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.