AKA: Bearers of Antigone (pronounced anTI-gunny), Antigonites, Guilt-Trippers, Tear-Jerks, Antigones (pronounced “anti-gones”), PETH (People for the Ethical Treatment of Hellspawn), Cobweb Blights, Atlanteans

From the Sleepers’ general dossier on demons and infernalists:

…As noted before, most adepts are paranoid enough to assume that any nonhuman being is to be avoided, and those who traffic with Hell usually make it a last resort. The largest movement in the occult underground reckless enough to seek demons for their own sake is the cult known among its members as “Bearers of the Antigone” and among outsiders as the Chthonomancers. Practitioners of a particularly self-righteous brand of ritualistic death fetishism, Chthonomancers are on a mission to create a world without tragedy by shaming away human stupidity.

The core ritual component of Chthonomancy is to construct altars to people believed to have died “unjustly”. (Read a very flexible definition of “unjust”, since the school’s ideology ultimately holds all death to be tragic and preventable.) These can range from billboards commemorating leukemia deaths and pleading for research donations, to roadside crucifixes that one would think had been placed by families of car crash victims, to cloying installations protesting the dangers of violent video games. Chthonomancers rely on these altars for their magick. For unknown reasons, Chthonomantic altars prevent Cliomancers from drawing power, which has caused the two schools to clash many times.

Members of this school believe demons are the souls of the dead, and that the malevolence of demons is due vengeance for various transgressions of the living, mainly not paying enough respect to the dead. Most also explain any unnatural phenomenon in similar terms, seeing adepts (including themselves) as extremely well-integrated examples of ghostly possession and avatars as reincarnations of famous historical figures. (On the other hand, several operatives in Asia have suggested that globally, the Chthonomantic view of avatars is probably the single most common explanation used by avatars for their own abilities.) Chthonomancers have an unusual amount of control over demons, partly because of their eagerness to serve the spirits’ whims.

Chthonomancers are the largest extant school with a canonical text that describes its doctrines. This is the Dirge of Antigone, a text supposedly penned by the school’s anonymous founder. It details Chthonomancy’s laws of respect for the dead and hospitality among Chthonomancers, as well as the parameters for building Chthonomantic altars, and a bunch of nonsensical parables about ancient Greece. A copy of the Dirge of Antigone should be on the tenth or twelfth page of a Google search for its title, and isn’t itself tiger-threatening. All the rituals are only useful to a fully converted Chthonomancer and are described in veiled, allegorical terms, although there have been cases of people who were already the right kind of crazy teaching themselves Chthonomancy using only the Dirge. It’s easy to mistake the Dirge of Antigone for a cloying, war-stricken example of occult mainstream bullshit.

Consecrating a new translation of the Dirge requires a great magickal working, but it has nevertheless been translated into several languages. Chthonomancers claim that the Dirge is thousands of years old, and although it conspicuously lacks contemporary or historical references, the oldest known version is in modern French, and lexical analysis places it in the 1940s or ‘50s.

Despite certain rumors, reading the Dirge won’t drive you insane, or make you instantly want to become a Chthonomancer. There are nonetheless some unnatural psychological effects surrounding the text. It’s preternaturally difficult to convince someone to read the Dirge of Antigone for the first time. People who hear of it tend to forget soon after, and to have an accurate, but unverified feeling that there is nothing of value in it.

On the other hand, research by a Bibliomancer agent has revealed that all copies of the Dirge are completely resistant to magickal effects, and that it is impossible to magickally alter a person’s perceptions of the book once they read the first sentence or so. This extends to electronic copies; it’s actually a good idea to keep one on your hard drive to protect against magickally instigated disk failure.

This Bibliomancer theorizes that the magickal protection was placed by the Dirge’s author, while the obfuscation effect results from an accumulation of probably Cliomantic attempts to circumvent that protection. She theorizes that the sudden and inexplicable appeal that the Dirge has to some readers is a side effect resulting from the feeling of “having the scales lifted from one’s eyes” when this Cliomancy is broken. This effect seems stronger the more the reader has heard of the Dirge before reading it.

