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.
Showing posts with label Unnatural Entity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Unnatural Entity. Show all posts
Tuesday, 24 March 2020
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.
Saturday, 7 March 2020
311 - Aetheric Remora
Unnatural Entity: Aetheric Remora
Specially cultivated by an Italian adept, Aetheric Remora are a perpetually juvenile form of astral parasite that have a more mutualistic relationship with their hosts. Instead of remorselessly battening themselves on someone’s positive abilities they can instead subsist on magickal energy. This cost comes out to a minor charge per week, if you can’t make it the Remora chows down on one of your positive abilities like a regular astral parasite. If this second option occurs enough to equal the ability (sending the host into a temporary coma) the Remora drops off and matures into an adult astral parasite.
The slow feed of magickal charges maintains the enchantment that keeps them from getting to this stage. It also cloaks the host from other parasites, the normal events and qualities that would draw their attention are absorbed by the Remora like an astral heat sink. No astral parasite can attach itself to a host so long as it is kept fed. Other intangible entities also have a difficult time interacting with the host, demons, revenants and the like are at a -30% shift to use their powers on one who is ponying up the weekly charge.
Long term hosts suffer no serious ill effects so long as they keep paying up, the worst of it is a tell-tale speckled pallor. Few understand its significance.
Aetheric Remora, Neotenic Astral Parasite
Wound Threshold: 20.
Abilities as an Astral Parasite, see page 14 of Book 3: Reveal.
Specially cultivated by an Italian adept, Aetheric Remora are a perpetually juvenile form of astral parasite that have a more mutualistic relationship with their hosts. Instead of remorselessly battening themselves on someone’s positive abilities they can instead subsist on magickal energy. This cost comes out to a minor charge per week, if you can’t make it the Remora chows down on one of your positive abilities like a regular astral parasite. If this second option occurs enough to equal the ability (sending the host into a temporary coma) the Remora drops off and matures into an adult astral parasite.
The slow feed of magickal charges maintains the enchantment that keeps them from getting to this stage. It also cloaks the host from other parasites, the normal events and qualities that would draw their attention are absorbed by the Remora like an astral heat sink. No astral parasite can attach itself to a host so long as it is kept fed. Other intangible entities also have a difficult time interacting with the host, demons, revenants and the like are at a -30% shift to use their powers on one who is ponying up the weekly charge.
Long term hosts suffer no serious ill effects so long as they keep paying up, the worst of it is a tell-tale speckled pallor. Few understand its significance.
Aetheric Remora, Neotenic Astral Parasite
Wound Threshold: 20.
Abilities as an Astral Parasite, see page 14 of Book 3: Reveal.
Thursday, 5 March 2020
309 - Old Joe
Unnatural Entity: Old Joe
In life Joe's name was Koenraad Strauss, he anglicised it when he emigrated from Germany to the U.S in 1858. This was less out of desire for acceptance than the fact he'd been left holding the bag on a series of robberies in his homeland and was wanted for murder. In much the same way as he'd been a day late and a dollar short in avoiding betrayal by his old gang he missed the heyday of the California gold rush by a few years.
Undetered, the newly minted Joe staked a claim in one of the most inhospitable parts of the stake and got to digging. He reasoned that by this point the best deposits were in places no one would willingly go. In his case he was wrong. Hardship and mishap plagued Joe from day one, but instead of yielding he took every misfortune as confirmation of his theory. Doubling, then tripling down on his initial investment as his fixation proved ever more fruitless. Isolation and sunk cost turned to madness and eventually Joe died out there, reduced to stringy meat and leather by the sun drenched land.
For a while the shapeless hunger of his unfulfilled certainty stewed and chewed upon itself in the trackless wilderness, alighting upon lost wanderers who then met their end scrabbling in the underground darkness for a payoff that never comes. Joe is geographically bound, peevish of his claim and magickally dependent on it (his Urge depletes at 1% per day he spends elsewhere, recovering at the same rate) but a quirk of his demonic nature gives the fruits of his labour a tangible benefit. The bones of those who die in his mines undergo an alchemical transformation at the moment of passing, becoming laced with the gold he craves. About 5 and a half ounces a head, all told.
This amounted to little more than the gradual accumulation of death and tainted lucre until a hiking/cave blog's sudden attention sent college kids and ramblers to the site in droves. Curious about the groups that are too many to possess at a time Joe is formulating a plan. One that involves hostages, blackmail, bribery with gold-veined femurs and a steady stream of victims lured by his agents to finally dig up the prize that's hidden down there somewhere. It has to be, he knows it in his bones.
Old Joe, Demonic Prospector
Urge: Gooold! 65%
In life Joe's name was Koenraad Strauss, he anglicised it when he emigrated from Germany to the U.S in 1858. This was less out of desire for acceptance than the fact he'd been left holding the bag on a series of robberies in his homeland and was wanted for murder. In much the same way as he'd been a day late and a dollar short in avoiding betrayal by his old gang he missed the heyday of the California gold rush by a few years.
Undetered, the newly minted Joe staked a claim in one of the most inhospitable parts of the stake and got to digging. He reasoned that by this point the best deposits were in places no one would willingly go. In his case he was wrong. Hardship and mishap plagued Joe from day one, but instead of yielding he took every misfortune as confirmation of his theory. Doubling, then tripling down on his initial investment as his fixation proved ever more fruitless. Isolation and sunk cost turned to madness and eventually Joe died out there, reduced to stringy meat and leather by the sun drenched land.
For a while the shapeless hunger of his unfulfilled certainty stewed and chewed upon itself in the trackless wilderness, alighting upon lost wanderers who then met their end scrabbling in the underground darkness for a payoff that never comes. Joe is geographically bound, peevish of his claim and magickally dependent on it (his Urge depletes at 1% per day he spends elsewhere, recovering at the same rate) but a quirk of his demonic nature gives the fruits of his labour a tangible benefit. The bones of those who die in his mines undergo an alchemical transformation at the moment of passing, becoming laced with the gold he craves. About 5 and a half ounces a head, all told.
This amounted to little more than the gradual accumulation of death and tainted lucre until a hiking/cave blog's sudden attention sent college kids and ramblers to the site in droves. Curious about the groups that are too many to possess at a time Joe is formulating a plan. One that involves hostages, blackmail, bribery with gold-veined femurs and a steady stream of victims lured by his agents to finally dig up the prize that's hidden down there somewhere. It has to be, he knows it in his bones.
Old Joe, Demonic Prospector
Urge: Gooold! 65%
Wednesday, 26 February 2020
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.
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.
Wednesday, 19 February 2020
295 - McCallisters
Unnatural Entity: McCallisters
Otherspace the Binge has proven impermeable to frustrated Videomancers since its discovery. Adepts aren't known for taking affronts to their worldview laying down so this has been more of a red flag to a bull than any disuasion. The efforts of one cabal of the dying school of magick have produced some success by vicariously studying viewers drugged into docility and subjected to 24/7 viewing.
By "reeling in" their subjects at the right time the cabal found that they could capture entities from the TV-based otherspace on VHS tapes. This process was deleterious to their subjects, but that was almost forgotten in the rush to extract favourable fictional characters from the popular imagination. A secondary breakthrough came up with another use for the mindless husks of their victims: they could use them as incubators to grow bodies for them.
The creatures the cabal spawned were downright horrific, which led to their eventual downfall and stories of an alien Xenomorph stalking the Canadian wilderness. Fortunately only one of the escapees has proven intelligent and wilful enough to reproduce in the wild: Home Alone protagonist Kevin McCallister. Living in secluded Lord of the Flies-style communes of a few dozen they desire more VHS tapes of their movies to digest, creating eggs, and living hosts to implant them inside. Thankfully they aren't limited to human hosts, the main factor is size so livestock are an appropriate substitute, and they have proven willing to negotiate with people for help.
That's not to say that the McCallisters should be considered benign. They are utterly amoral and consider human beings to be "flat" dull creatures, this place a drab low-contrast irreality in comparison to their home dimension. Anyone antagonising them will discover that the laws of physics have done nothing to curb their malicious inventiveness and flair for dangerous traps.
McCallisters, Parasitic Parthenogen TV-spawn
Wound Threshold: 35.
Maliciously Inventive 55%: Substitutes for Secrecy, Unique (making homemade traps).
Otherspace the Binge has proven impermeable to frustrated Videomancers since its discovery. Adepts aren't known for taking affronts to their worldview laying down so this has been more of a red flag to a bull than any disuasion. The efforts of one cabal of the dying school of magick have produced some success by vicariously studying viewers drugged into docility and subjected to 24/7 viewing.
By "reeling in" their subjects at the right time the cabal found that they could capture entities from the TV-based otherspace on VHS tapes. This process was deleterious to their subjects, but that was almost forgotten in the rush to extract favourable fictional characters from the popular imagination. A secondary breakthrough came up with another use for the mindless husks of their victims: they could use them as incubators to grow bodies for them.
The creatures the cabal spawned were downright horrific, which led to their eventual downfall and stories of an alien Xenomorph stalking the Canadian wilderness. Fortunately only one of the escapees has proven intelligent and wilful enough to reproduce in the wild: Home Alone protagonist Kevin McCallister. Living in secluded Lord of the Flies-style communes of a few dozen they desire more VHS tapes of their movies to digest, creating eggs, and living hosts to implant them inside. Thankfully they aren't limited to human hosts, the main factor is size so livestock are an appropriate substitute, and they have proven willing to negotiate with people for help.
