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.
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