321 - The Deadline

Unnatural Phenomenon: The Deadline

One of the last remaining payphones in the city where it is located, the Deadline lurks at the back of a graffiti-covered parking garage like the bones of a corroded chrome dinosaur. To the uninitiated it’s a wonder it hasn’t been torn out, not just because it’s an outmoded relic but because it’s not functional. There’s no dial tone when you pick up the receiver.

Still it stubbornly continues to exist. Attempts to contact the company that owns it lead in circles as though they're no longer running and the city doesn’t seem to have any records or real inclination to check up on it. The one person to take removing it into his own hands quickly found out that there are others with an interest in the Deadline. People who’d do just about anything to keep it right where it is.

The Deadline only works with quarters minted in 1943, a couple of those in the slot will get you a dial tone and a minute and a half of call time. Everyone who uses it has their own method of dialling. Some use the first phone number the person they’re trying to reach ever had, others stab randomly at the keypad while focusing on them. The Deadline can contact anyone in the world, if they’re no longer alive.

After the minute and a half is up an operator cuts in, they let you know what you need to do for more time. Having been an urbanomancer in life the demon that powers the Deadline wants you to be her hands in the city. She sees herself as a lone bastion against the inevitability of change and you and her other callers are the tools she uses. Defy property developments, trash new tech that promises to change the face of her city, keep the various groups that populate it right where they are - like insects pinned behind glass.

You don’t have to, so long as you never want to speak to whoever you contacted again. Or use a landline. Declining users who try the latter find they can’t hear whoever they’re speaking to over the dead person they called incoherently begging them to do as she wants. They’re trapped in the phone lines, whatever force that controls the Deadline abandoning them in a place they say rends the fibres of their very souls. For some callers that's the reason they sought out the Deadline in the first place.

305 - Leaper

Unnatural Phenomenon: Leaper

People born on February the 29th, a date which only occurs on leap years, typically celebrate their birthday on either February 28th or March 1st in other years. Legally this varies by jurisdiction.

Magickally it’s another story, this fractional percentage of the population might not be as rare as seventh sons of seventh sons but they have a certain symbolic gravitas of their own. Their legal and biological ages keep track with everyone else’s but for the purposes of magick they age at a quarter of the normal rate, one year for every four when February 29th rolls around. Mostly this is inconsequential but in a few instances it makes them hot commodities when it comes to rituals that demand components or participation from someone of or below a certain age. Even among the debauchery of the occult underground people are less squeamish about harvesting and suborning adults than children.

It’s not all bad news for leapers though. Not only are they in a position to bargain with blood and organ-harvesting wizards that only a fraction of one percent of the population enjoys, but their status confers them one additional protection. Every leap year - on that day cobbled from the leftover parts of the previous four - they are completely immune to magick. Curses drop off, proxy enchantments wither, not even the powers of godwalkers can afflict them on the day that isn’t there.

There’s a cabal of former bank robbers including a pair of twins born on the 29th who have stumbled across this fact. It forms the crux of their plan to seek vengeance against the Demagogue who set them up to take the fall 12 years ago, but they’ll need to be swift and sure. If they miss their window they don’t just lose the element of surprise, it’ll be another four years before they can count on immunity to his charms and rituals again.

283 - Dead Archetypes

Unnatural Phenomenon: Dead Archetypes

Not all archetypes are able to be deposed by new ones. The Mother, the Warrior, some symbols are too primal and universal to brook alteration. Others avoid removal not because they're intrinsic to the human condition but because there's no replacement for them, instead they end up culturally superseded and slowly fade from view. Arguably this is worse.

You can't kill an idea, but you can certainly kill a person and ultimately that's what archetypes were and can be again. The House of Renunciation serves as an outlet for the usurpee but nothing exists to clean up after the god that no one believes in anymore.

Left moldering in the crawlspace of reality these carcasses bear strange fruit. It is the confirmed source of at least one Otherspace (a surprisingly idyllic meatscape populated by extremely pious mosquito-person aesthetes) and the theoretical precursor to the Linguistic Void. As unnatural resources the idea of harnessing an archetype's pussiannce is too mouthwatering for many to maintain scruples for long.

One suspiciously well-funded parapsychology department owes its success to pragmatic metaphysical graverobbing. A team of careful anthropologists, psychologists, archaeologists and one former godwalker of the Magus have already dug up something and drained all the magical juice they could out of it with cold iron electrodes. Now they're hot on the trail of a second orphaned archetype, traipsing through the heart of South America after rumours that one of the old religions holds clues to where they might find it. Cat and mouse games with a militaristic rival cabal led by their original founder threaten to spill the beans to the Occult Underground at large. Both assume and hope that's where the interference they've run up against is coming from, the possibility that their quarry might be stirring is something neither wants to contemplate.

