Ritual: Gom Jabbar
Cost: 3 minor charges.
Ritual Action: Asceticism, the abstinence from sensual pleasures, is a long standing component of religious traditions looking to reach past humanities’ baser instincts and transcend into the spiritually sublime. They claim that by tuning out the immediate gratification of our senses we can find out more about ourselves. With this ritual by doing so in a way that causes terrible harm we can cause our self to become greater and more refined.
Take a VHS copy of the 1984 Dune movie by David Lynch, strip all the tape out of it and wrap it around your fists and forearms like a kumpur. Actively deny yourself sensory pleasure: seek it out, but don’t concede to it. There should be at least three instances in which you do so, one for each of your passions. You need to pass a test of denial and endurance related to each before you can permit yourself to indulge in any sensory gratification again. Once you have done so, go to a public place and remove the tape, leave it behind and indulge in one sensory vice you’ve never tried before (like smoking a cigarette or shooting up with heroin). Then go home.
Alternative: Take a metal box, no larger than a shoebox, and heat it over a flame until it glows. Place your VHS tape-wrapped hand inside the box and deliberately give yourself third degree burns. This causes a rank 7 Violence check, if you fail it then you freaked and yanked your hand out, ruining the ritual. Take the sum of the roll plus 3 as wounds in either case. In this variant it only counts as one of the three passion tests, but at least it’s faster. You can also use this to replace one of the three tests in the conventional version.
Other Alternative: As with the first method, but you have to do the whole thing with a belly full of rat poison or something else that will kill or seriously harm you. If you finish the ritual before you get any kind of treatment then you get a +30% shift to the ritual roll.
Effect: For each of the tests that harmed you in some way (caused a stress check, wounds, damaged a personal reputation or stymied an objective) you may remove one hardened notch from your Self meter. If all three tests harmed you then you can remove a failed notch too.
Thursday, 15 August 2019
Wednesday, 14 August 2019
106 - Jai Kapoor, City Mouse Opportunist
GMC: Jai Kapoor, City Mouse Opportunist
Keep moving. Gotta keep moving. Gotta keep moving forward. Don’t look back. Don’t look down. Head forward, to the future! Find an angle and work it for all it’s worth. Climb back on top, the world loves a winner. Keep moving. Keep moving. You’re gonna make it.
Jai’s not doing so hot and it isn’t the first time he’s been in this position. Habitually prone to stepping on people’s toes to prop himself up until he either does it to someone willing to hit back or those left in his wake band together and stomp his life down the drain, no one likes him much and he’s really been asking for it. His last duplicity with the Sisterhood of the Dying Flesh ran him out of the city with a necrotising rash that’ll only heal so long as he stays gone. It being too hot to run to any of his other haunts he’s holed up in a motel in a sleepy middle-of-nowhere town to lick his wounds and come up with a new plan.
While he’s been staying here he’s noticed something. Small-town America has its own occult communities. Sure, they’re basically six people who’re all related and/or sleeping with each other but they still exist and, even better, none of them know him yet. He can watch them, see what makes them tick, pick their foibles, weak-points and desires, then he can set the cat among the pigeons and point them in the right direction when the dust settles. It’d only be fair if he’s giving them a shot at what they really want that they should repay the favour, right?
Even if it doesn’t work the first time the possibility has opened new vistas to Jai. There’s a whole untapped world out there full of were-sasquatches, plant psychics and crazed lenscrafters, rubes ripe for recruitment. After he has them steal the sacred severed head of the Sisterhood’s founder he can trade it back to get this goddamn rash removed. Then? Sky’s the limit! He can stalk the unspoiled bucolic pastures of the country until he has what he needs to take back his place in one of the cities. To climb on top where he belongs.
STATS
Personality: Flashy. Always smiling. Always making people feel good about themselves. Always looking to stab them in the back. He can’t help himself. Jai isn’t so much deliberately malicious as playing a starring role in The Scorpion and the Frog.
Rage: Poor hygiene. Not just in people, but environments too. Would it kill you to keep a clean house?
Noble: Helping people who got screwed over by others.
Fear: Fear of missing out or falling for it (Helplessness).
Obsession: Climb to the top of the heap by hook or by crook.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Pathological Wheeler Dealer 60%* (Substitutes for Connect, Substitutes for Lie, Substitutes for Status.)