That's not to say that the McCallisters should be considered benign. They are utterly amoral and consider human beings to be "flat" dull creatures, this place a drab low-contrast irreality in comparison to their home dimension. Anyone antagonising them will discover that the laws of physics have done nothing to curb their malicious inventiveness and flair for dangerous traps.
McCallisters, Parasitic Parthenogen TV-spawn
Wound Threshold: 35.
Maliciously Inventive 55%: Substitutes for Secrecy, Unique (making homemade traps).
Wednesday, 5 February 2020
281 - Hollow Earther
Unnatural Entity: Hollow Earther
The Invisible Clergy don't always get them all when the universe resets, that's where Neverwhen People and Hollow Earthers come from. Unlike Neverwhen People, Hollow Earthers know exactly what they're doing. They're old hands at surviving the apocalypse even as the new worlds become stranger and less hospitable. Holdouts who have learned to sequester themselves beyond the Clergy's reach that make the basis of myth: kobolds and gnomes, the strange, stubborn precursors to humanity that live beneath the surface of the Earth.
They no longer have physical form, instead persisting as underground psychic entities in a world where the air and the gravity and the number of subatomic particles are poison to their odd bodies. If you know where to look and have the right sensitivity they're eager to talk, caverns with high concentrations of silicates are generally a good place to start.
They're curious. Hollow Earthers want to see the world, they need you to do it and are eager to share their secrets. It's nothing like demonic possession, they just ride around in your head like a passenger looking over your shoulder. A strong aversion to direct sunlight complicates the arrangement but having a creature with a natural affinity for rituals attached to you is sometimes worth dressing like a vampire braving high noon. Not only are they dab hands at seeing the cracks in the universe but once per week someone playing host to a Hollow Earther gets a 1 significant charge discount on casting a ritual of their choosing. For some this is the only way they can try the big stuff.
The cost of this power is severe. The longer a Hollow Earther is attached to someone the more intertwined they become. The aversion to sunlight becomes a shared condition, skin blistering and cracking under UV rays. Extra toes and digits sprout along with coarse, wiry hair as limbs and faces become short and gnarled. In wearing us they press us into their shapes. Removing one is a matter of exorcism, they won't let go willingly. It's not cheap or easy and it won't restore your appearance or let you develop a tan again. The alternative is to retreat back beneath the Earth, shedding material form and becoming as they are, waiting out the next incarnation of the universe in crystalline lifeboats.
The Invisible Clergy don't always get them all when the universe resets, that's where Neverwhen People and Hollow Earthers come from. Unlike Neverwhen People, Hollow Earthers know exactly what they're doing. They're old hands at surviving the apocalypse even as the new worlds become stranger and less hospitable. Holdouts who have learned to sequester themselves beyond the Clergy's reach that make the basis of myth: kobolds and gnomes, the strange, stubborn precursors to humanity that live beneath the surface of the Earth.
They no longer have physical form, instead persisting as underground psychic entities in a world where the air and the gravity and the number of subatomic particles are poison to their odd bodies. If you know where to look and have the right sensitivity they're eager to talk, caverns with high concentrations of silicates are generally a good place to start.
They're curious. Hollow Earthers want to see the world, they need you to do it and are eager to share their secrets. It's nothing like demonic possession, they just ride around in your head like a passenger looking over your shoulder. A strong aversion to direct sunlight complicates the arrangement but having a creature with a natural affinity for rituals attached to you is sometimes worth dressing like a vampire braving high noon. Not only are they dab hands at seeing the cracks in the universe but once per week someone playing host to a Hollow Earther gets a 1 significant charge discount on casting a ritual of their choosing. For some this is the only way they can try the big stuff.
The cost of this power is severe. The longer a Hollow Earther is attached to someone the more intertwined they become. The aversion to sunlight becomes a shared condition, skin blistering and cracking under UV rays. Extra toes and digits sprout along with coarse, wiry hair as limbs and faces become short and gnarled. In wearing us they press us into their shapes. Removing one is a matter of exorcism, they won't let go willingly. It's not cheap or easy and it won't restore your appearance or let you develop a tan again. The alternative is to retreat back beneath the Earth, shedding material form and becoming as they are, waiting out the next incarnation of the universe in crystalline lifeboats.
Thursday, 16 January 2020
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.
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.
Tuesday, 14 January 2020
259 - Eyes
Unnatural Entity: Eyes
Ephemeral as cobwebs and practically invisible, Eyes aren't always the source of feeling like you're being watched (there aren't that many of them) but more and more they're the root of that familiar sensation.
As far as origin goes the leading theories are that they're either some adept's magickal science fair project that got loose and started breeding in the wild or a reflection on a world in which surveillance is increasingly ever present and accepted. It could just as well be neither, in the two instances people have caught and killed Eyes they've dissolved like smoke. Catching them at the wrong time is sometimes enough to scatter their essence to the wind.
Eyes aren't directly harmful in any way, they seem to be the unnatural equivalent of vermin. An amorphous basketball sized wreath of odourless smoke studded with dozens of blinking, staring eyes of different sizes. They float, unseen for the most part, trying to play the voyeur because it's how they eat. Spotting someone doing something compromising nourishes an Eyes, to a degree relative to how harmful the observed behaviour would be if revealed. It's also their point of vulnerability: terminally shy, an Eyes caught spying on someone at their weakest takes damage from being seen as though it were a melee attack. If this fails to kill it, it will flee and not return to the area.
Given the similarity to their charging structure it's the wet dream of any cryptomancer to crack the code on wrangling Eyes to do their bidding. The idea of an almost invisible familiar whose whole raison d'etre is spying on people's foibles is too much to pass up. Frustratingly, perhaps fortunately, the few attempts at wielding magickal control over them have failed utterly and the few adepts that know about them have been too stubborn to resort to trying other methods yet.
Eyes, Peeping Tom
Wound Threshold: Only 15, but good luck harming something immaterial. On the other hand catching one observing you or someone else while they're in the middle of doing something compromising deals hand-to-hand damage to the Eyes as it metaphysically "leans in" to our world.
I See You 80%: Substitutes for Notice, Substitutes for Secrecy, Substitutes for Pursuit.
Ephemeral as cobwebs and practically invisible, Eyes aren't always the source of feeling like you're being watched (there aren't that many of them) but more and more they're the root of that familiar sensation.
As far as origin goes the leading theories are that they're either some adept's magickal science fair project that got loose and started breeding in the wild or a reflection on a world in which surveillance is increasingly ever present and accepted. It could just as well be neither, in the two instances people have caught and killed Eyes they've dissolved like smoke. Catching them at the wrong time is sometimes enough to scatter their essence to the wind.
Eyes aren't directly harmful in any way, they seem to be the unnatural equivalent of vermin. An amorphous basketball sized wreath of odourless smoke studded with dozens of blinking, staring eyes of different sizes. They float, unseen for the most part, trying to play the voyeur because it's how they eat. Spotting someone doing something compromising nourishes an Eyes, to a degree relative to how harmful the observed behaviour would be if revealed. It's also their point of vulnerability: terminally shy, an Eyes caught spying on someone at their weakest takes damage from being seen as though it were a melee attack. If this fails to kill it, it will flee and not return to the area.
Given the similarity to their charging structure it's the wet dream of any cryptomancer to crack the code on wrangling Eyes to do their bidding. The idea of an almost invisible familiar whose whole raison d'etre is spying on people's foibles is too much to pass up. Frustratingly, perhaps fortunately, the few attempts at wielding magickal control over them have failed utterly and the few adepts that know about them have been too stubborn to resort to trying other methods yet.
Eyes, Peeping Tom
Wound Threshold: Only 15, but good luck harming something immaterial. On the other hand catching one observing you or someone else while they're in the middle of doing something compromising deals hand-to-hand damage to the Eyes as it metaphysically "leans in" to our world.
I See You 80%: Substitutes for Notice, Substitutes for Secrecy, Substitutes for Pursuit.
Saturday, 11 January 2020
256 - Obliterite
Unnatural Entity: Obliterite
More than just about any other kind of adept Entropomancers - the chaos mages who charge up off taking risks - tend to get themselves killed chasing their obsession. A magickal belief system that requires you literally put your neck on the line will tend to do that. The other aspect to it is that the ones that die that way usually end up going out with a bundle of unspent charges sitting in their back pocket, which is what powers the formation of an Obliterite.
An Obliterite isn’t a demon, it would struggle to even qualify as a revenant. It’s more of a psychic compulsion to follow in the dead adept’s fateful footsteps. An intrusive thought that plays over and over and over in the spot that they died, it attempts to follow through on collecting the promised power by encouraging others to stage a do over. When it speaks to you it uses your own voice and darkest secrets but the dead wizard’s words. There’s a school of thought that says Obliterates aren’t living entities any more than snow angels are the actual celestial host. That they’re imprints which just happen to take the shape of our inner demons. The fact that they don’t seem to remember secrets they’ve goaded people with in the past supports this idea but it’s another thing to argue that when your soul is being laid bare.
