Optional Rules: Ongoing Objectives
Not all goals have a defined end point, quite a few of them require sustained effort in order to be maintained once they're up and running. Operating a business, running a support group, keeping the thing slumbering underneath the graveyard from rising up and eating everyone in town. This runs contrary to the default assumption in Unknown Armies: that players must always have goals defined by change. One way to address this within the established context is to use it as a background element or framework and make dealing with individual issues their own objectives or milestones within a larger objective (i.e. keep a roof over your cult compound by running a successful bake sale).
Another is to use milestones to shore up the objective percentile as though it were a Wound Threshold, taking hits based on trials and tribulations that threaten its integrity: hand-to-hand damage for petty hits and firearm damage for weighty hits (capped at 40 unless the harm is catastrophic).
In return for sacrificing the opportunity to pursue something proactively the psychological anchor of the objective provides both tangible support and mental shelter. Once per session it can substitute for protection against a stress check or provide material support as though it were a relationship, so long as it’s relevant in either case. Conversely if it hits zero anyone sufficiently invested to benefit from that suffers a rank 4 (plus 1 rank per relevant passion or obsession) stress check to either Isolation or Helplessness at the GM’s discretion. Zeroing out your objective to wreck someone else’s party works as normal, it just hurts more when you’re tearing down something that’s a part of you.
Tuesday, 31 March 2020
Sunday, 29 March 2020
329 - Sweet Reggie
Artifact: Sweet Reggie
Power: Significant
Description: A small, threadbare, blue and white teddy bear. Its black plastic nose droops forlornly and sewn over the feet are a pair of little felt clogs, once part of a more complicated outfit. The fur on the left ear is a singed and melted, the result of someone's aborted attempt to "burn that thing to ash" they wish they'd followed through on.
Effect: Reggie is one of those objects people naively swear is haunted or a conduit for unholy forces. It isn't. Instead it is the product of a very disappointed little girl whose momma was always making promises she couldn't keep, receiving one of Mak Attax's charge-laden Special Orders. If they knew that it would be a hotly contested item for that reason alone.
Reggie creates bad luck for people who don't follow through on their words. It makes no difference the scale of the promise or whether it was in jest or part of an idiom. It doesn't matter if you mean it and then change your mind. If you say you'll do something and then don't, Reggie will get you.
Every one of these lies told in earshot of the bear degrades the result of the liar's next failed roll into one a step worse, failures become matched failures which become fumbles. The degraded luck manifests in a way ironically related to the lie, threatening to choke someone might see food lodged in your throat or get you clotheslined by a dangling electrical cord. If there's no way for this irony to express itself then the effect lingers, cursing the roll anyway and persisting until circumstances allow for more poetic justice.
Reggie can throw out one of these a day - counting from when the lie was told - although several can be running at once. It does this for whoever makes themselves a liar first so you could theoretically protect yourself from the consequences of your words by getting someone else to throw themselves under the bus.
Power: Significant
Description: A small, threadbare, blue and white teddy bear. Its black plastic nose droops forlornly and sewn over the feet are a pair of little felt clogs, once part of a more complicated outfit. The fur on the left ear is a singed and melted, the result of someone's aborted attempt to "burn that thing to ash" they wish they'd followed through on.
Effect: Reggie is one of those objects people naively swear is haunted or a conduit for unholy forces. It isn't. Instead it is the product of a very disappointed little girl whose momma was always making promises she couldn't keep, receiving one of Mak Attax's charge-laden Special Orders. If they knew that it would be a hotly contested item for that reason alone.
Reggie creates bad luck for people who don't follow through on their words. It makes no difference the scale of the promise or whether it was in jest or part of an idiom. It doesn't matter if you mean it and then change your mind. If you say you'll do something and then don't, Reggie will get you.
Every one of these lies told in earshot of the bear degrades the result of the liar's next failed roll into one a step worse, failures become matched failures which become fumbles. The degraded luck manifests in a way ironically related to the lie, threatening to choke someone might see food lodged in your throat or get you clotheslined by a dangling electrical cord. If there's no way for this irony to express itself then the effect lingers, cursing the roll anyway and persisting until circumstances allow for more poetic justice.
Reggie can throw out one of these a day - counting from when the lie was told - although several can be running at once. It does this for whoever makes themselves a liar first so you could theoretically protect yourself from the consequences of your words by getting someone else to throw themselves under the bus.
Friday, 27 March 2020
328 - Jack Hamburg, Wannabe Avatar & Professional Catspaw
GMC: Jack Hamburg, Wannabe Avatar & Professional Catspaw
Jack thinks he's channeling The Noir Detective. He isn’t, he fundamentally misunderstands how the statosphere works, what an avatar actually is, and he’s unhealthily preoccupied with Humphrey Bogart movies courtesy of it being the only thing he shared with his dad. The only reason a chump like him has any idea at all is because someone took pity on him and he turned it into a job.
Jack was the youngest of four brothers, separated by just enough years and temperament that he was always the barely tolerated tag-along in his older sibling’s social lives. He ingratiated himself by being obsequious, which was a bit like hanging an invisible “kick me” sign on his back. But hey, at least he was being rewarded with some kind of attention. It’s a habit that has followed him into his adult life and colours his relationship with the occult underground.
When he first learned about the subculture Jack hoovered up all the information he could get his hands on to make himself useful. He’d trade for it and work for it, always keen and always reliable. Once people got used to it he developed a reputation and ended up running questionable errands for an avatar of the Judge who took the set dressing of his role too seriously. Dressed like an idiot, sure, but the results were there. When that arrangement ended after his patron ended up in a nursing home several others were already lined up to offer employment to a reliable minion. He said yes to all of them and just about everyone else that has come after.
Jack is a neutral party, he keeps his nose out of underground politics and keeps his interactions professional. Everybody uses him and everybody trusts him, even those on opposite sides of a conflict. He won’t take any jobs that call for wanton brutality - he’s a little squeamish and not really suited for it - but otherwise it’s open slather provided you don’t mind his obnoxious patter and patronising, weary cynicism.
STATS
Personality: A bundle of bad cliches in a trenchcoat and a stupid hat, Jack can be as insufferable as you’d expect. Nonetheless he is dutiful and dedicated to his clients and he’ll genuinely go the distance for you, if only out of manufactured machismo and commitment to his role.
Rage: Entitlement. Jack won’t stand for clients who think they’re owed more than they’re willing to put up.
Noble: Confidentiality. Jack’s sense of professionalism is built around discretion.
Fear: Vicious dogs (Violence).
Obsession: Epitomize the Noir Detective.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Occult P.I. 50%* (Substitutes for Secrecy, Evaluates Unnatural, Substitutes for Notice.)
Catspaw 40% (Substitutes for Status, Substitutes for Knowledge, Substitutes for Lie.)
Hedge Wizard 30% (Vague Information: Occult Trivia, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Jack thinks he's channeling The Noir Detective. He isn’t, he fundamentally misunderstands how the statosphere works, what an avatar actually is, and he’s unhealthily preoccupied with Humphrey Bogart movies courtesy of it being the only thing he shared with his dad. The only reason a chump like him has any idea at all is because someone took pity on him and he turned it into a job.
Jack was the youngest of four brothers, separated by just enough years and temperament that he was always the barely tolerated tag-along in his older sibling’s social lives. He ingratiated himself by being obsequious, which was a bit like hanging an invisible “kick me” sign on his back. But hey, at least he was being rewarded with some kind of attention. It’s a habit that has followed him into his adult life and colours his relationship with the occult underground.
When he first learned about the subculture Jack hoovered up all the information he could get his hands on to make himself useful. He’d trade for it and work for it, always keen and always reliable. Once people got used to it he developed a reputation and ended up running questionable errands for an avatar of the Judge who took the set dressing of his role too seriously. Dressed like an idiot, sure, but the results were there. When that arrangement ended after his patron ended up in a nursing home several others were already lined up to offer employment to a reliable minion. He said yes to all of them and just about everyone else that has come after.
