You know all those fake rituals written by demons that open you up to possession? Well, who do you think’s spreading them around?

Anthony Roddick in His Own Words:
Wait! What? Shh! They might be listening…
Okay, I think this is secure. Keep an eye on the candle-if it starts moving, like there’s a wind, shut up!
Look, the rituals in the book are fake, see? All of them. Well, not that one, but all the others! They’re fake, okay? They just open you up to possession. They shut down your astral firewall and psychically e-mail the password to every demon in a hundred miles. Okay? That’s why your friend’s in jail. Not my fault she didn’t check her sources before casting a ritual.
Well, yeah, maybe I did write the book. But I didn’t have any choice! You’ve seen what they can do just because they want to-imagine what they’d do if you made ’em mad! There was one guy, when this whole thing started out-he showed up on my doorstep at two in the morning… They said he was an example, in case I got any ideas about not holding up my end of the bargain. Took me days to get the stains out-at least they took care of the cops…
You think you can do something about them? Look, I don’t think you realize what you’re dealing with. They’re demons. The common-or-garden variety’s bad enough-how do you kill what’s already dead? But the head honcho’s even worse. They call him Balthazaar, but I don’t think it’s his real name. He was some kind of mage when he was alive, and he’s only gotten worse now that he’s dead.
So I cut ’em a deal, right? I write their stupid fake rituals in fake grimoires, I sell ’em to used bookstores, they leave me alive.
The stereo? Well, yeah, there are a few perks to the deal…
Look, I just don’t want you to get hurt, okay? Don’t poke around in this anymore. The wards you set up should keep them out of your friend’s head from now on. I’ll be fine, alright?
Ah, fuck, look at the candle!

Personality: Craven and selfish. He wants to minimize his pain and maximize his pleasure, in that order, and he doesn’t care who he has to step on – but threaten to step on him back and he’ll collapse like an Italian government.
Appearance: Thin, short, black hair and blue eyes, faintly weaselish. He always looks vaguely greasy.
Obsession: Getting what he wants.
Fear Passion: (Unnatural) The demons he’s dealing with. He’s seen what they can do, and it scares the shit out of him.
Rage Passion: Any threat to his current arrangement. He may be scared of what he’s dealing with, but the thought of losing it – of going back to being normal, having to work for a living-makes him mad.
Noble Passion: Homeless people. He was one once, he feels for those who still are. He always carries a pack of McDonalds’ gift cards that he gives to beggars.

Wound Points: 40

BODY: 40 Junk Food Addict
General Athletics 15%, Stay Up Late 40%, Struggle 15%
SPEED: 60 Wriggly
Dodge 40%, Driving 20%, Initiative 30%, Play Video Game 40%
MIND: 60 Low Cunning
Conceal 15%, General Education 20%, Notice 15%, Occult Trivia 30%, Write Fake Grimoire 60%
SOUL: 60 Craven
Charm 15%, Lying 40%, Negotiate with Demons 60%

Negotiate with Demons: This is Anthony’s skill for raising and negotiating with demons. He can’t use this to control demons-he doesn’t know you can even do that-but he can use it to bring them forth and to resist attempts at possession.
Write Fake Grimoire: This skill is used both to come up with the contents of Anthony’s fake grimoires, and also to make them seem authentic. Anyone with a Medieval Literature or a similar, book-related skill can make an opposed skill check against Anthony’s Write Fake Grimoire skill to tell it’s a fake, with a 20% shift in favor of the opponent (make only one Write Fake Grimoire check per book, with each would-be fraud detector then having to beat that roll). A Bibliomancer can instantly tell that the books are fake, just by touching them; something feels instinctively “wrong” about them.
Rituals: Anthony knows two useful rituals, one of which is Astral Scan, and about forty variations on various rituals designed to crack open your brain and invite a demon in. All of the trap rituals are designed so that, when cast, they let Balthazaar into the victim first; he then lets in whatever subsidiary demon is in his favor for that day. Victims can resist with a matched or critical Soul roll, or with a major check on Willpower, Prayer, or a similar skill. It should be noted that Anthony does not have a skill for casting rituals, since he almost never does it; he just uses Soul –30%.

Violence 0H 1F
Unnatural 3H 2F
Helplessness 0H 0F
Isolation 0H 0F
Self 0H 0F

Inventory: An Iron Maiden T-Shirt, jeans, ballpoint, high-end cellphone, and a wallet containing a driver’s license, MBTA pass, house keys, a pack of McDonalds’ gift cards, and at least $100-he likes to have a lot of cash on hand.
Possessions: A reasonably priced appartment in a lower-class but decent neighborhood of Boston, containing a high-end computer, the latest first-person shooters, and an unreasonably good stereo system. He also has a bank account with $10,000 in it, and an irregular but sufficient income, usually around $40,000 a year.

