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.

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