Jack is a neutral party, he keeps his nose out of underground politics and keeps his interactions professional. Everybody uses him and everybody trusts him, even those on opposite sides of a conflict. He won’t take any jobs that call for wanton brutality - he’s a little squeamish and not really suited for it - but otherwise it’s open slather provided you don’t mind his obnoxious patter and patronising, weary cynicism.
STATS
Personality: A bundle of bad cliches in a trenchcoat and a stupid hat, Jack can be as insufferable as you’d expect. Nonetheless he is dutiful and dedicated to his clients and he’ll genuinely go the distance for you, if only out of manufactured machismo and commitment to his role.
Rage: Entitlement. Jack won’t stand for clients who think they’re owed more than they’re willing to put up.
Noble: Confidentiality. Jack’s sense of professionalism is built around discretion.
Fear: Vicious dogs (Violence).
Obsession: Epitomize the Noir Detective.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Occult P.I. 50%* (Substitutes for Secrecy, Evaluates Unnatural, Substitutes for Notice.)
Catspaw 40% (Substitutes for Status, Substitutes for Knowledge, Substitutes for Lie.)
Hedge Wizard 30% (Vague Information: Occult Trivia, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Thursday, 26 March 2020
327 - Xipe Totecian Cybernetics
Artifact: Xipe Totecian Cybernetics
Power: Significant.
Description: A combination of cutting-edge technology crudely fused with the vestiges of old religion, Xipe Totecian Cybernetics are the last ditch vanity project of a DARPA-funded bureaucratic blindspot. Couched in terms of combining the latest in high-tech psychological conditioning with age old furrows of human superstition, the project is anything but the promised breakthrough in controlling human behaviour. It appears as an open mouthed ceramic mask depicting the Aztec god of harvest and warfare Xipe Totec, also known as 'Our Lord the Flayed One', festooned with a suite of VR interface equipment and suspended above a zero-g bed.
Essentially the project staff have vandalised a historical artifact by kludging a bunch of electronics on to it. If one of them wasn't an avatar of the hacker it would amount to little more than an expensive and ludicrous art project.
Effect: Ineffective until the mask was added, the suite bombards whoever lays inside of it with intense subliminal imagery and sound. It was intended to shortcut decision-making and moral squeamishness in the same way that military training prepares people to kill. Originally this produced headaches, nausea and little else in test subjects, now it relieves them of human weakness.
Power: Significant.
Description: A combination of cutting-edge technology crudely fused with the vestiges of old religion, Xipe Totecian Cybernetics are the last ditch vanity project of a DARPA-funded bureaucratic blindspot. Couched in terms of combining the latest in high-tech psychological conditioning with age old furrows of human superstition, the project is anything but the promised breakthrough in controlling human behaviour. It appears as an open mouthed ceramic mask depicting the Aztec god of harvest and warfare Xipe Totec, also known as 'Our Lord the Flayed One', festooned with a suite of VR interface equipment and suspended above a zero-g bed.
Essentially the project staff have vandalised a historical artifact by kludging a bunch of electronics on to it. If one of them wasn't an avatar of the hacker it would amount to little more than an expensive and ludicrous art project.
Effect: Ineffective until the mask was added, the suite bombards whoever lays inside of it with intense subliminal imagery and sound. It was intended to shortcut decision-making and moral squeamishness in the same way that military training prepares people to kill. Originally this produced headaches, nausea and little else in test subjects, now it relieves them of human weakness.
Spending time in the suite gives temporary protection against stress checks against Violence and Self, allowing the subject to flip-flop rolls to protect either gauge for an equal amount of time. Failed stress checks, on any gauge, during this time always trigger a frenzy result.
The withdrawal is less pleasant. For those who have gained hardened or failed notches on Violence or Self while under the suite’s influence future stress checks on that gauge are at a -20%. This is relieved only by rainfall (temporarily) or losing those notches.
Anyone hitting 5 failed notches on either gauge under either effect develops a severe alienation from their own body. A heinous aversion to their own skin. An ache to rid themselves of its covering and deliver it to the machine.
Tuesday, 24 March 2020
326 - Violence of Action
Unnatural Entity: Violence of Action
Fight, fuck, spit, claw, bite, anything for just a few moments more and few moments more and a few moments more. These revenants are a conglomerate of those who died horribly violent deaths, consumed by an urge to struggle and survive. They accumulate on battlefields, in prisons and hospitals, and in the meanest areas of the most lawless corners of the Earth.
Stillness is anathema to them. They haunt these places, trapped by the same impulses that gripped their desperate ends. A gelatinous fog only perceptible to those with unnatural senses that pervades and poisons those who breath it with the terrible purpose of life at all costs.
A Violence infects someone 1-5 temporary Rage passions, made up of the vestiges of the people who died to make the revenant. Ignoring the compulsions of this external anger provokes a Self check of an equal rank, failure results in blind rage as they take the wheel.
The psychological toll of actions taken while under the influence of a Violence are muted while infected. Someone under the influence gains a number of temporary hardened notches in Violence equal the number of passions inflicted on them. The aftermath is another story.
A California motumancer thought he could channel one to empower his rhetoric on the site of a nameless ancient atrocity. His remaining trio of proteges are currently locked in a game of chicken with one another to see if one of them can succeed where he failed. The risk of adding themselves to the formless anger - as he did - against the triumph they can hold over the others. None of them are willing to admit defeat.
Fight, fuck, spit, claw, bite, anything for just a few moments more and few moments more and a few moments more. These revenants are a conglomerate of those who died horribly violent deaths, consumed by an urge to struggle and survive. They accumulate on battlefields, in prisons and hospitals, and in the meanest areas of the most lawless corners of the Earth.
Stillness is anathema to them. They haunt these places, trapped by the same impulses that gripped their desperate ends. A gelatinous fog only perceptible to those with unnatural senses that pervades and poisons those who breath it with the terrible purpose of life at all costs.
A Violence infects someone 1-5 temporary Rage passions, made up of the vestiges of the people who died to make the revenant. Ignoring the compulsions of this external anger provokes a Self check of an equal rank, failure results in blind rage as they take the wheel.
The psychological toll of actions taken while under the influence of a Violence are muted while infected. Someone under the influence gains a number of temporary hardened notches in Violence equal the number of passions inflicted on them. The aftermath is another story.
A California motumancer thought he could channel one to empower his rhetoric on the site of a nameless ancient atrocity. His remaining trio of proteges are currently locked in a game of chicken with one another to see if one of them can succeed where he failed. The risk of adding themselves to the formless anger - as he did - against the triumph they can hold over the others. None of them are willing to admit defeat.
Monday, 23 March 2020
325 - Stalemate the Reaper
Ritual: Stalemate the Reaper
Cost: 3 significant charges.
Ritual Action: Light up an unfiltered cigarette and use it to burn out the eyes on a king of hearts playing card. Start smoking the cigarette. Stick the card to your forehead (most people who know the ritual use spit but it’s only traditional, not necessary). Keep smoking the cigarette. When you’re finished with it use it to light another and keep smoking. Do this forever.
Effect: You’re immortal. Kind of. So long as you keep smoking your current cigarette nothing can kill you. You can be beaten, injured and maimed beyond all comprehension but so long as you keep puffing away you’re fine. You take no injury penalties, but actions which are impossible such as running with no legs are still off limits. If you ever stop smoking the ritual fails and you die, even if you’d otherwise be fine. The same thing happens if the card falls off your forehead.
Playing poker lets you pass it on to others. Some regional variations of the ritual use different games like Big Two. Play to a showdown with a single other player and as you show hands, stub out the cigarette on the table and slap the king of hearts face down on top of it. If you win the hand your opponent has 24 hours to place the card on their forehead and start smoking as the ritual effect moves to them. If you lose, the ritual fails and you die.
If you refuse a challenge to a game of poker while the ritual effect is active it fails and, you guessed it, you die.
Cost: 3 significant charges.
Ritual Action: Light up an unfiltered cigarette and use it to burn out the eyes on a king of hearts playing card. Start smoking the cigarette. Stick the card to your forehead (most people who know the ritual use spit but it’s only traditional, not necessary). Keep smoking the cigarette. When you’re finished with it use it to light another and keep smoking. Do this forever.
