Unnatural Entity: Matryoshka Parasite
Magick can’t interfere with free will. It is an iron-clad law of the universe that personal autonomy is inviolate. You can walk all the way up to the line - at worst you can give people impulses and emotions that aren’t their own or puppet their flesh - but you absolutely cannot make them choose.
However creepy ritualists, willworkers and your would-be mesmerist types don’t tend to like taking “no” for an answer. In the case of adepts that’s essentially their whole deal, applied to the universe at large. Most Svengali wannabes thankfully flounder in getting far enough to exercise any magickal powers of mental domination and the few that do usually content themselves with off-brand “I can’t believe it’s not mind control” compromises. Only a tiny fraction of the tiny fraction who have enough juice to try it aren’t satisfied with that and are obsessive enough to never let up, which is where matryoshka parasites come from.
It’s not quite an unstoppable force versus an immovable object. The universal law of “your will ends where other people’s begins” still outweighs any amount of arcane puissance but repeatedly slinging juice at someone’s soul makes a mess. In the rare instances where someone is repeatedly subjected to magickal attempts to suborn their free will over a prolonged period it builds up as a sort of residue. If the frequency is too low or the intent is inconsistent the worst that will happen is that the attempts will discharge as unnatural phenomenon. If the attempts are both frequent and consistent (over years) the residue can instead take root inside of them. When the host is asleep or unconscious it comes out to play.
Matryoshka are about a foot and a half shorter and roughly 50-100 pounds lighter than their host (give or take), but physically identical in all other respects except for the tattoos. Unzippering the host from waist to mid-chest they emerge from the torso like Mary Poppins pulling a coat rack out of her bag (it’s posited this is an extradimensional effect, matryoshka don’t take up room inside of the host while inactive or show up in medical examination). This is where things can go a bit wrong: the matryoshka is a faithful copy of the original with the only differences being that a) it’s not human and, b) it has the violation it was intended to embody written into its mind and flesh. Imagine waking up one day and sleepily dragging yourself out of what turns out to be a much larger clone and finding some weirdo’s desire literally tattooed into you as your primary imperative. People have awoken to find their torso hanging open (this does no physical damage, it’s just really freaky) and their traumatised, inked-up mini-me weeping in the corner.
In the cases where that doesn’t happen the parasite has two goals: whatever is scrawled across its skin and to re-enter the host when it’s done. It has a maximum of three days to do the latter, losing a third of its wound threshold every sunrise until it climbs back inside and zips you back up. Most of them will try to get their business done quickly enough to return undetected, to the point that multiple excursions working towards a single goal are a thing. In the case of success if the imperative was a one-off then congratulations, the parasite dissolves on re-entry and you’re free to cope with the fallout. Otherwise a successful indulgence will buy you one to three months until it happens again.
You could kill it before it gets back inside of you. This isn't physically hard, matryoshka are small and relatively feeble, but can be harrowing. The consequence is that this leaves your chest permanent hanging open, which can be held shut with clothing but you probably won’t want to visit the beach ever again. Exorcising it through some magickal midwifery is also rumoured to be an option. There’s apparently a duo of powerfully built, middle-aged women with a set of stolen artifact forceps roaming about doing just this in between bopping people on the head for making them. The rumour also says that they don’t ask before acting and no one knows what they do with the parasites afterwards.
Matryoshka Parasite, Unrequited Mind Control Clone
Wound Threshold: 30.
Mimic 15-90%: The matryoshka has all of the host’s identities, abilities, relationships, shock gauges, knowledge and so on. The only exceptions are supernatural identities and that it cannot use obsessions or passions to flip/flop or reroll. It’s also at a -20% shift on physical actions that would be negatively impacted by its smaller size.
Saturday 31 August 2019
Friday 30 August 2019
122 - Manny Ortiz, Occult Manufacturer
Manny Ortiz, Occult Manufacturer
Manny’s immaculate workshop, out by the highway with a giant wireframe rooster in the parking lot, is a place where dreams are made. An expert blacksmith, electrical engineer, leatherworker, carpenter, mason, gem cutter, glass blower and reasonably well acquainted with a dozen other trades, he has a savant’s grasp of anything that requires him to work with his hands. Not quite an artist, not quite a craftsman, he makes his living on custom orders of the weird and wonderful.
In between banging out R&D prototypes for small to mid-sized businesses and would-be inventors who are all thumbs, and doing antique restoration work, Manny has developed a sideline with a clientele that spans the occult underground of the three closest major cities. Manny makes weird ritual components without asking questions. Need a 4 foot mirror of polished obsidian? He can do it. Want an orrery made from carved bone? It’ll take a month or two with the backlog but he can manage. Need a maypole with ribbons of tanned human skin? He’ll probably need to make some substitutions to get that to happen.
Manny’s only real condition is that he doesn’t want anything to do with anything illegal. He’s not at all assertive or confrontational though so this is a line in the sand that has been heavily scuffed. He does however, bear grudges and people who take advantage of his obliging nature can expect him to secretly try to find a way to keep them from ever coming back if they won’t take no for an answer. "The Highwayman", a viaturge who had him fashion a functioning suit of plate armor from stolen road signs and licence plates is the most recent offender he’s trying to shoo away. If the abrasive adept won’t listen then the flaming sword he’s trying to commission from him is likely to blow up in his hands. He wouldn’t be the first person Manny has indirectly put down.
STATS
Personality: Friendly, meticulous and gorgeous, but a bit of a milquetoast. Manny comes across as both down to earth and looks like he stepped out of the pages of a magazine ad. So long as you stick to the script of how he likes to interact with people it stays that way. Deviate and he’ll struggle to manage the unexpected.
Rage: Anyone who brings trouble into his shop.
Noble: Something good can be made from just about anything, real or metaphorical.
Fear: Drowning. Manny nearly died when he fell off a pier as a kid. He still doesn’t know how to swim (Violence).
Obsession: Craftsmanship pushed to its limits.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Clean Cut 60% (Substitutes for Status, Substitutes for Fitness, Protects Self.)
Handy As Heck 75%* (Substitutes for Notice, Unique: Make Things, Unique: Fix Things.)
Shock Gauges
Manny’s immaculate workshop, out by the highway with a giant wireframe rooster in the parking lot, is a place where dreams are made. An expert blacksmith, electrical engineer, leatherworker, carpenter, mason, gem cutter, glass blower and reasonably well acquainted with a dozen other trades, he has a savant’s grasp of anything that requires him to work with his hands. Not quite an artist, not quite a craftsman, he makes his living on custom orders of the weird and wonderful.
In between banging out R&D prototypes for small to mid-sized businesses and would-be inventors who are all thumbs, and doing antique restoration work, Manny has developed a sideline with a clientele that spans the occult underground of the three closest major cities. Manny makes weird ritual components without asking questions. Need a 4 foot mirror of polished obsidian? He can do it. Want an orrery made from carved bone? It’ll take a month or two with the backlog but he can manage. Need a maypole with ribbons of tanned human skin? He’ll probably need to make some substitutions to get that to happen.
Manny’s only real condition is that he doesn’t want anything to do with anything illegal. He’s not at all assertive or confrontational though so this is a line in the sand that has been heavily scuffed. He does however, bear grudges and people who take advantage of his obliging nature can expect him to secretly try to find a way to keep them from ever coming back if they won’t take no for an answer. "The Highwayman", a viaturge who had him fashion a functioning suit of plate armor from stolen road signs and licence plates is the most recent offender he’s trying to shoo away. If the abrasive adept won’t listen then the flaming sword he’s trying to commission from him is likely to blow up in his hands. He wouldn’t be the first person Manny has indirectly put down.
STATS
Personality: Friendly, meticulous and gorgeous, but a bit of a milquetoast. Manny comes across as both down to earth and looks like he stepped out of the pages of a magazine ad. So long as you stick to the script of how he likes to interact with people it stays that way. Deviate and he’ll struggle to manage the unexpected.
Rage: Anyone who brings trouble into his shop.
Noble: Something good can be made from just about anything, real or metaphorical.
Fear: Drowning. Manny nearly died when he fell off a pier as a kid. He still doesn’t know how to swim (Violence).
Obsession: Craftsmanship pushed to its limits.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Clean Cut 60% (Substitutes for Status, Substitutes for Fitness, Protects Self.)
Handy As Heck 75%* (Substitutes for Notice, Unique: Make Things, Unique: Fix Things.)
Shock Gauges
Thursday 29 August 2019
121 - Heart of Glass
Artifact: Heart of Glass
Power: Major.
Description: A heart-shaped sculpture of stained glass in reds, blues and violets, refracting different shades depending on how the light hits it. Reinforced with wrought iron and about twice the size of a large man’s fist, it is surprisingly solid considering its materials. The aorta opens like a crystalline flower, if you hold it up to your ear like a conch shell you can hear a soft murmuring inside. Long time users will tell you the sound is comforting, like the soft pillow talk of a loving partner or the dulcet tones of a caring parent. If they’ll tell you anything about it at all.
Effect: The heart of glass loves you. It doesn’t know you yet but the soft, abiding affection it feels for you is unmistakable. To anyone with more than one failed notch in Isolation spending time listening to the heart feels like being embraced by a warm blanket.
It can remove notches from your Isolation meter at a rate of a hardened per week or a failed per fortnight. In return you develop a relationship with it at a rate of 5% per week of regular use. The relationship depends on your temperament and lack, people who are neurotically protective will likely make the heart their responsibility and hapless romantics will substitute it for their lack of a favourite. This relationship can be built like any other if you wish, although given the lack of clear communication it’s hard to do more than build shrines and creepily anthropomorphize the heart. Coercing it is impossible.
This relationship blocks you from developing that kind of connection with another person. If you have that kind of connection it supplants it. Further, if you neglect the heart for more than a week the notches come back at the same rate they departed. You can consciously repudiate this effect by failing a roll on the heart relationship, if you succeed the roll instead the relationship grows by 5%. This relationship caps out at 70%.
Power: Major.
