276 - Ophelia Visser, Ouroboric Parthenogen

GMC: Ophelia Visser, Ouroboric Parthenogen

Ophelia murdered her parents so she could live forever. Insane? Yes, but raising a child in isolated worship of a cuckoo clock (He Who Sees All Histories And To All Futures Belong) was probably asking for it to some degree. Her reasoning was that by untethering her past she would be able to rewrite it, with the power of a major mechanomancy clockwork and ritual parricide she succeeded in the first only to be overwhelmed by the second. In a fit of panic she tied her flailing history to the only thing that was handy, her future.

Each instance of Ophelia is fated to survive for just shy of 75 years, in total she has lived for over 200. Every 37th anniversary of her parents death the younger Ophelia falls spontaneously pregnant, growing the next iteration of herself inside clockwork laced guts. Around these times is the most difficult, they are prefaced with caring for an increasingly infirm elder and followed by raising a prenaturally intelligent infant clone. Within months of the new birth the elder dies, her mind and memories passed to the new child by an act of cerebral self-cannibalism starting the cycle again.

Ophelia is a creature of her time, not only is it difficult to adjust attitudes held for centuries but for most of her life she has been content to maintain relative isolation. Childhood stories of witches tortured and burned are enough to overcome even the curiousity of her younger incarnations. Her once-ancestor’s facility for clockworking has proven elusive but thanks to lifetimes of correspondence with Europe’s sorcerer dynasties and the help of an eerily in-sync research partner she is one of the most accomplished ritualists alive. However even living on the outskirts of a small dutch village, the modern world is encroaching and it is proving increasingly difficult to maintain the fiction of a lone woman perpetually raising a daughter or caring for an ailing grandmother.

Ophelia has reached out through channels maintained over lifetimes, passed down along familial lines from a time before her own. Many of the families are extinct or no longer practicing the old arts. The few that remain can only give her sparse leads towards what she wants, she’ll have to venture out into the world to get it. Ophelia has heard of alternate realms of existence - otherspaces - and wishes to escape into one permanently to avoid discovery. Doing so in secret would be wise, there’s no shortage of weirdos desperate enough to live forever that they would risk feeding their brains to the infant Ophelia and trying to take her place in the cycle.

STATS
Personality: Ophelia is like an irascible grandparent whose incredibly dated attitudes and opinions barely even register today but have been reinforced by years of spending time with only other versions of herself for company. She tries to bull through any problems she comes up against with spooky obstinance.
Rage: Skepticism. Of course magick is real! If you don’t get out of my way I’ll prove it to you!
Noble: Potential. Whether it’s a person or an objective, Ophelia appreciates things pregnant with possibilities.
Fear: Fire. The idea of burning alive is something she has traumatised her younger selves with for hundreds of years.
Obsession: Life everlasting.
Wound Threshold: 50.

Reclusive Sorcerer 90% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Evaluates Unnatural, Coerces Unnatural.)
Eldritch Rebirth 80%* (Vague Information: Recalling lives past and fragments of the future, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Woodworker 45% (Substitutes for Notice, Unique - Can make intricate wooden crafts, Protects Isolation.)

Shock Gauges

Notches	Violence	Unnatural	Helplessness	Isolation	Self
Hardened	3	6	2	3	4
Failed	1	2	0	1	2

275 - Celebrity Glamour

Ritual: Celebrity Glamour

Cost: 3 minor charges.

Ritual Action: Wear an article of clothing belonging to someone famous who the target knows of but has not met. On an empty stomach eat a handful of cobwebs, soot and clover. Wash it down with a glass of collected morning dew. You can mix them if it makes it easier. Introduce yourself to the target of the ritual as the person whose clothing you're wearing, in Gaelic, and spend the charges.

Effect: The target of the ritual believes you are the person you introduce yourself as no matter how absurd. They still have control of all their faculties otherwise. They cannot shake this certainty on their own but if someone else confronts them with the reality its a rank 4 Unnatural check, failure prompts a breakdown or psychotic denial as they try to process believing two different things before the effect falters.

If not broken by intervention the effect of the ritual lasts until you either: take off the article of clothing, consume real food or drink, or become wet from rain. You may have more than one instance of the effect running at a time but need a different article of clothing for each of them.

274 - The Jungle of Kled

Otherspace: The Jungle of Kled

Hot, fetid and swarming. The Jungle of Kled is inhospitable to long-term survival. Constant growth, rot and decay in a sea of impenetrable vegetation, it reeks of life and death. A soup of virulent diseases that would baffle medical science. Predator and prey locked in ferocious evolutionary conflict. By comparison the staid and sterile environments of the liveliest cities are terrible bastions of stasis. Truly dead excepting where nature manages to inevitably bleed through, to consume and transform back into the cycle. Life is constant change, adapt or die.

Travelling to the Jungle of Kled
Discovered in the late 1960s by members of an itinerant hippie commune, the Jungle of Kled (named after an affection for H.P. Lovecraft’s The Silver Key) can only be accessed within a man-made structure reclaimed by nature. By chance, experimentation with psychedelics and lucid dreaming allowed their minds to enter as their bodies slept. Aside from rumour and hearsay the only record of the techniques they practiced is a poorly mimeographed pamphlet, all but three copies either destroyed by their creator or gone the way of all ephemera. One is in the hands of a small group of homeless urban spelunkers caught by a cultish fascination in the promise of a world that at least seems honest in its hostility.

Thanks to modern developments in pharmaceuticals there is another option. People under the influence of drugs which cause somnambulism can physically enter the Jungle while resting in the same places. This is unwise. Unlike entry by dream the only exit for sleepwalkers is to drug themselves into oblivion again and pray their sleeping bodies can find the real world before the inhabitants of the jungle find them. However it does allow them to bring things back.

