Ritual: Never Again
Cost: 4 minor charges.
Ritual Action: Some people feel compelled to repeatedly do things they know they’ll regret. Whether it’s the bottle, overeating, the needle or the arms of a woman who isn’t your wife, some addictions require years - even a lifetime - of hard work to overcome. Sometimes even that isn’t enough. For people more concerned with the product than the outcome magick provides one questionable shortcut. So long as they want it bad enough.
Take an antique coke bottle - at least 100 years old - and something that can be used to facilitate your regretful temptation of choice: whiskey, a bag full of heroin, cash. Put that object inside the bottle with a handful of ash from something burned at least a half dozen years ago. Seal it with wax from a scented candle (any except sandalwood). Give it to someone you don’t trust and convince them to bury it somewhere you won’t find it.
Make no act of contrition for at least 3 days. If it works the effect will take hold when you wake up on the fourth.
Effect: You physically can’t perform the action. You might want to, need to, but your body won’t comply.
Mentally it’s a different story, you’re constantly haunted by the consequences of the action as though you had caved in to your compulsion. Your unrelenting nightmares reflect a world in which the worst of your excesses are realised. Take a rank 5 stress check on a relevant gauge (Unnatural is a strong contender) once per week from the burden of guilt. Make it a rank 6 check if it’s relevant to a passion or obsession, rank 7 if it hits one of each. It doesn’t ever get worse than that, a lot of people eventually get used to carrying around an invisible monkey on their back. Some of them prefer it to the alternative.
The effect can be broken by retrieving and opening the bottle. However, doing so has the opposite effect, you cannot physically prevent yourself from indulging. At least the dreams will stop.
Thursday, 21 November 2019
Wednesday, 20 November 2019
204 - The Untether
Artifact: The Untether
Power: Major
Description: A length of fraying, fibrous rope looped into a loose hitch knot at one end. Following the knot with you finger leads to the same line you started at despite the fact it should end. Likewise trying to follow it to the other end seems to extend endlessly despite the fact that's impossible since you're always holding the same part of the rope. At a glance it’s three feet of rope ending in a complicated loop.
Effect: The Untether only functions for those with a profound sense of alienation, a relevant disorder from the Isolation, Helplessness or Self gauges is a good guideline. Grasping it is a grounding experience, it won’t recover any of the damage but so long as they maintain contact the worst of the effects are assuaged (for a disorder, the effect itself is subsumed but the effects of high failed notches remain).
Giving yourself over to the Untether means its the only thing that can keep you here. Here being in the same dimension the rest of us occupy.
Someone experiencing the first effect of the Untether who lets go of it is shunted out of reality (it disappears too). There’s a sensation like uncontrolled falling as everything becomes hazy and indistinct. To everyone observing, you vanish. In this state the world looks like its shrouded in a dense fog and sounds are echoey and distant, for those familiar with it the effect is similar to The Space Behind. Everything is intangible as if you're a ghost. If you don’t regain contact with the Untether you might as well be.
Roll 1d100 when you release the Untether, that’s the value you have to roll under to take ahold of the rope again, hovering just out of reach as it falls away from you in slow motion. For every turn you spend dicking around, waiting for the oncoming bus to pass through you or phasing through the walls of a bank vault, subtract 10 from this number. If it hits zero the Untether suddenly speeds up its descent as it snaps back to reality without you. Falling into a heap right where you dropped it.
Power: Major
Description: A length of fraying, fibrous rope looped into a loose hitch knot at one end. Following the knot with you finger leads to the same line you started at despite the fact it should end. Likewise trying to follow it to the other end seems to extend endlessly despite the fact that's impossible since you're always holding the same part of the rope. At a glance it’s three feet of rope ending in a complicated loop.
Effect: The Untether only functions for those with a profound sense of alienation, a relevant disorder from the Isolation, Helplessness or Self gauges is a good guideline. Grasping it is a grounding experience, it won’t recover any of the damage but so long as they maintain contact the worst of the effects are assuaged (for a disorder, the effect itself is subsumed but the effects of high failed notches remain).
Giving yourself over to the Untether means its the only thing that can keep you here. Here being in the same dimension the rest of us occupy.
Someone experiencing the first effect of the Untether who lets go of it is shunted out of reality (it disappears too). There’s a sensation like uncontrolled falling as everything becomes hazy and indistinct. To everyone observing, you vanish. In this state the world looks like its shrouded in a dense fog and sounds are echoey and distant, for those familiar with it the effect is similar to The Space Behind. Everything is intangible as if you're a ghost. If you don’t regain contact with the Untether you might as well be.
