153 - Goldfish In The Coalmine & Witchtest

Ritual: Goldfish In The Coalmine

Cost: 2 minor charges.

Ritual Action: Obtain one of those “goldfish in a water filled baggie” deals (it actually works better if you win it as a prize, +10% shift). Add a pinch of confetti thrown at a wedding for a marriage that ended in divorce and a nail clipping from your left index finger that is at least 3 months old. Hold the bag directly in front of you with your arm straight and recite the Serenity Prayer, better known by its adoption as the A.A pledge.

Effect: For so long as you hold the baggie stiff-armed ahead of you, you’ve got a one-shot magick detector. It’s reasonably sensitive, brought within 33 yards of any kind of active effect, artifact or unnatural entity or 3 yards of an adept or avatar, it goes off but provides no other information. This causes the goldfish to die instantly and float upside down to the top of the bag.

Ritual: Witchtest

Cost: 1 significant charge.

Ritual Action: Take 333 state standardized tests (school, driving, etc. Anything government administered) with failing grades and scatter them over a body of fresh water. Someone who is responsible for the death of an adept must bite their right thumb hard enough to draw blood, bleed into the water and make a recognized spiritual or religious appeal against being tricked or confused by evil.

Effect: The next adept who would drown in that body of water, by accident or intent, cannot. This effect only applies once and should they leave the body of water, even for just a second, the protection fades and they're just as susceptible as the rest of us.

152 - Homer Alaniz, Faux Hypochondriac

GMC: Homer Alaniz, Faux Hypochondriac

Overprotective parents are a common precursor to hypochondriasis, an excessive anxiety over the possibility of having a serious illness. It was certainly the case in Homer’s experience, his father was absent and his mother hovering and nervous. He was constantly pulled out of school to visit doctors, exempt from sports and kept away from socialising with other kids on account of his “delicate constitution”. The funny thing is that Homer was never, ever, sick as a child.

The fallout of being raised this way followed him into adulthood, if he’d been more talented germophobia could have been passed off as a quirk. Instead it stifled him professionally and socially. Otherwise well adjusted if a little timid, Homer turned to therapy, applied himself diligently and worked to overcome his obsessive scheduling of regular doctor’s appointments and knocking back dozens of spurious placebos a night. He succeeded and then he got deathly ill.

The mystery illness was never identified, it didn’t last long enough for that to be possible. Soon after being admitted to hospital Homer’s condition rapidly improved. Going from next to death to the picture of health in a span of hours confused doctors but the limitations of hospital resources put a pin in their curiousity and he was sent home. It did cause him to relapse into old negative behaviours, which he did his best to deal with, repaired his damaged confidence and then it happened again.

Once is coincidence, twice is a little hinky and Homer’s sensitivity piqued his interest. He experimented on himself, it seems that whenever he goes without his obsessive routine of burdening the healthcare system he gets horribly sick. On the other hand when he goes with it he could swim through sewage and never develop a sniffle. Naturally this sort of thinking isn’t endorsed by his therapist so he’s started lying. He’s also experimenting, modulating his routine to try and find the keystone that’s holding it all together and deliberately exposing himself to disease to gauge the extent of his immunity. So far while the results have been impressive specific details have been elusive. He’s getting impatient and started looking in corners most people ignore.

Next week he has a meeting with a brother/sister pair of katharomancers he met online. Posing as virology researchers they’re planning the world’s most sterile kidnapping to get to the bottom of this mystery for their own purposes.

STATS
Personality: Exhausted but with a fire behind his tired eyes. Homer has been a bit of an underdog most of his life, if he can nail down what’s going on with his body it’s his shot at making it big.
Rage: Neglected sanitation. Of all the unsafe things Homer sees in his day job the gross, bacteria-infested messes that build up behind fridges and under stoves piss him off the worst.
Noble: Minding your elders. Homer spends a lot of time with his parents and humours their dated opinions and concerns even if he doesn’t agree with them. They won’t be around forever.
Fear: Electrocution. Homer’s seen some grisly aftermaths in his job, death by electricity scares him the worst (Violence).
Obsession: How immune am I?
Wound Threshold: 50.

OHSA Inspector 50% (Substitutes for Notice, Substitutes for Knowledge, Coerces Helplessness.)
Meticulous Fortitude 70%* (Specific Protection - Illness, even supernatural, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)

Shock Gauges

Notches	Violence	Unnatural	Helplessness	Isolation	Self
Hardened	2	2	2	1	1
Failed	0	0	3	0	0

151 - Thalassian Pottery

Artifact: Thalassian Pottery

Power: Significant.

Description: A brown, glazed amphora about 2 feet tall and half as wide. Sealed with a clay-packed stopper that has miraculously survived the ravages of time (mostly because they’re all reproductions, not genuine antiques). Around the body, drawn with the black-figure technique, are depictions of people engaged in religious worship of something that looks like a sea anemone. There’s modern manufacturer’s markings on the base. It sloshes when shaken.

Effect: Breaking the seal or the amphora releases a burst of acrid tasting gas that sears the nose and throat (no damage), there’s no liquid inside. Anyone breathing it suffers from hallucinations of being trapped deep underwater: drowning, being set upon by terrifying sea creatures and rupturing from sudden pressure changes. This does damage as a significant blast rolled at the time of effect, spread over 4 turns. Each turn they may make a Fitness roll to negate that turn’s damage. While this is going on they are thrashing on the ground, their skin erupting with injuries mirroring their nightmarish visions and spewing seawater. Everyone - affected and witnesses - takes a rank 5 Unnatural check.

Thalassian pottery can be reused but requires a specific consecrating ritual so long as it’s undamaged. It involves collecting tears from someone with a disorder related to fear of water or the sea, enough to fill the amphora half-way, and a handful of genuine Aegean clay.

150 - The Secret Treehouse

Paragon Place: The Secret Treehouse

The world is a huge and mysterious place to children, most of it is already mapped and claimed by adults. Some thrive in that environment, it has a place for them and celebrates their talents and achievements. Others are not so lucky and have to carve out niches of their own, they stake claim to hidden and forgotten areas and use them as space to forge their own identities and private sub-cultures. These liminal, transformative boltholes are fragile, remaining secret is what gives them power. Intrusion risks the personal bonds and shared history of the people who grew up together there.

