048 - Ernesto's Stash: Liar's Pants, Geas Coins & Loaded Dice

In the 1960s there was a low-rent entropomancer - Ernesto Gumtree - who hated flakes, liars and cheats as much as he loved the chaos of surrendering himself to chance. Unreliable and dishonest people irked him on a level he claimed was philosophical but most people who knew him chalked up to the problems his unrepentant gambling caused with his estranged wife and children, who despised him.

One of two remarkable things about Ernesto was that he turned out minor artifacts like a factory, all centred around the unbearable, often imagined, gripes with people that he swore were the source of all his woe. Once he’d dealt with them it would be smooth sailing, he said. Selling the trinkets kept him in beer and skittles at least.

Maybe there was something to this, maybe someone got sick of him being a poor sport, or maybe making things that jab at people who are willing to violate rules isn’t a great idea. The second remarkable thing about Ernesto was the brutal and public nature of his murder, he was found carved up on a public beach one morning, his eyes missing and a deck of cards crammed into his mouth. It went unsolved and no one ever found his artifact stash. He must have had one though, over the years a steady trickle of his products have made their way into occult underground circulation.

Artifact: Liar’s Pants

Power: Minor.

Description: A pair of old-fashioned grey or black slacks, style and cut varies. Rolled up and tucked inside the fabric in the area behind the belt loops are several pieces of paper, each revealing an unadmitted lie made by their creator.

Effect: Gain a +10% shift to all Lie rolls while wearing the pants. Every time you tell a successful lie (something serious enough to require a roll on the Lie ability or a substitute identity) add the result of the roll to a tally. When that tally hits 100 the pants burst into flame, dealing 1d10 wounds. Doesn’t matter if someone else built up most of the tally, pushing it over the edge is what counts (also, why are you wearing other people’s pants?). The magickal impulse behind the fire dies out quickly but that doesn’t stop other things from catching alight off it or deal with the agony of melted nylon.

Artifact: Geas Coins

Power: Minor.

Description: A defaced Kennedy half dollar, the obverse side has been restamped so JFK faces right. If it has been used and defaulted against the letters ‘B’, ‘T’ and ‘Y’ disappear from the word ‘LIBERTY’. Geas coins are perfectly balanced as far as chance goes but feel wonky in the hand, all attempts to find the centre of balance fail. You definitely can’t make it walk across your knuckles.

Effect: If something is staked on a coin toss with a geas coin then the flip is binding (even something as mundane as deciding where to eat). Going against the outcome provokes a rank 3 Self check as the defaulter or defaulters are seized by an embarrassing existential dread. Going along with it provides a +10% shift to their next roll. Geas coins have 1d10 charges, using a single charge per flip, but burn out straight away if defaulted against.

Artifact: Loaded Dice

Power: Minor.

Description: A pair of six-sided dice that have been ‘cancelled’ by a licensed casino, defaced by having a hole drilled through them. Inserted into each cavity is a live .22 Short cartridge, glued in place with a flaky, brown epoxy.

Effect: Pitch them in the direction of someone you can see, both cartridges go off wrecking the dice but causing no other damage. If that person has cheated (breaking any agreement, implicit or otherwise, through dishonesty counts) in the past 33 minutes they are hit with a minor blast. It’s not very impressive with the default roll result of 12 (causing 3 measly wounds), but the user can gamble for additional damage as per ‘The Evil Eye’ entropomancy blast.

047 - The Gull-mind of San Francisco

Unnatural Entity: The Gull-mind of San Francisco

20th century multiple murderer and self-taught ornithologist Robert Stroud tread a line between fame and infamy. “The Birdman of Alcatraz” who was lauded as a poster child for reform developed the cure for avian hemorrhagic septicaemia from scratch, he also shot and stabbed several people and was a diagnosed psychopath. In between these pursuits he independently developed the adept school of Oiseauphagy during his incarceration, the arcane practice of devouring birds to breach the boundary of their dizzying sky-world (fully detailed in Nimrod Tzarking’s “Paris, TX vs. The 333rd Reich”). That’s the real reason he was transferred from Leavenworth to Alcatraz in 1942 and denied further access to his "pets", the prison authorities secretly deemed his proclivity for eating them alive too sensational for public record.

By then it was too late. True their actions put a crimp in things but he would not be deterred. Tabooed by being locked away in seclusion, Robert secretly fostered a nest of seagull eggs to hatch and realise his plan of escape. Twice more he was thwarted (once in a chance discovery by prison hospital staff and a second time by ill-advised bragging to another inmate) before finally succeeding in 1959. The man that was transferred to Springfield, MO later that year and died in 1963 was not entirely the same person.

