Statospheric Saturdays: The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 1 - Ed Christ, Epideromantic Savior

This is the first in what is currently looking like a 4-part... Sub-series, I guess? The idea is GMC adepts who take their magickal practice in an especially weird or unexpected direction. As a teaser, the concepts for the other three are "Daredevil Sociomancer", "Bibliomancer of Action", and "Minor Thanatomancer". Not sure which one will be next but I'll probably do them all in a row, possibly followed by ways to use them in a campaign.

The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 1 

This unlikely cure to all the world’s ills is known to some as “the small-fry the Jesus Christ Advisory Board turned away” (see Book 3: Reveal). To his fretful parents, he’s still Edward Moss; they don’t know he had his name legally changed a decade ago. To the local Christian community he’s a sad and unsavory character, to the local Sleepers a moderate priority to put down, and to his disciples, the second coming of Christ.

Ed’s story began in his childhood, specifically his trigger event, which he underwent at the tender age of sixteen. The youngest child of upper-middle-class suburban Catholics, he was well into his rebellious streak by this time. He more or less didn’t bother to attend high school anymore, lied to his parents about anything and everything that occurred to him, and had recently moved from pot to stronger stuff – he thought he was buying heroin, but his dealer read him as the rube he was, and what he got was cut with all kinds of nasty stuff. He paid for it by stealing from his parents; they knew he was doing it, but hadn’t yet figured out how to confront their “troubled” son.

With his being primed by an especially noxious hit (containing trace amounts of mercury, of all things), it’s no surprise it was a religious experience when he crossed paths with the then-godwalker of The Masterless Man. Ed never learned his name. His memories of the whole encounter are fuzzy and more than a little colored by his later commitment to his stoned interpretation.

This is what Ed remembers: A homeless man who shared his opioid habit had pulled a knife on him, and like an idiot, he’d tried to parry the first stab, receiving a hole in his hand in exchange. Just then, an angel rode up on a motorcycle. The addict rounded on him, and the angel’s wings unfurled as if in challenge. He took off his sunglasses to reveal eyes made of blistering light. The addict stabbed him in the chest, but the angel just smiled, then grabbed the addict by the hair, remounted his bike, and peeled away, dragging him, along the pavement as he went, heralded by an angelic choir.

He never learned that the addict who’d attacked him was actually a charger who had longstanding beef with that godwalker (thus ruling out any altruistic motive on the part of the “angel”. Nonetheless, the charger’s allies started coming after Ed, trying to find answers. They believed the Masterless Man godwalker had died after they’d seen him pushed off a skyscraper, reinforcing the divine haze through which Ed saw him.

This was not helped by the fact that, as the godwalker hunted down his remaining enemies in the area one by one, he saved Ed’s life a second time. In this case, Ed had been sober, but suffering a bad concussion and a faceful of blood from a gash in his forehead.

The intersection of statospheric glory surrounding these events, Ed’s muddled mind, and his latent Catholic guilt changed him. After his second encounter with the angel, he began the arduous process of getting clean, attending his first NA meeting the next day. The more those around him doubted his story of angelic intervention, the more he clung to that belief.

His NA sponsor turned out to be a checker whose misapprehension of the Invisible Clergy was framed through a Christian lens. This man noted Ed’s stigmata: he had a hole through one hand and a jagged forehead scar, both with infections that had so far resisted antibiotics. The sponsor, a guy called Craig O’Dell, was Ed’s epideromantic mentor, and his first disciple.

Like Craig, Ed sees epideromancy as a kind of penance for sin. As Ed believes he’s Christ, he focuses on harboring the suffering of others through his stigmata. He stopped taking antibiotics and charges primarily through reopening the wounds (including holes he’s added to his feet and other hand) and letting the infection run its course.

Despite one true believer and the development of actual magickal powers, it’s been slow going for Ed to build his following. He lacks any kind of charisma, and although he’s been sober for over a year now, he’s often delirious from infection (which, incidentally, coincides with all his conversations with God), and he never learned any kind of useful life skills. His parents have covered his rent and living expenses since this all started, but their patience has worn thin as Ed has reached thirty without his delusion waning.