Effect: You’re immortal. Kind of. So long as you keep smoking your current cigarette nothing can kill you. You can be beaten, injured and maimed beyond all comprehension but so long as you keep puffing away you’re fine. You take no injury penalties, but actions which are impossible such as running with no legs are still off limits. If you ever stop smoking the ritual fails and you die, even if you’d otherwise be fine. The same thing happens if the card falls off your forehead.
Playing poker lets you pass it on to others. Some regional variations of the ritual use different games like Big Two. Play to a showdown with a single other player and as you show hands, stub out the cigarette on the table and slap the king of hearts face down on top of it. If you win the hand your opponent has 24 hours to place the card on their forehead and start smoking as the ritual effect moves to them. If you lose, the ritual fails and you die.
If you refuse a challenge to a game of poker while the ritual effect is active it fails and, you guessed it, you die.
Sunday, 22 March 2020
324 - Morlock, Subterranean Hermit
GMC: Morlock, Subterranean Hermit
Morlock was once like you. Morlock had a family and a house and owned a successful practice. Morlock was a dentist, you see. Morlock kept in shape by cycling in marathons, took three weeks vacation with his wife and kids at their lake cabin every year, and was fooling around with one of the nurses at work. Morlock had a name he now only remembers in nightmares.
All of that is desperately forgotten in the face of keening existential dread. Morlock is aware, achingly aware, of geological processes and timescales. The shifting of tectonic plates and accretions and erosions of the Earth. A growing, nightmarish perception which overrode his dreams and spread to waking hours. Crippling his ability to interact with the chattering, ephemeral people around him. It would be the usual story of nascent mental illness destroying lives, if it wasn’t for the fact that his dreams are real.
Unable to cope and at threat of involuntary committal or incarceration he retreated, first into homelessness and then underground into the spaces beneath his home city. He tunneled and built and scraped out a new home in the womb of the ground. He lives down there, in the dark, changing and hibernating in vaunted isolation.
People know about him, they’ll spelunk the depths of the city to find him. He hates that. He'll trade glimpses of the distant geological future to people who seek him out for the one thing he prizes, more solitude. If you can tell him how you found him and got to him, how you evaded his traps and found your way past his mazes he’ll lay terrible visions of distant futures on you for the chance to redouble his locks and pitfalls. He wishes people would leave him alone even as he encourages them.
His ex-wife hates the memory of him. So do his children. Except for his eldest, whose first year at college has been punctuated by recurring dreams of frozen magma flows and crystalline caverns that she just can't shake.
STATS
Personality: Feral and vicious. Morlock maintains just enough civility to get what he wants and only does that under protest. If you can’t give him that he’s happy to dump you in a dark pit.
Rage: Inane chatter.
Noble: Solitude.
Fear: Returning to his old life (Self).
Obsession: Cutting himself off from humanity.
Wound Threshold: 65.
Rusty Dentist 25% (Substitutes for Knowledge, Medical, Coerces Helplessness.)
Hardened Recluse 65% (Substitutes for Struggle, Provides Wound Threshold, Protects Isolation.)
Geomantic Dreamer 30%* (Specific Information: Geological Precognition, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Morlock was once like you. Morlock had a family and a house and owned a successful practice. Morlock was a dentist, you see. Morlock kept in shape by cycling in marathons, took three weeks vacation with his wife and kids at their lake cabin every year, and was fooling around with one of the nurses at work. Morlock had a name he now only remembers in nightmares.
All of that is desperately forgotten in the face of keening existential dread. Morlock is aware, achingly aware, of geological processes and timescales. The shifting of tectonic plates and accretions and erosions of the Earth. A growing, nightmarish perception which overrode his dreams and spread to waking hours. Crippling his ability to interact with the chattering, ephemeral people around him. It would be the usual story of nascent mental illness destroying lives, if it wasn’t for the fact that his dreams are real.
Unable to cope and at threat of involuntary committal or incarceration he retreated, first into homelessness and then underground into the spaces beneath his home city. He tunneled and built and scraped out a new home in the womb of the ground. He lives down there, in the dark, changing and hibernating in vaunted isolation.
People know about him, they’ll spelunk the depths of the city to find him. He hates that. He'll trade glimpses of the distant geological future to people who seek him out for the one thing he prizes, more solitude. If you can tell him how you found him and got to him, how you evaded his traps and found your way past his mazes he’ll lay terrible visions of distant futures on you for the chance to redouble his locks and pitfalls. He wishes people would leave him alone even as he encourages them.
His ex-wife hates the memory of him. So do his children. Except for his eldest, whose first year at college has been punctuated by recurring dreams of frozen magma flows and crystalline caverns that she just can't shake.
STATS
Personality: Feral and vicious. Morlock maintains just enough civility to get what he wants and only does that under protest. If you can’t give him that he’s happy to dump you in a dark pit.
Rage: Inane chatter.
Noble: Solitude.
Fear: Returning to his old life (Self).
Obsession: Cutting himself off from humanity.
Wound Threshold: 65.
Rusty Dentist 25% (Substitutes for Knowledge, Medical, Coerces Helplessness.)
Hardened Recluse 65% (Substitutes for Struggle, Provides Wound Threshold, Protects Isolation.)
Geomantic Dreamer 30%* (Specific Information: Geological Precognition, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Saturday, 21 March 2020
323 - Eating for Two
Ritual: Eating for Two
Cost: 1 minor charge.
Ritual Action: No planning or preparation can go into casting the ritual. Go to the nearest place which sells food and prophylactics (probably a supermarket or gas station) and buy six items of food you've never eaten before plus a pack of condoms. Mix all the food together, you'll probably need to blend it, and pour the resulting combination into the condoms. Poke a few holes in each and swallow them. You have to eat all the food.
Effect: You attract the attention of a demon, which takes up residence in your stomach for the duration. You can lopsidedly communicate, it can hear you and poke at your belly to respond. Maybe you'll get one who can do morse code. It can't possess you unless you were already especially vulnerable, but you can sick it on other people. You just need to get them to eat a mixture of the foods you used to cast the ritual.
Otherwise it lasts just over 3 hours. Hopefully you got your money's worth because it won't work again for nine months. Likewise you won't be able to conceive a child for the same length of time (and god help you if you were pregnant at the time of casting, demon babies are no fun to take care of).
Cost: 1 minor charge.
Ritual Action: No planning or preparation can go into casting the ritual. Go to the nearest place which sells food and prophylactics (probably a supermarket or gas station) and buy six items of food you've never eaten before plus a pack of condoms. Mix all the food together, you'll probably need to blend it, and pour the resulting combination into the condoms. Poke a few holes in each and swallow them. You have to eat all the food.
Effect: You attract the attention of a demon, which takes up residence in your stomach for the duration. You can lopsidedly communicate, it can hear you and poke at your belly to respond. Maybe you'll get one who can do morse code. It can't possess you unless you were already especially vulnerable, but you can sick it on other people. You just need to get them to eat a mixture of the foods you used to cast the ritual.
Otherwise it lasts just over 3 hours. Hopefully you got your money's worth because it won't work again for nine months. Likewise you won't be able to conceive a child for the same length of time (and god help you if you were pregnant at the time of casting, demon babies are no fun to take care of).
Friday, 20 March 2020
322 - Tony Taylor, Contagious Chicken Little
GMC: Tony Taylor, Contagious Chicken Little
Hey, listen. Listen, listen, listen, listen, listen. Y-you seem like a good kid, I'd h-hate for anything to happen to you. That's why I'm going to fill you in. Y'see the U.S government has been deliberately poisoning the public f-for decades. Don't look at me like that! D-do you know how much high-fructose corn syrup is in b-basically everything you eat?! There was a study conducted at a German university where they discovered…
That's how Tony ropes people in. He gets to know someone, figures out whether they'd be receptive, drops a "truth bomb" on them and then employs this rhetorical technique where he pushes the boundaries of what you'll agree to at least humour, before retreating into milder proofs of his point when challenged then doing it again. He'll happily address any criticism provided you'll give him the same courtesy. That's only fair, right? It doesn't work on everyone, but more people than you'd think end up seeing the world his way. He genuinely believes every word he's telling you, even as it changes flavour from week to week.