Description: A heart-shaped sculpture of stained glass in reds, blues and violets, refracting different shades depending on how the light hits it. Reinforced with wrought iron and about twice the size of a large man’s fist, it is surprisingly solid considering its materials. The aorta opens like a crystalline flower, if you hold it up to your ear like a conch shell you can hear a soft murmuring inside. Long time users will tell you the sound is comforting, like the soft pillow talk of a loving partner or the dulcet tones of a caring parent. If they’ll tell you anything about it at all.
Effect: The heart of glass loves you. It doesn’t know you yet but the soft, abiding affection it feels for you is unmistakable. To anyone with more than one failed notch in Isolation spending time listening to the heart feels like being embraced by a warm blanket.
It can remove notches from your Isolation meter at a rate of a hardened per week or a failed per fortnight. In return you develop a relationship with it at a rate of 5% per week of regular use. The relationship depends on your temperament and lack, people who are neurotically protective will likely make the heart their responsibility and hapless romantics will substitute it for their lack of a favourite. This relationship can be built like any other if you wish, although given the lack of clear communication it’s hard to do more than build shrines and creepily anthropomorphize the heart. Coercing it is impossible.
This relationship blocks you from developing that kind of connection with another person. If you have that kind of connection it supplants it. Further, if you neglect the heart for more than a week the notches come back at the same rate they departed. You can consciously repudiate this effect by failing a roll on the heart relationship, if you succeed the roll instead the relationship grows by 5%. This relationship caps out at 70%.
There is only one way to pass the heart on so you're no longer dependent on it to stem the tide of loneliness. Form a relationship with someone, of the kind they would form with the heart, and raise its percentile to a level equal or greater to your heart relationship. Then gift it to them and sever all contact, effectively killing their relationship with you. If they take up the heart then you’re free of the regression effect and your relationship with it drops to zero.
If the heart of glass is ever broken all the notches it has gathered from you and everyone else come flooding back, even if you aren't the active user. The heart relationship also persists if you still have it, forever blocking you from making that kind of connection with another human being. At the GMs discretion specific types of therapy may clear this dead relationship at a rate of 5% per successful treatment. Alternatively magick may be used to the same effect.
If the heart of glass is ever broken all the notches it has gathered from you and everyone else come flooding back, even if you aren't the active user. The heart relationship also persists if you still have it, forever blocking you from making that kind of connection with another human being. At the GMs discretion specific types of therapy may clear this dead relationship at a rate of 5% per successful treatment. Alternatively magick may be used to the same effect.
Wednesday 28 August 2019
120 - Fairy Gold
Ritual: Fairy Gold
Cost: 2 significant charges.
Ritual Action: Take a sterling silver bell, a tall glass of unpasteurized milk mixed with three heaping tablespoons of sugar, two drops of mother’s tears and a tiny dash of bone marrow from a live man, and one of your most prized possessions. Something significant enough that it would cause you a stress check to see it destroyed.
Build a fire inside a ring of mushrooms (some versions say the ring has to be naturally occurring, but that isn’t actually important) and set the glass of milk, sugar, tears and marrow on a rock next to it one quarter turn anticlockwise from where you will be standing for the ritual. At twilight - dusk or dawn - recite a specific Gaelic incantation entreating blessing and protection from the sidhe, it’s lengthy. Really lengthy, it goes on for about 10 minutes. At its end throw the prized possession into the fire, tell it what you want, spend the charges and ring the bell seven times. Stay there and watch your possession burn completely without moving. If the ritual works, the glass of milk-mixture will empty as though someone invisible was drinking it through a straw.
Effect: Ash and smoke consolidates into the named object so long as it can be bought in your current locale for no more than $1,000 (no fooling this with false advertising or anything like that, only genuine opportunity need apply). You’ll have to fish it out of the fire without putting it out somehow as it only exists as long as it keeps burning (the fire won’t damage it fortunately). Once per day another object that would cause its owner a stress check to see destroyed must be fed to the fire, although this object need not belong to the ritual caster.
If the fire is kept burning without feeding it this way the object still persists. Instead of disappearing it falls apart into detritus the next time it is used: offal, manure, tinsel and confetti. This slight draws at least one faerie into the ritual caster’s life, to cause mischief and mayhem. Those spawned from still-births of the caster or someone close to them are the most likely to appear. Some casters deliberately use the ritual for this secondary effect, owing to the rejuvenating nature of devouring one of the fae. Few manage to do so consistently without suffering their collective ire as each subsequent casting draws an exponentially greater number.
Cost: 2 significant charges.
Ritual Action: Take a sterling silver bell, a tall glass of unpasteurized milk mixed with three heaping tablespoons of sugar, two drops of mother’s tears and a tiny dash of bone marrow from a live man, and one of your most prized possessions. Something significant enough that it would cause you a stress check to see it destroyed.
Build a fire inside a ring of mushrooms (some versions say the ring has to be naturally occurring, but that isn’t actually important) and set the glass of milk, sugar, tears and marrow on a rock next to it one quarter turn anticlockwise from where you will be standing for the ritual. At twilight - dusk or dawn - recite a specific Gaelic incantation entreating blessing and protection from the sidhe, it’s lengthy. Really lengthy, it goes on for about 10 minutes. At its end throw the prized possession into the fire, tell it what you want, spend the charges and ring the bell seven times. Stay there and watch your possession burn completely without moving. If the ritual works, the glass of milk-mixture will empty as though someone invisible was drinking it through a straw.
Effect: Ash and smoke consolidates into the named object so long as it can be bought in your current locale for no more than $1,000 (no fooling this with false advertising or anything like that, only genuine opportunity need apply). You’ll have to fish it out of the fire without putting it out somehow as it only exists as long as it keeps burning (the fire won’t damage it fortunately). Once per day another object that would cause its owner a stress check to see destroyed must be fed to the fire, although this object need not belong to the ritual caster.
If the fire is kept burning without feeding it this way the object still persists. Instead of disappearing it falls apart into detritus the next time it is used: offal, manure, tinsel and confetti. This slight draws at least one faerie into the ritual caster’s life, to cause mischief and mayhem. Those spawned from still-births of the caster or someone close to them are the most likely to appear. Some casters deliberately use the ritual for this secondary effect, owing to the rejuvenating nature of devouring one of the fae. Few manage to do so consistently without suffering their collective ire as each subsequent casting draws an exponentially greater number.
Tuesday 27 August 2019
119 - Sienna Wenz, Junk Scientist
GMC: Sienna Wenz, Junk Scientist
Easily distracted. That was the common refrain of all Sienna’s report cards growing up. Obviously gifted but a stargazer, her lackadaisical attitude to academic achievement bemused and disappointed every hopeful, would-be mentor that thought they could find a way to reach her and focus that clearly brilliant intellect. Worse, she alienated the rest of her teachers with her inability to stay focused on the intended subject matter in favour of wild tangents. Her precociousness would have had her labelled with a learning disability if it weren’t for the fact that she still performed well.
At college this lack of focus grew into a 15 year journey through over a dozen majors: industrial chemistry, archaeology, anaesthesiology, sports science, psychology and computer science, to name a few. It was a cycle. She would perform solidly, aggravate her professors to no end and eventually shift into a semester long sabbatical chasing after some harebrained oddity of the current field long held as disproven before switching majors. Lysenkoism, phlogiston theory, psychomotor patterning, her obsession with finding a kernel of truth in pseudoscience knew no end or boundaries. Eventually she got herself expelled for trying to recreate the Stanford Prison Experiment. Most people were surprised it took that long.
With little to her name and a temperament that made holding down a steady job a chore, Sienna strayed into petty crime and larceny before her intelligence and chemistry background brought her into the world of drug manufacturing. As something that allows her a certain degree of financial freedom without having to play by most of societies’ rules it’s the first thing that’s really held her attention for long. There have been narrow misses and harrowing experiences in the two years she’s been doing it, but overall she tells herself it’s superior to her alternatives.
It also allows her the opportunity to pursue independent study. In her warehouse squat there are a dozen failing experiments and variations of past attempts running at any one time. The odd thing is that they occasionally bear fruit they shouldn’t. A brief successful replication of cold fusion and the spontaneous generation of maggots in spoiled food, she’s not quite sure yet how she got either result but they've emboldened her to keep trying. It’s only a matter of time before she considers the role of human will as an activator and falls headlong into pseudoscientific magick.
STATS
Personality: Sienna can never let any weird theory go. Undermining her intelligence is a certainty that nothing - no idea - can exist without at least some basis in truth. She can’t rest until she vindicates them all.
Rage: Different =/= wrong. People blinker themselves too quickly and miss so much because it’s easier to cling to what they think they know.
Noble: People trying to get clean. Sienna recognizes the damage addiction can do. She’ll do what she can to help people who genuinely want to change.
Fear: That her obsession has destroyed her potential (Self).
Obsession: Finding scientific breakthroughs in discarded theories.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Junk Scientist 60%* (Substitutes for Knowledge, Substitutes for Notice, Protects Unnatural.)
Meth Cook 40% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Protects Violence, Protects Self.)
Mad Science 20% (Versatility, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Easily distracted. That was the common refrain of all Sienna’s report cards growing up. Obviously gifted but a stargazer, her lackadaisical attitude to academic achievement bemused and disappointed every hopeful, would-be mentor that thought they could find a way to reach her and focus that clearly brilliant intellect. Worse, she alienated the rest of her teachers with her inability to stay focused on the intended subject matter in favour of wild tangents. Her precociousness would have had her labelled with a learning disability if it weren’t for the fact that she still performed well.
At college this lack of focus grew into a 15 year journey through over a dozen majors: industrial chemistry, archaeology, anaesthesiology, sports science, psychology and computer science, to name a few. It was a cycle. She would perform solidly, aggravate her professors to no end and eventually shift into a semester long sabbatical chasing after some harebrained oddity of the current field long held as disproven before switching majors. Lysenkoism, phlogiston theory, psychomotor patterning, her obsession with finding a kernel of truth in pseudoscience knew no end or boundaries. Eventually she got herself expelled for trying to recreate the Stanford Prison Experiment. Most people were surprised it took that long.
With little to her name and a temperament that made holding down a steady job a chore, Sienna strayed into petty crime and larceny before her intelligence and chemistry background brought her into the world of drug manufacturing. As something that allows her a certain degree of financial freedom without having to play by most of societies’ rules it’s the first thing that’s really held her attention for long. There have been narrow misses and harrowing experiences in the two years she’s been doing it, but overall she tells herself it’s superior to her alternatives.
