This week, I'm posting a double feature of specific flavor I have used for the unnatural IDs of past player characters of mine. I love how flexible the identities listed in Book 1 and Me, Myself & You are with regards to what the source of the magick is, so here I'm showcasing just how weird you can get with them.
4Chan Diviner (Vague Information)
> Go on 4chan at 3:33 local time (AM or PM, doesn't matter)
> Post a question you want the answer to on the most relevant board
> Check the Post ID
> Find that number in "The Chaosfag's Worthless Guide to Divination" (if you don't know where to find the PDF, you're not cool enough to do this shit. Git gud)
> Read the entry
> Know a little more about what's going to happen in the future
> feelsgoodman.jpg
The character I made this flavor up for was a member of an online cabal that recruited using 4chan and shadier corners of the internet. His name was Cretin Anderson, he was a forgettably bland-looking 20-something white guy and an avatar of the Disciple, and sadly the campaign never got past corkboarding.
Undercroft Psalmist (Terrorize)
The Undercroft may seem like an otherspace, but it’s more accurate to say it’s… A curse? A concept? A fundamental truth of the universe? In sensory terms, most experience it as a dim parlor with olive wallpaper and no doors or windows. There's a perpetually dusty love seat and a rickety end table, and not a whole lot else.
Psalmists are people with a special connection to the Undercroft, typically developed after spending an unusually long time there, who can transport others into it by reciting to them the poem written below. The Terrorize roll affects the duration of their stay in their subjective experience, but it happens in only an instant of real time.
Psalm of the Undercroft:
Grains of sand and ticking hands, a churning void to fill
Idle minds are seeing signs in shadows ‘neath the hill
I wander and I wonder at the eyes within the dark
And I weep into the deepness of the toxins in my heart
The nights go by with open eyes and tremors in my hands
And in the day I cannot say the truth my soul demands
The character I invented this for was a nineteen-year-old named Alexander Head who had spent subjective decades in the Undercroft two years earlier, and subsequently been branded insane and slipped through the cracks of society, only to be recruited by the Sleepers. I did get to play as him for a full objective of around 3-4 sessions.
I enjoy the combination of the sci-fi thought experiment horrifically illustrated in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Hard Time" (season 4's iteration of the mandatory "O'Brien Must Suffer" episode) with the idea of a memetic verbal curse, similar to the King in Yellow play invented by Robert Chambers well over 100 years ago.