You could be excused for not realising that there’s something wrong with the Bay Area gull population, gulls are notoriously aggressive and noxious scavengers anywhere. But in large packs the local variety take on strange behaviours, they seem organised and intelligent. One will lure a grocer out of a store by making a mess before a swarm of them flash mob the place and grab whatever they can carry. There’s videos on YouTube and news articles about urban environments and junk food diets causing aberrant behaviour. Then there’s the rumours people have been finding dead cats and dogs with their insides pecked out.

One person knows the full truth, Ben “Waggy” Wagner a homeless man who can talk to birds. Quiet and gentle, he’s not cut out to be the human spokesperson for a bird-obsessed murderer reincarnated as a flock of seagulls but they aren't giving him a choice. He’s destitute and fragile - mostly because being mistakenly treated like you’re mentally ill all your life and subjected to antipsychotics you don’t need isn’t great for your brain - so they have him firmly in hand, er, wing. Currently they’ve got him working on publishing several books. A complete version of Stroud’s history of the penal system and a purportedly true account of the well-known Alcatraz prison escape. That one ends with an improvised raft being pecked to pieces.

The Gull-mind of San Francisco, Winged Menace
Wound Threshold: 1 per gull in the swarm. Individually? Any successful attack (at -10%, they’re hard to hit) will smack down a gull, dealing a single wound. You’d need a shotgun full of birdshot or a flamethrower to bring down more than one at a time, unless it’s especially effective such measures do hand-to-hand damage. The gull population in SF has exploded over the years so violence is only a temporary relief.
Mine! 1% per gull: Substitutes for Struggle, Substitutes for Notice, Substitutes for Pursuit, Substitutes for Knowledge. The more gulls in the immediate area the greater their collective intelligence and power, scattered they’re little different to wild gulls. Maybe a little crankier.
Eye in the Sky 40%: Specific Information: Bird’s-eye view. This is the chance that the gull-mind can find something in the Bay Area, provided it’s in a spot where a seagull might have seen it.

046 - Julian Funk, Futureshocked Plutomancer

GMC: Julian Funk, Futureshocked Plutomancer

You know that mathematical example they use to teach kids about compounding interest in school? The “would you rather have a million dollars or a penny that doubles every day for 30 days?” and the kicker is that if you picked the penny you’d have over $5 million at the end of the month. To Julian Funk it was the Archimedean lever that he would move the Earth with, he just needed a way to skip to the end.

In 1961, at the age of 38, the millionaire plastics magnate built himself a financial golem: an air-tight network of trusts that would manage his money over a period of decades and grow exponentially in value. While others would have to take the long way to this expression of human power he would have time do the work for him. The last of his personal fortune was liquidated and used to send him forward: the services of a dying cryptomancer, a major charge and an underground bunker like a pharaoh's tomb. Julian launched himself 50 years into the future. He cast off from society during the golden age of futurism, expecting to come back to a world where moon colonies and flying cars were commonplace and his wealth would make him a king. On his 2011 return he was bitterly disappointed.

The future has a lot of things that impress him, we’ve got the wristwatch televisions of comic books in smartphones, the instant communication of the internet and robot warehouses provide all manner of modern consumer contrivances. We also gave up on space, our crystal towers aren’t nearly as nice as advertised and more and more people have less and less. The possible utopia - which should have been created by all that money - had been cast aside.

Half of this dismay is that Julian did not come back to as much as he’d intended. The $9.1 million that welcomed him was barely double what he had left with and in comparative purchasing power less than a quarter of his original fortune. Mismanagement and the recession had not been kind (if he’d popped up pre-2009/10 he would’ve been quite comfortably in major charge territory). Having been kicked down a notch Julian suddenly felt like 'little people' despite all this money and he didn't like that at all.

The other half is that the nature of business has changed in Julian’s eyes. Impersonal communication, corporations that exist only to buy and gut others and a cut-throat culture in which people don’t work for themselves or someone else but are a slave to something intangible. This has always been true but Julian's rarefied circumstances had made his concept of money’s ineffable power about hierarchy and the human element of commerce. The acceleration of the present looks to him like others had created their own financial golems in his absence, only to be devoured by them.

Re-establishing himself has not been easy, many of Julian’s ideas are hideously outdated and it took time for him to acclimate to 50 years of technological and cultural change but he is still a consummate businessman. Today he has recouped his lost value and more across a slew of companies. Outside of this he operates as something of a venture capitalist and economic saboteur. His specific interest is in disruption of established businesses, the bigger the better. Organising unionisation across a whole region of Wal-Marts so they’ll close their branches rather than cave, then providing funding for the ex-employees to open co-ops in return for a cut? He’s done it, twice. It hasn’t worked well, poking the bear of more monied interests has earned him quite a few enemies but it has also drawn allies from unexpected quarters.

