MAGICIAN

 MAGICIAN

fuyuko matsui

There’s not another road for you than this. I’m so sorry.

Starting Equipment: specially tailored clothes, a letter of termination

Skills: 1) theoretical physicist 2) paranoid clerk 3) corporate striver 4) lab animal 5) fugitive

Templates

A) Katalepsis, Graveyard Girl // Kataleptic Limit 5

B) Down the Wolf's Throat // +2 Parasitic Tombs, Kataleptic Limit 10

C) The Dark Dark House // +2 Parasitic Tombs, +1 Appetite, Kataleptic Limit 15

D) Dogsbody // +2 Parasitic Tombs, +1 Appetite, +1 Haunt, Kataleptic Limit 20

∆) Vers La Flamme

Katalepsis

rothko

They drill the hole at the nape of your neck. There’s a tap that keeps the fluid in, but lets the membrane extrude. It’s agony the first time, but you get used to it. An invisible worm, a questing tongue. As you flex and feed it, it expands into a cobra hood of tangled false-nerves and alien mucus-slick. You can’t touch it, but you can feel it coming out of you. You can’t see it, but under ultraviolet light it dissolves strange colors from the air. The other magicians keep track of everyone’s colors, to predict personality and divine compatibility for covens. It’s mostly nonsense.

Really they should all be appetite. The thing that comes out of you is for feeding you. This is the organ of your body that is always open to the world. The real world. The ultrareality. When the things from that place come to crawl inside you this is how they come in.

When it uncoils from you it’s like being born, blind and mindless and wanting. Now that you can feel it you can’t stop. It isn’t touching air or light or gravity but it’s touching you. For your whole life it waited still and quiescent in the dark for things to crawl inside it. Now when it feels the ripple shape of the things from outside passing by it reaches out to touch them. It’s less like motion and more like yearning. Now you can feel that yearning. It’s like hunger but it’s not like hunger. It will never be silent again. Never be lonely again.

from angel's egg

The way you learn to feed is important. It’s only malleable now in the moment of birth and then you’re stuck forever in the trophic web that extends invisibly out of everything.

Smother

soft and quiet and in motion always, rocking back and forth like the sea, dark and smooth. you could be a home for them, an embrace. they’ll never want to leave you. when you rest, fill as many inventory slots as you like with Comfort. when you encounter a spirit, you can let it nestle in and feed it on that comfort, at your own pace. it will stay with you, growing docile and slow. if you let a day pass without feeding it, gain an injury (from your favorite random table) as it goes on taking anyway. There's no way to be rid of it but to feed it more. When you've fed it as much as its Cost without interruption, it swells to twice its size and suffocates.

Seduce

your naked need cracks like a banner in the breeze. you are shining, shining. they want you to want them like you want everything. they want to tangle in you until they’re the same. when you encounter a spirit, it makes a 2d6 reaction roll, modified by your CHA, and suffers that much Sickness. sick spirits trail after you, helpless. it loses sickness one at a time, scene by scene. if it gets better, it injures you as it tears its way free. you may prompt further reaction rolls by relentlessly seeking and satisfying your desires, however you prefer. when its sickness reaches its cost, it deliquesces.

Strangle

long languid limbs coil in the dark, pretending not to be flesh. they strike and strangle in a place where they’re the only thing that’s living. when you encounter a spirit you can hunt it. wait in predator stillness for as many turns as you like, then roll 1d20 that many times. for each die that comes up under your DEX, you injure it. for each die that comes up over, it injures you. when it has as many injures as its cost, it's lost the power to resist you.

from angel's egg

Spirits are substance that isn’t stuff, gravid and thick with shadow that only mostly isn’t energy. All that they’ve taken away is still inside them and when you pop them like a grape between your teeth it's all yours. Once a day, if you spend a few moments off-stage in an entangling place, where matter meets the shadow, you may pretend that the ragged tatters of things you swallow can sate you. You will gain a Tomb that isn’t yours. A Tomb is a unit of measurement of everything. It’s the sum total of the only thing you are. When you’re born they put things in you to grow it and nurture it and make it rich, and when you die they know it’s done cooking. Every time you take a Magician template, you must have them drill another hole in your spine. You will grow vaster, vaster, extending from yourself like a blooming flower, or the shadow of wings. You'll grow glorious. For each template you have, you can hold 5 Tombs in you that aren’t yours. When you feed off-stage, you gain 1. When you encounter a spirit, turn the tables, drag them into you and pop them, you get 1d4+1.