The Landscape of the Jungle of Kled
The Jungle is a bounty of constant change. A sea of boundless green so thick it’s often hard to tell whether it’s day or night. The ground carpeted with leaves and vines concealing twisted roots and muddy sinkholes. Hold still long enough and the vegetation will grow around you, snaring you. Landmarks are ephemeral like sand dunes rolling in the wind.

Heat and humidity are constant and punctuated only by sporadic and torrential rain. Insects that defy taxonomy buzz lazily through the air, eager to nibble or lay larvae in your flesh. The cries and bellows of prey and predator echo without indication of direction or distance. Animals mutate - over generations measured in days and hours - into shapes stranger than any seen in reality.

Underneath, in places, are the swallowed husks of civilization. Ozymandian relics that occasionally jut through the canopy like an exposed skeleton. They offer dubious shelter, dangerously unstable and attractive to local fauna. As their real world counterparts crumble into dust the jungle versions of these places are pulled back into the earth by nature and forgotten in the intense rush.

Dream Death
Travel by dreaming is less dangerous than visiting in the flesh but has its own hazards. Death while dreaming in the jungle permanently deprives a person of their ability to enter a rapid eye movement (REM) sleep state. The good news is that it won’t kill you the way sleep deprivation inevitably would, some people go for decades on REM-suppressing dosages of antidepressants with no ill effects. The bad news is that you will never ever dream again and struggle to hold on to magickal charges.

Someone who has experienced dream death leaks magick like a sieve. Every time they fall asleep, even for a moment, any charges they’re holding vanish along with consciousness. Deliberately putting off going to bed will delay this loss but unless you spend them it’s inevitable.

One other side effect of dream death is that any changes to your dream self caused by the fruit of the lamb are now gone for better or worse. Physical changes remain.

The Fruit of the Lamb
The object of most experienced jungle traveller's journeys, the rare fruit of the lamb grows in pairs from low-hanging vines in a shady grotto. At the centre of each leafy ear is a piece of pink, fleshy fruit that squeals like sizzling meat when bitten. It tastes just like its namesake and has miraculous, horrifying effects.

Consuming it feels invigorating, the experience has been likened to methamphetamine with a similar hangover. Wounds close, clumsily healed over with scarred pink flesh, but tear open again without rest. The body ripples and changes in chaotic spasms. New limbs, eyes sprouting compound facets like a fly, the loss of six inches in height are just a few of the unpredictable mutations people have experienced. Some are more or less subtle. A few are beautiful, many are monstrous.

For those eating the fruit while physically present effects carry into the real world. Dreamers who try it find their dream selves are warped but their physical bodies remain the same. This isn’t pleasant, conversion disorders and problems with proprioception are common outcomes of a mismatch between the physical body and mind. It’s possible (but unlikely) that pre-existing conditions could be “cured” the same way.

Apex
A creature of lamarckian consumption, the Apex looks like a transparent, beaked blob just over a yard wide supporting itself by dozens of thin, chitinous tentacles. Entirely carnivorous, it is defined by a unique ability to temporarily extrude pieces of animals it has eaten from its gelatinous body. Venomous stingers, wings and the faces of dead friends begging for help are just a few of the things that have been witnessed.

It loses these abilities after it metabolizes the nutrients from each of them, enforcing a frenzied pace of constant hunting and eating to stay at the top of the food chain. Primarily an ambush predator, its style and intelligence fluctuate with its most recent meals. Two people have had conversations with it after it ate their companions. Surprisingly witty and urbane, it knew all the things the dead did and more.

273 - Jolina Henriksson, Chainletter Research Society Founder

GMC: Jolina Henriksson, Chainletter Research Society Founder

Spurious correlation of spurious correlation is Jolina’s bread and butter. She started out as a behavioural economist who by a confluence of restricted opportunity and coincidence took up the study of the perception of causal relationships where none exist. It didn’t do much to help her problems with being taken seriously as an academic but it did allow her to carve out a niche studying the ways in which people would behave superstitiously with their money.

It appalled her family, they’d expected something far more prestigious for their daughter and her rebuff of lucrative offers from private sector jobs they sent her way added insult to injury. Resentful of their stifling interference she moved further and further away from her parents influence the harder they tried to exert control over her life. Feeling cornered and exasperated she did something she knew would be the last straw: she founded the Chainletter Research Society.

It was practically a gag endeavour, something she could use to embarrass her way out of association with them. Studying the influence of chainletters and emails over the fortunes of the people who participated in them seemed like the kind of idiocy she could artfully walk back by turning it into an examination of how the same psychological factors could be used to predict how groups of people could be influenced to behave.

Examining dozens of factors Jolina came to a bizarre conclusion, the results weren’t conclusive but there did seem to be a weak statistical correlation. At least for those at the top. The closer she looked the more certain it seemed. By examining the collective wills of hordes of people bent to singular purpose and isolating for factors like participation and intent she was building the first ever database of gutter magick worked at an industrial-scale.

Not that Jolina feels comfortable calling it that, even now when the evidence seems incontrovertible she prefers to call her discovery Ripple Theory as though there is some hidden science she just needs to find so that it will all make sense. Her own experiments have been effective enough that the results she has would be legitimately publishable if she could ever find a journal that would take her seriously. Instead she has used her discovery for personal enrichment, it's not as though her career prospects are great anymore or like anyone could convict her of insider trading with magick.