He’s no Alex Abel but Julian has a half-dozen occult underground malcontents who owe him favours. He’s hesitant to use them for anything illegal but most of them don’t share his scruples. His failure to make progress on his ultimate goal has made him paranoid that he has drawn the attention of the ‘beasts of finance’ that he is attempting to yoke and that they might crush him if he is not careful. It would only take one misconstrued directive or badly timed escalation to set a magickal-mundane commerce brush war ablaze.

STATS
Personality: Julian asserts himself through a gruff stoicism that reminds most people of their grandpa or great-grandpa. His obsession makes him dawdlingly egalitarian, he’s all about using his means to prop up others as a way to restore balance provided he also benefits. Secretly he’s narcissistically ashamed for abandoning the world, he feels like Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
Rage: Squalid modernity. Julian hates the waste people have made of the future. He's a big fan of Elon Musk.
Noble: Selling bootstraps. Julian wants to push money towards being an expression of human power rather than something faceless. Just make sure you pay him back, with interest.
Fear: Time. There’s never enough of it, everything you spend it on closes off other possibilities and if you let it slip away there’s no telling what might happen (Helplessness).
Obsession: Transform money into something people - preferably he - can own and act with rather than the other way around.
Wound Threshold: 50.

Plutomancer 65%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Old-fashioned Millionaire 65% (Substitutes for Status, Protects Helplessness, Unique: Gobs of Money.)
Know Things Old, Once New 45% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Substitutes for Knowledge, Unique: “I know that place/artifact/secret society (or their grandparents)”.)

Shock Gauges

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

045 - Schrodinger’s Redoubt

Artifact: Schrodinger’s Redoubt

Power: Significant.

Description: A Schrodinger’s redoubt is an opaque, sealable container ranging from the size of a shoebox to a large shipping crate. A distinguishing feature of redoubts is that they have been reinforced with pieces of an identical container, bits of lid or corner nailed or glued into approximate place, giving them the appearance of a lobster outgrowing an old shell.

Effect: Sometimes you need to kick probability in the guts a few times or at least try to buy time until somebody else can do it for you. A redoubt gives the possible state of an object a hard nudge by sealing it away from interacting with the rest of the world, until someone opens it and risks retroactively breaking the effect.

Anything stored in a redoubt is locked in a suspended state until someone looks inside the container. Whether this suspended state still remains true when the contents are observed is a 50/50 split, no matter how unlikely. A hidden cellphone won’t take calls while locked up but has a 50% chance of still being fully charged on retrieval. You can keep Mittens in the box for a month after she was hit by a car and there’s a 50% chance of her being alive (but still critically injured) when you open it. A bomb won’t go off after its timer should have hit zero, at least until someone takes a chance by peeking. Scrying and divination breaks the effect the same as mundane observation, some redoubts incorporate protection against this in the form of garish magickal symbols (-20% shift, functions once then burns out).

Technically you can’t store people this way with one caveat, so long as they aren’t conscious they don’t count as an observer and won’t break the effect of opening the box. Knock someone out with dental gas and mail them to Siberia, they (maybe) won’t starve to death. Redoubts work once, after the effect is broken it’s just an ordinary box.

044 - Caretaker

Unnatural Entity: Caretaker

“An object at rest remains at rest and an object in motion remains in motion with the same speed and same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.” - Newton’s first law

Human beings tend to perceive the world as being made up of immutable points and concepts, this provides a sense of stability. As children they are eager explorers and as adolescents and young adults seek to challenge and change their environment as a part of establishing themselves but eventually there comes a point at which most set their views and their self-image and go no further without upheaval. Sometimes this conflicts with a world which leaves things behind: the elderly woman who doesn’t understand kids these days and doesn’t want to, the disenfranchised rustbelter who laments an economic policy of laissez-faire abandonment or the office manager who can’t keep up with technology. An unwillingness or inability to move with change that is soon steamrollered by the cruel passage of time.

The emotional pollution of this conflict pools in quiet, almost-forgotten places building up like black mold. Left alone it does more harm than good, emitting a localised gravity of inflexibility that mires people already struggling to fit an unfamiliar world and those trying to change things. You can skim it off if you know how, not only will this alleviate the problem (a little, human stubbornness is a bigger issue) but collect enough of it and the blue, tarry substance will provide you with a +20% shift to magickal attempts to keep something as it is. Alternatively if it forms a critical mass a caretaker will emerge.

