055 - Tyler Woodard, Optometrical Despot

GMC: Tyler Woodard, Optometrical Despot

Millbrook is a quaint little town spared the rural decay of rampant poverty and urban migration. If anything more people move here every year, charmed by the rustic wholesomeness of the community. Good schools, a hospital, a feted local baseball team, everyone knows each other and rarely has much bad to say. It’s idyllic. Tyler Woodard, the town optometrist, has lived here his entire life and wouldn’t have it any other way.

People like and respect Tyler. He’s a broad-faced, grey-haired old man, mild and friendly but wind him up and he’ll stand against anything that threatens his town. He’s led the charge in council meetings and citizen initiatives against mass real-estate development, waste dumping and the destruction of historic landmarks. Ask anyone about him and they’ll have some story of neighbourly grace and charity. Not everyone agrees with him but he’s the public figure that represents keeping Millbrook’s small town charm and lifestyle the way it is.

There’s a pedigree to this attachment, the Woodards have provided seven generations of optometry to Millbrook. Before that they did the same in the town of Adelswig in their native Germany, where they went by the name of Vogt. The Vogts had always been lenscrafters and magick-workers, their secrets and their craft passed down from generation to generation. Tyler was told stories in his youth about fantastical telescopes that could pierce the veil of heaven and see the angels, the secret family origins of the Nimrud lens, and the mass-blinding of their enemies. He doesn’t know how true the tales are but one surviving practice was passed down alongside them.

There’s a room in the back of Tyler’s business, hidden behind the office bookshelf and locked with three deadbolts. Inside is an old metal desk pushed against the near wall - stationery and stamps, a stack of magazines and two duffle bags carelessly stuffed with cash on arranged on top - and a reclining chair in the centre of the room. Lining the walls of the place are spectacles, arrayed around the chair like artwork. Each of them is a labelled copy of a pair Tyler has made for someone and allows him to see through the ‘eyes’ of the original.

Historically the Vogts/Woodards used this power to spy on the well-to-do patrons who could afford their services, amassing a wealth of information and blackmail material that allowed them access to money and social power beyond their humble origins. Unfortunately they made the same mistake most wizards do in their position, they underestimated the ability of normal people to hurt them. Their retreat to America was tinged with bitter revelation. The story twisted over generations until it became a noble choice, a flight not from people who would harm them but from a decay of culture and society. The Vogts were right to move away from their enemies and as the Woodards would strike new ground in a frontier where virtue and community mattered. At least that’s how Tyler sees it.

Tyler doesn’t want money or power for himself. He only ever asks for cash to conceal the real motive of his blackmailing and uses the panopticon to monitor and put the fear of god into those who violate his small-town values. Half the local council and a pair of sheriff's deputies are only a fraction of the people that have been threatened by his anonymous notes at one time or another. Some don’t pay but almost all of them have swayed their course based on the secrets he knew about them. He sees the moral disintegration of the refuge his family took here as the last straw, if they were pushed to flee to this place then no one can be allowed to take it from him. He won’t stand for it.

STATS
Personality: Grandfatherly, in both the soft and hard aspects of the term. Tyler sees the entire town as his family and can’t stomach the idea of anything bad happening to it, the individual people in it not so much.
Rage: Transgression. It’s like littering, once it starts it’s harder to stop and signals to everyone else that it’s okay to do the same.
Noble: Manners. The benchmark of civilised living is minding your p’s and q’s.
Fear: Being cast out of his community (Isolation).
Obsession: Keep Millbrook "safe".
Wound Threshold: 50.

Pillar of the Community 60% (Substitutes for Status, Protects Self, Protects Isolation.)
Blackmailer 40%* (Substitutes for Lie, Coerces Self, Reads Fear.)
Panopticon Lenscrafting 40% (Specific Information: Eyeglass Scrying, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)

Shock Gauges

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

054 - Counter Coercion & Giving Coercion Fangs

Optional Rules: Counter Coercion

Risk freaking out, be traumatised enough to take it in stride, or roll over. Those are the three current reaction options under Unknown Armies’ coercion rules when threatened. However an alternative resolution when someone backs you up against the wall and things turn ugly is to make threats of your own.