279 - Mail-order Enlightenment

Unnatural Phenomenon: Mail-order Enlightenment

Word is that they kept getting targeted by the FDA in sweeps of shutting down those illegal websites that sell opioids and boner pills through the mail. They had their best run by labeling it as an alternative medicine but even then rumours that what they were selling was poisonous had all manner of law enforcement sniffing around. There was a big month-long sale last April and then the last site went offline after a week and never came back up. It’s all underground these days, best bet is if you can get someone who stocked up during the gold rush to hook you up.

Fourteen little yellow capsules in some cheap, numbered blister packaging like birth control. You can tell the real stuff from the fake by a strong artificial cheese-like odour that makes your nose sting. The knock offs haven’t managed to replicate that part yet. Take one a day and after about a week you’ll feel it start to kick in. The few old-school psychonaut subcultures on it (plenty won’t touch them) sit around dreaming up conspiracy theories about how the authorities are trying to clamp down on fast track, consumer-grade enlightenment. The truth is the cops and the politicians probably don’t know much, they certainly aren’t in any hurry to schedule the stuff. At least the kids and the nootropic huffing yuppies are willing to admit they’re mostly in it for the “cool powers”.

Basically it’s a pharmacological fast track to what you’d get out of five to ten years practicing meditation. You’ll feel better, think more clearly, even your immune system will thank you. You’ll be more in sync with the universe. The two week course of pills is enough to get you there and then back down gradually over the week after you stop taking them. Some people treat it like a mini-vacation for their brain, but you can chain them together to stay up there.

The really interesting thing is the side effects. Eventually people start to have visions, see things like auras around people or get premonitions of the future. One guy claimed he could see the whole lower end of the electromagnetic spectrum. What you get is luck of the draw and it’s inconsistent but the longer you keep taking your pills the stronger and more reliable it becomes.

I guess inviting an interdimensional entity to take up residence in your head will do that. What? You thought these people were “unlocking their potential”? No way, psychic powers are a crock of shit. What they’re seeing is what the entity sees when it’s looking at the world through their eyes. The pills are a gateway. I mean, who knows what they’re really even made out of?

Anyway, I need your help. I tried feeding them to my cat but it didn’t work. I want to negotiate with this thing, open a dialogue and find out what it really wants, but I can’t do that if I’m the one taking them. I’d be its hostage. That’s why you’re tied up. Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you. I just need to keep you down here for a couple of weeks while we work together on this.

Please don’t be mad, it’s going to be really cool.

278 - Magickal Entropy

Unnatural Phenomenon: Magickal Entropy

As time ravages the things left behind and the tenebrae devour those who die isolated and unloved, so too does magick left unattended become strange and warped. Without human intercession the holes in reality spoil and shift. Rituals become inert or spring from the ether in response to need, charges let loose refocus themselves into unnatural phenomenon. Artifacts are made of sterner stuff but susceptible to eventual eldritch entropies and mutation all the same. It's possible someone might learn to exploit this.

There's an automated money changing machine (the kind of device that charges an extortionate amount for something you can do at a bank) with a habit of creating very minor artifacts, the third quarter it spits out every Sunday will almost always come up heads. Over time this phenomenon might poison the country's entire supply of coinage if it weren't for the actions of a brave plutomancer who harvests and buries them in secret to keep this tiny apocalypse from happening.

The oldest clusters of buried currency, left unattended for years, have sprouted. Small, ugly bushes that look like weeds with one interesting property. Any home one is potted and kept in will suffer financial misfortune until the following Sunday. No one has discovered the fruits of this plutomancer's labour yet (he would be dismayed but intrigued), but it offers the best chance at studying and understanding the nature of magickal decay to the first person who does.

They'll probably just try to curse their enemies by using them as ugly housewarming gifts instead.

268 - Weeping Laughter

Unnatural Phenomenon: Weeping Laughter

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

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

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

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

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

255 - Carousel

Unnatural Phenomenon: Carousel

People don’t tend to remember much of their early childhood. The brain is still a half-formed soup at that age, not yet baked by life into something solid and set. In adults recollection of childhood events is fragmentary before six to eight years old and practically impossible before the age of three or four, for all but a few rare outliers these formative years are a lacuna. Aids to recall can dredge the cloudy depths of the past to give clarity to pieces of these lost moments, places, smells and people setting off mental connections that trigger dusty, disused parts of the brain. Emotional associations are one of the strongest correlates for recall, it’s part of how the carousel works.