It also allows her the opportunity to pursue independent study. In her warehouse squat there are a dozen failing experiments and variations of past attempts running at any one time. The odd thing is that they occasionally bear fruit they shouldn’t. A brief successful replication of cold fusion and the spontaneous generation of maggots in spoiled food, she’s not quite sure yet how she got either result but they've emboldened her to keep trying. It’s only a matter of time before she considers the role of human will as an activator and falls headlong into pseudoscientific magick.
STATS
Personality: Sienna can never let any weird theory go. Undermining her intelligence is a certainty that nothing - no idea - can exist without at least some basis in truth. She can’t rest until she vindicates them all.
Rage: Different =/= wrong. People blinker themselves too quickly and miss so much because it’s easier to cling to what they think they know.
Noble: People trying to get clean. Sienna recognizes the damage addiction can do. She’ll do what she can to help people who genuinely want to change.
Fear: That her obsession has destroyed her potential (Self).
Obsession: Finding scientific breakthroughs in discarded theories.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Junk Scientist 60%* (Substitutes for Knowledge, Substitutes for Notice, Protects Unnatural.)
Meth Cook 40% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Protects Violence, Protects Self.)
Mad Science 20% (Versatility, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Monday 26 August 2019
118 - Gorgon Mask, Mutineer's Cutlass and Razor Candy
Artifact: Gorgon Mask
Power: Minor.
Description: A cheap, plastic Halloween mask depicting the snake haired Medusa. The inside is slick and greasy to the touch, like an egg white, but leaves no residue on anything. While you're wearing it everything smells like the rotten-egg stench of hydrogen sulfide.
Effect: Wearing the mask causes you to inflict a rank 3 Unnatural stress check on anyone you see, if they fail the check the only option available to them is to freeze as long as you are present (maxing out at 10 minutes). You can only control who this takes effect on by limiting your vision, if you see someone it activates automatically. The mask also works on you, should you catch sight of your image (reflection, CCTV, etc.) while wearing it.
Gorgon masks have 6 charges, expending one for every person affected. Once this has been depleted it becomes a normal mask unless recharged. This is done by leaving it out all night under the moonlight on Halloween submerged in a bowl of curdled milk.
Artifact: Mutineer’s Cutlass
Power: Significant.
Description: A plastic cutlass from a child’s pirate costume set. It comes with a baldric sheath that’s uncomfortably small on most adults. It also comes with a little skull-and-crossbones hat, but you don’t really need to wear that too. Go nuts if you want though.
Effect: To use the artifact find yourself a captain avatar and put it on. Take them hostage and tie them up, gloat, make lots of piratey threats and establish your taking over their command. So long as they remain bound you have access to their avatar identity as though you were them at a -20% shift (the shift does not effect access to channels). For all intents and purposes their crew becomes your crew. If you were a part of their crew there is no negative shift on the stolen avatar powers.
If the captured avatar dies, gets free of their bonds or you lose the cutlass the effect ends. You also risk your new authority whenever you do something that would count as taboo, so keep the crew in line. If something does breach taboo the captain that you’re pirating off of can escape their confinement with a successful avatar roll (no negative shift on this).
Artifact: Razor Candy
Power: Minor.
Description: A no-brand bag of wrapped candy, depicted as mixed with what looks like a pile of razor blades on the blurry plastic packaging (there are a bunch of weird, non-sequitur warnings in the fine print too but most people miss those). Unwrapped they look like lumps of caramel and taste like Tylenol. There’s about 15-20 pieces in every bag.
Effect: Eat more than five pieces and you’ll think you’ve been poisoned. Nausea, sweats, dizziness, it’s a rank 4 Helplessness check. There’s nothing actually wrong with you, it’s all psychosomatic and clears up soon after you seek out any kind of medical treatment. Or after 24 hours if you’re a stubborn cuss about avoiding hospitals.
Power: Minor.
Description: A cheap, plastic Halloween mask depicting the snake haired Medusa. The inside is slick and greasy to the touch, like an egg white, but leaves no residue on anything. While you're wearing it everything smells like the rotten-egg stench of hydrogen sulfide.
Effect: Wearing the mask causes you to inflict a rank 3 Unnatural stress check on anyone you see, if they fail the check the only option available to them is to freeze as long as you are present (maxing out at 10 minutes). You can only control who this takes effect on by limiting your vision, if you see someone it activates automatically. The mask also works on you, should you catch sight of your image (reflection, CCTV, etc.) while wearing it.
Gorgon masks have 6 charges, expending one for every person affected. Once this has been depleted it becomes a normal mask unless recharged. This is done by leaving it out all night under the moonlight on Halloween submerged in a bowl of curdled milk.
Artifact: Mutineer’s Cutlass
Power: Significant.
Description: A plastic cutlass from a child’s pirate costume set. It comes with a baldric sheath that’s uncomfortably small on most adults. It also comes with a little skull-and-crossbones hat, but you don’t really need to wear that too. Go nuts if you want though.
Effect: To use the artifact find yourself a captain avatar and put it on. Take them hostage and tie them up, gloat, make lots of piratey threats and establish your taking over their command. So long as they remain bound you have access to their avatar identity as though you were them at a -20% shift (the shift does not effect access to channels). For all intents and purposes their crew becomes your crew. If you were a part of their crew there is no negative shift on the stolen avatar powers.
If the captured avatar dies, gets free of their bonds or you lose the cutlass the effect ends. You also risk your new authority whenever you do something that would count as taboo, so keep the crew in line. If something does breach taboo the captain that you’re pirating off of can escape their confinement with a successful avatar roll (no negative shift on this).
Artifact: Razor Candy
Power: Minor.
Description: A no-brand bag of wrapped candy, depicted as mixed with what looks like a pile of razor blades on the blurry plastic packaging (there are a bunch of weird, non-sequitur warnings in the fine print too but most people miss those). Unwrapped they look like lumps of caramel and taste like Tylenol. There’s about 15-20 pieces in every bag.
Effect: Eat more than five pieces and you’ll think you’ve been poisoned. Nausea, sweats, dizziness, it’s a rank 4 Helplessness check. There’s nothing actually wrong with you, it’s all psychosomatic and clears up soon after you seek out any kind of medical treatment. Or after 24 hours if you’re a stubborn cuss about avoiding hospitals.
Sunday 25 August 2019
117 - Sub-Project Candy Onion
Cabal: Sub-Project Candy Onion
“The way I see it human belief in these things effects the world in a very real way. Think of it like a pearl formed around a grain of sand. A gradual irritation pushing ceaselessly at the fabric of the universe. In most cases - as with the formation of a pearl - this does nothing, but with certain deluded and obsessive types the pressure is too much to ignore.
So something happens, nothing big. Maybe a cow gets torn up. Some crops get pushed down. Lights in the sky.
Only this doesn't relieve the pressure, with reinforcement it only mounts. Obsessives reach out to one another and form cliques. Even the public perception of UFO nuts as crazies keeps the idea accessible to people on the edge of society. Gradually, like an embolism, that grain of sand grows into a shiny, glossy tear in what the public sees as reality. Grays, abducting and mutilating people on the back of the psychic resonance these people are generating. I don’t know if they’re real entities baited in from some other planet or dimension, if they’re psychic projections, or something else entirely. It doesn’t make a difference. Certainly didn’t make one to those dead ranchers.
If you don’t believe me then you explain why this is happening.”
- Charlie Tusk, Interview Tape #022, May 14th 1983
Washington, 1947. A pilot witnesses nine glowing objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier. The government explains this event as a mirage and the term ‘flying saucer’ is coined by the press.
Roswell, 1947. Pieces of a weather balloon fall to Earth in the New Mexico desert, the story of it being an alien craft captures the public imagination for decades to come.
Desert Center, 1952. The head of a small occult commune claims to have made contact with alien visitors from Venus in the California desert. His claims are widely disputed.
The mid-20th century gave birth to the phenomenon of the UFO. The tension between disenchantment at an increasingly rational world and enchantment at the pace of technological development making anything seem possible resolved through cold war tensions and fear of the outsider. Even staid government agencies - in the form of USAF Project Blue Book (formerly Signal and Grudge) - became part of the tapestry. The myth of “men in black” who would show up to ask pointed and threatening questions, disappear inconvenient evidence and secretly collude with the little green men.
The dry reality - at least at the beginning - was that categorising and investigating unexplained aerial phenomena was a matter of national security and could potentially provide valuable information for aerospace development and the security of active research. Spurious public perception and bureaucratic indifference ground this down into a culture of complacency and withdrawal which eventually saw the programs shuttered, but one side project bore strange fruit and grew into its own twisted reflection of the original work while managing to survive its erasure: Sub-project Candy Onion.
Candy Onion was a disinformation program intended to take advantage of public UFO perception. In order to conceal the reality of experimental aircraft and weapons research why not encourage the emerging alien mythology and control it in ways that would provide a camouflaging advantage? It was a small outfit, but successful. At its inception its head, Captain Barry Campbell, was in charge of two other airmen and a secretary who shared cramped offices at the back of a New Mexico air base which grew to five times as many staff at the heyday of their operations. Candy Onion staged false alien encounters, gave cover to the testing and recovery of downed experimental equipment and encouraged UFO cults to spread their message. It was through this last practice that Campbell came into contact with Charlie Tusk.
Charlie didn’t seem like your average UFO looney, he was well-spoken, considered and didn’t believe in aliens. As a cliomancer, his area of intense interest was how other people believed in them. He interpreted conspiracy as modern mythology and knowing a lot of people in the subculture Charlie had access no one else did. It’s not clear exactly what arrangement he and Campbell came to but he avoided prison for trespassing through a military base and in return became Barry’s mole and inside man in developing these groups as effective patsies and misdirection. What wasn’t expected was for Charlie to run across real aliens.
