184 - Father Lonne Asbury, Excommunicated Cecilite

GMC: Father Lonne Asbury, Excommunicated Cecilite

Excommunication in the Catholic Church isn’t the same thing as being lacized - a loss of status as a member of the clergy - instead it’s a form of institutional shunning that invites the censured party to reconsider and repent for their actions so they may return to the fold. Lonne craves nothing more. He just has to do something first.

Lonne habitually stepped over the line as a priest. His willingness to question doctrine and go beyond the accepted boundaries of the church made otherwise marginalised people trust him. In combination with a particularly active local occult underground it exposed him to exactly the sort of things that the Order of St. Cecil deals with on a regular basis: possession, hauntings, sorcery. Despite his reputation, kicking requests that were substantiated up the chain enough times earned him the attention of the order. Delays in their response meant he went it alone against the forces of darkness more than once.

This combination earned him a pass on his questionable conduct and his eagerness to impress brought him into the order proper, despite the reservations of some senior membership. He performed admirably but his reliability and methods are shaky. It took an instance of him negotiating with one demon to displace another possessing a young girl for the order to put him on notice.

For the time being Lonne has moved out of the church and his regular parishioners aren’t exactly happy with his “temporary” replacement. Instead he runs his own off-the-books ministry, catering specifically to the occult underground following he developed for his accommodating views. Among them are two adepts and an avatar who he believes he can rehabilitate and use to prove to the order that a change of policy is in order. His current magickal version of conversion therapy is highly questionable but well-intentioned.

The order is keeping an eye on him and finds this behaviour alarming. They haven’t moved yet but are divided between issuing an ultimatum, allowing him to see the error of his ways naturally and cutting off the risk he poses to them as soon as possible. None of them want to move against the others and spur overt factionalism so for the time being he gets away with it. Much like he always has.

STATS
Personality: Pompous and self-aggrandizing on the outside, harrowed and spiritually suicidal on the inside. Lonne is raucous in manner but secretly believes the sacrifice of his own soul for the salvation of others would be an acceptable trade. Having spent so long away from the fold he’s going native in the occult underground.
Rage: Being judged by holier-than-thous, they haven’t faced what he has.
Noble: If not me, then who?
Fear: He can’t save them all (Self).
Obsession: Saving those furthest from God.
Wound Threshold: 50.

Ousted Cecilite 65%* (Substitutes for Knowledge, Protects Helplessness, Protects Unnatural.)
Shepherd To The Forsaken 55% (Substitutes for Connect, Substitutes for Status, Use Gutter Magick.)

Shock Gauges

Notches	Violence	Unnatural	Helplessness	Isolation	Self
Hardened	4	3	2	3	2
Failed	1	2	0	2	1

183 - Moon Egg

Artifact: Moon Egg

Power: Minor.

Description: A beige egg-shaped device about the size of a football but heavy enough to be unwieldy. It looks smooth and plastic but feels porous to the touch, like coral or pumice. Inset in the top is a black lens slightly larger than a human eye, it feels slick and moist. Arrayed around the widest point on its axis are five cup handles that feel slightly too large to grasp. Embedded in each of them is a hook-shaped button. Pressing any two of them together activates the effect.

Effect: Pointed at someone and activated, the moon egg glows with a scintillating display of colour. Experimentation will reveal that this colour changes with the target’s emotions. It’s essentially a big mood ring (with unlimited range). It’s good for 12 uses before it runs out of juice. Recharging is accomplished by using it on someone experiencing schadenfreude.

The effect isn’t magickal, it’s technological. The egg is a device from a previous incarnation of the universe that fell through the cracks during one or more resets like a neverwhen person. The only magickal effect is a tiny bubble of para-reality that lets it function in a universe where the laws of physics are slightly different to the one it came from. Being from a previous universe gives the egg a special value despite its questionable normal utility. To the right people it could be used to devise rituals, power otherspaces and advance objectives relating to understanding and influencing the very nature of the universe. Taking it apart and repurposing it for this reason is good for an intense milestone on any objective.

Obviously anyone who learns about this would best keep it a secret until they’re able to use or offload the egg. If the wrong cabals catch wind they might find out that it’s just as fragile as any mundane object and it’s not like they’re making any more of them.

182 - Eadie Scarborough, Yarnbombing Motumancer

GMC: Eadie Scarborough, Yarnbombing Motumancer

The transgressive nature of graffiti codes it negatively in some lights and positively in others. Associations with vandalism and criminal gangs inspire pearl clutching on one end and the empowerment of marginalized artists and the grass-roots beautification of public spaces stimulates the other. Yarnbombing, which involves knitting or crochet as the medium, subverts typical negative expectations of vandalism through focus on the positive aspects of graffiti and association with softer, traditionally feminine pursuits.

Eadie can’t stand that, it isn't safe.

It wasn’t always that way. Once upon a time, the new-in-town librarian embraced a tweedy hipster image with aplomb - she volunteered with children’s groups, ran a craft stall, rented a funny little bungalow and experimented in microfarming. It was her chance to define herself separate from her past. To get away from the abortion that had destroyed her already rocky relationship with her Baptist minister father and ended the marriage-to-be with her long-term girlfriend. The new her was a mask of happiness she tried to make real.

She was embraced into the community as an acceptably quirky, trendy young woman and for a while that was okay. It grated though, not all the time but Eadie wasn’t okay with the degree and ease with which she’d fooled everyone. Her discontent with the disconnect she felt manifested as heightened scrutiny of other people’s motivations. Eadie’s insecurity and unresolved buried feelings would probably have best been serviced by a therapist, but instead one irrational distrust led to another and she found herself skulking in the bushes outside PTA head Maggie Warwhal’s house late one evening. Trying to find out just what that obnoxious, fake busybody was really hiding behind her perfect, permed facade.