At first, this will be enough. But with each new hole there is more of you to fill. There must be more to fill you with. The tomb is everything that makes you real. If you are hungry, could you take that real away from someone else? Yes. Yes. They have a part of them that’s invisible too even if it’s not in extrusion (but it’s better if it is– once you’ve had it with a magician the others aren’t the same) and you can entangle deeply if they let you. If they don’t digest you when you sink into the spaces of them, if you don’t spread yourself into those spaces like nerves under skin, if you can press through the sieve of each other until something new is born…. Then yes. When you entangle it’s like birth and when you part it’s like death. Something goes into you and something comes out of you. At the end of any scene of intimacy, add 1 Tomb. If you let them keep some of you, so it’s more like birth and more like death, add 1d4+1, but they leave a Stigma in you. An absence. They can offer to fill it back, so they can give you another and feed you so deeply again, if you do something for them in return. Or they can hold it over your head to hurt you worse, passing through the space they made so you can’t defend yourself at all and closing it shut behind them.

How are you still unsatisfied? Every aperture they make in you unravels the lie of you. No inside, no out. As you grow vast and rich and more you also grow less. More of them and less of you. Can you become more yourself by eating yourself? Oh, yes. All the half-digested everything is churning inside of you and when you die a sludge-thick ghost will pour out of you like vomit. Let that flood tide rise to tease your palate. Let it enrich your flavor. Whenever you suffer Fatal Wounds, you gain that many Tombs.

from angel's egg

What are all these Tombs for? Just to sit and go rotten in you until you die? Maybe. But they can be terribly, horribly tempting. All those little freaks that spill from the ultrareality and put things in you and take things out of you. Now you can give them something they want, and it isn’t even yours.

Every spirit can do a trick. The better the trick, the harder a price it drives. It goes like this:

Nature of the Trick (Each spirit has a dominant humor. A favorite flavor. It changes the world only indirectly, and only ever via things associated with that humor. The trick always costs something.)

+1 Communicate with [Humor] Smell fear, see fate, seduce the rain.

+2 Command [Humor] Nourish, mutate, putrefy. Bolster bonds or rust them.

+3 Transform [Humor] Into another representation of that humor. Fear into chains, mirrors into doors.

+4 Awaken [Humor] Sow seeds that grow to monsters. Haunted masks and ghost trains.

Timing
+0 As soon as the price is paid

+1 At your calling, before the sun rises (if it’s night) or sets (if it’s day).

+2 On a general condition, like “when someone next sleeps in this bed.”

+3 On a specific condition, like “when Eshe next dreams of me.”

+4 On any number of specific conditions, whichever comes first.

Duration (if a trick heals or harms, that’s undone when it ends)

+0 One Round

+1 One Scene

+2 Until a specific condition comes to pass, like “they’re not afraid of me anymore,” or until the sun rises or sets, whichever comes first.

+3 Until a specific condition comes to pass, or for a night and a day, whichever comes first.

+4 Until a specific condition comes to pass.

Location

+0 In arm’s reach.

+1 Within your line of sight

+2 Anywhere you can be seen 

+3 Anywhere they can hear your voice 

+4 Anywhere that’s the same place as here.

Dominion

+0 You, or in your hands

+1 A volunteer from the audience, or some small single thing

+2 Three volunteers, or this room

+3 Seven volunteers, or this house

+4 Twenty-one volunteers, or this town.

Torment

+0 Cannot harm or heal anyone. Can provide dis/advantage

+1 1d4, an easy save

+2 1d6, an average save

+3 1d8, a hard save

+4 1d10, no save

But it’s not enough to pay them. You need to prepare the way. For every two Tombs spent, you must provide an Enticement that suits their preferred Humor, a living thing as an amuse-bouche, or a possession whose presence makes us better to them. More delicious. You might offer a person or an animal, an ingredient like a fresh peach or a collection of butterflies, a tool like a pen or a speculum, or even a moment in time like sunset or dawn. Each Enticement must be unique. Six peaches are the same as one peach. Living things offered as Enticements will be changed, but not in any way you can know or measure.

