The journal of an obscure sorcerer.

THE BOOK OF BAD EYES

Balthazar Balzac was a semi-notorious adept in the eighties. His magick was uniquely his as his moniker told, the Night Walker. Never actually feared, his reputation was built on mystery.

Although he has disappeared, his single creation, called the Book of Bad Eyes, floats around. Currently there are two copies, the hand-written original and a near complete photocopy version.

As a grimoire it is pretty plain. It is two slim hard covered notebooks taped together and covered with brown paper and plastic. Nostradamus Jones, who knew Balzac, and enjoyed puns, called it the Book of Bad Eyes. Jones wrote the title with a felt-tipped marker.

The entire text is hand-written with a painfully awkward script like a child’s cursive ABCs. The strange thing is the actual script is or isn’t there depending on the lighting. In bright lighting, the script is non-existent, but it peeks into visibility in gloomy lighting.

In the fumbling longhand, the book is part-journal and part occult scrap book. The first part is consists of three rituals written down and a pasted, typed eyewitness account of a demon possession.

The remainder of the book is a series of abbreviated, rambling, jumping instructions on eating Night Worms.

About two-thirds of the way through, the Night Worms are from then called tenebrae.

It gives useless summoning meditations, notes on how to avoid being badly bitten but wearing thick worker’s gloves, and an effective magic circle of arranging lamps, four and four, on octagonal points.

The remainder of the Book of Bad Eyes rambles on about Balzac’s own superhuman abilities as a Night Walker as well as a fabricated list of commandments, which make no sense, and an imaginative cosmology and metaphysics about the tenebrae.

In the hands of a potential adept, it is a primer for a minor school of magick. The only sure method of learning the basics of this school is to find some tenebrae and eat them. From there, the mageekian adepts can teach themselves.

A HISTORY OF BALTHAZAR BALZAC
During the Obscure Firefight of Arizona in 1984, Nostradamus Jones and Balthazar Balzac where holed up with three competing cabals hunting them down. During this night Balzac deferred Jones sexual advances, but told him his life story. In the morning, they both went their separate ways. Jones popped up again, but nothing certain ever came of Balzac’s whereabouts.
Woodrow Collison, was the sole child of a troubled marriage. The constant uncertainty of his parents made Woodrow a chronically insecure boy who developed a fear of the dark during the bitter divorce.

Fear of the dark is a little euphemistic for the pants-wetting terror whenever Woodrow saw shadows.

The stigmatic psychology turned out the lights on any normal social development, Woodrow had nobody to hold his hand during an occasional power blackout.

Woodrow knew that there were monsters in the darkness and they could hear him breathing, they could smell his sweat.

In New York in his early twenties, Woodrow was living in a tiny single apartment, spare and whitewashed. He was dragging by on a small disability check that barely covered utilities and his ad hoc lighting fixtures when the infamous Summer of Sam 1977 happened.

After the third night, the remaining power in his batteries began to wane. In the flickering, dimming light, the darkness started scuttling, one at a time.

Sitting in a corner, with all his remaining lamps making a small pool of light, Woodrow’s mind slowly froze in icy terror until it seized up when his the last of his batteries died for the last time. The darkness then crept in.

Whatever time that was, Woodrow’s mind simply imploded. He went into the frenzy of a dying man. He reached out and smashed randomly as they swarmed. When grabbed a chitinous thing and bit it.

And swallowed.

This battle raged for hours until dawn pushed the tide back leaving the panting, exhausted shell of Woodrow Courson.

The empty man sat where he had tumbled, his mind in neutral, waiting for night to fall, in his soiled clothes.

When it was dark enough, his mind clicked on and he dove in the shadows punching, stomping, and biting. This time he was the aggressor. He pulled many of the wriggling things in each fist and tore off chunks with his teeth as they thrashed and bit.

The second night was easier than the first. Now the night worms seemed to be confused or unsure.

On the third night he hunted them, and pulled them nipping and flexing and he chewed and sucked them dry.
On the fourth night the majority had disappeared but there where a few stragglers. He ate these with a slow relish as one would with a cooked lobster.

When the fifth day dawned, he felt lethargic and sluggish. Everywhere he looked the light seemed to glare. In the night, he felt awake and agile, stronger. His blood had turned to ink.

