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?