Once per day it can use this power to provoke an Unnatural stress check in response to resistance towards reenacting the fatal scene. It can only do this if the conditions are right. At least three significant factors need to match up with the original event, things like: the time of year, the presence of people who were there the first time, the weather, a song playing on the radio, etc. Any three will do to provoke a rank 2 check and for every additional factor the rank rises by 1 to a maximum of 6. In some instances an Obliterite will be able to make multiple attempts on different people on a particularly auspicious occasion but each of them is 1 rank lower than the last. Canny cabals take advantage of this when tracking them, looking for urban myths of haunted places that claim people’s lives in the same way under the same circumstances in cyclical patterns.
That’s because there is one upside to being attacked by an Obliterite, they play by the same rules in death as they did in life. Anyone who follows through with the fatal compulsion and somehow survives reaps the benefit of all the charges the adept was carrying at the time of death, plus one minor for each person it has claimed since (they’d be sigs but something has to keep the lights on). Drained like that most of them fade away, some only appear to but instead lay dormant for years before firing up again.
More than just about any other kind of adept Entropomancers - the chaos mages who charge up off taking risks - tend to get themselves killed chasing their obsession. A magickal belief system that requires you literally put your neck on the line will tend to do that. The other aspect to it is that the ones that die that way usually end up going out with a bundle of unspent charges sitting in their back pocket, which is what powers the formation of an Obliterite.
An Obliterite isn’t a demon, it would struggle to even qualify as a revenant. It’s more of a psychic compulsion to follow in the dead adept’s fateful footsteps. An intrusive thought that plays over and over and over in the spot that they died, it attempts to follow through on collecting the promised power by encouraging others to stage a do over. When it speaks to you it uses your own voice and darkest secrets but the dead wizard’s words. There’s a school of thought that says Obliterates aren’t living entities any more than snow angels are the actual celestial host. That they’re imprints which just happen to take the shape of our inner demons. The fact that they don’t seem to remember secrets they’ve goaded people with in the past supports this idea but it’s another thing to argue that when your soul is being laid bare.
Once per day it can use this power to provoke an Unnatural stress check in response to resistance towards reenacting the fatal scene. It can only do this if the conditions are right. At least three significant factors need to match up with the original event, things like: the time of year, the presence of people who were there the first time, the weather, a song playing on the radio, etc. Any three will do to provoke a rank 2 check and for every additional factor the rank rises by 1 to a maximum of 6. In some instances an Obliterite will be able to make multiple attempts on different people on a particularly auspicious occasion but each of them is 1 rank lower than the last. Canny cabals take advantage of this when tracking them, looking for urban myths of haunted places that claim people’s lives in the same way under the same circumstances in cyclical patterns.
That’s because there is one upside to being attacked by an Obliterite, they play by the same rules in death as they did in life. Anyone who follows through with the fatal compulsion and somehow survives reaps the benefit of all the charges the adept was carrying at the time of death, plus one minor for each person it has claimed since (they’d be sigs but something has to keep the lights on). Drained like that most of them fade away, some only appear to but instead lay dormant for years before firing up again.
Friday, 3 January 2020
248 - Spook
Unnatural Entity: Spook
Over there! No, don’t look, you’ll give it away! There’s a man outside. Dark suit. Sunglasses. You clocked him following you to the coffee shop at the last intersection and now he’s waiting outside. Watching. You know if you wait long enough he’ll disappear into the shifting crowd. Not that it means he’s given up. Others, different but familiar will replace him. Following, surveilling, reporting back to their masters.
You know you can’t tell anyone you’re being followed, they’d think you’re crazy. But you’re gathering evidence: photographs and footage, license plate numbers, yesterday you found a bug behind one of your electrical sockets. It looks like an eraser with pushpins stuck into it but you’re sure it’s a bug. Once you’ve got enough proof you’ll blackmail them into backing off or blow this whole thing wide open.
In life, Spooks were the kind of exhausted, desperate people just trying to make sense of the terrible dread and paranoia their damaged brains were constantly bombarding them with. Under that kind of duress from your own mind it’s a relief to believe that there are outside forces who’ve taken a direct interest in secretly persecuting you. Can you blame them? They only wanted the world to make sense (and for a vanishingly small minority, they were right about being watched). Raised awareness of government and corporate surveillance, not to mention the shared hysteria of “gang stalking”, have done nothing to help.
In death they form a special type of revenant, unable to quell their own fear they seek to share it, to confirm it, to make it real. They’ve become the mysterious figure in the stairwell, the car that’s followed you the last four turns and the clicking noise you hear when you pick up your phone. As maddeningly elusive as their own nightmares, they’re as ephemeral as shadows - cast enough light on them to see and they disappear. By getting others to accept it they aren’t alone. Spooks latch on to an individual and menace them with hallucinatory spies and spectral stalkers until they develop a disorder from the treatment. Then, their work done, they'll drop off to go bother someone else.
Sounds like something you might want to sick on to your enemies, right? Bad idea. Spooks deviate from their usual behaviour on one condition: their target is actually being watched and followed or harassed. In that case the watchers are assumed to be the same enemy that drove the Spooks to their wit’s end and the revenant will do anything to oppose them. Without physical form they are limited in what they can accomplish, most of them will work to deliberately out and lead the target to evidence that they’re really being surveilled. More than one adept has deliberately courted the attention of a Spook, who better to audit whether you’re really being followed?
Spook, Dreamlike MiB
Targeted Individual 10-50%: Once every couple of days a Spook can provoke either a Helplessness or Isolation check in someone it's targeting. Strangers following anybody for long enough will provoke a reaction with a rank equal to the ones place of a successful roll on their Urge. It also uses this to oppose roll used to conceal or perpetrate genuine surveillance or stalking of which it becomes aware.
Over there! No, don’t look, you’ll give it away! There’s a man outside. Dark suit. Sunglasses. You clocked him following you to the coffee shop at the last intersection and now he’s waiting outside. Watching. You know if you wait long enough he’ll disappear into the shifting crowd. Not that it means he’s given up. Others, different but familiar will replace him. Following, surveilling, reporting back to their masters.
You know you can’t tell anyone you’re being followed, they’d think you’re crazy. But you’re gathering evidence: photographs and footage, license plate numbers, yesterday you found a bug behind one of your electrical sockets. It looks like an eraser with pushpins stuck into it but you’re sure it’s a bug. Once you’ve got enough proof you’ll blackmail them into backing off or blow this whole thing wide open.
In life, Spooks were the kind of exhausted, desperate people just trying to make sense of the terrible dread and paranoia their damaged brains were constantly bombarding them with. Under that kind of duress from your own mind it’s a relief to believe that there are outside forces who’ve taken a direct interest in secretly persecuting you. Can you blame them? They only wanted the world to make sense (and for a vanishingly small minority, they were right about being watched). Raised awareness of government and corporate surveillance, not to mention the shared hysteria of “gang stalking”, have done nothing to help.
In death they form a special type of revenant, unable to quell their own fear they seek to share it, to confirm it, to make it real. They’ve become the mysterious figure in the stairwell, the car that’s followed you the last four turns and the clicking noise you hear when you pick up your phone. As maddeningly elusive as their own nightmares, they’re as ephemeral as shadows - cast enough light on them to see and they disappear. By getting others to accept it they aren’t alone. Spooks latch on to an individual and menace them with hallucinatory spies and spectral stalkers until they develop a disorder from the treatment. Then, their work done, they'll drop off to go bother someone else.
Sounds like something you might want to sick on to your enemies, right? Bad idea. Spooks deviate from their usual behaviour on one condition: their target is actually being watched and followed or harassed. In that case the watchers are assumed to be the same enemy that drove the Spooks to their wit’s end and the revenant will do anything to oppose them. Without physical form they are limited in what they can accomplish, most of them will work to deliberately out and lead the target to evidence that they’re really being surveilled. More than one adept has deliberately courted the attention of a Spook, who better to audit whether you’re really being followed?
Spook, Dreamlike MiB
Targeted Individual 10-50%: Once every couple of days a Spook can provoke either a Helplessness or Isolation check in someone it's targeting. Strangers following anybody for long enough will provoke a reaction with a rank equal to the ones place of a successful roll on their Urge. It also uses this to oppose roll used to conceal or perpetrate genuine surveillance or stalking of which it becomes aware.
Tuesday, 17 December 2019
231 - Arlan the Gnawer
Unnatural Entity: Arlan the Gnawer
It's unclear to most just what fuels Arlan's strange fixation. As demons go most want to re-experience life on their own terms, he bargains for pieces of yours. Given access to your life he’ll do his best to live it normally while you ride along as a helpless passenger. All the while this is accompanied by a dull chewing sensation as he metaphysically removes pieces of what he’s experiencing. When he departs that troublesome relationship, chronic disorder or hard-earned skill goes with him.
Arlan can’t possess people without their permission. He’d love to, it’d make things so much easier, but his powers don’t seem to work that way. He claims to have once been ensorcelled as the familiar of a powerful adept who crippled that ability while granting him others. Regardless of whether this is true he needs to negotiate for possession and for whatever reason he’s true to his word.
He does this by offering to remove things: disorders, toxic relationships, bad memories. In return he wants access to the good stuff (and since he can’t force you to give it up he wants it first), your positive traits, skills and life experiences. Once agreed on, he’s in the driver’s seat and you’re looking over his shoulder, locked out of your own body. The rank 6 Unnatural check from this experience dissuades a lot of repeat custom from people who aren’t desperate. Arlan can hear you (but not talk back, except by speaking aloud) while this is going on but he can’t or won’t hand back control until the negotiated time is up. He does his best but for most the experience is like watching a hapless tourist clumsily navigate a foreign culture, except that culture is your life.