A TNI-compromised SEC agent sniffing around her activities intends to make a go of charging her with something assuming the spooks tasked by information coming out of FLEX ECHO don't get to her first. Even then Mak Attax have gotten a hold of a file one of them shouldn't have left in a coffee shop and the Sleepers are tracking strange fluctuations in the way magickal energies are aligning themselves.

The ripples of Jolina Henriksson's actions have lit a beacon to anyone with an interest in magick and they're all curious just what's making all the noise.

STATS
Personality: Earnest, curious, brilliant, suspicious of people’s motives and absolutely in love with jazz. Dr. Henriksson wants to use her work in service of the broad aim of ‘helping people’ but between not nailing down what that means and fear of it being stolen from her struggles to make headway.
Rage: Being talked over. Jolina has taken a lot of mistreatment but hates not being taken seriously the most.
Noble: Freedom. People shouldn’t be tied down by others.
Fear: The ocean. Jolina never learned to swim after seeing of Jaws (Helplessness).
Obsession: The hidden ripples we miss in the noise of our everyday lives.
Wound Threshold: 50.

Black Sheep 40% (Substitutes for Status, Protects Isolation, Coerces Isolation.)
Earnest Academic 50% (Substitutes for Knowledge, Substitutes for Connect, Protects Unnatural.)
Ripple Theory 55%* (Vague Information, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick. Jolina can reroll an undesired result by putting a petty milestone’s worth of effort into sending out new chainletters to her curated mailing list.)

Shock Gauges

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

272 - Nostalgic Masque

Artifact: Nostalgic Masque

Power: Significant.

Description: A painted, wooden funerary mask once worn by a specific person and then stolen no less than three months after they were put in the ground. Defaced with obscenities that make mockery of their memory in extremely personal ways, it draws off the disconnection between recollection and reality for power.

Effect: To anyone who knew the person who the mask was originally intended for someone wearing it looks just like them. To everyone else you look like an asshole wearing a wooden mask covered in swears and ugly personal accusations. The illusion is complete to them, including all senses.

The illusory appearance isn't a genuine reproduction, it's how they remember the person looking. As they interact with you this perception is distorted and errors begin to accumulate in response to your actions. For example, if you've used it to intimidate them it becomes frightening (+10% shift on rolls to intimidate) or if you've used it to charm it becomes more attractive (+10% shift to rolls to charm).

These alterations persist between viewers creating an escalating uncanny valley-type effect. At a total accumulation of more than +40% in shifts across various contexts it is extreme enough to shatter the illusion and the mask loses its powers.

270 - Satanic Panic

Cabal: Satanic Panic

The Sleepers have it all wrong, trying to keep magick from the public is like trying to hold back the tide. Eventually something’s going to pop the seal and then there’s no putting all that toothpaste back in the tube. Mak Attax is equally delirious, they’ve got the packaging right but ‘magick for the people’ isn’t going to come from some hand-me-down mojo. Capitalism has harnessed naked self-interest to achieve some impressive stuff but thinking you can subvert that with good intentions and a can-do attitude is getting it backwards. The cabal calling themselves Satanic Panic base their credo off these two beliefs: everyone is going to find out eventually and if you’re going to hijack an existing social structure to promote your cause you need to work with it or you’ll get steamrollered.

They learned it the hard way. As a passel of aging punks and hipsters they saw exactly what was to “sell out” in their youth and how the subcultures they belonged to were gutted and stuffed for public consumption. What was theirs turned into something else before their eyes and scattered them to the wind. Sure, there were holdouts that held true to their principles, but do they matter to the collective unconscious that gobbles up whatever eroded image of the original is most palatable to the public? No and you can’t steer the ship if you aren’t on it. On the other hand aren’t sellouts just opportunists being enslaved by forces greater than themselves? Sure, there’s a rich history detailing the misery that being caged by celebrity can bring to back that up.

On both sides of the divide and feeling regret for their life choices, the cabal’s formation after a chance reunion put something else on the table: magick. They’d all discovered it in the interim, driven either by a need to rekindle feelings of youthful rebellion or make up for the encroaching impotence of clinging to beliefs that don’t pay the bills. Now it offers them a second bite at the apple. They’re going to build a brand for magick and when they unleash it on the world it’ll feed off all the banality needed to make an impact instead of being crushed by it. This time they’ll be at the helm.

Their plans have the current components:

• Build an attractively transgressive local subculture around magick (that can then be easily packaged for them to sell once it goes mainstream as their follow up objective). It’s their current, weighty objective at 23% completion.
• Keep a finger on the pulse, tweak it when necessary. Trends can change overnight and the cabal needs to be ahead of them, especially since they’re a little out of touch. They’ve got a number of plugged in people they’re setting up as cultural barometers to keep themselves calibrated in the occult demimonde.
• Corral a local Tagger swarm (see pages 85-86 of Book 3: Reveal for more details) to help the cabal on a semi-permanent basis. It’ll be worth the standard 2d10+5% boost but if they can somehow come to an arrangement it could also be a source of ongoing benefit.
• Have the members of the local occult underground who don’t fit the cabal’s vision run out of town or ostracized. They don’t need their message diffused when ponies start rolling in.
• Avoid the Sleepers until it’s too late to be stopped.

Carlos Sackett was a trust-fund poseur who never really meant the things he said or did. He played at being a graffiti artist but it was really just a way for him to feel rebellious and disaffected. He always had a future waiting for him beyond his expensive art school degree and, more importantly, family connections. At most his experience influenced his choice to pivot the section of the large advertising agency he was put in charge of towards guerilla marketing stunts.

