09 August 2025

Statospheric Saturdays: Rituals for a College Campus

This week, I have three more rituals for you, originally submitted along with two GMCs for a game jam on the UA discord server. They're unified by the theme that they would be useful to members of a Skull and Bones-esque occult fraternity with a postmodern magickal twist (an idea I may end up developing more thoroughly for a future StatSat post). I did refine some of the details of these a bit, for any readers who've seen them before.

Freshman Fifteen 
Cost:
2 minor charges

Ritual action: Share a meal at a university dining hall with your intended victim (fast food joints work too, as long as they’re within 3 miles of campus). Make sure you both get the non-diet soda to wash it down, and that you both eat at least 3,000 (kilo)calories of food. Before you eat again, weigh yourself on a scale while in a moving elevator.

Effect: The next time your victim weighs themself, fifteen pounds of body fat will be instantly transferred from your body to theirs instantaneously. This causes an Unnatural (3-4) check for both of you. The change in both your bodies is visible at a glance. 

 

Midnight Oil 
Cost: 1 minor charge

Ritual action: Starting at 11:48 PM (local time), drink twelve whole cans of an energy drink. It can be any brand, but it has to be the generic flavor. You must finish them all before midnight. As you empty them, arrange the cans in a circle around you, logos facing inward, and sit in the middle cross-legged. Make sure you cannot reach or see any timepieces. 
Effect: Time stretches and slows around you. For each hour that passes outside the circle, 70 minutes pass within. If someone were to observe you from outside, they’d probably think you're moving in exaggerated, pantomime slow-motion. If they watch for a while and realize that time is flowing at two different speeds in the same area, they are subject to an Unnatural (3-4) check. Similarly, any motion you can see is uncannily fast, and if you pay it any attention you face the same shock.

The effect persists for as long as you stay within the circle and unaware of the current time, so you can knock out quite a bit of homework, as long as you've got a bladder of steel. If you are told or otherwise become privy to the current time, on purpose or not, the magick of the ritual ceases immediately.

Oh, and a word of warning: if you fall asleep in the middle of the circle, you’re very susceptible to demonic possession.


Quiet Enjoyment
Cost: 2 minor charges

Ritual action: Knock five times on the wall, ceiling, or floor between your own living space and an adjacent dorm room or apartment from which you can hear some kind of noise whose source is beyond your control. Shout through the wall that you're calling in a noise complaint if it continues. For the ritual to work, the sound has to drop in response by at least 33.3 decibels (roughly the difference between normal conversation and a whisper) and then return to at least its original volume. 

Repeat this whole process, then call your RA, landlord, or local police (whichever is most accountable for maintaining peace and quiet where you live).

Effect: As long as your phone call is answered, the room/apartment where the sound was coming from becomes unnaturally muted - no sound can be made within, although sounds from without are still audible. The effect lasts as long as your call to the authority figure. Those caught unawares by the effect must make an Unnatural (3-4) check.

 

02 August 2025

Statospheric Saturdays: Flavor for Magick Identities

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.