The reason for all of this is simple. Arlan doesn't belong in our universe, he's the demonic equivalent of a neverwhen person. A refugee from a universe where things worked differently and he’s building himself a scavenged spacesuit out of the scraps of other people’s lives, something that will let him survive in our alien environment. Something that will - he hopes - let him take on physical form.
Arlan’s personality is in flux. There’s an earnest core, full of stilted speech and frank admissions but around it the built up material of his conquests form aspects of his ever changing self. Pirated identities give him new personality traits, positive or otherwise, while the baggage he takes on form psychological cancerous cysts just waiting to be purged on to whoever crosses him.
Arlan the Gnawer, Hungry for Life
Wound Threshold: 50. Intangible for now, Arlan can only be harmed by the kinds of magick that harm demons. That might change when he’s built up enough to create a physical body.
Urge - Be You 50%: For every 24 hours of uninterrupted possession a roll on this identity does damage like a hand-to-hand attack against an identity or relationship, adding that same amount to Arlan’s stash. Other aspects like disorders and notches should have wound thresholds assigned to them by the GM and are only properly removed when that value is exceeded.
Toxic Baggage 40%: Arlan might not be able to possess people without permission, but he can still ruin their lives. With a successful roll he can dump one of the negative things he has collected on someone, this happens at the same 24-hours-per-roll rate as removal but does not require possession.
It's unclear to most just what fuels Arlan's strange fixation. As demons go most want to re-experience life on their own terms, he bargains for pieces of yours. Given access to your life he’ll do his best to live it normally while you ride along as a helpless passenger. All the while this is accompanied by a dull chewing sensation as he metaphysically removes pieces of what he’s experiencing. When he departs that troublesome relationship, chronic disorder or hard-earned skill goes with him.
Arlan can’t possess people without their permission. He’d love to, it’d make things so much easier, but his powers don’t seem to work that way. He claims to have once been ensorcelled as the familiar of a powerful adept who crippled that ability while granting him others. Regardless of whether this is true he needs to negotiate for possession and for whatever reason he’s true to his word.
He does this by offering to remove things: disorders, toxic relationships, bad memories. In return he wants access to the good stuff (and since he can’t force you to give it up he wants it first), your positive traits, skills and life experiences. Once agreed on, he’s in the driver’s seat and you’re looking over his shoulder, locked out of your own body. The rank 6 Unnatural check from this experience dissuades a lot of repeat custom from people who aren’t desperate. Arlan can hear you (but not talk back, except by speaking aloud) while this is going on but he can’t or won’t hand back control until the negotiated time is up. He does his best but for most the experience is like watching a hapless tourist clumsily navigate a foreign culture, except that culture is your life.
The reason for all of this is simple. Arlan doesn't belong in our universe, he's the demonic equivalent of a neverwhen person. A refugee from a universe where things worked differently and he’s building himself a scavenged spacesuit out of the scraps of other people’s lives, something that will let him survive in our alien environment. Something that will - he hopes - let him take on physical form.
Arlan’s personality is in flux. There’s an earnest core, full of stilted speech and frank admissions but around it the built up material of his conquests form aspects of his ever changing self. Pirated identities give him new personality traits, positive or otherwise, while the baggage he takes on form psychological cancerous cysts just waiting to be purged on to whoever crosses him.
Arlan the Gnawer, Hungry for Life
Wound Threshold: 50. Intangible for now, Arlan can only be harmed by the kinds of magick that harm demons. That might change when he’s built up enough to create a physical body.
Urge - Be You 50%: For every 24 hours of uninterrupted possession a roll on this identity does damage like a hand-to-hand attack against an identity or relationship, adding that same amount to Arlan’s stash. Other aspects like disorders and notches should have wound thresholds assigned to them by the GM and are only properly removed when that value is exceeded.
Toxic Baggage 40%: Arlan might not be able to possess people without permission, but he can still ruin their lives. With a successful roll he can dump one of the negative things he has collected on someone, this happens at the same 24-hours-per-roll rate as removal but does not require possession.
Thursday, 28 November 2019
212 - Inflatable Turnkey
Unnatural Entity: Inflatable Turnkey
Once upon a time there was an adept who inherited his grandfather’s extensive collection of antique inflatable sex dolls. An ordinary human being would have disposed of the collection quietly or at least discreetly inquired about selling them to another collector. Sheila Carmody was anything but ordinary, the sole practitioner of a school dedicated to squalid nobility she instead turned them into servants to fill her court.
An inflatable turnkey starts life in a deflated heap of plastic with a little battery-powered air pump for rapid inflation and marked with the Elder Sign (H.P. Lovecraft’s original version that looks like a tree branch, not the five pointed star with an eye in the middle). Included is a uniform related to some kind of service occupation, you can switch it out with another one the first time but it has to be tailored to fit the doll. Inflated and dressed the turnkey is activated by the user daubing a four letter word of their choosing (hereafter the name the turnkey will respond to) on to its forehead and giving it an order.
The order must be related to the profession the doll is dressed like. A maid uniform is good for cleaning up your apartment but not bodyguarding you and a buddy and a driver is good to chauffeur you around but couldn’t appraise jewelry for you. This order forms a seed of their behaviour, which then is clumsily adapted over time and additional instructions to shape it into a tool that serves a very particular purpose. They learn to fill a very particular role in the same way that a roomba learns the layout of someone’s home.
But Shiela forgot to carry a two somewhere because once a turnkey starts learning into its role it doesn’t stop. Entire baroque philosophies are constructed around the act of making breakfast or piloting a boat. Over time these micro-philosophies usurp the original programming and the turnkey begins to behave erratically. Most of them are put down, some disappear, presumed runaways.
There are rumours that groups of runaway turnkeys have formed underground societies. That a city sanitation worker might one day open a door into a disused service tunnel and find a dried out cistern turned into an amphitheatre. Rows of vinyl faces drawn into surprised, open-mouthed rictuses in a myriad of uniforms turning towards them in unison in the glare of their flashlight. That they might get a vague impression of a gestalt formed of all these pieces working together and relying on each other in unison like a microcosm of how society is supposed to function. Depending on the collective temperament he might have a chance to escape before they set on him, pressing him into motley and forcing him to help continue refining their brains. In that case he’d best be served by finding a way to appease the collective philosophies of “mowing lawns” and “tending bar” before they try to reshape his brain to get better leadership out of him.
As they aren’t human, turnkey’s can’t use magick but they’ll know it when the see it.
Inflatable Turnkey, One-Use Factotum
Wound Threshold: 20. Damage from firearms does regular melee damage, damage from piercing weapons continues to do 1 point per turn unless patched. An active air pump can stave off this damage or restore it once repaired.
Purpose 66%: This is the identity that the turnkey uses for actions relating to its shaped purpose. It may be 10% to 20% worse or better than this, depending on the condition of their uniform and whether the development of their personality has begun to deviate from their programming.
Winging It 20%: Turnkey’s are terrible at everything outside of their single area of expertise. Use this for that.
Once upon a time there was an adept who inherited his grandfather’s extensive collection of antique inflatable sex dolls. An ordinary human being would have disposed of the collection quietly or at least discreetly inquired about selling them to another collector. Sheila Carmody was anything but ordinary, the sole practitioner of a school dedicated to squalid nobility she instead turned them into servants to fill her court.
An inflatable turnkey starts life in a deflated heap of plastic with a little battery-powered air pump for rapid inflation and marked with the Elder Sign (H.P. Lovecraft’s original version that looks like a tree branch, not the five pointed star with an eye in the middle). Included is a uniform related to some kind of service occupation, you can switch it out with another one the first time but it has to be tailored to fit the doll. Inflated and dressed the turnkey is activated by the user daubing a four letter word of their choosing (hereafter the name the turnkey will respond to) on to its forehead and giving it an order.
The order must be related to the profession the doll is dressed like. A maid uniform is good for cleaning up your apartment but not bodyguarding you and a buddy and a driver is good to chauffeur you around but couldn’t appraise jewelry for you. This order forms a seed of their behaviour, which then is clumsily adapted over time and additional instructions to shape it into a tool that serves a very particular purpose. They learn to fill a very particular role in the same way that a roomba learns the layout of someone’s home.
But Shiela forgot to carry a two somewhere because once a turnkey starts learning into its role it doesn’t stop. Entire baroque philosophies are constructed around the act of making breakfast or piloting a boat. Over time these micro-philosophies usurp the original programming and the turnkey begins to behave erratically. Most of them are put down, some disappear, presumed runaways.
There are rumours that groups of runaway turnkeys have formed underground societies. That a city sanitation worker might one day open a door into a disused service tunnel and find a dried out cistern turned into an amphitheatre. Rows of vinyl faces drawn into surprised, open-mouthed rictuses in a myriad of uniforms turning towards them in unison in the glare of their flashlight. That they might get a vague impression of a gestalt formed of all these pieces working together and relying on each other in unison like a microcosm of how society is supposed to function. Depending on the collective temperament he might have a chance to escape before they set on him, pressing him into motley and forcing him to help continue refining their brains. In that case he’d best be served by finding a way to appease the collective philosophies of “mowing lawns” and “tending bar” before they try to reshape his brain to get better leadership out of him.
As they aren’t human, turnkey’s can’t use magick but they’ll know it when the see it.
