They always said second-hand smoke was deadly…

Exactly who created the Cancer Sticks is unknown. One rumor points to an anti-smoking zealot; another suggests it was actually a clued-in tobacco exec; a third claims that they come about when a heavy smoker is killed by magic.

They’re all wrong. In the late 80’s, a young man in what would one day become Bosnia rediscovered a lost field of study: Herbamancy. Along with the magik of growing and working with plants, he also revealed a ritual that would create a very dangerous, very close-range weapon.

He’d seen that James Bond movie where the cigarettes fire mini-rockets, and thought it was a cool idea. So he followed the ritual to the letter. He was left with an even two dozen ordinary-looking cigarettes and a tumor growing within his lungs. He passed on a year later. If anyone bothers to find and unearth his coffin, they’ll just find one big cancerous mass that even death didn’t stop until it had engulphed his entire body.

Presently, only 14 of the Cancer Sticks survive, the rest having been used. They have a mystique about them that draws Entropomancers, and anyone with an urge to kill someone they can get close to.

To use a cancer stick, simply light it up like any normal cigarette and take a couple puffs. Then give someone a face-full of smoke. If your target doesn’t have cancer, well, they do now. An arcane cancer that kills within a year, is inopperable, untreatable, and will consume the body even after death. After that first facefull of smoke, the Cancer Stick loses its power, so make sure you don’t waste it. There might be a magical cure for the cancer… but let’s face it, if there was a magical cure for cancer, someone would have tried to cash in by now. Or maybe the Sleepers got to them first.

The sticks are bound together by the ritual that made them. Any attempt to take one of them more than a few feet from the rest of the pack causes it to vanish and reappear with its fellows. Anyone claiming to have a single Stick is either lying, or has used an awful lot of them.

Oh, there’s a 50-50 chance that whoever smokes the Stick will get the same cancer. But what’s life without a few risks?