Ed doesn’t actually charge that often, either, and has not found a lot of uses for the spells Craig has taught him that align with his persona. He’s also obsessed with figuring out how to channel the Martyr, but this hasn’t gone well since he has no cause to speak of.

He has two disciples besides Craig now, both also recruited through NA, and both also fleshworkers who took to the school much better than him. Their names are Nadia Warrick and Luther Martens. Nadia really only sticks around because Ed’s forsworn Craig from teaching her any significant formula spells until she shows the “proper piety” and atones for sins she doesn’t regret in the slightest. Luther is the kind of godfreak who didn’t take a lot of convincing to believe some weirdo he just met is the second coming. He still uses all the time, not just heroin but psychotropics, despite Ed’s chiding.

Sooner or later, it’ll all fall apart. Luther will OD and Ed will blame himself, or Nadia will turn Craig and they’ll disappear in the night, or Ed will simply die from his years-old, gangrenous wounds. The saddest part is how likely nothing meaningful is to come of it all.

Ed Christ, Epideromantic Savior

Obsession: Saving humanity by suffering for its sins, just as he did in a previous life.

Rage passion: Nonbelievers (in him specifically, moreso than Christianity in general).

Fear passion: (Helplessness) Maybe his parents, siblings, childhood friends, childhood pastor, and parole officer are right: maybe he is just crazy.

Noble passion: Say what you will about Ed, but he does want to make the world a better place.

Helplessness: Hardened: 6 / Failed: 3

Isolation: Hardened: 7 / Failed: 2

Self: Hardened: 6 / Failed: 1

Unnatural: Hardened: 5 / Failed: 3

Violence: Hardened: 4 / Failed: 1

Epideromancer 40%:* Casts Rituals, Casts Gutter Magick

Self-Styled Savior 25%: Substitutes for Status, Coerces Self. Protects Self

Wash-Up 25%: Substitutes for Dodge, Substitutes for Lie, Substitutes for Secrecy

In Recovery 45%: Substitutes for Connect, Evaluates Self, Evaluates Helplessness

D&D 4e is Full of Lies

Believe it or not, I do still have interest in games other than Unknown Armies. Radically different games, even. I’ve been entertaining the idea of getting back to my RPG origins and running D&D 4e. As much as I hate the clunkiness I associate with a turn order and a physical board and minis, I have been wanting to engage the board game design-y, tactical combat-y parts of my brain for a while and this is certainly a much better outlet for that than 5e.

Before the nuts and bolts of encounter design, though, I want to make the setting my own. If you didn’t know, 4e makes the bold (for D&D) and wise choice to acknowledge that it has assumptions about the kind of world you run it in. Even more interestingly, the “points of light” style it has verges on post-apocalyptic; major settlements are rare, the wilderness in between is dangerous, and nations don’t really exist. There’s also a unique cosmology that deviates in some neat ways from the D&D formula, while retaining all the racist, colonialist nonsense. Whoops.

In this post I’m going to riff on this post on Prismatic Wasteland, an OSR staple that I recommend reading first, if you haven't already. It even references 4e! From there I will be getting gnostic and subversive with 4e’s cosmology and setting assumptions in ways that will likely not surprise readers familiar with my politics.

 

The following are statements in the core books (PHB1, PHB2, MM1, DMG1; I haven’t looked at the rest yet):

• All of the PHB1 gods (except Melora and, to a lesser degree, Sehanine) have a shared imperialist goal.

• All of the gods in the PHB1 and DMG1 except for Gruumsh, Lolth, and Tharizdun are opposed to demons and the abyss, and they are all opposed to the primordials.

• The gods’ supposed values directly contradict each other (eg. Bahamut is a god interested in freeing the oppressed while also being the god of oppressive institutions like nobility) or contradict their purported mutual animosity (eg. Kord and Bane have nearly identical portfolios.