Every theory and shadow is a threat that Tony believes he is the one of the few to understand. The kernel of an obsession that began as a desire to take control of his life by having enough information has grown into an insidious magickal power he doesn't even realise he has: Tony can make the things he is terrified of real, for you. Anyone who fails the stress check caused by his power is captivated by delusions and hallucinations they are being or have been harmed by whatever evil he warned them about. Cellular tech making them sick or evil postal workers spying on them in the shower because they know about the Flat Earth, the evidence is suddenly everywhere no matter how absurd. The effect stops eventually but enough people prolong it by going right back to Tony for more answers.
To his credit, Tony is extremely interested in hearing about these cases. They confirm his worst fears and deepest desires, a seductive mix he shares with the growing list of confidants he plays guru to. He's one bad day away from running a cult.
STATS
Personality: Animated and highly-focused, Tony gives whoever he is speaking to his full attention. He's genuinely interested in the welfare of the people he explains his theories to.
Rage: People who naysay for the sake of it. Disagree if you want but don't stonewall for no reason.
Noble: Be informed, take an interest in the world around you.
Fear: Being undone by missing some vital detail. (Helplessness)
Obsession: Keeping himself and others safe from the powers that be.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Conspiracy Theorist 55%* (Substitutes for Notice, Protects Helplessness, Coerces Helplessness)
Persuasive Headgames 65% (Terrorise: Helplessness, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick)
Shock Gauges
Hey, listen. Listen, listen, listen, listen, listen. Y-you seem like a good kid, I'd h-hate for anything to happen to you. That's why I'm going to fill you in. Y'see the U.S government has been deliberately poisoning the public f-for decades. Don't look at me like that! D-do you know how much high-fructose corn syrup is in b-basically everything you eat?! There was a study conducted at a German university where they discovered…
That's how Tony ropes people in. He gets to know someone, figures out whether they'd be receptive, drops a "truth bomb" on them and then employs this rhetorical technique where he pushes the boundaries of what you'll agree to at least humour, before retreating into milder proofs of his point when challenged then doing it again. He'll happily address any criticism provided you'll give him the same courtesy. That's only fair, right? It doesn't work on everyone, but more people than you'd think end up seeing the world his way. He genuinely believes every word he's telling you, even as it changes flavour from week to week.
Every theory and shadow is a threat that Tony believes he is the one of the few to understand. The kernel of an obsession that began as a desire to take control of his life by having enough information has grown into an insidious magickal power he doesn't even realise he has: Tony can make the things he is terrified of real, for you. Anyone who fails the stress check caused by his power is captivated by delusions and hallucinations they are being or have been harmed by whatever evil he warned them about. Cellular tech making them sick or evil postal workers spying on them in the shower because they know about the Flat Earth, the evidence is suddenly everywhere no matter how absurd. The effect stops eventually but enough people prolong it by going right back to Tony for more answers.
To his credit, Tony is extremely interested in hearing about these cases. They confirm his worst fears and deepest desires, a seductive mix he shares with the growing list of confidants he plays guru to. He's one bad day away from running a cult.
STATS
Personality: Animated and highly-focused, Tony gives whoever he is speaking to his full attention. He's genuinely interested in the welfare of the people he explains his theories to.
Rage: People who naysay for the sake of it. Disagree if you want but don't stonewall for no reason.
Noble: Be informed, take an interest in the world around you.
Fear: Being undone by missing some vital detail. (Helplessness)
Obsession: Keeping himself and others safe from the powers that be.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Conspiracy Theorist 55%* (Substitutes for Notice, Protects Helplessness, Coerces Helplessness)
Persuasive Headgames 65% (Terrorise: Helplessness, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick)
Shock Gauges
Wednesday, 18 March 2020
321 - The Deadline
Unnatural Phenomenon: The Deadline
One of the last remaining payphones in the city where it is located, the Deadline lurks at the back of a graffiti-covered parking garage like the bones of a corroded chrome dinosaur. To the uninitiated it’s a wonder it hasn’t been torn out, not just because it’s an outmoded relic but because it’s not functional. There’s no dial tone when you pick up the receiver.
Still it stubbornly continues to exist. Attempts to contact the company that owns it lead in circles as though they're no longer running and the city doesn’t seem to have any records or real inclination to check up on it. The one person to take removing it into his own hands quickly found out that there are others with an interest in the Deadline. People who’d do just about anything to keep it right where it is.
The Deadline only works with quarters minted in 1943, a couple of those in the slot will get you a dial tone and a minute and a half of call time. Everyone who uses it has their own method of dialling. Some use the first phone number the person they’re trying to reach ever had, others stab randomly at the keypad while focusing on them. The Deadline can contact anyone in the world, if they’re no longer alive.
After the minute and a half is up an operator cuts in, they let you know what you need to do for more time. Having been an urbanomancer in life the demon that powers the Deadline wants you to be her hands in the city. She sees herself as a lone bastion against the inevitability of change and you and her other callers are the tools she uses. Defy property developments, trash new tech that promises to change the face of her city, keep the various groups that populate it right where they are - like insects pinned behind glass.
You don’t have to, so long as you never want to speak to whoever you contacted again. Or use a landline. Declining users who try the latter find they can’t hear whoever they’re speaking to over the dead person they called incoherently begging them to do as she wants. They’re trapped in the phone lines, whatever force that controls the Deadline abandoning them in a place they say rends the fibres of their very souls. For some callers that's the reason they sought out the Deadline in the first place.
One of the last remaining payphones in the city where it is located, the Deadline lurks at the back of a graffiti-covered parking garage like the bones of a corroded chrome dinosaur. To the uninitiated it’s a wonder it hasn’t been torn out, not just because it’s an outmoded relic but because it’s not functional. There’s no dial tone when you pick up the receiver.
Still it stubbornly continues to exist. Attempts to contact the company that owns it lead in circles as though they're no longer running and the city doesn’t seem to have any records or real inclination to check up on it. The one person to take removing it into his own hands quickly found out that there are others with an interest in the Deadline. People who’d do just about anything to keep it right where it is.
The Deadline only works with quarters minted in 1943, a couple of those in the slot will get you a dial tone and a minute and a half of call time. Everyone who uses it has their own method of dialling. Some use the first phone number the person they’re trying to reach ever had, others stab randomly at the keypad while focusing on them. The Deadline can contact anyone in the world, if they’re no longer alive.
After the minute and a half is up an operator cuts in, they let you know what you need to do for more time. Having been an urbanomancer in life the demon that powers the Deadline wants you to be her hands in the city. She sees herself as a lone bastion against the inevitability of change and you and her other callers are the tools she uses. Defy property developments, trash new tech that promises to change the face of her city, keep the various groups that populate it right where they are - like insects pinned behind glass.
You don’t have to, so long as you never want to speak to whoever you contacted again. Or use a landline. Declining users who try the latter find they can’t hear whoever they’re speaking to over the dead person they called incoherently begging them to do as she wants. They’re trapped in the phone lines, whatever force that controls the Deadline abandoning them in a place they say rends the fibres of their very souls. For some callers that's the reason they sought out the Deadline in the first place.
Tuesday, 17 March 2020
320 - Reworking Rituals
Optional Rules: Reworking Rituals
Ritual magick occupies a liminal space in Unknown Armies. It’s a more serious undertaking than splashing around in the kiddie pool of gutter magick but doesn’t require the life-shattering investment of adept mind-rending. It’s capable of breaking the laws of nature but it’s also limited, specific and difficult to obtain. It’s often the last stop on the train away from normalcy.
Rituals without Identities
By default ritual magick requires the ‘Casts Rituals’ identity feature. Gutter Magick can be cast with a single hardened notch in unnatural and a secrecy roll but the hard stuff is off limits unless you’ve made a serious character investment. Within the context of ritual magick having the reputation of being rife with frauds, traps and uncertainty this makes some sense - an uncultivated arcane mindset is a good explanation why it might work for some but not for others. It also means that clueless nobodies who stumble across occult knowledge usually get off scot free, if disappointed.