Then along came a mid-life crisis and he found himself trying to relive and find meaning in the lost patterns of his youth, his desperation giving him an understanding that juvenile indolence never could. He’s a logomancer by night, tagging his way across the city and trying to unravel its symbols in greater and greater acts of daring, and a mid-level advertising executive by day. Neither fits him but he doesn’t know how to be anything else, his personal take on the cabal’s objective is trying to reconcile the two.

Carlos is too politic to admit he finds Katie’s vocation revolting since they have a minor professional relationship but far less restrained about expressing disdain for Adam clinging to his youth. Part of him is envious of the man’s willingness to put his whole life under a bus for what he believes in, the other part feels sorry for him. He doesn’t like exploiting Cassie but seeing how she lights up when they come to get her warms him enough to put his scruples to bed.

Katie Myrick could have gotten into any kind of group, she was in it for the atmosphere not the principles. Her budding sociomancy is second nature to the outwardly happy-go-lucky coolhunter who can seamlessly fit in wherever she goes. The only reason she didn’t take to it sooner is that before she only really cared about looking cool. An inveterate social climber with no actual gauge for trends, she maintains a number of codependent relationships with talented people purely to use them as measuring sticks for her current pursuits. She is secretly as envious of her dependencies as she is loath to lose them, using magick as a crutch to salve her insecurities.

Today Kate works for a record label, suckering young musicians with predatory deals that leave them indentured in return for a pittance and a bunch of empty promises. She feels a little bad about it but not enough to stop. In the cabal’s objective she sees both a way out of her current line of work and a way for her to get ahead and define the zeitgeist rather than letting it define her.

To her the rest of the cabal are mostly just useful, if there’s an exception it’s admiration of Carlos’s professional success. She hides this cynicism behind an upbeat facade but they’re savvy enough to see partway through it. It was her idea to pull Cassandra out of retirement and put her to work and she ruthlessly manipulated the others to make it happen.

Adam Turner hates this. He hates this hollow, nothing, front of an enterprise. He’s pretending he doesn’t since it’s the only way to make sure it fails. The others see this but they think he’s making concessions because he’s disillusioned with what a lifetime of ruthlessly holding on to punk ideals has bought him. What he sees is a final chance to make it work.

A mid-level avatar of The Rebel whose body can’t really hack the lifestyle anymore, Adam has essentially become a petty criminal and drug peddler with a small band of no-hoper cronies who occasionally lash out at the status quo in between benders. It’s a far cry from his original ideal and the one thing he’s openly sensitive about, attacking anyone who tries to take him to task over it. Redemption is Adam’s game, if he can give the thing they’re building enough momentum the others might see that they don’t have to turn it into garbage. Fuck ‘em if they don’t.

Adam thinks Carlos and Katie are sell outs trying to buy their souls back and he’s acerbic enough to sting them with it when he’s angry, which is often. Carlos he kind of understands since he never really ‘got it’ but Katie’s ethos gives him the creeps since he knows some people she screwed over. He has a protective sympathy for Cassandra muddled by a lifetime of desensitization, they were close in their old lives.

Cassandra Crum is a burnout who used to follow raves around. Until recently she lived a forgotten life in an assisted living facility given her severe problems with drug-related brain damage - trouble with things like leaving the stove on and remembering what year it is - before the rest of the cabal convinced the staff they were relatives and started taking her out on day trips. A little street chemistry courtesy of Adam gets her most of the way to lucid when they do, but there’s no telling what further damage that’s causing.

The reason they do this is a very particular talent, Cassie is incredibly, supernaturally persuasive. A narco-alchemical drug trip 15 years ago that never really ended has left her mind smeared across a connection with all things. Share a drink from the same container and you’ll find yourself caught up in what she's experiencing, fearfully clinging to her more experienced psyche for safety. In that moment she could make you think or believe just about anything. Pleasant and spacey, Cassandra’s too out of it to appreciate how malicious she could be with this ability. She thinks the cabal’s objective is cool even though she can’t always remember it, mostly she’s just grateful to be getting outside and feeling a little like her old self again.

Cassandra likes the whole cabal, it upsets her when they fight. She doesn’t always understand that it isn’t the old days and sometimes tries to get affectionate with Adam who she had a fling with, forcing him to gently rebuff her advances. He’s a dirtbag but he’s not comfortable taking advantage like that.

271 - Weakness in the Wi-Fi

Ritual: Weakness in the Wi-Fi

Cost: 2 significant charges.

Ritual Action: You need to be currently carrying an infectious disease and in a symptomatic and contagious state. Build a radio transmitter according to a specific schematic, it’s about $500-600 worth of components (less if you can salvage from scrap), which incorporates a number of electronically non-functional symbols made out of transistors and integrated circuits including a 3 meter antenna shaped like a rod of Asclepius.

Set the device up in an area where the stench of cadaverine is present and use it to broadcast yourself suffering: cough, vomit, mumble feverishly. Ham it up even if you aren't feeling that bad. If it works your symptoms will start to rapidly abate.

Effect: Anyone using a device to receive radio signals (cell phone, television, wireless internet) within a 333 yard range of the transmission risks catching whatever disease you’re carrying as though you did the equivalent of coughing in their face with the flu. This danger persists for as long as the transmitter continues to broadcast without stopping or being moved. Once a person has caught the disease your symptoms cease. Destroying the transmitter cures anyone currently suffering and dumps the equivalent of everyone’s infection back on to you, if multiple people are suffering this could prove fatal. If everyone infected heals by conventional means (or dies) that ceases to be a danger.

Other than the transmission vector the disease that victims of this ritual catch is mundane and may be treated accordingly by medicine.

269 - Ebers Other Papyrus

Artifact: Ebers Other Papyrus

Power: Significant.