Marcus Green misses being a little kid more than anything. He had a good life: loving family, good home, friends, a bright future. Then dad went to prison for embezzling the money that had made their lives so easy and mum got sick - one of those ugly neurodegenerative conditions - and they had to move into her sister’s cramped apartment two states over. Some people would thrive or at least persevere given that kind of situation, more wouldn’t. Marcus has found his own way of dealing with it.

He ended up at Maestro Shelton’s Travelling Circus as a ride operator because it was one of the last places he remembered being happy before all that happened. The antique carousel that has been with the carnival for nearly 150 years has been his pride and joy to run for the last 20, it’s given him back what he thought he’d lost forever. Literally.

Riding the carousel, as Marcus first did about 35 years ago, cements a part of a child’s history inside of it. Some find it distressing but it’s nothing they’ll ever miss as adults, small splinters of time chipped away from each of them. For every 333 children that permanently give over a piece of themselves riding the carousel, Marcus has discovered that he can turn back the clock: using it alone himself to re-experience an entire hour of that lost time. It’s genuine time travel of a sort, he’s legitimately experiencing that night over and over from the perspective of his 7 year old self. Aside from the limitations of being that young and at a carnival with his parents, he doesn’t have the imagination to do anything terrible with it.

The trouble is that having done this for so long some of those people whose childhood memories aren’t just locked away by neurology but by magickal splintering are now returning to the carnival with children of their own. Only two have ridden the carousel while it held enough charge to transport them back to the time it originally stole from them, but more are inevitable. Marcus doesn’t care so much about being caught, he’s more distressed that these interlopers are robbing him of his childhood. He may do something drastic.

250 - Rat King

Unnatural Phenomenon: Rat King

Unusual occurrences in nature draw attention and the human need to work a narrative for everything usually ascribes supernatural influence to the most extreme examples. Rat Kings are an example of this: rats clustered together in grime and filth become entangled by their tails forming a hideous gestalt which dies quickly and painfully as they struggle to eat, avoid predators and clean themselves. As a bad omen rat kings are associated with plague, most likely because the elements that give rise to their formation (in the cases that they aren’t hoaxes) are the same ones in which the fruits of disease and poor healthcare run rampant.

In areas with a high level of magickal pollution similar entanglements form. Wallowing in the metaphysical filth of repeatedly abusing the fabric of reality, willworkers, ritualists and avatars find that the results of their efforts begin to overlap. A ritual fizzles unexpectedly, only to have its effects fire off when a nearby adept tries to level a blast at somebody. In return the lost blast manifests when the ritualist glowers at someone or while an avatar is trying to channel their archetype at a person. As conditions deteriorate these occurrences become more frequent and extreme. At their worst groups of the magickally inclined find their entire repertoire is dysfunctional and are bound to experience each other’s magick even if they leave the area.

Fixing the problem involves treating it like a public sanitation issue. Sometimes it’s a specific monster or artifact wreaking havoc on the location that needs to be run off and doing so will set things right. Other times it’s more complicated, the built up consequences of laissez faire “do what thou will” hands-off occult policy coming home to roost. In that case fixing your magickal misfires is a case of convincing people on a regional level to be more circumspect with their magick use. Use the objective rules in that case.

239 - Open City

Unnatural Phenomenon: Open City

In war, the concept of declaring an open city is an act of deliberately surrendering it to the enemy. Conspicuously abandoning a location’s defences in the hope that instead of destroying the location and its population in bombings and bloody fighting, that they will instead take it as reason to occupy it in relative peace. Symbolic prostration intended to preserve life and property at your enemies’ mercy. The brush wars of the occult underground are, if anything, less morally constrained than conventional warfare but at least there that symbolism carries real weight.

A tactic employed by beleaguered True Kings and Urbanomancers, declaration of their territory as an open city divorces them from their connection to it but compels others to honour their deference with magnanimity.

First of all, doing so takes effort. As an objective, the encroaching parties must be made properly aware of it and measures to concede that territory to them taken. Fly white flags from the rooftops of every building and weave gutter magick into formal letters of capitulation. For a relatively small territory or one contested by only one or two enemies this can be done as a local objective. For a major metropolitan city a weighty or even cosmic objective is required to magickally encumber a location with your conspicuous withdrawal. In either case a serious claim to it is a prerequisite, a True King or Urbanomancer identity of at least 40%.