• The material plane (and the Shadowfell and Feywild) were created by the gods. Their creation was opposed by the primordials, who also removed the latter two from the former out of spite.

• Primal spirits represent a balance between the gods and the primordials, and were only created after their struggle.

• Empires never last for very long, and the world in the present exists without any kind of unified civilization.

• “Civilization” (that is, unified empire) is the product of collaboration between the PHB1+2 races; the “monstrous” races do not have any kind of counterpart in scale or level of unity.

• Following the creation of the material plane, the primordials’ agency is greatly deemphasized compared to the gods, and there are none with specific names or characterization as individuals (aside from those that became demon princes; Demogorgon, Baphomet, and Orcus).

• Tharizdun is portrayed in the core books as creating the abyss and subverting several primordials to his side as demon princes, with the goal of supreme cosmic power as an individual. This drove him insane and led to his imprisonment in the abyss and erasure from the culture of mortals (hence there being no mention of him in the PHB1 or PHB2).

• The abyss is not portrayed as able to mount a meaningful opposition to the gods; demon princes and Tharizdun only have disparate cults with their own apocalyptic projects, Lolth is either insane or scheming indefinitely, and Gruumsh is dedicated to a fruitless, eternal war with Bane.

• The elemental chaos and the primordials predate the gods, and the primordials are said to oppose the stability and longevity of the material plane.

• Player characters are just more special than everyone around them. They’re heroes, they play by different rules, they have unique agency and the capacity to reach an epic level of power, on par with the demon princes, who are just below the gods in terms of power.

• The divine power source comes from the gods, and the primal power source comes from primal spirits. Martial and arcane power seem to be the results of exceptional personal skill.

• Sigil, the main settlement in the Astral Sea (and thus center of the gods’ “civilization” in their own realm), is ruled by The Lady of Pain, who is not a god (as she’s not mentioned in the gods section of either DMG1 or PHB1).

These ideas lead me to the conclusion that:

• The voice of the core books is an unreliable narrator (much the same as that of Keep on the Borderlands, several decades earlier) who is aligned with the gods and against the primordials.

• There is probably less dissent and disagreement amongst the gods, including the “good” and “evil” ones, than the core books indicate. They are all proponents of cosmic order in the Moorcockian sense, as well as sharing imperialist and colonialist goals. Thus, the gods are kind of analogous to the capitalist class or feudal monarchs; they have supreme (astral) power while the other occupants of the universe have to settle for subservience and obedience.

• Melora is likely a figurehead for the primordials’ agenda (chaos/untamed wilderness) among the gods, with minimal influence, if she even really exists. I could also see her being a turncoat/”reformed” primordial; there’s a precedent for primordials changing sides in the demon princes.

• There must still be some kind of powerful cosmic opposition to the gods’ goals, because of the difficulty their imperial projects routinely face. It seems like monsters are the primary vehicle for this opposition, perhaps more than “monstrous humaoids” that still tend to worship the gods.

• There is more to the story of the abyss. It may not really be part of the elemental chaos, or perhaps represents a failed project of the primordials, because multiple of the gods are aligned with the demons, its residents. Regardless, it is not likely to be the basis of cosmic chaos.

• The primordials are likely more anarchistic than “chaotic,” opposing the gods’ cosmic colonization and the way much of the universe they created was stolen and made the vehicle for the oppression of all the mortal races of the material plane, Shadowfell, and Feywild. Perhaps this even persists in a metaphysical sense; is death really an inevitable truth, or is The Raven Queen’s domain just part of the imperial engine of the gods?

The following are the questions I think thus need answering to fully flesh out the campaign setting provided:

• Why are PCs empowered with greater potential than all other mortals?

• Are the primordials really proponents of cosmic chaos antithetical to the existence of mortals? If not, what is their actual agenda? What have they been doing since they lost their war with the gods and the material plane got made?

• Do primal spirits really represent the balance, when they occupy and are a product of the material world, which is the result of the gods’ victory over the primordials? Relatedly, what is Melora’s deal?