After the authorities caught the Son of Sam, Woodrow changed his name to Balthazar Balzac by deed poll. It was Balzac, who went out to refill the void left by Woodrow Collison.

In the late seventies Balzac left the dead New York scene of defunct magicians, disco, and cocaine, and earned a reputation of an up-and-coming duke. He drifted with a few cabals until the San Francisco scene when to pot in 1980. During this time he started writing his book, in presumably, is his own blood.

He dropped off the radar only to appear during the infamous Obscure Firefight of Arizona: hunted by three hostile cabals. Balzac had got into a fight over a paid-for Death Mask ritual, and made the turncoat’s insides to be consumed from the inside out.

It was here he met the adept Nostradamus Jones, also hunted by the same three cabals, by synchronous accident and they fought it out until retreating to squat in a dingy motel room. Jones had some unnamed vendetta and apparently messed with the three cabal’s flimsy truce with demagoguery.

Nostradamus Jones kept the book when he left Arizona eastwards towards the Mississippi. His last knowledge was that Balzac was heading north.

NOCTOPEDIA

Night Walking is a minor school of magick. Its taboo is slight but its effects hinge on existing skills rather than actual spells and it is relatively safe.

The Obsession covers all tagged skills. The Night Walker only gets to flip-flop rolls if it the effect released is magickal. Mundane uses of the skills are not flip-flopped. Gathering charges is not intrinsically magickal so the charge gathering Struggle-type roll is not flip-flopped unless magick is directly used.

Generate a charge: Eat a live tenebrae. Roll your Struggle skill and gain as many charges as the sum of the struggle roll. The tenebrae will not be compliant. It will fight back.

Taboo: Just by the fact that the sun rises, causes the noctopede to lose one charge every day. Exposure to direct sunlight directly violates taboo and drains all charges.

Default Attribute Modifications
These skill-shifts are permanent and require no charges to use. They do affect the dice rolls.

Direct sunlight or light bright enough to read without problems causes the Noctopede to suffer a -10 shift to all his skill rolls.

Gloomy or indirect lighting causes no change.

Complete or near darkness causes a +10 shift to all his skill rolls. The noctopede cannot naturally see in such conditions without sorcery.

Random Magick Domain: anything with manipulating darkness and tenebrae or assuming their attributes through skills. As with all other random magick spells, the costs are higher and a required Significant charge is covered by rolling a good matched pair.

Formulae Skill Effects
Each use of a magickally tagged skill requires the expenditure of a minor charge. If the skill roll fails the charge isn’t lost unless it is a bad match. The magick lasts for that round and the one following. The noctopede can gain cherries if his magicked skill rolls matched pairs.

Summon Tenebrae
By rolling a successful Charm-type skill, the night walker can draw forth tenebrae into his immediate vicinity if there’s sufficient darkness. The tenebrae are always wild. The amount of tenebrae is roughly equal to the roll of the Summon Tenebrae dice roll.

A noctopede can summon the tenebrae without a charge. This charge-debt is removed with every charge gained through the tenebrae.

One of the Swarm
By rolling a Lie-type skill, the night walker tricks the other tenebrae into sensing he is one of them. This just makes the tenebrae think he is one of them. It does not make them friendly.

See in Darkness
By rolling a Notice-type check, the noctopede can see in complete darkness. This effect lasts until the noctopede is exposed to bright light. It has to be near or at the noctopede in order to break the spell.

Walk in Darkness
By rolling his General Athletics skill, the noctopede can move doubly fast or effectively in areas of shadow, or can literally skip from one deep shadow to the next at his usual movement.

Depending on what system is being used, the roll is doubled, whether the roll itself or the sum of the roll. If the lowest number is required, simply halve the result. If the higher result is required, double it. Since the result is successful, the boosted number can exceed the noctopede’s skill rating, but it is capped by the Stat though.

Flitter
Similar to Walk in Darkness except it powers up the Dodge skill.

Fast Relief
By rolling a General Athletics check, the noctopede can negate hunger, thirst, and sleep for one day. The need is gone, the requirements supplied by the eating of the wet tenebrae flesh.
There are other skill-spells but these have to be tried by the noctopede as any formula spells.

Starting charges: a beginning noctopede starts with eight charges.