In an abandoned New Mexico trailer park the two grey-skinned, black oval-eyed carcasses he found dead and mouldering under a tarp lasted just long enough for Campbell to watch them deteriorate into slush before his eyes. Having followed a breathless phone call from Charlie, who had been working with a cult believing they were descendants of ancient astronauts trying to phone home, he wanted an explanation he could stomach. Shaken, Charlie told him how the aliens had arrived when prophesied and been shot at by the jumpier members. Still in shock he started trying to explain magick. Disbelieving and disgusted, Campbell kicked him to the curb.
Then it happened again the year after. And again and again. Corpses that turned into puddles of ammonia and silicon and technology that turned into non-functioning junk within hours of being handled. In one case a hovering hubcap the size of a bus made the papers and it all landed in Campbell’s lap one way or another. Then three rural households wound up dead, riddled with cleanly cut, swiss cheese holes and it seemed like aliens were to blame.
Exasperated by evidence that would evaporate before he could get it into a lab, Campbell tracked Charlie down and the adept excitedly explained how he’d discovered that these occurrences were a direct result of what they’d been doing all along. That these encouraged UFO groups were somehow psychically responsible for the aliens. Overjoyed, Charlie bounced through a dozen variations on themes that involved thoughtforms, interdimensional psychic beings and collective belief-based power in his interview tapes. He magickally demonstrated the reality of these things to Campbell and talked about what they could do with it, how they could study it and how it could be controlled and weaponized by steering these people. Campbell nodded, kept his cool and then late one night he held a pillow over Charlie’s face and shot him at his isolated Arizona bungalow.
Sickened by the evidence of his complicity in the deaths of his countrymen and limited by his inability to provide proof to higher-ups Campbell secretly resolved to conceal and control the phenomenon. The idea of the concept spreading and the potential chaos and destruction it could cause was not something he was willing to conscience or share with the chain of command. Schooled in deception and bureaucracy, the well-connected officer misappropriated, lied and inveigled his group into a new kind of organisation. One that would secretly keep people safe from this scourge using the same tools he'd perfected to inadvertently encourage it.
By some miracle Sub-project Candy Onion still exists in a forgotten corner of the gigantic US military budget, surviving the shuffle of post-9/11 restructuring and organisation. Ostensibly its role is the same as it has always been with the added touch of being used to teach counterintelligence techniques to newly recruited air force intelligence officers in an inconsequential environment.
Disinformation is still the name of the game, the three people the now retired Campbell let in on his secret steer what control they have over the UFO narrative into keeping believer groups small and destabilised without tipping them off to government interference. Occasionally more direct action is needed. Only one of them has spilled blood and the consensus is that’s too risky outside of an emergency. More often an ascendant prophet claiming to be from Alpha Centauri gets busted with drugs or explosives in his car. To this cabal keeping a low profile is the best tool they have for keeping everyone safe.
“The way I see it human belief in these things effects the world in a very real way. Think of it like a pearl formed around a grain of sand. A gradual irritation pushing ceaselessly at the fabric of the universe. In most cases - as with the formation of a pearl - this does nothing, but with certain deluded and obsessive types the pressure is too much to ignore.
So something happens, nothing big. Maybe a cow gets torn up. Some crops get pushed down. Lights in the sky.
Only this doesn't relieve the pressure, with reinforcement it only mounts. Obsessives reach out to one another and form cliques. Even the public perception of UFO nuts as crazies keeps the idea accessible to people on the edge of society. Gradually, like an embolism, that grain of sand grows into a shiny, glossy tear in what the public sees as reality. Grays, abducting and mutilating people on the back of the psychic resonance these people are generating. I don’t know if they’re real entities baited in from some other planet or dimension, if they’re psychic projections, or something else entirely. It doesn’t make a difference. Certainly didn’t make one to those dead ranchers.
If you don’t believe me then you explain why this is happening.”
- Charlie Tusk, Interview Tape #022, May 14th 1983
Washington, 1947. A pilot witnesses nine glowing objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier. The government explains this event as a mirage and the term ‘flying saucer’ is coined by the press.
Roswell, 1947. Pieces of a weather balloon fall to Earth in the New Mexico desert, the story of it being an alien craft captures the public imagination for decades to come.
Desert Center, 1952. The head of a small occult commune claims to have made contact with alien visitors from Venus in the California desert. His claims are widely disputed.
The mid-20th century gave birth to the phenomenon of the UFO. The tension between disenchantment at an increasingly rational world and enchantment at the pace of technological development making anything seem possible resolved through cold war tensions and fear of the outsider. Even staid government agencies - in the form of USAF Project Blue Book (formerly Signal and Grudge) - became part of the tapestry. The myth of “men in black” who would show up to ask pointed and threatening questions, disappear inconvenient evidence and secretly collude with the little green men.
The dry reality - at least at the beginning - was that categorising and investigating unexplained aerial phenomena was a matter of national security and could potentially provide valuable information for aerospace development and the security of active research. Spurious public perception and bureaucratic indifference ground this down into a culture of complacency and withdrawal which eventually saw the programs shuttered, but one side project bore strange fruit and grew into its own twisted reflection of the original work while managing to survive its erasure: Sub-project Candy Onion.
Candy Onion was a disinformation program intended to take advantage of public UFO perception. In order to conceal the reality of experimental aircraft and weapons research why not encourage the emerging alien mythology and control it in ways that would provide a camouflaging advantage? It was a small outfit, but successful. At its inception its head, Captain Barry Campbell, was in charge of two other airmen and a secretary who shared cramped offices at the back of a New Mexico air base which grew to five times as many staff at the heyday of their operations. Candy Onion staged false alien encounters, gave cover to the testing and recovery of downed experimental equipment and encouraged UFO cults to spread their message. It was through this last practice that Campbell came into contact with Charlie Tusk.
Charlie didn’t seem like your average UFO looney, he was well-spoken, considered and didn’t believe in aliens. As a cliomancer, his area of intense interest was how other people believed in them. He interpreted conspiracy as modern mythology and knowing a lot of people in the subculture Charlie had access no one else did. It’s not clear exactly what arrangement he and Campbell came to but he avoided prison for trespassing through a military base and in return became Barry’s mole and inside man in developing these groups as effective patsies and misdirection. What wasn’t expected was for Charlie to run across real aliens.
In an abandoned New Mexico trailer park the two grey-skinned, black oval-eyed carcasses he found dead and mouldering under a tarp lasted just long enough for Campbell to watch them deteriorate into slush before his eyes. Having followed a breathless phone call from Charlie, who had been working with a cult believing they were descendants of ancient astronauts trying to phone home, he wanted an explanation he could stomach. Shaken, Charlie told him how the aliens had arrived when prophesied and been shot at by the jumpier members. Still in shock he started trying to explain magick. Disbelieving and disgusted, Campbell kicked him to the curb.
Then it happened again the year after. And again and again. Corpses that turned into puddles of ammonia and silicon and technology that turned into non-functioning junk within hours of being handled. In one case a hovering hubcap the size of a bus made the papers and it all landed in Campbell’s lap one way or another. Then three rural households wound up dead, riddled with cleanly cut, swiss cheese holes and it seemed like aliens were to blame.
Exasperated by evidence that would evaporate before he could get it into a lab, Campbell tracked Charlie down and the adept excitedly explained how he’d discovered that these occurrences were a direct result of what they’d been doing all along. That these encouraged UFO groups were somehow psychically responsible for the aliens. Overjoyed, Charlie bounced through a dozen variations on themes that involved thoughtforms, interdimensional psychic beings and collective belief-based power in his interview tapes. He magickally demonstrated the reality of these things to Campbell and talked about what they could do with it, how they could study it and how it could be controlled and weaponized by steering these people. Campbell nodded, kept his cool and then late one night he held a pillow over Charlie’s face and shot him at his isolated Arizona bungalow.
Sickened by the evidence of his complicity in the deaths of his countrymen and limited by his inability to provide proof to higher-ups Campbell secretly resolved to conceal and control the phenomenon. The idea of the concept spreading and the potential chaos and destruction it could cause was not something he was willing to conscience or share with the chain of command. Schooled in deception and bureaucracy, the well-connected officer misappropriated, lied and inveigled his group into a new kind of organisation. One that would secretly keep people safe from this scourge using the same tools he'd perfected to inadvertently encourage it.
By some miracle Sub-project Candy Onion still exists in a forgotten corner of the gigantic US military budget, surviving the shuffle of post-9/11 restructuring and organisation. Ostensibly its role is the same as it has always been with the added touch of being used to teach counterintelligence techniques to newly recruited air force intelligence officers in an inconsequential environment.
Disinformation is still the name of the game, the three people the now retired Campbell let in on his secret steer what control they have over the UFO narrative into keeping believer groups small and destabilised without tipping them off to government interference. Occasionally more direct action is needed. Only one of them has spilled blood and the consensus is that’s too risky outside of an emergency. More often an ascendant prophet claiming to be from Alpha Centauri gets busted with drugs or explosives in his car. To this cabal keeping a low profile is the best tool they have for keeping everyone safe.
Saturday 24 August 2019
116 - Max McElhannon, Agrimancer Activist
GMC: Max McElhannon, Agrimancer Activist
In prehistory humanity lived in small, tribal groups. Work was broadly shared and specialized roles were limited by both size and complexity of these proto-societies. Then hunting gave way to farming livestock and agriculture which in turn allowed for the development of larger groups, more complex technology, conflicts and ideas. The early mastery of environmental ills allowed people to turn their back on the truth of their base needs. It built the city.
The city doesn’t need you know how to be a hunter-gatherer, it doesn’t need you to understand where your food comes from at all. It merely asks is that you be a cog in its system, a specialized part filling a need in the whole so that the machinery can function. It asks you to forget taming the chaos of nature and instead tames you. It’s this distinction that separates agrimancers from urbanomancers, to the latter the former are primitives - clinging to outmoded vestiges of ancient living - and to the former the latter are whipped servants of false idols who have given themselves away.
Max McElhannon has some different ideas, he picks around the edges of urban failure. In cities where the machinery of society has broken down and people either won’t, can’t or don’t understand how to repair it he offers an alternative. Self-sufficient living, vertical farming and raising social consciousness of how people control and exist in their environments, he helps people retake what he sees as the abandoned frontier of urban decay by hearkening to the past. In some places its caught on like wildfire, in others he’s run up against learned helplessness, city ordinances and occult opposition.