Once you’ve given over your Tombs and Enticements, it is customary to hush the audience. The show's about to start.

The system of humors is as accurate as phylogeny and as reliable as an arranged car accident. As magicians understand them and have recorded them, the humors of spirits are as follows:

NEON

If the world is invisible, how do I see it?

Neon is the shining humor of fate, beauty, and transgression. It is associated with music and mathematics, social technologies of reason and decision, the violation of trust, taboos, and paradigms, the freedom of unknowable things, the prisons of delusion and terror. Daybreak, telescopes, experimental nootropics, scrupulous clerks, or blind and terrified hostages are all suitable enticements. Spirits of Neon always want very badly to shock, disturb, or break whatever they’re unleashed on.

Sans-Garotte

when it takes the tombs from you, your skin loosens. your organs forget they're your friends. all the blood and phlegm in you starts to seep for the exits.

Trick: Slither Kisses (Neon 5 / Nature +2, Duration +2, Dominion +1) saw a volunteer in half. it's mostly harmless. until sunrise or sunset, or they stick themselves back together, their top and bottom halves can go their separate ways and get up to mischiefs. putting them in a long pretty box first is not necessary, but it is traditional.

SOOT

If all this stuff is coming out of me, what will be left of me?

Soot is the enduring humor of decline, defiance, and peace. It is associated with rust and rain,  paranoia and obsession, language and memory, and relentless determination beyond the limits of flesh or sanity. The evening hours, a dismal winter’s day, the corroded hulk of a dead machine, or someone who just can’t let go are all suitable enticements. Spirits of Soot always want very badly to stay here holding tightly to you, to keep you and the world exactly the same.

The One Like a Lamp

when it takes the tombs from you, your throat starts to close, and your pupils go tiny, and your heart beats so so fast. you always think "this is it." but it never is.

Trick: Please Please Please (Soot 2 / Nature +1, Dominion +1) kiss a corpse with corpse-cold lips. whisper a single question down its soft dark throat. it will whisper back an answer.

DROOL

If all of this stuff is me, where does it all come from?

Drool is the flourishing humor of inheritance, mutation, and possibility. It is associated with blood oaths and relations, social and evolutionary lineages and relicts, nested ecosystems of carnivorous interdependence, the baroque organic chaos of mutation and freedom, and the creative struggles of consumption and birth. Fossils, heirlooms, parasitic infestations, gourmets, and runaways are all suitable enticements. Spirits of Drool always want very badly to change things to be more like themselves.

That's My Girl

when it takes the tombs from you it's like someone's on the other side of the door and if they come in they'll see what you're doing and they can't see what you're doing even if you're not doing anything and they'll hate you if they see. it's like that for a very long time.

Trick: Shapes Under Skin (Drool 6 / Nature +4, Duration +1, Dominion +1) Snuggle your pet bunny tonight, and it will twist and grow into a clever, funny fellow in a rabbit mask. He will escort you, laugh with you, dance with you. When the night passes, he will always remember what you shared.

MERCURY

If this is me, what am I?

Mercury is the liminal humor of transfiguration, expurgation, and grotesquery. It is associated with masks and mirrors, chaos and darkness, catharsis and splintering, and the merciless alchemy of never-going-back. A shattered hand mirror, the act of vomiting, a mask of your own face that doesn’t look like you, and a photo of a person you can never be again with a name that isn’t yours are all suitable enticements. Spirits of Mercury scar the world where they pass, with catalyzed reactions and radioactive debris.

Two Thirty Eight Oh Three

when it takes the tombs from you it always stays to play a little while: to hold you close and spin you till you're dizzy, to paint you with blisters and thread you with your own hair, to dance with you under a cold and pretty light that makes your bones feel funny. funny how?