• What’s stopping god-backed empire from permanently taking root? Or, put another way, what makes monsters so numerous, and why do they seem to inherently oppose law?

• Who (or what) is the Lady of Pain? Is she the head god?

• What’s the deal with Tharizdun and the abyss? Did Tharizdun really get driven insane by choosing to utilize “evil”? Is he really a god, and was he always? Is the abyss really part of the elemental chaos, and if so, does that mean it’s in alignment with the primordials?

My answers to these have yet to take form, although I have a vague vision for a campaign setup, framed by the recent and mysterious magical obliteration of the capital city of the “civilized races’” most recent doomed empire. I plan to have more 4e stuff on here eventually, in between the ongoing Statospheric Saturdays posts, which will continue as long as I continue to have the free time and motivation to write them.

Statospheric Saturdays: Phosphomancy

I've thought a radiation-themed adept school would be appropriate for Unknown Armies for a while, but it really started to take shape for me after I watched the excellent 1979 Japanese movie, The Man Who Stole The Sun. The symbolic power of the A-Bomb and the protagonist's aimless but consuming obsession feel very on brand for UA, even though nothing supernatural happens in it. There are a handful of references to it littered throughout the school. It's kind of like the offspring of Taxi Driver and Breaking Bad, but a lot more whimsical than either.

 

Just a boy and his plutonium.

Anyway, here's the school.

 

Phosphomancy

AKA Curies, atom splitters, half-lives

(Not to be confused with Photomancy.)

"They say radiation’s harmful

It’s a fact of life

Without it, we would die"

Nuclear Babies – Oingo Boingo (unreleased)

The cold war may be over, but humanity will forever live in the shadow of The Bomb. The effects of atomic annihilation are as ingrained as the imprints of its victims in the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There’s something very Promethean about a manmade force of such unspeakable creative and destructive power. We have devices whose energy output exceeds that of the sun many times over, and yet we put them to such prosaic ends: threatening other countries, powering industry, and so on.

Nuclear power demands respect – and yet we don’t respect it. Systems of its regulation are laughable in comparison to the worst case scenario should they ever fall through, and despite a colorful history of disasters and hand-wringing scientific papers. We can never put the genie back in the bottle, and today most people don’t think twice about it as they go about their lives.

The central tension of phosphomancy is encapsulated in inverting this mentality: atom splitters pray at the altar of the A-bomb. Their god was born in the Trinity test. To invest their bodies with radiation is to harbor a divine spark; to build a nuclear bomb is to hold the power of the sun in their hand. As mere mortals, they are unworthy to turn this divine wrath against others, but they live to be subsumed by its blinding light.

STATS

Generate a minor charge: This is not possible for phosphomancers. They can split up sigs if they need to for rituals or the like, but there are no minor spells and no minor random magick in this school, just as there are no half-measures in nuclear war.

Generate a significant charge: There are two methods: either sustain a dose of ionizing radiation sufficient to permanently alter their health, or acquire sufficient fissile material to power an atomic bomb.

For the former, a few hours in a tanning bed won’t cut it; a few minutes standing right next to the elephant’s foot will. See below for radiation mechanics.

For the latter, “acquire” means it’s your personal property, not just in a lead-lined truck you’ve been hired to drive between facilities. Equivalent or greater explosive yield to Little Boy or 13 kilotons of TNT qualifies as “sufficient”.

You may notice that doing this enables the other charging method. Many Curies have, too. It’s common to see them worship with fetishes made from radioactive plutonium or uranium isotopes, usually involving ritual actions that expose them to sufficient radiation to charge.

Generate a major charge: Two methods again. You can sustain a fatal dose of radiation, or singlehandedly build a functional atomic bomb or nuclear generator. “Singlehandedly” means that you personally own all the materials that go into the bomb and all the equipment with which you make it. This does put rich half-lives at a big advantage, but that was true anyway, because they can afford a lawyer if they get caught pinching plutonium.

