Buy some things to bring them to the mountain,
The mountain which does not exist.
Fulfill your destiny!
Do that thing to that guy!
Play that trick on him.
Peepee in your Coke
Old Chinese joke
Perfect heir forever

Blood of the Ancient Oak

Cost: 7 significant charges

The Rite: The ritual is exceedingly involved. The pre-rite involves the ritualist-to-be to marry his wife (or husband, if female) as such: they must be wed under the shadow of a tree near the mountains, the largest and oldest tree near the edge of land where forest bleeds to mountain. The marriage must be in the evening, as the sun sets and the tree casts a shadow; the wedding may only be attended by the groom, bride, priest (or whatever), three of the groom’s friends, three of the bride’s friends, and three enemies they share.

After the wedding, the ritual may be attempted any time the caster can pay for the ritual. On a full moon on a clear night, under the same tree they were wed, the husband and wife meet under its shadow, along with three of the husband’s friends, three of the wife’s friends, and three unnatural beings. These can be clockworks, Nonpeople, or demons. They can be bound or trapped if need be. The three friends of the husband break off three branches of the tree, and form a cross with two horizontal parts on the wife’s back. The three friends of the wife must burn candles of bee’s wax mixed with the crushed-up queens from the hives the wax came from, and drip the wax onto the cross at its intersections and tips. The husband then mounts the wife “doggy style” (for lack of a better term) as the nine attendants utter words in a pre-Latin language for the duration of the copulation (always at least five minutes; make a Body check if you absolutely need to).

At the end of the ritual, make the ritual roll. On a failure, well, there’s always the next time you can spend 7 charges–and get more candles and monsters. If you succeed, the wax burns into the wife’s back, and the branch-cross melds into her flesh for as long as she is pregnant (oh–she is, by the way). You can tell if a pregnant woman is afflicted by this spell by how stiff her back is…

The child gestates for nine months–exactly–and the birth goes flawlessly, save for the wife, who suffers horrible, crippling, potentially fatal damage during the labor (roll percentiles; she takes the result as gunshot damage). The child will always be a son, perfectly healthy and free of deformities, and resemble an idealized version of the father (should he be raised healthily). If the wife survives, she bears a noticable cross-shaped scar on her back. No matter the wife’s fate, it’s also on the back of the child.

The child always has a Soul stat of at least 60, and is guaranteed to have an interesting, successful life, though it is not guaranteed to be a positive sort of “successful.” It is enough for the ritual to be as relatively popular as it is. However, by the time he reaches adulthood (or, with GM permission, player-character-hood…) he will be … unstable, and have a failed notch on Self or Unnatural, representing the strange things his mind has meditated on (or the other cruel magicks his father/mother may have worked).

It is believed that the Merrovingians first discovered this ritual, and made extensive use of it–hense the significance of their red cross-shaped birthmarks. It’s further compounded by the tradition among families who know the rite to use it whenver their son or daughter gets hitched. The generational aspect of the rite has garnered it, in recent years, the nickname “Perfect Heir Forever.” Blame whatever Videomancer saw that show…