Before that happened Max wasn’t really aware that there was more magick out there than his own brand of adept sorcery, which he had simply taken as metaphysical support for his neo-traditional worldview. Running afoul of urbanomancers and true kings has stoked his resolve. As he sees it in the same way that urban living has failed the people he tries to reach these magi act as parasites who prey on the downtrodden and disaffected for their own power. Naturally this has earned him some enemies and he has to move around a lot to avoid trouble. It’s also brought him allies and relationships with people who are at least hopeful that they can use him in their own schemes.
In prehistory humanity lived in small, tribal groups. Work was broadly shared and specialized roles were limited by both size and complexity of these proto-societies. Then hunting gave way to farming livestock and agriculture which in turn allowed for the development of larger groups, more complex technology, conflicts and ideas. The early mastery of environmental ills allowed people to turn their back on the truth of their base needs. It built the city.
The city doesn’t need you know how to be a hunter-gatherer, it doesn’t need you to understand where your food comes from at all. It merely asks is that you be a cog in its system, a specialized part filling a need in the whole so that the machinery can function. It asks you to forget taming the chaos of nature and instead tames you. It’s this distinction that separates agrimancers from urbanomancers, to the latter the former are primitives - clinging to outmoded vestiges of ancient living - and to the former the latter are whipped servants of false idols who have given themselves away.
Max McElhannon has some different ideas, he picks around the edges of urban failure. In cities where the machinery of society has broken down and people either won’t, can’t or don’t understand how to repair it he offers an alternative. Self-sufficient living, vertical farming and raising social consciousness of how people control and exist in their environments, he helps people retake what he sees as the abandoned frontier of urban decay by hearkening to the past. In some places its caught on like wildfire, in others he’s run up against learned helplessness, city ordinances and occult opposition.
Before that happened Max wasn’t really aware that there was more magick out there than his own brand of adept sorcery, which he had simply taken as metaphysical support for his neo-traditional worldview. Running afoul of urbanomancers and true kings has stoked his resolve. As he sees it in the same way that urban living has failed the people he tries to reach these magi act as parasites who prey on the downtrodden and disaffected for their own power. Naturally this has earned him some enemies and he has to move around a lot to avoid trouble. It’s also brought him allies and relationships with people who are at least hopeful that they can use him in their own schemes.
For now he travels between the cities, where the co-ops and aid agencies he helped found and gave his expertise to are located, in his battered white van with his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Mandy Wiggins. Mandy - a motumancer - admires his optimism and pluck in standing up against entrenched disenfranchisement but thinks he’s just shackling people a different way with all the old-fashioned living baggage. He adores her fighting spirit but thinks she strays too far into pointless, anti-social nihilism. They fight about it, a lot. In fact it’s this conflict that makes them so into each other. If either of them has a weakness it’s their connection and given their squabbling it’s only a matter of time until someone exploits it.
STATS
Personality: Hopeful, folksy and smart. Max has taken full advantage of the fruits of advanced education offered by civilization in the same way he asks others to value understanding things beyond their own narrow life-roles.
Rage: Parasites. It’s one thing to live off the land, it’s another to live off of people.
Noble: Teaching people to fend for themselves.
Fear: Replacement of people with inhuman machinery. Max can use technology but things like automated checkouts make his skin crawl (Helplessness).
Obsession: Carry the torch of humanity's birthright and spread the fire.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Self-Sufficiency Activist 70% (Substitutes for Connect, Substitutes for Knowledge, Protects Helplessness.)
Agrimancer 50%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
STATS
Personality: Hopeful, folksy and smart. Max has taken full advantage of the fruits of advanced education offered by civilization in the same way he asks others to value understanding things beyond their own narrow life-roles.
Rage: Parasites. It’s one thing to live off the land, it’s another to live off of people.
Noble: Teaching people to fend for themselves.
Fear: Replacement of people with inhuman machinery. Max can use technology but things like automated checkouts make his skin crawl (Helplessness).
Obsession: Carry the torch of humanity's birthright and spread the fire.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Self-Sufficiency Activist 70% (Substitutes for Connect, Substitutes for Knowledge, Protects Helplessness.)
Agrimancer 50%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Friday 23 August 2019
115 - Cardboard Phylactery
Artifact: Cardboard Phylactery
Power: Significant.
Description: Cardboard phylacteries have no singular form but are fashioned from the cheap and disposable commercial rubbish intended to express and commemorate important events in people’s lives. Anniversary cards, baby books, those big wooden birthday keys, all junk for marking milestones and showing each other how much we care. Only commercially made items cut it, it’s very nice if your daughter made your wife a mother’s day card but that doesn’t count. Purchased for people who passed before they could be given or used, they are invested with a degree of that lost life just waiting for someone else to take shelter inside of it.
People who know what these are usually find them disgusting or want to know where they can get one. Or both.
Effect: Put a drop of blood on or into a cardboard phylactery and it will act as a proxy (see page 180 of Book 1: Play, you may only have one such proxy at a time), this effect wanes over time but can be refreshed with a weekly top up. It works as long as you are carrying the phylactery on your person. It deflects magick as normal. If the holder dies then there is a 50% chance they are spared and the phylactery is destroyed instead.
Shoving part of your soul into a piece of cheap tat doesn’t do it any favours. For every month, or part thereof if the connection is broken, you spend in this awkward position it atrophies. For each month lose either 5% from a supernatural identity or 20% from a relationship as the ineffable parts that make you human struggle to survive in the chintzy, factory-manufactured receptacle of human spirit. Further, if your phylactery is destroyed there is a 50% chance that its destruction kills you. Worryingly, most of them are very fragile and unlike the protective aspects this does not require you to be holding on to it at the time. Someone who gets a hold of your phylactery may use it to cast magick on you as though you were present.
Power: Significant.
Description: Cardboard phylacteries have no singular form but are fashioned from the cheap and disposable commercial rubbish intended to express and commemorate important events in people’s lives. Anniversary cards, baby books, those big wooden birthday keys, all junk for marking milestones and showing each other how much we care. Only commercially made items cut it, it’s very nice if your daughter made your wife a mother’s day card but that doesn’t count. Purchased for people who passed before they could be given or used, they are invested with a degree of that lost life just waiting for someone else to take shelter inside of it.
People who know what these are usually find them disgusting or want to know where they can get one. Or both.
Effect: Put a drop of blood on or into a cardboard phylactery and it will act as a proxy (see page 180 of Book 1: Play, you may only have one such proxy at a time), this effect wanes over time but can be refreshed with a weekly top up. It works as long as you are carrying the phylactery on your person. It deflects magick as normal. If the holder dies then there is a 50% chance they are spared and the phylactery is destroyed instead.
Shoving part of your soul into a piece of cheap tat doesn’t do it any favours. For every month, or part thereof if the connection is broken, you spend in this awkward position it atrophies. For each month lose either 5% from a supernatural identity or 20% from a relationship as the ineffable parts that make you human struggle to survive in the chintzy, factory-manufactured receptacle of human spirit. Further, if your phylactery is destroyed there is a 50% chance that its destruction kills you. Worryingly, most of them are very fragile and unlike the protective aspects this does not require you to be holding on to it at the time. Someone who gets a hold of your phylactery may use it to cast magick on you as though you were present.
Someone who has their death diverted through a cardboard phylactery once cannot use one ever again or be subject to any kind of proxy effect. Surviving the experience breaks something irreplaceable and necessary to the process.
Thursday 22 August 2019
114 - The Worm That Eats
Unnatural Entity: The Worm That Eats
"Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head."
- H.P Lovecraft, The Festival
Gluttony is excessive consumption that deprives another of life-giving necessity. It is malignant primacy of personal pleasure and greed that starves those in its wake, like a cancer. It says "my hunger has dominion over you" as it snuffs them out before turning on its owner. That's the criteria for creation of a worm that eats: someone's excessive appetites, appetites which defined them, must have killed or destroyed others before devouring them in turn. While food is the first thing that usually comes to mind when gluttony is mentioned it isn't limited to the gastronomic, drugs, sex, gambling or any other voracious esurience equally qualifies.
Unlike demons, worms aren't the product of unfulfilled obsession, they are the obsession filled past bursting. Buoyed by the death it has caused and darkly reflected in the decay and consumption of its vessel, the hunger refuses to rest. It twists the graveworms, bacteria and carrion feeders (one bizarre example was made mostly out of vultures) who feast on the dead glutton into a rough, bipedal approximation of their image and sends it out to eat again.
Vestigial elements of the original personality persist but worms aren't their parent. They only want to consume in ways that are harmful to others and batten on the resulting suffering. All else is deception. When fat and sleek with other's deprivation they are intelligent and crafty, even charming in the limited ways they have to communicate. They disguise their inhuman nature with heavy clothing and masks, manifesting their power to draw in the vulnerable (once per day an uninjured worm can broadcast a compulsion over 3 miles to someone that shares its appetites, rank 4 stress check on an appropriate gauge if they choose to resist). Only when heavily damaged do these personality vestiges come to the fore. Trying to remember how to fill the yawning abyss inside itself, a wounded worm will idiotically retread the old haunts and habits of its progenitor, starving and barely bothering to hide its nature.
Ultimately bottomless, the hunger will eventually consume itself. The question is how many others will it eat first.
The Worm That Eats, Dead Hunger Walking
Wound Threshold: 50+. Worms start out with normal human wound threshold, but this increases over time as it eats. A byproduct of this means that a worm requires more to sustain itself the greater it becomes and eventually this is unsustainable. Every day a worm takes damage equal to 1/10th of its maximum wounds out of autocannibalism, although this can be mitigated by feeding. Firearms usually do hand-to-hand damage since it doesn't have vital organs, but the GM may allow exceptions.
Feed 100%: Roll this identity when a worm's indulgence seriously harms somebody (mentally or physically), adding the sum of a successful roll to its wound threshold. If they died add 10 points. If this takes it above its maximum then the maximum increases to accommodate. For every point of damage a worm has sustained, this identity takes an equal negative shift. Eventually, unable to feed itself enough, a worm will inevitably collapse.
Echo 25+3d10%: Something of their original life, usually ignored.