As a result, you can no longer gain charges or access your avatar channels but you are not penalized for being outside of the city or tabooed for losing the territory. Instead for every day until you retake it your relevant identity declines by 1% (alternating if you’re one of the rare individuals with both). Retaking territory is its own objective. In return for as long as you are alive and have more than 0% left, any other True King, Urbanomancer or someone acting on their behalf may not damage the territory or its occupants unless directly threatened. If they do it undermines their own powers, tabooing their connection to the statosphere or charges. This includes them using magickal effects which cause incidental harm.

220 - Prescriptive Divination

Unnatural Phenomenon: Prescriptive Divination

In a quiet corner of an ostentatious botanical garden located just outside a small seaside town there is an archway covered in vines and exotic flowers. The flowers are the last of their kind, but appearing to be their more mundane cousins no one - not even those who understand the properties of the arch - is aware of their significance or mild hallucinogenic properties. The nectar from its blooms causes the timing of signals between hemispheres of the brain to fall into disarray. Duplication of thought and recursion of feedback generates the sensation we call deja vu, the feeling of having done something before.

Passing through the secluded arch at noon has a more profound effect. The sensation of repetition is exacerbated into one of anticipation and more than one person has learned how to read the feeling for what turns out to be clues to the future. What you're wearing, how you feel examining the contents of your pockets, the first thing to come into you head as you pass through - take a hunch roll for mulling it over.

What only two people realize (and each of them think they're the only one) is that this isn't just chance and the eddies of fate being revealed to them, anyone who passes through has an active hand in determining their own future holds. By only wearing certain clothes and curating their personal effects to symbolically comply with a desired future they can goose fate. In game terms you can roll an appropriate identity (such as haruspex, numerologist, or brain-fried pattern matcher) once per day (it takes a time consuming amount of consideration, mechanizing the process would be a boon. GNOMON adepts, if they had a clue, would be particularly well situated to take advantage). A successful roll provides exactly the right factors to obtain that result as the hunch roll ONCE, essentially allowing you to pre-roll and then choose whether or not to go through with claiming it. There's no fate but what you make.

Objectives based around foretelling and influencing the future could incorporate the arch into one of their milestones. Doing so properly would be good for a petty local result. Destroying it in the process on the other hand, bumps this up a level to intense local/petty global. Pity about all the scratchcards you could've bought off the back of it but sometimes you want it that bad.

200 - Unwritten

Unnatural Phenomenon: Unwritten
Written record (and more recently other kinds of media) holds a kind of authority that human recollection does not. It tells us stories across time, reaches people we will never meet and holds the world in order. Made uncertain it removes a foundation most of us take for granted.

Unwritten is like a fungal rot surrounding the records on a particular subject. It unravels them as though they never existed. Events disappear in everything but people’s vague recollections. A person affected will find their birth records, social media and banking details all unspooling into the ether. Something afflicted will either historically disintegrate from its origin forwards faster than it can be replaced or “age backwards” as more recent records are the first to go and no new ones seem to stick.

There are those who can recognise the phenomenon in progress and stem the tide or even halt or reverse it. They’ll deliberately continue to create records as a prophylactic measure when possible, once complete the process is irreversible. Others weaponize the phenomenon to cover their tracks, erase their enemy's records or rewrite history. Stranger folks and creatures do it to feast on the runoff and waste products, cisterns and sewers overflowing with ink and portable harddrives filled with digital white noise.

195 - Reefer Madness

Unnatural Phenomenon: Reefer Madness

A yearning for the sea, a sense of communion with a greater whole, an ache for an aquatic heritage never before known. H.P. Lovecraft wrote of the deep one taint, an ancestral curse of the blood that called his protagonists back to the sea with batrachian transformations into the gilled monsters that had spawned their forebears. Reefer madness is inherited not through the lines of lineage but an infection which courses through the connections we choose.

It is based out of a small coral reef formation, slightly too far out from the coast and not colourful enough to be popular with tourists. It looks as though it has been bleached a chalky white in the places it isn’t a soft, fleshy pink but make no mistake, it is as vibrant as ever. Just ask the people who visit it, swimming out furtively and fully dressed to sit for hours in the ocean spray.

