Artifact: Existential Distillery
Power: Significant
Description: A microdistillery in a poor state of repair, there’s rust and additional fittings have been attached haphazardly. One of the attachments is a gridly looking hand-powered mass of blades like a garbage disposal. It is stained by something you might naively hope is copper.
Effect: Make some alcohol and while adding the ingredients stick your hand into the thresher attachment and crank the handle. The wrenching, grinding sensation is more than just flesh being stripped away, like it’s hollowing your very soul. You’re giving up part of yourself.
Lose a number of percentiles from one of your identities, how much you lose is up to you (unless someone else is turning the handle). This loss is permanent so make sure you’re certain. Also make a Violence stress check, rank with a rank equal to the tens place of the percentiles given up and take damage equal to the sum of the percentiles as though it had been rolled as hand-to-hand damage. You cannot do this with adept or avatar identities and others may be excluded at GM discretion.
Make some alcohol with the mixture. Drinking said alcohol has an additional effect aside from getting you buzzed, it passes on wisdom and knowledge. While under the effects of the alcohol the imbiber gains access to the invested identity at a value equal to the points stripped away from it. This effect lasts until you sober up. It can be prolonged by drinking more alcohol (of any kind). Certain stress checks may be warranted depending upon the circumstances and nature of the appropriated identity.
Saturday, 30 November 2019
Friday, 29 November 2019
213 - Astrid Osgood, Climate Accelerationist
GMC: Astrid Osgood, Climate Accelerationist
Astronomical events, weather, the change of seasons: all of these are vitally important parts of our environment. Our reliance on them to mark time and facilitate agriculture formed the basis for early society. They’re so important we tied our religious traditions to them, celebrations and rites tied to the ebb and flow of the earth.
But those events are finite. You get 2 equinoxes and 2 solstices a year and that’s it, if there’s a ritual that can only be performed in spring and you miss your window that’s 9 months minimum until you can try again (unless you’re willing to travel to the opposite hemisphere of the earth at least). Astrid - the heir to a lineage of ritualists spanning back centuries but ruined by the 20th century - thinks she’s discovered a way around that limitation. If the weather can be changed by human hands, then why not its symbolism and magickal influence.
The crux of this belief is a potent charging ritual - “Loki’s Teeth” - which allows her to reap a bevy of significant charges through the summer months. Except with this new belief came experimentation and with experimentation the realization that her window for using the ritual is expanding. Whether this is down to changing weather or a measure of her own arcane puissance is immaterial, she’s certain she knows the score.
So she wants to accelerate anthropic climate change while everyone else is either trying to thwart it or claim it isn’t real because they’re doing too well off the back of related industries (or would like to be). She fully believes in a coming collapse and wants it more than anything, with her powers she thinks she can rule her dream of a barren wasteland as a post-apocalyptic sorceror-queen. It’s a narrative with a terrible magnetism to it and because of that her woodland compound is staffed by a cadre of cultists and their families. They have faith in Astrid and believe they in turn will inherit power and authority by proximity.
Given humanities’ general laziness it seems like Astrid’s goals will be fulfilled if she just kicks back and takes a nap. For this reason the cult does not aim to promote climate change as a cause, instead they engage in action against anyone trying to stop it. Three people are dead because of this, twice as many have had their lives ruined and every year her hold over them grows stronger as her magick becomes more and more powerful.
STATS
Personality: Astrid is like a smug version of an apocalyptic street corner preacher because she’s being proved right. She knows she can’t meaningfully effect change on her own, but being on the “winning” side she just has to keep people who can at bay.
Rage: People who manipulate false narratives for personal gain (it’s okay when she does it).
Noble: Action before words, Astrid prizes doers over talkers.
Fear: Astrid fell down a well as a kid and wasn’t found for hours. Being trapped in a small, dark pit is her greatest fear (Helplessness).
Obsession: Destroy the world, become queen of the wreckage.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Apocalyptic Cult Leader 50%* (Substitutes for Lie, Substitutes for Status, Coerces Self.)
Survivalist 45% (Substitutes for Fitness, Provides Firearm Attacks, Protects Helplessness.)
Witch 60% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Cast Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Astronomical events, weather, the change of seasons: all of these are vitally important parts of our environment. Our reliance on them to mark time and facilitate agriculture formed the basis for early society. They’re so important we tied our religious traditions to them, celebrations and rites tied to the ebb and flow of the earth.
But those events are finite. You get 2 equinoxes and 2 solstices a year and that’s it, if there’s a ritual that can only be performed in spring and you miss your window that’s 9 months minimum until you can try again (unless you’re willing to travel to the opposite hemisphere of the earth at least). Astrid - the heir to a lineage of ritualists spanning back centuries but ruined by the 20th century - thinks she’s discovered a way around that limitation. If the weather can be changed by human hands, then why not its symbolism and magickal influence.
The crux of this belief is a potent charging ritual - “Loki’s Teeth” - which allows her to reap a bevy of significant charges through the summer months. Except with this new belief came experimentation and with experimentation the realization that her window for using the ritual is expanding. Whether this is down to changing weather or a measure of her own arcane puissance is immaterial, she’s certain she knows the score.
So she wants to accelerate anthropic climate change while everyone else is either trying to thwart it or claim it isn’t real because they’re doing too well off the back of related industries (or would like to be). She fully believes in a coming collapse and wants it more than anything, with her powers she thinks she can rule her dream of a barren wasteland as a post-apocalyptic sorceror-queen. It’s a narrative with a terrible magnetism to it and because of that her woodland compound is staffed by a cadre of cultists and their families. They have faith in Astrid and believe they in turn will inherit power and authority by proximity.
Given humanities’ general laziness it seems like Astrid’s goals will be fulfilled if she just kicks back and takes a nap. For this reason the cult does not aim to promote climate change as a cause, instead they engage in action against anyone trying to stop it. Three people are dead because of this, twice as many have had their lives ruined and every year her hold over them grows stronger as her magick becomes more and more powerful.
STATS
Personality: Astrid is like a smug version of an apocalyptic street corner preacher because she’s being proved right. She knows she can’t meaningfully effect change on her own, but being on the “winning” side she just has to keep people who can at bay.
Rage: People who manipulate false narratives for personal gain (it’s okay when she does it).
Noble: Action before words, Astrid prizes doers over talkers.
Fear: Astrid fell down a well as a kid and wasn’t found for hours. Being trapped in a small, dark pit is her greatest fear (Helplessness).
Obsession: Destroy the world, become queen of the wreckage.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Apocalyptic Cult Leader 50%* (Substitutes for Lie, Substitutes for Status, Coerces Self.)
Survivalist 45% (Substitutes for Fitness, Provides Firearm Attacks, Protects Helplessness.)
Witch 60% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Cast Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Thursday, 28 November 2019
212 - Inflatable Turnkey
Unnatural Entity: Inflatable Turnkey
Once upon a time there was an adept who inherited his grandfather’s extensive collection of antique inflatable sex dolls. An ordinary human being would have disposed of the collection quietly or at least discreetly inquired about selling them to another collector. Sheila Carmody was anything but ordinary, the sole practitioner of a school dedicated to squalid nobility she instead turned them into servants to fill her court.
An inflatable turnkey starts life in a deflated heap of plastic with a little battery-powered air pump for rapid inflation and marked with the Elder Sign (H.P. Lovecraft’s original version that looks like a tree branch, not the five pointed star with an eye in the middle). Included is a uniform related to some kind of service occupation, you can switch it out with another one the first time but it has to be tailored to fit the doll. Inflated and dressed the turnkey is activated by the user daubing a four letter word of their choosing (hereafter the name the turnkey will respond to) on to its forehead and giving it an order.
The order must be related to the profession the doll is dressed like. A maid uniform is good for cleaning up your apartment but not bodyguarding you and a buddy and a driver is good to chauffeur you around but couldn’t appraise jewelry for you. This order forms a seed of their behaviour, which then is clumsily adapted over time and additional instructions to shape it into a tool that serves a very particular purpose. They learn to fill a very particular role in the same way that a roomba learns the layout of someone’s home.
But Shiela forgot to carry a two somewhere because once a turnkey starts learning into its role it doesn’t stop. Entire baroque philosophies are constructed around the act of making breakfast or piloting a boat. Over time these micro-philosophies usurp the original programming and the turnkey begins to behave erratically. Most of them are put down, some disappear, presumed runaways.
There are rumours that groups of runaway turnkeys have formed underground societies. That a city sanitation worker might one day open a door into a disused service tunnel and find a dried out cistern turned into an amphitheatre. Rows of vinyl faces drawn into surprised, open-mouthed rictuses in a myriad of uniforms turning towards them in unison in the glare of their flashlight. That they might get a vague impression of a gestalt formed of all these pieces working together and relying on each other in unison like a microcosm of how society is supposed to function. Depending on the collective temperament he might have a chance to escape before they set on him, pressing him into motley and forcing him to help continue refining their brains. In that case he’d best be served by finding a way to appease the collective philosophies of “mowing lawns” and “tending bar” before they try to reshape his brain to get better leadership out of him.
As they aren’t human, turnkey’s can’t use magick but they’ll know it when the see it.
Inflatable Turnkey, One-Use Factotum
Wound Threshold: 20. Damage from firearms does regular melee damage, damage from piercing weapons continues to do 1 point per turn unless patched. An active air pump can stave off this damage or restore it once repaired.
