I hope you never need this last-ditch ritual.
This is a ritual for the desperate, the people who have nothing else to lose because they are severely f**ked over. The benefits are great if you’re willing to take the loss, but the risk is great too.
Cost: 8 significant charges
You’ll need:
1 human body (dead within the last week, preferably fresh) that is the same gender as the caster
1 willing cook
1 seasoning for everything, preferably one reflective of the dead person’s life.
5 items of immense or great value to the dead person
1 outfit of the deceased
1 kitchen to cook in, preferably huge
Ingredients to cook the items listed below
A seating area the caster must occupy for the entirety of the ritual
Set up:
The seating area must be set up with the five items surrounding the place where the caster will sit. There must be an agreed place for the cook to present his creations to the castor.
If one of the valued items is something like a house or a car, it can serve as the seating area (giving a +5% shift to the soul roll), with the other four items surrounding the caster inside it. Any other situations are up to the GM approval, but all five items HAVE to be around the caster. For example, if one item is a car and the other a house, the car can’t be parked in the garaged while the ritual is performed or the ritual fails. However, the caster can sit on the porch of the house with the car parked across from him while the ritual is being performed.
The caster must be wearing the outfit of the dead person, and has to wear it in the fashion that the deceased would. If the deceased did not sag his jeans, you can’t sag them now or the ritual fails. Not only is this necessary for the ritual, but it will also prevent self-checks if the ritual succeeds.
Process:
In order, the willing cook will prepare, and then serve the castor these dishes made from the body of the deceased:
Fried fingers and toes
Candied tongue and eyes
A wine glass worth of blood
A stew of the brain
Heart dumplings
All of each body part mentioned must be used, no skimping on ingredients. The cook can cook these starting from the sunrise before the caster starts the ritual (this gives the cook an extra 24 hours if he needs them), but the food must be cooked in that order. There can only be 1 cook for all the foods, no help. The chosen seasoning must be in every dish. The dishes can have other ingredients and seasonings, but the chose season must be abundant enough to be tasted in every dish by the caster. We’re talking about the traditional idea of a seasoning- a dried plant that adds flavor and doesn’t have to be refined like sugar canes. No maple syrup, hot sauce or salad dressings passing as seasonings. The GM can decide if a season is in question. If the season is not present in everything, or can’t be tasted in every dish by the caster, the ritual fails. No going back and putting seasoning on once the dish has been presented to the caster. Also, the cook can’t taste any of the food to see if it’s good (why would he want to?) or the ritual fails.
When the castor is ready, he will sit in the arranged place with the five items on a sunrise where there is no rainfall or snow and begin to eat the food in the previously mentioned order. The cook will present the dish in the designated serving area before the caster begins to consume the dish. The caster has to consume every crumb and morsel in front of him. Lick the plate or bowl clean if necessary. If anything is spilled or goes to waste, the ritual fails. After finishing every course the caster must say “I am (dead person’s full name)” before the next dish is presented or it all goes to waste. As said before the eating process must start at sunrise, and must be finished by the next sunrise, both of which must experience no rainfall on snow.
The caster, when saying reciting the deceased’s name after the last course, will then immediately fall into a coma, and will wake up at high noon.
Effect:
The caster has to make a soul check when he wakes up. If he succeeds, he becomes the person he just ate. This is not a physical change. Instead, the caster, going back as many years as the sum of the die roll, now owns all records and personal memories of the eaten person. Photos of the deceases person are now photos of the caster, and change to reflect that. People remember the caster as the deceased person.
Example: Tom Smith succeeds at the ritual with a 45 under 55, eating Perry Winston. The cook for the ritual is Perry’s brother, Charles. When Tom wakes up from his coma, Charles sees him wake and says “Hey Perry, glad to see you up you lazy bum. Can you help me clean this kitchen before Mom comes over?”
On top of that, the caster remembers being the deceased for the same amount of years. He has all the memories of the person, knows where all his stuff is, his secrets, what his job is… everything down to his favorite pair of underwear.
Example: Back to Tom, who is now Perry. He gets up and smiles at Charles, and says “Sure, just don’t tell Mom about the toaster incident last week. I don’t need her telling me I shouldn’t be in the kitchen again.”
Charles laughs and says “Sure thing, little brother.”