Avatar: The Opportunist 60% (Avatar, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Keep moving. Gotta keep moving. Gotta keep moving forward. Don’t look back. Don’t look down. Head forward, to the future! Find an angle and work it for all it’s worth. Climb back on top, the world loves a winner. Keep moving. Keep moving. You’re gonna make it.
Jai’s not doing so hot and it isn’t the first time he’s been in this position. Habitually prone to stepping on people’s toes to prop himself up until he either does it to someone willing to hit back or those left in his wake band together and stomp his life down the drain, no one likes him much and he’s really been asking for it. His last duplicity with the Sisterhood of the Dying Flesh ran him out of the city with a necrotising rash that’ll only heal so long as he stays gone. It being too hot to run to any of his other haunts he’s holed up in a motel in a sleepy middle-of-nowhere town to lick his wounds and come up with a new plan.
While he’s been staying here he’s noticed something. Small-town America has its own occult communities. Sure, they’re basically six people who’re all related and/or sleeping with each other but they still exist and, even better, none of them know him yet. He can watch them, see what makes them tick, pick their foibles, weak-points and desires, then he can set the cat among the pigeons and point them in the right direction when the dust settles. It’d only be fair if he’s giving them a shot at what they really want that they should repay the favour, right?
Even if it doesn’t work the first time the possibility has opened new vistas to Jai. There’s a whole untapped world out there full of were-sasquatches, plant psychics and crazed lenscrafters, rubes ripe for recruitment. After he has them steal the sacred severed head of the Sisterhood’s founder he can trade it back to get this goddamn rash removed. Then? Sky’s the limit! He can stalk the unspoiled bucolic pastures of the country until he has what he needs to take back his place in one of the cities. To climb on top where he belongs.
STATS
Personality: Flashy. Always smiling. Always making people feel good about themselves. Always looking to stab them in the back. He can’t help himself. Jai isn’t so much deliberately malicious as playing a starring role in The Scorpion and the Frog.
Rage: Poor hygiene. Not just in people, but environments too. Would it kill you to keep a clean house?
Noble: Helping people who got screwed over by others.
Fear: Fear of missing out or falling for it (Helplessness).
Obsession: Climb to the top of the heap by hook or by crook.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Pathological Wheeler Dealer 60%* (Substitutes for Connect, Substitutes for Lie, Substitutes for Status.)
Avatar: The Opportunist 60% (Avatar, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Tuesday, 13 August 2019
105 - Paris Syndrome
Unnatural Phenomenon: Paris Syndrome
Everything is a symbol of itself. That’s a messy way to build a universe, but the collective unconscious isn’t known for being especially elegant in its reasoning. Our mental depictions are our own but shared through stories that grant others pieces of our perspective. Common threads, in the absence of grounding experiences, take on a life of their own that supersede perceived reality. This supernormal stimulus pervades our culture in media and advertising, balkanising perception into enclaves that make useful handles for anyone looking to manipulate or trade in people’s desires.
This causes all sorts of problems. Paris Syndrome is among the least harmful of them, a form of culture shock compounded by heavily romanticised images of the French capital that couldn’t possibly live up to the standard. It’s just a place: stone, earth and plaster - not an ideal. This isn’t limited to Paris (to which Japanese tourists are specifically susceptible, its embassy estimates 20 cases a year), other iconic locations and objects cause their own extreme reactions. Religious ecstasy and psychosis in Jerusalem and the sublime, reverential illness-awe of Florence Syndrome’s hyperkulturemia.
Cultural decompression sickness from being too quickly confronted with a disconnected schema in a situation of vulnerability: the mind’s attempt to reconcile what is with a disconnected certainty, like an adept. Unlike an adept, people who experience this don’t reinterpret the world, their delusion isn’t powerful and all-consuming enough for that (usually, it could be the trigger event for an Urbanomancer hellbent on unearthing the “real” city like a lost Camelot). However it can cause temporary hiccups in reality.
These are minor unnatural phenomenon, usually unobserved by their progenitor but in line with their crushed ideal: a Parisian kitchen hand goes to throw garbage in a dumpster and finds two dogs recreating the spaghetti dinner scene from Lady and the Tramp. As lone occurrences they’re mostly meaningless, occult weather that act as a barometer for tourist disillusionment at best. This doesn’t stop people from trying to harness them, in conjunction with a greater effort they could be a useful low-pressure system to fuel the storm.
