107 - Gom Jabbar

Ritual: Gom Jabbar

Cost: 3 minor charges.

Ritual Action: Asceticism, the abstinence from sensual pleasures, is a long standing component of religious traditions looking to reach past humanities’ baser instincts and transcend into the spiritually sublime. They claim that by tuning out the immediate gratification of our senses we can find out more about ourselves. With this ritual by doing so in a way that causes terrible harm we can cause our self to become greater and more refined.

Take a VHS copy of the 1984 Dune movie by David Lynch, strip all the tape out of it and wrap it around your fists and forearms like a kumpur. Actively deny yourself sensory pleasure: seek it out, but don’t concede to it. There should be at least three instances in which you do so, one for each of your passions. You need to pass a test of denial and endurance related to each before you can permit yourself to indulge in any sensory gratification again. Once you have done so, go to a public place and remove the tape, leave it behind and indulge in one sensory vice you’ve never tried before (like smoking a cigarette or shooting up with heroin). Then go home.

Alternative: Take a metal box, no larger than a shoebox, and heat it over a flame until it glows. Place your VHS tape-wrapped hand inside the box and deliberately give yourself third degree burns. This causes a rank 7 Violence check, if you fail it then you freaked and yanked your hand out, ruining the ritual. Take the sum of the roll plus 3 as wounds in either case. In this variant it only counts as one of the three passion tests, but at least it’s faster. You can also use this to replace one of the three tests in the conventional version.

Other Alternative: As with the first method, but you have to do the whole thing with a belly full of rat poison or something else that will kill or seriously harm you. If you finish the ritual before you get any kind of treatment then you get a +30% shift to the ritual roll.

Effect: For each of the tests that harmed you in some way (caused a stress check, wounds, damaged a personal reputation or stymied an objective) you may remove one hardened notch from your Self meter. If all three tests harmed you then you can remove a failed notch too.