For GMs who wish to grant their PCs and GMCs access to rituals without this restriction: casting rituals without an appropriate identity feature is done with the secrecy ability and the result is automatically flip-flopped to the worst outcome. Bonuses from blowing enough charges or priming your attempt with a gutter magick blessing still apply but it will always be fraught with danger.
It’s not all bad, even a botched ritual should count as a significant milestone towards an objective for learning an identity with the ‘Casts Rituals’ feature.
Ritual Components & Modification
Rituals are like secret holes in the universe, places where a little extra give was left to keep things running smoothly or handwaved out of laziness and forgotten about. Places where the laws of previous incarnations of the universe bleed through and play havoc with our ideas of physics and nature. Owing to the nature of the invisible clergy these holes were placed by consensus, with the right know-how you can widen or even move them to grasp more power.
One way is doing this is to substitute especially resonant components, things defined almost as much by their rarity as their relevance. Symbolic connection isn’t enough, what we think of as important is only half of the puzzle. Divining the hidden identity of such an object is a local objective for minor rituals and a global objective for significant ones. The pay off is increased potency, the effects of the ritual might last longer, have greater power or be less taxing to cast (even free) so long as you incorporate the component. Rare instances can even be used more than once.
The other way is to meddle with their connection to this universe. This is a far graver undertaking which not only risks destroying the ritual in a storm of unnatural phenomenon but changes things for everyone. Pulling off something like this is a global objective for a minor ritual and a cosmic objective for a significant one. This could make a particular target off limits to the ritual or widen or shrink the acceptable ingredients. It's a good way to make enemies out of anyone who was relying on the old formula, but if you're able to pull off a stunt that shifts the cosmic fabric this much then you can probably afford to not care.
Ritual magick occupies a liminal space in Unknown Armies. It’s a more serious undertaking than splashing around in the kiddie pool of gutter magick but doesn’t require the life-shattering investment of adept mind-rending. It’s capable of breaking the laws of nature but it’s also limited, specific and difficult to obtain. It’s often the last stop on the train away from normalcy.
Rituals without Identities
By default ritual magick requires the ‘Casts Rituals’ identity feature. Gutter Magick can be cast with a single hardened notch in unnatural and a secrecy roll but the hard stuff is off limits unless you’ve made a serious character investment. Within the context of ritual magick having the reputation of being rife with frauds, traps and uncertainty this makes some sense - an uncultivated arcane mindset is a good explanation why it might work for some but not for others. It also means that clueless nobodies who stumble across occult knowledge usually get off scot free, if disappointed.
For GMs who wish to grant their PCs and GMCs access to rituals without this restriction: casting rituals without an appropriate identity feature is done with the secrecy ability and the result is automatically flip-flopped to the worst outcome. Bonuses from blowing enough charges or priming your attempt with a gutter magick blessing still apply but it will always be fraught with danger.
It’s not all bad, even a botched ritual should count as a significant milestone towards an objective for learning an identity with the ‘Casts Rituals’ feature.
Ritual Components & Modification
Rituals are like secret holes in the universe, places where a little extra give was left to keep things running smoothly or handwaved out of laziness and forgotten about. Places where the laws of previous incarnations of the universe bleed through and play havoc with our ideas of physics and nature. Owing to the nature of the invisible clergy these holes were placed by consensus, with the right know-how you can widen or even move them to grasp more power.
One way is doing this is to substitute especially resonant components, things defined almost as much by their rarity as their relevance. Symbolic connection isn’t enough, what we think of as important is only half of the puzzle. Divining the hidden identity of such an object is a local objective for minor rituals and a global objective for significant ones. The pay off is increased potency, the effects of the ritual might last longer, have greater power or be less taxing to cast (even free) so long as you incorporate the component. Rare instances can even be used more than once.
The other way is to meddle with their connection to this universe. This is a far graver undertaking which not only risks destroying the ritual in a storm of unnatural phenomenon but changes things for everyone. Pulling off something like this is a global objective for a minor ritual and a cosmic objective for a significant one. This could make a particular target off limits to the ritual or widen or shrink the acceptable ingredients. It's a good way to make enemies out of anyone who was relying on the old formula, but if you're able to pull off a stunt that shifts the cosmic fabric this much then you can probably afford to not care.
Monday, 16 March 2020
319 - Kow-tow
Ritual: Kow-tow
Cost: 2 minor charges.
Ritual Action: Grill a pair of someone else's shoes and then eat them while prostrating yourself before the flag of a nation which no longer exists. Verbally affirm your obedience to it to the next three people you meet.
Effect: You are emotionally cloaked against interference from the person whose shoes you ate and any groups that form a core component of who they are (those related by identity or relationship are a good indicator of what counts). This lasts for three days or until you commit an act of trespass against that person or one of their groups. So long as you are compliant it gives you a +20% shift on social interactions with them and direct interference on their part prompts a rank 3 Isolation check from intense feelings of alienation.
Sunday, 15 March 2020
318 - Maurice Iosua, Charged Up Construction Worker
GMC: Maurice Iosua, Charged Up Construction Worker
Maurice (Maury to his friends) figured out what Mak Attax were up to. Not the whole picture, not even most of it. He doesn't know about how they changed the world 20 years ago or their ethos or factionalism or anything about what they want. He wouldn’t have cared much about that part, he's an ordinary guy with an ordinary life and he likes things that way. He's be comfortable with his world having an understandable rhythm and flow. He just liked burgers.
Maury is what Attaxers would call a ‘superuser’, they’re supposed to be careful about who gets charges through their Special Orders and keep an eye out afterwards but in practice the demands of the job don’t always give them that kind of leeway. Occasionally someone gets a bunch of them and the results are more powerful and stranger than usual. Maurice ate an Attaxer franchise almost every single day for 4 years, in that time he received almost half a dozen by happenstance. Now he can smell magick.
It wasn’t enough to connect the poltergeist attack and the rain of nickels to his daily lunch, that part of his routine was set in stone and the strange occurrences weren’t. It was noticing the acrid ozone smell as a Special Order passed from cashier to customer and seeing her cough up flowers that clued him in. Following two others over the next month who had the same oddly scented burgers passed to them and seeing their own minor miracles sealed it.
Cautious but not particularly subtle, Maury is considering his options. He can't go to the police, he isn’t sure he even would if he could. He’s not sure about confronting the workers, they might not know what they're doing. For what it’s worth they’ve noticed him, Maurice is a mountain of a man and sticks out like a sore thumb at the half a dozen restaurants he now frequents. If he doesn’t say something one of them is going to.
For his efforts Maurice has managed to finagle a dozen Special Orders for himself, either timing an order of a dozen burgers to when he can tell one with a charge is on the grill or imposing himself on a customer and offering 5 times what they paid for it in the parking lot. They’re all in his refrigerator, still humming with magick. It’s a good thing they keep forever.
STATS
Personality: Generous and hardworking. Slow but not stupid. Maurice has a measured lanquidity to his actions, taking all the time he needs to mull them over. He won’t be rushed and when he does act he won’t be swayed.
Rage: Cheats and liars. Honesty carries a lot of weight with Maurice.
Noble: Hard work. Maurice was raised to see his labour as his value.
Fear: Being taken advantage of by the legal system. His aunt lost everything in a civil dispute so Maurice is very cagey about interacting with lawyers (Helplessness).
Obsession: Keeping his part of the world in order.
Wound Threshold: 70.
Gigantic 70% (Substitutes for Struggle, Substitutes for Fitness, Provides Wound Threshold.)
Chargescent 50%* (Specific Information: Smells Charges, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Maurice (Maury to his friends) figured out what Mak Attax were up to. Not the whole picture, not even most of it. He doesn't know about how they changed the world 20 years ago or their ethos or factionalism or anything about what they want. He wouldn’t have cared much about that part, he's an ordinary guy with an ordinary life and he likes things that way. He's be comfortable with his world having an understandable rhythm and flow. He just liked burgers.