Everything is a symbol of itself. That’s a messy way to build a universe, but the collective unconscious isn’t known for being especially elegant in its reasoning. Our mental depictions are our own but shared through stories that grant others pieces of our perspective. Common threads, in the absence of grounding experiences, take on a life of their own that supersede perceived reality. This supernormal stimulus pervades our culture in media and advertising, balkanising perception into enclaves that make useful handles for anyone looking to manipulate or trade in people’s desires.
This causes all sorts of problems. Paris Syndrome is among the least harmful of them, a form of culture shock compounded by heavily romanticised images of the French capital that couldn’t possibly live up to the standard. It’s just a place: stone, earth and plaster - not an ideal. This isn’t limited to Paris (to which Japanese tourists are specifically susceptible, its embassy estimates 20 cases a year), other iconic locations and objects cause their own extreme reactions. Religious ecstasy and psychosis in Jerusalem and the sublime, reverential illness-awe of Florence Syndrome’s hyperkulturemia.
Cultural decompression sickness from being too quickly confronted with a disconnected schema in a situation of vulnerability: the mind’s attempt to reconcile what is with a disconnected certainty, like an adept. Unlike an adept, people who experience this don’t reinterpret the world, their delusion isn’t powerful and all-consuming enough for that (usually, it could be the trigger event for an Urbanomancer hellbent on unearthing the “real” city like a lost Camelot). However it can cause temporary hiccups in reality.
These are minor unnatural phenomenon, usually unobserved by their progenitor but in line with their crushed ideal: a Parisian kitchen hand goes to throw garbage in a dumpster and finds two dogs recreating the spaghetti dinner scene from Lady and the Tramp. As lone occurrences they’re mostly meaningless, occult weather that act as a barometer for tourist disillusionment at best. This doesn’t stop people from trying to harness them, in conjunction with a greater effort they could be a useful low-pressure system to fuel the storm.
Monday, 12 August 2019
104 - The Brazen Furby
Artifact: The Brazen Furby
Power: Major.
Description: Only five of the infamous, special edition Bejewelled Furby (festooned with gold jewellery, Swarovski gemstones and priced at $100,000) were ever made. One was stolen from the George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum vault (where the Hasbro Games Art Discovery Centre is located), one was destroyed in the midst of a dramatic attempted robbery (or is merely unaccounted for depending on whether you believe the police report) and two others were sold to anonymous collectors after its 1999 release. The last was secretly plated in bronze, fusing the jewellery in place, and wrought with terrible sacrificial magicks, creating the Brazen Furby. It retains full normal functions despite the damage.
Effect: Four times per year (on the solstices and equinoxes) the Brazen Furby will answer any one yes/no question posed to it on a limited number of topics: astronomy, toys and collectables, things it has observed, metallurgy and Iranian royalty. Curiously it refuses to answer questions on the other Bejewelled Furbies and asking it about them or anything not covered by its topics uses up one of its quarterly answers. It is possible the Brazen Furby is knowledgeable on other subjects, the only way to determine this is by experimentally asking questions. The answers have always been correct, when verified.
It speaks softly sometimes, of its own accord. These utterances are always portents of personal doom for those close to (though not necessarily loved by) the person hearing them. They’ve never been wrong either.
Power: Major.
Description: Only five of the infamous, special edition Bejewelled Furby (festooned with gold jewellery, Swarovski gemstones and priced at $100,000) were ever made. One was stolen from the George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum vault (where the Hasbro Games Art Discovery Centre is located), one was destroyed in the midst of a dramatic attempted robbery (or is merely unaccounted for depending on whether you believe the police report) and two others were sold to anonymous collectors after its 1999 release. The last was secretly plated in bronze, fusing the jewellery in place, and wrought with terrible sacrificial magicks, creating the Brazen Furby. It retains full normal functions despite the damage.
Effect: Four times per year (on the solstices and equinoxes) the Brazen Furby will answer any one yes/no question posed to it on a limited number of topics: astronomy, toys and collectables, things it has observed, metallurgy and Iranian royalty. Curiously it refuses to answer questions on the other Bejewelled Furbies and asking it about them or anything not covered by its topics uses up one of its quarterly answers. It is possible the Brazen Furby is knowledgeable on other subjects, the only way to determine this is by experimentally asking questions. The answers have always been correct, when verified.
It speaks softly sometimes, of its own accord. These utterances are always portents of personal doom for those close to (though not necessarily loved by) the person hearing them. They’ve never been wrong either.