When confronted with a coercion attempt if you have means to coerce that person in turn you can invoke the doctrine of mutually assured destruction to short-circuit their threats. Your estranged sister shows up at your wedding and threatens to ruin the day with tales of your sordid past if you don’t lend/give her a bunch of money? You’ve got grandpa’s ear and if she wants a snowball’s chance of any inheritance when he dies she’ll keep it to herself. You’re standing on the brink of respective Isolation and Helplessness checks but if you both back down things can proceed undisturbed, uneasily.

A tense situation in which the threats go unresolved is probably worth a rank 2-4 stress check on Self, Isolation or Helplessness depending on the circumstances. It’s a stop-gap solution in which both parties have tipped their hands and are left uncertain about whether the other will be able to seize the advantage (or blow up and wreck the whole thing in which case everyone gets to face the consequences).

Optional Rules: Giving Coercion Fangs

A standard success on a coercion check yields a rank 1 stress check (assuming no passions come into it). Everyone has at least 1 hardened notch in every meter (unless you hold GMCs to a different standard) and given how gauges and core abilities work in 3e it’s not unreasonable for them to be much higher, so is the juice worth the squeeze?

One interpretation is: yes, absolutely, if you want to ding someone’s meters you need to put the work in and find a way to incorporate as many of your and their passions as possible and if that doesn’t work then up the ante. Escalation is entirely possible, you just have to be willing to actually go through with it. That works and is well in line with the game’s themes. It’s also a fact that imposing a stress check on someone whether they succeed or not has ongoing consequences to their gauges and may be worth limiting.

On the other hand it’s important enough to merit an identity feature per gauge all to itself and you may feel that threatening someone with a gun is worth more than the rank 1 violence check which everyone can pass by default. Social combat might also be more important to the themes you and your players want to run with, higher powered coercion encourages it over other forms of conflict resolution.

If you find coercion lacking consider bumping the base ranks up a point or two for each tier of success (ie. success 2, matched success 3, crit 4) plus the default 1 rank per passion of the involved parties invoked. Alternatively (or concurrently) grant circumstantial boosts of 1-3 ranks: a gun is more threatening than a knife and photographic evidence of infidelity pushes home the point that someone could wreck your marriage over just mentioning that they know about your affair.

053 - Chalk Fairy

“This photo shows evidence that the crime scene had been visited by a "chalk fairy" — a term used to describe mysterious police officers who feel the need to draw lines around the body and then disappear when investigators attempt to find out who contaminated the scene.” - Vernon Geberth, Practical Homicide Investigation

Artifact: Chalk Fairy

Power: Minor.

Description: A vial full of chalk dust, either yellow or white. Gathered from a crime scene contaminated in error by well-meaning first responders or bystanders and itself contaminated by oil of wormwood - the adulterant responsible for absinthe’s hallucinogenic reputation. It sparkles softly when it catches the light. It takes effect when consumed or blown into someone’s face.

Effect: People believe all sorts of incorrect things. Sometimes these false ideas are passed around and take on a life of their own, transmuting through the gravitas of propagation into stubbornly persistent urban myths. In some ways the internet era has quelled this phenomenon by providing easy access to information, in others it has exacerbated it by creating echo chambers and polarization.

To someone under the effects of a chalk fairy the next one of these memetic tripwires presented seems entirely truthful, no matter how nonsensical (“Yeah but Big Al says dogs can’t look up!”). It won’t force them to do anything they ordinarily wouldn’t especially in conflict with their other beliefs, but false certainty can be a hell of a thing when it comes to arguments and drunken bets. Being presented with incontrovertible evidence of the mistaken belief typically prompts a rank 2-4 Self check depending on how they’ve handled it (“...but I was so sure”).

A chalk fairy lasts 12 minutes from the time it is consumed/inhaled. Arguments can go on much longer, people dig their heels in on principle about stupid things all the time.

052 - Home Is Where The Heart Is

Ritual: Home Is Where The Heart Is

Cost: 5 significant charges.

Ritual Action: You’ll need a place you’ve lived for at least 10 years (making it your true home rather than just somewhere you keep your stuff) and it needs to have a brick hearth. Find someone with the expertise (or a compensatory bloody enthusiasm) to perform a heart transplant, the catch being that you’re exchanging your heart for a house brick.