Carrionform 60%: This identity covers abilities unique to the make up of a given worm. One made out of maggots could use it to slide under a door or the aforementioned vulture-worm could use it to fly - clumsily. Capped at wound threshold.
"Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head."
- H.P Lovecraft, The Festival
Gluttony is excessive consumption that deprives another of life-giving necessity. It is malignant primacy of personal pleasure and greed that starves those in its wake, like a cancer. It says "my hunger has dominion over you" as it snuffs them out before turning on its owner. That's the criteria for creation of a worm that eats: someone's excessive appetites, appetites which defined them, must have killed or destroyed others before devouring them in turn. While food is the first thing that usually comes to mind when gluttony is mentioned it isn't limited to the gastronomic, drugs, sex, gambling or any other voracious esurience equally qualifies.
Unlike demons, worms aren't the product of unfulfilled obsession, they are the obsession filled past bursting. Buoyed by the death it has caused and darkly reflected in the decay and consumption of its vessel, the hunger refuses to rest. It twists the graveworms, bacteria and carrion feeders (one bizarre example was made mostly out of vultures) who feast on the dead glutton into a rough, bipedal approximation of their image and sends it out to eat again.
Vestigial elements of the original personality persist but worms aren't their parent. They only want to consume in ways that are harmful to others and batten on the resulting suffering. All else is deception. When fat and sleek with other's deprivation they are intelligent and crafty, even charming in the limited ways they have to communicate. They disguise their inhuman nature with heavy clothing and masks, manifesting their power to draw in the vulnerable (once per day an uninjured worm can broadcast a compulsion over 3 miles to someone that shares its appetites, rank 4 stress check on an appropriate gauge if they choose to resist). Only when heavily damaged do these personality vestiges come to the fore. Trying to remember how to fill the yawning abyss inside itself, a wounded worm will idiotically retread the old haunts and habits of its progenitor, starving and barely bothering to hide its nature.
Ultimately bottomless, the hunger will eventually consume itself. The question is how many others will it eat first.
The Worm That Eats, Dead Hunger Walking
Wound Threshold: 50+. Worms start out with normal human wound threshold, but this increases over time as it eats. A byproduct of this means that a worm requires more to sustain itself the greater it becomes and eventually this is unsustainable. Every day a worm takes damage equal to 1/10th of its maximum wounds out of autocannibalism, although this can be mitigated by feeding. Firearms usually do hand-to-hand damage since it doesn't have vital organs, but the GM may allow exceptions.
Feed 100%: Roll this identity when a worm's indulgence seriously harms somebody (mentally or physically), adding the sum of a successful roll to its wound threshold. If they died add 10 points. If this takes it above its maximum then the maximum increases to accommodate. For every point of damage a worm has sustained, this identity takes an equal negative shift. Eventually, unable to feed itself enough, a worm will inevitably collapse.
Echo 25+3d10%: Something of their original life, usually ignored.
Carrionform 60%: This identity covers abilities unique to the make up of a given worm. One made out of maggots could use it to slide under a door or the aforementioned vulture-worm could use it to fly - clumsily. Capped at wound threshold.
Wednesday 21 August 2019
113 - Contagious Memory
Unnatural Phenomenon: Contagious Memory
Our internal worlds are walled gardens of history and experience stored as conditioning and memory. Memory isn’t accurate recall, it bends and twists to serve purpose. Stories at odds with self-image are recontextualised to sooth the ego, social influence breeds false consensus and trauma looms large. Even innocent intention doesn’t escape its slippery nature, every time you think back on an event you change it by adding facets of your current state to its retrieval and gradually transforming it into the eroded artifact of a lifelong game of telephone. Nonetheless we rely on memory to tell us who we are by what we’ve done and in understanding that conceptualise the self. In smaller doses we learn from past experiences and in even smaller doses share it with others.
Phenomenon that breach the private amnion of this experience and cause our memories to spill over into others or others into us are fundamentally disorienting.
Shared narco-alchemical drug trips, demons hellbent on equalizing the internal states of several people and cabals deliberately marching toward hiveminded bliss: there are no shortage of magickal vectors for the experience. It can come on as hallucinatory vision of other’s experiences, a sourceless implant of a foreign internalised view or temporary dissolution of the self combined with a spiritual spin cycle. One person might share with a group, a group might share with just one person or everyone present could end up in the reminiscence gumbo.
Occasionally a single memory will ricochet or spread through a population over an extended period, along a specific method of contagion. Relational triggers from actions or the environment can provide some small degree of control over exactly what is shared (and give GMs and players a thematic rudder to exploit when using or subjected to it), but the outcome could just as easily be dictated by the source of the phenomenon or subject to so many factors as to seem completely random.
The effect can be unifying and alienating, it can be damaging, it can be therapeutic. What it is never, even in its most mundane incarnation, is ordinary. Although you might not remember it that way.
Our internal worlds are walled gardens of history and experience stored as conditioning and memory. Memory isn’t accurate recall, it bends and twists to serve purpose. Stories at odds with self-image are recontextualised to sooth the ego, social influence breeds false consensus and trauma looms large. Even innocent intention doesn’t escape its slippery nature, every time you think back on an event you change it by adding facets of your current state to its retrieval and gradually transforming it into the eroded artifact of a lifelong game of telephone. Nonetheless we rely on memory to tell us who we are by what we’ve done and in understanding that conceptualise the self. In smaller doses we learn from past experiences and in even smaller doses share it with others.
Phenomenon that breach the private amnion of this experience and cause our memories to spill over into others or others into us are fundamentally disorienting.
Shared narco-alchemical drug trips, demons hellbent on equalizing the internal states of several people and cabals deliberately marching toward hiveminded bliss: there are no shortage of magickal vectors for the experience. It can come on as hallucinatory vision of other’s experiences, a sourceless implant of a foreign internalised view or temporary dissolution of the self combined with a spiritual spin cycle. One person might share with a group, a group might share with just one person or everyone present could end up in the reminiscence gumbo.
Occasionally a single memory will ricochet or spread through a population over an extended period, along a specific method of contagion. Relational triggers from actions or the environment can provide some small degree of control over exactly what is shared (and give GMs and players a thematic rudder to exploit when using or subjected to it), but the outcome could just as easily be dictated by the source of the phenomenon or subject to so many factors as to seem completely random.
The effect can be unifying and alienating, it can be damaging, it can be therapeutic. What it is never, even in its most mundane incarnation, is ordinary. Although you might not remember it that way.
Tuesday 20 August 2019
112 - Ghost Car
Ritual: Ghost Car
Cost: 4 significant charges.
Ritual Action: Take two functional cars involved in “phantom vehicle” incidents (one that causes injury, damage or fatality without physical contact) and wreck one half of each of them. Rebuild the remains of the vehicles into a cut and shut car (one that is jigsawed together from the undamaged halves of both). Cancel any registration, official records of both original vehicles need to be at least a year out of date.
Once these conditions are met the ritual can be cast: mount the hood ornament from a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost that has been urinated on by a defrocked priest and bled upon by a viaturge onto the car and spend the charges. The hood ornament can be reused in future castings but must be rebaptised first. Don’t roll for the ritual until its effects activate.
Effect: The trigger for activating the ritual is crashing the car the next time it is driven. A successful roll causes it and its contents to become temporarily intangible long enough to avoid the collision, but only for a number of feet equal to the roll (an 01 gives you 100 feet, if the distance is greater than that the ritual automatically fails). The car blinks out of existence and continues along the same plane at the same speed before reappearing. To anyone inside the car the transition seems instantaneous.
If the ritual roll isn’t high enough to clear the obstacle then the crash happens as normal, there’s no rematerializing stuck in the middle of a wall or an oncoming semi. You also don't get to mulligan a second crash, even if the ritual put you in that position.
Cost: 4 significant charges.
Ritual Action: Take two functional cars involved in “phantom vehicle” incidents (one that causes injury, damage or fatality without physical contact) and wreck one half of each of them. Rebuild the remains of the vehicles into a cut and shut car (one that is jigsawed together from the undamaged halves of both). Cancel any registration, official records of both original vehicles need to be at least a year out of date.
Once these conditions are met the ritual can be cast: mount the hood ornament from a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost that has been urinated on by a defrocked priest and bled upon by a viaturge onto the car and spend the charges. The hood ornament can be reused in future castings but must be rebaptised first. Don’t roll for the ritual until its effects activate.
Effect: The trigger for activating the ritual is crashing the car the next time it is driven. A successful roll causes it and its contents to become temporarily intangible long enough to avoid the collision, but only for a number of feet equal to the roll (an 01 gives you 100 feet, if the distance is greater than that the ritual automatically fails). The car blinks out of existence and continues along the same plane at the same speed before reappearing. To anyone inside the car the transition seems instantaneous.
If the ritual roll isn’t high enough to clear the obstacle then the crash happens as normal, there’s no rematerializing stuck in the middle of a wall or an oncoming semi. You also don't get to mulligan a second crash, even if the ritual put you in that position.
Monday 19 August 2019
111 - Sciamachy
Supernatural Identity: Sciamachy
Professional fighting is a rough game, economically speaking. Sure you’ve got megastar athletes earning millions of dollars on high-end fights but as with most lucrative careers there’s a vast number of people just getting by. Average yearly earnings for a professional boxer are around $35K and expenses like travel, training and management fees come out of that. Most have a second job while trying to make it big. Most, by the competitive nature of the sport, do not make it big.
Superstition in boxing is about as common as it is in sailors and gamblers. Sports are already a motley of arcane rules around pursuit of a goal, so adding a little psychic grist to placebo an athlete into a better mental state isn’t just tolerated, it’s celebrated. Lucky charms, pre-fight rituals, omens: they’re all part of the pageant.
These two factors set the stage for David Sousa to fall ass backwards into magick through a combination of desperation to succeed and receptiveness to superstition. A hard luck case who had once been the archetypal up-and-comer it was a personal problems and poor judgement that led to his inability to get off the ground. His no-good scam artist of a brother constantly dragging him into trouble and his sister’s bad taste in men creating the same, he struggled to balance familial responsibility, his own ambitions and his vices. Ultimately it soured his career with a string of losses and some resulting trouble with the law put him away for a while.
