Statospheric Saturdays: The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 5 - "Evil, Vile" Levi Oster, Anagram Gematriast Heretic

Here is the last entry in this subseries. Levi was originally going to be my PC in an All-Mart campaign that never got past the dreaded scheduling phase.

As mentioned a couple weeks ago, I will be shelving weekly StatSat entries for the time being. I have a 4e D&D campaign starting soon and want to focus my RPG writing time on prepping for that. There will probably be more posts relating to that soon. And even if I'm not writing it down weekly, the UA brainworms will never leave me in peace, you can rest assured.

 
 

The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 5

Levi Oster, known in occult circles by his own tongue-in-cheek title, “Evil, Vile Levi,” has a relationship to his heritage that lies between “complicated” and “tortured.”

He was born into a Brooklyn Ashkenazi Jewish community, assigned female, and raised to become a loyal housewife and faithful mother. He always chafed at the strictures of his orthodox upbringing, wanting to be given the respect shown to his brothers and male cousins: a modicum of freedom, a listening ear to his ideas, a future that he might make his own. His father was a respected gematriast – not of the anagram variety, mind you, but of the ancient Jewish tradition. Premodern mysticism, the kabbalah and the like, held a dignified place in his community. Levi always hovered as close to the edges of those mysteries as a “girl” could get.

By his early teens, Levi knew he was actually a boy. He also had the wherewithal to keep that fact to himself if he wanted to continue to have a roof over his head. Sometimes, in the wee hours, he would stay up to complain with the neighborhood girls about the unfairness of their lot in comparison to the boys. But he always had to hold back what he really wanted to say. In the end, he had to repress it as a survival instinct.

A stranger attended his Bat Mitzvah. He was an old man with a long, white beard, the very image of a sagacious elder, and the sort of man Levi had been raised to listen to carefully, and with great respect. The stranger kept his distance, not just from Levi, but apparently everyone else there, to some degree. And nobody seemed to know him either.

As things wound down, with the other kids and the women released to play, study, or clean, and the men talking in clusters, Levi approached him. The man’s name, he said, was Moshe, and he knew Levi’s name. This seemed pretty in keeping with expectation until he said that name. He called him Levi, not his deadname. For that one instant, everything fell away around them, as Levi accessed mystic truth unfettered for the first time.

Until he turned eighteen, Levi and Moshe – whose surname was never revealed – met regularly under the guise that the latter was a rabbi from Israel whose son he might wish to marry off to Levi (which delighted his parents). Moshe was every bit as erudite, pious, and wealthy as he needed to be to support this claim. When Levi left home, Moshe told him that he had convinced his parents it was to plan the wedding. Levi continues to feel conflicted about his disappearance from their lives, but has never considered going back.

Moshe had known Levi’s name through means he never explained, and because of that, had known Levi was male, even when he had all but forgotten that fact himself. But as he started to build himself a new life, he questioned everything. And in the end, he turned his back on Moshe, too. Partly, it was out of spite at his restrictive upbringing - at having his identity denied, and at the fate of all the girls and women he’d known. Partly, he saw the contradictions within Jewish traditions, and between Judaism and other religions. He had a lot of questions and unresolved frustration, and Moshe expected him to be a Nice Jewish Boy. Years later, he’d mature to the point that he wanted to try and make up with the old man, but by then Moshe had faded away, whether succumbing to age or illness, or something more primordial, Levi never found out.

What was left to Levi of their bond was, in truth, not particularly Jewish. But it was magick: the magick of names. True names are something that the trans community Levi has found as an adult tends to balk at, and understandably so. Who decides what is “true” about them? Why does one person only get the one name? Levi doesn’t know. He doesn’t make the rules. But he can do magick with them.

In essence, he practices anagram gematria (Break Today, p. 91), but only with people’s names. He believes it only works with a person’s true name, and that those are granted from some ineffable force on high. It’s quite likely he’s mistaken there, and that if he had his horizons broadened he could do the full gamut of anagram gematria, with any word or phrase.

Generally, when Levi meets someone, he tries to come up with spells for their name. For example, his boss at the All-Mart where he works is named Oliver Anderson, and he has found success casting “I Order Venal Son” on him to manipulate him with bribery, even in ways that don’t make sense, like giving him a raise. For about one in ten people, Levis’ magick doesn’t work, in which case he assumes their true name is not their legal name, or the name they go by. Usually, this means he just can’t affect them, but once in a while he digs up a childhood nickname or occult underground moniker, and then he can ensorcell them just fine.