Description: A carefully preserved ancient sheet of papyrus once owned by noted German Egyptologist, George Ebers. Sister document to the famed Ebers Papyrus, this artifact is considerably older and describes more explicitly magickal processes than the original medical text, in hieratic Egyptian.

With the right provenance it could be worth quite a bit to the right people.

Effect: Part of a sorcerer’s tome, the papyrus is home to the bound revenant of its original owner. As such the writing has a habit of changing when no one is looking, a detail that escapes the notice of most who can’t read the ancient language it is written in.

Although knowledgeable in matters of sorcery it has proven impossible to communicate with the fragmented demon, who scrawls rituals for treating ancient ills like neutralizing a specific snake venom and protecting crops in between rants against long dead political functionaries and escalating bread prices. The magickal formula are typically useless, either because they don’t work or do but have been superseded by modern technology. There’s always a chance though, the last owner was holding out for that staves to snakes trick from Exodus.

With the right language skills it could be worth killing over to the right people.

268 - Weeping Laughter

Unnatural Phenomenon: Weeping Laughter

In a section of forest in the Pacific Northwest is a rust-coloured moss that grows on the south side of a copse of fir trees by a small clearing. One vanity published treatise on indigineous religious practices calls it Weeping Laughter and assigns spiritual significance to the plant but no reputable source backs that claim. Dried, crushed and smoked it produces a mild psychedelic effect and provokes a sense of egoless, introspection that fades into muddled, nonsense when sober. For anyone holding charges it does a little more.

Weeping Laughter soaks up magickal power like a sponge, draining a smoker like an adept that just tabooed. Depending on the degree of power absorbed the smoke then manifests as a projection of their psyche, based on one of their deepest drives. Select a passion at random - with a successful roll on an identity like Psychonaut a savvy smoker could rule one out (or choose which with a matched success or crit) - as the core basis for the illusory caricature.

A projection lasts for 1d10 hours per charge absorbed, degrading in form as it uses up the more powerful mojo first. One spawned from minor charges is barely there, a disembodied voice that warbles and forgets things as time runs out. Significant charges produce a mental illusion that looks like a twisted reflection of the smoker, visible to people but invisible to things like security cameras and intangible. Results from dumping a major charge on smoking Weeping Laughter are a matter of speculation.

The personality of the projection depends on the passion it is based on and the temperament of the smoker. Rage passions are provocative and choleric, fear, paranoid and flinching, and noble, inspiring and hopeful. Not all of them are agreeable, to someone with psychological damage or a conflicted personality projections can be rude or even dangerous. Insight into inner demons can be helpful for therapy attempts (+20% shift, probably not great for treating Unnatural notches though) or milestones on a relevant objective. With a little cajoling a projection might even spy on someone for you or provide you with a conspicuous public alibi while you’re off doing something nefarious.

Even the most benign projections have an agenda. Those that interact with with their parent want them to focus on the interests of that passion and will horse trade for concessions in return for providing any services and won’t act against it themselves. They’ve got no way of enforcing any bargains but smokers who renege will find that future projections are less reasonable, not because the projection remembers but because they do. Hostile projections will happily blackmail and browbeat their parent into compliance with their darkest secrets and desires. If this fails they’re not above using their short-lived autonomy to wreak havoc by impersonating them to others to force the issue.

267 - Fungal Telepathy

Supernatural Identity: Fungal Telepathy

Forests are underpinned by vast hidden blankets of fungi, hiding just beneath the surface of the Earth. As a reflexive adaption this blanket chemically signals to the plant life attached to it when other parts of the forest are damaged, subtly firing off warnings which go unnoticed to human eyes that allow other plants to change their growth or release chemicals that are poisonous to predators. Time begets a system of emergent, idiot self-interest as this symbiosis favours those who the mold is best able to extract food from - the strains that do not are less likely to survive. Eventually a type of supraorganism develops from the interaction of these parts.

Occasionally, deliberately or through happenstance, a person becomes a carrier for something similarly adapted to humans, a spore-ridden mule of magickally charged mutuality. It's not good for you, you'll look terrible and feel worse. Hacking cough, bloodshot eyes and odd sugar cravings are all symptoms of an infection that will kill if left untreated. Complete cures once it has set in take months of treatment with steroids and surgical debridement. Those trying to take advantage of it drink a variety of anti-fungals to keep their condition in check, cycling between poisons fast enough to limit the damage to their bodies and keep their passenger under control without killing it.

The reason they do this is simple: the fungus signals to the host, hijacking the nervous system with impulses that favour those whose breath reeks of higher concentrations. By slipping someone a little primer culture of spores this can act as a form of primitive mesmerism. Like a parasite altering a host behaviour to ensure its own survival, hosts can in turn use mutual infection to subtly influence one another. People vying for control by deliberately skirting the boundaries of manageable levels of infection has led to clusters of deaths. The fungus doesn't prevent it, a live host is only marginally different to a dead one.

Supernatural Identity: Fungal Telepathy
Feature: Influence.
Feature: Casts Rituals.
Feature: Use Gutter Magick.

266 - Bird-tongue & Photographic Memory

Ritual: Bird-tongue

Cost: 2 minor charges.

Ritual Action: Eat a crow, feathers and everything, from a formal table setting arranged correctly for an eight-course meal. Save the furcula - wishbone - but make sure you finish the rest. Go outside to a place you can hear birdsong and snap the bone by squeezing it in a hand clenched over your heart.