Purpose 66%: This is the identity that the turnkey uses for actions relating to its shaped purpose. It may be 10% to 20% worse or better than this, depending on the condition of their uniform and whether the development of their personality has begun to deviate from their programming.
Winging It 20%: Turnkey’s are terrible at everything outside of their single area of expertise. Use this for that.
Once upon a time there was an adept who inherited his grandfather’s extensive collection of antique inflatable sex dolls. An ordinary human being would have disposed of the collection quietly or at least discreetly inquired about selling them to another collector. Sheila Carmody was anything but ordinary, the sole practitioner of a school dedicated to squalid nobility she instead turned them into servants to fill her court.
An inflatable turnkey starts life in a deflated heap of plastic with a little battery-powered air pump for rapid inflation and marked with the Elder Sign (H.P. Lovecraft’s original version that looks like a tree branch, not the five pointed star with an eye in the middle). Included is a uniform related to some kind of service occupation, you can switch it out with another one the first time but it has to be tailored to fit the doll. Inflated and dressed the turnkey is activated by the user daubing a four letter word of their choosing (hereafter the name the turnkey will respond to) on to its forehead and giving it an order.
The order must be related to the profession the doll is dressed like. A maid uniform is good for cleaning up your apartment but not bodyguarding you and a buddy and a driver is good to chauffeur you around but couldn’t appraise jewelry for you. This order forms a seed of their behaviour, which then is clumsily adapted over time and additional instructions to shape it into a tool that serves a very particular purpose. They learn to fill a very particular role in the same way that a roomba learns the layout of someone’s home.
But Shiela forgot to carry a two somewhere because once a turnkey starts learning into its role it doesn’t stop. Entire baroque philosophies are constructed around the act of making breakfast or piloting a boat. Over time these micro-philosophies usurp the original programming and the turnkey begins to behave erratically. Most of them are put down, some disappear, presumed runaways.
There are rumours that groups of runaway turnkeys have formed underground societies. That a city sanitation worker might one day open a door into a disused service tunnel and find a dried out cistern turned into an amphitheatre. Rows of vinyl faces drawn into surprised, open-mouthed rictuses in a myriad of uniforms turning towards them in unison in the glare of their flashlight. That they might get a vague impression of a gestalt formed of all these pieces working together and relying on each other in unison like a microcosm of how society is supposed to function. Depending on the collective temperament he might have a chance to escape before they set on him, pressing him into motley and forcing him to help continue refining their brains. In that case he’d best be served by finding a way to appease the collective philosophies of “mowing lawns” and “tending bar” before they try to reshape his brain to get better leadership out of him.
As they aren’t human, turnkey’s can’t use magick but they’ll know it when the see it.
Inflatable Turnkey, One-Use Factotum
Wound Threshold: 20. Damage from firearms does regular melee damage, damage from piercing weapons continues to do 1 point per turn unless patched. An active air pump can stave off this damage or restore it once repaired.
Purpose 66%: This is the identity that the turnkey uses for actions relating to its shaped purpose. It may be 10% to 20% worse or better than this, depending on the condition of their uniform and whether the development of their personality has begun to deviate from their programming.
Winging It 20%: Turnkey’s are terrible at everything outside of their single area of expertise. Use this for that.
Wednesday, 27 November 2019
211 - Liability Waiver & Quick Study
Ritual: Liability Waiver
Cost: 1 significant charge.
Ritual Action: Take a legal waiver that was successfully used to guard against liability for something life altering. Permanent injury, death, someone losing their home are good guidelines - a broken arm isn’t going to cut it and it has to have been challenged and the challenge defeated. Destroy something you made for someone else that they value highly and wrap the remains in the waiver along with something that’s illegal for you to possess. Bathe in mineral water and while still dripping wet hold the package up over your head between two mirrors facing each other. Throw it at the mirror ahead of you and catch it on the rebound. If it works it’ll seem to switch places with its reflection.
Effect: So long as you carry the package your actions don’t cause stress checks to others. They’ll still know if things you do are fucked up and wrong but there’s no emotional impact to go with it, that alone is enough to sneak some hairy behaviour under the radar. This effect lasts for the longest of either 33 minutes from the first stress check ignored or until 6 checks have been ignored. Destroying the package undoes the effect too as does taking it to an area where the contraband is legal.
Ritual: Quick Study
Cost: 2 minor charges.
Ritual Action: Take a textbook for a subject that you have a related identity for at less than 50%. Tear out a page you have never read or have read but failed to understand and roll it into a cylinder. Crush a small handful of the “limited edition” 0% sugar Alpha-Bits cereal that was taken off the market in 2008 into a powder and use the rolled up page to snort it. Before that horrible choked up feeling subsides tilt your head back and recite prime numbers at a normal speaking pace for at least 30 seconds. If you use the ritual more than once you have to start the next recited series where you left off.
Effect: You gain a +30% shift to the specific related identity for 24 hours as information from the textbook floods your brain. Afterwards you forget everything you learned and it’s stuck at a permanent -10% shift from sticky erasure of the lost information.
Cost: 1 significant charge.
Ritual Action: Take a legal waiver that was successfully used to guard against liability for something life altering. Permanent injury, death, someone losing their home are good guidelines - a broken arm isn’t going to cut it and it has to have been challenged and the challenge defeated. Destroy something you made for someone else that they value highly and wrap the remains in the waiver along with something that’s illegal for you to possess. Bathe in mineral water and while still dripping wet hold the package up over your head between two mirrors facing each other. Throw it at the mirror ahead of you and catch it on the rebound. If it works it’ll seem to switch places with its reflection.
Effect: So long as you carry the package your actions don’t cause stress checks to others. They’ll still know if things you do are fucked up and wrong but there’s no emotional impact to go with it, that alone is enough to sneak some hairy behaviour under the radar. This effect lasts for the longest of either 33 minutes from the first stress check ignored or until 6 checks have been ignored. Destroying the package undoes the effect too as does taking it to an area where the contraband is legal.
Ritual: Quick Study
Cost: 2 minor charges.
Ritual Action: Take a textbook for a subject that you have a related identity for at less than 50%. Tear out a page you have never read or have read but failed to understand and roll it into a cylinder. Crush a small handful of the “limited edition” 0% sugar Alpha-Bits cereal that was taken off the market in 2008 into a powder and use the rolled up page to snort it. Before that horrible choked up feeling subsides tilt your head back and recite prime numbers at a normal speaking pace for at least 30 seconds. If you use the ritual more than once you have to start the next recited series where you left off.
Effect: You gain a +30% shift to the specific related identity for 24 hours as information from the textbook floods your brain. Afterwards you forget everything you learned and it’s stuck at a permanent -10% shift from sticky erasure of the lost information.
Tuesday, 26 November 2019
210 - Miles Pilner, Boring Beyond Words & Changeless
GMC: Miles Pilner, Boring Beyond Words
7 AM, alarm, shower and shave, get dressed, breakfast (two pieces of toast and an apple), brush teeth and leave the house at exactly 7:45. Commute takes 1 hour and 3 minutes, he arrives at 8:48 and is at his desk by 8:55. Miles’ day passes uneventfully, as it does every day for him working as a low-level accountant in a small office with one, tiny window set high in the wall. Every day is exactly the same for Miles, as it has been for the past 34 years, and he hardly notices.
Miles isn’t just stuck in a rut. At some point the grinding, endless monotony of his life slipped a gear and Miles won the lottery of banality, he’s stuck in an endless loop of his own making. Time still passes but thanks to his perfect, unchanging routine it might as well be standing still. This stability extends to things that facilitate his existence: the company he works at has weathered several financial crises without missing a beat but so long as Miles works there it will never expand. The apartment building he lives in will never charge more for rent than it did when he moved in and it will never be renovated. The tiny independent grocery store down the block barely stays in business off a trickle of Miles’ radiating immotility.
Most people don’t notice this, the ones that do tend to be quite odd. The kind that wonder just what they can do with a man who acts as a walking universal constant. A small handful of them live in his orbit like remora fish, feeding off the stability and cheap rent that are boons to people with the kind of chaotic lives that typify the occult underground. Most drift away eventually, the obsessions that cause their problems proving too tempting and incompatible with the lifestyle. The ones that stay get institutionalized and territorial, they don’t take kindly to interlopers especially if they try to mess with their meal ticket.
For his part Miles doesn’t notice and so long as nothing infringes on his routine he probably never will.
STATS
Personality: Bland. He slides right out of your mind as soon as you stop interacting with him, that part’s not magickal he just doesn’t leave much of an impression. Miles like it that way and would find the attentions of a bunch of occult weirdos highly distressing.
Rage: People who use violence to get their way. He can take being yelled at but don’t put your hands on him.
Noble: Little details. Miles likes getting everything just right.
Fear: Miles is secretly afraid that he’ll never have kids (Isolation).
Obsession: Predictably, Miles has no obsession.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Accountant 60% (Substitutes for Notice, Substitutes for Knowledge, Unique - Can cook books and parse byzantine records.)
Nebbish 50% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Protects Isolation, Evaluates Isolation.)
Changeless 99% (Vague Protection, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick. See below for more details.)