Chthonomancers are exceedingly dangerous and should be approached with extreme caution even when not apparently engaged in threatening activities. Never let one lay eyes on you if he’s angry. A Chthonomantic blast is enough to make your eyes pop out and your jaw drop to the floor. Don’t laugh — that’s not something I’ll ever unsee.

They also possess a degree of solidarity rarely encountered in the underground. We realized this in the 1970s, when the Chthonomantic scene underwent a series of novel fads, like blitzing military recruitment centers with small hordes of demons, and blitzing abortion clinics with large hordes of fairies. Following this period, the school eluded several of our attempts at annihilating them by way of a tight-knit yet widely dispersed community of adepts and sympathizers who were able to evade our pogrom until we’d all learned our lessons and they moved on to more clandestine assassination activities.

As a result, the Chthonomantic network now possesses an unusual collective knowledge of our tactics, though thankfully their theories about what we are still float comfortably between Atlantis and Area 51. In spite of their zealotry, they’ve learned to avoid confrontation and the most devoted lead itinerant lifestyles. These are more dangerous as they have less to lose and more fanatical devotion to the “big picture”; that of a cosmic war between the dead and the living.

The ones you should really be afraid of, though, are ones who get into politics. Chthonomancers can be found scattered among a variety of activist groups. It’s dangerous to create prejudices about which causes are more likely to harbor Chthonomancers, since any activist group that capitalizes on societal guilt over human death is fair game.

An even more dangerous assumption that led to many of our early failures in combatting Chthonomancy is that the more outwardly fanatical homeless Chthonomancers represent a faction opposed the ones who blend in with mundane society. We’ve since discovered that this is more of a symbiotic clergy-laity distinction. The more-stable Chthonomantic “deacons” are obliged to provide hospitality for “priests”, who in turn are able to carry out riskier terrorist activities without worrying about their reputations. Traditionally, Chthonomancers start out as deacons, and then graduate to the priesthood once they have to go into hiding for one reason or another.

Not that Chthonomancers are completely united; they just have very strict rules of mutual hospitality. One fissure within the school began in early eighties with a heart-warming romance between a Chthonomancer and a Thanatomancer, who infected some Bearers of Antigone with a fatal strain of Munchausen’s-by-proxy. This has been behind a number of what were called “hate crimes”. To them, they’re just the true Bearers, but the rest of us call them “Wholesalers”. They’re into orchestrating tragedies, usually by kidnapping someone, having the victim possessed, and sending him to do something awful. The lead Wholesalers then reports the crime to the police himself, and the rest use celebrity and journalist contacts to publicize it and then go build a mess of altars, and they all get a whole bunch of mojo.

This led to several fissures in the school, including a backlash which gave birth to another splinter group who want to rescue the school from ethical bankruptcy by forming cults so they can give their pets consenting hosts.

Paradox: Take your pick: they take the personal and make it political. They worship that which they hate. In the name of peace they bring chaos. They fight that which they insist is inevitable. They want to give consolation, but the word “closure” isn’t in their vocabularies.

Taboo: Chthonomancers must honor the dead. If a Chthonomancer speaks ill of anyone who has died, he loses all charges. It doesn’t matter if the bastard killed the Chthonomancer’s own mother. It doesn’t matter if it’s Hitler. You can say all you want about the tenets of National Socialism or any living Nazi, just not anyone who has suffered death. Chthonomancers must also make some reverent gesture whenever referring to a dead person, or passing by a corpse, a grave, or any sort of altar to a dead person’s memory, or any other obvious symbol of remembrance. This can be any physical gesture (crossing oneself) or verbal gesture (saying “may-he-rest-in-peace” or “peace-be-upon-him” or “so-it-goes” after any reference to a dead person) that anyone paying attention would notice.

Killing doesn’t break taboo, unless the Chthonomancer shows disrespect for the victim after he or she is dead, or the killing somehow insults the dead by taking place in a graveyard, or while the victim is mourning. Killing another Chthonomancer also breaks taboo, as long as the victim is carrying charges. Other than that, any amount of bloodlust and sadism is okay as long as it targets only the living.