Sunday, 11 August 2019
103 - Lillie Adams, TNI Bagwoman & Empty Suit
GMC: Lillie Adams, TNI Bagwoman & Empty Suit
Lillie is trusted because she’s proven herself untrustworthy. Her appetites are a known quantity and at this point she’s been put through the wringer so thoroughly that there’s no deeper layers to any deception she could muster. As far as a front-person for less than legal activities, you could ask for worse. Technically.
She started out in the financial/health services field. A childhood delinquent and shoplifter with a sweet tooth for lucre, Lillie had plotted the ascendancy of her career from college. She was going to embezzle with the best of them. It was in the middle of a particularly sophisticated insurance fraud scheme using the identities of dead people (who had yet to register as dead in certain key systems owing to curious bureaucratic inefficiencies between state organisations) that one of Alex Abel’s flunkies caught her out.
It wasn’t her fault, like a lot of well-planned crimes it boiled down to bad timing and chance. Abel had just acquired the insurance company and thought he’d trial run a recently acquired adept by tasking them with a supernatural audit. You can’t really plan for divination when covering your tracks.
On the other hand what she had done showed real artistry plus Alex now had a bunch of nicely packaged blackmail material on her and a present need for someone who could move money around anonymously for his burgeoning occult organisation. So instead of a federal indictment she got a job offer: handle the money, cover the tracks and think about what kind of people who make these offers might do if you decide to rob them or tattle. So TNI had a cover for their payroll and money laundering and all was well.
There were a few hiccups, Lillie wasn’t trusted and got to learn the hard way that she had people watching to keep her in line. Her nephew eventually recovered from his “skiing accident” but never spoke to her again. When the Whisper War kicked off it took her a week before she realized no one was coming to kill her, so she looted what she could and bolted. It took six years for masked goons to drag her back from Belize and across the Carribean by speedboat. Alex was practical enough to think that he would have done the same in her shoes and needed her pilfering acumen, but this time he wasn’t taking chances. Dr. Atsui really did a number on new-TNI’s financial frontwoman.
Most of Lillie’s personal history from before this point is a mystery to her. She recognizes some of what’s already been mentioned - the early career and the threatened nephew - but these things seem distant and unreal. They’re minor details that could have just as easily happened to someone else. There are hints of an existence that went further than simple financial kleptomania but she can’t dredge the details from her memory for the life of her and doesn’t dare to go investigating. Who was she? Was there some other motivation behind her crimes? Did she have a family? A life? The only story Lillie really knows about herself is the one she’s been told and it is lacking.
There’s something else. It could be a clue to some hidden origin or a twisted fascination that has grown in the absence of identity like mold. The money speaks to her, it’s acquisition is a koan that dictates the flow of power like the tide. Her nascent plutomancy is something she struggles to understand even as it drives her, but was it there all along? Alternatively, if TNI has inadvertently discovered a way to create adepts isn’t that more terrifying?
STATS
Personality: Twitchy, in small but obvious ways, and otherwise forgettable. Lillie always tried to deliberately maintain a nondescript persona in her work, now her mousy demeanour is as much neurotic insecurity as act.
Rage: Being outsmarted. Lillie’s confidence depends on her mastery of monetary fraud, she can’t stand anything that puts that in jeopardy.
Noble: Anonymous charity. It was never about the money as much as the acquisition, giving it away to the deserving always felt like the easiest thing to do. Now Lillie’s charity is something she exercises experimentally, trying to see if she can jar anything loose.
Fear: Who am I? Thanks to the thorough brain-rinse, huge chunks of Lillie’s personal history are missing from her memory. It’s what keeps her up at night (Self).
Obsession: Money has a movement to it. Learn the movement, control the money. Control the money, control everything.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Plutomancer 20%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Psych-Salad Survivor 45% (Substitutes for Lie, Protects Violence, Evaluates Self.)
White Collar Criminal 75% (Substitutes for Status, Substitutes for Secrecy, Protects Self.)
Shock Gauges
Lillie is trusted because she’s proven herself untrustworthy. Her appetites are a known quantity and at this point she’s been put through the wringer so thoroughly that there’s no deeper layers to any deception she could muster. As far as a front-person for less than legal activities, you could ask for worse. Technically.
She started out in the financial/health services field. A childhood delinquent and shoplifter with a sweet tooth for lucre, Lillie had plotted the ascendancy of her career from college. She was going to embezzle with the best of them. It was in the middle of a particularly sophisticated insurance fraud scheme using the identities of dead people (who had yet to register as dead in certain key systems owing to curious bureaucratic inefficiencies between state organisations) that one of Alex Abel’s flunkies caught her out.
