Artifact: The Leash
Power: Significant.
Description: A small harness and lead, the kind intended for controversially restraining a toddler from wandering off. Tied all along the leather straps with coarse, orange twine are the individual bones from small birds. There are enough of them to make up just over three American Robin skeletons.
Effect: If you can get the leash on someone (remember that it’s intended to fit a small child) the restraint acts as a volitional blind spot. Leading the wearer somewhere with the leash makes it seem to them like the only feasible possibility, likewise tying it off somewhere leaves them feeling like they’ve no reason to stray further than the few feet of slack it gives them. They won’t remove it on their own either, it won’t occur to them that they can.
This risks breaking down if the wearer is confronted with an immediate and urgent need to oppose the restraint, be it the threat of violence, something related to a passion or obsession or anything that causes a stress check. Other stimulus may qualify at the GMs discretion. Attempting to react to this stimulus requires taking a rank 6 Helplessness check, passing results in sudden recognition of their restraint (and allows them to remove the harness) but failing results in an automatic freeze result. Most often collapsing in a fit of tears at being unable to reconcile the present need with mental inaccessibility.
Avatars of the Child are at a -30% shift to their avatar identity while under restraint by the leash.
Thursday, 14 November 2019
Wednesday, 13 November 2019
197 - Maria Wood aka Monterey Jack, A Miserable Pile of Advertising
GMC: Maria Wood aka Monterey Jack, A Miserable Pile of Advertising
Back when she was Maria Wood, Jack knew that the world didn’t feel right. That heady childhood bloom of newness faded as she got older only to be replaced by a droning, surreal monotony that wouldn’t let her sleep. What might have been diagnosed and treated as a rare case of childhood depersonalization if her parents paid more attention was instead wallpapered over by something that promised a hazily similar shine to those nostalgic memories: the magic of brands.
In an earlier era this wouldn’t have worked. Advertising is an old game and older generations were, if anything, more susceptible to it than they are today. But they didn’t have the same instant global exposure, the same hypertrophic stimulus battling fatigued apathy, the same grip on the culturally impoverished’s sense of self and worth. Brands weren’t religions.
So Maria used them as a proxy for feeling like she was real, a shifting collage of traits gathered from products and marketing in place of a real personality. It was an unhealthy adaption but it worked enough to survive as she made her mad way through the world. Well enough that she became an adept without even realising what she was, a sociomancer by second nature. She was received with curiousity by the occult underground but barely noticed them beyond the fact it was easier to avoid taboo without having to deal with the awkward shunning of creeped out normal people.
Her imperfect suit of mental armour worked right up until her brother showed up, their father had passed and the estate was stuck in probate. There were taxes and insurances and paperworks to be gone over with lawyers and they needed her. That history, a life so prosaic and achingly tedious it made a mockery of who she really was. Maria broke down completely and fled.
Her intended self destruction, hiding in the demolition of a local photocopier manufacturer’s last plant isn’t something she remembers. Nor does she recall the ensuing months hitchhiking across the country as the tweedy mascot she’d once admired. She has completely reshaped herself in dying corporate images a half a dozen times since. Risking death alongside them she subsumes herself to these falling minor gods in return for the major charge she gains with risking death. Spending it, she walks away wearing what they were.
This is only temporary. Maria’s sense of self has the same fragility that has dogged her all her life. As it starts to get the better of her, the current skin she wears begins to itch. Tracking dying brands all over the country she is always trying to stay ahead of her real identity. For now she wears the face of an almost cartoonish cowboy, lasoo, boots and all, cribbed from a shuttered cheese manufacturer. Each new mask resets her Self gauge, if she ever reaches five failed notches the facade will disintegrate and leave her exposed in convulsing catatonia.
STATS
Personality: A little too big and a little too bright to be believable. Monterey Jack is currently a slow talking, hyper-masculine parody of a cowboy that Maria hermit-crabbed off a cheese factory. In a few months she could be something else and something else again a year later. Either that or her facade will slip and she’ll wind up catatonic in a hospital.
Rage: Banal reality.
Noble: Aspirational glamour.
Fear: What am I underneath this? (Self).
Obsession: Cloaking herself in the shells of cast off brands.
Wound Threshold: 65.
Sociomancer 55%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Magickal Facade 65% (Substitutes for Fitness, Protects Self, Provides Wound Threshold.)
Shock Gauges
Back when she was Maria Wood, Jack knew that the world didn’t feel right. That heady childhood bloom of newness faded as she got older only to be replaced by a droning, surreal monotony that wouldn’t let her sleep. What might have been diagnosed and treated as a rare case of childhood depersonalization if her parents paid more attention was instead wallpapered over by something that promised a hazily similar shine to those nostalgic memories: the magic of brands.
