she broke through her ability to feel fear or much of anything to her regret. Robbed of the emotional highs of danger and self-destruction she tried to find another way.
She won’t tell anyone where she got her ability (why create competition?) but her travels had taken her around the edge of the occult underground before, so she wasn’t a stranger to the weirder things in life. Romana can take your fear from you (for a while) and keep it for herself. It’s not an easy thing to do, she has to draw it out of you first. For that reason she figured she’d need help and/or protection, that’s why she’s in Mak Attax.
To her credit she’s reliable so long as she gets what she wants. Romana works night shift without complaint, handles the most disgusting bathroom messes without pause and has twice been robbed at gunpoint and not missed a step. She has no social life outside of work or her cabal and sleeps her days away in her poorly kept trailer.
Speaking of her cabal, Romana mostly grudgingly tolerates them. Even the more jaded members seem like excitable puppies to her, just waiting to get themselves slapped down. In turn they see her as a mystical, take-no-shit badass who they can point at any problem and watch it crumple. On an organisational basis Romana gets visits from Mak Attax members from other branches who want some emotional shielding when they’re expecting trouble. She’s careful not to seem too eager on the boards but makes her ability well known to take advantage of this.
The fears she takes from people lose their power over her too quickly for her liking but she can still feel them jostling around in her head. A mountain of terror, the panicked power of multitudes. She’s building something inside of her, she just doesn’t know what it is yet.
STATS
Personality: Stoic and sleepy-eyed, people regard Romana as either unflappable or a psychopath. She’s neither, she’s just beyond the threshold of what most people would consider normal tolerance. The only thing she has any intensity about is her obsession, everything else is done with implacable, mechanical duty. Romana behaves fearlessly, even when she’s terrified.
Rage: People who look down on her.
Noble: Sharing what she has with the people who need it most.
Fear: Too many to count at this point. If Romana ever recovers from her burned out state she is unlikely to remain functional for long.
NOTE: In her current state Romana cannot use any of her passions to flip or reroll. She is burned out, having accumulated 30 hardened notches. Her Fear Eater identity allows her to partially overcome this.
Obsession: Gain more “power” by consuming more of other people’s fears.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Fear Eater 60%* (Unique - Steal Fear Passion, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick. See below for more details.)
Creepy Fast-Food Worker 60% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Coerces Helplessness, Reads Fear.)
Shock Gauges
Notches
|
Violence
|
Unnatural
|
Helplessness
|
Isolation
|
Self
|
Hardened
|
6
|
5
|
6
|
7
|
6
|
Failed
|
2
|
2
|
2
|
2
|
5
|
Disorder: Addictive Behavior - Experiencing consumed fears. Given a chance to use a fresh stolen fear passion Romana must take it. If she does not it sinks beneath the surface of her accumulated trauma and she loses access to it, like her other passions.
Supernatural Identity: Fear Eater
In order to consume someone’s fear you have to tease it out of them first. The target must experience a stress check related to their fear passion. The result doesn’t matter so long as they aren’t too hardened to have to roll. While the frisson is being processed a successful Fear Eater roll scoops out the emotional impetus of their terror and gobbles it down. For a number of days afterwards equal to the tens place of the roll (or the sum of the roll on a matched success, 20 days on a crit) the target effectively has no fear passion, no rerolls or flip-flopping and they can’t be coerced with it. They don’t have to make stress checks for anything related to it either, even things that would scare an ordinary person. Eventually the form of their personality reasserts itself and the passion reemerges.
You gain that fear passion permanently, along with everything that entails. In Romana's case she can use it despite being burned out until her disorder paves over it.
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