Taboo: You must insist on respect for the object of your worship. Any time you bear witness to someone making dismissive or blasé comments about nuclear power or nuclear war, failing to take proper precaution around radioactive materials, or disregarding the chain of command for their usage, you have to correct them in no uncertain terms. This can make charging by acquiring and compiling bomb components tricky, of course. You don’t have to force them to act differently, but at the least you should issue a dire warning and remind them what they’re dealing with.

Simply addressing heresy is not enough, though. You need to proselytize as well. If you ever pass a week without making some kind of public statement, such as counterprotesting at a rally for disarmament, publishing an opinion piece in the news, or teaching your middle school science class how to build a nuke of their own, you break taboo. This can be avoided only if you’ve made meaningful progress on building a bomb or generator of your own during that time.

On top of all that, you cannot seek medical care for radiation you sustain for the purpose of charging, or any adverse health conditions that result from it.

Random magick domain: radiation, mutation, disaster and indiscriminate destruction; more symbolically, weaponized science and the hubris that comes with it, collective ignorance of existential danger, and raw energy on a scale greater than humans can comprehend.

Ω: +0.

 

Mechanics for Radiation

In game mechanic terms, doses high enough to generate a significant charge (ballpark figures, between 100-1,000 roentgens) provoke a Fitness test. On a matched failure or better, you feel sick for 1d10 hours (and probably shit yourself) but recover fully. On a fumble, or if your Fitness score was in the negatives (see below) prior to rolling, you develop cancer in 1d10 days, probably leukemia. See Book 4’s writeup of ustrinaturgy for more details on how that works in game terms.

Your Fitness score also accrues a negative shift equal to the ones place of the test every time you are irradiated enough for a sig charge. It’s suggested the cumulative penalty be tracked in secret by the GM, as with wound points. Every month you spend without sustaining further radiation, the penalty drops by 1d10.

A major charge-worthy dose also provokes a Fitness test, and on anything less than a crit, you have a number of hours to spend that charge equal to the sum of the dice before you are too disabled by acute radiation sickness to do anything but die in agony. On a crit, you get to repeat this test once a day for a week, and if you pass them all, you survive, although your Fitness is penalized by an amount equal to the highest of those rolls, reduced over time as described above, and any children you have will be horribly mutated and unlikely to survive their infancy.

Phosphomancy Significant Formula Spells

Atomic Abjuration

Cost: 2 significant charges.

Effect: The atom splitter enchants a homeopathic crystal purported to ward off ill health such that it actually does. This spell only works if the crystal in question is radioactive, although it doesn’t have to be hazardous enough to provoke a Fitness check against radiation. Whenever the bearer of the crystal (which can be the atom splitter, but doesn’t have to) would enter into harm’s way, be it exposure to a deadly virus or the path of a drunk driver, synchronicity protects them from harm. The one exception is that the crystal has no effect on radiation. This effect occurs a number of times equal to the ones place of the casting roll, after which the crystal disintegrates into slightly radioactive ash.

Demon Core

Cost: 3 significant charges.

Effect: The curie targets a radioactive object and any number of demons within a yard of one another. As long as the object chosen is radioactive enough to qualify for generating a significant or major charge for direct exposure, the demon(s) are bound to the object, and cannot move more than one yard from it. Because of how radioactive decay works, the object’s radioactive emission will eventually drop low enough that it no longer qualifies for the spell, at which point the demons are free. Additionally, every time the half-life period of the object’s radiation passes, the range from it that the demon(s) can move doubles.

I Am Become Death

Cost: 1 significant charge.

Effect: This is the phosphomancy blast spell. The atom splitter inflicts horrific radiation burns on the target, subjecting them to a Violence (5) check as well as a Fitness check as if they just received a significant charge’s worth of radiation (see above).

I'm Number Nine

Cost: 1 significant charge.