Inflatable Turnkey, One-Use Factotum
Wound Threshold: 20. Damage from firearms does regular melee damage, damage from piercing weapons continues to do 1 point per turn unless patched. An active air pump can stave off this damage or restore it once repaired.
Purpose 66%: This is the identity that the turnkey uses for actions relating to its shaped purpose. It may be 10% to 20% worse or better than this, depending on the condition of their uniform and whether the development of their personality has begun to deviate from their programming.
Winging It 20%: Turnkey’s are terrible at everything outside of their single area of expertise. Use this for that.
Tuesday, 19 November 2019
203 - Freudian Chimera
Unnatural Entity: Freudian Chimera
There’s an agrimancer who fancies herself a therapist. She’s no such thing, she never finished high school, but she reads about it every moment she isn’t experimenting with animal husbandry. Theories of mind and compulsion, traumas buried in the subconscious that conventional aid can only root out after years of painful introspection. This seems uncertain and primitive to her. Instead in the same way that she has shortcut around nature in the microcosm of messy expulsions, animal midwifery and selective breeding, she births her client’s inner demons into the world to deal with them directly.
It’s an involved process combining the extraction of a number of bodily fluids and tissues (including marrow and bile) from the progenitor client and the carefully managed interspecies surrogacy of at least three cycles of different animals determined by a complex combination of astrology and personality testing. Unless magickally sped up (and she hates to interfere like that) the process can take years. The creatures spawned from the final birth are hideous freaks of nature, conglomerations of every previous animal involved in the process and animated with unnatural vigor.
The resemblance of any of their forebears is entirely superficial for these creatures. Dissected they are undifferentiated material the whole way through except for a trio or quartet of sacs containing an oily rainbow of fluid that reeks of hydrocarbons if they are punctured. They eat only the inedible refuse we throw away, plastics, glass, etc. In most respects chimeras are only as smart as the dumbest animal in their combination, excepting in cases of their progenitor’s passions. Their reaction to those is uncannily human.
Everyone has a different use for chimeras: journeys of self-discovery and transformation, an unnatural proxy for the excision of persistent traumas, a mirror to gauge their mental health against or an unusual pet or familiar. One repeat customer demands to be locked in a barn with his overnight, emerging bloodsoaked and victorious with the dawn. It would be more impressive if his weren’t mostly made out of chickens and cats. It is theoretically possible that a chimera might be used to indirectly control, monitor or hurt someone but their creator would never willingly make one for that purpose.
Used to further a relevant objective in the right way they are good for a weighty global/petty cosmic milestone. Even using one the wrong way is good for a milestone only one step down from that.
Freudian Chimera, Beast of Inner Nature
Wound Threshold: 30-120, depending on the size of the agglomerated animals.
Id 50%: Substitutes for Struggle, depending on the animals it is made from the chimera may have a +3 or +6 damage bonus. Can be flip-flopped against targets of its progenitor’s rage passion.
Ego 50%: Coerces a gauge. The same one tied to its progenitor’s fear passion, it can flip-flop rolls that relate to the passion directly.
Superego 50%: Cooperative. May shift its or another party’s rolls by exactly 10 points in either direction consistent with its progenitor’s noble passion.
Trauma 70%: Select a supernatural identity. This identity only exists for chimera’s birthed from progenitor’s with one or more disorders, to which its power is symbolic.
There’s an agrimancer who fancies herself a therapist. She’s no such thing, she never finished high school, but she reads about it every moment she isn’t experimenting with animal husbandry. Theories of mind and compulsion, traumas buried in the subconscious that conventional aid can only root out after years of painful introspection. This seems uncertain and primitive to her. Instead in the same way that she has shortcut around nature in the microcosm of messy expulsions, animal midwifery and selective breeding, she births her client’s inner demons into the world to deal with them directly.
It’s an involved process combining the extraction of a number of bodily fluids and tissues (including marrow and bile) from the progenitor client and the carefully managed interspecies surrogacy of at least three cycles of different animals determined by a complex combination of astrology and personality testing. Unless magickally sped up (and she hates to interfere like that) the process can take years. The creatures spawned from the final birth are hideous freaks of nature, conglomerations of every previous animal involved in the process and animated with unnatural vigor.
The resemblance of any of their forebears is entirely superficial for these creatures. Dissected they are undifferentiated material the whole way through except for a trio or quartet of sacs containing an oily rainbow of fluid that reeks of hydrocarbons if they are punctured. They eat only the inedible refuse we throw away, plastics, glass, etc. In most respects chimeras are only as smart as the dumbest animal in their combination, excepting in cases of their progenitor’s passions. Their reaction to those is uncannily human.
Everyone has a different use for chimeras: journeys of self-discovery and transformation, an unnatural proxy for the excision of persistent traumas, a mirror to gauge their mental health against or an unusual pet or familiar. One repeat customer demands to be locked in a barn with his overnight, emerging bloodsoaked and victorious with the dawn. It would be more impressive if his weren’t mostly made out of chickens and cats. It is theoretically possible that a chimera might be used to indirectly control, monitor or hurt someone but their creator would never willingly make one for that purpose.
Used to further a relevant objective in the right way they are good for a weighty global/petty cosmic milestone. Even using one the wrong way is good for a milestone only one step down from that.
Freudian Chimera, Beast of Inner Nature
Wound Threshold: 30-120, depending on the size of the agglomerated animals.
Id 50%: Substitutes for Struggle, depending on the animals it is made from the chimera may have a +3 or +6 damage bonus. Can be flip-flopped against targets of its progenitor’s rage passion.
Ego 50%: Coerces a gauge. The same one tied to its progenitor’s fear passion, it can flip-flop rolls that relate to the passion directly.
Superego 50%: Cooperative. May shift its or another party’s rolls by exactly 10 points in either direction consistent with its progenitor’s noble passion.
Trauma 70%: Select a supernatural identity. This identity only exists for chimera’s birthed from progenitor’s with one or more disorders, to which its power is symbolic.
Friday, 8 November 2019
192 - Nightmare Extrusion
Unnatural Entity: Nightmare Extrusion
Times change but people do not. Grey matter developed to survive harsh natural environments, riddled with biases that work to protect the tribal unit and avoid predators. Their suitability to modern life is hijacked by proxying political and group identity for family and the use of marketing and media to prey on primitive reward circuitry. The strength of centralisation has overcome enough of the downsides to reward us with culture, technology and medicine. Yet underneath we’re the same smelly animals that scrambled down out of the trees.
Mechanomancy turned its back on this in favour of the bright mechanical future in which innovation and shedding the things - memories - that made its practitioners human was the new way. As it faded from relevancy with the march of technology one clockworker liquidated his resources and took a last stab at removing what he saw as foundational flaws in humanity that denied them this way. The result, in the bowels of an abandoned 19th century bedding factory on the edge of a dying rust belt town, is a vast mechanical apparatus, the size of the earliest computers. Through the winding, rusty twists of its bowels at its heart is a chair where people were seated to have these instinctual fears removed.
Being run through the extractor is a bizarre sensation combining metaphysical mutilation with machine actuated brain surgery. For those who can sit still through a rank 6 Violence check (failing is good for hand to hand +6 damage, the machinery is careful but it’s still surgery), it removes fears based on the old world of our origins. From this point forward people who’ve been through the machine don’t make stress checks for those anxieties. However if a case can be made that the fear is the product of modernity - even if it’s rooted in primitive instinct - it still frightens them. They also lose access to their fear passion regardless of what it is.
Times change but people do not. Grey matter developed to survive harsh natural environments, riddled with biases that work to protect the tribal unit and avoid predators. Their suitability to modern life is hijacked by proxying political and group identity for family and the use of marketing and media to prey on primitive reward circuitry. The strength of centralisation has overcome enough of the downsides to reward us with culture, technology and medicine. Yet underneath we’re the same smelly animals that scrambled down out of the trees.
Mechanomancy turned its back on this in favour of the bright mechanical future in which innovation and shedding the things - memories - that made its practitioners human was the new way. As it faded from relevancy with the march of technology one clockworker liquidated his resources and took a last stab at removing what he saw as foundational flaws in humanity that denied them this way. The result, in the bowels of an abandoned 19th century bedding factory on the edge of a dying rust belt town, is a vast mechanical apparatus, the size of the earliest computers. Through the winding, rusty twists of its bowels at its heart is a chair where people were seated to have these instinctual fears removed.
Being run through the extractor is a bizarre sensation combining metaphysical mutilation with machine actuated brain surgery. For those who can sit still through a rank 6 Violence check (failing is good for hand to hand +6 damage, the machinery is careful but it’s still surgery), it removes fears based on the old world of our origins. From this point forward people who’ve been through the machine don’t make stress checks for those anxieties. However if a case can be made that the fear is the product of modernity - even if it’s rooted in primitive instinct - it still frightens them. They also lose access to their fear passion regardless of what it is.
Extrusions are the waste product of this process. Mechanical nightmares that embody the fears of prehistory. They are drawn to their progenitor (but not supernaturally gifted in tracking them), but their frustration in being unable to feed from them often ends in violence. Others they will stalk for days, being the lions outside of the campfire light, before setting upon them too.
Nightmare Extrusion, Fear Rendered Anew
Wound Threshold: 10-250, equal to the number of failed notches on the person it was extracted from multiplied by 10. Wound threshold is restored on a 10 per failed notch basis on checks caused by an extrusion’s prenatural fear identity.