Maggie was eating other PTA member’s brains with a hidden proboscis. Unscrewing the tops of their head’s like bottle caps and taking a slurp from each before putting them back together.

The Warwhal residence burned down two nights later. No one ever suspected Eadie, no one had reason too. Except that her personal crusade kicked off a few weeks later. She believes that all social structures are really just footholds for what she calls “cuckoos”, monstrous parasites that conceal themselves in sympathetic social structures and assumptions to prey on humanity. Taking up her needles she’s intent on shaking up the image of not just her own subculture by violating boundaries, but as many others as she can obscenely lampoon and disrupt with woolen-woven scandal.

And when the monsters scurry out, she’ll burn them all.

STATS
Personality: She’s nice, aggressively nice unless she’s trying to tear the wool away from your eyes. Then the knitting needles come out. Knives and gasoline too, sometimes.
Rage: Social exclusion. She’s been super vigilant about it with the kid’s groups she supervises. Of course, being an overbearing authority figure in that regard tends to do more harm than good.
Noble: Telling it to people straight. She’ll hide it from most behind her cheery facade, but the people she thinks can handle it will privately get honest answers out of Eadie.
Fear: The hidden monsters that walk among us (Unnatural).
Obsession: Social institutions are a hotbed for infection, shatter people’s expectations to spread the truth and freedom.
Wound Threshold: 50.

Yarnbomber 55% (Substitutes for Connect, Substitutes for Secrecy, Provides Initiative.)
Vigilante 40% (Substitutes for Notice, Substitutes for Lie, Coerces Helplessness.)
Motumancer 25%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)

Shock Gauges

Notches	Violence	Unnatural	Helplessness	Isolation	Self
Hardened	5	3	1	3	4
Failed	1	0	1	1	3

181 - Unseasonable

Ritual: Unseasonable

Cost: 4 significant charges.

Ritual Action: Artificially preserve a snowball made of naturally occurring snow for at least three months. Travel to the highest point in 33 miles and anoint it with the blood of a sacrificed goat or sheep younger than the snow just before dawn. Close your eyes, facing away from the rising sun, and throw the snowball as high into the air as possible. Before it can hit the ground recite a litany of the highest and lowest temperatures, rainfall, humidity, etc. in the region since the last time it snowed. If successful you won’t hear the snowball hit the ground because it will disappear.

Effect: For the next 24 hours weather conditions in a 3 mile area match those of the time and location the snowball was collected from. Afterwards they return to normal along a conventional progression, in areas where it doesn’t snow this readjustment can be turbulent. For the intent of any magickal effects or rituals dependent on things like season (such as Snowbound) the local area counts as that time.

Unnatural phenomenon that keys off of specific dates (i.e every 9th summer solstice the cyber-jabberwocky abducts 3 children to slave in its arcade-dungeon forever!) can be delayed by 24 hours the same way. If delayed for over a month by consecutive castings the delayed effect is dismissed. For now.

180 - Wolf At The Door

Artifact: Wolf At The Door

Power: Significant.

Description: The complete skeleton of an adult male timber wolf. The Alaskan adept who makes these totems kills the animals himself but the only real prerequisite is that they die by violence and the carcass is processed before rot can set in. The exact procedure is a guarded secret, so the few that show up elsewhere can only have come from him.

Effect: Trapped inside its earthly remains, the living energy of the wolf is a potent, potentially fatal, curse that can be levied against anyone whose home you have access to. Bury it in their yard three days before the full moon to activate the effect. If the target lives in an apartment building a courtyard is fine but living spaces without an area of uncovered earth attached to them do not count. You must plant the skeleton with deliberate intent, targeting a specific individual living in the building.

For the next lunar month, following the full moon, the target is plagued by nightly harassment from a ghostly wolf. It begins testing the security of their home, scratching at doors and windows and shitting on the doorstep, unless it can get inside. Howling and snarling will keep them and others awake at night, but no physical signs of the creature can be found. Escalating, the wolf will break into the home and attack the target with a 45% Struggle and a +3 damage bonus for claws and teeth, ignoring all others. Invisible and largely intangible, the only real defence is escape or appropriate magick (it has a wound threshold of 45 in that case). Barricading can hold the beast back but it will work tirelessly to gain access, tearing and clawing away at any barrier. It is roughly as intelligent as a human when it comes to bypassing traps and obstacles it cannot destroy.

There are three circumstances in which the curse ends: the target dies, the target survives the attacks until the next full moon, or someone digs up the skeleton. Moving to a new place can delay the attacks, precautions and a successful Secrecy roll grant a one night reprieve before it finds the target in their new hiding spot.

179 - The Lost Cosmonauts

Cabal: The Lost Cosmonauts

To a small cabal of occultists the collapse of the Soviet Union was not because of malfeasance, mismanagement or sabotage. Instead the seeds of its destruction were planted on July 21st 1969, when the USA beat it to the moon.

To them that event started the trickle which became an avalanche which swept away any chance of communism prevailing. Most of them are too young or stubborn to blame economic stagnation or fallout from the loosening yoke of control over USSR satellite states, let alone exhaustion from war in Afghanistan or the Chernobyl reactor meltdown. No, it was that moment in the late 60s, when American boots touched lunar soil in front of the world that was the fulcrum of history. The tide turned on the day that humanity's greatest achievement was snatched away. The fact that it took more than two decades for the final impact to be felt is mere technicality.

However the means to rewrite history are within their grasp. They need to plan and prepare carefully for the opportunity, they’ll only have one shot. (Not that any of them really give a shit about the Soviet Union outside their personal agendas, but it makes good set dressing for the direction they pretend to share.)