The Barrens from IT is a good example of a secret treehouse, it’s free of adult influence in a way a normal treehouse isn’t, but the spot down by the reservoir a band of teenagers go to smoke and drink could be just as applicable if it's special to them.

Taboo: Losing its exclusiveness. People can come and go from the secret treehouse but if it’s colonised by a large group of outsiders it loses gravitas as a crucible for bonding and transformation. Outsiders can know about it, they just can't make use of it. Excessive use by adults does it too, you might visit briefly to regain a whiff of the nostalgic magick that defined you growing up but squatting there is unhealthy and damaging.

Associated Avatars: The Explorer, The Shaman, The True King.

Resonant Avatars: The Child, The Fool, The Outsider.

Symbols: Small, ramshackle buildings, junk food wrappers and cigarette butts, graffiti and tree carvings, isolation and freedom from a stifling community.

Adjuncts
1%-50%: Kids come to the secret treehouse to get away from their problems and stake a claim to themselves. Sharing this with your buddies creates a syncretic experience that lets you lean on each other and work as a group. It’s limited to one relevant hunch roll at a time but everyone can roll and pick the single best result. The caveat is that any matched roll or fumble takes automatic precedence, the worse the better. Kids are well-known for doing stupid shit, often it’s their mistakes that create the more memorable stories.

51%-70%: On the other hand, some problems aren’t so easily solved and sometimes you just need to get away from them. Play can be a cathartic escape and a reminder that there is a world outside of what might be waiting at home or at school, however small. Engaging in this kind of escapism can be good for the soul, gain the Therapeutic feature or can flip-flop on an identity that already has it while in the secret treehouse.

71%-90%: The secret treehouse is a redoubt and a community. It offers safety, bonding, development and discovery:

• Better: “Crap, I’m sorry! It’s fine, you’re fine! Please don’t tell mom!” +20% to Medical rolls to fix the injuries caused by roughhousing, accidents and childhood misadventure (even without an appropriate identity you can roll at 20%). Most of the time the result indicates it wasn’t really as bad as everyone dreaded and the ice pack definitely helps. The caveat to this power is that if an adult/authority figure cops wise to Kyle’s broken leg then the healing evaporates as it turns out to be exactly as bad as originally thought.
• Faster: Kids make fast friends easily and for those in the secret treehouse it’s them against the world. Any bonding experiences at the secret treehouse count for double the benefit (+10%) to relationships. Unfortunately the inverse is true, damaging and coercing relationships knocks off 10%. It’s a special place and spoiling that seems especially shitty.
• Cheaper: Weird shit turns up in weird places and the kind of spaces that secret treehouses occupy epitomize this. Usually it’s dirty magazines, beer bottles and hubcaps but with a successful roll something that fits a current need might show up. More likely it'll be something that acts as a unique catalyst, either in conjunction with current events or on its own.

91+%: The borders of reality seem more porous here. Even though the real world might be 90 feet away where the hillside crests to abut a busy highway, the secret treehouse can seem as isolated as the most secretive grotto. A successful roll keeps non-members out, they can stumble around the area for hours and not come across the clearing where you’re hiding out. If there’s any contention over whether someone has membership they probably don’t.

99%: Eventually you have to leave leave childhood behind, whether it comes out of a climactic and traumatic event or you just age past it. The secret treehouse rewards the former and marking a rite of passage that separates you from it is powerful. Completing a relevant objective is a good benchmark for what qualifies. Doing so at the secret treehouse grants an one-time 10% increase to one of your identities. The downside is that using the secret treehouse after this invokes taboo for you.

149 - Meatpacker's Misery

Unnatural Entity: Meatpacker’s Misery

Only humanity wields magick and power over the cosmos, all else is projection. The only gods responsible for the world we live in are us, a thought too alien and terrifying for most to consider. To someone disenfranchised by the sum total of humankind's efforts this seems both cold comfort and an academic distinction. People who have seen miseries might argue that they are proof that other species have similar claims. They’d be wrong.

Abattoir work is filthy, disgusting and repetitively violent. Even in a more enlightened age of captive-bolt humane kill devices it is a conveyor belt industry of animal death. It inures the people who work in it to constant slaughter as it shields the broader public from the reality of anything but the sanitised image of buying cleanly packaged meat at the supermarket. The disconnect is shocking for some who peer behind the veil. A small number of them dedicate themselves to standing against a system that protects what they judge to be an intolerable practice borne of inhumane suffering. A smaller number of them die while consumed by this obsession.

So that’s the checklist: one dead, obsessive activist, the thing that traumatised them, and the anthropomorphized suffering of that thing. The resulting projection could be likened to a demon or a fiend, but is more specific than either. It starts off as a psychic image, invisible to cameras and sensors, of the dead progenitor’s humanised image of their championed victims - in one case it was stories of a skinless minotaur, dripping tallow and blood, that would menace late-night workers who it would catch alone at one meat processing plant. This image can’t do more than terrorize initially, but in doing so it builds tangibility. Nothing bad had actually happened at that plant except for a bunch of people quitting so management put a stern moratorium on spreading stories. Then one guy stepped out for a smoke break one night and found a coworker with his head smashed apart by a maul.

Having taken a life, the misery dissipates for a while before beginning the cycle anew. It might stay in one place or move around depending on whether it can find appropriate victims. If it loses relevance then it will either perish or lay dormant. It’s hard to tell which. One enterprising cabal of environmentalist magi are attempting to adapt miseries to tackle climate change.The only thing stopping them is their uncertainty in having sufficiently humanised the issue and the high price of admission.

Meatpacker’s Misery, Anthropomorphized Suffering
Wound Threshold: Equal to Accrued Vengeance. A misery can only be physically harmed while using its Accrued Vengeance identity, otherwise you’ll need to use magick.
Terrorize 65%: Once per day a misery can appear and provoke a stress check with a rank equal to the highest of either the failed or hardened notches on the most relevant gauge of the person who died to create it. This is tied to one gauge and only works on targets relevant to the misery’s issue. To people with enough hardened notches to ignore its displays the misery is invisible and it cannot target them.
Accrued Vengeance 1-100%: Starts at 1% and gains 10% for every failed notch the misery creates with its Terrorize power. Choosing to use this identity allows the misery to temporarily physically manifest and substitutes for all relevant abilities while doing so. If it manages to kill a target relevant to its issue this identity drops back to 1% and the misery goes away sated. Otherwise it vanishes after 33 minutes, but can try again in a day or two. It can flip-flop rolls on this identity against people hardened enough to ignore its Terrorize power.