Then there’s the hospitality part. A Chthonomancer loses all charges if he deliberately attempts to harm another Chthonomancer or restrict another Chthonomancer’s physical movement, or threatens to do so, as long as both Chthonomancers have charges. Chthonomancers customarily don’t touch each other at all, just to play it safe, but that’s not strictly necessary. A Chthonomancer can lock his door on general principle, but he cannot specifically act to prevent another charge-carrying Chthonomancer from walking in and making herself at home.

Blast Style: A Chthonomantic blast gives the victim a taste of what it’s like to be dead. Death is permanent, and this blast tends to do permanent damage, even if it isn’t fatal. Rapid necrosis of the flesh is the most gruesome part, followed by the blood clotting in your veins. This often leads to large chunks of flesh having to be removed, and even amputations. Organ failure, strokes aneurysms, hallucinations, shortness of breath, loss of bowel control, blindness, sterility, and brain damage are also common. Oh yeah, and death. That’s also a little more common than with most blasts.

Generate Minor Charge: Build an altar to honor someone who died tragically. For a minor charge, the Chthonomancer may place the altar on the his or her own property, or unobtrusively on public property where such an installation is legal or unlikely to be taken down by authorities, such as a public park or by the side of the street. The minimum requirements for an altar are detailed in the Dirge of Antigone as follows:

1. The altar must commemorate one or more specific people whose passing was preventable and needless.

2. The altar must display name of the departed prominently and mention how he or she passed away.

3. The altar must include an exhortation to do something that may prevent future passings by the same cause.

4. The altar must include a symbol of a faith held by the departed, an exhortation to remember the departed, or a well-wishing for the departed.

5. The altar must contain an offering of food or beauty for the departed, such as food or flowers. All such offerings must be perishable, such that their sustenance or beauty will fade within a week.

6. The altar must be rooted at a single location. An altar in motion is no altar; an altar moved is a new altar.

In order to generate charges, at least 333 different people must see the altar in a given week. Otherwise, the altar generates no charges and does not interfere with Cliomancy, but can still be used in spells that require altars.

The fifth requirement can be anything from the direct and logical (“don’t drink and drive”), to information about a charity or political cause, to a call to boycott violent movies or support gun control. The death doesn’t have to have been nearby or recent; victims of war are popular, and no self-respecting Chthonomancer forgets Kitty Genovese Day (March 13th), Polly Klaas Day (October 1st), or Matthew Shepard Day (October 12th).

The Chthonomancer gains one minor charge for each week that the altar remains intact. If the altar becomes damaged such that it does not fulfill at least one of the above criteria (most commonly, the offering is taken or damaged, but it’s just as bad if one of the messages or symbols becomes illegible), it stops producing charges until someone fixes it.

A Chthonomancer may solicit help from others in building or maintaining an altar, but he must be the main person to instigate it, and all helpers must know this. A Chthonomancer may have as many altars at a time as he or she can maintain.

Like many schools, Chthonomancy has experienced a renaissance since the Information Age. Seeing an altar on a web page counts as viewing it, but only if it’s a live webcam feed of a physical altar. The offering poses catch-22. On the one hand, the hard drive where a picture of a rose is stored neither beautiful to most people, nor edible, nor visible on the web page. On the other hand, a picture of a rose on a web page doesn’t have a single location. Any monitor displaying the page contains just as authentic a picture. Each viewer also has to know exactly where in the world the altar is, so if you don’t embed a big, accurate Google map next to the feed, few if any of your hits will count.

Chthonomantic altars have an annoying side effect that has gotten many of their builders on Cliomancers’ hit lists. No location from which an altar is visible produces Cliomantic charges. If a Chthonomancer someone puts an altar outside the Eiffel Tower, or someone goes to the Eiffel Tower and points his Android’s web browser to a feed of an altar in Beijing, the Eiffel Tower’s charge is lost for the day. Also, if a Chthonomancer builds an altar near a place where a Cliomantic major charge is waiting, the charge is lost for another decade as if a Cliomancer had claimed it.

This is because Cliomancers obsess over history as a single drama of great people making places great by doing great things in them. They remember the horror, but they never forget that it’s all worth it to stand on the shoulders of giants. The only thing more glorious to a Cliomancer would be to see her favorite piece of history for herself. Obsessing over little stories of people history stepped on is antithetical to that mindset.