Rusty & Razor Sharp 60%: Substitutes for Struggle, Substitutes for Pursuit. Using this identity against someone successfully coerced with prenatural fear allows it to be flip-flopped and grants +6 damage.
Prenatural Fear 60%: Coerces all gauges. Apart from their naturally horrifying industrial appearances, extrusions are the embodiment of our ancient fears: predators, outsiders, sickness. They feed off these things, this identity is for coercion based on our most primitive fears. Being scared of the dark qualifies, on the other hand, being afraid of not being able to pay your mortgage is an alien flavour and does not.
Rust Bucket 45%: Substitutes for Secrecy. Stopping and falling into a heap makes nightmare extrusions look like a pile of ordinary rusty scrap, it’ll still stick out in the wrong environment.
Nightmare Extrusion, Fear Rendered Anew
Wound Threshold: 10-250, equal to the number of failed notches on the person it was extracted from multiplied by 10. Wound threshold is restored on a 10 per failed notch basis on checks caused by an extrusion’s prenatural fear identity.
Rusty & Razor Sharp 60%: Substitutes for Struggle, Substitutes for Pursuit. Using this identity against someone successfully coerced with prenatural fear allows it to be flip-flopped and grants +6 damage.
Prenatural Fear 60%: Coerces all gauges. Apart from their naturally horrifying industrial appearances, extrusions are the embodiment of our ancient fears: predators, outsiders, sickness. They feed off these things, this identity is for coercion based on our most primitive fears. Being scared of the dark qualifies, on the other hand, being afraid of not being able to pay your mortgage is an alien flavour and does not.
Rust Bucket 45%: Substitutes for Secrecy. Stopping and falling into a heap makes nightmare extrusions look like a pile of ordinary rusty scrap, it’ll still stick out in the wrong environment.
Wednesday, 23 October 2019
176 - Mirrormouth
Unnatural Entity: Mirrormouth
Within the deeper machinery of the universe there are unnatural processes that clear away the waste products of humanities’ messy meddling with the universal firmament. Humanity, being the unpredictable element that necessitates the clean up in the first place, can pollute these processes into being something more than intended. For example, collapsed otherspaces leave behind wreckage and fragments of the intentions and beliefs that built them. The precursors to mirrormouths dutifully spawn, multiply and scoop up these fragments in the wake of these collapses and digest them so they don’t bleed into reality before dissolving into ephemeral flotsam themselves. All of this occurs in dimensions imperceptible to all but the most spaced out and incoherent of magi.
Occasionally exposure to this wreckage causes a mutation in the clean up organism’s reproduction, instead of programmed death it persists like bacteria that has learned to turn magickal radiation into food. Persisting, it needs more food.
Mirrormouths appear as man-sized, disembodied, toothy maws in the junctions between spaces, like doorways and tunnel openings, but also symbolic portals like reflective surfaces (hence the name). They can only intersect with our world in these junctures, the rest of the time they maneuver in a spaces as invisible and intangible to us as we are to them.
Despite appearances they aren’t physically dangerous and will only go after those involved in constructing or maintaining an otherspace (completed permanent otherspaces don’t register to them for some reason, hiding in one is a good way to avoid attention from a pack of ‘mouths). Instead a mirrormouth will snack off of an otherspace objective, each percentage point will give it another week of life. Alternatively it will parasite on maintenance of an existing otherspace, costing an extra charge per day unless dislodged and dealt with, for the same benefit
There’s rumours of a YA novel author and adept in New Jersey that keeps a tamed mirrormouth as a pet. Threatening would-be universe builders in a unique protection racket or sending it to chow down on pocket dimensions whose powers she wants for herself. Two people have tried to kill her for her predations, both were sent back to their respective cabals bent 90 degrees backwards at the waist but otherwise unharmed as warnings.
Mirrormouth, Extradimensional Cleaner
Wound Threshold: 50. Mirrormouth’s can’t be hurt directly, damage to a junction one appears in will harm it normally but only push it out of our dimension temporarily if destroyed unless the mirrormouth is also dead.
Otherspace Sniffer 50%: Once a week a mirrormouth can roll on this identity to track down an otherspace or cabal making one based on magickal energies visible in its dimension. +20% shift on instances it has previously fed on.
Local Reality Warping 70%: Mirrormouth’s pick up the characteristics of the otherspaces they eat. Per encounter they can roll once for each of these until they succeed, inflicting the successful result on local reality for the duration.
Om Nom 60%: On a successful roll can gobble the sum of an otherspace-building objective’s percentiles at a rate of 1% per turn unless interrupted. Usable once per encounter.
Within the deeper machinery of the universe there are unnatural processes that clear away the waste products of humanities’ messy meddling with the universal firmament. Humanity, being the unpredictable element that necessitates the clean up in the first place, can pollute these processes into being something more than intended. For example, collapsed otherspaces leave behind wreckage and fragments of the intentions and beliefs that built them. The precursors to mirrormouths dutifully spawn, multiply and scoop up these fragments in the wake of these collapses and digest them so they don’t bleed into reality before dissolving into ephemeral flotsam themselves. All of this occurs in dimensions imperceptible to all but the most spaced out and incoherent of magi.
Occasionally exposure to this wreckage causes a mutation in the clean up organism’s reproduction, instead of programmed death it persists like bacteria that has learned to turn magickal radiation into food. Persisting, it needs more food.
Mirrormouths appear as man-sized, disembodied, toothy maws in the junctions between spaces, like doorways and tunnel openings, but also symbolic portals like reflective surfaces (hence the name). They can only intersect with our world in these junctures, the rest of the time they maneuver in a spaces as invisible and intangible to us as we are to them.
Despite appearances they aren’t physically dangerous and will only go after those involved in constructing or maintaining an otherspace (completed permanent otherspaces don’t register to them for some reason, hiding in one is a good way to avoid attention from a pack of ‘mouths). Instead a mirrormouth will snack off of an otherspace objective, each percentage point will give it another week of life. Alternatively it will parasite on maintenance of an existing otherspace, costing an extra charge per day unless dislodged and dealt with, for the same benefit
There’s rumours of a YA novel author and adept in New Jersey that keeps a tamed mirrormouth as a pet. Threatening would-be universe builders in a unique protection racket or sending it to chow down on pocket dimensions whose powers she wants for herself. Two people have tried to kill her for her predations, both were sent back to their respective cabals bent 90 degrees backwards at the waist but otherwise unharmed as warnings.
Mirrormouth, Extradimensional Cleaner
Wound Threshold: 50. Mirrormouth’s can’t be hurt directly, damage to a junction one appears in will harm it normally but only push it out of our dimension temporarily if destroyed unless the mirrormouth is also dead.
Otherspace Sniffer 50%: Once a week a mirrormouth can roll on this identity to track down an otherspace or cabal making one based on magickal energies visible in its dimension. +20% shift on instances it has previously fed on.
Local Reality Warping 70%: Mirrormouth’s pick up the characteristics of the otherspaces they eat. Per encounter they can roll once for each of these until they succeed, inflicting the successful result on local reality for the duration.
Om Nom 60%: On a successful roll can gobble the sum of an otherspace-building objective’s percentiles at a rate of 1% per turn unless interrupted. Usable once per encounter.
Saturday, 12 October 2019
165 - Hermit Car
Unnatural Entity: Hermit Car
Not all demons are lucky enough to be able to sate their Urge easily. Between infernal competition, magickal interference, fortuitous comeuppance or a lack of acceptable hosts many of the obsessive dead go unfulfilled. Some decay into revenants, others are forced into bestial shapes by desperate stooping to animal hosts and some, a bare handful, are twisted into something even more lowly, a Hermit Car. Named for what was arguably the first confirmed postmodern instance, Hermit Cars are the old trope of demons bound into objects, gone feral. Abandoned or lost by their creators their adaption is one of blind necessity.
Trapped in unfeeling stone, blind pages and dead metal the human shape and obsession of a bound demon twists under sensory deprivation. It takes the thoughtform of the unfeeling, unthinking object it is in while also fettered by the aching shadows of its old, forgotten Urge. Most of them lay dormant and undetected, unable to see the world or satisfy themselves.
There are two criteria for waking a Hermit Car, proximity to someone scarred by the Unnatural and the object of their long lost Urge. Pirating the latent signal of their damage like a ship using the shine of a lighthouse to guide it, the hermit lurches into a grotesque parody of life and bee-lines for its Urge. Most Urges can't be managed by a possessed toaster however and the resulting battering can be fatal for the subject if it is fragile or the Hermit Car large and powerful.
If it does manage to destroy the object of its Urge the catharsis provides momentary freedom as the demon is released. But the damage and adaptation to inanimacy is permanent, all Hermit Cars require a shell like their namesake crabs in order to retain coherency. Scuttling back to their old digs is likewise impossible, the growth accompanying release will never restore them to their former selves but it does rend the old shell to pieces and demand the next one be a little larger.
Not all demons are lucky enough to be able to sate their Urge easily. Between infernal competition, magickal interference, fortuitous comeuppance or a lack of acceptable hosts many of the obsessive dead go unfulfilled. Some decay into revenants, others are forced into bestial shapes by desperate stooping to animal hosts and some, a bare handful, are twisted into something even more lowly, a Hermit Car. Named for what was arguably the first confirmed postmodern instance, Hermit Cars are the old trope of demons bound into objects, gone feral. Abandoned or lost by their creators their adaption is one of blind necessity.
