A weird way of giving someone a serious headache.
Power : Significant
Cost : 3 Sig charges
Effect : In a nutshell, the target of this spell gets a mindfull of spiders. This is distracting to say the least : having hundreds of tiny arachnids interrupting your thoughts is good for a rank 5 Unnatural check and makes it very hard to concentrate. Hitting people with 2x4s is probably ok, but any skill where concentration or deep thought is required is at a Gm assigned penalty, usually about -20% but could be worse depending on circumstances. Trying to perform open heart surgery, for example, would probably be at -30 or an automatic failure.
It doesn’t stop there, unfortunately. After a while the spiders start to become a bit more litteral and periodicaly crawl out of the victim’s mind through whatever orifices he happens to have in his head (ears, nostrils, mouth, under the eyelids, that cut he got shaving this morning, etc…). Seeing this happen to someone is a rank 2 Unnatural check, rank 8 if you’re the one it’s happening to. The skill penalties stay in effect as well.
The ritual’s effect lasts until someone either smashes the clay head (see below) or dispells it using Spellbreaker or some other counterspell of that sort.
Ritual Action : Take a piece of your future victim’s body (blood, hair, toenails, you know the usual voodoo shtick) and mix it into few pounds of red clay. Sculpt it into a life sized facsimile of his head ; it doesn’t have to be perfect but it does need to look like the person.
Slice off the top of the head and empty out a hole inside roughly as big as the brain cavity would be. Fill the cavity with 333 live spiders you caught yourself, seal it up and carve the words “shielm roai deostrum tol” on the effigy’s forehead. After that spend the charges and stick the head in an oven to cook until it hardens.
What you hear …
No one’s quite sure where this ritual actually came from, but the general concensus is that some duke might have brought it back with him from some Otherspace.
The vast majority of people who have come across The Spider Curse (which is to say not all that many) think it’s a neat way of messing up your enemies, but some find it… I don’t know, weird for some reason.
It might have something to do with those words you have to carve onto the head.
Shielm roai deostrum tol.
They mean “Send these crawling things to this person’s dream/mind”.
In haltolmish.
Wicked.
I’m going to use this in the campaign I’m running, but just with one little alteration: Won’t be 333 spiders in the ritual instructions, but rather some other powerful number like 7, 13, 22, etc.
Mainly because I like dropping the good ol’ 333 on my players’ heads only on rare occasion, but in a context where I can really weird them out with it when they stumble upon it. Like the team’s Numerologist taking a while to realize that all victims they’ve been doing forensics on had 333 hairpins or 333 toothpicks or 333 butane lighters or 333 polaroid photos in their houses.
That is, if the corpses and their pigstys aren’t too distracting to notice that.
Yeah, I only put the 333 in there because I coundn’t think of another halfway decent number on the spot.