Shock Gauges
Supernatural Identity: Changeless
Miles still ages (slowly), can get sick and injured or suffer trauma but he’s partially protected from many of life’s hazards. For starters everything that tries to harm Miles is at a -20% shift, -10% if its value is higher than his identity. If some random event threatens to disrupt the routine a successful roll rearranges synchronicity to put things back to normal. More direct action takes a toll on his ability.
Objectives that threaten Miles routine lose the tens dice of a successful roll (sum on a matched success) from progress on reaching milestones. This only applies to local or very specific global objectives. The same amount of damage applies to Miles’ changeless identity, although it can be increased again by normal advancement.
This identity can also be damaged by moving Miles out of his routine directly. This is potentially dangerous since its protective abilities oppose rolls made against the routine, but every day in which he can’t fulfill it the identity takes a -10% cumulative shift which lasts until he returns to its familiar embrace. An easier method of disruption might involve preying on Miles’ passions, if he makes the choice to depart from his routine of his own will then the penalty accrues at the same rate but no one has to deal with magickal bad luck trying to crash their car as they drive away with him stuffed in the trunk.
7 AM, alarm, shower and shave, get dressed, breakfast (two pieces of toast and an apple), brush teeth and leave the house at exactly 7:45. Commute takes 1 hour and 3 minutes, he arrives at 8:48 and is at his desk by 8:55. Miles’ day passes uneventfully, as it does every day for him working as a low-level accountant in a small office with one, tiny window set high in the wall. Every day is exactly the same for Miles, as it has been for the past 34 years, and he hardly notices.
Miles isn’t just stuck in a rut. At some point the grinding, endless monotony of his life slipped a gear and Miles won the lottery of banality, he’s stuck in an endless loop of his own making. Time still passes but thanks to his perfect, unchanging routine it might as well be standing still. This stability extends to things that facilitate his existence: the company he works at has weathered several financial crises without missing a beat but so long as Miles works there it will never expand. The apartment building he lives in will never charge more for rent than it did when he moved in and it will never be renovated. The tiny independent grocery store down the block barely stays in business off a trickle of Miles’ radiating immotility.
Most people don’t notice this, the ones that do tend to be quite odd. The kind that wonder just what they can do with a man who acts as a walking universal constant. A small handful of them live in his orbit like remora fish, feeding off the stability and cheap rent that are boons to people with the kind of chaotic lives that typify the occult underground. Most drift away eventually, the obsessions that cause their problems proving too tempting and incompatible with the lifestyle. The ones that stay get institutionalized and territorial, they don’t take kindly to interlopers especially if they try to mess with their meal ticket.
For his part Miles doesn’t notice and so long as nothing infringes on his routine he probably never will.
STATS
Personality: Bland. He slides right out of your mind as soon as you stop interacting with him, that part’s not magickal he just doesn’t leave much of an impression. Miles like it that way and would find the attentions of a bunch of occult weirdos highly distressing.
Rage: People who use violence to get their way. He can take being yelled at but don’t put your hands on him.
Noble: Little details. Miles likes getting everything just right.
Fear: Miles is secretly afraid that he’ll never have kids (Isolation).
Obsession: Predictably, Miles has no obsession.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Accountant 60% (Substitutes for Notice, Substitutes for Knowledge, Unique - Can cook books and parse byzantine records.)
Nebbish 50% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Protects Isolation, Evaluates Isolation.)
Changeless 99% (Vague Protection, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick. See below for more details.)
Shock Gauges
Supernatural Identity: Changeless
Miles still ages (slowly), can get sick and injured or suffer trauma but he’s partially protected from many of life’s hazards. For starters everything that tries to harm Miles is at a -20% shift, -10% if its value is higher than his identity. If some random event threatens to disrupt the routine a successful roll rearranges synchronicity to put things back to normal. More direct action takes a toll on his ability.
Objectives that threaten Miles routine lose the tens dice of a successful roll (sum on a matched success) from progress on reaching milestones. This only applies to local or very specific global objectives. The same amount of damage applies to Miles’ changeless identity, although it can be increased again by normal advancement.
This identity can also be damaged by moving Miles out of his routine directly. This is potentially dangerous since its protective abilities oppose rolls made against the routine, but every day in which he can’t fulfill it the identity takes a -10% cumulative shift which lasts until he returns to its familiar embrace. An easier method of disruption might involve preying on Miles’ passions, if he makes the choice to depart from his routine of his own will then the penalty accrues at the same rate but no one has to deal with magickal bad luck trying to crash their car as they drive away with him stuffed in the trunk.
Monday, 25 November 2019
209 - The Coathanger
Artifact: The Coathanger
Power: Significant.
Description: A no-frills wire coat hanger with a red, felt tag glued to the hook at the top. On a little plastic label the tag reads “Property of H. Holmes” (although the plastic’s manufacture is far too late to have belonged to the famed serial killer).
Effect: Stick the coathanger into the back of your shirt while you’re still wearing it (you need to be fully clothed). Securing the hook with something (tying it to a doorhandle or getting someone else to hang on to it both do the trick) give it a hard, continuous pull. So long as you don’t hesitate or stop (seriously, don’t) before the effect is complete the artifact will activate.
It rips all your skin off. This is about as painful as it sounds while it’s happening but it doesn’t require nearly as much force as it should, thankfully afterwards you can’t feel a thing. It is still incredibly dangerous: you’ll get horrible infections unless you’re in a sterile environment and you’ll lose the ability to regulate your body’s temperature and fluids. Your tactile senses are gone and you won’t bleed to death since the removal is somehow bloodless. You’ll still die, quickly, though this can be delayed for a while by specialised medical attention. It takes all of your clothes off with it.
So long as you’re alive, you or someone else can climb into your skin through the mouth and wear it like a suit. It’s utterly convincing, even if they’re of a completely different height or build. It doesn’t do anything about the voice though and observant people will be able to spot if you have different coloured eyes. It also provides 10 additional points of wound threshold for someone else which are lost first for external injuries, if they are depleted your skin is ruined.
Until you put it back on yourself the clothing is fused to the skin as though it were part it, there’s no changing outfits (someone could theoretically layer up if they really wanted to). If you die while someone else is wearing the skin the effect ends instantly and it becomes immediately apparent to everyone watching that they’ve been talking to a Buffalo Bill wannabe.
Power: Significant.
Description: A no-frills wire coat hanger with a red, felt tag glued to the hook at the top. On a little plastic label the tag reads “Property of H. Holmes” (although the plastic’s manufacture is far too late to have belonged to the famed serial killer).
Effect: Stick the coathanger into the back of your shirt while you’re still wearing it (you need to be fully clothed). Securing the hook with something (tying it to a doorhandle or getting someone else to hang on to it both do the trick) give it a hard, continuous pull. So long as you don’t hesitate or stop (seriously, don’t) before the effect is complete the artifact will activate.
It rips all your skin off. This is about as painful as it sounds while it’s happening but it doesn’t require nearly as much force as it should, thankfully afterwards you can’t feel a thing. It is still incredibly dangerous: you’ll get horrible infections unless you’re in a sterile environment and you’ll lose the ability to regulate your body’s temperature and fluids. Your tactile senses are gone and you won’t bleed to death since the removal is somehow bloodless. You’ll still die, quickly, though this can be delayed for a while by specialised medical attention. It takes all of your clothes off with it.
So long as you’re alive, you or someone else can climb into your skin through the mouth and wear it like a suit. It’s utterly convincing, even if they’re of a completely different height or build. It doesn’t do anything about the voice though and observant people will be able to spot if you have different coloured eyes. It also provides 10 additional points of wound threshold for someone else which are lost first for external injuries, if they are depleted your skin is ruined.
Until you put it back on yourself the clothing is fused to the skin as though it were part it, there’s no changing outfits (someone could theoretically layer up if they really wanted to). If you die while someone else is wearing the skin the effect ends instantly and it becomes immediately apparent to everyone watching that they’ve been talking to a Buffalo Bill wannabe.
Sunday, 24 November 2019
208 - “WW_D?”
Artifact: “WW_D?”
Power: Minor.
Description: One of those little cloth “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelets with the “J” scratched off. Imbued with a little magick, they’re inert until someone you have either a Guru or Mentor relationship with stains it with at least three different bodily fluids. You have to wear it at least half the time in the past week for it to function, no slipping it on right before you use it.
Effect: At times of personal crisis the wisdom of those we look up to and trust can be vital and comforting. By taking a moment to center yourself and touching the bracelet with your other hand (while wearing it, of course) you open the ability to substitute your relationship with that person for one of their identities. The rolled against value is capped at the lowest of either your relationship with them or their identity score. If it’s their obsession identity you can flip-flop just like they can. Avatar and adept identities can be used to cast rituals and use gutter magick but their primary abilities are off-limits.
Using one of these to perform an action contrary to one of the channelled person’s passions triggers a Self check with a rank of 3 plus 1 per passion violated. Further, they’ll know what you did, even if they have no way of understanding how they know it.
Power: Minor.
Description: One of those little cloth “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelets with the “J” scratched off. Imbued with a little magick, they’re inert until someone you have either a Guru or Mentor relationship with stains it with at least three different bodily fluids. You have to wear it at least half the time in the past week for it to function, no slipping it on right before you use it.