The reef converts people in physical contact with it into additional biomass at a rate of 1d10 wound threshold per visit. It doesn’t take this away from their existing wound threshold but instead converts that many points of flesh into hard, calcified coral growths which do not heal naturally and can only be restored by future visits at the same rate. In the early stages these growths an undetectable outside of intimacy but in the later stages those undergoing transformation look like shuffling coral monsters. Unnatural checks range from 1 to 6 ranks depending on the grade of transformation and who it is happening to. When a person’s entire threshold is converted they are absorbed into the reef permanently, the only physical reminders being the occasional tooth or eyeball. Why would anyone do this? All their friends and family did it first.

Those absorbed into the coral biomass retain their relationships and can psychically reach out to those people in their dreams and quieter moments, drawing them in. This effectively acts as coercion against the target’s Isolation gauge using the relevant relationship’s percentiles (but does not reduce them), with the caveat that on a matched success or critical they’ll find themselves sleepwalking unbidden towards the sea instead. Drawn into the ocean, people are called to the reef that has absorbed their loved ones time and time again.

Visits to the reef are a surreal experience. Physical contact allows telepathic communication with the minds of the converted. They speak joyously of boundless communion, never knowing the fear of death or loss and a desire to share this bounty with their visitor. This is magickally soothing and allowing them to assuage your existential fears and speaking with the people you’ve lost once again acts as an automatic matched success on a long-term therapy roll, it also increases your relevant relationship by 5%. Choosing to resist provides no therapeutic benefit but still converts flesh. Sometimes the reef will ask favours from would-be converts before their transformation is complete, sometimes it is sought out for the wealth of occult and ritual knowledge it is rumoured to keep by those willing to risk partial conversion to negotiate for it.

177 - Owls

Unnatural Phenomenon: Owls

Owls have a widespread and varied mythology. In Japan and Mongolia they are regarded as good luck. Ancient Greece is responsible for an enduring association with wisdom. As nocturnal birds of prey, one of the more pervasive superstitions is that owls are harbingers of death and bad luck.

For those who dabble in the magick of death, whether its Thanatomancy or the incorporation of human sacrifice into gutter magick, this association has fangs. Holding charges or effects drawn from human death is a magnet for owls. At low-levels this is merely inconvenient, clusters of them roosting openly wherever you stop for long no matter the location or time of day. Creepy and perhaps inconvenient when trying to hide the source of your powers from clued-in enemies (or less bloodthirsty associates and allies).

Among those whose souls are thoroughly stained with the blood of others it becomes a risk. People report losing things and poor memory, in extreme cases they become completely non-functional for long periods of time. The reason for this is that beyond a certain fuzzy threshold the owls seem to steal things from your mind. They aren’t unnatural entities or using magick (killing and dissecting one will reveal it’s an ordinary owl) but the effect is dependent on their proximity.

If you’ve attracted the attention of owls, once you reach this threshold continuing down the path costs you the mental image of one object or concept per additional person harmed. If it takes apples from you, for example, the idea of an apple would be a blank. You might see one and not be able to register it or the concept of apple pie would never occur to you when talking about food even if it’s normally your favourite. This only lasts while in line of sight to the owl which now holds your stolen thoughts. If you lock yourself in a windowless closet you can talk about apples all day. This effect can be counteracted piecemeal by killing and eating the owl assigned a particular concept. Unfortunately for those affected the first thing owls usually take from someone is the concept of owls themselves.

170 - Demigodwalker

Unnatural Phenomenon: Demigodwalker

All archetypes were once human. Before being stripped of the complication of earthly appetites and concerns they were the same stinking, thinking, walking, talking flesh as the rest of us. They had jobs, favourite foods, parents, friends, siblings, treasured memories. Children.

These offspring retroactively carry a shard of their parent’s ascension in the same way that symbolically appropriate artifacts can become imbued with their power. Hotly contested as limited archetypal proxies while surrounded by keen synchronicity, they live lives that may not be charmed but are never boring. Powerful and monied lineages exist predicated on the inherited power and gravitas from the legacy of an ascended ancestor. Any with an avatar identity the same as their parent’s operates at 30% higher as far as access to channels is concerned, this bonus also mitigates penalties but does not provide a positive shift. Any other avatar identity is at a -20% shift and opposed archetypes are inaccessible.

More interesting, that person stands out from the mass of humanity as far as that archetype is concerned. Unlike the clumsy myopia archetypes have when trying to distinguish people from one another, demigodwalkers appear as lighthouses in the fog of humanity. What this means varies depending on the archetype and their symbolic relationship with it. Ascension strips away many mortal concerns, like love for your offspring, but at the same time being able to see and influence a particular person clearly above all others makes them a potentially valuable asset or at least a toy that can be played with as others cannot. It also makes them a target for anyone with a grudge against the archetype, those willing to strip them of their organs as ritual ingredients and existing avatars looking to bump off the competition.

