302 - Vampiric Keepsake

Unnatural Entity: Vampiric Keepsake

People invest themselves in objects: my lucky shirt, my grandmother’s ring, my first car. They take on special anthropomorphized roles in our personal narratives that make us attached to them and influence our behaviour. In cases of trauma it can be a crutch which allows someone to externalise their behaviour or circumstances, weathering and performing acts which their self-image and conception of the world cannot brook.

Someone who dies in the throes of a delusion based on totemic compulsion or externalised psychosis will occasionally channel their dying energies into one of these talismans as a revenant. Archaeological artifacts from the lost Franklin Expedition to find the Northwest Passage were stolen by a cabal who suspected they must include these, their arrest and incarceration has left it the subject of speculation. Whatever they wanted with a bunch of trapped, shipwrecked cannibal spirits is anyone’s guess.

Vampiric keepsakes are disrupted equilibrium, they function as a dark parallel to Stains (page 83-84 of Book 3: Reveal) desiring only to externalise their suffering on the living and return to rest. Failing a stress check while in possession of one provokes behaviour as though the the holder had a disorder related to keepsake’s origin, over time this mentality cements itself and on the 5th failed notch in a gauge transfers itself permanently to the bearer at which point the keepsake becomes inert while they suffer in its place.

More powerful versions of the revenant are created by this process repeating itself. Multiple people all dying in the same way with the same delusions in a grand snowballing effect that lends gravitas and the crowded leftovers of wounded psyches buried within the object. Particularly potent instances have the ability to afflict multiple people simultaneously and across great distances. The possibility of a cult worshipping one such object is an occult underground boogeyman occasionally rumoured but never confirmed.