Know what those lines of weird script written on the sidewalk means? Maybe it’s best you didn’t.
Cost: 3 significant charges (possibly more)
Ritual Action: By using the hidden names of the Urban Shamanic totems, and inscribing them with orange paint, the caster can force the community targetted to enact whatever atrocity, blessing, or ritualized action desired, within limits.
After the final words are inscribed, the first portion is finished; the second step is to place
Orange Pylons in the area, redirecting surface traffic into the ley lines of the region, drawing a power core into reality, giving the ritual even further ‘push’. Finally, the caster opens a manhole nearest their domicile, sanctum, or place of personal importance.
Then the REAL fun starts.
Effect:
Upon the manhole’s unsealing, it is then the foci of the effect, permitting the caster to draw charges for each person in the region acting on their Passions (only Fear and Rage will function); anyone attempting to act outside their Passions finds a -5% shift per attempt made; this is cumulative, and when it exceeds their given stat, they find themselves drawn to the loci of the ritual, and force themselves into the manhole. In this fashion, one can slowly dwindle a block to a handful of paranoid, insane, or shut-in dwellers. This ritual is known in Urbanomancy circles as ‘Block Party’, or ‘Tenement Blues’. One successful roll against their given stat, however, and they are immune to it’s effect for a full calendar year, or until they change dwellings inside the city limits, but outside the caster’s range (normally one or two city blocks across at it’s widest point).
Good clean fun, if you like to eliminate entire small-ish communities; this one dates back to the era when witchburning was actually the right thing to do. Your own thoughts may vary, but when someone can pop your head open like a grape by cutting themselves, you do have to admit that’s something you’re probably fairly interested in seeing them catch fire.
This ritual would be a great modernised take on summoning Unnaturals. The manhole is the magic circle through which the “demons” enter from the (literal) Underworld.
In your spell, what happens to the people who enter the sewer system through the manhole. Are they lost in Otherspace, eaten, come back years later?
Cheers,
Chris.
Re: Manhole people.
Dunno, really.
One idea that a roommate came up with:
“Maybe they crawl out somewhere else, but don’t look the same, think the same, and suddenly work for the city…”
They have all their souls sucked out and end up as nonentities.
Cheers,
Chris.
I like the Otherspace idea: a maze-like system of modern and ancient sewers, catacombs, caves, dirt tunnels, etc in which the people who enter are trapped until a new manhole is opened, somewhere. (lots of madness checks inherent in that situation, especially as people get hungry and start looking at each-other as food…) Perhaps only the first person who gets to the new opening can escape, assuming it can be found before it’s closed from the other side… could be some interesting stuff in there, along with all the bones, etc
For further fun, perhaps time is a bit asynchronous in the Otherworld, and there are people (or former people) who have settled in there. Something like Midian from Nightbreed/Cabal, or London Below from Neverwhere. At which point perhaps the ritual’s original, primary purpose, was to provide access to the Otherspace, or maybe it was intended as a way to get rid of Unaturals, so when it’s opened they try to come back out again. And either way the emotional impact on the neighborhood is only a side effect, one that modern casters aren’t aware of, or don’t care about…
So thats what happened to Roanoke.