Effect: At times of personal crisis the wisdom of those we look up to and trust can be vital and comforting. By taking a moment to center yourself and touching the bracelet with your other hand (while wearing it, of course) you open the ability to substitute your relationship with that person for one of their identities. The rolled against value is capped at the lowest of either your relationship with them or their identity score. If it’s their obsession identity you can flip-flop just like they can. Avatar and adept identities can be used to cast rituals and use gutter magick but their primary abilities are off-limits.
Using one of these to perform an action contrary to one of the channelled person’s passions triggers a Self check with a rank of 3 plus 1 per passion violated. Further, they’ll know what you did, even if they have no way of understanding how they know it.
This artifact functions once, substituted identities can be used only once but the effect lasts for up to 12 minutes or until discharged.
Saturday, 23 November 2019
207 - With You In Spirit
Ritual: With You In Spirit
Cost: 1 significant charge.
Cost: 1 significant charge.
Ritual Action: Make plans with someone who already owns their own burial plot, doesn’t matter what the plans are so long as they have to meet you somewhere and genuinely believe you will. Go to the plot and dig it up, a hole six feet deep and rectangular is what you’re after. Instead of following through with the plans, at the time you’re supposed to meet them climb into the hole, eat the petals from three plastic roses and lay down with your arms crossed over your chest.
Effect: You leave your body. This kind of astral projection is kind of a drag in comparison to the typical stories: you’re only sort of intangible (can't interact with anything, you can pass through solid objects but it feels unpleasant and you have to press against them really hard, on the other hand so long as you keep moving you won’t sink into the ground) and you can’t fly (or drive what with the whole semi-intangible thing, so unless you have a chauffeur you're walking). On the other hand you’re invisible and ghost-you is invulnerable to most forms of physical harm (you’ll want to be selective about what walls you walk through since live electrical wiring still packs a whallop and magick works on you just fine). Your physical body is comatose and unfeeling for the duration, if it dies then you do too.
The effect lasts for as long as the person you stood up waits for you to show. If they leave (or see your body, somehow) it ends and you snap back from wherever you were, this is nauseating commensurate with the distance it pulled you back across. Anything more than a mile results in incapacitated wretching for a minute or two. Having an accomplice who can string them along for a while with promises you’re on your way is probably your best bet for getting a useful duration out of this ritual.
Effect: You leave your body. This kind of astral projection is kind of a drag in comparison to the typical stories: you’re only sort of intangible (can't interact with anything, you can pass through solid objects but it feels unpleasant and you have to press against them really hard, on the other hand so long as you keep moving you won’t sink into the ground) and you can’t fly (or drive what with the whole semi-intangible thing, so unless you have a chauffeur you're walking). On the other hand you’re invisible and ghost-you is invulnerable to most forms of physical harm (you’ll want to be selective about what walls you walk through since live electrical wiring still packs a whallop and magick works on you just fine). Your physical body is comatose and unfeeling for the duration, if it dies then you do too.
The effect lasts for as long as the person you stood up waits for you to show. If they leave (or see your body, somehow) it ends and you snap back from wherever you were, this is nauseating commensurate with the distance it pulled you back across. Anything more than a mile results in incapacitated wretching for a minute or two. Having an accomplice who can string them along for a while with promises you’re on your way is probably your best bet for getting a useful duration out of this ritual.
Friday, 22 November 2019
206 - Lazaro Renninger, Trauma Cleaner
GMC: Lazaro Renninger, Trauma Cleaner
Lazaro idolised the helping professions as a kid, he wanted to be a cop or a doctor or a social worker. Lazaro wasn’t suited to any of those, a bad stutter and a strange air meant he grew up avoidant and nervous. After high school he put his keen eyes to work in CCTV monitoring for a few years while he picked up a side job as a cleaner.
Unfulfilled and looking for a change, it was a chance encounter with someone in the industry that led him into the career of trauma cleaning. The clean up of violent or long putrefied deaths is something people don't often consider, after the authorities have left the task of dealing with the grisly mess falls to those left behind. Not only traumatising, the waste can be hazardous to human health, hence why specialized services (like the one Lazaro ended up working for and then decided to operate on his own) exist. Having found his own quiet space for helping others, not what he’d ever envisioned but satisfying nonetheless, Lazaro was grateful.
There is one rub. Cleaning up the homes of the forgotten and abandoned eventually intersects with the kind of oddity that makes up the occult underground. In Lazaro’s case the hoarder’s home that gave him his condition belonged to a detritomancer who choked to death on a hotdog. Latched on to by something not quite a revenant, he now attracts the strange and magickal like shit attracts flies.
His problem, his skillset and his temperament have made him a shoe-in as a valuable member of his local Sleeper community. They can help him deal with what his passenger attracts and in turn he helps clean up the messes some of them make to keep the sleeping tiger dozing. Lazaro’s skills have soundly shredded the forensics on at least one murder scene. It bothers him, he’s by no means bloodthirsty, and he tells himself that sometimes extreme things need to be done and that he’d be more than happy to cut loose anyone truly monstrous. Sometimes, when a new occult mess threatens to spill into public view or his odd magnetism draws something unnatural he needs help with into his life he wonders just how true that is.
STATS
Personality: Professional and polite, but sometimes beleaguered and a little naive. Lazaro uses his profession as a social shield. He’s ambivalent about his new ability to attract the weird but considers it a part of the trouble he has to keep from normal people.
Rage: Callousness.
Noble: Sparing what he can.
Fear: Getting led into a mess he can’t get out of (Helplessness).
Obsession: Being part of the line that keeps people civilized.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Trauma Cleaner 60%* (Substitutes for Notice, Protects Violence, Protects Helplessness.)
Weirdness Magnet 40% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Protects Unnatural, Unique - Encounters the occult with high frequency.)
Avatar: The Solid Citizen 20% (Avatar, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Lazaro idolised the helping professions as a kid, he wanted to be a cop or a doctor or a social worker. Lazaro wasn’t suited to any of those, a bad stutter and a strange air meant he grew up avoidant and nervous. After high school he put his keen eyes to work in CCTV monitoring for a few years while he picked up a side job as a cleaner.
Unfulfilled and looking for a change, it was a chance encounter with someone in the industry that led him into the career of trauma cleaning. The clean up of violent or long putrefied deaths is something people don't often consider, after the authorities have left the task of dealing with the grisly mess falls to those left behind. Not only traumatising, the waste can be hazardous to human health, hence why specialized services (like the one Lazaro ended up working for and then decided to operate on his own) exist. Having found his own quiet space for helping others, not what he’d ever envisioned but satisfying nonetheless, Lazaro was grateful.
There is one rub. Cleaning up the homes of the forgotten and abandoned eventually intersects with the kind of oddity that makes up the occult underground. In Lazaro’s case the hoarder’s home that gave him his condition belonged to a detritomancer who choked to death on a hotdog. Latched on to by something not quite a revenant, he now attracts the strange and magickal like shit attracts flies.
His problem, his skillset and his temperament have made him a shoe-in as a valuable member of his local Sleeper community. They can help him deal with what his passenger attracts and in turn he helps clean up the messes some of them make to keep the sleeping tiger dozing. Lazaro’s skills have soundly shredded the forensics on at least one murder scene. It bothers him, he’s by no means bloodthirsty, and he tells himself that sometimes extreme things need to be done and that he’d be more than happy to cut loose anyone truly monstrous. Sometimes, when a new occult mess threatens to spill into public view or his odd magnetism draws something unnatural he needs help with into his life he wonders just how true that is.
STATS
Personality: Professional and polite, but sometimes beleaguered and a little naive. Lazaro uses his profession as a social shield. He’s ambivalent about his new ability to attract the weird but considers it a part of the trouble he has to keep from normal people.
Rage: Callousness.
Noble: Sparing what he can.
Fear: Getting led into a mess he can’t get out of (Helplessness).
Obsession: Being part of the line that keeps people civilized.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Trauma Cleaner 60%* (Substitutes for Notice, Protects Violence, Protects Helplessness.)
Weirdness Magnet 40% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Protects Unnatural, Unique - Encounters the occult with high frequency.)
Avatar: The Solid Citizen 20% (Avatar, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Thursday, 21 November 2019
205 - Never Again
Ritual: Never Again
Cost: 4 minor charges.
Ritual Action: Some people feel compelled to repeatedly do things they know they’ll regret. Whether it’s the bottle, overeating, the needle or the arms of a woman who isn’t your wife, some addictions require years - even a lifetime - of hard work to overcome. Sometimes even that isn’t enough. For people more concerned with the product than the outcome magick provides one questionable shortcut. So long as they want it bad enough.
Take an antique coke bottle - at least 100 years old - and something that can be used to facilitate your regretful temptation of choice: whiskey, a bag full of heroin, cash. Put that object inside the bottle with a handful of ash from something burned at least a half dozen years ago. Seal it with wax from a scented candle (any except sandalwood). Give it to someone you don’t trust and convince them to bury it somewhere you won’t find it.
Make no act of contrition for at least 3 days. If it works the effect will take hold when you wake up on the fourth.
Effect: You physically can’t perform the action. You might want to, need to, but your body won’t comply.