Roll 1d100 when you release the Untether, that’s the value you have to roll under to take ahold of the rope again, hovering just out of reach as it falls away from you in slow motion. For every turn you spend dicking around, waiting for the oncoming bus to pass through you or phasing through the walls of a bank vault, subtract 10 from this number. If it hits zero the Untether suddenly speeds up its descent as it snaps back to reality without you. Falling into a heap right where you dropped it.
Tuesday, 19 November 2019
203 - Freudian Chimera
Unnatural Entity: Freudian Chimera
There’s an agrimancer who fancies herself a therapist. She’s no such thing, she never finished high school, but she reads about it every moment she isn’t experimenting with animal husbandry. Theories of mind and compulsion, traumas buried in the subconscious that conventional aid can only root out after years of painful introspection. This seems uncertain and primitive to her. Instead in the same way that she has shortcut around nature in the microcosm of messy expulsions, animal midwifery and selective breeding, she births her client’s inner demons into the world to deal with them directly.
It’s an involved process combining the extraction of a number of bodily fluids and tissues (including marrow and bile) from the progenitor client and the carefully managed interspecies surrogacy of at least three cycles of different animals determined by a complex combination of astrology and personality testing. Unless magickally sped up (and she hates to interfere like that) the process can take years. The creatures spawned from the final birth are hideous freaks of nature, conglomerations of every previous animal involved in the process and animated with unnatural vigor.
The resemblance of any of their forebears is entirely superficial for these creatures. Dissected they are undifferentiated material the whole way through except for a trio or quartet of sacs containing an oily rainbow of fluid that reeks of hydrocarbons if they are punctured. They eat only the inedible refuse we throw away, plastics, glass, etc. In most respects chimeras are only as smart as the dumbest animal in their combination, excepting in cases of their progenitor’s passions. Their reaction to those is uncannily human.
Everyone has a different use for chimeras: journeys of self-discovery and transformation, an unnatural proxy for the excision of persistent traumas, a mirror to gauge their mental health against or an unusual pet or familiar. One repeat customer demands to be locked in a barn with his overnight, emerging bloodsoaked and victorious with the dawn. It would be more impressive if his weren’t mostly made out of chickens and cats. It is theoretically possible that a chimera might be used to indirectly control, monitor or hurt someone but their creator would never willingly make one for that purpose.
Used to further a relevant objective in the right way they are good for a weighty global/petty cosmic milestone. Even using one the wrong way is good for a milestone only one step down from that.
Freudian Chimera, Beast of Inner Nature
Wound Threshold: 30-120, depending on the size of the agglomerated animals.
Id 50%: Substitutes for Struggle, depending on the animals it is made from the chimera may have a +3 or +6 damage bonus. Can be flip-flopped against targets of its progenitor’s rage passion.
Ego 50%: Coerces a gauge. The same one tied to its progenitor’s fear passion, it can flip-flop rolls that relate to the passion directly.
Superego 50%: Cooperative. May shift its or another party’s rolls by exactly 10 points in either direction consistent with its progenitor’s noble passion.
Trauma 70%: Select a supernatural identity. This identity only exists for chimera’s birthed from progenitor’s with one or more disorders, to which its power is symbolic.
There’s an agrimancer who fancies herself a therapist. She’s no such thing, she never finished high school, but she reads about it every moment she isn’t experimenting with animal husbandry. Theories of mind and compulsion, traumas buried in the subconscious that conventional aid can only root out after years of painful introspection. This seems uncertain and primitive to her. Instead in the same way that she has shortcut around nature in the microcosm of messy expulsions, animal midwifery and selective breeding, she births her client’s inner demons into the world to deal with them directly.
It’s an involved process combining the extraction of a number of bodily fluids and tissues (including marrow and bile) from the progenitor client and the carefully managed interspecies surrogacy of at least three cycles of different animals determined by a complex combination of astrology and personality testing. Unless magickally sped up (and she hates to interfere like that) the process can take years. The creatures spawned from the final birth are hideous freaks of nature, conglomerations of every previous animal involved in the process and animated with unnatural vigor.
The resemblance of any of their forebears is entirely superficial for these creatures. Dissected they are undifferentiated material the whole way through except for a trio or quartet of sacs containing an oily rainbow of fluid that reeks of hydrocarbons if they are punctured. They eat only the inedible refuse we throw away, plastics, glass, etc. In most respects chimeras are only as smart as the dumbest animal in their combination, excepting in cases of their progenitor’s passions. Their reaction to those is uncannily human.