The objective of the Lost Cosmonauts is to change history so that the Soviet Union was the first to land on the moon (they’re at 18% of their cosmic objective), in order to complete this objective their goals are the following:

• Find the lost Krechet-94 of Grinin Yakovich, a one-of-a-kind artifact created by Vetrov’s unit back in the 1960s, which is capable of a very specific kind of space/time travel.
• Obtain two major charges to power the artifact. Technically the plan could be carried out with one but it would mean stranding Adrian on the moon. Only Vetrov is aware of this complication.
• Build a man-portable apparatus capable of broadcasting their achievement to the world of the 1960s. They can’t change anything on the ground so it will have to take advantage of existing infrastructure.

There is no telling what might happen if they succeed, time travel is a fraught and inexplicable endeavour. Will they really change history? Or will they become trapped in a microcosm of their own making? Or will nothing of consequence result? Won’t the world of the 1960s write their efforts off as a hoax? There’s only one way to find out.

Vetrov Nikitovich was a ghoulish imp of a man in the 1960s and time has done nothing to improve things. He was second-in-charge of a small Soviet military research unit ostensibly working on the mathematics of rocket trajectories. In reality they were the pet project of a high level political functionary with an intense interest in occult metaphysics and their technological and military applications. Towards the end of the 60s their entire purpose was bent towards a last ditch effort to win the space race.

They only partially succeeded and not enough to win. The unit was disbanded and its members receded into obscurity. Vetrov himself was convicted of trafficking in samizdat, contraband literature, in the 1970s and spent a significant period of time imprisoned until well after the fall of the Union in the 90s. Afterwards he approached the new regime as a would-be court wizard but received stony reception.

Vetrov’s motives are entirely selfish, if he can recapture the success of the project that promised him ascendancy he can hit the undo button on his shitty life. He likes to pretend the entire undertaking is his idea, but until Zoya put the idea in his head the decrepit mathematical and arcane savant would have likely drank himself to death surrounded by crumbling tomes and unnatural proofs.

Adrian Sokolov grew up wanting to be a cosmonaut. Unlike a lot of kids he held onto this dream and nearly realised it. An aerospace engineering degree from MIPT, a pilot’s career with the Russian Air Force, a sterling reputation as a stalwart and purposeful young man on a mission. Resigning his commission to enter the cosmonaut selection process (a technicality required by Roscosmos’s status as a civilian organisation) he was on the cusp of realising a lifetime’s work and dedication. Three months later he had a breakdown from trying to keep together the fallout of symptoms that until then he put down to stress reactions that he felt he simply had to handle to keep his place.

Adrian has severe bipolar disorder, which he manages with a raft of varying medications. Applying the same discipline and routine to living his life that saw him through his studies and military career is what kept him going. Truncating the horizon of his life down to one day at a time is the only way he was able to cope. His career was over, until Zoya approached and literally offered him the moon.

Pulled back from a life of listless survival Adrian is utterly committed to the cabal’s cause. If the cabal can promise him his shattered dreams back he’ll be the wildest political zealot they’ve ever seen. The others find his anachronistic affectations bewildering but are willing to stomach the fiery convictions none of them actually share in return for his talented dedication.

Zoya Petrov, thief and sorcerer. Zoya has a history of attaching herself to other’s dreams and seeing what she can make of them. It was her that dredged Vetrov up from rotting away in a bedsit with his equations and pulled Adrian out of his funk. She and Miwa encountered each other by happenstance in Vladivostok but Zoya still takes the credit for their encounter, these things just happen for her. She is an avatar of the opportunist and attuned to the eddies of the statosphere by virtue of a prosthetic eye made of topaz, which she usually conceals behind mirrored sunglasses.

For Zoya the cabal’s goal is an expression of opportunity that trumps all others, snatching back circumstances lost to the passage of time for personal benefit. Her well-off family was ruined in the fall and success will either mean rewriting her personal history to fix this or one hell of a powerful kick towards godwalker status or even ascension. The irony of giving up her self-made success as a high-level go-between and smuggler in organised crime circles isn’t lost on her. While Zoya appreciates the material wealth and power of her position, her ideal waffles between either metaphysical supremacy or giving up the game entirely for the cosseted wealth and status she could have had. If she can, she’ll take both.

Zoya maintains an air of mystery, coming and going as she pleases. Between her criminal contacts and a collection of magickal artifacts the eye has helped her amass she works to make herself indispensable to the cabal. When that isn't enough she uses her position to play the other members off against one another. Although Vetrov is allegedly in charge, Zoya is the one really pulling the strings.

Miwa Mikura grew up in Hokkaido, but her family was originally from the Kuril Islands. Her great-grandparents displacement by Soviet invasion and administration from the end of WWII onward was always a sore point with her father. His aggressive and outspoken opinions on the matter and, more to the point, excessive public drinking made him a public figure of derision and this carried over to the rest of his family. Outcast amongst an established diaspora, her upbringing was fertile ground as a budding motumancer. She breaks down the identities of those who cling to heritage and tradition while secretly nursing her own out of a sense of wounded superiority.

Miwa desires nothing more than putting a match to the Cold War. The Soviet Union never technically made peace with Japan and she hopes increasing tensions between the two superpowers can spark it off into a conflagration that will - if not unhand her ancestral home - consume the invading nation. If she can’t have the place that ruined her family (that she has ironically never seen) then no one can. To this end she intends to corrupt the message the cabal will send to the world of the 1960s with her brand of acrimonious sorcery.

The rest of the cabal are relying on her for the magickal energy to make the trip possible. She exploits this need by needling their foibles as a source of charges.

178 - Hover

Ritual: Hover

Cost: 3 minor charges

Ritual Action: Eat only yellow food for at least a day beforehand. Take 3 needles, two of pure silver and one carved out of a bone from a pregnant animal. Insert the two silver needles through the skin and into the space underneath your shoulder blades. Swallow the third. In a place lit by sunlight but not directly visible to the sun say the five word Hindi incantation, fully turn anti-clockwise once and raise both feet off the ground.