Trick: Little Crocodile (Mercury 12 / Nature +3 Timing +4 Duration +4 Dominion +1) Brush a standing mirror with mercury and give it a name in the dark. Now it is a door. If you sprint through it a great speed, or slip through it silently and unseen, or whisper its name under your breath, it will let you pass through it, and slip into the ultrareality and back again. If sunlight ever touches it, it shatters.

TRUTH

If the lovely dark isn’t real, what is it?

Truth is the annihilating humor of truth. It is associated with love, boxing, cliffs and valleys, the moon. Caring for a friend, a good clean fight, breathing clean air, burying yourself alive, and fresh peaches are all suitable enticements. Spirits of Truth only want you to be honest. If the lovely dark, isn’t real, what is it?

Graveyard Girl

plastiboo

Your whole body shivers all the time. The drills and the opening of the apertures. It takes something out of you that you never get back. In Rainmouth they have a parlor with flavorless mushroom crisps and fresh rainwater. Warm lights and a nurse with a hot towel. Even then your jaw got stuck and your head felt like it was shrinking to the size of a fist and you had to wear headgear or you’d choke on your tongue. Now you sneak in back entrances and let undergraduates operate on you with stolen dental tools. You’re coiled tight as a spring but if you try to run you hack a freezing cough. You’re hungry all the time but you always need to vomit. But you’ll never be lonely again.

All your Hit Dice are d4. As long as you have this template, they can’t be any larger.

There’s a spirit that lives in your extrusion. Lurking there to protect itself, maybe? You can’t kill it, or digest it, or get rid of it. Less like a familiar and more like a parasite. It has a total of 2 Tombs. Its trick can be anything you want. Whenever you take another Magician template, you can let another spirit nest in you, or add 2 Tombs to the trick of an existing one. You can call on their power by rolling a Hit Die and losing that much Health, instead of spending Tombs. They’re so deep in you that you can feel them in your brain stem. Whatever they’re taking from you, it’s leaving a scar behind.

Down the Wolf’s Throat

Caroline Murta

You’re hungry all the time but you always need to vomit but you’re hungry all the time. The surgery and the taps, your immune system fighting for your life and your head running hot and your body running cold. That shudder in your back when you stand up and you think you might fall. The feelingless feeling of the extrusion, the knowledge that there’s an emptiness inside you that is always being filled, even when you don’t know it. There’s no appetite behind this hunger. When it makes you too sick to sleep you can’t ever be rid of it. You need a little poison for the cure. You need to cultivate appetite fast, or you’ll starve.

Cultivate an appetite for two of these things. Whenever you take another Magician template, you may cultivate another.

Deception: When you save against a Trick, roll twice, and take the better. When you make someone else save, they roll twice and take the worse. Magic is mostly misdirection, really.

Cruelty: When feeding off-stage, you may leave yourself conspicuously vulnerable- your taps uncovered, your extrusion shivering gently like a tree in the October wind. This will lure a wandering spirit to investigate.

Humiliation: When you gain a Tomb from a scene of intimacy, you may ask one question of your partner, and they may ask one of you. You both must answer truthfully.

Dissolution: When you share a moment of intimacy with someone, you may have one of your parasite-familiars follow and protect them instead of you.

Desperation: Dropping to 0 HP always gives you a tomb, even if you receive no fatal wounds.

Transformation: Injuries you receive from spirits count as enticements of their humor.

Indulgence: If you would kill a spirit in a hunt, you may surrender to a moment of intimacy with it instead. It always leaves a stigma in you.

Sacrifice: If you would be killed by a spirit, you may spend all your remaining tombs to clear that many fatal wounds and/or injuries. The spirit, sated, departs.

Destruction: When someone leaves a stigma in you in a moment of intimacy, they may give you any number of fatal wounds.

In The Dark Dark House

tastysemochka

It’s humiliating, sometimes, to rely on the spirits to sustain you. They don’t love you. They don’t know you. They don’t even want you the way you understand wanting. But you’ll never be alone. Wherever you stay things settle into space around you. Dust and trash and cracks in the walls and leaks in the roof and spirits. Haunting the place, like you. Blowing out the candles and rattling the windows like the weather always used to do. In rainmouth all the buildings are sealed with rubber and plastic. You can’t keep drifting back there.