It wasn’t her fault, like a lot of well-planned crimes it boiled down to bad timing and chance. Abel had just acquired the insurance company and thought he’d trial run a recently acquired adept by tasking them with a supernatural audit. You can’t really plan for divination when covering your tracks.
On the other hand what she had done showed real artistry plus Alex now had a bunch of nicely packaged blackmail material on her and a present need for someone who could move money around anonymously for his burgeoning occult organisation. So instead of a federal indictment she got a job offer: handle the money, cover the tracks and think about what kind of people who make these offers might do if you decide to rob them or tattle. So TNI had a cover for their payroll and money laundering and all was well.
There were a few hiccups, Lillie wasn’t trusted and got to learn the hard way that she had people watching to keep her in line. Her nephew eventually recovered from his “skiing accident” but never spoke to her again. When the Whisper War kicked off it took her a week before she realized no one was coming to kill her, so she looted what she could and bolted. It took six years for masked goons to drag her back from Belize and across the Carribean by speedboat. Alex was practical enough to think that he would have done the same in her shoes and needed her pilfering acumen, but this time he wasn’t taking chances. Dr. Atsui really did a number on new-TNI’s financial frontwoman.
Most of Lillie’s personal history from before this point is a mystery to her. She recognizes some of what’s already been mentioned - the early career and the threatened nephew - but these things seem distant and unreal. They’re minor details that could have just as easily happened to someone else. There are hints of an existence that went further than simple financial kleptomania but she can’t dredge the details from her memory for the life of her and doesn’t dare to go investigating. Who was she? Was there some other motivation behind her crimes? Did she have a family? A life? The only story Lillie really knows about herself is the one she’s been told and it is lacking.
There’s something else. It could be a clue to some hidden origin or a twisted fascination that has grown in the absence of identity like mold. The money speaks to her, it’s acquisition is a koan that dictates the flow of power like the tide. Her nascent plutomancy is something she struggles to understand even as it drives her, but was it there all along? Alternatively, if TNI has inadvertently discovered a way to create adepts isn’t that more terrifying?
STATS
Personality: Twitchy, in small but obvious ways, and otherwise forgettable. Lillie always tried to deliberately maintain a nondescript persona in her work, now her mousy demeanour is as much neurotic insecurity as act.
Rage: Being outsmarted. Lillie’s confidence depends on her mastery of monetary fraud, she can’t stand anything that puts that in jeopardy.
Noble: Anonymous charity. It was never about the money as much as the acquisition, giving it away to the deserving always felt like the easiest thing to do. Now Lillie’s charity is something she exercises experimentally, trying to see if she can jar anything loose.
Fear: Who am I? Thanks to the thorough brain-rinse, huge chunks of Lillie’s personal history are missing from her memory. It’s what keeps her up at night (Self).
Obsession: Money has a movement to it. Learn the movement, control the money. Control the money, control everything.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Plutomancer 20%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Psych-Salad Survivor 45% (Substitutes for Lie, Protects Violence, Evaluates Self.)
White Collar Criminal 75% (Substitutes for Status, Substitutes for Secrecy, Protects Self.)
Shock Gauges
Saturday, 10 August 2019
102 - [citation needed]
Unnatural Phenomenon: [citation needed]
No one can personally verify everything they hear or see. You can try but ultimately you’re placing your trust in the veracity of at least one source (who could, for all you know, be some kind of social Cartesian demon). Even if it’s something you’re anally retentive about, most people aren’t that diligent. They’re exhausted. There’s too much information and anxiety about things that are frightening and completely beyond their control. They want a story that confirms the things they already know and stirs those fears into righteous anger, at least anger feels powerful. Something that tells them that opposing views are malicious falsehoods deliberately dreamt up to hoodwink others who don’t know any better, who are either ignorant or just plain evil. That’s how you get various sides of any contentious issue publicly lying and accusing each other of the same.
It’s not new, but in the modern era the specific backlash against spreading deliberate lies as public information has taken on a life of its own. An indiscriminate boogeyman able to target those who others look to as a reliable source, anyone with profile. They don’t even have to be guilty (the magickal version of it seems to happen to the squeaky clean ones more often). Some errant magick, a convenient public mouthpiece and a piece of news is all it takes.