Of all the things to come back out with, a thorough schooling in magick courtesy of his entropomancer cellmate is probably the last thing anyone expected. While not a chaos mage himself, Sousa has developed an arcane practice that many attribute to unimpeded training while he was inside. David has taken his inner demons and harnessed his futile battles against them to psychically dominate his opponents. He’s finally making some headway and people are starting to pay attention. Hopefully not the wrong kind of people.
Sciamachy, shadow boxing, is a Specific Harm supernatural identity with the following caveats. David makes a roll on this identity before a match (he could theoretically do it in a real fight too, but he’d need a moment or two to psyche himself up first): if he has more total hardened and total failed notches on his gauges than his opponent he gets a +20% shift, if he only beats them in one category the roll is at base value. On the other hand if his opponent is carrying more damage than he is then the results of his roll are automatically downgraded a step, matched success becomes success, success becomes failure, etc. Any results play out during the fight.
The effects are subtle but telling, sudden fatigue and critical missteps by his opponents as they are overwhelmed by his projected problems and discontent. Of course, unfortunately, being able to psyche out your opponent by being more messed up than they are doesn’t exactly incentivise taking good care of yourself.
Professional fighting is a rough game, economically speaking. Sure you’ve got megastar athletes earning millions of dollars on high-end fights but as with most lucrative careers there’s a vast number of people just getting by. Average yearly earnings for a professional boxer are around $35K and expenses like travel, training and management fees come out of that. Most have a second job while trying to make it big. Most, by the competitive nature of the sport, do not make it big.
Superstition in boxing is about as common as it is in sailors and gamblers. Sports are already a motley of arcane rules around pursuit of a goal, so adding a little psychic grist to placebo an athlete into a better mental state isn’t just tolerated, it’s celebrated. Lucky charms, pre-fight rituals, omens: they’re all part of the pageant.
These two factors set the stage for David Sousa to fall ass backwards into magick through a combination of desperation to succeed and receptiveness to superstition. A hard luck case who had once been the archetypal up-and-comer it was a personal problems and poor judgement that led to his inability to get off the ground. His no-good scam artist of a brother constantly dragging him into trouble and his sister’s bad taste in men creating the same, he struggled to balance familial responsibility, his own ambitions and his vices. Ultimately it soured his career with a string of losses and some resulting trouble with the law put him away for a while.
Of all the things to come back out with, a thorough schooling in magick courtesy of his entropomancer cellmate is probably the last thing anyone expected. While not a chaos mage himself, Sousa has developed an arcane practice that many attribute to unimpeded training while he was inside. David has taken his inner demons and harnessed his futile battles against them to psychically dominate his opponents. He’s finally making some headway and people are starting to pay attention. Hopefully not the wrong kind of people.
Sciamachy, shadow boxing, is a Specific Harm supernatural identity with the following caveats. David makes a roll on this identity before a match (he could theoretically do it in a real fight too, but he’d need a moment or two to psyche himself up first): if he has more total hardened and total failed notches on his gauges than his opponent he gets a +20% shift, if he only beats them in one category the roll is at base value. On the other hand if his opponent is carrying more damage than he is then the results of his roll are automatically downgraded a step, matched success becomes success, success becomes failure, etc. Any results play out during the fight.
The effects are subtle but telling, sudden fatigue and critical missteps by his opponents as they are overwhelmed by his projected problems and discontent. Of course, unfortunately, being able to psyche out your opponent by being more messed up than they are doesn’t exactly incentivise taking good care of yourself.
Sunday 18 August 2019
110 - Mindwrite Protype 7
Artifact: Mindwrite Protype 7
Power: Significant.
Description: A vintage 1993 Playskool Sing-A-Long child’s tape player/recorder. Its brightly coloured plastic facade has been modified, an embossing label maker has been used to name it and one of the microphones has been cut away so a crude, homemade EEG cap could be wired in place. Inside the circuitry is a mess, it shouldn’t even function. Instead the haphazard pattern of solder, transistors and foreign microchips is arranged in symbols found in kabbalah, raëlism and goetia. It does function just fine though, in most circumstances it acts as a normal tape recorder.
Included are 4 compact cassette tapes with a playtime of 33 minutes per side, which themselves have been modified with a green material along the magnetic strip and sides with “RECORD!!” and “PLAY” written in permanent marker. If they are used appropriately in the recorder then it performs its intended function. They are one-use objects and if you screw up with a partial recording that particular tape is rendered useless.
Effect: By attaching the EEG cap to a subject and recording for a full side on one of the tapes you can create a limited duplicate of their mind. It’s like a ghost, a recording of emotional and mental energies, an image instead of a full person. Flip it over, press play and you have a 33 minute window to interact with it via the microphone and the speakers.
Going from having a weird rubber hat on their head while hooked up to a tape recorder to suddenly finding themselves trapped in a pitch dark space with no bodily senses except a directionless voice speaking to them is predictably hard on the recording’s mental health. Try to keep them calm, if they push against it too hard the tape won’t be able to handle the stress and the whole thing will come to pieces.
Stressors reduce the fidelity of the recording (this includes anything that would cause a stress check to the original and especially coercion attempts). If it starts out at 100% then the first shock drops it to 66%, the second to 33% and a third shreds the tape's contents in a brief storm of magnetic static. If it’s necessary to determine whether a recording is able to recall things or act like the original use these percentages as either a guideline or straight chance on a dice roll.
Recorded minds have several other limitations:
Power: Significant.
Description: A vintage 1993 Playskool Sing-A-Long child’s tape player/recorder. Its brightly coloured plastic facade has been modified, an embossing label maker has been used to name it and one of the microphones has been cut away so a crude, homemade EEG cap could be wired in place. Inside the circuitry is a mess, it shouldn’t even function. Instead the haphazard pattern of solder, transistors and foreign microchips is arranged in symbols found in kabbalah, raëlism and goetia. It does function just fine though, in most circumstances it acts as a normal tape recorder.
Included are 4 compact cassette tapes with a playtime of 33 minutes per side, which themselves have been modified with a green material along the magnetic strip and sides with “RECORD!!” and “PLAY” written in permanent marker. If they are used appropriately in the recorder then it performs its intended function. They are one-use objects and if you screw up with a partial recording that particular tape is rendered useless.
Effect: By attaching the EEG cap to a subject and recording for a full side on one of the tapes you can create a limited duplicate of their mind. It’s like a ghost, a recording of emotional and mental energies, an image instead of a full person. Flip it over, press play and you have a 33 minute window to interact with it via the microphone and the speakers.
Going from having a weird rubber hat on their head while hooked up to a tape recorder to suddenly finding themselves trapped in a pitch dark space with no bodily senses except a directionless voice speaking to them is predictably hard on the recording’s mental health. Try to keep them calm, if they push against it too hard the tape won’t be able to handle the stress and the whole thing will come to pieces.
Stressors reduce the fidelity of the recording (this includes anything that would cause a stress check to the original and especially coercion attempts). If it starts out at 100% then the first shock drops it to 66%, the second to 33% and a third shreds the tape's contents in a brief storm of magnetic static. If it’s necessary to determine whether a recording is able to recall things or act like the original use these percentages as either a guideline or straight chance on a dice roll.
Recorded minds have several other limitations:
- Identities possessed by the original can be accessed (with a cap of 40%) but only in ways that can be performed by a voice on a cassette player. This only applies to mundane identities: supernatural powers, adept magick or avatar channels are strictly verboten.
- While they will still act in line with them, they can not flip-flop or reroll with passions or an obsession.
- Factual recall is limited to just over 3 days prior to making the recording. Drawing attention to this probably counts as a stressor. The only exceptions are subjects and memories specifically thought about by the original during the recording process.
- You may pause playback of the recording at any time, however once a recording is started the recorded mind’s sense of the passage of time is continuous. The results of leaving them alone in what is essentially a state of total sensory deprivation for extended periods are predictably horrible.
Saturday 17 August 2019
109 - Rorschaching
Supernatural Identity: Rorschaching
People see the things they have been conditioned to see. Like a Skinner box the world shapes belief along neurological paths of least resistance. Creating, shattering and reinforcing schema as tectonic forces and weather influence strata. Broad strokes are the necessities for biological life, things like food, sex and shelter but as you hone in variation emerges. You get culture as shared experiences and beliefs. Below that are the individual eccentricities, the things we celebrate or hide. The aspects that separate and make us unique and are ultimately, inalienably personal. As social animals we can communicate them, to an extent that’s what culture is, but no one can really know another person’s mind.
Rorschaching is a type of mental hacking that broaches the gap. Conventional psychotherapy is the cultural equivalent, attempting to inculcate pro-social conformity and acceptance while maintaining its own integrity. Rorschaching piggybacks on it, lensing someone’s issues through a heavily personalized perspective to achieve the same ends. In doing so it also subsumes their passions for yours, temporarily. The primary Unique feature of the Rorschaching identity works as the Therapeutic and Alter Passion features, sharing the capabilities and downsides of both.
For example: after a long period of explaining to your buddy that his poisonous relationship with his mother is really a reflective issue of personal hygiene it suddenly clicks and everything makes sense. A successful roll means he can let go of a hardened notch on his Isolation gauge if he wants, it also means he inherits your fear passion "germs are everywhere" for a number of hours equal to the tens place of the roll.
Alternatively, maybe you blow it. You get too far up your own ass expounding and he realises how fucked up it is to be making serious comparisons between his family and bacteria and how he was so into it. Fumble the roll and it’s the GMs choice of a rank 3-5 Self or Unnatural check (or both if they’re feeling mean about it) for your friend. You probably won’t be hearing from him again for a while.
Naturally this doesn’t always fit the mold of therapy. It can (there are some weird alternative medicines out there), but Rorschaching has more in common with running a cult than a psychiatrist's practice. Given the risks to the target’s sense of self in a lot of cases you’re just trading one type of damage for another and patting yourself on the back because it fits your worldview. It can be abusive and in some cases the user may not even realise they are doing harm. In the worst cases that’s why they’re doing it.