156 - The Montego Hills Scriptwriter

Unnatural Phenomenon: The Montego Hills Scriptwriter

Someone was terrorising a single outlying suburb of a major metropolitan city. He or she wasn’t robbing or killing or directly harming the residents in any way. They were telling them how their lives could turn out, if they’d just follow the script.

It starts with an unobserved delivery, a sheaf of papers written in a spidery hand in red ink and smelling vaguely of lilac. They’re a partial script, like a scene for a television show or play, except that the protagonist is the recipient. It describes them in their life with perfect accuracy and about half of these are retrospective. The rest describe events that have yet to come. If they play their part the scriptwriter, besotted, will continue to shower them with its attention.

This is not true divination, there’s nothing forcing anyone to adhere to the script but unless someone intervenes and goes “off script” it tells exactly how the described event will play out. Someone clued in could use it to get an inside line by carefully adhering to but otherwise working around the work or deviating entirely if the pages predict catastrophe. Most react with revulsion to the stalkery literary portraits, which given that going “off script” is grounds for being abandoned by the scriptwriter as its current muse loses them access to future predictions.

It seems to have quieted for now. The people previously menaced by the scriptwriter mostly breathe easier. The reason for this is that local cat-lady Bernice Callow has been playing her part with vigor. For certain types of people having someone else take the reins is a relief, the scripts which wallpaper the inside of her house tell her exactly how to live. She won’t even dare flinch from the bad ones, doesn’t even conceive that she could.

This would be a largely self-contained tragedy, a lonely old woman withering away in the light of an impending reflection, except for the fact she has spread her interest to others. Contacting studios in Los Angeles with delusions of stardom based on the attention she has received hasn’t provoked the interest of movie studios. It has independently prompted two adepts to pack a bag and make for Montego Hills. The cineamancer and cryptomancer working for rival agencies but unaware of each other have heard of phenomena like this before and want to steal it for themselves.

They have competition on the ground already, one of the scriptwriter’s previous targets, a budding teenage psychopath, is hunting for whoever the scriptwriter is writing for now. Blaming her own deviation from the script for a recent breakup (it honestly wouldn’t have lasted much longer on its own), she will stop at nothing and hurt whoever she has to in order to try to force the scriptwriter to give her a second chance at her possessive love. It won’t, maybe it can’t, but try telling her that.

155 - Avatar Relics

Unnatural Phenomenon: Avatar Relics

Despite a common religious belief in the dualistic nature of the body and the soul as two distinct aspects of a person, veneration of human remains as sacred objects is by no means rare. Ancient Greek hero cults, the remains of Christian and Islamic saints, even the Buddha was divided into eight pieces on his death and his remains enshrined in specially built stupas wherever his faith spread. Much like how the remains of our loved ones hold symbolic place for the people who are no longer with us, those of important traditions hold an unconscious association with that spiritual power. This isn’t restricted to religion, the mausoleums of Mao Zedong and Vladmir Lenin both serve as secular proxies in their displays of the remains of those prominent communists.

With this concept firmly rooted in the collective unconscious it is little wonder that the remains of powerful avatars are imbued with a degree of supernatural power and are hotly contested objects. If one with access to at least the third tier of channels dies while using their abilities in a symbolically powerful way it grants their remains a certain gravitas in becoming sacred objects. The appropriate veneration required to awaken this potential is an objective - local for third channel avatars, weighty for fourth channel avatars and cosmic for godwalkers. Predictably people willing to go through all that effort are usually loath to part with the fruits of their labours. Each avatar is only good for one relic, so no pulling an Osiris.

It is notable that, much like the differences between adept and avatar powers, relics tend to have subtle effects. None of them generate conspicuous unnatural phenomena (there’s a man in Burma who believes the fossilized heart of a warrior avatar he wears around his neck makes him bulletproof, he’s just been exceptionally lucky). Instead they apply a static +10/20/30% shift (for third/forth channel and godwalker relics) to rituals and gutter magick they are incorporated into. More compellingly they act as blessings on relevant objectives, priming them as petty local, intense local/petty weight and intense weighty/petty cosmic milestones respectively. Cabals in possession of avatar relics should be wary of acting against their path as contrary objectives find their first milestones negated to the same degree.