Everyone has a different use for chimeras: journeys of self-discovery and transformation, an unnatural proxy for the excision of persistent traumas, a mirror to gauge their mental health against or an unusual pet or familiar. One repeat customer demands to be locked in a barn with his overnight, emerging bloodsoaked and victorious with the dawn. It would be more impressive if his weren’t mostly made out of chickens and cats. It is theoretically possible that a chimera might be used to indirectly control, monitor or hurt someone but their creator would never willingly make one for that purpose.
Used to further a relevant objective in the right way they are good for a weighty global/petty cosmic milestone. Even using one the wrong way is good for a milestone only one step down from that.
Freudian Chimera, Beast of Inner Nature
Wound Threshold: 30-120, depending on the size of the agglomerated animals.
Id 50%: Substitutes for Struggle, depending on the animals it is made from the chimera may have a +3 or +6 damage bonus. Can be flip-flopped against targets of its progenitor’s rage passion.
Ego 50%: Coerces a gauge. The same one tied to its progenitor’s fear passion, it can flip-flop rolls that relate to the passion directly.
Superego 50%: Cooperative. May shift its or another party’s rolls by exactly 10 points in either direction consistent with its progenitor’s noble passion.
Trauma 70%: Select a supernatural identity. This identity only exists for chimera’s birthed from progenitor’s with one or more disorders, to which its power is symbolic.
Monday, 18 November 2019
202 - Sebastian Sturgill, Pestilent Evolution
GMC: Sebastian Sturgill, Pestilent Evolution
Antimicrobial resistance is rated as one of the biggest threats to global human health, the adaptation and evolution of microbes outstripping the ability of our medicine to fight them. Life is much faster at the microscopic level: bacteria can reproduce almost 100,000 times in the span it takes to bring a human baby to term, over 9 million generations of them over the course of a human life. With every division they are shaped by their environment into increasingly perfect biological machines at unthinkable speed. Sebastian grinds his teeth with envy.
A single lifespan trapped inside a body shackled by limited preset potential with the only hope of escape in the metaphorical legacy of offspring. It was an existential insult to the collegiate premed that he could not stomach, to be a conscious mind trapped by that fate. That’s what he tells himself when thinking about why he dropped out. Armed with mail-order DIY gene-editing kits and stolen medical equipment over the past several years the biohacker has transformed himself.
Sebastian would not call what he does magick. He’d be offended at the suggestion. That said there’s very little scientific about cultivating superbugs and shooting them into your body with the expectation that they will ultimately make you stronger, like a cannibal eating someone’s heart. Despite the holes in his methodology Sebastian has an impressive set of rationalizations for why it does work and reams of data supporting genuine results.
Sebastian no longer spends any time in the one-story ranch house he grew up in. Instead he lives, hermetically sealed, in the laboratory he built in the backyard. Constant tinkering has altered his immune system radically and he is aware of the infection risk he poses to others outside of a specially built pressurized suit. Some of the fruits of his labours are impressive enough from a scientific point of view that he has gained fraudulent access to academic and medical circles by misrepresenting himself as the owner of a genuine research lab to further his experiments. His attachment to the occult underground is incidental, the services of those twisted enough to desire his expertise and willing to enable this deception has a significant overlap with that kind of character and he isn’t shy about exploiting it.
STATS
Personality: Unnaturally vain in ways that defy most people’s conception of the term. Sebastian idolises forms and capabilities far outside of most people’s aesthetic and performative ideals. Outside of this limitation he is sharply intelligent and personable, so long as he doesn’t consider you a threat.
Rage: Injury. Sebastian’s body is his temple and he needs it to be in perfect shape to weather his experiments.
Noble: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Fear: Losing his ability to keep adapting (Unnatural).
Obsession: Becoming the perfect organism through infection.
Wound Threshold: 100 (magickally boosted, it may be lower depending on what strain of the sniffles Sebastian currently has running through him).
Epideromancer 70%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Backyard Microbiologist 50% (Substitutes for Knowledge, Medical, Unique - Access to biohazardous materials and lab equipment.)
Shock Gauges
Note: Through obsessive use of the formula spell Preternatural Prowess Sebastian has boosted his Fitness, Dodge, Pursuit and Struggle to 65%.