Mentally it’s a different story, you’re constantly haunted by the consequences of the action as though you had caved in to your compulsion. Your unrelenting nightmares reflect a world in which the worst of your excesses are realised. Take a rank 5 stress check on a relevant gauge (Unnatural is a strong contender) once per week from the burden of guilt. Make it a rank 6 check if it’s relevant to a passion or obsession, rank 7 if it hits one of each. It doesn’t ever get worse than that, a lot of people eventually get used to carrying around an invisible monkey on their back. Some of them prefer it to the alternative.
The effect can be broken by retrieving and opening the bottle. However, doing so has the opposite effect, you cannot physically prevent yourself from indulging. At least the dreams will stop.
Cost: 4 minor charges.
Ritual Action: Some people feel compelled to repeatedly do things they know they’ll regret. Whether it’s the bottle, overeating, the needle or the arms of a woman who isn’t your wife, some addictions require years - even a lifetime - of hard work to overcome. Sometimes even that isn’t enough. For people more concerned with the product than the outcome magick provides one questionable shortcut. So long as they want it bad enough.
Take an antique coke bottle - at least 100 years old - and something that can be used to facilitate your regretful temptation of choice: whiskey, a bag full of heroin, cash. Put that object inside the bottle with a handful of ash from something burned at least a half dozen years ago. Seal it with wax from a scented candle (any except sandalwood). Give it to someone you don’t trust and convince them to bury it somewhere you won’t find it.
Make no act of contrition for at least 3 days. If it works the effect will take hold when you wake up on the fourth.
Effect: You physically can’t perform the action. You might want to, need to, but your body won’t comply.
Mentally it’s a different story, you’re constantly haunted by the consequences of the action as though you had caved in to your compulsion. Your unrelenting nightmares reflect a world in which the worst of your excesses are realised. Take a rank 5 stress check on a relevant gauge (Unnatural is a strong contender) once per week from the burden of guilt. Make it a rank 6 check if it’s relevant to a passion or obsession, rank 7 if it hits one of each. It doesn’t ever get worse than that, a lot of people eventually get used to carrying around an invisible monkey on their back. Some of them prefer it to the alternative.
The effect can be broken by retrieving and opening the bottle. However, doing so has the opposite effect, you cannot physically prevent yourself from indulging. At least the dreams will stop.
Wednesday, 20 November 2019
204 - The Untether
Artifact: The Untether
Power: Major
Description: A length of fraying, fibrous rope looped into a loose hitch knot at one end. Following the knot with you finger leads to the same line you started at despite the fact it should end. Likewise trying to follow it to the other end seems to extend endlessly despite the fact that's impossible since you're always holding the same part of the rope. At a glance it’s three feet of rope ending in a complicated loop.
Effect: The Untether only functions for those with a profound sense of alienation, a relevant disorder from the Isolation, Helplessness or Self gauges is a good guideline. Grasping it is a grounding experience, it won’t recover any of the damage but so long as they maintain contact the worst of the effects are assuaged (for a disorder, the effect itself is subsumed but the effects of high failed notches remain).
Giving yourself over to the Untether means its the only thing that can keep you here. Here being in the same dimension the rest of us occupy.
Someone experiencing the first effect of the Untether who lets go of it is shunted out of reality (it disappears too). There’s a sensation like uncontrolled falling as everything becomes hazy and indistinct. To everyone observing, you vanish. In this state the world looks like its shrouded in a dense fog and sounds are echoey and distant, for those familiar with it the effect is similar to The Space Behind. Everything is intangible as if you're a ghost. If you don’t regain contact with the Untether you might as well be.
Roll 1d100 when you release the Untether, that’s the value you have to roll under to take ahold of the rope again, hovering just out of reach as it falls away from you in slow motion. For every turn you spend dicking around, waiting for the oncoming bus to pass through you or phasing through the walls of a bank vault, subtract 10 from this number. If it hits zero the Untether suddenly speeds up its descent as it snaps back to reality without you. Falling into a heap right where you dropped it.
Power: Major
Description: A length of fraying, fibrous rope looped into a loose hitch knot at one end. Following the knot with you finger leads to the same line you started at despite the fact it should end. Likewise trying to follow it to the other end seems to extend endlessly despite the fact that's impossible since you're always holding the same part of the rope. At a glance it’s three feet of rope ending in a complicated loop.
Effect: The Untether only functions for those with a profound sense of alienation, a relevant disorder from the Isolation, Helplessness or Self gauges is a good guideline. Grasping it is a grounding experience, it won’t recover any of the damage but so long as they maintain contact the worst of the effects are assuaged (for a disorder, the effect itself is subsumed but the effects of high failed notches remain).
Giving yourself over to the Untether means its the only thing that can keep you here. Here being in the same dimension the rest of us occupy.
Someone experiencing the first effect of the Untether who lets go of it is shunted out of reality (it disappears too). There’s a sensation like uncontrolled falling as everything becomes hazy and indistinct. To everyone observing, you vanish. In this state the world looks like its shrouded in a dense fog and sounds are echoey and distant, for those familiar with it the effect is similar to The Space Behind. Everything is intangible as if you're a ghost. If you don’t regain contact with the Untether you might as well be.
Roll 1d100 when you release the Untether, that’s the value you have to roll under to take ahold of the rope again, hovering just out of reach as it falls away from you in slow motion. For every turn you spend dicking around, waiting for the oncoming bus to pass through you or phasing through the walls of a bank vault, subtract 10 from this number. If it hits zero the Untether suddenly speeds up its descent as it snaps back to reality without you. Falling into a heap right where you dropped it.
Tuesday, 19 November 2019
203 - Freudian Chimera
Unnatural Entity: Freudian Chimera
There’s an agrimancer who fancies herself a therapist. She’s no such thing, she never finished high school, but she reads about it every moment she isn’t experimenting with animal husbandry. Theories of mind and compulsion, traumas buried in the subconscious that conventional aid can only root out after years of painful introspection. This seems uncertain and primitive to her. Instead in the same way that she has shortcut around nature in the microcosm of messy expulsions, animal midwifery and selective breeding, she births her client’s inner demons into the world to deal with them directly.
It’s an involved process combining the extraction of a number of bodily fluids and tissues (including marrow and bile) from the progenitor client and the carefully managed interspecies surrogacy of at least three cycles of different animals determined by a complex combination of astrology and personality testing. Unless magickally sped up (and she hates to interfere like that) the process can take years. The creatures spawned from the final birth are hideous freaks of nature, conglomerations of every previous animal involved in the process and animated with unnatural vigor.
The resemblance of any of their forebears is entirely superficial for these creatures. Dissected they are undifferentiated material the whole way through except for a trio or quartet of sacs containing an oily rainbow of fluid that reeks of hydrocarbons if they are punctured. They eat only the inedible refuse we throw away, plastics, glass, etc. In most respects chimeras are only as smart as the dumbest animal in their combination, excepting in cases of their progenitor’s passions. Their reaction to those is uncannily human.
Everyone has a different use for chimeras: journeys of self-discovery and transformation, an unnatural proxy for the excision of persistent traumas, a mirror to gauge their mental health against or an unusual pet or familiar. One repeat customer demands to be locked in a barn with his overnight, emerging bloodsoaked and victorious with the dawn. It would be more impressive if his weren’t mostly made out of chickens and cats. It is theoretically possible that a chimera might be used to indirectly control, monitor or hurt someone but their creator would never willingly make one for that purpose.
Used to further a relevant objective in the right way they are good for a weighty global/petty cosmic milestone. Even using one the wrong way is good for a milestone only one step down from that.
Freudian Chimera, Beast of Inner Nature
Wound Threshold: 30-120, depending on the size of the agglomerated animals.
Id 50%: Substitutes for Struggle, depending on the animals it is made from the chimera may have a +3 or +6 damage bonus. Can be flip-flopped against targets of its progenitor’s rage passion.
Ego 50%: Coerces a gauge. The same one tied to its progenitor’s fear passion, it can flip-flop rolls that relate to the passion directly.
Superego 50%: Cooperative. May shift its or another party’s rolls by exactly 10 points in either direction consistent with its progenitor’s noble passion.
Trauma 70%: Select a supernatural identity. This identity only exists for chimera’s birthed from progenitor’s with one or more disorders, to which its power is symbolic.
There’s an agrimancer who fancies herself a therapist. She’s no such thing, she never finished high school, but she reads about it every moment she isn’t experimenting with animal husbandry. Theories of mind and compulsion, traumas buried in the subconscious that conventional aid can only root out after years of painful introspection. This seems uncertain and primitive to her. Instead in the same way that she has shortcut around nature in the microcosm of messy expulsions, animal midwifery and selective breeding, she births her client’s inner demons into the world to deal with them directly.
It’s an involved process combining the extraction of a number of bodily fluids and tissues (including marrow and bile) from the progenitor client and the carefully managed interspecies surrogacy of at least three cycles of different animals determined by a complex combination of astrology and personality testing. Unless magickally sped up (and she hates to interfere like that) the process can take years. The creatures spawned from the final birth are hideous freaks of nature, conglomerations of every previous animal involved in the process and animated with unnatural vigor.
The resemblance of any of their forebears is entirely superficial for these creatures. Dissected they are undifferentiated material the whole way through except for a trio or quartet of sacs containing an oily rainbow of fluid that reeks of hydrocarbons if they are punctured. They eat only the inedible refuse we throw away, plastics, glass, etc. In most respects chimeras are only as smart as the dumbest animal in their combination, excepting in cases of their progenitor’s passions. Their reaction to those is uncannily human.