Try as he might to move on, he keeps being drawn back to Orthodox Judaism. He always studies the Torah and kabbalah in his free time, and he’s gone as far as to try and join a couple synagogues in recent years, now he can reliably pass. There’s inevitable friction when he does, and he ends up burnt out on his faith and resentful for months at a time, but he can never quite shake the belief that was instilled in him so young. Worst of all, the misogyny he internalized as a child has only festered in him as he’s purged himself of femininity. Sometimes, it comes out in ugly ways.

Someday, he wants to use anagram gematria to commune with Yahweh. He’s sunk a lot of hours and taken many risks to try and figure out the name he would need to use, having tried Hebrew, English, Spanish, and a half-dozen other languages he’s barely familiar with. To be sure, he’s arrogant to even try, and it will probably burn him eventually, even though his choice of higher power to believe in is misguided in the World of Our Desires.

In the meantime, he works nights stocking at All-Mart, occasionally smuggling out a piece of exostock, always carrying on his person a notebook or two of true names and associated spells.

“Evil, Vile” Levi Oster, Anagram Gematriast Heretic

Obsession: True names. They are the essence of a person, and they hold great power.

Rage passion: The adulteration of faith by the institutions of orthodox religion.

Fear passion: (Helplessness) Being reduced back to womanhood.

Noble passion: I’m going to learn the true name of God someday, and finally get some answers.

Helplessness: Hardened: 5 / Failed: 2

Isolation: Hardened: 4 / Failed: 0

Self: Hardened: 4 / Failed: 0

Unnatural: Hardened: 3 / Failed: 1

Violence: Hardened: 1 / Failed:

Anagram Gematriast 60%:* Casts Rituals, Casts Gutter Magick

Night Shift Stock Boy 20%: Substitutes for Fitness, Protects Isolation, Evaluates Helplessness

Conflicted Agnostic 40%: Substitutes for Secrecy, Evaluates Unnatural, Evaluates Self

 

As a bonus, here are some of Levi's spells using his own "true name":

LEVI OSTER = RESOLVE IT: All-purpose minor boost to actions taken to proactively resolve a problem.

LEVI OSTER = EVER TOILS: +20% to Fitness checks that take place over at least a half hour.

LEVI OSTER = IS REVOLT: +10% to Struggle against authority figures and systemic power.

LEVI OSTER = ISLE TROVE: +20% to Status when referencing his "off-shore accounts" and/or playing into "Jew Gold" stereotypes. 

Statospheric Saturdays: The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 4 - Steven Smith, Soulless Thanatomancer

Here is the penultimate entry in this little subseries. Getting a bit spooky with this one; UA is a horror game, after all. 

The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 4

Many serial killers have been called soulless, sociopathic, heartless. Often there’s an element of metaphor, or at least exaggeration to these accusations. But for Steven Smith, it’s literal.

Smith had no upbringing. He wasn’t born. A glitch in the universe shat him out, fully formed, fourteen years ago. Well, fully formed, sans any kind of blood, bone, internal organs, or soul. If you haven’t already inferred, he is a nonentity (see UA2 Core Book, p. 304). Of the roughly decade and a half he’s existed, he has spent very little doing anything of note, which is typical of his kind, and necessary for his survival. He wore sweater vests and khakis, walked into a cubicle at a struggling temp firm and stared at its wall eight hours a day. After clocking out, he found a secluded alley, 24-hour diner booth, or the like to spend the night doing nothing.

This changed one night, nearly a year ago now, in the darkened Hot Topic of an isolated shopping mall. Smith sat motionless in the changing room he’d selected to spend the night, the college-age employee either having forgotten he’d gone inside or failing to give a shit when they locked up. The floor-to-ceiling grate outside the store rattled up, and a thanatomancer (see Postmodern Magick, p. 111) by the name of Florence Simon walked inside, pushing her sacrifice ahead of her.

As she explained, in brutal detail, her plans for the poor homeless woman she had chosen to harvest a sig from, the aura of terror wafted to Smith like a macabre apple pie on a windowsill. Silently, he unlatched the door to the changing room and watched the proceedings from the shadows.