There is one notable exception. As with the Hand or Eye (and to a lesser extent, Head) of Vecna of D&D fame, avatar relics provide shortcuts to power for greedy mystics willing to abuse them. Replacing a body part with a charged relic grants an automatic improvement roll on an avatar identity (+10 for fourth channel relics or an automatic upgrade to the next channel level (or 98% for those already in the last channel) for godwalker relics). It should be noted that incorruptibility is not a feature of avatar relics, they rot and wither just like normal human remains unless embalmed. The complications that can arise from attaching a withered hand to the stump of your arm are too often overlooked in the pursuit of power.

145 - Thin Ground

Unnatural Phenomenon: Thin Ground

There’s a spot in a remote section of Sydney’s Royal National Park, out by the cliffs overlooking the ocean. Nothing immediately marks it as strange from a distance and the terrain makes it hard to get to which is why it went undetected for so long. It’s a rough rectangle of rocky cliffside about 4 and a half by 7 feet, tapering a little on one end. If you stand on it you can see to the ends of the world.

In any direction other than east this effect is blocked by vegetation, but out over the ocean there’s suddenly no horizon for things to disappear behind. You can see as far as your eyes, binoculars or telescope will allow like something out of a Flat Earther’s wet dream. The shift in perspective is perceptible if you’re looking for it as you cross the boundary, stop halfway and you get that weird effect where your brain attempts to reconcile two different images at once. The colours look different too. Bright and cartoonish, as though someone has added a filter to a bad picture.

Six inches under the rock, crumbly and loamy unlike the hard earth around it, is sheet metal held together with rivets along a singular seam. It ends at the boundary of the effect, if you dug around and under it would hang suspended in mid-air. Breaking through it from the top, popping the rivets and bending and cracking the thin metal reveals a void. It’s only visible from the top and extends as far out of view in every direction occupying space that must logically intersect with the rock beneath it like the world reflected in a mirror. Within is darkness, stars and vacuum.

Fortunately only organic materials can pass through the threshold, so it can’t suddenly hoover up the Earth’s atmosphere. This also made it easier to cover up after one of the trio of park rangers who found it fell through up to his belt buckle and then frantically suffocated in deep space before the others could pull him out. The elder, a staunch anti-government, government worker, appealed to the other’s confused terror and the sense that nothing good would come of people in authority learning about it. Her complicity in hiding the body by shoving it the rest of the way through unclothed is why she remains silent.

Between the two of them there is an uneasy agreement. Solo neither one could comfortably pull enough strings and run enough interference to make sure that part of the park remains unexplored forever. That one of them has been posting pictures of the void online and trying to figure out its location by what stars are visible doesn’t help matters.

140 - Karmic Cobwebs

Unnatural Phenomenon: Karmic Cobwebs

Responsibility is a concept that leverages obligation into a moral virtue. Enforcement comes from practices like cultural indoctrination, collective shaming and the threat of intangible punishment, like karmic retribution. When it fails, karmic retribution - based on the idea that the universe is a place of moral balance and people naturally get what’s coming to them - is in tragically short supply. Often the person who pays the price is not the same person whose negligence caused the problem. The inequality of this damage, lensed through the collective belief that the world should be/is a just place, creates karmic cobwebs.

Shimmering gossamer threads that are barely perceivable and physically intangible, collected around the places where one person’s malice or negligence has done substantial damage to another without restitution. Most people can’t interact with them, it takes a certain degree of openness to even realise they’re there (a successful Secrecy roll by someone with at least 1 hardened notch in Unnatural is a good guideline). Once you’ve zeroed in there are a couple of options.

You can easily choose to get yourself tangled in one, which carries with it a karmic debt that operates a little like the transactional way an adept charges. For as long as the debt goes unresolved you’ve got a standing -10% shift on all rolls as it weighs you down but you gain a minor charge per week. On top of that if by some circumstances you (and it has to be you) can set things right the cobweb dissolves, which takes any remaining minor charges with it but rewards you with a hunch roll that is an automatic matched success/failure (roll one die to find out, 1=11, 2=22, etc.).

The alternative use people put cobwebs to is cursing others. There’s a bit of a trick to collecting one without it attaching itself to you but once you get the hang of it you can do it reliably. Putting it in their path with intent is enough even if they couldn’t ordinarily interact with it. This can be pretty nasty for those who aren’t clued-in, not only do their lives get measurably worse but they’re usually dogged by unnatural phenomenon as they leak unspent charges. Compounding this misery is the tendency of those already entangled by a cobweb to pick up extras. The penalties for this stack as does the charge building.