Generate Significant Charge: Significant altars look just like minor altars, but their placement must transgress against the living. The simplest way to do this is to put the altar on someone else’s private property, or a public place that the local government takes pains to keep pristine. An altar ostentatious or offensive enough to block pedestrian traffic, distract motorists, or harm nearby businesses may also generate significant charges.

Also, if a non-Chthonomancer fixes damage that has made a Chthonomantic altar invalid without being asked by a Chthonomancer, the altar-builder gets a bonus significant charge, whether the altar was minor or significant, but not if it’s major.

Generate Major Charge: The Chthonomancer must contrive an altar or public demonstration that makes national news of a non-famous person’s death, with the help of at least 333 willing participants who are not Chthonomancers. Each participant must give at least an hour of his or her time to the effort, and contribute at least one of the key elements of a Chthonomantic altar. (The name of a person who died from whatever is being protested, a prayer or well-wishing for the deceased, an exhortation to save future victims, or a perishable offering of sustenance or beauty.) Unlike with significant and minor charges, the publicly displayed fruits of this labor need only last for 3 hours as long as at least 3 national or international news networks with audiences of at least 333,333 people each cover the demonstration. Examples include a candlelight vigil, a Million Mom March, or a massive pile of paper cranes for Sadako.

Random Magick Domain: Chthonomancers are masters of sadness and anger, and have greater control of demons and revenants than any adepts except Thanatomancers.

Certain Cthonomancy spells only effect people or things “within visual range” of an altar used in the spell. You are within visual range of an altar if someone standing exactly where the altar is could turn to see you.

A Chthonomancer may only cast spells on targets that he has built or helped build. If an altar is a part of a spell, the spell will last at most until the altar next ceases to be valid.

Minor Formula Spells

Not a statistic (1 minor charge)

For the next hour, a single target stands out in a crowd. That person receives a -20% shift on all stealth-related rolls, and anyone arbitrarily picking someone out of a group or off the street will choose him if he’s an option and they don’t have a good reason not to. The range of this spell is unlimited, and it affects anyone choosing someone out of a group or list that contains the target. Side effects include calls from exes, telemarketers, creditors, and bored friends. The caster must be able to see the target.

Break the Chains (1 minor charges)

This spell tears open a hole in reality and summons a random ghost the old fashioned way, per the core book.

Lift the Scales (1 minor charge)

For the next 24 hours, one target gains the ability to see demons and revenants. The caster must be able to see the target.

Guilt Trip (2 minor charges)

This spell overwhelms a target with inexplicable feelings of shame and humility. This causes a Self check at a rank equal to the ten’s digit of the roll, and gives a +20% bonus to anyone trying to convince the target that he or she deserves blame for something in the next hour. Guilt Trip cannot be cast on the same person more than once in a day. The caster must be able to see the target.

Bullshit! (2 minor charges)

This spell may be cast on anyone who is about to make a Lie roll. That roll automatically fails. The target says what he wanted to say, but if he’s lying, he lies badly. If the target wasn’t trying to deceive, the spell fails and the charge is lost. The caster must be able to see the target.

Go in Peace (3 minor charges)

Unlike Entropomancers, Chthonomancers are above “controlling” spirits. Sure, they know how to avoid getting possessed, but it’s not as if the living have the right to tell the dead what to do. Chthonomancers roll on the normal Demon Control Table (Unknown Armies, pg. 221), but where another adept would control a demon, a Chthonomancer merely avoids possession by that demon for a number of hours equal to the roll. On the bright side, if the Chthonomancer rolls a critical failure, she is “merely” possessed for a number of days equal to the roll, rather than permanently.

Lean on Me (5 minor charges)

As Go in Peace, only this one can be cast on someone else who is possessed to give them a free resistance roll.

Significant Formula Spells

Alms for the Fallen (1 significant charge)

The Chthonomancer casts this spell on a public altar, and places some kind of notice on it requesting donations on some pretense and a receptacle in which to put them. A subtle enchantment makes people more likely to heed this request than they would otherwise be. It only takes a rank-1 Self check to resist this compulsion and one who fails it only has to leave a quarter or so, but in a well-traficked area the cumulative effect can be fairly profitable; most people aren’t stingy enough to bother with an inner struggle every time they get a random urge to be generous. Expect 1d10 dollars per hour that the altar remains uncompromised and its location is at least somewhat busy, with modifiers for traffic at the GM’s discretion. One might think Chthonomancers would feel guilty about spending money given on the pretense of charity themselves, but that would be underestimating how deserving Chthonomancers think their real cause is.