Maury is what Attaxers would call a ‘superuser’, they’re supposed to be careful about who gets charges through their Special Orders and keep an eye out afterwards but in practice the demands of the job don’t always give them that kind of leeway. Occasionally someone gets a bunch of them and the results are more powerful and stranger than usual. Maurice ate an Attaxer franchise almost every single day for 4 years, in that time he received almost half a dozen by happenstance. Now he can smell magick.
It wasn’t enough to connect the poltergeist attack and the rain of nickels to his daily lunch, that part of his routine was set in stone and the strange occurrences weren’t. It was noticing the acrid ozone smell as a Special Order passed from cashier to customer and seeing her cough up flowers that clued him in. Following two others over the next month who had the same oddly scented burgers passed to them and seeing their own minor miracles sealed it.
Cautious but not particularly subtle, Maury is considering his options. He can't go to the police, he isn’t sure he even would if he could. He’s not sure about confronting the workers, they might not know what they're doing. For what it’s worth they’ve noticed him, Maurice is a mountain of a man and sticks out like a sore thumb at the half a dozen restaurants he now frequents. If he doesn’t say something one of them is going to.
For his efforts Maurice has managed to finagle a dozen Special Orders for himself, either timing an order of a dozen burgers to when he can tell one with a charge is on the grill or imposing himself on a customer and offering 5 times what they paid for it in the parking lot. They’re all in his refrigerator, still humming with magick. It’s a good thing they keep forever.
STATS
Personality: Generous and hardworking. Slow but not stupid. Maurice has a measured lanquidity to his actions, taking all the time he needs to mull them over. He won’t be rushed and when he does act he won’t be swayed.
Rage: Cheats and liars. Honesty carries a lot of weight with Maurice.
Noble: Hard work. Maurice was raised to see his labour as his value.
Fear: Being taken advantage of by the legal system. His aunt lost everything in a civil dispute so Maurice is very cagey about interacting with lawyers (Helplessness).
Obsession: Keeping his part of the world in order.
Wound Threshold: 70.
Gigantic 70% (Substitutes for Struggle, Substitutes for Fitness, Provides Wound Threshold.)
Chargescent 50%* (Specific Information: Smells Charges, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Saturday, 14 March 2020
317 - Astral Cloaking
Ritual: Astral Cloaking
Cost: 3 minor charges.
Ritual Action: Switch to a vegan or peskitarian diet if you're not on one already, no meat except fish. Once you have the stench of dead things out of your system bathe yourself in a tub of water as hot as you can bear and oil extracted from verbena. Once purified give up part of yourself permanently: destroy a career you've spent years building, suffer irrevocable injury, renounce a belief in a way you can't go back on, it must be dramatic enough for you to feel the loss.
On the culmination of your sacrifice, twist your right hand into a prescribed gesture. It's uncomfortable but you have to maintain it as long as you want the effect to continue. Some people hold themselves in position with string, tape and glue.
Effect: Demons can't track you, they might get a glimpse of you for a moment every so often but then you become a grainy, foggy blur that slides out of their mind's eye. They can't surveil you and certainly have no hope of possessing you. It has no effect on other entities.
Animals also have difficulty around you, either behaving aggressively or shying away. It's the surest way to tell whether it's working.
If you ever regain the sacrificed part of yourself the effect is reversed, you stand out like a beacon. Interest and possession attempts are likely to increase. This gets worse if you do it several times, not all versions warn against it with some instead telling the caster to "temporarily relieve themselves" of their sacrifice.
Cost: 3 minor charges.
Ritual Action: Switch to a vegan or peskitarian diet if you're not on one already, no meat except fish. Once you have the stench of dead things out of your system bathe yourself in a tub of water as hot as you can bear and oil extracted from verbena. Once purified give up part of yourself permanently: destroy a career you've spent years building, suffer irrevocable injury, renounce a belief in a way you can't go back on, it must be dramatic enough for you to feel the loss.
On the culmination of your sacrifice, twist your right hand into a prescribed gesture. It's uncomfortable but you have to maintain it as long as you want the effect to continue. Some people hold themselves in position with string, tape and glue.
Effect: Demons can't track you, they might get a glimpse of you for a moment every so often but then you become a grainy, foggy blur that slides out of their mind's eye. They can't surveil you and certainly have no hope of possessing you. It has no effect on other entities.
Animals also have difficulty around you, either behaving aggressively or shying away. It's the surest way to tell whether it's working.
If you ever regain the sacrificed part of yourself the effect is reversed, you stand out like a beacon. Interest and possession attempts are likely to increase. This gets worse if you do it several times, not all versions warn against it with some instead telling the caster to "temporarily relieve themselves" of their sacrifice.
Friday, 13 March 2020
316 - Predestined Diversion
Ritual: Predestined Diversion
Cost: 4 minor charges.
Ritual Action: Participate in an anonymous gift exchange, something like a secret santa. Ensure your gift violates at least one of the rules. Wrap it in unpaid traffic tickets (those don't have to be yours) and send it before you receive a gift of your own. Do not consume any animal products until you receive your gift. Don't open it when you do, instead bury it inverted on top of the casket of someone who became a demon.
Effect: You and the target (your gift recipient) briefly swap fates, depending on what's in store for either of you this could be a boon or fatal. Aside from any effects determined by the GM this transfers any gutter magick effects either of you are under to the other. More powerful sorcery is either unaffected or only partially affected. A curse that ensures your death within a week may just badly maim both of you, for example.
You'll run into each other by chance several times, the third time it happens the effect is broken.
Cost: 4 minor charges.
Ritual Action: Participate in an anonymous gift exchange, something like a secret santa. Ensure your gift violates at least one of the rules. Wrap it in unpaid traffic tickets (those don't have to be yours) and send it before you receive a gift of your own. Do not consume any animal products until you receive your gift. Don't open it when you do, instead bury it inverted on top of the casket of someone who became a demon.
Effect: You and the target (your gift recipient) briefly swap fates, depending on what's in store for either of you this could be a boon or fatal. Aside from any effects determined by the GM this transfers any gutter magick effects either of you are under to the other. More powerful sorcery is either unaffected or only partially affected. A curse that ensures your death within a week may just badly maim both of you, for example.
You'll run into each other by chance several times, the third time it happens the effect is broken.
Thursday, 12 March 2020
315 - Road-Atlas Shrugged
Artifact: Road-Atlas Shrugged
Power: Significant.
Description: A heavily annotated road atlas detailing the vehicular geography of the United States. The cover is plastered with Randian bumper stickers. Written in several hands and with several mediums, the annotations detail acts of self-reliance and perseverance in the face of adversity, especially those which eschew using available outside aid. No outcomes are included but a number of entries are crossed out.
Effect: The simplest function of the atlas is divinatory, it's hard to pinpoint as few of the descriptions list names but every relevant act is listed. They fade in and out over time but if you're looking for something it will always be there. Knowing someone is having or had a specific type of crisis and their rough location at the time can help you figure out the location they decided to remove their own appendix with a pocket knife.
The second function is prescriptive. By writing your own act into the book before performing it you lend credence to your attempt. This doesn't make it any easier, you still have to do it on your own. However succeeding grants you your choice of any roll made in the attempt as a hunch roll on your next stress check. Establishing a will to power imbues you with self-possession. Several rolls may be banked this way.
Failing gets you locked out. Your self-entry is crossed out but you'll never know it since to your eyes the pages of the book only show regular maps.
Power: Significant.
Description: A heavily annotated road atlas detailing the vehicular geography of the United States. The cover is plastered with Randian bumper stickers. Written in several hands and with several mediums, the annotations detail acts of self-reliance and perseverance in the face of adversity, especially those which eschew using available outside aid. No outcomes are included but a number of entries are crossed out.
Effect: The simplest function of the atlas is divinatory, it's hard to pinpoint as few of the descriptions list names but every relevant act is listed. They fade in and out over time but if you're looking for something it will always be there. Knowing someone is having or had a specific type of crisis and their rough location at the time can help you figure out the location they decided to remove their own appendix with a pocket knife.
The second function is prescriptive. By writing your own act into the book before performing it you lend credence to your attempt. This doesn't make it any easier, you still have to do it on your own. However succeeding grants you your choice of any roll made in the attempt as a hunch roll on your next stress check. Establishing a will to power imbues you with self-possession. Several rolls may be banked this way.