Over the next three hours, the butcher did her work and cleaned up afterwards. She never even noticed Smith staring. Her victim did, but by that point she had been overwhelmed with agony, her screams long grown indistinct, her tongue cut out. Simon left dragging two heavy black trash bags and a fleshy fetish in a pouch hanging from around her neck. Enthralled, Smith followed.

Simon was on the warpath with an enemy cabal. She had just started charging up nightly for the span of a week in anticipation of some supremely grisly workings. However, on the third night, she caught Smith, because he had become overwhelmed with bloodlust and wanted to join in. Startled and angry to have a carefully planned charging rite ruined, the death mage reflexively unleashed a significant blast on Smith. She expected him to fall to literal pieces, but he just kept kneeling over her gagged and flailing sacrifice, digging fistfuls of meat from his chest cavity.

Simon went from upset to frantic. She struck out with her flensing knife, severing three fingers from the philosophical zombie. Though they were coated in the sacrifice’s blood, the stumps did not bleed themselves. From this point, her rage and terror escalated to twisted reverence.

Nonentities are immune to magick, but, though it’s vanishingly rare, they can still practice it. Smith’s obsession with suffering and pain dovetailed beautifully with thanatomancy. He also had the benefit of a devoted tutor. Unaware of what Smith was, Simon had interpreted his immunity to, and fixation on torture as a sign he was some kind of cenobite-esque entity, perhaps one she had attracted after her storied career as a ritualistic killer.

Unfortunately for both, but mercifully for the local unhoused population, their morbid attraction had allowed Simon to forget her feud until it was too late. The cabal got the drop on her, and although Smith harvested four significant charges in the aftermath, she received a nasty stab wound. It wouldn’t have been fatal, though she was in and out of consciousness for most of a day. But once Smith had finished with her attackers, he took one last boon from his mentor.

Short-lived as his training was, Smith learned enough of Simon’s ideology to know how to cover his tracks. It had been important to Simon to conduct her sacrifices in public places, but to leave no trace behind. So became Smith’s practice. He disappeared from his job, causing a minor kerfuffle, but before anyone could decide if they wanted to check if he had any emergency contacts, his firm went under. No one who knew him before ever thought of him again.

Now, Smith spends his days stalking and planning his sacrifices, and carries them out at night. His body count is in the hundreds. He has evaded erasure by the universe only because no one has ever associated him with his actions. He takes teeth or knucklebones as fetishes, which now weigh down his pockets, but do not slow his pursuit. He is stealthy, steady, and perfectly forgettable. And no one who he chooses to cross paths with lives to tell the tale.

There is one other oddity about him: he never casts a spell. He never fully learned how from Simon, and moreover, he’s obsessed with the process of the sacrifice and its resultant emotions. He couldn’t care less about exercising mystic power. He is a hollow man suffused with the equivalent mojo of several dozen major charges. It’s unlikely mundane authorities will catch him, but unnatural phenomena have been dogging him for months now. Surely, when he’s discovered by the occult underground of one of the cities his trail of blood passes through, he will go out with a terrible bang.

Steven Smith, Soulless Thanatomancer

Obsession: Ritualistic murder and the resultant froth of pain, fear, and misery in the victim.

As a nonentity, Smith has no passions and does not face stress checks. He has a base rating of 15% in all abilities.

Thanatomancer 75%: Casts Rituals, Casts Gutter Magick

Soulless Killer 75%: Substitutes for Pursuit, Substitutes for Struggle, Coerces Violence

Statospheric Saturdays: The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 3 - Gwen Paylik, Bibliomancer of Action

I still have the thanatomancer planned for this subseries, and I will be adding an anagram gematriast as well. After that, I think I might take a break from StatSat for a while so I have time to develop my non-UA posts a bit more. But that's a couple weeks out. We shall see.

Oh, and a disclaimer: I have not actually read any airport thrillers. I am willing to do research for these posts, but not a whole book I expect I will not enjoy. So take this post as the GMC in question's view of the genre (?) rather than my own. 

The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 3

Gwen Paylik hates “airport thrillers” – “ghostwritten, paint-by-numbers dreck with the literary merit and attitude toward women of a Republican politician’s drunken Twitter screed,” as she once described them. Unfortunately, she is under the (mistaken) impression that they have unique mystical potency, and she owns a minimum of two copies of every single one of them: a hardcover and a paperback.