Chose two hauntings that you’ll allow to settle into you. If you move, they’ll follow. If you take the last Magician template, chose a third.

A spirit settles in the Hearth of your home, whatever that is. The shapes it makes in shadow catch in the hollow spaces of you. It is unsatisfied with the way you feel. It wants you to feel better, so you'll taste better. It will keep the house warm and the rain out and the rooms clean. Food you cook here is always cooked perfectly. When you sleep here you always get a good night’s sleep. 

A spirit winds the corridors of your home into a predatory gullet that traps intruders, coiling back in on itself, taunting them with painted-on doors and windows too high to reach, dragging them down into some dark sealed room and waiting for them to die. It digests them completely, and leaves behind only their shadows. The shadows stay. They’ll make your bed and unlock the door for you if you forget your keys. You’ll never forget what they are.

A spirit roots itself in the heart of the house. Its rooms shift and click like pieces in a puzzle box. Doors lead where you want them to lead, ceilings are as high as you need them to be, the wallpaper and the doorknobs change when you get sick of them. It’s the same house, but it’s always a new house. It's never familiar, a dollhouse for the spirit to play with.

A spirit dances in the shadow of your vehicle. When it goes it goes like a bird, slipping through air and night and the spaces between buildings and trees and everything. It isn’t yours anymore, it’s a living mischief thing that only goes because it wants you to die pleased, someday.

A spirit rips up the inside of your vehicle, if it has an inside. Now it has twice as much inside. It has tea rooms where all the tea tastes like medicine and a photography darkroom that’s always developing candid photos of your face and a lot of other strange and variably useful things but mostly it has a lot of space for you to sit and think about how small you are.

A spirit awakens your vehicle. It remembers all the time you’ve ever spent with it and it wants to spend more. It knows how you feel about it and it feels the same way. it has a master, and that master isn’t you.

Dogsbody

takashi miike

There’s so little of you now it’s easy. 

The final surgery will replace everything except the tomb and the extrusion. Those are the only parts of you that are real. The part that’s wanted and the part that wants. Everything else can be replaced with Xolotite. Black slick and crumbling, dragged up by lightning storms from the dark spaces under the earth. You’ll be skeletal and gorgeous, bare skulled and shining wet, arcs of twisting piezoelectric discharge cascading from you like notes in your theme song. 

The spirits can’t go in you anymore. You can’t be hurt or touched. Your tomb can’t be defiled. You can touch them with your hands. Caress them, strangle them, splatter them to paste, care for them in their dotage. They can’t touch you, but you can touch them. You’re free, free, free. 

You’re immune, too, to poison and sickness and curses. You’re incorruptible. When you die it will take millennia for something to evolve that can decompose you. And now tombs are something you can touch. Gorge yourself, you've waited so long! Fill yourself back up with everything that's ever come out of you! Any number of them rolls that many hit dice and heals you for that much. You can’t describe how they taste, because you can’t taste, but with your extrusion in its fullness you don’t need to. All you need to do is flourish, and you are flourishing. This is you, flourishing. You're finally whole.

Vers La Flamme

james fenner

A spirit of truth could tell you how to find this template, but only a terribly powerful one. A spirit of Mercury could help, or it could lead you astray. You will need to surrender all your tombs, even the last one, the one you were born with, the one that’s everything you are and everything you could ever be. And you’ll need to answer their question. If the lovely dark isn’t real, what is it? The whole of you that you can understand is here in the dark. Why is the tomb the part of you that’s real? Why is the extrusion the part of you that matters? If you aren’t real, what are you? If you aren’t real, why not?

The truth is fire. At last, vomit. Let it all come out of you, like a long-awaited scream. A flood of rainwater and marine snow. The truth is fire. Strike the match. The extrusion will not scream. The fire will melt the taps and they’ll run down your back in rivulets of boiling plastic. Your nerves will pop and sizzle like wires. The water in your spine will catch like gasoline and your brain will boil. Truth is fire, and when it’s all gone out of you, the fire will remain. You lose all your Magician templates except for this one.