Failing gets you locked out. Your self-entry is crossed out but you'll never know it since to your eyes the pages of the book only show regular maps.
Wednesday, 11 March 2020
314 - Loathsome Watchers
Unnatural Entity: Loathsome Watcher
A creature not quite like a small, wet, black toad with a v-shaped crest of blinking, pupiled eyes. It moves with a slippery, birdlike grace, sliding and flitting from nook to cranny. It hides, its sickly rotting stench suppressed, lurching into view one at a time in an emerging horde like a gruesome children’s pop-up book when their quarry lets its guard down.
Bemused disbelief is the first impulse, they sincerely look uncannily close to a real amphibian at a glance. This is quickly replaced with overpowering revulsion. Watchers are a perfectly calibrated font of nauseating subliminal signalling. People have likened it to the sensation of trypophobia dialled up to debilitating levels.
Watchers aren’t physically threatening: they have no effective means of attacking someone, a half-hearted kick is enough to put an end to them and they’re clumsy even if they’re quick. Instead the threat that watchers pose is psychological. Given room in the mind of a person harbouring self-doubt or alienation the negative sensations they evoke reverberate in a cascade that overwhelms the mind. People struggle under a sudden weight of stress and anxiety that feels physical, exposed to a great enough number it can freeze them in place entirely. Driven into an existential pseudocoma.
Then the watchers sit, waiting, observing. Pulsating and reeking they are content to allow their prey to slowly deteriorate and die on its own. The heart of someone who does becomes a new loathsome watcher, dissolving aortic bonds and esophageal tissue before wiggling up the throat and out through the mouth.
Dealing with watchers is difficult. Usually by the time you know they’re there it’s too late. However, if you’re tracking down an infestation there are a couple of options. Work in a group since the effect seems to be limited by the watcher’s attention and dividing their’s spreads it around. Temper yourself against insecurity if you can’t let go of it, people with stronger coping mechanisms have a better chance resisting the watcher’s psychic malaise (ironically, numbing yourself with trauma offers no protection). Carry salt, the soft, permeable membrane of a watcher is susceptible to drying out like a snail which makes it useful as both a weapon and a barrier for keeping them out (exposure does damage like a hand-to-hand attack).
A creature not quite like a small, wet, black toad with a v-shaped crest of blinking, pupiled eyes. It moves with a slippery, birdlike grace, sliding and flitting from nook to cranny. It hides, its sickly rotting stench suppressed, lurching into view one at a time in an emerging horde like a gruesome children’s pop-up book when their quarry lets its guard down.
Bemused disbelief is the first impulse, they sincerely look uncannily close to a real amphibian at a glance. This is quickly replaced with overpowering revulsion. Watchers are a perfectly calibrated font of nauseating subliminal signalling. People have likened it to the sensation of trypophobia dialled up to debilitating levels.
Watchers aren’t physically threatening: they have no effective means of attacking someone, a half-hearted kick is enough to put an end to them and they’re clumsy even if they’re quick. Instead the threat that watchers pose is psychological. Given room in the mind of a person harbouring self-doubt or alienation the negative sensations they evoke reverberate in a cascade that overwhelms the mind. People struggle under a sudden weight of stress and anxiety that feels physical, exposed to a great enough number it can freeze them in place entirely. Driven into an existential pseudocoma.
Then the watchers sit, waiting, observing. Pulsating and reeking they are content to allow their prey to slowly deteriorate and die on its own. The heart of someone who does becomes a new loathsome watcher, dissolving aortic bonds and esophageal tissue before wiggling up the throat and out through the mouth.
Dealing with watchers is difficult. Usually by the time you know they’re there it’s too late. However, if you’re tracking down an infestation there are a couple of options. Work in a group since the effect seems to be limited by the watcher’s attention and dividing their’s spreads it around. Temper yourself against insecurity if you can’t let go of it, people with stronger coping mechanisms have a better chance resisting the watcher’s psychic malaise (ironically, numbing yourself with trauma offers no protection). Carry salt, the soft, permeable membrane of a watcher is susceptible to drying out like a snail which makes it useful as both a weapon and a barrier for keeping them out (exposure does damage like a hand-to-hand attack).
No one has bothered to study them or learn where they come from. It seems too distasteful.
Loathsome Watcher, Psychic Quagmire
Wound Threshold: 5.
Paralytic Revulsion 30%: This is the ability watchers use to hold people in place, it can be opposed by an identity or ability that protects the Self or Isolation gauges (whichever the target has more failed notches in). A group of them gets a single attempt at a +10% shift per additional watcher. A group of watchers can divide its numbers to paralyse multiple targets. If they beat the target it is paralysed with nauseated disgust and loathing. Even succeeding against them imposes a -10% shift on rolls while they’re present, short of a matched success or crit. This is repeated each round until a target succumbs, leaves or the watchers are dead or gone.
Paralysed targets may make another attempt to break free after a number of hours equal to the sum of their failed roll, additional failures inflict another failed notch on the relevant gauge. Targets with no failed notches in Self or Isolation are immune to paralytic revulsion.
Loathsome Watcher, Psychic Quagmire
Wound Threshold: 5.
Paralytic Revulsion 30%: This is the ability watchers use to hold people in place, it can be opposed by an identity or ability that protects the Self or Isolation gauges (whichever the target has more failed notches in). A group of them gets a single attempt at a +10% shift per additional watcher. A group of watchers can divide its numbers to paralyse multiple targets. If they beat the target it is paralysed with nauseated disgust and loathing. Even succeeding against them imposes a -10% shift on rolls while they’re present, short of a matched success or crit. This is repeated each round until a target succumbs, leaves or the watchers are dead or gone.
Paralysed targets may make another attempt to break free after a number of hours equal to the sum of their failed roll, additional failures inflict another failed notch on the relevant gauge. Targets with no failed notches in Self or Isolation are immune to paralytic revulsion.
Tuesday, 10 March 2020
313 - Tulip Sallow, Human Hermit Crab
GMC: Tulip Sallow, Human Hermit Crab
All living things steal. Plants steal the squandered energy from sunlight, fighting each other and the environment to do it best. Predators rob their prey of life to prolong their own. Offspring con nourishment and protection from their parents. Theft is survival.
Tulip’s philosophy took time to get to that point and as a kid this core belief was unexamined. The hand to mouth reality of her situation was invisible since she lacked the perspective to see that things could have been different. Her parents could have taught her otherwise, if only they’d known better themselves, but instead their disinterest taught her that taking without permission was a fact of life and an expression of strength and cunning.
It was Sherridan Kellogg that gave her the catalyst for adepthood. Sherridan was well-off, well liked, she didn’t have real struggle. Her interest in delinquency was purely licentious and her friendship with Tulip purely a product of a desire to rebel. Tulip grew to resent this dynamic and feel as though her use to Sherridan was a far more compelling form of theft than shoplifting. So Tulip quietly gathered incriminating material and anonymously destroyed her, socially manoeuvring to take her incarcerated friend’s place in the school’s pecking order.
That theft of Sherridan’s cachet was the first of more than Tulip can remember. She’s a become a socially-lethal chameleon, slicing deftly through people’s foibles to cloak herself in the pieces of their lives she can take for herself. Quite literally, thanks to her command of cryptomancy. The security and power she’s found stealing people’s lives is greater than any physical theft. Flitting from one patchwork identity to the nest, Tulip is an incorrigible social climber in whichever milieu she lands. At home in just about any environment the only limit to her power seems to be the harm she does taking it from others.
STATS
Personality: Prone to nonchalantly straying across boundaries, Tulip playfully presses her luck with people so they’ll let their guard down when she really goes for the kill.
Rage: Social humiliation.
Noble: Fresh starts. Tulip starts over all the time, she can appreciate how difficult it is for people without her powers to do the same.
Fear: Having no rock to crawl under if her schemes go wrong (Helplessness).
Obsession: Build herself a new life from the things she steals from others.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Social Parasite 60% (Substitutes for Lie, Protects Self, Coerces Self.)