Effect: The next time the half-life attempts coercion, the stress check provoked is a Violence (10) or Helplessness (10) check, as their target perceives them to be as dangerous as a head of state with their hand inches from the big red button labeled “launch”. What they’re being coerced into is irrelevant to the apocalyptic implications of refusing (although they still can). As soon as the coercion is resolved, they return to viewing the half-life as they did before.

Manhattan Projection

Cost: 1 significant charge.

Effect: The atom splitter touches an object up to the size of an armchair, and it becomes sufficiently radioactive to provoke a Fitness check at a significant charge level (see above). The caster immediately has to make that check for standing right next to it, but they don’t gain a charge from doing so. Without a geiger counter or Rad-O-Vision (see below), the object appears unchanged upon examination. After a number of minutes equal to the ones place of the casting roll, or after that many people are subjected to the Fitness check, it returns to normal.

Mutagenesis

Cost: 2 significant charges.

Effect: Playing on decades of cultural tropes around post-apocalyptic mutation (and almost nothing to do with actual science), the Curie mutates themself or a target they touch for a number of minutes equal to the total of the casting roll.

This manifests in game terms by letting them exchange all the features of one of the target’s mundane identities for different ones, chosen from the following (see Book 1: Play): provides wound threshold, provides initiative, coerces Unnatural, coerces Violence, medical (affects self only), and provides firearm attacks (which manifests in some kind of biological projectile weapon).

Undergoing such a mutation provokes an Unnatural (5-6) check, and anyone present to witness the transformation, including the Curie, faces an Unnatural (2-4) check.

Mutually Assured Destruction

Cost: 2 significant charges.

Effect: The half-life mystically binds two objectives together, one of which they must either be working toward, and the other of which must go against one of their passions or be diametrically oppose to their own objective. Once this binding is in place, should either objective be completed, the other is instantly completed as well. Every party working towards both objectives is notified of the binding, through a vivid dream, unnatural omen symbolically linked to the two objectives, or series of obvious, synchronous signs.

Rad-O-Vision

Cost: 2 significant charges.

Effect: The atom splitter gains a new Specific Information identity (see Book 1: Play) with a rating equal to the sum of the casting roll dice. This identity, which shares the name of the spell, makes them a human geiger counter. They now see radiation as a kind of bright haze, with intensity corresponding to the amount emitted. A person sunbathing on a nice Summer day will have a little extra ambient glow. A nuclear reactor will be bright enough to make the atom splitter wince without eye protection.

Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Cost: 1 significant charge.

Effect: A single target the phosphomancer can see at the time of casting is overwhelmed with existential dread to the extent of paralysis. They become certain nuclear annihilation is imminent and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. Taking any action that only makes sense if the victim expects to be alive the next day is only possible if they overcome a Helplessness (10) check. This effect lasts a number of minutes equal to the ones place of the casting roll.

The Cost of Lies

Cost: 2 significant charges.

Effect: The Curie warps synchronicity around some complex bureaucratic process in a way that tangibly and directly affects people’s lives. This spell cannot just gum up the voting process on a bill in the senate that relates to the allocation of resources to homeless shelters, for example. Such a bill certainly affects life and death tangibly for unhoused people, but not in a direct enough way for this spell.

What the spell can do (for example) is generate some procedural SNAFU that results in somebody getting fired from a job they can’t afford to lose, cause a workplace accident causing up to a total of 5d10 wounds, or allow a criminal to escape life in prison or death row through some abstruse technicality or disappearance of evidence.

As you’d expect, this spell cannot be used to aid a Curie in the acquisition of bomb or generator components for the purpose of charging.

Major Charge Effects

Neutralize every warhead in one world power’s nuclear arsenal, confer a permanent supernatural identity to someone in the form of a pop-culture-style genetic mutation, put a neighborhood through all the effects of a nuclear detonation except the radiation (EMP, disastrous shockwaves, everything catches fire), power electrical infrastructure or other machinery with the energy of a nuclear power plant for a month, create compelling, falsified intelligence indicating an impending nuclear strike by one nation against another.