[citation needed] twists perception of information shared by a specific source. They’re lying, they have to be, just look at them! The blatant untrustworthiness of the subject of this phenomenon is plain as day, regardless of the actual truth of what they’re sharing. You can go check it if you’d like, but if they’re saying 2+2=4 and you have independent verification you’re still not going to be able to shake the feeling. Effectively it’s like they fumbled a Lie check. If you can’t reconcile the disconnect then that’s probably a low-level Self check, most just go along with it without realising.
Usually this happens to someone once and then the fallout gets lost in the cycle to everyone except those closest to it. In bad cases it ricochets around an issue, targeting everybody repeatedly and picking up steam until one side screws up and lies for real. Then there was that one news anchor who ended up committing suicide because a demon who was obsessed with getting even with him (for “having such great hair”, of all things) wouldn’t let up, tanked his career and ruined his personal relationships, but that’s rare I promise. Would I lie to you?
No one can personally verify everything they hear or see. You can try but ultimately you’re placing your trust in the veracity of at least one source (who could, for all you know, be some kind of social Cartesian demon). Even if it’s something you’re anally retentive about, most people aren’t that diligent. They’re exhausted. There’s too much information and anxiety about things that are frightening and completely beyond their control. They want a story that confirms the things they already know and stirs those fears into righteous anger, at least anger feels powerful. Something that tells them that opposing views are malicious falsehoods deliberately dreamt up to hoodwink others who don’t know any better, who are either ignorant or just plain evil. That’s how you get various sides of any contentious issue publicly lying and accusing each other of the same.
It’s not new, but in the modern era the specific backlash against spreading deliberate lies as public information has taken on a life of its own. An indiscriminate boogeyman able to target those who others look to as a reliable source, anyone with profile. They don’t even have to be guilty (the magickal version of it seems to happen to the squeaky clean ones more often). Some errant magick, a convenient public mouthpiece and a piece of news is all it takes.
[citation needed] twists perception of information shared by a specific source. They’re lying, they have to be, just look at them! The blatant untrustworthiness of the subject of this phenomenon is plain as day, regardless of the actual truth of what they’re sharing. You can go check it if you’d like, but if they’re saying 2+2=4 and you have independent verification you’re still not going to be able to shake the feeling. Effectively it’s like they fumbled a Lie check. If you can’t reconcile the disconnect then that’s probably a low-level Self check, most just go along with it without realising.
Usually this happens to someone once and then the fallout gets lost in the cycle to everyone except those closest to it. In bad cases it ricochets around an issue, targeting everybody repeatedly and picking up steam until one side screws up and lies for real. Then there was that one news anchor who ended up committing suicide because a demon who was obsessed with getting even with him (for “having such great hair”, of all things) wouldn’t let up, tanked his career and ruined his personal relationships, but that’s rare I promise. Would I lie to you?
Friday, 9 August 2019
101 - Marilyn Merino, Passive Thanatomancer
GMC: Marilyn Merino, Passive Thanatomancer
Civilization, like all gods, demands sacrifice. Appeasement through the death of a few is how we safeguard the well being of the many. Road death tolls are lamentable but no one is going to stop driving. People die from industry, coal and tobacco kill more people than they employ, yearly. The consumer electronics you’re reading this on? Chances are they were manufactured in circumstances little better than slave labour, which have driven many to their ends.
To Marilyn this is the hidden truth of the modern world, concealed beneath the cultural lie of individual value. That we allow this thing we’ve built to consume some and in return keep the greater number of us warm, fed and sheltered. She sees herself as above this, she is the leech that drains the power of these sacrifices for herself and is elevated by it.
Marilyn wasn’t in one of the frontline professions exposed to death on a daily basis, but she was in the one that saw how it was dramatised for public consumption. A photojournalist who saw how the sausage was made in industrial accidents, war and crime reporting. She became inured to the human cost, but never to the way it was misrepresented. Predictably this made her difficult to work with, co-workers and friends would point out how much farther see could go professionally if she weren’t so hellbent on alienating her employers for editorialising. So she bounced around the bottom of the industry for a long time, a first-rate talent pulling second and third-rate work.