Antimicrobial resistance is rated as one of the biggest threats to global human health, the adaptation and evolution of microbes outstripping the ability of our medicine to fight them. Life is much faster at the microscopic level: bacteria can reproduce almost 100,000 times in the span it takes to bring a human baby to term, over 9 million generations of them over the course of a human life. With every division they are shaped by their environment into increasingly perfect biological machines at unthinkable speed. Sebastian grinds his teeth with envy.
A single lifespan trapped inside a body shackled by limited preset potential with the only hope of escape in the metaphorical legacy of offspring. It was an existential insult to the collegiate premed that he could not stomach, to be a conscious mind trapped by that fate. That’s what he tells himself when thinking about why he dropped out. Armed with mail-order DIY gene-editing kits and stolen medical equipment over the past several years the biohacker has transformed himself.
Sebastian would not call what he does magick. He’d be offended at the suggestion. That said there’s very little scientific about cultivating superbugs and shooting them into your body with the expectation that they will ultimately make you stronger, like a cannibal eating someone’s heart. Despite the holes in his methodology Sebastian has an impressive set of rationalizations for why it does work and reams of data supporting genuine results.
Sebastian no longer spends any time in the one-story ranch house he grew up in. Instead he lives, hermetically sealed, in the laboratory he built in the backyard. Constant tinkering has altered his immune system radically and he is aware of the infection risk he poses to others outside of a specially built pressurized suit. Some of the fruits of his labours are impressive enough from a scientific point of view that he has gained fraudulent access to academic and medical circles by misrepresenting himself as the owner of a genuine research lab to further his experiments. His attachment to the occult underground is incidental, the services of those twisted enough to desire his expertise and willing to enable this deception has a significant overlap with that kind of character and he isn’t shy about exploiting it.
STATS
Personality: Unnaturally vain in ways that defy most people’s conception of the term. Sebastian idolises forms and capabilities far outside of most people’s aesthetic and performative ideals. Outside of this limitation he is sharply intelligent and personable, so long as he doesn’t consider you a threat.
Rage: Injury. Sebastian’s body is his temple and he needs it to be in perfect shape to weather his experiments.
Noble: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Fear: Losing his ability to keep adapting (Unnatural).
Obsession: Becoming the perfect organism through infection.
Wound Threshold: 100 (magickally boosted, it may be lower depending on what strain of the sniffles Sebastian currently has running through him).
Epideromancer 70%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Backyard Microbiologist 50% (Substitutes for Knowledge, Medical, Unique - Access to biohazardous materials and lab equipment.)
Shock Gauges
Note: Through obsessive use of the formula spell Preternatural Prowess Sebastian has boosted his Fitness, Dodge, Pursuit and Struggle to 65%.
Sunday, 17 November 2019
201 - No Man's Land
Paragon Place: No Man’s Land
Not all paragon places are actively generated by human choice and action, some are defined by unconscious reflection on natural occurrences and reputation. For example, a house might gain a reputation as haunted after a couple of unfortuitous deaths and regardless of whether it actually is this reputation will haunt the place on its own. The Bermuda Triangle is the product of scandalous press, confirmation bias and bad weather more than anything unnatural. No Man’s Land is inhospitable environment empowered by reputation.
The adjuncts for no man’s land are dangerous rather than helpful. This is deliberate, it doesn’t follow the conventional rules for paragon places. Unnatural phenomenon and objective juicing are the same but adjuncts activate automatically when people intrude, associated and resonant avatars may reroll any results at normal frequencies. Beyond the usual occult uses the dangerous nature of no man’s land lends it to being exploited for security or used as a trap.
Taboo: Occupation and development. No man’s land is defined by active resistance to human influence and safety, yoking it to civilized purposes undermines its uncontrolled danger and “otherness” even if it is manmade.
Associated Avatars: The Outsider, the Shaman, the Tamer.
Resonant Avatars: The Explorer, the Survivor.
Symbols: Long falls onto sharp rocks or through collapsed floors, bad weather, isolation from civilization, urban legends and true stories of grisly fates.
Adjuncts
1%-50%: Foreboding. Once per person per week, a successful roll acts like a negative cousin to a hunch. The value rolled opposes a single stress check or roll to avoid injury, rolling equal to or below it inflicts a normal failed result (except on a crit).
51%-70%: Stranded. There’s no help coming, cellular coverage is dead, the roads are out and no one knows where you are and there’s so little you can do alone. Identities with the Therapeutic or Medical features either lose the ability to be flip-flopped or suffer a -20% shift from sheer unnaturally powered hopelessness in no man’s land.