Cryptomancy 60%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
All living things steal. Plants steal the squandered energy from sunlight, fighting each other and the environment to do it best. Predators rob their prey of life to prolong their own. Offspring con nourishment and protection from their parents. Theft is survival.
Tulip’s philosophy took time to get to that point and as a kid this core belief was unexamined. The hand to mouth reality of her situation was invisible since she lacked the perspective to see that things could have been different. Her parents could have taught her otherwise, if only they’d known better themselves, but instead their disinterest taught her that taking without permission was a fact of life and an expression of strength and cunning.
It was Sherridan Kellogg that gave her the catalyst for adepthood. Sherridan was well-off, well liked, she didn’t have real struggle. Her interest in delinquency was purely licentious and her friendship with Tulip purely a product of a desire to rebel. Tulip grew to resent this dynamic and feel as though her use to Sherridan was a far more compelling form of theft than shoplifting. So Tulip quietly gathered incriminating material and anonymously destroyed her, socially manoeuvring to take her incarcerated friend’s place in the school’s pecking order.
That theft of Sherridan’s cachet was the first of more than Tulip can remember. She’s a become a socially-lethal chameleon, slicing deftly through people’s foibles to cloak herself in the pieces of their lives she can take for herself. Quite literally, thanks to her command of cryptomancy. The security and power she’s found stealing people’s lives is greater than any physical theft. Flitting from one patchwork identity to the nest, Tulip is an incorrigible social climber in whichever milieu she lands. At home in just about any environment the only limit to her power seems to be the harm she does taking it from others.
STATS
Personality: Prone to nonchalantly straying across boundaries, Tulip playfully presses her luck with people so they’ll let their guard down when she really goes for the kill.
Rage: Social humiliation.
Noble: Fresh starts. Tulip starts over all the time, she can appreciate how difficult it is for people without her powers to do the same.
Fear: Having no rock to crawl under if her schemes go wrong (Helplessness).
Obsession: Build herself a new life from the things she steals from others.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Social Parasite 60% (Substitutes for Lie, Protects Self, Coerces Self.)
Cryptomancy 60%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Monday, 9 March 2020
312 - Anthony Novak, Horrible Office Manager
GMC: Anthony Novak, Horrible Office Manager
Anthony was a tyrant since he was a little kid. Apart from being aggressive and boisterous nothing about him stood out as a marker for leadership, he wasn’t smarter or bigger than the other children. He just had this way of working his way into a position of authority and then ruthlessly trampling people to stay there.
As a result Anthony has middle-management written all over him, he craves authority and will do anything to get it which motivates him enough to reach that level but also lacks the leadership to move any higher. He does not understand or accept this as the reason for his stalled career, instead it’s always someone else’s fault. It has to be, Anthony has good reason to think he is special.
Anthony can hone in on what he calls a person’s “jelly point”, their soft mental underbelly, like a guided missile provided he is in a position of authority over them. It’s a sensitivity that has woven itself so tightly into his subconscious it’s hard to tell where the impulse ends and he begins. The rush and ease of exploiting it has become justification in and of itself, doubled down in response to the negative feedback of any failures.
The office supply company where he works as a corporate logistics manager, overseeing two dozen other staff and indirectly in control of twice as many more, is his domain. Anthony is widely hated and several harassment complaints have landed at his door, but so far he has managed to evade sanction through a combination of blackmail, force of personality and bureaucratic exploitation. The finesse with which he has achieved this is a point of pride.
It’s also put a ceiling on his career. However unsubstantiated, the complaints against him mean that he will never move to the next rung of the career ladder that he covets so furiously. Alternatively in denial and enraged he has plotted horrific crimes against his competitors which he hasn’t the stomach to commit and horribly abused his long suffering family.
His wife Samantha bears the brunt, her nerve shattered by years of this treatment. Anthony never strikes her but the terrible things he says and does to sate himself have left indelible marks on her. She has tried to leave, twice, but he has always lured her back. The third time may be the charm. Through her job at a hair saloon Samantha’s made fast friends with an outspoken and combative gutter mage - Durrani Afridi - who used her own talents to escape a similar situation. She’s keenly aware that something isn't right in Samantha's world and more than willing to apply them on behalf of her new friend.
This may be a terrible idea for more reasons than inexpertly interfering in an abusive relationship. Anthony’s talent is the result of unwitting psychic sensitivity cultivated over a lifetime. He has no clue regarding the unnatural for now, him catching wise to the existence of that kind of power will be a recipe for disaster.
STATS
Personality: Smug, barely repressed narcissism wrapped up in petty pedantry and officiousness. Anthony is justly detested by everyone under his thumb and those outside his sphere of influence either think of him as repellent or are blithely ignorant of his shortcomings. When he can’t assert himself over someone he’ll try to weasel his way into subjugating them or flinch away. He’s an irredeemable piece of shit.
Rage: Defiance.
Noble: Hierarchy.
Fear: Bigger fish (Helplessness).
Obsession: Being in authority over others.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Terrible Boss 65%* (Substitutes for Status, Substitutes for Secrecy, Coerces Helplessness.)
Authoritarian Augury 55% (Influence, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick. Only works on a person Anthony is in a position of authority over.)
Shock Gauges
Anthony was a tyrant since he was a little kid. Apart from being aggressive and boisterous nothing about him stood out as a marker for leadership, he wasn’t smarter or bigger than the other children. He just had this way of working his way into a position of authority and then ruthlessly trampling people to stay there.
As a result Anthony has middle-management written all over him, he craves authority and will do anything to get it which motivates him enough to reach that level but also lacks the leadership to move any higher. He does not understand or accept this as the reason for his stalled career, instead it’s always someone else’s fault. It has to be, Anthony has good reason to think he is special.
Anthony can hone in on what he calls a person’s “jelly point”, their soft mental underbelly, like a guided missile provided he is in a position of authority over them. It’s a sensitivity that has woven itself so tightly into his subconscious it’s hard to tell where the impulse ends and he begins. The rush and ease of exploiting it has become justification in and of itself, doubled down in response to the negative feedback of any failures.
The office supply company where he works as a corporate logistics manager, overseeing two dozen other staff and indirectly in control of twice as many more, is his domain. Anthony is widely hated and several harassment complaints have landed at his door, but so far he has managed to evade sanction through a combination of blackmail, force of personality and bureaucratic exploitation. The finesse with which he has achieved this is a point of pride.
It’s also put a ceiling on his career. However unsubstantiated, the complaints against him mean that he will never move to the next rung of the career ladder that he covets so furiously. Alternatively in denial and enraged he has plotted horrific crimes against his competitors which he hasn’t the stomach to commit and horribly abused his long suffering family.
His wife Samantha bears the brunt, her nerve shattered by years of this treatment. Anthony never strikes her but the terrible things he says and does to sate himself have left indelible marks on her. She has tried to leave, twice, but he has always lured her back. The third time may be the charm. Through her job at a hair saloon Samantha’s made fast friends with an outspoken and combative gutter mage - Durrani Afridi - who used her own talents to escape a similar situation. She’s keenly aware that something isn't right in Samantha's world and more than willing to apply them on behalf of her new friend.
This may be a terrible idea for more reasons than inexpertly interfering in an abusive relationship. Anthony’s talent is the result of unwitting psychic sensitivity cultivated over a lifetime. He has no clue regarding the unnatural for now, him catching wise to the existence of that kind of power will be a recipe for disaster.
STATS
Personality: Smug, barely repressed narcissism wrapped up in petty pedantry and officiousness. Anthony is justly detested by everyone under his thumb and those outside his sphere of influence either think of him as repellent or are blithely ignorant of his shortcomings. When he can’t assert himself over someone he’ll try to weasel his way into subjugating them or flinch away. He’s an irredeemable piece of shit.
Rage: Defiance.
Noble: Hierarchy.
Fear: Bigger fish (Helplessness).
Obsession: Being in authority over others.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Terrible Boss 65%* (Substitutes for Status, Substitutes for Secrecy, Coerces Helplessness.)
Authoritarian Augury 55% (Influence, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick. Only works on a person Anthony is in a position of authority over.)
Shock Gauges
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