The transplant needs to be conducted at home. When complete your old heart is placed in the hearth where the brick was taken from and submerged in concrete. In addition to an extremely difficult and uncertain surgery in a less than ideal environment (seriously, even with a Cardiothoracic Surgeon identity involved you’re looking at a significant negative shift) the ritual involves a number of restrictions and additional actions.

First, your blood must remain pure: no alcohol, no drugs, no toxins. An excess of any (enough to impose a mechanical effect) breaks the ritual. Second, no child must ever be conceived in the house before or afterwards. Third, the ritual must take place on entirely on the morning of December 3rd.

The ritual intertwines with the surgery: suspension from an ash tree, the constant burning of silphium incense (difficult to get a hold of since the needed variety is apparently extinct) and lengthy prayers and offerings to Anubis culminating in weighing the heart against the brick.

Effect: You don’t die from having a lump of stone replacing a vital organ. No heartbeat either, but somehow it all runs fine.

You gain a permanent vital connection to your home and it to you. If you get stabbed, a pipe bursts in the laundry. If some kid puts a baseball through a window you pop a blood vessel in your eye. Consequently an identity like Carpenter effectively gains the Medical feature for you (handy since an x-ray or MRI scan will raise a lot of questions) or if you’re willing to get some stitches and rest up you can avoid calling a plumber. You don’t want to see what happens if someone burns the place down.

Part of this connection allows you to place gutter magick effects on yourself without a proper ritual, you can gain the same results by making changes to your home. Slap on a coat of fresh paint and gain a sticky +20% bonus to acing that job interview or making a good first impression with the in-laws. Fastidious upkeep and renovations are a good way to keep the benefits rolling in. Others can do this to you too if they know about it.

You’re also housebound. Make a Fitness roll with a cumulative -10% shift for every day that you don’t spend at least 12 hours at home or travel more than 33 miles away from it. If you fail, take the sum of the roll as damage which cannot heal until you return and get some rest in your own bed. Interestingly this damage is the only type not reflected in your home’s condition and it’s not like medical science can help you with it either. Recovery is as per normal outpatient convalescence (see page 74 of Book 1: Play).

Lastly, if your old heart is ever removed from the hearth the ritual effect ends and the coroner will have an interesting time explaining the state of your corpse.

051 - Naegleria Fowleri

Unnatural Phenomenon: Naegleria Fowleri

The infamous brain-eating amoeba, an evocative and grisly critter that normally feasts on bacteria but has an unfortunate sweet-tooth for human grey matter. Found in warm, poorly or unchlorinated water sources like swimming holes or neti pots it enters the nasal cavity of its victims and - attracted by the chemicals nerve cells use to communicate with each other - climbs into the brain via the olfactory nerve. It’s fortunately rare, less than a thousand cases have been reported globally. Unfortunately it’s also highly lethal with a 97% mortality rate. An average of five days after exposure symptoms appear: headache, fever, nausea, vomiting, stiffness, then become more serious as hallucinations, ataxia and seizures take the stage. Sufferers typically don’t last more than a week or two.

What does this horrifying and utterly mundane condition have to do with the unnatural? In the case that this rare and grim fate befalls an equally rare (and sometimes grim) type of person something unusual happens. Adepts don’t die of it, in a manner of speaking. It’s only happened once and the woman afflicted is locked up in a Lubbock psychiatric hospital for stabbing a bunch of people on account of she couldn't handle the changes, but she's still kind of alive. When N. fowleri chows down on the twisted, charged-addled material of a willworker’s brain the pale waste product left behind is an almost carbon copy of the original grey matter.

It’s not a material copy, a coroner or a surgeon digging around in the brain pan would be left scratching their heads at the smooth, white undifferentiated mass, but it’s functionally close. You can think with it just like you would your old brain. The replacement process isn’t much fun though, in addition to all the symptoms a normal person goes through adepts develop transient behavioural tics since the new wiring doesn’t line up perfectly with the slow erosion of the old brain. Temporary foot fetishes would be common if it happened enough. This all resolves itself after a full conversion with some side effects.