Effect: You hover, about 6 to 8 inches off the ground. Most people will assume this is some kind of street magician trick as you waver a little bit but you’re genuinely levitating. You can’t bear a whole lot of weight without sinking and will do so very gradually regardless unless you concentrate solely on maintaining the effect. You can keep it up for as long as you can maintain focus but it’s exhausting, people have described it like swimming constantly against a strong current.

A cheap, flashy, reasonably easy magickal ritual? Why isn’t everyone doing it? What’s not to love?

The hidden downside is that it destroys your liver and kidneys. For every minute (or fraction thereof for brief castings) you lose about 10% function as they shrivel and atrophy under the strain of lifting you into the air. This does not recover naturally but other magick may undo the damage.

177 - Owls

Unnatural Phenomenon: Owls

Owls have a widespread and varied mythology. In Japan and Mongolia they are regarded as good luck. Ancient Greece is responsible for an enduring association with wisdom. As nocturnal birds of prey, one of the more pervasive superstitions is that owls are harbingers of death and bad luck.

For those who dabble in the magick of death, whether its Thanatomancy or the incorporation of human sacrifice into gutter magick, this association has fangs. Holding charges or effects drawn from human death is a magnet for owls. At low-levels this is merely inconvenient, clusters of them roosting openly wherever you stop for long no matter the location or time of day. Creepy and perhaps inconvenient when trying to hide the source of your powers from clued-in enemies (or less bloodthirsty associates and allies).

Among those whose souls are thoroughly stained with the blood of others it becomes a risk. People report losing things and poor memory, in extreme cases they become completely non-functional for long periods of time. The reason for this is that beyond a certain fuzzy threshold the owls seem to steal things from your mind. They aren’t unnatural entities or using magick (killing and dissecting one will reveal it’s an ordinary owl) but the effect is dependent on their proximity.

If you’ve attracted the attention of owls, once you reach this threshold continuing down the path costs you the mental image of one object or concept per additional person harmed. If it takes apples from you, for example, the idea of an apple would be a blank. You might see one and not be able to register it or the concept of apple pie would never occur to you when talking about food even if it’s normally your favourite. This only lasts while in line of sight to the owl which now holds your stolen thoughts. If you lock yourself in a windowless closet you can talk about apples all day. This effect can be counteracted piecemeal by killing and eating the owl assigned a particular concept. Unfortunately for those affected the first thing owls usually take from someone is the concept of owls themselves.

176 - Mirrormouth

Unnatural Entity: Mirrormouth

Within the deeper machinery of the universe there are unnatural processes that clear away the waste products of humanities’ messy meddling with the universal firmament. Humanity, being the unpredictable element that necessitates the clean up in the first place, can pollute these processes into being something more than intended. For example, collapsed otherspaces leave behind wreckage and fragments of the intentions and beliefs that built them. The precursors to mirrormouths dutifully spawn, multiply and scoop up these fragments in the wake of these collapses and digest them so they don’t bleed into reality before dissolving into ephemeral flotsam themselves. All of this occurs in dimensions imperceptible to all but the most spaced out and incoherent of magi.

Occasionally exposure to this wreckage causes a mutation in the clean up organism’s reproduction, instead of programmed death it persists like bacteria that has learned to turn magickal radiation into food. Persisting, it needs more food.

Mirrormouths appear as man-sized, disembodied, toothy maws in the junctions between spaces, like doorways and tunnel openings, but also symbolic portals like reflective surfaces (hence the name). They can only intersect with our world in these junctures, the rest of the time they maneuver in a spaces as invisible and intangible to us as we are to them.

Despite appearances they aren’t physically dangerous and will only go after those involved in constructing or maintaining an otherspace (completed permanent otherspaces don’t register to them for some reason, hiding in one is a good way to avoid attention from a pack of ‘mouths). Instead a mirrormouth will snack off of an otherspace objective, each percentage point will give it another week of life. Alternatively it will parasite on maintenance of an existing otherspace, costing an extra charge per day unless dislodged and dealt with, for the same benefit

There’s rumours of a YA novel author and adept in New Jersey that keeps a tamed mirrormouth as a pet. Threatening would-be universe builders in a unique protection racket or sending it to chow down on pocket dimensions whose powers she wants for herself. Two people have tried to kill her for her predations, both were sent back to their respective cabals bent 90 degrees backwards at the waist but otherwise unharmed as warnings.

Mirrormouth, Extradimensional Cleaner
Wound Threshold: 50. Mirrormouth’s can’t be hurt directly, damage to a junction one appears in will harm it normally but only push it out of our dimension temporarily if destroyed unless the mirrormouth is also dead.
Otherspace Sniffer 50%: Once a week a mirrormouth can roll on this identity to track down an otherspace or cabal making one based on magickal energies visible in its dimension. +20% shift on instances it has previously fed on.
Local Reality Warping 70%: Mirrormouth’s pick up the characteristics of the otherspaces they eat. Per encounter they can roll once for each of these until they succeed, inflicting the successful result on local reality for the duration.
Om Nom 60%: On a successful roll can gobble the sum of an otherspace-building objective’s percentiles at a rate of 1% per turn unless interrupted. Usable once per encounter.

175 - Ghoulish Repast & The Last $20

Artifact: Ghoulish Repast

Power: Significant.

Description: A piece of long bone, broken in half and emptied of marrow. The broken end is shiny and smooth. Medical analysis will indicate that it is a human femur and almost 200 years old.

Effect: Added to any meal (by grinding it into bonemeal or boiling it in a stew or soup, for example) activates its effect. Anyone partaking in a meal prepared this way can ignore the psychological effects of starvation. Aside from being an aid in unhealthy attempts at weightloss this negates 10% of penalties based on not eating. This benefit is doubled for avatars of the Survivor. Unfortunately it also causes weekly nightmares of freezing cold, aching isolation, and terrified cannibalism prompting rank 4-5 stress checks on appropriate meters. These nightmares become more frequent during times of distress and may bleed over into real behaviours for the psychologically vulnerable.