148 - Moneygrub

Unnatural Entity: Moneygrub

A lot of people have trouble managing their money. Consumer debt continues to rise even as wages stagnate against the tide of inflation, people pushed to despair sacrifice an uncertain tomorrow for temporary comfort today. Scarcity pushes poor financial habits more than abundance and with far graver consequences. Entire businesses are built around capitalizing on it. People unable to trust their own impulses sometimes resort to shortcuts around building a discipline that persistent pressure has prevented or excused them from affording. Cutting up credit cards, surrendering power of attorney to a more responsible family member, growing arcane parasites that literally prevent them from spending money.

A plutomancer with compulsive spending habits is a sorry creature, pathologically fixated on acquiring the one thing they can’t get rid of fast enough. At best it’s a situation of dizzying highs and lows, more often it’s a teeth grinding side dish to persistent poverty. Desperation and power make for extreme solutions and so a plutomancer money launderer fallen on hard times whipped up one of these, swallowed the thumbnail-sized, white egg and shed her frivolous relationship with what had once been easy money. All it cost her was the jagged, articulated bundle of credit card shards nestling up against her amygdala. She could feel it rustle when agitated and would hear its whistling cooing in her sleep.

Every time she risked breaching taboo the moneygrub would take over. It doesn’t matter what you choose to spend if something pulls a string in your head and yanks your hand away whenever you reach for that credit card. It doesn't alter your choices, just hijacks your flesh. This is a rank 6 Helplessness check, but eventually the reaction shapes behaviour and people either become inured to sharing their autonomy or go crazy.

The problem is that the moneygrub was mistakenly built with a lifecycle and its growing restrictions can become fatally inconvenient. Following the quarters of the financial year it starts out at just shy of $2,000 - a plutomancer’s taboo - slicing in half by the end of the first quarter. This isn’t too bad but by the end of the second this plummets to a roof of $50 on transactions and coming into the final quarter it prevents you from spending at all, actively or passively. If you survive this the effect ends and the grub purges itself from you painfully but non-fatally when you get your next tax return (if you don't file taxes it just sits in your head, inert).

Their creator did not survive, she had a catatonic breakdown and starved. Found dead in her bedsit surrounded by money the thing in her head would not let her touch, it had burrowed its way out of her neck and built a nest of bloodstained lucre on her bed. Lifeless and shattered atop a mound of small, white ovals. Today they’re trafficked in the occult underground as anything from weapons to financially poison your enemies to the tapeworm-egg equivalent of monetary diet pills.

Moneygrub, There Is An IRS Agent Inside All Our Heads
Wound Threshold: 1-10. Moneygrubs are tiny, even at their largest. The real trick is getting to something that’s wrapped around a person's brain stem without killing the host.
Credit Limit 99%: If you try to exceed the transaction threshold the moneygrub is currently guarding against it will automatically hijack your body, controlling you like a helpless puppet, to prevent the action. This extends to passive dodges, if you set up a regular electronic payment exceeding its tolerance or give your card to a friend so they can spend for you it will act to rectify the situation. Sometimes violently.

Moneygrub's perceptions aren’t perfect, clever and complex obfuscation can evade censure. Give a -20% shift to rolls on this identity for every layer of a deception it hasn’t seen before. It can’t understand anything you say or do that isn’t spending money so feel free to openly discuss and plot with co-conspirators.

147 - Overbooked

Ritual: Overbooked

Cost: 1+ significant charges.

Ritual Action: By a flight ticket and arrive late enough for boarding that the airline may have given your seat to someone else, but not so late as they could refuse you on tardiness alone. If they have done so kick up a stink and try to get them to compensate you with accommodation. If they hand or email a hotel voucher over to you then you’ll need to get them to verbally affirm that they are doing so of their own free will.

Check in to the hotel, bring food and drink. Eat and drink half of what you brought, leaving the rest on the table. Sleep with the original boarding pass under your pillow.

Effect: For the duration of the flight or until you wake up you share total sensory perception with the person who took your seat. You can’t read their thoughts but you can get a feel for their emotions based on the physical sensations they cause. By spending an additional significant charge while the effect is active you can provoke them to perform simple, brief actions (like standing up, saying a dozen words or punching the guy sitting next to them), they may resist by succeeding against a rank 5 Unnatural check.

By taking advantage of the proxied hospitality granted by the ritual you open yourself up to the same claim. You are automatically possessed by the next demon who tries for a day plus another day for each extra significant charge spent. The only way to avoid this secondary effect is for someone to offer lodging to the demon and convince them to finish the food and drink you started, which ends the possession.

146 - Form 28B

Ritual: Form 28B

Cost: 4 minor charges.

Ritual Action: Go to your nearest bureau of transportation or department of motor vehicles or whatever your local equivalent for vehicle licensure is, arriving before it opens. If they have a stack of forms available grab the longest and most complicated one. Otherwise stand in line and obtain the longest and most complicated form by asking for it without articulating why you want it. Once you have it you cannot leave the building without finishing or the ritual is ruined for you forever.

You must seek solutions to questions on the form that cannot be explained by three bureaucrats by the end of the day. When you manage to thoroughly stump one then write a piece of personal information about that employee that is not freely available on the relevant section of the form. Once you have all three then fill out the rest of the form with offensive gibberish, the kind of thing that would be at home on the walls of a bathroom stall.

The ritual effect remains primed until you do something that would reasonably require ID like drive, rent a hotel room or buy liquor. Activities you use the ritual for do not count for this restriction.

Effect: The form automatically passes for any bureaucratic paperwork it is submitted in lieu of, once. So long as the effect remains primed no one notices the discrepancy and likely won’t after the fact unless it is specifically checked or referenced against.