71%-90%: Part of no man’s land’s danger is its unpredictability. One of these channels can apply to each visitor at a time (for ease of use I’d stick to using the same one for everyone, but you do you). If someone survives a dangerous encounter in no man’s land and later returns the same one cannot apply twice in a row.
91%+: Even magick can’t protect you. All rolls on avatar channels, adept spells and gutter magick rituals intended to guard against the danger of no man’s land are at a -20% shift. Worse, protective magicks put in place before you enter are automatically rerolled for with the penalty.
99%: No man’s land only maintains a reputation if it has victims. Once every so often it can dangle a lure to draw people in, the archetypal haunted house drawing in victims every seven years. A side effect is that this can pay off if you manipulate the symbolism correctly, horror tropes like final girl and hereditary curse inform the way this channel interacts with people. Overcoming it in a symbolically appropriate way is good for an extra +10% to an identity or objective on top of any regular benefits of survival.
Not all paragon places are actively generated by human choice and action, some are defined by unconscious reflection on natural occurrences and reputation. For example, a house might gain a reputation as haunted after a couple of unfortuitous deaths and regardless of whether it actually is this reputation will haunt the place on its own. The Bermuda Triangle is the product of scandalous press, confirmation bias and bad weather more than anything unnatural. No Man’s Land is inhospitable environment empowered by reputation.
The adjuncts for no man’s land are dangerous rather than helpful. This is deliberate, it doesn’t follow the conventional rules for paragon places. Unnatural phenomenon and objective juicing are the same but adjuncts activate automatically when people intrude, associated and resonant avatars may reroll any results at normal frequencies. Beyond the usual occult uses the dangerous nature of no man’s land lends it to being exploited for security or used as a trap.
Taboo: Occupation and development. No man’s land is defined by active resistance to human influence and safety, yoking it to civilized purposes undermines its uncontrolled danger and “otherness” even if it is manmade.
Associated Avatars: The Outsider, the Shaman, the Tamer.
Resonant Avatars: The Explorer, the Survivor.
Symbols: Long falls onto sharp rocks or through collapsed floors, bad weather, isolation from civilization, urban legends and true stories of grisly fates.
Adjuncts
1%-50%: Foreboding. Once per person per week, a successful roll acts like a negative cousin to a hunch. The value rolled opposes a single stress check or roll to avoid injury, rolling equal to or below it inflicts a normal failed result (except on a crit).
51%-70%: Stranded. There’s no help coming, cellular coverage is dead, the roads are out and no one knows where you are and there’s so little you can do alone. Identities with the Therapeutic or Medical features either lose the ability to be flip-flopped or suffer a -20% shift from sheer unnaturally powered hopelessness in no man’s land.
71%-90%: Part of no man’s land’s danger is its unpredictability. One of these channels can apply to each visitor at a time (for ease of use I’d stick to using the same one for everyone, but you do you). If someone survives a dangerous encounter in no man’s land and later returns the same one cannot apply twice in a row.
- Better: The earlier foreboding now ceaselessly dogs their steps. The effects of the first channel apply to all relevant rolls of an odd number until they leave. This place wants them dead.
- Faster: Things can turn foul unexpectedly and without warning and with this adjunct they’ll do so far more frequently. Inflict damage equivalent to a minor blast or a rank 5 stress check relevant to the danger of the environment apropos of nothing.
- Cheaper: Preparation and technology are how we overcome our environment. Here they fail, at some point a piece of equipment is automatically destroyed or malfunctions in the face of dire peril.
91%+: Even magick can’t protect you. All rolls on avatar channels, adept spells and gutter magick rituals intended to guard against the danger of no man’s land are at a -20% shift. Worse, protective magicks put in place before you enter are automatically rerolled for with the penalty.
99%: No man’s land only maintains a reputation if it has victims. Once every so often it can dangle a lure to draw people in, the archetypal haunted house drawing in victims every seven years. A side effect is that this can pay off if you manipulate the symbolism correctly, horror tropes like final girl and hereditary curse inform the way this channel interacts with people. Overcoming it in a symbolically appropriate way is good for an extra +10% to an identity or objective on top of any regular benefits of survival.
Saturday, 16 November 2019
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.
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.
Friday, 15 November 2019
199 - Memetic Putty
Artifact: Memetic Putty
Power: Significant.
Description: Memetic putty is odd for an artifact in that it isn’t a physical object, it wouldn’t be unfair to label it unnatural phenomenon (or a magickal flu) except that the adepts that keep “rediscovering” it manufacture it in the same way as magickal artifacts. It's a conceptual object made of magick.