Statospheric Saturdays: Magickal Amplifier

Magickal Amplifier (Supernatural Identity)
Examples: Spirit Channeler, Synchronicity Resonator, Wish Granting

These identities do not do anything unnatural on their own. Despite this, anyone that has one is in extremely high demand by all chargers that know they exist.
Their effect is straightforward: they make magick more potent in their presence by granting a positive shift on a successful usage of the identity to the roll of somebody else’s supernatural ID (inclusive of avatar paths and adept schools) made immediately afterward. There are two general types, colloquially known in some circles as “monkeypaws” and “scanners” respectively.

Monkeypaws require intense focus and precise direction to amplify magick, and can only use this identity once per day before becoming mentally and mystically exhausted. They must also be in physical contact with the recipient of their amplification when the identity is rolled.
Scanners, however, have a passive field of amplification that is “on” 24/7 by default and is rolled for ANY magick performed within range. The field extends a number of feet from them equal to their rating in the identity, in every direction and through all surfaces.
Not only can you not amplify your own other magick identities with this power, you also suffer a perpetual -10% shift to rolls to use it if you have any. Cosmic interference, some say, or maybe the Invisible Clergy just punishes those too greedy with their mojo.

 

As usual, Mr. Cronenberg likes to exaggerate these things. 

Fumble (Scanner): You find out the hard way how apt your moniker is, and take damage equal to the total of the roll that would have been amplified. If this kills you, your head doesn’t explode, but your brain turns to mush and any demons within range make a beeline for the recently vacated real estate of your body.

Matched Failure or Failure (Scanner): You suffer 1d5 wounds from a spontaneous nosebleed and headache. This identity is then suppressed for a number of minutes equal to the ones place of the failed roll.

Fumble or Matched Failure (Monkeypaw): You apply a negative shift to the target’s roll equal to the tens place of your rating in this identity. If they still succeed, the effect of their roll is somehow perverted or twisted, monkey’s paw style.

Failure (Monkeypaw): Nothing happens, aside from you tuckering yourself out.

Success, Matched Success, or Crit: You apply a positive shift to the target’s roll equal to the tens place of your rating in this identity.

Statospheric Saturdays: Door to the Dawn of Time

A nice, simple ritual for you this week, as we all mourn the Halloween season, and I brace for the least wonderful time of year for a Jew living in a hegemonic Christian country.

 

Door to the Dawn of Time 

Significant ritual

Cost: 3 significant charges

Ritual Action: Remove a door from a building that has yet to have any long-term occupants. It will work if it’s from a house that’s on the market, as long as nobody has ever moved in. The same goes for any office space or storefront; if it’s never been used by a business, it’s good. Whether or not the building has an owner is immaterial.

The door must be taken intact, including the frame and hinges. The ritual works best with a regular interior door. The era of the destination and the duration of the ritual has been known to vary when garage or cabinet doors are used.

You must then bring the door someplace quiet that has personal significance to you – either because it relates directly to one of your Passions or your Obsession, or because it’s the main place you associate with one of your Relationships. Leave it there unattended for at least 48 hours. If anybody comes into sight of it before then, the ritual will fail.

Once it’s ready, knock on the door once, turn it upside down, knock once more, and open it.

Effect: For as many minutes as the casting roll, the door becomes a one-way portal to 3,303 million years ago, in the same geographic location. While this isn’t quite the dawn of time, it is before any life scientists have been able to identify more complex than a microbe. Anything passing through either side the open door goes alllll the way back, and stays there. If you tie something (or someone, if you’re a real dickhead) to a rope and throw it through, then try to pull it back out, the rope on the other side reacts like it’s been frozen in invisible cement. Nothing can come through to the present, even if that’s where it originated.

This ritual is most often used for prosaic reasons such as hiding incriminating evidence. So far, no trace of anything put through has survived to be found millennia later, and thus blow apart several scientific disciplines. As useful as a magick garbage chute is, though, don’t underestimate the tranquility of setting up a lawn chair and enjoying the view.