145 - Thin Ground

Unnatural Phenomenon: Thin Ground

There’s a spot in a remote section of Sydney’s Royal National Park, out by the cliffs overlooking the ocean. Nothing immediately marks it as strange from a distance and the terrain makes it hard to get to which is why it went undetected for so long. It’s a rough rectangle of rocky cliffside about 4 and a half by 7 feet, tapering a little on one end. If you stand on it you can see to the ends of the world.

In any direction other than east this effect is blocked by vegetation, but out over the ocean there’s suddenly no horizon for things to disappear behind. You can see as far as your eyes, binoculars or telescope will allow like something out of a Flat Earther’s wet dream. The shift in perspective is perceptible if you’re looking for it as you cross the boundary, stop halfway and you get that weird effect where your brain attempts to reconcile two different images at once. The colours look different too. Bright and cartoonish, as though someone has added a filter to a bad picture.

Six inches under the rock, crumbly and loamy unlike the hard earth around it, is sheet metal held together with rivets along a singular seam. It ends at the boundary of the effect, if you dug around and under it would hang suspended in mid-air. Breaking through it from the top, popping the rivets and bending and cracking the thin metal reveals a void. It’s only visible from the top and extends as far out of view in every direction occupying space that must logically intersect with the rock beneath it like the world reflected in a mirror. Within is darkness, stars and vacuum.

Fortunately only organic materials can pass through the threshold, so it can’t suddenly hoover up the Earth’s atmosphere. This also made it easier to cover up after one of the trio of park rangers who found it fell through up to his belt buckle and then frantically suffocated in deep space before the others could pull him out. The elder, a staunch anti-government, government worker, appealed to the other’s confused terror and the sense that nothing good would come of people in authority learning about it. Her complicity in hiding the body by shoving it the rest of the way through unclothed is why she remains silent.

Between the two of them there is an uneasy agreement. Solo neither one could comfortably pull enough strings and run enough interference to make sure that part of the park remains unexplored forever. That one of them has been posting pictures of the void online and trying to figure out its location by what stars are visible doesn’t help matters.

144 - Marcella Cruz, Patchwork Apotheosis

GMC: Marcella Cruz, Patchwork Apotheosis

Marcella has received more organ transplants than any other person, living or dead. It was never because she needed them, it was because she desperately wanted the money, wasn’t squeamish and was fortunate enough to have a broadly compatible blood type and genetics. Her job in the murky world of semi-illicit organ procurement was to transport selected organs to their end point, inside of her body. An incredibly dangerous and ill-conceived strategy that nonetheless allowed the people she worked for to evade detection and “store” organs for periods of time before allocating them to a recipient. While it was tough on her body, Marcella was exceptionally well compensated given the rarity of her capacity and hardiness.

She ended up carrying the kidney of an entropomancer who’d died holding a major charge.

Marcella already had a shaky relationship with the integrity of her body, between literally selling herself to overcome her families’ debts back in Manilla, juggling an ever-shifting rotation of anti-rejection drugs and painkillers and the treatment these circumstances inflicted on her. The leaking power of the charge and the flavour of the deceased adept was an intoxicating certainty by comparison. A fortuitous win on a magickally-malfunctioned slot machine gave her the money to buy the loyalty of some hard men to go back and force the doctor to give her the rest of the dead guy. She didn’t care that he was no longer viable, she wanted, needed, more.

It didn’t work well. She got a lung, the other kidney and a cornea, the rest absolutely had to be scrapped. Even then it was still a bad choice, the kidney and the lung failed spectacularly. The doctor had his neck wrung by the men looking for the rest of their money and her employers were extremely unhappy about the whole debacle. Her family caught their violent reprisal and she was comparatively fortunate to get away with quietly and anonymously dying in a local hospital. Except that major charge wouldn’t let her go.

Today Marcella is an entirely different person. She credits her experiences as an awakening to the ascendance of those who can craft the best of themselves from others. This takes the form of a semi-religious, semi-self-help cult with chapters in three countries. The outer ranks practice transformative meditation and actualization exercises which become increasingly baroque and isolating as they progress. Only the inner circle, her closest half dozen, fully understand and have received the full communion of taking on flesh from unwitting sacrifices. The dual hearts beating in her chest serve as a powerful image for them, elevating her example to divine status for this growing cabal.

STATS
Personality: Casually violent and disconnected from herself. Marcella treats her body the same way people treat their car, it’s a piece of machinery to be modified and cared for as needed. She no longer sees herself as the same person she started out as, like the Ship of Theseus she’s certain she’s not the same woman who ruined her family. She’s willing to commit to obscene gambles on the subconscious belief that she’s invincible and matters more than other people.
Rage: People digging into her past.
Noble: People who step up when it comes to family.
Fear: That the drugs and magick keeping her whole will fail, leading to total organ failure (Helplessness).
Obsession: Become more than human through organ transplantation.
Wound Threshold: 80.

Messianic Medical Cult Leader 40%* (Substitutes for Status, Medical, Coerces Self.)
One, Of Many 80% (Substitutes for Fitness, Provides Wound Threshold, Use Gutter Magick.)

Shock Gauges

Notches	Violence	Unnatural	Helplessness	Isolation	Self
Hardened	7	5	2	3	6
Failed	4	3	1	1	3

143 - Infragreen Flashlight

Artifact: Infragreen Flashlight

Power: Significant.

Description: An antique 1899 Model One Ever Ready ring contact flashlight. It looks more like an old spyglass rather than a modern flashlight, wrapped in leather except for the ring switch, the end caps and the bubble-shaped lens. Aside from being in very decent condition the only stand out feature is the green hue of the glass of the lens.

Effect: The light is fairly dim by the standards of modern flashlights so it’ll need to be night or in a darkened room. Sit the person down a good distance from a blank wall and shine the flashlight at their head from the other side. It looks grisly. The light shines right through the hair, skin and bone of the head and neck, exposing the organs and circulatory system underneath. That’s a rank 4 Unnatural check the first time.