The new material reacts to trauma differently than a normal human brain, it keeps ingrained behaviours but can’t adapt to new ones. This is specific to trauma. You can still form new memories and take an art class, but being shot at by a sniper either will or won’t mentally effect you depending entirely on who you were before you got pod-personed. In game terms your shock gauges are locked in place. You still make stress checks and suffer the immediate effects of failing a roll but you can’t gain or lose notches no matter how many ordeals or therapy sessions you go through. If you’ve got an associated disorder you’re stuck with that as well.

Full conversions can’t do magick either. Sorry, the you that is you now isn’t really human anymore. That may or may not bother you until you die depending on what your self gauge was looking like beforehand. Given an adept’s obsession, finding themselves cut off from their one-and-only goes down poorly and won’t stop going down poorly because they can’t get used to it. There is a way that skirts this problem, notice how I said full conversions?

Theoretically if an adept was infected with N. fowleri and were to somehow halt the process part way through they could get a measure of both worlds. For every 20% of your grey matter replaced one random gauge is frozen forever, disorders and all. You also get a cumulative -20% shift to all magick, be it gutter magick, avatar powers or adept reality-bending. If it isn’t mundane, you get penalized. Plus you’re stuck with whatever transient tic the sloppy interface between old and new brain puts on you. There are hospital treatments that could manage something like this, but you’d draw a ton of heat as a medical marvel to emerge seemingly unscathed.

050 - Angela Demoss, Pragmatic Shaman

GMC: Angela Demoss, Pragmatic Shaman

Magick isn’t worth it. That’s the big reveal, sorry. Anything worthwhile you can do with it is better done through mundane means and the things you can’t do through mundane means aren’t worth the sacrifice. It’s a narcotic, it’ll feel wonderful and secret and powerful and suck you into a spiral of addiction and self-destruction if you don’t turn away. It’s a curse.

People still do it, Angela Demoss is one of them as much as she laments the fact. She serves her local community from her musty walk-up apartment in much the same way as village witches, tribal shamans and wise men have done for centuries. A disenfranchised group left behind in a society where it isn’t profitable enough to cater to them still needs medicine, hope and opportunity. If she doesn’t do her magick they’ll try to reach for it themselves, or worse, do without. To her it’s better that she occupy that space and make the sacrifice for all of them.

When she started on her path 40 years ago it was an entirely different story. Angela was headstrong and wilful, diving into a secret world that would grant her knowledge and mastery over the universe. She and her friends were going to change the world, one spell at a time. She couldn’t have been more wrong. It took two of them getting killed by the third - possessed by a thing calling itself “the looped garoo” - in the bowels of a shattered shopping mall to prove it to her and the sleepless nights won’t let her forget it.

The experience didn’t break her but it did make her weary. Rather than completely retreat she now shoulders the burden of magick for as many of the underprivileged as possible. Where possible she’ll dress mundane solutions up as magick, it’s less complicated and the placebo effect of some herbs and ground up viagra is a better cure for marital difficulties than any fertility charm she knows. When she doesn’t have a choice she’ll pull out the big guns: a pair of ex-Sleepers who took her for a charlatan are locked in perpetual nightmares for trying to turn her corner of the city into their personal fiefdom. A detente with the rest has earned her enough respect from the underground that now she can pull the same wizard-of-oz shtick on the clued-in folks too.

Getting on in years Angela has taken on an apprentice, a teenager who came to her begging for a solution to the violence at home. She sees the same hungry desire to change the world of her youth in her protege and to her student’s chagrin her lessons are often cautionary tales, hard work and study, like a magickal Mr. Miyagi. Moretails - her rat-king spirit guide - pshaws this approach as unnecessary hardship. More than one late-night debate between them has centred on the trope of mastery coming full circle and her response that she might just as well take its disdain as an indication she is on the right path. To its credit Moretails hasn’t yet brought up that the looped garoo is still out there, that the wards she wove to lock it away won’t last forever. That if she doesn’t face her past then who will?

STATS
Personality: Enigmatic but practical. Angela will put on the act and woo the rubes because half of her magick is selling people on her reputation to peddle mundane solutions as magickal. The other half is knowing when to actually use her power to push back the darkness.
Rage: Magickal abuse. It’s all the more insidious because ordinary people can’t see or do anything about it.
Noble: Equality through unequal means. Putting her thumb on the scale in favour of people at a disadvantage is Angela’s bread and butter.
Fear: Calling up something she cannot put down (Unnatural).
Obsession: Magick is a horses ass, people could get what they want without the danger if they weren’t so fixated on the quick-fix.
Wound Threshold: 50.