In an earlier era this wouldn’t have worked. Advertising is an old game and older generations were, if anything, more susceptible to it than they are today. But they didn’t have the same instant global exposure, the same hypertrophic stimulus battling fatigued apathy, the same grip on the culturally impoverished’s sense of self and worth. Brands weren’t religions.
So Maria used them as a proxy for feeling like she was real, a shifting collage of traits gathered from products and marketing in place of a real personality. It was an unhealthy adaption but it worked enough to survive as she made her mad way through the world. Well enough that she became an adept without even realising what she was, a sociomancer by second nature. She was received with curiousity by the occult underground but barely noticed them beyond the fact it was easier to avoid taboo without having to deal with the awkward shunning of creeped out normal people.
Her imperfect suit of mental armour worked right up until her brother showed up, their father had passed and the estate was stuck in probate. There were taxes and insurances and paperworks to be gone over with lawyers and they needed her. That history, a life so prosaic and achingly tedious it made a mockery of who she really was. Maria broke down completely and fled.
Her intended self destruction, hiding in the demolition of a local photocopier manufacturer’s last plant isn’t something she remembers. Nor does she recall the ensuing months hitchhiking across the country as the tweedy mascot she’d once admired. She has completely reshaped herself in dying corporate images a half a dozen times since. Risking death alongside them she subsumes herself to these falling minor gods in return for the major charge she gains with risking death. Spending it, she walks away wearing what they were.
This is only temporary. Maria’s sense of self has the same fragility that has dogged her all her life. As it starts to get the better of her, the current skin she wears begins to itch. Tracking dying brands all over the country she is always trying to stay ahead of her real identity. For now she wears the face of an almost cartoonish cowboy, lasoo, boots and all, cribbed from a shuttered cheese manufacturer. Each new mask resets her Self gauge, if she ever reaches five failed notches the facade will disintegrate and leave her exposed in convulsing catatonia.
STATS
Personality: A little too big and a little too bright to be believable. Monterey Jack is currently a slow talking, hyper-masculine parody of a cowboy that Maria hermit-crabbed off a cheese factory. In a few months she could be something else and something else again a year later. Either that or her facade will slip and she’ll wind up catatonic in a hospital.
Rage: Banal reality.
Noble: Aspirational glamour.
Fear: What am I underneath this? (Self).
Obsession: Cloaking herself in the shells of cast off brands.
Wound Threshold: 65.
Sociomancer 55%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Magickal Facade 65% (Substitutes for Fitness, Protects Self, Provides Wound Threshold.)
Shock Gauges
Tuesday, 12 November 2019
196 - Paved with Good Intentions
Ritual: Paved with Good Intentions
Cost: 4 significant charges.
Ritual Action: Cocoon a dead rabbit in kudzu vines and leave it out in the sun for three days. At the conclusion of this time get a hold of a demon whose Urge revolves around what was its noble passion in life and convince it to agree to occupy your putrefying rabbit burrito and alter your target (which you have to identify somehow). The length of time is up to your negotiating skills and means, the longer you can manage the longer the ritual effect lasts. How you manage this is completely up to you.
Having primed the ritual this way travel to a crossroads the target passes through on a regular basis. Bury the carcass under the road, if it’s dirt just tamp it back in, it it’s asphalt then pave over or patch it. The ritual activates the next time the target (or someone matching the description you gave the demon) passes over the buried rabbit.
Effect: This ritual causes the target’s noble passion to become progressively all consuming. The next time they are coerced or otherwise suffer a stress check related that results in a failed notch it temporarily replaces either their rage passion (if they choose the fight result) or their fear passion (if they choose flight or paralysis). The old passion is still there but is inaccessible beneath the new compulsion. The next time this happens it replaces the remaining passion. Then their obsession, restricting any flip-flopping on the attached identity to actions only relating to their noble passion. Self stress checks are likely but rationalization isn’t unthinkable.
A secondary effect of the ritual is that each faux-passion (or faux-obsession) allows the target to count their hardened notches as one higher for the purposes of determining whether they need to make stress checks for actions undertaken in service of their noble passion.
This effect lasts for as long as you had the bound demon agree to occupy the buried rabbit carcass under the crossroads. The only ways to break it is to dig the rabbit up and scatter it to the wind or for the target to deliberately change their noble passion, short circuiting the ritual and restoring their faculties.
Cost: 4 significant charges.