Invitation to Solace (1 significant charge)

This spell summons a ghost, but unlike normal summoning, it can get you a specific ghost, or even a revenant as the case may be. Invitation to Solace must be cast on an altar to a single person with a well-wishing that somehow implies that the departed is still present, like “You are in our hearts always.” If successful, the ghost or revenant of that person will be summoned to that altar the moment someone other than the caster reads the well-wishing aloud, as long as that person became a ghost when he or she died. If the spirit summoned does not exist or has passed on, the spell fails and the charge is lost.

Beacon of Truth (2 significant charges)

This spell must be cast on an altar with a depressing statistic and a shocking picture. Any non-Chthonomantic, mind-altering magick cast on or by anyone within visual range of that altar automatically fails. Even persistent effects cast before the Beacon was erected lose their power over anyone in visual range until they leave.

Ghost Dance, AKA “demon crack” (2 significant charges)

This spell makes ghosts angry. If you’re pissed that you got the stiff who just wants to listen to Nickelback and eat junk food, this is how to make him kill.

Ghost Dance is cast on an altar with an offering of beauty and a picture of the departed smizing with teeth. Anyone within visual range of the of the altar who is not a Chthonomancer carrying at least one charge is at a -20% shift to resist ghostly possession.

Sword of the Grave lasts until the offering on the altar is replaced.

Rest for the Wicked, AKA “demon smack” (2 significant charges)

Ghosts under the effects of this spell don’t become nice or happy, but they do get a little less ambitious. They become less angry and more surly, less hateful and more depressed.

This spell is cast on an altar with an offering of hot food and a picture of the departed smizing with his or her lips closed. Anyone within visual range of the of the altar who is not a Chthonomancer carrying at least one charge is at a +20% shift to resist ghostly possession. Furthermore, when someone is first possessed within visual range of the altar, they may make an additional resistance roll.

Remember, if you replace the offered food, you have to cast the spell again, and the food has to stay hot. The moment the offering hits room temperature, the effect ends.

Of course, you can always install a heat source in the altar, although the offering still becomes invalid when it ceases to be appetizing or even sanitary after sitting under a heat lamp all day. Just make sure no one turns it off and nothing catches fire. Electricity around ghosts is generally risky, though; you never know when the ambient unnatural phenomena will cause a short.

Heaven’s Eyes (3 significant charges)

This spell is cast on an altar with a picture of the departed. As long as the altar is valid, the caster can always use any sensory organs of the departed that are visible in the picture on the altar.

Being able to see someone through Heaven’s Eyes counts as being able to see them for purposes of spells that require the caster to see the target. However, this is conspicuous — the picture of the departed will show the departed in the current state of her corpse for about a minute or the duration of the remote spell, whichever is longer. If the departed was cremated, the departed vanishes from the picture, and the picture appears dusty. Anyone who observes that the picture has changed makes a rank-3 Unnatural check.

Using more than one set of senses at once is distracting. Take a -5% penalty for each set of eyes or ears you try to pay attention to at once.

Blessed Redemption (4 significant charges)

Chthonomancers would really like a way of restoring the dead to their personalities in life. The problem is that what makes ghosts so ornery isn’t some arbitrary curse that can simply be reversed. It’s the frigid, agonizing loneliness of being a soul with no body and no sensation kept in an impotent half-existence by an unending cycle of obsession. With strong enough magick, however, it is possible to revert a ghost’s memory to the moment before death. That’s what this spell does.

Blessed Redemption can only be cast on a ghost in possession of a human or animal body (the caster’s or someone else’s). The spell must be cast when the caster and the target are in visual range of an altar to the target ghost. The altar must have a flame as its offering. The spell lasts until the flame goes out, the possession ends, the target leaves the visual range of altar.

