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Rick Neal…continued from the previous reply…
After several months, most of which is spent hiding from the FBI, you manage to tattoo all ten children. Satan possesses the last one just as you finish, and hauls the soul of the guy’s wife out of the netherworld and crams it into a mason jar for you.
As you pocket the jar for your trip to the ICU of the local hospital to find a pretty, brain-dead woman for the wife to possess, Satan warns you that now the Cruel Ones have marked you, and will be waiting to shred your soul, unless you give the wife back right now.
You say, “screw that,” and make a mental note to look into avoiding that possibility in the future. Finally, you stuff the dead woman’s being into the body of someone else’s wife, or mother, or sister, and she wakes up and embraces her husband. Now, all you have to do is collect the payment.
He’s not so sure that he wants to make good on his debt right now. You consider threatening him with the police, but decide to keep this in the family: you promise to tell his wife about the dead baby, the kidnapped and mutilated kids, the things he did with prostitutes while on the run, everything. He turns white, pays up, and you vanish in a flash of light.
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At every stage of the game, you have the opportunity to back away, lay down your cards, and bow out. You lose the Godwalker position, most likely, but you get to keep your soul.
UA is a game about choices, and consequences, and the price of power. For an ascension, especially a conscious one, you have to make sure that the choices get harder and harder, until the Godwalker proves that there is nothing more important than completing this test. Remember, all the characters in the game are at least a little broken to begin with: the necessity of having an obsession proves that. An ascension test should take the garden variety obsession of the rules, and turn it into something profound, epic, and disturbing.
At least, that’s the way I see it.
Rick NealHere’s the way I see it.
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Let’s say you’re looking at ascending as the Merchant. You’re a jumped-up Godwalker, ready to challenge the big boy. You’re primed for stepping up to the big time, and are looking for that little something to push you over the edge, into critical ascension mass.
The Statosphere provides.
Along comes this big deal. Actually, big just isn’t the word for it. Mythic. Legendary. A man comes to you and wants you to cut the deal that buys his dead wife out of hell. How’s that?
So you step up to the plate, ready to take your swing. First of all, you have to spend some time tracking down someone to deal with. So that means research. Squeezing contacts, trading information, calling in favours, and promising more in the future. All the while, you’re keeping track of the cost, so that you don’t wind up hosing yourself by coming out of the deal with a loss. Your other clients drift away, because you’re devoting everything to this one, big score. Eventually, even your friends abandon you, your wife leaves you, and your cat dies because you kept forgetting to feed him. Anyway, you finally track down a ritual that lets you call up Satan himself and wrangle.
There’s a catch, though. The ritual in question requires the sacrifice of an unbaptised child. Still, this one is for all the marbles, so you screw your courage to the sticking point, and pay some low-life to raid a hospital nursery. You run through the ritual in a church that you have to desecrate yourself, and get the big kahuna of evil poking around inside your head, wondering who’s silly enough to call him up.
Be that as it may, you batter Old Nick down with the force of your sovereign will, and begin to cut a deal. In return for the dead wife, he wants access to pure, innocent bodies to possess. He wants you to provide him with ten young boys and girls, each of which you will have to tattoo with a symbol he teaches you, so that he will be able to inhabit their bodies at any time.
You say fine, and take this back to the client. You don’t want the hassle of finding and tattooing the kids yourself, so you just tell him the price, show him the pattern, and ask for payment. Unfortunately, the poor shlub cracks, and begs you to help him with the kids. You sigh, tack on some extra considerations to his bill (maybe the services of his wife, if she’s cute), and all of a sudden, you’re part of a serial kidnapping and mutilation team.
…to be continued in the next reply…