Ritual Action: Cocoon a dead rabbit in kudzu vines and leave it out in the sun for three days. At the conclusion of this time get a hold of a demon whose Urge revolves around what was its noble passion in life and convince it to agree to occupy your putrefying rabbit burrito and alter your target (which you have to identify somehow). The length of time is up to your negotiating skills and means, the longer you can manage the longer the ritual effect lasts. How you manage this is completely up to you.
Having primed the ritual this way travel to a crossroads the target passes through on a regular basis. Bury the carcass under the road, if it’s dirt just tamp it back in, it it’s asphalt then pave over or patch it. The ritual activates the next time the target (or someone matching the description you gave the demon) passes over the buried rabbit.
Effect: This ritual causes the target’s noble passion to become progressively all consuming. The next time they are coerced or otherwise suffer a stress check related that results in a failed notch it temporarily replaces either their rage passion (if they choose the fight result) or their fear passion (if they choose flight or paralysis). The old passion is still there but is inaccessible beneath the new compulsion. The next time this happens it replaces the remaining passion. Then their obsession, restricting any flip-flopping on the attached identity to actions only relating to their noble passion. Self stress checks are likely but rationalization isn’t unthinkable.
A secondary effect of the ritual is that each faux-passion (or faux-obsession) allows the target to count their hardened notches as one higher for the purposes of determining whether they need to make stress checks for actions undertaken in service of their noble passion.
This effect lasts for as long as you had the bound demon agree to occupy the buried rabbit carcass under the crossroads. The only ways to break it is to dig the rabbit up and scatter it to the wind or for the target to deliberately change their noble passion, short circuiting the ritual and restoring their faculties.
Monday, 11 November 2019
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.
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.
Sunday, 10 November 2019
194 - Cadaverous Reconstruction & Elisha's Curse
Ritual: Cadaverous Reconstruction
Cost: 4 minor charges.
Ritual Action: Take a C mount CCTV camera which recorded an unsolved murder, remove the insides and drill a hole in it. Fill it with offal from an animal slaughtered according to halal practices but forbidden for human consumption by the Quran. Bury it at the base of a lemon tree that is at least 3 years old. After it has rained three times return and dig up the spot, removing the tree in the process.
Effect: With a successful ritual the camera will be gone, instead replaced with a corpse identical to the murder victim at the time of their death right down to any wounds from the moment it is unearthed. Non-magickal clothes and personal effects that were on them at the time are included. Physically, magickally and symbolically it’s an almost perfect clone. The only discrepancy is that it has no teeth. No matter what magick you use the duplicate can never be raised from the dead, possessed by a demon or otherwise animated by any means.
Ritual: Elisha’s Curse
Ritual Action: Take the last hairs from a balding man's head and the spittle and tears from a young child that has lost a sibling. Mix them with a commercially produced bear lure and daub it on the front door of the target’s home. Confront them in a public place with witnesses and accuse them of a crime for which the victim has forgiven the perpetrator. Throw what’s left of the mixture in their face.
Effect: The nearest animal of the infraorder Arctoidea is compelled to travel towards and attack the target of the ritual. While bears, under the family Ursidae, are a part of this infraorder it also includes various seals, walruses, skunks, ferrets, raccoons and red pandas, among others. The animal is only compelled to land a single damaging blow, whether it keeps attacking afterwards or flees is down to circumstances and its temperament.
Ritual Action: Take a C mount CCTV camera which recorded an unsolved murder, remove the insides and drill a hole in it. Fill it with offal from an animal slaughtered according to halal practices but forbidden for human consumption by the Quran. Bury it at the base of a lemon tree that is at least 3 years old. After it has rained three times return and dig up the spot, removing the tree in the process.
Effect: With a successful ritual the camera will be gone, instead replaced with a corpse identical to the murder victim at the time of their death right down to any wounds from the moment it is unearthed. Non-magickal clothes and personal effects that were on them at the time are included. Physically, magickally and symbolically it’s an almost perfect clone. The only discrepancy is that it has no teeth. No matter what magick you use the duplicate can never be raised from the dead, possessed by a demon or otherwise animated by any means.
Ritual: Elisha’s Curse
Cost: 3 minor charges.
Ritual Action: Take the last hairs from a balding man's head and the spittle and tears from a young child that has lost a sibling. Mix them with a commercially produced bear lure and daub it on the front door of the target’s home. Confront them in a public place with witnesses and accuse them of a crime for which the victim has forgiven the perpetrator. Throw what’s left of the mixture in their face.