Effect: For a number of minutes equal to the ritual roll you can understand birdsong and other avian vocalisation as though it were normal speech. This comprehension is one-way, it won’t help them understand you. Some versions of the ritual claim that if you eat the crow alive it lets you circumvent his restriction but that’s just a bullshit rumour spread to make an unpleasant activity more uncomfortable.

It might sound good but the usefulness is limited. Birds typically talk about things like predators, food, their young and mates. It might be possible to provoke specific subjects with the right stimuli. Often details humans wouldn’t realize or would consider trivial are central to the way the bird sees the world and communicates. Parrots and corvids tend to be the smartest, making them the most useful birds to eavesdrop on.

Ritual: Photographic Memory

Cost: 1 minor charge.

Ritual Action: Take a small metallic capsule made from silver-plated copper and filled with mercury. Remove any contacts, glasses or other vision corrective device (too bad if you’ve got implanted lenses). Place the capsule between your back teeth and hold your left hand, balled into a fist, beside your head. Bite through the capsule.

Effect: You gain perfect recall of whatever you’re looking at when you cast this, forever. Anything displayed through a device that would augment your perception, like spectacles or a CCTV monitor, isn’t covered (you remember it normally, a little better than average given that the associated scene is permanently burned into your brain, take a +10% shift on any roll to recall those details). Even particulars that escaped your notice when you were first observing the scene are visible, you can flip, rotate and focus in on tiny details in the mental picture like the most Hollywood depictions of forensic image analysis.

This is the one memory that will be inviolate as long as you live. It won’t change or be recoloured the more you pick at it and the details won’t shift to match new perspectives. No matter what else you forget, be it what you had for breakfast last Monday or the way your wife’s voice sounded when she was still alive, it will always be there. Unchanged.

265 - Natalie Hanson, Democracy Manifest

GMC: Natalie Hanson, Democracy Manifest

The only thing that Natalie believes in is that democracy is the greatest system of government on Earth. She has no attachment to any economic policy, no stance on abortion or guns and certainly doesn’t care about the party line. Outside of the fervent view that the role of government is to enforce the will of its constituents she’s a rabid political nihilist who cleaves ruthlessly and unapologetically to populist sentiment. Campaigning on it has won her a mayoral race, two terms as a state senator and a narrow miss at the governorship.

Part of it is an uncanny ability to read the room, no matter what you believe, she can see it and capitalize on some kind of common ground. She can tell what the majority want and she sees it as her job to give it to them. She’ll push you to act against your own self-interest if you aren’t a part of it and when she works you it’s almost impossible not to agree. Obstinate ideologues have come away shaken by the way she plays their closely held beliefs off against each other to twist their worldview to match the herd.

If it wasn’t for the supernatural gravitas that relentlessly pushing for majority rule has given her the fact that this demagogue avatar actually stands for nothing would have put a much lower ceiling on her political aspirations. Instead she’s managed to turn her lack of position into a strength, using her powers to publicly embarrass and tongue-tie opponents into appearing arrogant and out of touch. If there was any way it could withstand national-level electioneering she’d be presidential nominee material.

After her most recent loss Natalie is taking some time to regroup and think things over. As she sees it the problem is that people only believe in democratic process in service to their own beliefs, they’re too unwilling to set them aside for everyone’s benefit even if they’d expect it from others. She’s been talking to people about it and is starting to develop a following of those dissatisfied with polarised politics and partisanship. Not shy about attacking all sides of conventional politics she provokes a zeal in the disaffected that inspires selfless dedication and sacrifice for the cause. What started off as a grassroots organisation is starting to look a lot like a cult.

STATS

Personality: Natalie’s got that fake veneer associated with professional gladhanders but a genuine zeal and interest is also apparent to anyone who interacts with her for more than a few minutes. It’d be creepy if she wasn’t so passionate about the same issues as you. Or is that the other way around?
Rage: Legal obstruction. Abusing loopholes to obnoxiously block or force proper process is flawed and selfish.
Noble: Public service. You can’t bribe or blackmail Natalie.
Fear: How far am I willing to go to serve the people? (Self).
Obsession: Democracy, to the exclusion of all else.
Wound Threshold: 50.

Politician 55% (Substitutes for Status, Substitutes for Lie, Protects Self.)
Avatar: The Demagogue 75%* (Avatar, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)

Shock Gauges

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

264 - Seeds of Confusion

Artifact: Seeds of Confusion

Power: Minor.

Description: A handful of bulbous seeds with a light yellow-green hue. They smell vaguely sulphurous and feel slippery and soft in the hand even though they’re quite large and hard to damage.

Nothing will grow from them if planted, they’re long spoiled having been liberated from museum storage where they languished uncatalogued as the property of an Ancient Roman miller who was lynched for trying to implement a byzantine system of profit sharing that would have left the local farmers exponentially indebted to him.

Effect: You know that myth about vampires being compelled to count any individual grains of rice or seeds cast in front of them? It’s like that but for demons. Specifically one confronted by someone scattering them must fail an Urge roll (flip-flopping to succeed where possible) to avoid stooping to tally them up as though doing so were its obsession. This misdirection is actually more potent when the demon is in direct pursuit of its Urge, when performing unrelated activities the compulsion only activates where it succeeds against the 20% value they use for everything else, no flip-flopping.

A standard amount is good for a three to five minute diversion. Multiples can be combined for a longer distraction.

These are a one-use artifact. A demon who successfully counts them all gains a minor charge which it can use to produce minor unnatural phenomenon.

263 - Leon Fine, Living Forever in the Moment

GMC: Leon Fine, Living Forever in the Moment

Tachypsychia is the name for the sensation of time’s passage slowing in response to great danger. Bloodstream and brain awash with with adrenaline, objects appear to move in slow motion as fear, anger and anxiety take hold. Heartbeat quickens, blood pressure rises and bronchial passages dilate to prepare for the coming peril. It’s Leon’s holy grail.