Wearily Insightful 50% (Substitutes for Notice, Substitutes for Knowledge, Therapeutic.)
Practical Witch 55%* (Substitutes for Lie, Medical, Coerces Unnatural.)
Avatar: The Shaman 80% (Avatar, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)

Shock Gauges

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

049 - The Truck Stop

Paragon Place: The Truck Stop

Everybody who’s made their life on the highways winds up there eventually. It’s the kind of middle-of-nowhere, beacon of respite that truckers, roadtrippers and holidaymakers all come to associate with the open road and long journeys. It’s the modern oasis, making impossible journeys into something probable. That place of safety and comfort far from the fruits of civilization. And yet, unlike civilization no one settles there. It’s a place with people, but not for people. Somewhere to be visited, but not a destination.

Taboo: Nobody lives at the truck stop (I mean, I guess you could but that’s not what it’s for). Staying longer than overnight is taboo. So is making it a destination, always be passing through on your way to someplace else. Employees occupy a weird liminal space, they’re excluded from a lot of the benefits even as caretakers.

Associated Avatars: The Masterless Man, the Outsider, the Salesman, the Solid Citizen.

Resonant Avatars: The Charioteer, the Explorer, the Guide, the Loyal Labourer, the Pilgrim, the Unsung Champion.

Symbols: The squeegee for wiping windshields (and you know some prick has wrecked one by wiping down their entire filthy vehicle), air fresheners and the stink of spilled gas and oil, food that’s either been sitting under a heat lamp all day or really good.

Adjuncts
1%-50%: Need to plot out the next leg of your journey? Gain a hunch roll to figure out where you’re going while drawing on a road atlas with a marker or fiddling with google maps in between scarfing down questionable sandwiches. Alternatively use it to pick up information about where you’re going by eavesdropping on conversations, noticing discarded tourist brochures or hearing voices from that inexplicable concrete dinosaur sculpture by the roadside.

51%-70%: Gain your choice of the Medical feature for performing first aid or the ability to flip-flop a roll to make temporary repairs to a vehicle at the truck stop. Temporary being the operative word, any benefits only last until you get to where you’re going. Go to the friggin’ hospital for your snakebite already.

71%-90%: The truck stop is a place to rest, wool-gather and marshal your resources before plowing on. It’s a bulwark against the long distances people have to travel and comforts them like a watering hole in the desert.

• Better: Truck stops offer more facilities and travel-oriented products to smooth out the stresses of the road than ever these days. By taking advantage of them gain a hunch roll for your next stress check, if it winds up passing you can use it while you’re still travelling. Otherwise disregard it and roll normally.
• Faster: Just a little shut-eye and then back on the road. A 15-minute kip counts as a full night’s sleep, once per journey. Pushing the envelope again unravels the effect without you realizing it, as many have fatally learned.
• Cheaper: On your last legs, broke and your vehicle won’t run? This one’s good for one freebie that will get you out of here but only if you’re truly desperate, there’s no guarantee it’ll get you where you’re going but finding a discarded half-full fuel can in the bushes is better than a kick in the teeth.

91%+: Everyone’s passing through on their way to something. If you’re stuck or lost you can stick your wagon wheels into these universal ruts and let the cosmos take you where you need to go. Go through the motions of purposeful travel: gas up, eat, play at having a destination and then drive on out with a careless, automatic-writing sort of vibe. If you have an objective it’ll put your on a synchronous path to whatever the GM thinks is the most convenient petty milestone. You just won’t know it until you get there.

99%: Whatever their differences all truck stops look the same in certain ways: that flickering fluorescent tube in the overhead lights outside, the one wrecked bathroom stall that you don’t want to know what happened to, the food, the graffiti, the people. Part of this is a frequency illusion, you see and remember the things that you expect. Part of it is that they’re all the same place. Make a roll, cutting the length of your journey by the resulting percentage. It only happens when you’re not paying attention, go into the bathroom or sleep in your cab and come out or wake up in a different stop. It’ll be obvious later, like when you drive someplace and suddenly realize you have no memory of how you did it.