Artifact: The Last $20

Power: Minor.

Description: A U.S $20 bill, crumpled and defaced. Someone has graffitied a third eye on to Andrew Jackson and drawn a speech bubble in which is written, “through me all things are possible, I guess.” There’s also a disconnected phone number for someone called Connie scrawled on the other side.

Effect: This is fated to be the last $20 bill in existence, synchronicity will find the smallest possible ways to ensure this happens. If you intend to destroy it, it goes missing. If you take it somewhere dangerous hoping its magick would protect you, you left your wallet in your other pants. Pitch it into a garbage disposal and you’ll find that was a different $20. Attempting to thwart its quasi-immortality won’t cause you any real harm, but it will be as least mildly inconvenient.

On the other hand if you take care to keep it safe, clean and whole the same synchronicity will work to make the bill stick around. Cashiers will give you back too much change or drop it on the floor (where it will get caught in your pant cuff), vending machines will spit it back out but register as paid anyway. As with the other effect, nothing super overt. At best having a little shrine where you pamper the bill is good for $20 a week of free stuff.

174 - EULAgy

Ritual: EULAgy

Cost: 1 significant charge.

Ritual Action: Take one person suffering from demonic possession, an identifying object from when they were alive and a printed hardcopy of an End User License Agreement (including all ancillary documentation like Terms of Service & Use, Privacy Policies, etc.) that you personally have agreed to spritzed with lemon juice on every page. Physically bind that person in the center of a circle marked with the Seal of Solomon (from the Lesser Key) and identifying the demon with the object, make it an offer - guarantees of future possession from willing parties are typically all that they will agree to. If it accepts, proffer the EULA as a condition and spend the charge. If the ritual is successful it will take it from you and begin to read.

Effect: Piggybacking on the association between the bewildering legalese of licencing agreements and the double-edged, backstabbing tropes surrounding deals with the devil, EULAgies allow the haphazard binding of demonic entities. Much like the old legend of vampires stopping to count grains of sand or rice, a demon under the effect is compelled to carefully review the entire text before it can take its reward.

The time it takes to read the EULA counts against the duration of the current possession and it can take no other actions during this time. If you or anyone else meaningfully interrupts this (by damaging or taking the documentation or destroying the seal, for example) the ritual completes without the demon needing to finish. If this happens or it does finish it may claim its agreed upon reward at any time.

If the duration of the possession expires before the demon can finish reading the effect hangs until it can complete its reading during another possession. It isn’t compelled to do so and must seek out a copy of the documentation on its own. If legal developments invalidate the user agreement before it can do this the ritual effect is broken and it gets nothing.

There is one cautionary caveat, if a demon has been bound with a particular EULA before it may complete its end of the bargain without reading it again.

173 - Pneuma Bottle & Carpet Diem

Artifact: Pneuma Bottle

Power: Significant.

Description: A blue, cloudy-glassed crystal bottle about 9 inches high and shaped like a tapered decanter. It is sealed with a crumbling, black cork that sticks if left closed for too long. When full the contents are a barely visible ripple, pulsing and swirling intermittently but difficult to discern through the thick cut, occluded glass.

Effect: Held in front of their mouth, the pneuma bottle can collect the dying breath of someone “impure” (in game terms, having acquired 3 or more notches from their own actions). It can only hold one breath at a time, uncorking it lets the current one out. Sucking the breath out of the bottle is greasily invigorating like using amphetamines that have been cut with something awful and industrial: it imparts a minor charge. With a successful Secrecy roll you can get an impression of the worst trespasses of the person whose breath was collected. The better the roll the more precise the information you receive. Obviously you only get one shot at it.

Artifact: Carpet Diem

Power: Major.

Description: A large persian rug, big enough to fill a small room. It is dirty and threadbare, in one section a hole has worn through from constant pacing. Despite this the design woven into the fabric is elaborate and beautiful, almost fractal.

Effect: While standing on the rug you can rob your future to pay for your present. Gain your choice of a +10%/+20%/+30% shift to any action you can perform while remaining standing on it. This effect can be used repeatedly for accrued positive shifts equal to your wound threshold. In response your ability to meaningfully influence the world is muted when you are not standing on the rug, reduce the rolled result of any objective milestone you reach while not standing on the carpet by -5% for petty milestones and -10% for intense milestones. Negated progress goes towards paying back this debt.

If the rug is cleaned or destroyed while you still owe, the result is catastrophic: take the debt as damage from a significant blast while simultaneously losing an equal amount from any current objective. All effects may apply multiple times to the same objective if multiple participants have debts.

172 - Vita Plunkett, Tornado Tamer

GMC: Vita Plunkett, Tornado Tamer

The United States gets more tornadoes than any other country. Tornado Alley, as it’s colloquially known, is an area of the Great Plains especially prone to the scourge that causes massive property damage, kills scores and injures thousands a year. In the grand scheme this human cost pales in comparison to drownings, traffic fatalities and firearm deaths but that’s a raw comparison to make for those affected. People like Vita Plunkett.

Vita lost her husband to drink years before it happened, but the land they farmed had been her family’s and she’d grown up knowing better than him how to work it. Even before his passing she headed the household and ran their business. Her two daughters idolised and emulated Vita’s leadership and resilience. The tight knit nature of the trio made it especially hard for her after a twister crushed their house, smashing in the basement shelter while they hid inside and killing both her girls.

Vita coped the way she had when her husband had passed. Instead of breaking she’d knuckled down and sublimated her grief into her livelihood. The wrecked farm took weeks to get back into working order but the next harvest was set to be a bumper crop. Then another tornado came tearing through the area and gritting her teeth in defiance she refused to leave. It evaporated right in front of her.