This allows the caster to be the deceased instantly. He can live the life of the deceased as if the deceased was not dead to begin with. Memories surrounding the last week involving the deceased’s absence from the living realm are modified to make sense. “Of course Perry was hiding from his wife— they had a big spat!” and things of that nature.
However, going back past the years of the die roll becomes tricky. Anyone who associates with the caster-now-deceased will no find if difficult to remember that far. Photos from before those years still have the original person, not the caster. Self-checks will be in order in that situation.
The caster can learn about his past via the standard looking through old journals, yearbooks, family stories, even newspaper clippings about his life.
The caster will not remember anything of his old life until he gets 5 fails self-checks. Whatever insanity takes place at that point will then revolve around the caster’s conflicting facts in his head. People who know of who the caster was before, now feel like he’s dropped out of thin air with no explanation.
No one will remember that the ritual took place unless there is a magic fluke going around. For example, if a person eats a McDonald’s burger charged by the Mak Attaks right when the ritual takes affect, they could be the only one that knows that something weird took place, and the caster is actually not who he thinks he is.
Now, if the caster fails… well then life is a living hell. The caster will have memories for the sum of the die roll, and will have the same effects if she had succeeded. She will forget her old life and remember the new one. However, she is the only one who changes. No photos or records that need to change will change in her favor. No other person’s memories will see her instead of the deceased. Everyone else will see her as the person she’s always been, and not who she says she is now. People might be intrigued by how much she knows about the person she says she is, but they will still know that she is not that person, unless of course they never know who the hell the deceased person was before. Self-checks are in order from day one at this point.
—–
Enjoy your feast.
Written by Frisco
Just want people to know that I posted this up for feedback. Feel free to kick at my ego. 😛
I like, particularly as a back story for a PC or NPC.
Thanks! I definitely made this one up something to be put in the game to be a character’s back story. Right now I am trying to run a street level campaign that has a situation where this happened, and the PCs are suppose to investigate. I want my PCs to figure this stuff out. They just discovered the “cool” stuff about the occult, but it’s time for them to get scared. 😀
So, just to be clear, the caster has memories from his original life as well as those gained from the deceased?
Does the cook know that the caster is still the caster?
This would perma-taboo, explode or otherwise bizarrely transform a personamancer, no doubt. Or at least really make their charging up very odd (or very easy, as they might now easily pretend to be themselves to people who once knew them).
No, the caster forgets his former life and replaces them with the memories he obtains from the deceased person. He’ll only remember if he has five failed self checks. The mix of memories will be the center of his insanity.
The cook does not know that the caster is still the caster. The cook does not know that the ritual happened. The memories of cooking someone’s dead body would be replaced with the memory of doing something else that somehow is logical. The ritual is suppose to convince the world that the caster is actually the deceased and “fix” the universe to accommodate that.
And the personamancer would not even remember being the personamancer. No caster that successfully completes this ritual will remember the person they were before. The only time I can think of anyone really needing the ritual is if they need witness protection program services in a short amount of time, and have no problem forgetting who they are to become another person.
Next time I will get F.A.R. to proof-read my posts so that they’re clearer, Neville. 😛
If a personamancer eats a personamancer…
Weird charges appearing at random, mad confusion, inevitable insanity!
Hey sounds good, but I would make two changes. First, the caster must also cook the body as part of the ritual. Second, if he fails his check, he looses his memory and everyone things he dropped out off the face of the earth, but he gets no memories and no one thinks he is the dead person. So effectively the caster is now a total blank slate with no past, no friends or enemies and no memory.
Thanks vagina for the input.
Having the caster cook is definitely something I’m going to explore, but I still like the idea of someone having to serve him the food in order at his arranged seating area… hmm, something to ponder.
To be honest, this ritual seems more like a trap than anything else. For every intent and purpose, the caster is dead. In reality, it would seem more likely that its something the caster was tricked into by someone with a recently deceased loved one they can’t bear to give up. If there was a fade-out or dual memories or end-trigger or even Manchurian Candidate style subconscious goals, it might make more sense. I like that it would be touted as a last-ditch escape, but is in reality something else. Particularly if it reeeeeeally opened you up to possession by the deceased person’s demon (if they have one).
Be tricked into doing a ritual? Why what person would ever do that?
😉 For the campaign I am using this ritual, something along those lines happened. I wouldn’t say the caster was entirely tricked, but i don’t think he was smart enough to understand the full scale of succeeding this ritual.