The more interesting but less arresting effect is what plays out on the wall, depicted as shadow-puppets are the target’s surface thoughts and perceptions. If you’re looking for a particular piece of information you’ll have to do something to bring it to mind, thankfully saying “don’t think about the pink elephant” is a surefire way to get someone do just that unless they’re singularly disciplined. No one sees exactly the same thing either, as it’s shaded by their own individual perceptions but wholly accurate to the originator. If you want to know about a captive’s embezzlement scheme you get his take on it in ways that you can understand even if you’ve no idea how embezzlement works. Taking a photo or video of the effect yields nothing since it’s entirely psychic in nature.

The flashlight is powered by human eyeballs. Specifically 5 eyes crammed into the battery housing that have each seen something you haven’t (conceptually, otherwise any would count) and are good for a single, short use each. When depleted they dry up like raisins.

142 - The Life I Never Led

Ritual: The Life I Never Led

Cost: 2 significant charges.

Ritual Action: People probably don’t live multiple lives, to an extent demons are proof of that but not everyone really understands what they represent. It definitely doesn’t stop people from confabulating false memories of having once been someone else. The good news is that regardless of how true the idea of reincarnation by default is, you can tack one on post-hoc.

This ritual can only be cast on another willing person, so if you want its benefits you’ll need to convince someone to do it to you. It also requires a third subject, someone dead and gone (so no one who’s turned into a demon) who passed before the subject was born and three objects from their life: one from their birth, one from their highest or lowest moment, and one from their death. Lastly you’ll need an intact egg from the extinct Elephant Bird (fortunately there are about 40 in public collections).

Preparation for the ritual looks a lot like religious purification (fasting, meditation, etc.) followed by the kind of thing that would have been considered deprogramming in a cruder era. They’ll need a total of 3 fresh notches on their Self gauge (failed or hardened, doesn’t matter) from this treatment to qualify. You’ll probably need to make a few stress checks yourself for participating in something like that.

Place the egg in the subject’s lap and use the objects in reverse order to reenact the events they represent, finishing with the birth. As the ritual progresses both you and the subject will experience vivid, total sensorium hallucinations of these events as they happened. The culmination, successful or otherwise, is hatching from the egg. The trauma is worth a rank 6 Unnatural check for both of you.

Effect: The subject loses a percentile amount equal to the ritual roll from their choice of an identity or relationship and gains half that value in one related to the adopted past life (excluding avatar and adept identities). It comes along with appropriate memories although having pieces of someone else’s life kicking around inside you isn’t good for their already damaged Self gauge. It doesn’t mean anyone from that life will think of them as them in terms of relationship connections or your work but their knowledge and resemblance of these things is uncanny and verifiable.

An avatar who is subjected to this ritual and adopts the past life of a historical figure who is a mask for their archetype may use the percentiles to increase their avatar identity, up to the next channel.

141 - Felicia Nyugen, Slave to Mystery

GMC: Felicia Nyugen, Slave to Mystery

Everything has already been explored. Not really, but there’s a sense of lost struggle and opportunity in civilized living that leads to a romanticism and yearning for a younger and less known world. Mystery and discovery are in abundance but restrictive individual circumstances can shrink people’s worldview. The fantasy of uncertainty, for the potential of positive upheaval it represents, is desired in contrast to being trapped by crushing banality.

Unable to climb beyond working at the gas station her family owns on the edge of the city she has lived in all her life, Felicia knows this feeling well. A four time college dropout paralysed by indecision and unrewarded effort, she’s channelled her lack of fulfilment into the pop cultural diversions designed to compensate for an unfulfilled interest in discovery. Geocaching, online sleuthing communities, urban exploration, codebreaking - she ran through them all, voraciously reading and daydreaming from behind the Formica counter.

Her imagination was captured by the idea of alternative reality games, Cicada 3301 and the podcast Rabbits in particular. Participating in a few whet her appetite and sparked ideas of her own. The story behind her idea was never fixed, shifting and mutating, never quite as good as the potential of what if could have been. Instead the real fruit of her fancies was a dazzling network of puzzles and schemes that she never intended to leave the confines of her head.

It was a fit of pique that made her cross this boundary, wanting to share her creation and have it appreciated by others. She left her first cipher taped to the window of a laundromat across town, which led to a fortuitous post on social media by a curious patron. The validation, even in anonymity, had too strong a pull for Felicia to ignore. What she intended as a one-off exercise became the first thread in a tapestry.

Today the mystery has sprawled into a massive undertaking, every moment she isn’t working the counter at the gas station Felicia is plotting her next move and masterfully crafting devious enigmas to stump her fans. Several online communities have sprung up around her work, speculating and taking sides on what it all might mean. It’s a recruitment tool for an intelligence organisation, it’s a promotional stunt for a movie that seems to never come, it’s the work of a cult or organised crime groups communicating in secret. None of the rumours are remotely true but she loves to visit and marvel at the speculation. It drives her, but the work has also taken on a more burdensome aspect. The reality can never live up to the fantasy and even as it takes over her life she is loath to give it up. She can’t stand to let everybody down with the truth.

STATS
Personality: Frazzled but ebullient and quietly clever. Felicia is extremely inquisitive but was constantly disappointed to find that every hill she climbed already had flags planted. In creating her own mysteries for others she’s opened up the possibility of new worlds, untouched by anything but her own hands.
Rage: Misbehaving children. She hates that some parents let their kids run wild.
Noble: People who make real discoveries. Far from jealous, Felicia openly hero worships those who do what she does but make contributions to humanity.
Fear: Failing to live up to people’s expectations (Self).
Obsession: Create the ultimate mystery.
Wound Threshold: 50.

Mysterycrafter 65%* (Substitutes for Secrecy, Substitutes for Knowledge, Substitutes for Lie.)
Gas Station Clerk 55% (Substitutes for Notice, Evaluates Violence, Protects Helplessness.)

Shock Gauges

Notches	Violence	Unnatural	Helplessness	Isolation	Self
Hardened	3	1	2	3	3
Failed	0	0	1	2	3

140 - Karmic Cobwebs

Unnatural Phenomenon: Karmic Cobwebs

Responsibility is a concept that leverages obligation into a moral virtue. Enforcement comes from practices like cultural indoctrination, collective shaming and the threat of intangible punishment, like karmic retribution. When it fails, karmic retribution - based on the idea that the universe is a place of moral balance and people naturally get what’s coming to them - is in tragically short supply. Often the person who pays the price is not the same person whose negligence caused the problem. The inequality of this damage, lensed through the collective belief that the world should be/is a just place, creates karmic cobwebs.