Trapped in unfeeling stone, blind pages and dead metal the human shape and obsession of a bound demon twists under sensory deprivation. It takes the thoughtform of the unfeeling, unthinking object it is in while also fettered by the aching shadows of its old, forgotten Urge. Most of them lay dormant and undetected, unable to see the world or satisfy themselves.
There are two criteria for waking a Hermit Car, proximity to someone scarred by the Unnatural and the object of their long lost Urge. Pirating the latent signal of their damage like a ship using the shine of a lighthouse to guide it, the hermit lurches into a grotesque parody of life and bee-lines for its Urge. Most Urges can't be managed by a possessed toaster however and the resulting battering can be fatal for the subject if it is fragile or the Hermit Car large and powerful.
If it does manage to destroy the object of its Urge the catharsis provides momentary freedom as the demon is released. But the damage and adaptation to inanimacy is permanent, all Hermit Cars require a shell like their namesake crabs in order to retain coherency. Scuttling back to their old digs is likewise impossible, the growth accompanying release will never restore them to their former selves but it does rend the old shell to pieces and demand the next one be a little larger.
Hermit Car, Possessed Artifice
Wound Threshold: Highly variable when incorporated, otherwise 25 but only vulnerable to magickal attacks.
Rabid Genius Loci 30-60%: Covers anything the demon might try when active. Equal to the highest native (as in going by shock gauges) Secrecy of anyone nearby with at least three hardened and one failed Unnatural notches. Alternatively it can substitute a supernatural identity from anyone nearby, including being able to flip flop.
Wound Threshold: Highly variable when incorporated, otherwise 25 but only vulnerable to magickal attacks.
Rabid Genius Loci 30-60%: Covers anything the demon might try when active. Equal to the highest native (as in going by shock gauges) Secrecy of anyone nearby with at least three hardened and one failed Unnatural notches. Alternatively it can substitute a supernatural identity from anyone nearby, including being able to flip flop.
Friday, 11 October 2019
164 - Lipsticked Pig
Unnatural Entity: Lipsticked Pig
A lot of things are either unpalatable options or plain not fit for purpose, that doesn’t stop people from trying to use them or sell them as somehow cheaper but mysteriously better alternatives. The phrase “lipstick on a pig” is an idiom that denigrates the practice of superficially gussying up one thing as another with this intent in mind. Whether the product of an adept with a wry sense of humour or a pearl formed around a thousand false promises and cheap disguises, lipsticked pigs epitomize the concept.
A lipsticked pig appears as an above average example of what people expect in its environment: meet one in a bank and it’s the snappily dressed branch teller who is sure to win “employee of the month”, running into one in a warzone and it’s the gallant and disciplined officer or prizewinning war-photographer. Once a stereotype has been written by other people’s expectations, it struggles to live up to it. As far as anyone can tell this is a pig’s primary drive and it does try, but even the intelligence of the world’s fifth-smartest animal often falters. Most won’t notice short of intense scrutiny since the natural allure of the pig redirects blame for its failures on innocent bystanders.
Without anything major on the line this could go on indefinitely, a seemingly well-performing middle manager who just happens to have a higher than average staff turnover can go unnoticed in a lot of organisations. If some crank develops a grudge and learns the truth they’ll be hard pressed to pierce the magick of the illusion for others, but if they can pull it off the pig is revealed.
It’s hard to look at, your eyes slide off it as it shuffles between your expectations like a bad magic eye poster. Underneath is the impression of pale, pink flesh, garishly applied cosmetics and a voice that bleats in porcine squealing from a disquietingly humanoid shape. Unmasked lipsticked pigs aren’t vengeful, they’re terrified. If allowed, they’ll flee in terror to build a new nest elsewhere. Unfortunately for any vigilantes their powers make them sympathetic victims to unaware bystanders.
Eating the cooked flesh of a lipsticked pig confers some of its illusory lustre, diners gain a +10% shift on Status and Connect until their next failed roll of any kind. Mistepping shatters the illusion and the fall from grace is especially hard, treat that failure as though it were one step worse (regular failures become matches which become fumbles in turn).
Lipsticked Pig, Cowardly Porcine Imposter
Wound Threshold: 60. In physical combat pigs are hard to pin down perceptually, take a -10% shift to attacks unless it attacked you last.
Emperor’s New Clothes 65%: This is the identity that occludes the pig’s true nature. Note that even if you’ve uncovered this it still works on other people, calling attention to it gives the pig a free coercion result on this identity if it succeeds an opposed roll against their scrutiny, “how dare you!” If you’ve got buddies it takes -10% for every bystander backing you up.
Limited Aptitude 30%: This is what the pig uses to get actual results, it’s not exactly stupid but quietly ineffectual and relies on others for protective colouration.
Hoggish Thrashing 35%: Substitutes for Struggle, Substitutes for Dodge. Pigs are poorly skilled fighters but backing one into a corner is dangerous, their attacks count as a +3 damage weapon.
A lot of things are either unpalatable options or plain not fit for purpose, that doesn’t stop people from trying to use them or sell them as somehow cheaper but mysteriously better alternatives. The phrase “lipstick on a pig” is an idiom that denigrates the practice of superficially gussying up one thing as another with this intent in mind. Whether the product of an adept with a wry sense of humour or a pearl formed around a thousand false promises and cheap disguises, lipsticked pigs epitomize the concept.
A lipsticked pig appears as an above average example of what people expect in its environment: meet one in a bank and it’s the snappily dressed branch teller who is sure to win “employee of the month”, running into one in a warzone and it’s the gallant and disciplined officer or prizewinning war-photographer. Once a stereotype has been written by other people’s expectations, it struggles to live up to it. As far as anyone can tell this is a pig’s primary drive and it does try, but even the intelligence of the world’s fifth-smartest animal often falters. Most won’t notice short of intense scrutiny since the natural allure of the pig redirects blame for its failures on innocent bystanders.
Without anything major on the line this could go on indefinitely, a seemingly well-performing middle manager who just happens to have a higher than average staff turnover can go unnoticed in a lot of organisations. If some crank develops a grudge and learns the truth they’ll be hard pressed to pierce the magick of the illusion for others, but if they can pull it off the pig is revealed.
It’s hard to look at, your eyes slide off it as it shuffles between your expectations like a bad magic eye poster. Underneath is the impression of pale, pink flesh, garishly applied cosmetics and a voice that bleats in porcine squealing from a disquietingly humanoid shape. Unmasked lipsticked pigs aren’t vengeful, they’re terrified. If allowed, they’ll flee in terror to build a new nest elsewhere. Unfortunately for any vigilantes their powers make them sympathetic victims to unaware bystanders.
Eating the cooked flesh of a lipsticked pig confers some of its illusory lustre, diners gain a +10% shift on Status and Connect until their next failed roll of any kind. Mistepping shatters the illusion and the fall from grace is especially hard, treat that failure as though it were one step worse (regular failures become matches which become fumbles in turn).
Lipsticked Pig, Cowardly Porcine Imposter
Wound Threshold: 60. In physical combat pigs are hard to pin down perceptually, take a -10% shift to attacks unless it attacked you last.
Emperor’s New Clothes 65%: This is the identity that occludes the pig’s true nature. Note that even if you’ve uncovered this it still works on other people, calling attention to it gives the pig a free coercion result on this identity if it succeeds an opposed roll against their scrutiny, “how dare you!” If you’ve got buddies it takes -10% for every bystander backing you up.
Limited Aptitude 30%: This is what the pig uses to get actual results, it’s not exactly stupid but quietly ineffectual and relies on others for protective colouration.
Hoggish Thrashing 35%: Substitutes for Struggle, Substitutes for Dodge. Pigs are poorly skilled fighters but backing one into a corner is dangerous, their attacks count as a +3 damage weapon.
Sunday, 6 October 2019
159 - Mask-Lich
Unnatural Entity: Mask-Lich
One of the most common goals of any self-respecting sorcerer is “live forever”. Either completely out of reach or part of a faustian bargain too rich for the blood of most, its rarity is usually a function of extreme difficulty or high attendant cost. That and no one who has it also wants to risk someone snatching it away by exposing themselves.
Personamancers, adepts focused on the magick of identity and its subversion with a heavy focus on masks, has one route that’s been practiced by those lucky enough to gain a major charge. Investing their consciousness in a mask will technically only last as long as the materials do, but that’s still a step up from human frailty. Being disembodied without access to a host body, they’re one of the few types of immortal encountered with any frequency.
Unless someone puts on the mask-lich the extent of their ability to interact with the world is the occasional blat of unnatural phenomenon. Worn by a person it can possess them just like a demon. One useful side effect of this, in addition to the ability to bargain with an entity with the ability to create supernatural effects, is that nothing else can glob on to you and any effects attached to you as a person are suppressed (but still running) for the duration of the possession. Astral parasites and time leeches fall off and disappear into the ether and that proxy ritual temporarily goes AWOL.
In order to overcome the limitations of their new form most successful mask-liches plan ahead and form cults in which playing host is a venerated position. Owing to the power of any adept strong and dedicated enough to try for the long haul they usually have access to special occult knowledge, artifacts and rituals warped around whatever rationale forms their theology. These are useful crutches for the lich to try to maintain position in a humanocentric universe, but also weak points as it would be severely hampered without them.