This is essentially a suicide mission. As I said, the caster has to be pretty desperate to try this. Or not know what’s happening, like you just stated.
That is a worthwhile point. If you can trick someone into eating half a corpse in a single night (and somehow get them to say “I am so-and-so” after each course, which would raise my suspicions), you’ve got them. But, who’s not going to recognize fried toes?
And what does happen if the ritual fails? I talked about it with Frisco a while back, but there’s nothing mentioned in the article. There are a thousand ways it could go wrong – I think my favorite from that conversation was that the caster (and cook?) gets his memories replaced, but nobody else does. Wiping them clean with no replacement would be fun, too – maybe that’s a matched failure?
– FAR out
A bit of a spolier, but the movie is from the late 80’s so shame on you if you haven’t seen it yet.
Angel Heart.
A modern day black magician tries to get out on his contract with the devil by killing another person and becoming them…by eating his heart? Can’t remember.
F.A.R.–that ending is mentioned in the last paragraph, the fail part, if you read 😛
Making them wiped clean with no replacement could be a great match failure.
See, it’s not tricking them into doing the ritual and not knowing it’s a person, it’s tempting them into performing the ritual which they think does something else entirely (allows them to take the powers/memories/identity-as-a-disguise-not-as-a-new-self of the deceased, to talk to the spirit of the dead, to assume their symbolic place in an organization such as becoming the new leader of a cult or the president, supercharge their Mystic Hermaphrodite avatar level, or to give birth to a reincarnated version of the dead person… which is sort of true). Let them know the ritual actions, see, but misleading them on the result. That’s the thing about symbolic imagery in ritual: symbols are slippery and many faced.
Or just make them do it at gunpoint. when you’ve lost the man you love (though you know you could never really be together) who needs to be alive for the revolution to succeed… you’ll do a lot of things
And to clarify: Memories are switched and records altered, but traits and skills are unchanged? Because that could be interesting….
“That’s odd, I remember being picked on last week, but I am frikkin’ BUILT!”
“When did I learn the mystic history of sanskrit?”
“I’ve been an architect for twenty years, why can’t I figure out this CAD program…?”
That’s something I hadn’t thought of Neville.
I would say that when the caster performs the ritual he will get the mind and soul skills from the deceased, but not the body and speed. History from as far back as the added die roll would slightly alter to accomodate those changes, but not by a lot. It’ll explain just enough.
The level of alteration, in addition to how far back in years the changes go, could also be determined by the success of the die roll (or successes split somehow). So a better success means more skills transformed (with skills that are similar, like tennis and athletics and skills that are the same but at different levels, being easier to shift, though having the universe be lazy and just leave the skill level unchanged when the skill is the same could be interesting). There ought to be enough room for the hiding in another man’s life to be a bit rickety even on a good ritual success.
Neville Yale Cronten: “And to clarify: Memories are switched and records altered, but traits and skills are unchanged? Because that could be interesting….”
And if a guy does the ritual with a girl’s body:
“Hmmm, that’s strange, was my chin always this hairy? And why is my chest so flat, I’m wearing my best push-up bra? And what is this in my pa–OH MY ****ING GOD, I HAVE A ****!!”
BAM! Intensity 7 Self check! ;P
Maybe in the case of a critical success, you could end up becoming someone else without losing yourself. Convince the universe that for the last decade you’ve been living a double life, living with two families and always taking care that they never meet. The records could change so that a diligent enough investigator would find a very well-executed case of identity theft … the real Perry Winston must have died years ago, but this Smith guy forged the records, got himself a passport and bank accounts in the dead guy’s name. He’s been living 2 lives for 9 years now, making sure the friends and family never meet, carefully managing his time, ready for the day he’d need a new identity to cover his tracks.
Alternative random thought: What if he keeps all his own skills (as well as acquiring those of the deceased), but doesn’t remember having them. Could lead to self checks when a new skill is discovered.
If the caster is an adept, maybe he still has magick, but without the obsession he’s bound to taboo himself sooner or later. But if he panics and throws up a spell by accident … he can recall who he really is (a messed-up freak who now has 2 obsessions).
I can imagine an avatar using this as a last resort, gambling that something would happen sooner or later to make his power pop up, make himself known and return his old memories, before the avatar skill he’s not even aware of dwindles away completely.