The Deal:
Anthony has betrayed the living. He spends several hours a day writing fake medieval grimoires, filled with lots of occult-sounding nonsense and peppered with rituals. One of these rituals, usually the first one in the book, are real and actually work, the intent being to make you trust the rest in the text. This ritual should probably be something useful to the PCs current situation. Of the rest, 80% don’t do a thing, but are written vaguely enough that it’s impossible to tell if you cast it right, and the other 20% are traps that open you up to demonic possession. Anthony writes these books, complete with faux-aged vellum and leather, and then sells them cheap to used book stores specializing in the occult.
What does he get out of the deal? A wage, for one. The demons preferred method of financing is rigged card games-one demon possesses some poor sod and gets him in a poker game or similar, a second hovers intangible and looks at the other players’ cards. Once they’ve won whatever they can without arousing too much suspicion, they drop the cash off with Anthony. And there are other perks-once in a while the would-be adept is a nubile teenage female, and Balthazaar has a (male) demon in his retinue with an appropriate obsession.

Astral Scan:
Since striking his deal with the devil(s), Anthony has wanted to have an ace up his sleeve in case things go south. As such, he has done a small amount of actual occult research, most of it fruitless. However, he has found one ritual that at least lets him know if any of the demons are actually watching him. The original name is in Latin and eighteen words long; Anthony just calls it the Astral Scan.

Cost: Four minor charges. As a minor ritual, it can be cast without spending charges by rolling a major Avatar or Authentick Thaumaturgy check, or a Soul –30% check.
Ritual Action: Prepare a bath of half gasoline and half water. Then, attach floats to a lens so that it floats exactly at the boundary between the two substances. This is really hard; I would recommend a Mind check to get it to work in addition to the casting check. Put the lens in the bath at dawn. Let it sit there until dusk, then light the gasoline on fire, make your casting roll, and spend charges as appropriate. If you are successful, the fire will evaporate all of the water, leaving only the lens, miraculously intact.
Ritual Effect: Looking through the lens lets you see entities that are invisible because they exist on the astral plane, such as demons or astral parasites. In addition, if you put a candle on top of the lens and light it, it will act as a sort of magical alarm system; if any astral being is observing the area the candle is in, the candle’s flame will flicker as though in a heavy wind, though it will not go out. The lens works until the next solstice.

Balthazaar:
Who and what Balthazaar is, I leave as an exercise for the reader. If you’re feeling unimaginative, use Karl Erron, or Carthage or Rome (from Postmodern Magick, pp. 180-4 print, pp. 184-8 e-book). Whoever it is, however, should ideally be devious, cunning, have a complex and hidden agenda, and be at least a reasonably powerful mage. He should also have at least a couple of servitor demons that obey his orders in exchange for body time.

Using Anthony Roddick:
There are a couple of ways to introduce Anthony Roddick, most of them involving PCs or their friends finding one of his fake grimoires. Maybe one of their friends cast one of the trapped rituals and ended up doing something he or she now really regrets. Maybe the PCs find themselves needing a ritual in one of the books, and then try experimenting with the others. If they have any morals at all, they should realize that Anthony and co. are a public menace, and need dealing with.
Anthony won’t volunteer information about the demons, the deal, or any fake books he’s written, but even the mildest threat will get him to start talking. Ideally, the PCs’ should initially think that Anthony is a victim as well. The poor guy, he’s obviously scared out of his wits, he’s being pushed around by the big bad demons-sure what he’s doing is wrong, but what choice did he have? Anthony certainly won’t try to cure any PCs of this delusion, and will play the part of the pathetic victim to the hilt. He’ll only turn on the PCs when he’s good and ready-perhaps about the time they notice the expensive stereo system, or the high-end computer, or the possessed 17-year-old girl showing up at his front door.
So how do you win? Well, you could always just shoot Anthony, but that doesn’t really solve the problem, since Balthazaar can always find another patsy. The best thing to do would be to bind, banish, or destroy Balthazaar-the trapping rituals are keyed to him and won’t work for any other demons, and his servitors don’t have the brains or the guts to try to replicate the scheme-if they did, they already would have done so, instead of hanging around Balthazaar. With Balthazaar gone, Anthony’s more of a danger to himself than anyone else-with the focus of his life, the Deal, gone, he’s liable to commit suicide.