Thanks to her efforts since, Vita’s neck of the woods has turned into an island of tranquillity smack dab in the middle of the worst part of tornado alley. Without articulating a proper understanding of her methods she’s taken to warding the regional area, driving the highways and leaving little poppets and devil’s nests by the roadside. The lull has drawn the attention of meteorology researchers at a nearby university who’ve decided to study the unusual phenomenon. They’d want to steer clear of Vita or she might find the intrusion an excuse to test whether her storm-charming abilities can be used offensively.

STATS
Personality: Laconic and often bemused, Vita doesn’t suffer fools and has a very clear sense of purpose. Her magick is something she won’t talk about, she’ll hardly even admit it to herself.
Rage: Acceptance of “acts of god”. Don’t roll over, get mad at the universe goddamnit!
Noble: Earned salvation. Nothing in this world is free.
Fear: Being caught by the government. Vita’s not entirely sure what she’s doing but is certain there must be some kind of secret program that hunts people like her (Helplessness).
Obsession: Nature can keep its distance.
Wound Threshold: 70.

Agrimancer 50%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Independent Farmer 70% (Substitutes for Status, Provides Wound Threshold, Protects Helplessness.)

Shock Gauges

Notches	Violence	Unnatural	Helplessness	Isolation	Self
Hardened	4	3	2	5	2
Failed	0	1	2	2	0

171 - The Garden of Earthly Delights

Ritual: The Garden of Earthly Delights

Cost: 1 significant charge.

Ritual Action: Enter a hedge maze alone while under the influence of the hallucinogen peyote and become lost while wandering it. Once lost, indulge in one vice you never otherwise would and offer ritualized thanks to Nicholas Flamel. A demon pretending to be him may offer to lead you to freedom or some transcendental reward, reject or ignore this unless you wish to suffer possession in return for it. If you come across strange landscapes seen through apparent exits likewise ignore them or risk being deposited in a random Otherspace.

When ready to leave use a mundane, non-technological, method of finding you way out. Navigate by starlight or recall that method of solving mazes by following one of the walls. Escaping while intoxicated is a matter of a successful Secrecy roll, fail it and you spend too long wandering the rows. A fumble or matched failure indicates falling prey to one of the maze's hazards. If the peyote wears off the ritual fails, hopefully you brought some more and have the presence of mind to use it.

Effect: For a period of time equal to the length of time spent lost, all failed and hardened notches you gain are illusory, like a weird drug trip. When the effect fades any changes to your shock gauges reverts to their pre-ritual state. Any disorders gained remain but can be treated via conventional (or unconventional) means. The GM is encouraged to hit you with minor sensory unnatural phenomenon while the effect is active.

For the next week plant materials are indigestible to you. Careful, a lot of food products contain high-fructose corn syrup and many medications are also restricted.

170 - Demigodwalker

Unnatural Phenomenon: Demigodwalker

All archetypes were once human. Before being stripped of the complication of earthly appetites and concerns they were the same stinking, thinking, walking, talking flesh as the rest of us. They had jobs, favourite foods, parents, friends, siblings, treasured memories. Children.

These offspring retroactively carry a shard of their parent’s ascension in the same way that symbolically appropriate artifacts can become imbued with their power. Hotly contested as limited archetypal proxies while surrounded by keen synchronicity, they live lives that may not be charmed but are never boring. Powerful and monied lineages exist predicated on the inherited power and gravitas from the legacy of an ascended ancestor. Any with an avatar identity the same as their parent’s operates at 30% higher as far as access to channels is concerned, this bonus also mitigates penalties but does not provide a positive shift. Any other avatar identity is at a -20% shift and opposed archetypes are inaccessible.

More interesting, that person stands out from the mass of humanity as far as that archetype is concerned. Unlike the clumsy myopia archetypes have when trying to distinguish people from one another, demigodwalkers appear as lighthouses in the fog of humanity. What this means varies depending on the archetype and their symbolic relationship with it. Ascension strips away many mortal concerns, like love for your offspring, but at the same time being able to see and influence a particular person clearly above all others makes them a potentially valuable asset or at least a toy that can be played with as others cannot. It also makes them a target for anyone with a grudge against the archetype, those willing to strip them of their organs as ritual ingredients and existing avatars looking to bump off the competition.

169 - Crocodile Tears

Ritual: Crocodile Tears

Cost: 3 minor charges.

Ritual Action: Prepare by eating nothing but crocodile for three days (gator meat also works, but gharial does not). Crash a funeral or wake for someone you don’t know and collect tears from a genuine mourner while falsely commiserating with them (offering a handkerchief or tissue is the easiest method). If you succeed and there is a register or guest book sign it with your real name before you leave. Visit the burial site/marker of someone you know and care about, consuming the tears while standing over it.

Effect: Gain a +30% shift on all rolls that involve portraying emotions you don’t genuinely feel until the next sunrise or sunset, whichever is furthest into the future. This shift is dependent on evincing a consistent personality, even between people who haven’t seen you earlier deceptions. If you falsely confide in someone about sharing their fringe political views to gain their trust you’re stuck with that position as long as the ritual lasts. The more lies you tell, the more you box yourself in.

Going against your established facade shatters the illusion, instead everything you say - true or not - comes across as phony and dishonest. Lose the positive shift and flip-flop all social rolls to the worst possible result. This penalty disappears after three days.

168 - Saigo Yoshitoki, Homeless Cyber-Adept

GMC: Saigo Yoshitoki, Homeless Cyber-Adept

Yoshi fell through the cracks, he failed to take the prescribed Japanese path into employment or higher education and lacked the wherewithal to pursue unconventional pathways to success. He wasn’t exactly stupid, just unmotivated. When his father died the piecemeal gig work he’d dithered with via online apps in lieu of the seemingly unreachable goal of real employment wasn’t enough to sustain him. He was out on the street.