He always was a daredevil of a kid, pushing two steps beyond the “how did I survive that?” of most people’s childhood recollections. A naturally high level of energy and addiction to the adrenaline rush were a ticket to constant scrapes, detentions and more than one visit from the police. Absentee parents who were too busy raising more kids than they’d planned for meant supervision was occasional and inconsistently applied, so he never grew out of it.

Applied to little else Leon’s mind fixated on the intense sensations and emotions he could wring out of it. He built a private mythology out of his experiments. Over time this matured into delusion which became the basis for his spontaneous development of entropomancy. By giving himself over to situations in which he has a total lack of control Leon feels as though he has learned to ride the waves, to stretch those moments out like taffy on command. He believes that if he can find just the right approach he might be able to use one of them to live forever. He hasn’t read it, but he would consider Jorge Borges’ The Secret Miracle a masterpiece (an admittedly low bar considering he hasn’t read anything since high school).

Irregularly employed, Leon gets by on the largess of a wide array of counterculture friends, the occasional bit of gig economy work and larceny. He’s been to jail a handful of times for petty infractions but never something heavy enough to warrant prison (and it’s unlikely he would survive long in that environment). He had a short-lived stint where he tried to sell his services to the occult underground as a type of risk-taking mercenary who would do any dangerous job but his impulsiveness put an end to that. He’ll still try it out on newcomers even though two of his old clients have made it clear they’ll break his legs if they catch him at it again. Most of the underground either think he’s hilarious or aggravating depending on their disposition and whether he’s pissed them off lately.

STATS
Personality: Impulsive, risk-seeking and very funny. Leon can’t help but constantly crack jokes, especially under stress. The worse things are the more incorrigibly wiseass he gets. It belies a certain loneliness that only a few pick up on that makes up the other half of his obsession.
Rage: Drugs. He’s experimented in the past but now Leon considers anything harder than caffeine to be bad juju.
Noble: Physical excellence.
Fear: No one really likes me (Isolation).
Obsession: Experiencing moments that will last forever.
Wound Threshold: 50.

Daredevil 70% (Substitutes for Dodge, Substitutes for Pursuit, Provides Initiative.)
Entropomancer 50%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)

Shock Gauges

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

262 - Verminous Rebirth

Ritual: Verminous Rebirth

Cost: 5 significant charges.

Ritual Action: Steal an object that the residents of the city it comes from would think of as its heart and build a nest of refuse gathered from local garbage bins at least 10 feet across around it in a place they shun. Line the nest with the fresh carcasses of up to 100 wild rats from the area. Remove all hair, nails, fillings and any surgical implants or foreign materials from your body before covering yourself in a carefully inked, accurate roadmap of the city.

Flood the nest with effluent. It doesn’t have to be wastewater, it could be rain, but it does have to come from a sewer. Take a large dose of a synthetic psychedelic and submerge yourself completely (you’ll want a tube to breathe through). There are a series of meditative exercises which will keep you from drowning yourself and catalyse the transformation. The process usually takes at least an hour.

A successful ritual ends with a diffusing sense of teeth chattering vibration, a loss of proprioception and nausea. An unsuccessful one probably just gets the nausea and will never work if attempted again.

Effect: You transform into a swarm of rats, permanently.

Your actions are limited to anything a group of rats could perform. Things like heavy lifting, speech and driving a car are probably all off the table unless you’re particularly resourceful or creative. The number of rats in your swarm is equal to the ritual roll capped by the number of rat corpses you used and is your new Wound Threshold. Typical attacks can only harm one of your swarm at a time, unless the GM says otherwise you only take 1 point of damage from most sources. The number of rats in your swarm will fluctuate by 1d10-5 every 24 days as new members are born and old ones die, though specific actions, environmental factors and current swarm size can influence this change. If it ever hits zero you're gone for good.

You may divide your swarm to be in several places at once, however doing so spreads your cognition thin. All abilities or identities are capped at the number of rats you have in an area. This does not apply if your entire swarm is in one place regardless of its size.

Losing your human form doesn’t immediately rob you of your ability to perform magick, but those faculties rapidly decay. Any supernatural, avatar or adept identities you have may no longer improve and begin to decline at a rate of 1d10% per day. Spending a minor charge each day reduces this to the lowest result of 2 dice, spending a significant charge puts it off for 24 hours. This applies to each identity separately and once they are gone it also robs you of your ability to perform rituals or gutter magick.

You are physically incapable of leaving the city in which you were created. Any parts of your swarm taken outside of it die immediately. The boundary is determined by the roadmap inked on your old body.

261 - Bridge Troll

Unnatural Entity: Bridge Troll

The concept of traps scattered to catch the unwary on the path to enlightenment is a common cultural touchstone, it’s present in many aspects of Buddhism, fiction from the books of Ursula K. Le Guin to Star Wars, and at least rumoured in any esoteric magical tradition (to keep the initiates in line, if nothing else).

Bridge Trolls are people who have fallen prey to the magickal versions of these traps so hard that it has warped their entire worldview around the conundrum. Speculation that a Room of Renunciation is responsible is unlikely given the breadth and varied circumstances this happens in but the result is always the same: someone so tightly wound around a pitfall they’ve fallen prey to that they warp reality like a very small and specific school of magick. Unable to move on they instead squat over the territory of their failure like tiny dominions. This territory is typically represented by some kind of physical space (paragon places draw them like flies) but more abstract domains aren’t out of the question.