Caretakers are creatures of stasis and frighteningly literal. They latch on to a physical place, called a locus, maintaining it exactly as it is - given the conditions they are created in a caretaker is more likely to keep something in a ruinous state than pristine. Many loci gain a reputation as haunted. It isn’t unfair, aside from the power to restore the locus to its original form (at the time of adoption) a caretaker is very territorial and telekinetic. They behave like poltergeists, dangerous ones. That old hospital that never gets torn down which all those kids died in last year? A caretaker dropped them down an elevator shaft for repeatedly graffiting the maternity ward. It got chalked up as misadventure.

You can get on one’s good side if you’re willing to play ball. More than one person sleeping rough has fallen under the protection of a caretaker by working to keep their surroundings "clean". Beware however, taxing a caretaker’s abilities repeatedly can earn its wrath if it comes to see your presence as a catalyst for change no matter your intention.

Destruction of a caretaker’s locus puts an end to it, a change that can be a symbol of reform or drag people under or both depending on the circumstances. Add 2d10+10% to any active objectives based on altering the local environment for doing so. All of them, not just yours. Alternatively if you’re able to attach one to a location you’re trying to protect take a 1d10+5% bonus.

Caretaker, Violent Inertia
Wound Threshold: 50. Caretakers are immaterial and invisible (to anyone who can see them they look like two-dimensional whirlwinds that sweep over the environment without touching anything), you’d better have weird magick or be willing to destroy the locus if you want to finish one off.
Emotional Inertia 50%: A caretaker emits the same gravitational aversion as the substance that birthed it. Oppose all rolls related to changing its locus (be it convincing city hall to finally tear the place down or doing it yourself) with this identity.
Restoration 20-80%: Starts at 50%, with a successful roll restore a percentage of a damaged locus’s original condition or heal a caretaker equal to the sum of the result and shift a 10% value from this identity to Destruction.
Destruction 20-80%: Starts at 50%, treat as a Struggle attack with a weapon bonus applicable to the environment. Also shift a 10% value from this identity to Restoration on a successful roll.

043 - “Self Portrait, Man With Gun”, Oil on Canvas, 36x18 Inches by Unknown Artist (ca. 1978)

Artifact: “Self Portrait, Man With Gun”, oil on canvas, 36x18 inches by Unknown Artist (ca. 1978)

Power: Significant.

Description: An oil painting on canvas over a cheap, wooden backing. The frame is damaged, the left side pulls loose when lifted if not supported. Subject is a male, caucasian, 30s with a pensive and resigned expression on his face, standing on the front porch of a white weatherboard home at dusk. He is dirty, dressed in unbuttoned denim overalls and holding a shotgun while knocking on the front door. The light is on inside and in the background are unplowed fields of wheat and hills. There is an empty painter’s easel on the porch next to a love seat. The style is evocative but technically unimpressive, the perspective is wrong for one thing. Long-term viewers report a sense of grinding unease.

The provenance of the work is completely unknown, tracing it reveals a maze of owners that loops back on itself and is impossible to properly verify. Most won’t admit to ever having possessed it and dealers and auction houses refuse to touch it. It has been stolen on no less than three occasions, once in an unsolved robbery turned murder. It is unsigned.

Effect: The portrait is destructive to other artwork. Stored with other paintings it causes the paint to run, leaving behind a vaguely stained canvas. If the paint is collected (for example, setting them up above a trough with a funnel) it holds magickal properties: for every 72 hours of work destroyed this way the resulting sludge holds a minor charge. Only the runoff from original works has this property, reproductions do not but they are still destroyed. If reused in a new painting it will discharge in a minor unnatural phenomenon related to the subject matter, but only under legitimate scrutiny of the new work.

Alternatively you can gain the charge for yourself if you’re willing to drink paint.

042 - The Mt Stillwell Hospice Resurrectionists

Cabal: The Mt Stillwell Hospice Resurrectionists

Nobody really thinks they’ll die.

It still happens. The Mt Stillwell Hospice provides medical, spiritual and emotional care to those for who this is not an abstract, distant worry but an impending certainty. Built atop a mountain retreat famed for the restorative powers of its spring water the idyllic greenery and invigorating climate provide calm and pleasant surroundings for people in their final days.

Owing to the machinations of one of its patients - now deceased - a group of residents and staff are embroiled in conflict over the pursuit of life after death. The members of the cabal all want different things, it would be relatively simple for any one of their desires to be fulfilled but only at the expense of the others. They currently have no group objective.