Mask-Lich, Face Forever
Wound Threshold: 15-30. Mask-liches are tiny, slightly smaller than a human head but made out of sturdy materials. Attacks against one are at a -30% shift, like a normal called shot against someone’s head (see page 66 of Book 1: Play). This also applies to magickal blasts and other sorcerous attacks. If an attack against a worn mask is missed but would have hit without the penalty it does damage to the host instead.
Wield Host 50-80%: Amounts to demonic possession for a host who puts on the mask (use the rules on pages 103-104 of Book 2: Run). Varies significantly based on local social conditions: negative shifts in circumstances where wearing a mask is frowned upon and positive shifts during events where wearing a mask is the norm or celebrated.
Faux Sorcery 60%: Mask-Liches have given up their humanity and with it their access to magick. Instead they can generate 1 significant and 3 minor unnatural phenomenon a day, directed by this identity.
Play Human 45%: Substitutes for all abilities (except one, chosen at creation, which falls under Wield Host).
One of the most common goals of any self-respecting sorcerer is “live forever”. Either completely out of reach or part of a faustian bargain too rich for the blood of most, its rarity is usually a function of extreme difficulty or high attendant cost. That and no one who has it also wants to risk someone snatching it away by exposing themselves.
Personamancers, adepts focused on the magick of identity and its subversion with a heavy focus on masks, has one route that’s been practiced by those lucky enough to gain a major charge. Investing their consciousness in a mask will technically only last as long as the materials do, but that’s still a step up from human frailty. Being disembodied without access to a host body, they’re one of the few types of immortal encountered with any frequency.
Unless someone puts on the mask-lich the extent of their ability to interact with the world is the occasional blat of unnatural phenomenon. Worn by a person it can possess them just like a demon. One useful side effect of this, in addition to the ability to bargain with an entity with the ability to create supernatural effects, is that nothing else can glob on to you and any effects attached to you as a person are suppressed (but still running) for the duration of the possession. Astral parasites and time leeches fall off and disappear into the ether and that proxy ritual temporarily goes AWOL.
In order to overcome the limitations of their new form most successful mask-liches plan ahead and form cults in which playing host is a venerated position. Owing to the power of any adept strong and dedicated enough to try for the long haul they usually have access to special occult knowledge, artifacts and rituals warped around whatever rationale forms their theology. These are useful crutches for the lich to try to maintain position in a humanocentric universe, but also weak points as it would be severely hampered without them.
Mask-Lich, Face Forever
Wound Threshold: 15-30. Mask-liches are tiny, slightly smaller than a human head but made out of sturdy materials. Attacks against one are at a -30% shift, like a normal called shot against someone’s head (see page 66 of Book 1: Play). This also applies to magickal blasts and other sorcerous attacks. If an attack against a worn mask is missed but would have hit without the penalty it does damage to the host instead.
Wield Host 50-80%: Amounts to demonic possession for a host who puts on the mask (use the rules on pages 103-104 of Book 2: Run). Varies significantly based on local social conditions: negative shifts in circumstances where wearing a mask is frowned upon and positive shifts during events where wearing a mask is the norm or celebrated.
Faux Sorcery 60%: Mask-Liches have given up their humanity and with it their access to magick. Instead they can generate 1 significant and 3 minor unnatural phenomenon a day, directed by this identity.
Play Human 45%: Substitutes for all abilities (except one, chosen at creation, which falls under Wield Host).
Thursday, 26 September 2019
149 - Meatpacker's Misery
Unnatural Entity: Meatpacker’s Misery
Only humanity wields magick and power over the cosmos, all else is projection. The only gods responsible for the world we live in are us, a thought too alien and terrifying for most to consider. To someone disenfranchised by the sum total of humankind's efforts this seems both cold comfort and an academic distinction. People who have seen miseries might argue that they are proof that other species have similar claims. They’d be wrong.
Abattoir work is filthy, disgusting and repetitively violent. Even in a more enlightened age of captive-bolt humane kill devices it is a conveyor belt industry of animal death. It inures the people who work in it to constant slaughter as it shields the broader public from the reality of anything but the sanitised image of buying cleanly packaged meat at the supermarket. The disconnect is shocking for some who peer behind the veil. A small number of them dedicate themselves to standing against a system that protects what they judge to be an intolerable practice borne of inhumane suffering. A smaller number of them die while consumed by this obsession.
So that’s the checklist: one dead, obsessive activist, the thing that traumatised them, and the anthropomorphized suffering of that thing. The resulting projection could be likened to a demon or a fiend, but is more specific than either. It starts off as a psychic image, invisible to cameras and sensors, of the dead progenitor’s humanised image of their championed victims - in one case it was stories of a skinless minotaur, dripping tallow and blood, that would menace late-night workers who it would catch alone at one meat processing plant. This image can’t do more than terrorize initially, but in doing so it builds tangibility. Nothing bad had actually happened at that plant except for a bunch of people quitting so management put a stern moratorium on spreading stories. Then one guy stepped out for a smoke break one night and found a coworker with his head smashed apart by a maul.
Having taken a life, the misery dissipates for a while before beginning the cycle anew. It might stay in one place or move around depending on whether it can find appropriate victims. If it loses relevance then it will either perish or lay dormant. It’s hard to tell which. One enterprising cabal of environmentalist magi are attempting to adapt miseries to tackle climate change.The only thing stopping them is their uncertainty in having sufficiently humanised the issue and the high price of admission.
Meatpacker’s Misery, Anthropomorphized Suffering
Wound Threshold: Equal to Accrued Vengeance. A misery can only be physically harmed while using its Accrued Vengeance identity, otherwise you’ll need to use magick.
Terrorize 65%: Once per day a misery can appear and provoke a stress check with a rank equal to the highest of either the failed or hardened notches on the most relevant gauge of the person who died to create it. This is tied to one gauge and only works on targets relevant to the misery’s issue. To people with enough hardened notches to ignore its displays the misery is invisible and it cannot target them.
Accrued Vengeance 1-100%: Starts at 1% and gains 10% for every failed notch the misery creates with its Terrorize power. Choosing to use this identity allows the misery to temporarily physically manifest and substitutes for all relevant abilities while doing so. If it manages to kill a target relevant to its issue this identity drops back to 1% and the misery goes away sated. Otherwise it vanishes after 33 minutes, but can try again in a day or two. It can flip-flop rolls on this identity against people hardened enough to ignore its Terrorize power.
Only humanity wields magick and power over the cosmos, all else is projection. The only gods responsible for the world we live in are us, a thought too alien and terrifying for most to consider. To someone disenfranchised by the sum total of humankind's efforts this seems both cold comfort and an academic distinction. People who have seen miseries might argue that they are proof that other species have similar claims. They’d be wrong.
Abattoir work is filthy, disgusting and repetitively violent. Even in a more enlightened age of captive-bolt humane kill devices it is a conveyor belt industry of animal death. It inures the people who work in it to constant slaughter as it shields the broader public from the reality of anything but the sanitised image of buying cleanly packaged meat at the supermarket. The disconnect is shocking for some who peer behind the veil. A small number of them dedicate themselves to standing against a system that protects what they judge to be an intolerable practice borne of inhumane suffering. A smaller number of them die while consumed by this obsession.
So that’s the checklist: one dead, obsessive activist, the thing that traumatised them, and the anthropomorphized suffering of that thing. The resulting projection could be likened to a demon or a fiend, but is more specific than either. It starts off as a psychic image, invisible to cameras and sensors, of the dead progenitor’s humanised image of their championed victims - in one case it was stories of a skinless minotaur, dripping tallow and blood, that would menace late-night workers who it would catch alone at one meat processing plant. This image can’t do more than terrorize initially, but in doing so it builds tangibility. Nothing bad had actually happened at that plant except for a bunch of people quitting so management put a stern moratorium on spreading stories. Then one guy stepped out for a smoke break one night and found a coworker with his head smashed apart by a maul.
Having taken a life, the misery dissipates for a while before beginning the cycle anew. It might stay in one place or move around depending on whether it can find appropriate victims. If it loses relevance then it will either perish or lay dormant. It’s hard to tell which. One enterprising cabal of environmentalist magi are attempting to adapt miseries to tackle climate change.The only thing stopping them is their uncertainty in having sufficiently humanised the issue and the high price of admission.
Meatpacker’s Misery, Anthropomorphized Suffering
Wound Threshold: Equal to Accrued Vengeance. A misery can only be physically harmed while using its Accrued Vengeance identity, otherwise you’ll need to use magick.
Terrorize 65%: Once per day a misery can appear and provoke a stress check with a rank equal to the highest of either the failed or hardened notches on the most relevant gauge of the person who died to create it. This is tied to one gauge and only works on targets relevant to the misery’s issue. To people with enough hardened notches to ignore its displays the misery is invisible and it cannot target them.
Accrued Vengeance 1-100%: Starts at 1% and gains 10% for every failed notch the misery creates with its Terrorize power. Choosing to use this identity allows the misery to temporarily physically manifest and substitutes for all relevant abilities while doing so. If it manages to kill a target relevant to its issue this identity drops back to 1% and the misery goes away sated. Otherwise it vanishes after 33 minutes, but can try again in a day or two. It can flip-flop rolls on this identity against people hardened enough to ignore its Terrorize power.
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