Within this space the bridge troll is like a petty god. They can’t work constructive miracles but they can obstruct almost anything, physical trespass, magickal blasts, demons, investigation and discovery, you name it they can block you from doing it with an opposed roll. This can take the form of an overwhelming presence of authority to superhuman feats of strength to outright negation of magickal energies. What makes it especially troublesome is that repeated attempts to breach this barrier only wind the trap tighter, for each attempt someone makes to bypass the Bridge Troll it gets to use the best result of any roll it has made to oppose that person. If you’re trying to muscle your way past it on a third occasion it can use the best of this or the previous two rolls against you.

Bridge Trolls are madly hyperfocused so their domains are typically very small and focused, they’re almost always at a crossroads or chokepoint of some kind so unless you need something very specific you might be better off finding another way. They do have a couple of weaknesses. If you can lure one out of its domain they lose access to their ability to block you, reduced to pitiful husks of human beings that serve as depressing object lessons in what may lie ahead.

Alternatively, all Bridge Trolls have a test, like a self-defined riddle or trial that revolves entirely around their own failing. Not all of them will openly offer it but all are compelled to answer the challenge. If you can beat or short circuit it in some way the Bridge Troll’s power holds no sway over you. If their defeat is comprehensive enough they may lose their powers and obsession altogether.

Bridge Troll, Spiteful Sphinx
Impassable 60-90%*: This identity opposes anything that might be used to bypass the bridge troll on its home turf. Use the best result of all rolls made against someone, it gets harder the more you try. Always an obsession identity, Bridge Trolls cannot be adepts (and lose the ability if they ever were) and are rarely avatars. Also has the Casts Rituals and Use Gutter Magick features.

260 - Carla Wagstaff, Hooked on Herself

GMC: Carla Wagstaff, Hooked on Herself

Carla never wanted much, like many her aspirations were pedestrian and her life middle-of-the-road and she was happy with that much. She liked her job running a diner and her regular customers and her funny little Volkswagon Beetle that she knew she should really get rid of because it kept breaking down. She liked visiting the little art gallery down the street, felt ambivalent about her noisy neighbour Wendy and loved to go dancing. The only thing that would have really stood out about her - something she was quite shy about - was that she wanted to be an author.

It was a small fancy that she allowed herself in the privacy of her own thoughts, a possibility that was almost too sweet to let spoil by trying to realize it. Aside from a few half-hearted pages she probably would never have let it get beyond a daydream if it hadn’t been for the writer’s workshop flyer that was left in the diner one evening. The one that led her to Freya.

Freya was something else to Carla’s relatively sheltered lifestyle, the woman’s new aged affectations seemed so worldly and bohemian to her sensibilities. She was sophisticated and charming in a way that she found magnetic. Enamoured, Carla hung off the workshop chairwoman’s every word and when she was given a present after three weeks, “something I wrote, just for you”, she could hardly wait to get home before diving in.

It was a story, about Carla. A version of her that had made different choices and had realized her dream of becoming a successful writer with a breakout bestseller. The details were enthralling and engrossing in a way she never would have imagined, every nuance was better than her wildest fantasies.

Then it was over.

It seemed quite drab in comparison: her little apartment with the kitchen tap that wouldn’t stop dripping, her unreliable car and the tedious job that would eat up the rest of her life and give nothing back. That emotional comedown didn’t abate, it got worse. She tried replicating it but her own words rang hollow. By the time next week rolled around she was chomping at the bit to interrogate Freya for details. To maybe hint that she’d like to read more.

Freya’s unsurprised response was to offer to let Carla commission work from her. The prices were quite steep but Carla was overjoyed enough at the possibility to overlook it. For the next month she began to empty her bank account in return for superlative images of herself that felt better than anything real. It was fantastic until she ran out of money. Freya was superficially sympathetic but adamant that if she made special allowances for Carla she’d have to do it for everyone and she was very busy. The prospect of going cold turkey felt like losing a limb, so Carla begged and Freya relented, on one condition.

She just had to convince her neighbour Wendy to read something Freya had written for her. Wendy who worked down at the courthouse and had access to all sorts of things Freya and people Freya knew would find interesting. If Carla could do that then she might be persuaded to give her a little something.

Their arrangement has continued to develop this way, Carla is Freya’s gopher and catspaw. She doesn’t dare deviate from her master's wishes lest the supply of dizzying illusions dries up. Freya knows and has obviously done this before, slowly stringing her along into more and more questionable behaviour. Carla has done bad things for her, nothing hell worthy but she’s concerned. What Freya has underestimated is her underling’s tenacity, instead of rendering her helpless Carla’s desperation has kept her from knuckling under. She’s looking for a way to get one over on her dealer and invert their relationship, to learn how to make those stories for herself.

STATS
Personality: The main distinguishing features anyone would say Carla once had was that she was genial and slightly lazy. Now, honed by the insectile urges of addiction, she’s become crafty and rawboned, reaching back to her former easygoing nature to keep people relaxed up until the need becomes too strong and resurfaces.
Rage: Treating people in service jobs badly.
Noble: Everybody has a story.
Fear: Losing access to Freya (Isolation).
Obsession: Learn how to write her own magickal stories.
Wound Threshold: 50.

Fantasy Addict 50% (Substitutes for Lie, Substitutes for Secrecy, Protects Self.)
Aspiring Writer 40%* (Substitutes for Knowledge, Substitutes for Notice, Evaluates Self.)
Hospitality Worker 30% (Substitutes for Connect, Substitutes for Fitness, Protects Helplessness.)

Shock Gauges

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

Disorder: Addiction (Freya’s stories).