Nurse Jacklyn Carson has worked at Mt Stillwell for 6 years, she likes working here even though she’ll grouse about long shifts the same way anybody does. Giving respite to people who are in the final days of their lives is the closest she feels she’s ever had to a calling. To think it mightn’t have happened if it wasn’t the only job she could get.

Jacklyn almost got fired from her last job, in a hospital, for stealing and abusing painkillers. A back injury years prior had put her in the position of relying on Oxycontin to get through the day and her use snowballed out of control. Her knowledge of the chief nurse’s affair with one of the surgeons is the only reason she’s still registered and in return for her silence she was quietly moved instead of fired. A relapse in this bad habit was enough for hospice patient Eugene Ross to blackmail her into helping with his plan.

She deeply regrets it. Never especially religious, Jacklyn nonetheless maintains an agnostic belief in a christian god. Menaced by Eugene she has confided in Elgin Hetrick who, at first confused and later dismayed, has done his best to counsel her. She fears for her soul and wants to undo the damage she has done but is terrified of what Eugene might have in store if she tries.

Eugene Ross died last week. He planned on it.

A lifelong devotee of the occult, Eugene never fit in well with the underground. His beliefs were too old-fashionedly rigid for most and those who might have taken to him were rubbed the wrong way by his bigoted attitude. As far as Eugene was concerned he was always the most important person in any room he was in, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. So naturally he wanted to live forever.

He came close a couple of times during his career but due to bad luck and the fact that nobody liked him Eugene kept coming up empty handed. He got old and desperate and at the end of his tether he took the only option available to him, the ‘Cracking the Soul’ ritual he’d murdered a man for in Arkansas 20 years ago. He didn’t much like the idea of becoming a demon but it beat the alternative and he figured he could always find a way to resurrect himself afterwards.

Eugene secretly recorded nurse Jacklyn’s indiscretions and blackmailed her into agreeing to place his body in the spring under the foundations in return for them never coming to light. Demonstration of magick was enough to seal the deal and he possessed the timid physician Dr. Miles Garland after the fact to ensure that records of disposal for his body were falsified. Now he just has to figure out how to clean up the loose ends.

Elgin Hetrick is a retired religious studies and theology professor. He isn’t anything of a believer himself, his interest was the result of a lifelong, frustrated dedication to a search for meaning. Once a firebrand atheist he alienated his minister father who took his move into academic theology as a continued personal attack. Needless to say they didn’t get along.

From his own perspective Elgin never saw his attacks on organised religion (and he wasn’t picky about which he went after) as malicious. They were interrogative. Surely if any of these belief systems were true they would hold up to ruthless examination. Then Elgin would know, he’d have found the thing to invest his life in and fill the empty feeling in his heart. His life would have meaning.

He never found it. Every belief system had holes Elgin could not in good conscience reconcile with his rigorous standards. This didn’t come as the crushing disappointment he’d dreaded. Life had mellowed him and the experiences he’d had tempered his expectations, he’d lived well and known good people. He’d seen what there was and it was enough.

Waiting out the last of his days at Mt Stillwell he’s come to an appalling realisation, through Jacklyn Carson’s confession and the evidence he’s seen of Eugene’s demonic nature: he now knows he was wrong about everything. He’s doing his best to help the younger woman while floundering through a lifetime of tested and discarded beliefs to figure out the truth he missed. He wishes it were happening to a younger him.

Bobby Bruche desperately wants a second chance, it’s a reasonable desire considering he was barely given a first one. He’s only 18 and diagnosis of a degenerative brain condition means it’s unlikely he will see 20. On his good days he’s mostly functional. On his bad days he has mood swings, trouble speaking and needs crutches to get around. Most days are bad.

Bobby is a bad kid. He was a self-centred, bullying shit before his diagnosis and his impending mortality has made him even meaner to the point of being unmanageable. It’s half the reason his family have squirrelled him away here. Big and heavy he was used to using his size to push his way around, but having to interact with hospice staff instead of high school students and being occasionally robbed of the ability to move properly means he resorts to an unimaginatively foul mouth when he can’t. Some are sympathetic but no one really likes him.

He is Eugene’s unstable ace in the hole. Whispered promises of the ability to continue after illness claims his body, the dead occultist is trying to figure out how to use Bobby to make sure that Jacklyn and Elgin don’t spoil his afterlife. Bobby is starting to get his own ideas, he doesn’t trust Eugene and if he can get access to the ritual he won’t need him to live forever. He just needs to find where the hospice stored Eugene’s personal effects without the dead man noticing. He’ll hurt whoever he thinks is standing between him and his second chance if it comes to it.