Effect: The nearest animal of the infraorder Arctoidea is compelled to travel towards and attack the target of the ritual. While bears, under the family Ursidae, are a part of this infraorder it also includes various seals, walruses, skunks, ferrets, raccoons and red pandas, among others. The animal is only compelled to land a single damaging blow, whether it keeps attacking afterwards or flees is down to circumstances and its temperament.
Saturday, 9 November 2019
193 - The Autumn Court
Cabal: The Autumn Court
You can’t get time back once you’ve spent it. To the men and woman of the Autumn Court this was the impetus behind pursuing wealth and professional success, spending their time judiciously to outpace the value accrued by others. Having achieved their dreams and materially wanting for little they’ve run back up against this tireless axiom, no matter their wealth they can’t buy back the time they’ve spent amassing their fortunes. At least, that would be the case if it weren’t for magick.
The Autumn Court are doing what they’ve done best for their entire lives: extracting time from others in an uneven exchange that leaves them ahead in the bargain. Greased with three different flavours of magick the increasingly alien cabalmates work together to perfect their methods and act as an insurance against outside predations and individual failure. How far this mutual support will go under fire has yet to be put to the test.
The Autumn Court has the following concerns:
Clark Bailey is a chronophage (a time focused adept who gains power by wasting the time of others but loses it if he wastes his own) who takes a surprisingly hands on role in administering the internship programs of his accountancy firms. What is taken as a twilight years taste for mentorship is really a front for his occult activities. Taking a page from his childhood terror at the bedtime fairytales his grandmother would tell him of fay bargains and lifetimes spent trapped in strange realms, he has styled himself (and the cabal’s name) after those creatures. Making contracts for people’s time in return for the promise of intangible experience he deliberately wastes it while providing nothing of value in return and harvests charges in the process.
Stopping barely short of the banishment rooms designed to punish employees with meaningless work until they become disheartened and quit, Clark has tailored his process carefully. The upfront appearance of legitimacy keeps applicants keen for just long enough before the bait and switch robs them of the opportunity to take up other offers. Selective use and magickal cover ups keeps complaints from being taken seriously and the Kafkaesque weave of contractual obligation paired with institutional ties to several colleges keeps things quiet. The primary bottleneck for Clark’s process is the number of applicants he can abuse at a time, but performed correctly it’s rich in charges.
A man of advancing years whose adept obsession has estranged him from his family, at home Clark holds imaginary conversations with his missing spouse and children. Over time this has muddled with his fairy motif and a fancy for 18th century fashion, on the staff’s days off he struts the rooms of his home in aged finery and powdered wigs twisted to take on gossamer and ephemeral qualities while talking to himself. It’s a secret pastime he is ashamed of and would do a lot to protect.
Miguel Chandler made his fortune on payday loans and holds a particular disdain for his customer base for needing his services while simultaneously maintaining a belief that they do so with no coercing factors. Acknowledging that would infringe on his self-image and sense of superiority and fairness. As an avatar of the salesman he’s made deals most of his life, it’s only with the formation of the cabal that he’s been ambitious enough to industrialise it. Tutoring would-be franchisees on the avatar path he now heads a growing pyramid scheme of merchants who owe him a fraction of the special deals he has taught them to make with clients who are especially vulnerable.
The vivacious bleached-blonde, tanned golfer moves across the green with vigor of a man 30 years his 68 year old junior while cutting deals and indulging in social jockeying with upper crust of his home city - the same people who would’ve felt about him as he feels about his customer base in his youth (and still do in snide whispers). The subtle humiliations and one upmanship he visits on them shelter an ego as precarious as his empire. I mean, what if his protege-employees unionised?
Susan Reese has fought damned hard to get to where she is as head of the largest cosmetics manufacturer in five states. Even in an industry focused on women she had to contend with the glass ceiling, only bypassing it by shrewd and ruthless political acumen. As someone who has been described as “dowdy” she knows all too well how focused people are on physical appearance and apparent youth. She counts on it for her immortality.
The secret ingredient in her formulations is a type of mummy brown (a special pigment made from mummified corpses) mixed with her own blood, the recipe allegedly originating with Countess and serial killer Elizabeth Bathory. Added to products which provide short term alleviation of the ravages of time it gives them an added kick of magickal oomph in return for vampirically draining the internal health of her customers. By consuming the leftover skulls of the powdered mummies Susan remains timelessly young on the inside, even as she appears to continue ageing.
You can’t get time back once you’ve spent it. To the men and woman of the Autumn Court this was the impetus behind pursuing wealth and professional success, spending their time judiciously to outpace the value accrued by others. Having achieved their dreams and materially wanting for little they’ve run back up against this tireless axiom, no matter their wealth they can’t buy back the time they’ve spent amassing their fortunes. At least, that would be the case if it weren’t for magick.