Shimmering gossamer threads that are barely perceivable and physically intangible, collected around the places where one person’s malice or negligence has done substantial damage to another without restitution. Most people can’t interact with them, it takes a certain degree of openness to even realise they’re there (a successful Secrecy roll by someone with at least 1 hardened notch in Unnatural is a good guideline). Once you’ve zeroed in there are a couple of options.

You can easily choose to get yourself tangled in one, which carries with it a karmic debt that operates a little like the transactional way an adept charges. For as long as the debt goes unresolved you’ve got a standing -10% shift on all rolls as it weighs you down but you gain a minor charge per week. On top of that if by some circumstances you (and it has to be you) can set things right the cobweb dissolves, which takes any remaining minor charges with it but rewards you with a hunch roll that is an automatic matched success/failure (roll one die to find out, 1=11, 2=22, etc.).

The alternative use people put cobwebs to is cursing others. There’s a bit of a trick to collecting one without it attaching itself to you but once you get the hang of it you can do it reliably. Putting it in their path with intent is enough even if they couldn’t ordinarily interact with it. This can be pretty nasty for those who aren’t clued-in, not only do their lives get measurably worse but they’re usually dogged by unnatural phenomenon as they leak unspent charges. Compounding this misery is the tendency of those already entangled by a cobweb to pick up extras. The penalties for this stack as does the charge building.

People swamped by cobwebs have an unfortunate tendency to wind up dead. This isn’t just due to the weight of the many debts they’re carrying finally crushing them. They show up constricted and desiccated, as though crushed and drained of fluid by an industrial nightmare machine built just for the purpose. Rumour points to the parallels between karmic and mundane cobwebs. Sure, they’re powered by avoided punishments inflicted on others, but what kind of monster is actually spinning them?

139 - Marie Antoinette’s Cake & Snowglobe

Artifact: Marie Antoinette’s Cake

Power: Significant.

Description: A carefully preserved, but ancient and crumbling, piece of bread-pastry enriched with butter and eggs making it golden and brown on the crust. Despite its obvious age there is no sign of mold and, leaning close, it still has the vague smell of being freshly baked. It tastes pretty nice.

Effect: Eating a mouthful of the cake temporarily (until the sunrise after next) relieves you of the physical and psychological effects of privation. You won’t starve, become sick from malnutrition or die of exposure in the freezing rain. However it provides no relief from actually being in that situation and in fact it makes people who are better off less inclined to help you. Anyone with a higher Status (gauged off the greater of native ability or a substituting identity) can’t perceive you as being in need and any appeals to them on that basis automatically fail. This extends to coercion and magickal effects less powerful than a significant adept spell or the channels of an avatar with an identity of less than 60%.

Artifact: Snowglobe

Power: Minor.

Description: Difficult to distinguish from an ordinary snowglobe depicting a well-known landmark, the trick is that the snow will only fall if it is actually snowing at that location in real life. Otherwise it stubbornly sticks to the bottom when you shake it. There are stories of those depicting fictional locations, but that’s probably bullshit.

Effect: Crack open the globe and slurp down all the liquid inside. It’s ethylene glycol - used as an agent in antifreeze - which is very poisonous so this is generally regarded as a bad idea. However it does allow you to ask and have one question answered correctly about the current state of the depicted location, so long as it can be answered in four words or less. Hopefully it’s worth the trip to the hospital.

138 - Stefan Weismuller, Fastest Man Alive

GMC: Stefan Weismuller, Fastest Man Alive

People who have a passion for something they are great at usually eventually run into the fact that they’ll never be the best at it. It’s simple logic, out of everyone, why would it be a given individual over all the other possible contenders? There also has to be a best, in that intersection between incredible talent, driving discipline and opportunity, and Stefan Weismuller had the fortune to be that person. It has become the focus of his life to the exclusion of all else.

Stefan is fast, scary fast. If it weren’t for the fact that he openly espouses the use of performance enhancing drugs to reach beyond the merely human he’d be a multiple olympic medalist. Growing up it was never about the accolades that came with his dynamite athletic prowess, in being better than everyone else at one specific thing he feels objectively elevated above other people. Naturally this attitude rubs most people the wrong way. It’s cost him more than competitive sports, spoiling personal relationships and enviable career opportunities that he honestly doesn’t really care about.

It’s also given him a very dedicated niche following of speed and athletics nuts with a Randian bent towards glorifying individual performance. Across social media and his YouTube channel this gives him the echo chamber he needs to support his worldview and continue his project of building himself into a hyper-focused marvel of velocity. It also means that his ego is egg-shell thin and he is prone to picking fights and taking on challengers.

It’s one of these fights that saw him soundly beaten by semi-anonymous parkourist “Manifickfak” in a sprawling rooftop chase that Stefan swears was rigged. His GoPro didn’t pick it up but he knows he saw his opponent duck into a stairwell in one building and simultaneously emerge from one on another. Unwilling to let it go he’s posted a series of “exposée” videos that don’t prove much of anything but allege a lot of different types of trickery while he doggedly pursues the truth he knows he saw. The idea that he was beaten cleanly just can’t compute. That’s fair in this case, he wasn’t. The truth is that Manifickfak is a high-level avatar of the Pilgrim, now on the Sleeper shit-list for publicly indulging herself in this debacle.

On the edge of falling into the occult underground, Stefan presents a unique threat and resource to its denizens. Someone who is supremely skilled in a mundane way and hellbent as any adept, likely to make big waves in ways few expect. Given his attitude towards drugs it’s likely that Stefan will see the potential magick has to improve his performance as a goldmine.

STATS
Personality: Wilful, aggressive and headstrong. Stefan lives, breathes and eats his obsession with speed. His entire life revolves around training, exercising, dieting, researching and tweaking himself for peak performance. He’d be at a complete loss without it.
Rage: Being beaten at what makes him special.
Noble: Remembering the elderly. Stefan worries about getting older being stripped of the characteristics that define him, it’s why he visits his grandparents so often.
Fear: Crippling injury (Violence).
Obsession: I am the fastest!
Wound Threshold: 50.