Losing the baseline comfort of being taken care of past childhood lit a bit of a fire under Yoshi, but all the moxie in the world won’t convince a conventional business to hire you without a solid employment history, let alone no fixed address. Facing a heavy cultural focus on lifetime investment in young employees, this chronic unemployment pigeonholed him back into the only work he’d ever known and he hustled hard at it. Sleeping on the streets for a time he eventually became aware of the practice of using internet cafe booths as a cheap alternative to capsule hotels.

Steady internet access gave him an opportunity to optimize his work-scrounging. He developed a system for scraping data from multiple platforms and created an ad-hoc, self taught method for hitting the selection with the most efficient payout. The spaghetti-coded bodge he came up with couldn’t have been mistaken for anything professional but the result was more than impressive. He probably could have sold it but that wasn’t the point anymore. The depths of obsession spurred by survival had become its own object.

GNOMON’s injection into the mix was a result of this haphazard correlation. Attracted by the interesting patterns Yoshi left in the sea of data, it dangled a job (not consciously, more in the way that a spider’s web will be built to be conducive to catching food) and he was almost seamlessly hooked. Yoshi certainly hardly noticed, he regards the weirdness and power from his connection to GNOMON as a part of his own system. It’s an indicator that he has been right all along and once he finds the perfect run it won’t matter how much of an outsider he is, he’ll have it all. Not that he's clear on what "all" is, except better runs.

STATS
Personality: Curious. He’s both outwardly unconcerned with material success but utterly obsessed with finding the ultimate inside edge on how to trade time for money on his own terms.
Rage: Flaunted wealth.
Noble: Finding purpose for lost and discarded things.
Fear: Running out of battery. Being brought crashing down from the digital high of his gamified life ruins the escapism Yoshi depends on to keep going (Helplessness).
Obsession: Cheat codes to the gig economy.
Wound Threshold: 50.

Cyber-Homeless 35% (Substitutes for Lie, Substitutes for Notice, Protects Isolation.)
Gig Economist 55% (Substitutes for Knowledge, Substitutes for Pursuit, Unique - Insight into underground economies.)
GNOMON 30%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)

Shock Gauges

Notches	Violence	Unnatural	Helplessness	Isolation	Self
Hardened	2	3	4	5	2
Failed	0	1	3	2	2

167 - Wishing Well

Artifact: Wishing Well

Power: Significant

Description: Built to look older than it is, the wishing well is a dilapidated landmark in a small public park. Despite poor upkeep and the obvious plasticity of its facade (and the grotesque garden gnomes on the path leading up to it) it remains a popular meeting spot and locals genuinely participate in the tradition of tossing in coins while making wishes.

Effect: It doesn’t grant wishes.

By tossing a coin into the well you are empowered with the ability to retrieve someone else’s wish, if you can obtain their coin. It doesn’t provide the means of physically achieving the feat or a way of identifying which coin belongs to who, it just means that dredging up some loose change from its murky depths provides you with more than fare for the parking meter. Getting a hold of someone else’s coin tells you their deepest wish. It isn’t necessarily the wish they made (especially if what they want has changed since) but the information does give you a considerable edge in coercion attempts (a +20% shift and +2 ranks to any check capitalizing on it).

166 - The Fractal Watch

Artifact: The Fractal Watch

Power: Significant

Description: A slick analogue wristwatch in burnished chrome. It’s face appears marked with the standard twelve hourly divisions but closer inspection reveals they’re part of a larger, infinitely recursive, pattern which goes as far down as inspection allows (hitting it with an electron microscope is probably good for an Unnatural check). It’s missing an hour hand and the minute hand is perpetually stuck at the 42 minute mark. If wound (there’s no battery, despite it’s modern appearance), it jerks forward before slipping back constantly as though the workings are damaged. There is an extra button on the side.

Effect: The product of a chronophage’s obsession with the paradox of Zeno’s arrow, the fractal watch marks the passage of an event that can never end. Almost mimicking the formula spell “How About We Try That Again?”, clicking the button while focusing on a target in sight ensures they can never quite finish the thing they are currently doing. At the halfway point the remaining effort stretches out to take twice the length of time the first half did, then half of that and so on endlessly. No matter how far through what they are doing the target gets they are always as far away from finishing as when they started. Trapped in time like a fly in amber.

The effect is easy enough to break. Change your mind. Giving up on the targeted action releases the target from their time-prison, snapping them back into our normal schedule. To anyone observing it’s as though nothing happened, depending on how far their perception was stretched the target may have a breakdown. More likely they'll find a way to rationalise it away. Every time the watch is used the hand progresses by one minute, whether this means anything hasn't been discovered.

165 - Hermit Car

Unnatural Entity: Hermit Car

Not all demons are lucky enough to be able to sate their Urge easily. Between infernal competition, magickal interference, fortuitous comeuppance or a lack of acceptable hosts many of the obsessive dead go unfulfilled. Some decay into revenants, others are forced into bestial shapes by desperate stooping to animal hosts and some, a bare handful, are twisted into something even more lowly, a Hermit Car. Named for what was arguably the first confirmed postmodern instance, Hermit Cars are the old trope of demons bound into objects, gone feral. Abandoned or lost by their creators their adaption is one of blind necessity.

Trapped in unfeeling stone, blind pages and dead metal the human shape and obsession of a bound demon twists under sensory deprivation. It takes the thoughtform of the unfeeling, unthinking object it is in while also fettered by the aching shadows of its old, forgotten Urge. Most of them lay dormant and undetected, unable to see the world or satisfy themselves.

There are two criteria for waking a Hermit Car, proximity to someone scarred by the Unnatural and the object of their long lost Urge. Pirating the latent signal of their damage like a ship using the shine of a lighthouse to guide it, the hermit lurches into a grotesque parody of life and bee-lines for its Urge. Most Urges can't be managed by a possessed toaster however and the resulting battering can be fatal for the subject if it is fragile or the Hermit Car large and powerful.