To begin with the putty is malleable since it is an idea not yet fully formed. It has some shape, imparted by the person who created it but they all end up with less control over it than any of them would like. Memetic putty is flavoured after one of the creator's passions or obsession, on a matched success the creator can pick which one instead of determining it randomly, on a crit they can make it about anything). It will stay this way, in the creator’s head, for up to a month before it begins to spoil. They’d best use it since the cost of creation is the hard work and drive invested in something genuinely important to the creator (1d10+5% percentiles off of their current objective).
There’s an Agrimancer down in Oklahoma who has come up with a way to invest the memetic putty he creates into chicken eggs. Unfortunately no one else has been able to replicate this feat and the flavours of idea he has aren’t particularly useful to most people. Still, it’s a big enough deal for him to get regular visits from TNI goons who aggressively buy up his whole supply. Word is that he’s sick of the money and wants some help getting out from under them.
Effect: Memetic putty can be used to communicate anything with perfect clarity. It's platonic potential as an idea that throws signal to noise ratio completely to out the window. The restriction is that it must be related to the core concept invested into it. If you can fulfil that requirement it offers either a +20% shift on Connect or Status rolls (it’s ineffective at attempts to Lie) or +2 ranks on a coercion attempt made with it.
It retains this quality after you’ve shared it but loses some of the original flexibility when exposed to grubby reality. Each person it is used on may turn around and use it on someone else for the same benefit. They can’t change what they’ve been told but they can put their own spin on it (this is inevitable even if they don’t intend to, like a big game of telephone), gradually shaping the putty into something more concrete.
As it spreads the putty loses effectiveness and becomes increasingly inflexible. After a number of people equal to the sum of the casting roll have been influenced the benefits are cut in half (to a +10% shift or +1 stress check rank), once this number reaches the total of the casting roll (plus 100 for results below 10) it loses effectiveness entirely. Stretched across too many preconceptions and permutations whatever compelling seed once laid at the heart of the putty is spent. Quite a few creators see this, assume it was really a one-off bolt of creative lightning and never make a second or third attempt.
Description: Memetic putty is odd for an artifact in that it isn’t a physical object, it wouldn’t be unfair to label it unnatural phenomenon (or a magickal flu) except that the adepts that keep “rediscovering” it manufacture it in the same way as magickal artifacts. It's a conceptual object made of magick.
To begin with the putty is malleable since it is an idea not yet fully formed. It has some shape, imparted by the person who created it but they all end up with less control over it than any of them would like. Memetic putty is flavoured after one of the creator's passions or obsession, on a matched success the creator can pick which one instead of determining it randomly, on a crit they can make it about anything). It will stay this way, in the creator’s head, for up to a month before it begins to spoil. They’d best use it since the cost of creation is the hard work and drive invested in something genuinely important to the creator (1d10+5% percentiles off of their current objective).
There’s an Agrimancer down in Oklahoma who has come up with a way to invest the memetic putty he creates into chicken eggs. Unfortunately no one else has been able to replicate this feat and the flavours of idea he has aren’t particularly useful to most people. Still, it’s a big enough deal for him to get regular visits from TNI goons who aggressively buy up his whole supply. Word is that he’s sick of the money and wants some help getting out from under them.
Effect: Memetic putty can be used to communicate anything with perfect clarity. It's platonic potential as an idea that throws signal to noise ratio completely to out the window. The restriction is that it must be related to the core concept invested into it. If you can fulfil that requirement it offers either a +20% shift on Connect or Status rolls (it’s ineffective at attempts to Lie) or +2 ranks on a coercion attempt made with it.
It retains this quality after you’ve shared it but loses some of the original flexibility when exposed to grubby reality. Each person it is used on may turn around and use it on someone else for the same benefit. They can’t change what they’ve been told but they can put their own spin on it (this is inevitable even if they don’t intend to, like a big game of telephone), gradually shaping the putty into something more concrete.
As it spreads the putty loses effectiveness and becomes increasingly inflexible. After a number of people equal to the sum of the casting roll have been influenced the benefits are cut in half (to a +10% shift or +1 stress check rank), once this number reaches the total of the casting roll (plus 100 for results below 10) it loses effectiveness entirely. Stretched across too many preconceptions and permutations whatever compelling seed once laid at the heart of the putty is spent. Quite a few creators see this, assume it was really a one-off bolt of creative lightning and never make a second or third attempt.
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