People swamped by cobwebs have an unfortunate tendency to wind up dead. This isn’t just due to the weight of the many debts they’re carrying finally crushing them. They show up constricted and desiccated, as though crushed and drained of fluid by an industrial nightmare machine built just for the purpose. Rumour points to the parallels between karmic and mundane cobwebs. Sure, they’re powered by avoided punishments inflicted on others, but what kind of monster is actually spinning them?

135 - The Place You’ve Never Been

Unnatural Phenomenon: The Place You’ve Never Been

There’s a place you’ve never been. It’s a turn off on the highway, you drive past it every day on the way to work. A blip on the radar, barely an off-ramp that goes on to a dirt road. You remember the sign though. It’s a landmark you use to gauge how far you are from your exit. Sometimes in the car you daydream about what that place might be like. Maybe once or twice you actually contemplate making the turn, but you’ve always got more important things to do.

You mention it to someone at work. They say they know someone whose brother-in-law moved out there a few years back, apparently its real nice, good for families. Or they say they’ve got a second cousin who has family out there stuck in the kind of industrial poverty that comes from a solo industry town that’s gone down the toilet. The details of the stories are never the same and the people referred to are always at a remove or two from whoever’s telling them, like it’s a rumour they’re trying to put a face on. They seem sincere. It’d be a weird thing to lie about.

You go back to your desk or pull up your phone and punch the name into a web browser. The results come up blank. Maybe you get a hit or two that’s obviously for a different place with the same name. That might have been where your co-workers were talking about. Google maps is no help, the satellite view doesn’t show it and neither does the street view. The capture dates on the images are a little old though.

It bugs you. A little burr that sticks up every time you pass the sign on the road. This place you’ve dreamt about that won’t stick to a story or be defined. You lie idly awake at night, thinking about it. One day, without even consciously thinking about it, you take the turn. Once you’re on the other side of the double line and curving away from the asphalt it’s honestly a relief, you’ve crossed the point of no return and you’ll finally be able to put this ridiculous anxiety to bed.

You drive for what seems like hours in a straight line. There is no one else on the road. You’ll definitely miss work. After a while there are no landmarks to guide you. There’s a nausea in your gut and bad taste in your mouth, like you slept all night with it hanging open. Then finally, up ahead, another highway with traffic. The dirt road comes to an end and you pull onto the on-ramp. Two exits down you pass the sign again and another two exits down you make your turn off for work.

Pulling into your parking space, four hours late and beginning to convince yourself that it never happened, you are seized by a sudden vertiginous image. A microcosm of the world, looping over itself on the edges like an old video game with the illusion of being part of a much larger universe. Trapped inside of a curved fishbowl. And there’s one horrible question that surfaces in your mind, unbidden: how much of the world is the place you’ve never been?

127 - Nibiru Cataclysm

Unnatural Phenomenon: Nibiru Cataclysm

A mistake was once made when putting together a forgotten incarnation of the universe and like a lazy copy-paste the mistake was carried over through later initializations. A 3,600 year event in the making, the catastrophic impact of a close encounter between Earth and an ancient, wayward planetary object - Nibiru - spells potential doom for humanity and the universe as a whole. If the stock of humanity were destroyed by polar inversion, orbital disturbance and meteoric bombardment the statosphere and the Invisible Clergy would be cast adrift in the void. Trapped and unable to reincarnate the cosmos without a collective unconscious to reflect it. The universe, in essence, would come to an end.

It is the most closely guarded secret of all.

In the background of more prosaic occult struggles a secret secondary war rages. Factions move against each other to hide, discredit, divine and reveal the truth of the impending apocalypse. They build otherspace bulwarks and life rafts, they try to warn humanity or hide the awful truth, they attempt to strangle or fertilize final ascensions to control whether the Clergy has a chance to correct the fatal flaw. Cults of alien worshippers, puppets and proxies, work to unwittingly discredit or reveal a reflection of the truth while tracked by governments that themselves don’t yet see the pattern.There are avatar serial-killers and serial-killer avatars who criss-cross the country, receiving orders from hidden masters and locked in an endless game of cat-and-mouse. Cyborgs build vast underground computer shrines to a machine-god yet to come, humanities' replacement safely cocooned and poised to rise from the ashes.

In her dingy Melbourne apartment an old woman with spotty memories of worlds long gone tries to remember these things and plot for the end. Sometimes she’s not sure if it’s real. Maybe it already happened once a long time ago. Maybe she dreamed it all up.