Everyone has a different use for chimeras: journeys of self-discovery and transformation, an unnatural proxy for the excision of persistent traumas, a mirror to gauge their mental health against or an unusual pet or familiar. One repeat customer demands to be locked in a barn with his overnight, emerging bloodsoaked and victorious with the dawn. It would be more impressive if his weren’t mostly made out of chickens and cats. It is theoretically possible that a chimera might be used to indirectly control, monitor or hurt someone but their creator would never willingly make one for that purpose.
Used to further a relevant objective in the right way they are good for a weighty global/petty cosmic milestone. Even using one the wrong way is good for a milestone only one step down from that.
Freudian Chimera, Beast of Inner Nature
Wound Threshold: 30-120, depending on the size of the agglomerated animals.
Id 50%: Substitutes for Struggle, depending on the animals it is made from the chimera may have a +3 or +6 damage bonus. Can be flip-flopped against targets of its progenitor’s rage passion.
Ego 50%: Coerces a gauge. The same one tied to its progenitor’s fear passion, it can flip-flop rolls that relate to the passion directly.
Superego 50%: Cooperative. May shift its or another party’s rolls by exactly 10 points in either direction consistent with its progenitor’s noble passion.
Trauma 70%: Select a supernatural identity. This identity only exists for chimera’s birthed from progenitor’s with one or more disorders, to which its power is symbolic.
Monday, 18 November 2019
202 - Sebastian Sturgill, Pestilent Evolution
GMC: Sebastian Sturgill, Pestilent Evolution
Antimicrobial resistance is rated as one of the biggest threats to global human health, the adaptation and evolution of microbes outstripping the ability of our medicine to fight them. Life is much faster at the microscopic level: bacteria can reproduce almost 100,000 times in the span it takes to bring a human baby to term, over 9 million generations of them over the course of a human life. With every division they are shaped by their environment into increasingly perfect biological machines at unthinkable speed. Sebastian grinds his teeth with envy.
A single lifespan trapped inside a body shackled by limited preset potential with the only hope of escape in the metaphorical legacy of offspring. It was an existential insult to the collegiate premed that he could not stomach, to be a conscious mind trapped by that fate. That’s what he tells himself when thinking about why he dropped out. Armed with mail-order DIY gene-editing kits and stolen medical equipment over the past several years the biohacker has transformed himself.
Sebastian would not call what he does magick. He’d be offended at the suggestion. That said there’s very little scientific about cultivating superbugs and shooting them into your body with the expectation that they will ultimately make you stronger, like a cannibal eating someone’s heart. Despite the holes in his methodology Sebastian has an impressive set of rationalizations for why it does work and reams of data supporting genuine results.
Sebastian no longer spends any time in the one-story ranch house he grew up in. Instead he lives, hermetically sealed, in the laboratory he built in the backyard. Constant tinkering has altered his immune system radically and he is aware of the infection risk he poses to others outside of a specially built pressurized suit. Some of the fruits of his labours are impressive enough from a scientific point of view that he has gained fraudulent access to academic and medical circles by misrepresenting himself as the owner of a genuine research lab to further his experiments. His attachment to the occult underground is incidental, the services of those twisted enough to desire his expertise and willing to enable this deception has a significant overlap with that kind of character and he isn’t shy about exploiting it.
STATS
Personality: Unnaturally vain in ways that defy most people’s conception of the term. Sebastian idolises forms and capabilities far outside of most people’s aesthetic and performative ideals. Outside of this limitation he is sharply intelligent and personable, so long as he doesn’t consider you a threat.
Rage: Injury. Sebastian’s body is his temple and he needs it to be in perfect shape to weather his experiments.
Noble: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Fear: Losing his ability to keep adapting (Unnatural).
Obsession: Becoming the perfect organism through infection.
Wound Threshold: 100 (magickally boosted, it may be lower depending on what strain of the sniffles Sebastian currently has running through him).
Epideromancer 70%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Backyard Microbiologist 50% (Substitutes for Knowledge, Medical, Unique - Access to biohazardous materials and lab equipment.)
Shock Gauges
Note: Through obsessive use of the formula spell Preternatural Prowess Sebastian has boosted his Fitness, Dodge, Pursuit and Struggle to 65%.
Antimicrobial resistance is rated as one of the biggest threats to global human health, the adaptation and evolution of microbes outstripping the ability of our medicine to fight them. Life is much faster at the microscopic level: bacteria can reproduce almost 100,000 times in the span it takes to bring a human baby to term, over 9 million generations of them over the course of a human life. With every division they are shaped by their environment into increasingly perfect biological machines at unthinkable speed. Sebastian grinds his teeth with envy.
A single lifespan trapped inside a body shackled by limited preset potential with the only hope of escape in the metaphorical legacy of offspring. It was an existential insult to the collegiate premed that he could not stomach, to be a conscious mind trapped by that fate. That’s what he tells himself when thinking about why he dropped out. Armed with mail-order DIY gene-editing kits and stolen medical equipment over the past several years the biohacker has transformed himself.
Sebastian would not call what he does magick. He’d be offended at the suggestion. That said there’s very little scientific about cultivating superbugs and shooting them into your body with the expectation that they will ultimately make you stronger, like a cannibal eating someone’s heart. Despite the holes in his methodology Sebastian has an impressive set of rationalizations for why it does work and reams of data supporting genuine results.
Sebastian no longer spends any time in the one-story ranch house he grew up in. Instead he lives, hermetically sealed, in the laboratory he built in the backyard. Constant tinkering has altered his immune system radically and he is aware of the infection risk he poses to others outside of a specially built pressurized suit. Some of the fruits of his labours are impressive enough from a scientific point of view that he has gained fraudulent access to academic and medical circles by misrepresenting himself as the owner of a genuine research lab to further his experiments. His attachment to the occult underground is incidental, the services of those twisted enough to desire his expertise and willing to enable this deception has a significant overlap with that kind of character and he isn’t shy about exploiting it.
STATS
Personality: Unnaturally vain in ways that defy most people’s conception of the term. Sebastian idolises forms and capabilities far outside of most people’s aesthetic and performative ideals. Outside of this limitation he is sharply intelligent and personable, so long as he doesn’t consider you a threat.
Rage: Injury. Sebastian’s body is his temple and he needs it to be in perfect shape to weather his experiments.
Noble: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Fear: Losing his ability to keep adapting (Unnatural).
Obsession: Becoming the perfect organism through infection.
Wound Threshold: 100 (magickally boosted, it may be lower depending on what strain of the sniffles Sebastian currently has running through him).
Epideromancer 70%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Backyard Microbiologist 50% (Substitutes for Knowledge, Medical, Unique - Access to biohazardous materials and lab equipment.)
Shock Gauges
Note: Through obsessive use of the formula spell Preternatural Prowess Sebastian has boosted his Fitness, Dodge, Pursuit and Struggle to 65%.
Sunday, 17 November 2019
201 - No Man's Land
Paragon Place: No Man’s Land
Not all paragon places are actively generated by human choice and action, some are defined by unconscious reflection on natural occurrences and reputation. For example, a house might gain a reputation as haunted after a couple of unfortuitous deaths and regardless of whether it actually is this reputation will haunt the place on its own. The Bermuda Triangle is the product of scandalous press, confirmation bias and bad weather more than anything unnatural. No Man’s Land is inhospitable environment empowered by reputation.
The adjuncts for no man’s land are dangerous rather than helpful. This is deliberate, it doesn’t follow the conventional rules for paragon places. Unnatural phenomenon and objective juicing are the same but adjuncts activate automatically when people intrude, associated and resonant avatars may reroll any results at normal frequencies. Beyond the usual occult uses the dangerous nature of no man’s land lends it to being exploited for security or used as a trap.
Taboo: Occupation and development. No man’s land is defined by active resistance to human influence and safety, yoking it to civilized purposes undermines its uncontrolled danger and “otherness” even if it is manmade.
Associated Avatars: The Outsider, the Shaman, the Tamer.
Resonant Avatars: The Explorer, the Survivor.
Symbols: Long falls onto sharp rocks or through collapsed floors, bad weather, isolation from civilization, urban legends and true stories of grisly fates.
Adjuncts
1%-50%: Foreboding. Once per person per week, a successful roll acts like a negative cousin to a hunch. The value rolled opposes a single stress check or roll to avoid injury, rolling equal to or below it inflicts a normal failed result (except on a crit).
51%-70%: Stranded. There’s no help coming, cellular coverage is dead, the roads are out and no one knows where you are and there’s so little you can do alone. Identities with the Therapeutic or Medical features either lose the ability to be flip-flopped or suffer a -20% shift from sheer unnaturally powered hopelessness in no man’s land.
71%-90%: Part of no man’s land’s danger is its unpredictability. One of these channels can apply to each visitor at a time (for ease of use I’d stick to using the same one for everyone, but you do you). If someone survives a dangerous encounter in no man’s land and later returns the same one cannot apply twice in a row.
91%+: Even magick can’t protect you. All rolls on avatar channels, adept spells and gutter magick rituals intended to guard against the danger of no man’s land are at a -20% shift. Worse, protective magicks put in place before you enter are automatically rerolled for with the penalty.
