This is a ritual to turn the user invisible. Unfortunately, you can’t turn it off, and you’re going to spend the rest of your life alone even in crowds.
Invisibility: Cost – 4 Significant Charges
This ritual may be found amongst a stack of papers in the deserted home of an adept, or in the middle of a self-styled thaumaturge’s ‘spellbook’ (full of rituals that plain don’t work).
There’s a certain amount of preamble, which imply that the writer hasn’t used the ritual yet. However, he or she expounds on how advantageous it would be to be undetectable at times. The writer talks about avoiding enemies, but you just know someone wants to use this thing to hide in the shower room, right?
To carry this out, you have to commit yourself to living on the streets. The homeless and destitute are the ultimate invisibles of our world. Even if people can see them, most people will just plain pretend they can’t.
You have to do this for 333 days. You’re not allowed to speak to anyone, except to utter the third verse of the third chapter of the third book of the Bible*. You must utter the third verse at least once each day. You’re allowed to carry signs saying whatever you like, begging for money. You just can’t communicate with people in a free fashion. You also need to avoid being seen by anyone who knows you on a personal level. That wrecks the ritual, and you lose the charges.
At sunset on the 333rd day, you become invisible. Congratulations. Get ready for Isolation checks. There’s no way to break the ritual or end the effects – that anyone knows of. No-one will be able to see you, and people will forget about you. If somehow reminded of you, they confabulate a story of you going missing or dying.
And forget about writing messages to people. People either fail to notice what you do, or see the consequences of your actions and see a completely different cause. The universe itself seems to aid them. Write a letter to someone, and it won’t be seen by anyone. Shoot a guy, and reality is edited so that he died of a heart attack, or someone else killed him. Slapping people just gives them a mild headache. Each time the invisible individual does something, an Isolation check of some kind is necessary.
Anyone successfully getting *out* of the state of invisibility is likely to be emotionally scarred – either trying to interact with people on a desperate and constant level, or ceasing to care about social interaction at all.
*For convenience sake, the third book is Leviticus, and this is what you’re allowed to say: ‘From the fellowship offering he is to bring the sacrifice made to the Lord by fire: all the fat that covers the inner parts or is connected to them’
What you hear:
This ritual doesn’t turn you invisible. It just takes you out of this reality to the place where the Cruel Ones dwell. And they don’t like visitors.
This ritual is all screwed up, because Leviticus isn’t the real third book of the Bible. If you found the *real* third book, you could turn the effect on and off when you wanted.
I found the original book this ritual appears in. It’s only 100 pages long, but weighs as much as one of those old fashioned Family Bibles.
Remember that creepy uncle you never liked? He found this ritual, and he watches you at night.
I think my favorite part of this one is the rumors. I never even had a creepy uncle, and I’m looking over my shoulder! …But of course, that wouldn’t help.
The four sigs seem almost unnecessary. This ritual has involved and difficult actions with excellent symbolic potence; it’s certainly powerful, especially with the universe’s writing you out of things, but anyone willing to undertake this is earning every drop of mojo! Thanks for posting this one.
– FAR out
If you like it, feel free to drop the charges. I considered posting it at ‘1 sig charge’, thinking of Thaumaturges, and how tricky it is for them to get even one Significant Charge. Then I remembered Adepts.
But considering that this ritual harms more then it helps, a lower charge is probably a good idea. Feel free to try it at a lower level, and *do* let me know what happens. 😀
I was thinking about this at work today and realized that it explains a lot of the confusion around JFK’s assassination.
– FAR out
If this ritual has got you thinking about it that much, it’s done its job.
That said, I saw a documentary that explained how there was no killer on the grassy knoll, etc. This guy had basically got recordings of the event, compared it to witness testimony, etc, and worked up a computerised simulation of what happened. One of the things that the whole dispute was based on was the claim that Lee Harvey Oswald couldn’t reload and fire a rifle quick enough to get multiple shots off in the time involved. In fact his army record apparently showed that he was a great sniper.
Of course, I am taking the word of a documentary. If the Sleepers were trying to cover something up, after there’d been a lot of fuss, making a documentary would probably be the easiest way to smooth it over decades on.
Could you do this to someone else? It sounds better as a Curse…or a trick – somebody tells somebody else to do this and they can’t get out.
What happens if an Urbanomancer posseses somebody during the 333 days of homelessness?
Ok, re: tricking someone else. Sure, you could. It might even work exactly as you planned. But depending on who you do it to, it could be risky.
There’s a chance you’ll end up with an enemy you can’t remember, and who you are incapable of defending yourself against – because they either don’t exist to you, or you think they’re dead/ long gone.
That said, in Unknown Armies people don’t tend to know everything about how ‘It’ works – so certainly someone might try and trick an enemy, and get their comeuppance (not that it helps the vengeful invisible man/woman). It could make a very interesting story.
As for what happens if an Urbanomancer possesses you? Who knows? Maybe, as a clued-in type you might get to resist possession with a soul check? Maybe you get possessed as normal?
Maybe the Urbanomancer is unlucky enough to possess you just as the ritual takes effect, and gets whammied with the result as well?
I would personally try and interpret (based on specific context) what the symbolic meaning of a set of actions is, and whether there’s a potential twist in how the universe resolves any paradoxes.
(In a one-off I ran, the PCs discovered that a ‘friend’ had been killed in an Otherworld where money was almost literally everything. One of the PCs put on a lawyer act and bluffed the universe into restoring his ‘client’s property.’ They ended up with a dead body belonging to their friend, and later coming face to face with their friend alive and well.)
Similarly, it should be possible to proxy the ritual effect.