The Autumn Court are doing what they’ve done best for their entire lives: extracting time from others in an uneven exchange that leaves them ahead in the bargain. Greased with three different flavours of magick the increasingly alien cabalmates work together to perfect their methods and act as an insurance against outside predations and individual failure. How far this mutual support will go under fire has yet to be put to the test.
The Autumn Court has the following concerns:
- Build a centralised magickal vault to store their harvested time in, safe from the vagaries and scavenging of lesser cabals (their current weighty objective is at 39%, they’ve just had false planning approved as a cover for what their construction crew will be really building). This is as much an exercise in solidarity as cementing their power.
- Clark is being blackmailed by a private detective in the employ of his son with video of his hobbies and wants to deal with it quietly. His son just wants money for drugs.
- Susan is stuck playing cat-and-mouse with a dogged FDA inspector who has come perilously close to discovering the secret ingredient in her cosmetics. With Clark distracted by his own problems she has approached Miguel for help.
Clark Bailey is a chronophage (a time focused adept who gains power by wasting the time of others but loses it if he wastes his own) who takes a surprisingly hands on role in administering the internship programs of his accountancy firms. What is taken as a twilight years taste for mentorship is really a front for his occult activities. Taking a page from his childhood terror at the bedtime fairytales his grandmother would tell him of fay bargains and lifetimes spent trapped in strange realms, he has styled himself (and the cabal’s name) after those creatures. Making contracts for people’s time in return for the promise of intangible experience he deliberately wastes it while providing nothing of value in return and harvests charges in the process.
Stopping barely short of the banishment rooms designed to punish employees with meaningless work until they become disheartened and quit, Clark has tailored his process carefully. The upfront appearance of legitimacy keeps applicants keen for just long enough before the bait and switch robs them of the opportunity to take up other offers. Selective use and magickal cover ups keeps complaints from being taken seriously and the Kafkaesque weave of contractual obligation paired with institutional ties to several colleges keeps things quiet. The primary bottleneck for Clark’s process is the number of applicants he can abuse at a time, but performed correctly it’s rich in charges.
A man of advancing years whose adept obsession has estranged him from his family, at home Clark holds imaginary conversations with his missing spouse and children. Over time this has muddled with his fairy motif and a fancy for 18th century fashion, on the staff’s days off he struts the rooms of his home in aged finery and powdered wigs twisted to take on gossamer and ephemeral qualities while talking to himself. It’s a secret pastime he is ashamed of and would do a lot to protect.
Miguel Chandler made his fortune on payday loans and holds a particular disdain for his customer base for needing his services while simultaneously maintaining a belief that they do so with no coercing factors. Acknowledging that would infringe on his self-image and sense of superiority and fairness. As an avatar of the salesman he’s made deals most of his life, it’s only with the formation of the cabal that he’s been ambitious enough to industrialise it. Tutoring would-be franchisees on the avatar path he now heads a growing pyramid scheme of merchants who owe him a fraction of the special deals he has taught them to make with clients who are especially vulnerable.
The vivacious bleached-blonde, tanned golfer moves across the green with vigor of a man 30 years his 68 year old junior while cutting deals and indulging in social jockeying with upper crust of his home city - the same people who would’ve felt about him as he feels about his customer base in his youth (and still do in snide whispers). The subtle humiliations and one upmanship he visits on them shelter an ego as precarious as his empire. I mean, what if his protege-employees unionised?
Susan Reese has fought damned hard to get to where she is as head of the largest cosmetics manufacturer in five states. Even in an industry focused on women she had to contend with the glass ceiling, only bypassing it by shrewd and ruthless political acumen. As someone who has been described as “dowdy” she knows all too well how focused people are on physical appearance and apparent youth. She counts on it for her immortality.
The secret ingredient in her formulations is a type of mummy brown (a special pigment made from mummified corpses) mixed with her own blood, the recipe allegedly originating with Countess and serial killer Elizabeth Bathory. Added to products which provide short term alleviation of the ravages of time it gives them an added kick of magickal oomph in return for vampirically draining the internal health of her customers. By consuming the leftover skulls of the powdered mummies Susan remains timelessly young on the inside, even as she appears to continue ageing.
It would be a perfect, if grisly and inhumane, plan to live forever if the ritual didn’t require authentic ancient Egyptian mummies. Between difficulty in indulging in Hobby Lobby-style smuggling and a dwindling supply Susan is keen to find a different method without exposing her potential obsolescence to her cabalmates.
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.
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