99%: No man’s land only maintains a reputation if it has victims. Once every so often it can dangle a lure to draw people in, the archetypal haunted house drawing in victims every seven years. A side effect is that this can pay off if you manipulate the symbolism correctly, horror tropes like final girl and hereditary curse inform the way this channel interacts with people. Overcoming it in a symbolically appropriate way is good for an extra +10% to an identity or objective on top of any regular benefits of survival.
Not all paragon places are actively generated by human choice and action, some are defined by unconscious reflection on natural occurrences and reputation. For example, a house might gain a reputation as haunted after a couple of unfortuitous deaths and regardless of whether it actually is this reputation will haunt the place on its own. The Bermuda Triangle is the product of scandalous press, confirmation bias and bad weather more than anything unnatural. No Man’s Land is inhospitable environment empowered by reputation.
The adjuncts for no man’s land are dangerous rather than helpful. This is deliberate, it doesn’t follow the conventional rules for paragon places. Unnatural phenomenon and objective juicing are the same but adjuncts activate automatically when people intrude, associated and resonant avatars may reroll any results at normal frequencies. Beyond the usual occult uses the dangerous nature of no man’s land lends it to being exploited for security or used as a trap.
Taboo: Occupation and development. No man’s land is defined by active resistance to human influence and safety, yoking it to civilized purposes undermines its uncontrolled danger and “otherness” even if it is manmade.
Associated Avatars: The Outsider, the Shaman, the Tamer.
Resonant Avatars: The Explorer, the Survivor.
Symbols: Long falls onto sharp rocks or through collapsed floors, bad weather, isolation from civilization, urban legends and true stories of grisly fates.
Adjuncts
1%-50%: Foreboding. Once per person per week, a successful roll acts like a negative cousin to a hunch. The value rolled opposes a single stress check or roll to avoid injury, rolling equal to or below it inflicts a normal failed result (except on a crit).
51%-70%: Stranded. There’s no help coming, cellular coverage is dead, the roads are out and no one knows where you are and there’s so little you can do alone. Identities with the Therapeutic or Medical features either lose the ability to be flip-flopped or suffer a -20% shift from sheer unnaturally powered hopelessness in no man’s land.
71%-90%: Part of no man’s land’s danger is its unpredictability. One of these channels can apply to each visitor at a time (for ease of use I’d stick to using the same one for everyone, but you do you). If someone survives a dangerous encounter in no man’s land and later returns the same one cannot apply twice in a row.
- Better: The earlier foreboding now ceaselessly dogs their steps. The effects of the first channel apply to all relevant rolls of an odd number until they leave. This place wants them dead.
- Faster: Things can turn foul unexpectedly and without warning and with this adjunct they’ll do so far more frequently. Inflict damage equivalent to a minor blast or a rank 5 stress check relevant to the danger of the environment apropos of nothing.
- Cheaper: Preparation and technology are how we overcome our environment. Here they fail, at some point a piece of equipment is automatically destroyed or malfunctions in the face of dire peril.
91%+: Even magick can’t protect you. All rolls on avatar channels, adept spells and gutter magick rituals intended to guard against the danger of no man’s land are at a -20% shift. Worse, protective magicks put in place before you enter are automatically rerolled for with the penalty.
99%: No man’s land only maintains a reputation if it has victims. Once every so often it can dangle a lure to draw people in, the archetypal haunted house drawing in victims every seven years. A side effect is that this can pay off if you manipulate the symbolism correctly, horror tropes like final girl and hereditary curse inform the way this channel interacts with people. Overcoming it in a symbolically appropriate way is good for an extra +10% to an identity or objective on top of any regular benefits of survival.
Saturday, 16 November 2019
200 - Unwritten
Unnatural Phenomenon: Unwritten
Written record (and more recently other kinds of media) holds a kind of authority that human recollection does not. It tells us stories across time, reaches people we will never meet and holds the world in order. Made uncertain it removes a foundation most of us take for granted.
Unwritten is like a fungal rot surrounding the records on a particular subject. It unravels them as though they never existed. Events disappear in everything but people’s vague recollections. A person affected will find their birth records, social media and banking details all unspooling into the ether. Something afflicted will either historically disintegrate from its origin forwards faster than it can be replaced or “age backwards” as more recent records are the first to go and no new ones seem to stick.
There are those who can recognise the phenomenon in progress and stem the tide or even halt or reverse it. They’ll deliberately continue to create records as a prophylactic measure when possible, once complete the process is irreversible. Others weaponize the phenomenon to cover their tracks, erase their enemy's records or rewrite history. Stranger folks and creatures do it to feast on the runoff and waste products, cisterns and sewers overflowing with ink and portable harddrives filled with digital white noise.
Written record (and more recently other kinds of media) holds a kind of authority that human recollection does not. It tells us stories across time, reaches people we will never meet and holds the world in order. Made uncertain it removes a foundation most of us take for granted.
Unwritten is like a fungal rot surrounding the records on a particular subject. It unravels them as though they never existed. Events disappear in everything but people’s vague recollections. A person affected will find their birth records, social media and banking details all unspooling into the ether. Something afflicted will either historically disintegrate from its origin forwards faster than it can be replaced or “age backwards” as more recent records are the first to go and no new ones seem to stick.
There are those who can recognise the phenomenon in progress and stem the tide or even halt or reverse it. They’ll deliberately continue to create records as a prophylactic measure when possible, once complete the process is irreversible. Others weaponize the phenomenon to cover their tracks, erase their enemy's records or rewrite history. Stranger folks and creatures do it to feast on the runoff and waste products, cisterns and sewers overflowing with ink and portable harddrives filled with digital white noise.
Friday, 15 November 2019
199 - Memetic Putty
Artifact: Memetic Putty
Power: Significant.
Description: Memetic putty is odd for an artifact in that it isn’t a physical object, it wouldn’t be unfair to label it unnatural phenomenon (or a magickal flu) except that the adepts that keep “rediscovering” it manufacture it in the same way as magickal artifacts. It's a conceptual object made of magick.
To begin with the putty is malleable since it is an idea not yet fully formed. It has some shape, imparted by the person who created it but they all end up with less control over it than any of them would like. Memetic putty is flavoured after one of the creator's passions or obsession, on a matched success the creator can pick which one instead of determining it randomly, on a crit they can make it about anything). It will stay this way, in the creator’s head, for up to a month before it begins to spoil. They’d best use it since the cost of creation is the hard work and drive invested in something genuinely important to the creator (1d10+5% percentiles off of their current objective).
There’s an Agrimancer down in Oklahoma who has come up with a way to invest the memetic putty he creates into chicken eggs. Unfortunately no one else has been able to replicate this feat and the flavours of idea he has aren’t particularly useful to most people. Still, it’s a big enough deal for him to get regular visits from TNI goons who aggressively buy up his whole supply. Word is that he’s sick of the money and wants some help getting out from under them.
Effect: Memetic putty can be used to communicate anything with perfect clarity. It's platonic potential as an idea that throws signal to noise ratio completely to out the window. The restriction is that it must be related to the core concept invested into it. If you can fulfil that requirement it offers either a +20% shift on Connect or Status rolls (it’s ineffective at attempts to Lie) or +2 ranks on a coercion attempt made with it.
It retains this quality after you’ve shared it but loses some of the original flexibility when exposed to grubby reality. Each person it is used on may turn around and use it on someone else for the same benefit. They can’t change what they’ve been told but they can put their own spin on it (this is inevitable even if they don’t intend to, like a big game of telephone), gradually shaping the putty into something more concrete.
As it spreads the putty loses effectiveness and becomes increasingly inflexible. After a number of people equal to the sum of the casting roll have been influenced the benefits are cut in half (to a +10% shift or +1 stress check rank), once this number reaches the total of the casting roll (plus 100 for results below 10) it loses effectiveness entirely. Stretched across too many preconceptions and permutations whatever compelling seed once laid at the heart of the putty is spent. Quite a few creators see this, assume it was really a one-off bolt of creative lightning and never make a second or third attempt.
Description: Memetic putty is odd for an artifact in that it isn’t a physical object, it wouldn’t be unfair to label it unnatural phenomenon (or a magickal flu) except that the adepts that keep “rediscovering” it manufacture it in the same way as magickal artifacts. It's a conceptual object made of magick.
To begin with the putty is malleable since it is an idea not yet fully formed. It has some shape, imparted by the person who created it but they all end up with less control over it than any of them would like. Memetic putty is flavoured after one of the creator's passions or obsession, on a matched success the creator can pick which one instead of determining it randomly, on a crit they can make it about anything). It will stay this way, in the creator’s head, for up to a month before it begins to spoil. They’d best use it since the cost of creation is the hard work and drive invested in something genuinely important to the creator (1d10+5% percentiles off of their current objective).
There’s an Agrimancer down in Oklahoma who has come up with a way to invest the memetic putty he creates into chicken eggs. Unfortunately no one else has been able to replicate this feat and the flavours of idea he has aren’t particularly useful to most people. Still, it’s a big enough deal for him to get regular visits from TNI goons who aggressively buy up his whole supply. Word is that he’s sick of the money and wants some help getting out from under them.
Effect: Memetic putty can be used to communicate anything with perfect clarity. It's platonic potential as an idea that throws signal to noise ratio completely to out the window. The restriction is that it must be related to the core concept invested into it. If you can fulfil that requirement it offers either a +20% shift on Connect or Status rolls (it’s ineffective at attempts to Lie) or +2 ranks on a coercion attempt made with it.