Then she nearly died - should have died - in a work-chartered light plane crash that killed everyone else aboard. She spent months in hospital and then more learning to walk again (still uses a cane on the bad days). The up close and personal trauma twisted and crystallized something she had always believed into a strange, new obsession. Turning her back on the temporary fame of insipid sympathy she reconciled the need to feed society with death with her resolve to never fall victim to it. Her work ethic has become spotty and her loved ones are worried about her. About the way she travels between hospitals and accident sites, dressed for mourning and smelling of rosewater. Hovering hungrily over those civilization has claimed before they can expire.
Different from other death sorcerers, Marilyn’s personal ritual doesn’t require her to be responsible for the harvested death. In fact, it prohibits it. All the other typical prerequisites are there: ritual purification of the self, observance of proper reverence for the death, subjugation of the victim. In many ways it parallels the adept practice of Cuxinjia, the death must be directly and personally observed and must be in service to civilized living (but not necessarily the result of neglected risk). It’s a quibbling distinction in some respects, except that she also needs to harvest a trophy to keep the captured essence in.
STATS
Personality: Somber, intelligent and self-absorbed. Marilyn speaks so convincingly about her obsession it’s easy to forget just how horrible it is. On just about any other subject she falters and stammers, usually choosing to remain terse.
Rage: Comforting lies.
Noble: Authority and power should be wielded with care.
Fear: Taboo and running out of charges. The idea of being as naked to death as everyone else terrifies Marilyn (Unnatural).
Obsession: Siphoning off the power of our collective sacrifices for herself.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Ghoulish 50% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Protects Violence, Coerces Violence.)
Troublemaking Photojournalist 50% (Substitutes for Notice, Protects Helplessness, Coerces Helplessness.)
Thanatomancer 40%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Civilization, like all gods, demands sacrifice. Appeasement through the death of a few is how we safeguard the well being of the many. Road death tolls are lamentable but no one is going to stop driving. People die from industry, coal and tobacco kill more people than they employ, yearly. The consumer electronics you’re reading this on? Chances are they were manufactured in circumstances little better than slave labour, which have driven many to their ends.
To Marilyn this is the hidden truth of the modern world, concealed beneath the cultural lie of individual value. That we allow this thing we’ve built to consume some and in return keep the greater number of us warm, fed and sheltered. She sees herself as above this, she is the leech that drains the power of these sacrifices for herself and is elevated by it.
Marilyn wasn’t in one of the frontline professions exposed to death on a daily basis, but she was in the one that saw how it was dramatised for public consumption. A photojournalist who saw how the sausage was made in industrial accidents, war and crime reporting. She became inured to the human cost, but never to the way it was misrepresented. Predictably this made her difficult to work with, co-workers and friends would point out how much farther see could go professionally if she weren’t so hellbent on alienating her employers for editorialising. So she bounced around the bottom of the industry for a long time, a first-rate talent pulling second and third-rate work.
Then she nearly died - should have died - in a work-chartered light plane crash that killed everyone else aboard. She spent months in hospital and then more learning to walk again (still uses a cane on the bad days). The up close and personal trauma twisted and crystallized something she had always believed into a strange, new obsession. Turning her back on the temporary fame of insipid sympathy she reconciled the need to feed society with death with her resolve to never fall victim to it. Her work ethic has become spotty and her loved ones are worried about her. About the way she travels between hospitals and accident sites, dressed for mourning and smelling of rosewater. Hovering hungrily over those civilization has claimed before they can expire.
Different from other death sorcerers, Marilyn’s personal ritual doesn’t require her to be responsible for the harvested death. In fact, it prohibits it. All the other typical prerequisites are there: ritual purification of the self, observance of proper reverence for the death, subjugation of the victim. In many ways it parallels the adept practice of Cuxinjia, the death must be directly and personally observed and must be in service to civilized living (but not necessarily the result of neglected risk). It’s a quibbling distinction in some respects, except that she also needs to harvest a trophy to keep the captured essence in.
STATS
Personality: Somber, intelligent and self-absorbed. Marilyn speaks so convincingly about her obsession it’s easy to forget just how horrible it is. On just about any other subject she falters and stammers, usually choosing to remain terse.
Rage: Comforting lies.
Noble: Authority and power should be wielded with care.
Fear: Taboo and running out of charges. The idea of being as naked to death as everyone else terrifies Marilyn (Unnatural).
Obsession: Siphoning off the power of our collective sacrifices for herself.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Ghoulish 50% (Substitutes for Secrecy, Protects Violence, Coerces Violence.)
Troublemaking Photojournalist 50% (Substitutes for Notice, Protects Helplessness, Coerces Helplessness.)
Thanatomancer 40%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
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