World’s Fastest Man 95%* (Substitutes for Pursuit, Substitutes for Fitness, Provides Initiative.)
D-List Celebrity 25% (Substitutes for Status, Substitutes for Lie, Protects Helplessness.)

Shock Gauges

Notches	Violence	Unnatural	Helplessness	Isolation	Self
Hardened	2	1	2	3	1
Failed	0	1	1	0	0

137 - Snowbound

Ritual: Snowbound

Cost: 4 minor charges.

Ritual Action: Go outside during the first instance of snow in the winter season of your region. Build a snowman as tall as you are, place three items symbolising: your identity (like a birth certificate) in its base, your connection to your closest (highest rated) bond in its chest, and your obsession in its head. Strip naked, dressing it in your clothes as you build it. Finally (still naked) perform some version of an initiation rite for a religion that you belong to with the snowman as the subject (you). If you don’t belong to a religion that has that or cannot physically perform it on a snowman you’re ineligible for the effect.

Effect: Got a curse bothering you? Whether it’s a gutter magick whammy or a supernatural wasting disease you can temporarily deflect it on your snow doppelganger. You’ll be free of that temporary penalty or your skin will stop sloughing off as long as it’s in one piece. Effects that would damage a snowman will erode your creation at a rate the GM deems appropriate but otherwise it’s as durable as anything made out of snow. You can shore it up with naturally occurring snow, but that only counts if you do it. I wouldn’t try using freezer crust.

This curse binding lasts until either the snowman is destroyed (damaged sufficiently that it would be life threatening to a real person), the end of winter, or you leaving the region. It also diminishes you a little while it’s active. Once per session the GM has the option of choosing to either place a -10% shift on a roll or deny the use of a passion (expending it). People who’ve experienced this describe it as being a little like a temporary sense of seasonal affective disorder and awareness of their life’s impermanence.

136 - Kompromat

Artifact: Kompromat

Power: Significant.

Description: A padded green envelope, A4 size. There's some Cyrillic lettering on it and a seal but it's too worn and faded to identify. It’s impossible to tell what’s inside by external examination. The shape and feel might be a tape, a sheaf of photographs or a USB stick inside some packing materials. It rattles ambiguously. X-rays, metal detectors and other scientific hoo-hah fail to give anything definitive but the results aren’t unnaturally doctored. The only way to tell for sure is to open it up.

Effect: The dark sister to Grandma’s Diary (see pg. 87 of Book 1: Play), Kompromat shows you definitive physical proof of the worst thing you’ve ever done in the most compromising light. Even if that’s impossible. It’s probably around a rank 4-6 Helplessness or Self check to be confronted by it depending on what you’ve done, although GMs are encouraged to fiddle with the rank and gauge depending on a character’s history. Used as blackmail material it adds 3 ranks to any coercion check that manages to incorporate it.

This might be difficult though, since no one can see any but their own sins staring them in the face. Unlike Grandma’s Diary you can absolutely show this to other people, but what they’ll see is you holding evidence of their most heinous crimes. Calming down enough to realise that you’re both seeing something different is usually the first clue people get that something unnatural is going on. Given the reluctance of people to share the worst of themselves this doesn’t happen often.

There is an exception. If someone is truly blameless, like a one-in-a-million super saint, Kompromat instead appears as the compromising material of the one person in the world who is most diametrically opposed to their views. Kompromat has that bedevilling quality of some artifacts to go missing and show up again in unexpected places and cause more trouble, even if thought destroyed. Theoretically, a blameless individual diametrically opposed to another blameless individual could cause a self-destructive recursion. Fat chance of that happening though.

135 - The Place You’ve Never Been

Unnatural Phenomenon: The Place You’ve Never Been

There’s a place you’ve never been. It’s a turn off on the highway, you drive past it every day on the way to work. A blip on the radar, barely an off-ramp that goes on to a dirt road. You remember the sign though. It’s a landmark you use to gauge how far you are from your exit. Sometimes in the car you daydream about what that place might be like. Maybe once or twice you actually contemplate making the turn, but you’ve always got more important things to do.

You mention it to someone at work. They say they know someone whose brother-in-law moved out there a few years back, apparently its real nice, good for families. Or they say they’ve got a second cousin who has family out there stuck in the kind of industrial poverty that comes from a solo industry town that’s gone down the toilet. The details of the stories are never the same and the people referred to are always at a remove or two from whoever’s telling them, like it’s a rumour they’re trying to put a face on. They seem sincere. It’d be a weird thing to lie about.

You go back to your desk or pull up your phone and punch the name into a web browser. The results come up blank. Maybe you get a hit or two that’s obviously for a different place with the same name. That might have been where your co-workers were talking about. Google maps is no help, the satellite view doesn’t show it and neither does the street view. The capture dates on the images are a little old though.

It bugs you. A little burr that sticks up every time you pass the sign on the road. This place you’ve dreamt about that won’t stick to a story or be defined. You lie idly awake at night, thinking about it. One day, without even consciously thinking about it, you take the turn. Once you’re on the other side of the double line and curving away from the asphalt it’s honestly a relief, you’ve crossed the point of no return and you’ll finally be able to put this ridiculous anxiety to bed.

You drive for what seems like hours in a straight line. There is no one else on the road. You’ll definitely miss work. After a while there are no landmarks to guide you. There’s a nausea in your gut and bad taste in your mouth, like you slept all night with it hanging open. Then finally, up ahead, another highway with traffic. The dirt road comes to an end and you pull onto the on-ramp. Two exits down you pass the sign again and another two exits down you make your turn off for work.

Pulling into your parking space, four hours late and beginning to convince yourself that it never happened, you are seized by a sudden vertiginous image. A microcosm of the world, looping over itself on the edges like an old video game with the illusion of being part of a much larger universe. Trapped inside of a curved fishbowl. And there’s one horrible question that surfaces in your mind, unbidden: how much of the world is the place you’ve never been?

134 - Rapunzel’s Bezoar

Artifact: Rapunzel’s Bezoar

Power: Significant.

Description: A disgusting, ratty hairball compressed into a dense, dark fibrous tube of with light, airy edges of loose strands. It is clearly made of hair from multiple different people and squishes slightly when squeezed. Just barely small enough to swallow, but doing so is painful and can cause choking. It is hot and prickly to the touch.