People see the things they have been conditioned to see. Like a Skinner box the world shapes belief along neurological paths of least resistance. Creating, shattering and reinforcing schema as tectonic forces and weather influence strata. Broad strokes are the necessities for biological life, things like food, sex and shelter but as you hone in variation emerges. You get culture as shared experiences and beliefs. Below that are the individual eccentricities, the things we celebrate or hide. The aspects that separate and make us unique and are ultimately, inalienably personal. As social animals we can communicate them, to an extent that’s what culture is, but no one can really know another person’s mind.
Rorschaching is a type of mental hacking that broaches the gap. Conventional psychotherapy is the cultural equivalent, attempting to inculcate pro-social conformity and acceptance while maintaining its own integrity. Rorschaching piggybacks on it, lensing someone’s issues through a heavily personalized perspective to achieve the same ends. In doing so it also subsumes their passions for yours, temporarily. The primary Unique feature of the Rorschaching identity works as the Therapeutic and Alter Passion features, sharing the capabilities and downsides of both.
For example: after a long period of explaining to your buddy that his poisonous relationship with his mother is really a reflective issue of personal hygiene it suddenly clicks and everything makes sense. A successful roll means he can let go of a hardened notch on his Isolation gauge if he wants, it also means he inherits your fear passion "germs are everywhere" for a number of hours equal to the tens place of the roll.
Alternatively, maybe you blow it. You get too far up your own ass expounding and he realises how fucked up it is to be making serious comparisons between his family and bacteria and how he was so into it. Fumble the roll and it’s the GMs choice of a rank 3-5 Self or Unnatural check (or both if they’re feeling mean about it) for your friend. You probably won’t be hearing from him again for a while.
Naturally this doesn’t always fit the mold of therapy. It can (there are some weird alternative medicines out there), but Rorschaching has more in common with running a cult than a psychiatrist's practice. Given the risks to the target’s sense of self in a lot of cases you’re just trading one type of damage for another and patting yourself on the back because it fits your worldview. It can be abusive and in some cases the user may not even realise they are doing harm. In the worst cases that’s why they’re doing it.
Friday 16 August 2019
108 - Adrienne Gingras, Truant Fashionista & Alice Gingras, Grim Vizier
GMC: Adrienne Gingras, Truant Fashionista & Alice Gingras, Grim Vizier
Urbane. Charming. Scatterbrained Daydreamer. Adrienne is a darling of the fashion world, her eccentricities tolerated and celebrated for her pedigree as the daughter of a centuries old garment-making dynasty and her occasional splashes of outright genius. She flouts her responsibility to the Gingras name, choosing to neglect the multinational brand to the care of her younger sister, Alice, for a more introspective journey to spiritual wealth. Unfettered access to money and a private jet certainly don’t hurt though.
Both women grew up understanding that they were part of a tradition that would provide them with the best life had to offer, but that it came with certain costs. They would be expected to perform in roles that had been established generations ago and sacrifice any other ambitions. Adrienne, being the eldest, was indoctrinated in the practice of Vestimancy by their father and took to it with verve. She just didn’t take the message that it was her job to sit in an office and callously dictate the flow of vogue to the world, she craved her own vision of seeking fashion’s highest purpose.
Alice’s jealousy at being excluded boiled. Her attempts to sneak access to the secrets being taught to her sister were repeatedly discovered and punished. It was the sole right of the eldest to the secret knowledge of magick. It wouldn’t have mattered, her obsessional rivalry clouded headway she could have made with the arcane and her aptitudes were ultimately in the prosaic elements of running a business.
Which is what she does now, excellently. While Adrienne is out gallivanting across the globe in search of fashion’s own version of the holy grail her long suffering sister administrates the company, an arrangement set up by their father before he was strangled by a cravat (a grim coincidence honestly). He foresaw conflict between them and Adrienne’s inability to take her duties seriously gravely concerned him. Instead of cutting his losses and allowing Alice as an understudy he divided responsibilities between them. It was his limited way of showing that he loved them both.
Adrienne misses him horribly and wishes she could have made him understand. The old ways were a chain to what clothing could be: civilization isn’t dictated by expression, it is an expression unto itself. She takes delight in the sprawling cornucopia of global culture as proof of this, immersing herself in it while enjoying a privileged existence very few can manage. One week investigating new textiles in Istanbul and visiting archaeological sites in Greenland the next, she stays ahead of the curve while dropping the paltry crumbs of her genius in her sisters lap as an afterthought. The results have been breathtaking.
Alice’s resentment is spurred by jealousy. She cannot and doesn’t dare to cut her sister off, it would destroy their business. She does try to bring Adrienne to heel through whatever legal and financial wrangling she can muster and Adrienne gleefully keeps her distance. This cat-and-mouse game has been going on between the two of them for years, Adrienne taunting Alice and threatening to stray into the hands of a rival if she is cut off and Alice doing anything she can to keep Adrienne in line and limit her excesses. Ironically it’s drawn them closer together than ever.
STATS - Adrienne Gingras
Personality: Maniacal whimsy and scattered spirituality cosseted by piles of cash. It would be easy to dismiss Adrienne as a hack were it not for the fact that she can work literal miracles and has the weight of her inherited legacy behind her. She would do well to remember where it comes from but that would cramp her style. She loves Alice but is wary of her.
Rage: Being controlled by her stuffy younger sister.
Noble: Freedom. Caged birds sing the saddest songs.
Fear: Having to fend for herself and how it would limit her work (Helplessness).
Obsession: Find the highest spiritual truth of civilization mirrored in fashion.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Footloose Fashion Genius 70% (Substitutes for Status, Protects Isolation, Unique - Fashion industry connections.)
Vestimancer 50%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Rage: Her way or the highway.
Noble: Equal chances. Alice’s standards are ruthless but everyone gets an opportunity to prove themselves, regardless of station or origin.
Fear: That she wasn’t taught magick because she isn’t good enough (Self).
Obsession: Dominate the family business.
Wound Threshold: 60.
CEO 60%* (Substitutes for Status, Protects Helplessness, Unique - Control of a multinational fashion icon.)
Ruthless 60% (Substitutes for Fitness, Coerces Helplessness, Provides Wound Threshold.)
Shock Gauges
Urbane. Charming. Scatterbrained Daydreamer. Adrienne is a darling of the fashion world, her eccentricities tolerated and celebrated for her pedigree as the daughter of a centuries old garment-making dynasty and her occasional splashes of outright genius. She flouts her responsibility to the Gingras name, choosing to neglect the multinational brand to the care of her younger sister, Alice, for a more introspective journey to spiritual wealth. Unfettered access to money and a private jet certainly don’t hurt though.
Both women grew up understanding that they were part of a tradition that would provide them with the best life had to offer, but that it came with certain costs. They would be expected to perform in roles that had been established generations ago and sacrifice any other ambitions. Adrienne, being the eldest, was indoctrinated in the practice of Vestimancy by their father and took to it with verve. She just didn’t take the message that it was her job to sit in an office and callously dictate the flow of vogue to the world, she craved her own vision of seeking fashion’s highest purpose.
Alice’s jealousy at being excluded boiled. Her attempts to sneak access to the secrets being taught to her sister were repeatedly discovered and punished. It was the sole right of the eldest to the secret knowledge of magick. It wouldn’t have mattered, her obsessional rivalry clouded headway she could have made with the arcane and her aptitudes were ultimately in the prosaic elements of running a business.
Which is what she does now, excellently. While Adrienne is out gallivanting across the globe in search of fashion’s own version of the holy grail her long suffering sister administrates the company, an arrangement set up by their father before he was strangled by a cravat (a grim coincidence honestly). He foresaw conflict between them and Adrienne’s inability to take her duties seriously gravely concerned him. Instead of cutting his losses and allowing Alice as an understudy he divided responsibilities between them. It was his limited way of showing that he loved them both.
Adrienne misses him horribly and wishes she could have made him understand. The old ways were a chain to what clothing could be: civilization isn’t dictated by expression, it is an expression unto itself. She takes delight in the sprawling cornucopia of global culture as proof of this, immersing herself in it while enjoying a privileged existence very few can manage. One week investigating new textiles in Istanbul and visiting archaeological sites in Greenland the next, she stays ahead of the curve while dropping the paltry crumbs of her genius in her sisters lap as an afterthought. The results have been breathtaking.
Alice’s resentment is spurred by jealousy. She cannot and doesn’t dare to cut her sister off, it would destroy their business. She does try to bring Adrienne to heel through whatever legal and financial wrangling she can muster and Adrienne gleefully keeps her distance. This cat-and-mouse game has been going on between the two of them for years, Adrienne taunting Alice and threatening to stray into the hands of a rival if she is cut off and Alice doing anything she can to keep Adrienne in line and limit her excesses. Ironically it’s drawn them closer together than ever.
STATS - Adrienne Gingras
Personality: Maniacal whimsy and scattered spirituality cosseted by piles of cash. It would be easy to dismiss Adrienne as a hack were it not for the fact that she can work literal miracles and has the weight of her inherited legacy behind her. She would do well to remember where it comes from but that would cramp her style. She loves Alice but is wary of her.
Rage: Being controlled by her stuffy younger sister.
Noble: Freedom. Caged birds sing the saddest songs.
Fear: Having to fend for herself and how it would limit her work (Helplessness).
Obsession: Find the highest spiritual truth of civilization mirrored in fashion.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Footloose Fashion Genius 70% (Substitutes for Status, Protects Isolation, Unique - Fashion industry connections.)
Vestimancer 50%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
STATS - Alice Gingras
Personality: Shrewd, calculating and a neurotic control-freak. Alice takes grim pleasure in taking out her frustrations on her professional rivals and errant underlings. Any perception of sororal affection is either calculated on her part or wishful thinking on the observer’s, she truly loathes her sister.Rage: Her way or the highway.
Noble: Equal chances. Alice’s standards are ruthless but everyone gets an opportunity to prove themselves, regardless of station or origin.
Fear: That she wasn’t taught magick because she isn’t good enough (Self).
Obsession: Dominate the family business.
Wound Threshold: 60.
CEO 60%* (Substitutes for Status, Protects Helplessness, Unique - Control of a multinational fashion icon.)
Ruthless 60% (Substitutes for Fitness, Coerces Helplessness, Provides Wound Threshold.)
Shock Gauges
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