It retains this quality after you’ve shared it but loses some of the original flexibility when exposed to grubby reality. Each person it is used on may turn around and use it on someone else for the same benefit. They can’t change what they’ve been told but they can put their own spin on it (this is inevitable even if they don’t intend to, like a big game of telephone), gradually shaping the putty into something more concrete.
As it spreads the putty loses effectiveness and becomes increasingly inflexible. After a number of people equal to the sum of the casting roll have been influenced the benefits are cut in half (to a +10% shift or +1 stress check rank), once this number reaches the total of the casting roll (plus 100 for results below 10) it loses effectiveness entirely. Stretched across too many preconceptions and permutations whatever compelling seed once laid at the heart of the putty is spent. Quite a few creators see this, assume it was really a one-off bolt of creative lightning and never make a second or third attempt.
Thursday, 14 November 2019
198 - The Leash
Artifact: The Leash
Power: Significant.
Description: A small harness and lead, the kind intended for controversially restraining a toddler from wandering off. Tied all along the leather straps with coarse, orange twine are the individual bones from small birds. There are enough of them to make up just over three American Robin skeletons.
Effect: If you can get the leash on someone (remember that it’s intended to fit a small child) the restraint acts as a volitional blind spot. Leading the wearer somewhere with the leash makes it seem to them like the only feasible possibility, likewise tying it off somewhere leaves them feeling like they’ve no reason to stray further than the few feet of slack it gives them. They won’t remove it on their own either, it won’t occur to them that they can.
This risks breaking down if the wearer is confronted with an immediate and urgent need to oppose the restraint, be it the threat of violence, something related to a passion or obsession or anything that causes a stress check. Other stimulus may qualify at the GMs discretion. Attempting to react to this stimulus requires taking a rank 6 Helplessness check, passing results in sudden recognition of their restraint (and allows them to remove the harness) but failing results in an automatic freeze result. Most often collapsing in a fit of tears at being unable to reconcile the present need with mental inaccessibility.
Avatars of the Child are at a -30% shift to their avatar identity while under restraint by the leash.
Power: Significant.
Description: A small harness and lead, the kind intended for controversially restraining a toddler from wandering off. Tied all along the leather straps with coarse, orange twine are the individual bones from small birds. There are enough of them to make up just over three American Robin skeletons.
Effect: If you can get the leash on someone (remember that it’s intended to fit a small child) the restraint acts as a volitional blind spot. Leading the wearer somewhere with the leash makes it seem to them like the only feasible possibility, likewise tying it off somewhere leaves them feeling like they’ve no reason to stray further than the few feet of slack it gives them. They won’t remove it on their own either, it won’t occur to them that they can.
This risks breaking down if the wearer is confronted with an immediate and urgent need to oppose the restraint, be it the threat of violence, something related to a passion or obsession or anything that causes a stress check. Other stimulus may qualify at the GMs discretion. Attempting to react to this stimulus requires taking a rank 6 Helplessness check, passing results in sudden recognition of their restraint (and allows them to remove the harness) but failing results in an automatic freeze result. Most often collapsing in a fit of tears at being unable to reconcile the present need with mental inaccessibility.
Avatars of the Child are at a -30% shift to their avatar identity while under restraint by the leash.
Wednesday, 13 November 2019
197 - Maria Wood aka Monterey Jack, A Miserable Pile of Advertising
GMC: Maria Wood aka Monterey Jack, A Miserable Pile of Advertising
Back when she was Maria Wood, Jack knew that the world didn’t feel right. That heady childhood bloom of newness faded as she got older only to be replaced by a droning, surreal monotony that wouldn’t let her sleep. What might have been diagnosed and treated as a rare case of childhood depersonalization if her parents paid more attention was instead wallpapered over by something that promised a hazily similar shine to those nostalgic memories: the magic of brands.
In an earlier era this wouldn’t have worked. Advertising is an old game and older generations were, if anything, more susceptible to it than they are today. But they didn’t have the same instant global exposure, the same hypertrophic stimulus battling fatigued apathy, the same grip on the culturally impoverished’s sense of self and worth. Brands weren’t religions.
So Maria used them as a proxy for feeling like she was real, a shifting collage of traits gathered from products and marketing in place of a real personality. It was an unhealthy adaption but it worked enough to survive as she made her mad way through the world. Well enough that she became an adept without even realising what she was, a sociomancer by second nature. She was received with curiousity by the occult underground but barely noticed them beyond the fact it was easier to avoid taboo without having to deal with the awkward shunning of creeped out normal people.
Her imperfect suit of mental armour worked right up until her brother showed up, their father had passed and the estate was stuck in probate. There were taxes and insurances and paperworks to be gone over with lawyers and they needed her. That history, a life so prosaic and achingly tedious it made a mockery of who she really was. Maria broke down completely and fled.
Her intended self destruction, hiding in the demolition of a local photocopier manufacturer’s last plant isn’t something she remembers. Nor does she recall the ensuing months hitchhiking across the country as the tweedy mascot she’d once admired. She has completely reshaped herself in dying corporate images a half a dozen times since. Risking death alongside them she subsumes herself to these falling minor gods in return for the major charge she gains with risking death. Spending it, she walks away wearing what they were.
This is only temporary. Maria’s sense of self has the same fragility that has dogged her all her life. As it starts to get the better of her, the current skin she wears begins to itch. Tracking dying brands all over the country she is always trying to stay ahead of her real identity. For now she wears the face of an almost cartoonish cowboy, lasoo, boots and all, cribbed from a shuttered cheese manufacturer. Each new mask resets her Self gauge, if she ever reaches five failed notches the facade will disintegrate and leave her exposed in convulsing catatonia.
STATS
Personality: A little too big and a little too bright to be believable. Monterey Jack is currently a slow talking, hyper-masculine parody of a cowboy that Maria hermit-crabbed off a cheese factory. In a few months she could be something else and something else again a year later. Either that or her facade will slip and she’ll wind up catatonic in a hospital.
Rage: Banal reality.
Noble: Aspirational glamour.
Fear: What am I underneath this? (Self).
Obsession: Cloaking herself in the shells of cast off brands.
Wound Threshold: 65.
Sociomancer 55%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Magickal Facade 65% (Substitutes for Fitness, Protects Self, Provides Wound Threshold.)
Shock Gauges
Back when she was Maria Wood, Jack knew that the world didn’t feel right. That heady childhood bloom of newness faded as she got older only to be replaced by a droning, surreal monotony that wouldn’t let her sleep. What might have been diagnosed and treated as a rare case of childhood depersonalization if her parents paid more attention was instead wallpapered over by something that promised a hazily similar shine to those nostalgic memories: the magic of brands.
In an earlier era this wouldn’t have worked. Advertising is an old game and older generations were, if anything, more susceptible to it than they are today. But they didn’t have the same instant global exposure, the same hypertrophic stimulus battling fatigued apathy, the same grip on the culturally impoverished’s sense of self and worth. Brands weren’t religions.
So Maria used them as a proxy for feeling like she was real, a shifting collage of traits gathered from products and marketing in place of a real personality. It was an unhealthy adaption but it worked enough to survive as she made her mad way through the world. Well enough that she became an adept without even realising what she was, a sociomancer by second nature. She was received with curiousity by the occult underground but barely noticed them beyond the fact it was easier to avoid taboo without having to deal with the awkward shunning of creeped out normal people.
Her imperfect suit of mental armour worked right up until her brother showed up, their father had passed and the estate was stuck in probate. There were taxes and insurances and paperworks to be gone over with lawyers and they needed her. That history, a life so prosaic and achingly tedious it made a mockery of who she really was. Maria broke down completely and fled.
Her intended self destruction, hiding in the demolition of a local photocopier manufacturer’s last plant isn’t something she remembers. Nor does she recall the ensuing months hitchhiking across the country as the tweedy mascot she’d once admired. She has completely reshaped herself in dying corporate images a half a dozen times since. Risking death alongside them she subsumes herself to these falling minor gods in return for the major charge she gains with risking death. Spending it, she walks away wearing what they were.
This is only temporary. Maria’s sense of self has the same fragility that has dogged her all her life. As it starts to get the better of her, the current skin she wears begins to itch. Tracking dying brands all over the country she is always trying to stay ahead of her real identity. For now she wears the face of an almost cartoonish cowboy, lasoo, boots and all, cribbed from a shuttered cheese manufacturer. Each new mask resets her Self gauge, if she ever reaches five failed notches the facade will disintegrate and leave her exposed in convulsing catatonia.
STATS
Personality: A little too big and a little too bright to be believable. Monterey Jack is currently a slow talking, hyper-masculine parody of a cowboy that Maria hermit-crabbed off a cheese factory. In a few months she could be something else and something else again a year later. Either that or her facade will slip and she’ll wind up catatonic in a hospital.
Rage: Banal reality.
Noble: Aspirational glamour.
Fear: What am I underneath this? (Self).
Obsession: Cloaking herself in the shells of cast off brands.
Wound Threshold: 65.
Sociomancer 55%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Magickal Facade 65% (Substitutes for Fitness, Protects Self, Provides Wound Threshold.)
Shock Gauges
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