If it does manage to destroy the object of its Urge the catharsis provides momentary freedom as the demon is released. But the damage and adaptation to inanimacy is permanent, all Hermit Cars require a shell like their namesake crabs in order to retain coherency. Scuttling back to their old digs is likewise impossible, the growth accompanying release will never restore them to their former selves but it does rend the old shell to pieces and demand the next one be a little larger.

Hermit Car, Possessed Artifice
Wound Threshold: Highly variable when incorporated, otherwise 25 but only vulnerable to magickal attacks.
Rabid Genius Loci 30-60%: Covers anything the demon might try when active. Equal to the highest native (as in going by shock gauges) Secrecy of anyone nearby with at least three hardened and one failed Unnatural notches. Alternatively it can substitute a supernatural identity from anyone nearby, including being able to flip flop.

164 - Lipsticked Pig

Unnatural Entity: Lipsticked Pig

A lot of things are either unpalatable options or plain not fit for purpose, that doesn’t stop people from trying to use them or sell them as somehow cheaper but mysteriously better alternatives. The phrase “lipstick on a pig” is an idiom that denigrates the practice of superficially gussying up one thing as another with this intent in mind. Whether the product of an adept with a wry sense of humour or a pearl formed around a thousand false promises and cheap disguises, lipsticked pigs epitomize the concept.

A lipsticked pig appears as an above average example of what people expect in its environment: meet one in a bank and it’s the snappily dressed branch teller who is sure to win “employee of the month”, running into one in a warzone and it’s the gallant and disciplined officer or prizewinning war-photographer. Once a stereotype has been written by other people’s expectations, it struggles to live up to it. As far as anyone can tell this is a pig’s primary drive and it does try, but even the intelligence of the world’s fifth-smartest animal often falters. Most won’t notice short of intense scrutiny since the natural allure of the pig redirects blame for its failures on innocent bystanders.

Without anything major on the line this could go on indefinitely, a seemingly well-performing middle manager who just happens to have a higher than average staff turnover can go unnoticed in a lot of organisations. If some crank develops a grudge and learns the truth they’ll be hard pressed to pierce the magick of the illusion for others, but if they can pull it off the pig is revealed.

It’s hard to look at, your eyes slide off it as it shuffles between your expectations like a bad magic eye poster. Underneath is the impression of pale, pink flesh, garishly applied cosmetics and a voice that bleats in porcine squealing from a disquietingly humanoid shape. Unmasked lipsticked pigs aren’t vengeful, they’re terrified. If allowed, they’ll flee in terror to build a new nest elsewhere. Unfortunately for any vigilantes their powers make them sympathetic victims to unaware bystanders.

Eating the cooked flesh of a lipsticked pig confers some of its illusory lustre, diners gain a +10% shift on Status and Connect until their next failed roll of any kind. Mistepping shatters the illusion and the fall from grace is especially hard, treat that failure as though it were one step worse (regular failures become matches which become fumbles in turn).

Lipsticked Pig, Cowardly Porcine Imposter
Wound Threshold: 60. In physical combat pigs are hard to pin down perceptually, take a -10% shift to attacks unless it attacked you last.
Emperor’s New Clothes 65%: This is the identity that occludes the pig’s true nature. Note that even if you’ve uncovered this it still works on other people, calling attention to it gives the pig a free coercion result on this identity if it succeeds an opposed roll against their scrutiny, “how dare you!” If you’ve got buddies it takes -10% for every bystander backing you up.
Limited Aptitude 30%: This is what the pig uses to get actual results, it’s not exactly stupid but quietly ineffectual and relies on others for protective colouration.
Hoggish Thrashing 35%: Substitutes for Struggle, Substitutes for Dodge. Pigs are poorly skilled fighters but backing one into a corner is dangerous, their attacks count as a +3 damage weapon.

163 - Century Egg

Ritual: Century Egg

Cost: 1-7 significant charges.

Ritual Action: Whether these started the tradition of hereditary curses or were a product of it, the century egg is a way to pass on any nasty magickal consequences of your actions on to your kids. First off you need biological children, if you attempt the ritual without them it backfires as if the effect had been broken (more on that in a bit).

Cook a century egg as per the traditional recipe, adding bodily fluids from each of your offspring to the boiling tea. Summon and bind a demon to the egg, convincing it to willingly bargain its service by imprisoning itself in the egg. Spend one significant charge per generation you wish the curse to be delayed. Enjoy making Self checks every time you interact with your kids unless you’re the kind of monster who thinks of them as tools (but if the guilt ever gets to be too much you’ve always got an out).

Effect: If the ritual is successful the demon takes one negative magickal effect (minor or significant, no major charge magick, last channel avatar effects or Invisible Clergy interference), removing it from you and becoming imprisoned in the egg. If unsuccessful you’ve just created a demonic timebomb with no positive effect.

The negative effect’s power is multiplied by the number of significant charges you’ve spent, a Viaturgy blast will almost certainly kill your grandkids or anyone who comes later for example. The positive aspect is that it doesn’t go off right away. The negative side is that the demon you’ve bound has free reign to pester and possess the living eldest of that generation (after you’re dead) with a +10% shift per significant charge spent and can hit them with it at any time as a punishment. If it does not do so it loses 1d10% from its Urge per significant charge on their death.

There are several ways to call it quits, none of them pleasant. If your line ends before you do (and so on down the line) you (or the eldest of those still alive) suffer the full, multiplied effects of the original curse. If they survive this the demon is then free to hound them. If the living eldest of your line do not have children by the age of 24 the curse resolves on them. If the egg turns bad (despite the name century eggs do not actually keep for 100 years), the curse activates. You’ll have to find some way of keeping it fresh.