Keep in mind, someone who became a ghost probably wasn’t very nice to begin with, and almost certainly wasn’t sane. This goes double when she’s in the process of being stabbed to death by her husband and suddenly finds herself tied to a chair in the uninjured body of a man twice her age. One can get a lot of information that would be very hard get otherwise, though, especially about a ghost’s psychology (but not any information about the afterlife etc., since the ghost won’t remember). This is especially potent considering that most ghosts will like the sound of this spell and won’t think twice about the ramifications, even if you tell them what your intentions are before they possess the victim.

Now You See (5 significant charges)

This is Chthonomancy’s dreaded blast. The caster must look at the target and give him a gesture of respect for the dead. The target takes significant blast damage, plus one die for each Hardened notch she has in Violence. Then, the target permanently loses an amount distributed among any of her four stats equal to the sum of the original two percentile dice, plus one for each Hardened notch she has in Violence. The victim’s player chooses how to distribute the lost stat points.

If you hit a sociopath with this blast, don’t even roll the extra dice unless you really want to know why the funeral is closed casket; the bastard dies no matter what.

Major Formula Spell

Spread the Word (1 major charge)

This spell reproduces the enchantment on the Dirge of Antigone, the Chthonomantic holy book. Most Chthonomancers are willing to kill anyone who uses Spread the Word for anything other than creating a faithful translation of the Dirge of Antigone, although abusing major charges in this way doesn’t technically break taboo. Of course, the accuracy of a translation is somewhat subjective, but it’s hard to get away with noticeable additions or subtractions.

Spread the Word requires a copy of the text to be enchanted in a binding that includes a physical part of the person to whom the major-charge-earning altar was dedicated. For example, you could thread a piece of a shooting victim’s hair through the binding. Or you could go old school and bind the whole thing in human skin.

Spread the Word takes effect the moment the text is written and the binding is complete. Once cast, this spell affects all complete copies of the targeted text, in any format, physical or electronic, even transliterated or encrypted. As long as there is a perfect symbolic correspondence with the enchanted text, the spell holds.

The direct effects of Spread the Word are simple. Any spell that if successful would damage any copy of the enchanted text, fails. Furthermore, any spell that would alter any person’s perception or understanding of that text fails if that person has read even a single letter of the text.

The real power isn’t in Spread the Word itself, though — it’s in the accumulation of Urban Legends placed on the Dirge of Antigone by spiteful Cliomancers. Whenever someone first hears of the Dirge of Antigone, the psychic barrage of notions that it drives people insane or is full of misinformation or is just boring all blends together into a vague but potent feeling that it just isn’t worth bothering with.

Once a person even glances at a complete copy of the Dirge of Antigone, he will instantly forget the Urban Legends, which has a way of making of the Dirge seem inexplicably attractive. The reader makes a rank-1 to rank-4 Unnatural check, depending on how much the reader has heard of the Dirge of Antigone, or no check if he’s never heard of it. Until then, however, the Urban Legends will affect his perceptions of anything associated with the Dirge, even excerpts, damaged or incorrect copies, or unconsecrated translations. Fighting through the psychic static to read and comprehend such things without having read a true copy of the Dirge requires an Education check at a -30% penalty.

What You Hear

A lot of dukes seem to think there’s some kind of common history between the Cobweb Blights and the Cobweb farmers — like maybe they were founded by the same guy, or the author of the Dirge of Antigone was a Cliomancer who defected, or vice versa. The Dirge of Antigone begins with this weird parable about Oedipus’ daughter Antigone going to Atlantis for some reason and failing to stop some solar cult from making it sink, so a lot of Cliomancers call the Antigonites “Atlanteans” — sort of like calling Scientologists “clams”.

There’s also the alleged World War II connection. A lot of people think certain parts of the Dirge of Mourning are references to the Holocaust or the atomic bomb, like where Antigone talks about “a thousand thousand perishing in the fire of an Earthly sun” in Atlantis, even though Atlantis sunk.

Then again, the Dirge of Antigone is extremely vague and allegorical, and just doesn’t make much sense, especially if you’re even passingly familiar with classical theatre, and parts of it are probably reminiscent of a lot of points in history, and it’s hard to say anything about the history a group that’s come under so much attack from Cliomancers. For all we know, the school may actually be millenia old, and the French version of the Dirge might just seem like it’s the oldest because it was the first to receive magickal protection.