Typically, bibliomancy revolves around the knowledge one derives from the written word. Not exactly so for Gwen, who can, and often does, earnestly attest she has learned nothing of value from any book in her collection. In her mind, the books are all completely interchangeable, except for the signed copies, which are the only ones valuable enough to be usable for a traveling library (which is essential in her line of work).

Something about the stream of capital revolving around these books, combined with her abject loathing of them, has drawn her along a path in which she embodies their stereotypical heroes, defying logic and expectation in perilous work just as they do. By day she’s a stay-at-home mom of two, by night a private investigator, burglar, and occasional assassin.

Gwen had no magickal mentor, just an ex-husband obsessed with these books and an inability to ever shut up. She rid herself of him eventually, but the brainworms had taken root. Though she has since crossed paths with other chargers and checkers a number of times, she still has an incomplete understanding of adept magick, hence her… Specialization.

She had the benefit of a sizeable starting collection, having finagled her ex’s hoard in the divorce. He thought it was purely out of spite, but in fairness he had rarely bothered to ask her what she wanted, let alone why she wanted it. And she wasn’t about to explain to him that she could become a real-life action-thriller badass from the books so polarizing in their relationship that they wound up being the final straw that got her to contact a lawyer. Plus, she gets decent alimony payments.

As of right now, her library contains about 5,000 total books across two adjacent storage units. This would make her something of a powerhouse if she understood she could derive significant and major charges from higher quantities. That said, she would also need to know more spells, or understand how to use random magick to its fullest.

She casts “Book Learning” (see UA2 core book, p. 119) about a dozen times for every other use of a minor charge. Those are usually random magick castings that have more to do with her hatred of her library’s contents than the specifics of the books. For example, she can amplify the misogynistic attitudes of men she encounters, getting them to mansplain for literal hours while she cases a joint or roots around for evidence. Another favorite is to prevent witnesses from remembering anything more distinct about her than her hair color or breast size to report to authorities.

The other bibliomancers in her area are (so far) intimidated by her ruthlessness, and to be honest, her physical fitness, to the point of refraining from stealing from her, even though she’s pretty careless with her library’s security. But they have arranged a conspiracy of silence to keep her in the dark about the full truth of their school.

Jaded Gwen might be, but not stupid. She is aware that other wizards exist, even being peripheral to the occult underground, and she correctly assumes there is more power she could learn to access. She’s encountered a few avatars, who she tends to view through the lens of stereotypical fiction character types, but sooner or later she’ll run across an avatar of the Naked Goddess, the Mother, or some other archetype that is impossible to square with a view that all magick is tied to her least favorite genre of fiction.

For the half-decade since her divorce and descent into bibliomantic wetwork, she has chosen to protect her tweenage boys by staying at arm’s length rather than diving into magick. She has some inkling of getting more involved once they’re both in college.

Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise that engaging with bibliomancy is such an unpleasant experience for her. Nonetheless, she is obsessed like any other adept, and it’s probably only a matter of time before her curiosity wins out, or worse: a past target gets set on revenge, or decides she knows too much. It’s not really in keeping with convention for the woman to have her sons “fridged” as opposed to the other way around, but the contradiction of her femme fatale alter ego and her magick’s source (or at the very least, her view of it) is probably one of the mystical tensions that made her an adept in the first place.

Gwen Paylik, Bibliomancer of Action

Obsession: Airport thrillers are so popular, but so bad, (and remind her of her ex-husband so much) that they are uniquely deserving of her obsessive hatred.

Rage passion: The success and popularity of some of the worst writing ever penned by human hand.

Fear passion: (Isolation) Her sons preferring their washed-up bore of a father to her, and/or cutting her off after they leave for college.

Noble passion: Doing it all as a strong, independent woman – raising kids, hoarding objects of magick power, and stalking the streets with a paperback in one hand and a silenced pistol in the other.

Helplessness: Hardened: 2 / Failed: 0

Isolation: Hardened: 5 / Failed: 2

Self: Hardened: 3 / Failed: 2

Unnatural: Hardened: 2 / Failed: 0

Violence: Hardened: 3 / Failed: 0

Bibliomancer 40%:* Casts Rituals, Casts Gutter Magick

Single Mom 55%: Substitutes for Connect, Protects Self, Protects Isolation

Secret Badass 35%: Substitutes for Secrecy, Substitutes for Dodge, Protects Violence