Effect: Rapunzel’s bezoar purifies the body of physical addictions, swallowed alongside indulging in the object of addiction. In addition to being painful, willingly swallowing something so disgusting is a rank 6 helplessness check. Processing the bezoar take three debilitating days, anyone getting less than a matched success on a Fitness roll on each day is in agony and bedridden for 24 hours. At its conclusion the bezoar passes out of the body and the addiction with it, there are no complications from withdrawal. Psychological addictions are not removed.

Using the bezoar within a month of someone else replaces your addiction with theirs. The new addiction cannot be removed by the bezoar.

133 - The Artlux Collective Castoffs

Cabal: The Artlux Collective Castoffs

The purpose of art - as experienced beyond the artist themselves - is to communicate. Whether to evoke emotion, serve a political message or psychologically entice for commercial purposes, used effectively it bridges a chasm of understanding impassable by other means. Nonetheless communication gaps are inevitable, no two umwelts can ever fully synchronise and the signal to noise ratio for delivering your experiences to someone else will always fall hopelessly short of true fidelity. To most this is desirable, the very concept of privacy is based on being able to curate what you share of yourself. To others, the inability to really choose to fully open up is intolerable.

It was this inescapable aspect of being human that drove Hayley Rudall, art patron and coal heiress to create the Artlux Collective. Inheritance of an artifact - a mammoth ivory flute accidentally uncovered in one of their mines - that had allowed her father and grandfather to subjugate their workers by directly inflicting their perceptions and values on them, made it more than the idle and decadent art salon of a bored socialite. Sharing the power of this object allowed the collective to truly share and experience each other. Most weren’t cut out for that level of intimacy but those who stayed bonded inseparably and would take up permanent residence in the Collective’s historic tenement.

A commune hivemind that has survived decades since its 1923 origin, the Collective has since gained the ability to invest its greatest creations with magickal power. Artists temporarily sequestering themselves from the greater whole to craft deeply personal works and shape the group's future. This is not without risk, reception reflects directly on the degree of connection an artist is allowed moving forward. As the castoffs discovered, heinous trespasses can be met with expulsion. For people used to living with the thoughts of others inside their heads withdrawal is debilitating.

The Tantalus, an opus reflecting on and provoking unreachable and intense personal desire, was deliberately divisive. Reception was extremely mixed but the collective decision to recycle the magickal energy invested in its creation for other works was met by its creator stealing and then accidentally losing it to the city’s criminal underground. Having offended the bulk of the collective and then misplaced a sizable portion of their power she was expelled, along with her sponsor and followed by another artist emotionally invested in her welfare. Plagued by a degenerative condition only experienced by ex-hivemind members, their only hope for readmission and survival is retrieval of the Tantalus.

The cabal’s current goals are:

• Find the Tantalus, following the clues so far has led them through a series of local drug dealers to a Russian Bratva middleman responsible for supplying a sizeable chunk of local trade. Reaching this milestone puts them at 58%.
• Safeguard their cache of artifacts. Gloria, ever resourceful, managed a personal store of occult power that the cabal relies on as their primary advantage. Among their collection is several optimist’s cards, a return ticket and a half consumed hand of glory. The GM is encouraged to add any others as desired.
• Manage their condition. Losing connection to a hivemind is like losing several major senses all at once and the magickal backlash results in progressive mental deterioration. Obsessive mindfulness exercises and listening to constant recordings of babble to simulate the background of other people’s thoughts are the current extent of their prophylaxis. Gloria is following rumours of a drug which might provide relief through her sister, a medical researcher.

Aveline Bishop has been hit the worst, in no small part due to the severity and suddenness of her ejection from Artlux. As the Tantalus’s creator, she is indirectly responsible for the cabal’s predicament. She is also dependent on the other two members, her condition has progressed to a point she often forgets who she is and stares vacantly unless brought back to the world by a familiar voice. Her connection to the Tantalus has so far allowed her to act as a magickal compass and guide the group through acts of gutter magick.

Outwardly Aveline seems like an ingenue but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The well-educated and sophisticated child of the city's well to do, it's that her artistic talent is an instinctive beast that constantly surprises and seizes her. Headhunted from a prestigious art school by Gloria as a means to join the collective she took to the hivemind as an inspirational experience, spending some of her time on the peripheries and the rest in deep, soulful dives of communion. It offered her insight like nothing else she has ever found.

She resents and would buck at Gloria’s control were it not for what she owes her mentor and her encroaching infirmity. Conversely, she is grateful for Cameron’s support while feeling guilty that she cannot reciprocate the attachment he feels to her.

Gloria Bloxam was a successful gallery owner before joining the collective, atypical of their membership she produces no work herself but acted as a valve for releasing their work to the wider world. This bought her a certain degree of leeway and the opportunity to sponsor the other cabal members in joining the collective. Division over her membership without personal contribution was openly a factor in deciding to expel her along with Aveline.

Shrewd and tightly-wound Gloria prides herself on possessing poise above all else. If anything this, more than control of the collective’s artistic contribution to the world, drove her desire to join it. Battering her will against being consumed in the thoughts and feelings of others was a constant battle she gloried in winning. Fighting the steady deterioration of the cabal’s condition has become her new battleground.

Cameron Weldon feels a terrible responsibility to Aveline. A graffiti-artist styling himself as a optimistically nihilistic (but considerably less talented) Banksy, he is Gloria’s second protege. Being taken under her wing at the same time as Aveline the two of them bonded and for the first time he felt able to share stories of a troubled upbringing and his struggles with heroin addiction. Initially repulsed by the deeply personal nature of the revelation (and culture shock, having enjoyed a comparatively privileged and sheltered upbringing), Aveline’s later apology only made their friendship more awkward. Cameron blames himself for misstepping but Aveline simply values their connection in a less intimate way, reserving the best of herself for her work.

Choosing expulsion along with the other cabal members in a fit of pique, Cameron is now uncertain and queasy about his personal motivations in joining them. Given their collective predicament he is putting that aside for now to focus on survival. His checkered past has helped the cabal move through circles that would otherwise be off-limits to them, but it has also brought him closer to falling back on the needle than ever before.