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[#] FATAL & Friends Repost: In Dark Alleys, Part 17
05:49pm EST - 1/01/2016
In Dark Alleys

Most of these objects come from Christian martyrs, repressed Victorian girls or homosexual sex in public restrooms.

Artifacts

So these things come in a few different forms, first are "Shatter Relics," which are caused by intense emotions breaking the threadbare fabric of reality.

Relics of the Martyrs posted:

These relics come from early persecution of Christianity. Most of the martyrs were celibate women who died simultaneously fearing death, hating their executioners, joyful that they would be martyrs and lustful for an idea of Jesus upon which they had projected their repressed sexuality.

Sorry, did I say intense emotions? I meant intense boners, because apparently all of this comes down to dicks. Also this next one is going to make some biology/medical person's head explode, brace yourselves for flying skull chunks!

Finger of St. Raphael posted:

A finger bone wrapped up in an old cloth in a wooden box. A person clutching this relic cannot be harmed by any amount of heat. However, he or she is also unable to combine sugars and oxygen to create chemical energy, so he or she loses 2 pooled END per round.

A round is half a second, and an unmodified character has between 1 and 20 END. Besides that, the other two example Christian Martyr Artifacts are an arrow(St. Germaine's) that makes all matter near it transparent and all light sources nearby far more intense. The second is a tooth(St. Oglethorpe's) on a chain that makes corpses explode into swarms of screaming, aggressive locusts if brought near them.

The Victorian Girls posted:

At the height of Victorian England’s prudishness, a few women were unlucky enough to grow up without any knowledge of their own sexuality or female anatomy. they were from very religious upper middle-class-homes.

Their mothers died at an early age and they were never lucky enough to make friends with servant girls who could have explained things to them. They grew to adulthood with no knowledge of sex, masturbation, procreation or menstruation.

They only knew that there was something about their anatomies so sinful that nobody would dare speak about it. Many were so unprepared for menstruation that they believed they were dying. Shatters occurred when joy and lust (at discovering the potential for sexual pleasure) coincided with fear and hatred (of their own bodies). The shatters were quickly covered up by the powers-that-be in the Victorian government and the relics were confiscated and hidden away.

The Victorian Girl artifacts are... Eliza Preston's preserved fetus that lets a person's Shadow speak through it! Mary Sutton's "bloody rags" which will bleed forever until everything within 100 feet is covered in it! And...

Elizabeth Hartford's Labia posted:

Two strips of leathery dried flesh. If placed on either side of a human orifice they will attach, becoming living flesh. The orifice will become lined with teeth. If any part of any living thing (save the owner of the orifice) is placed within the orifice, the living thing will be devoured. The orifice pulls the creature towards it at 40 STH, strong enough to break bones. Once the mouth has caught hold of a piece of flesh, there is no way to save the victim without tearing or cutting off the captured parts. The mouth does 2 BLD damage per round to the victim. The mouth can consume any amount of flesh and consumed flesh is never seen again.

The goddamn Cunt of Vecna.

The third category is the Shatter Artifacts produced by those wacky dudes sucking dick in public bathrooms. The first is named, I shit you not, The Glory Hole. It's a piece of wood with a hole in it, if you look through the hole you can see Invisible things, and if you poke anything through the hole the poked-through part phases out and can interact with the Invisible only for a while. I don't really need to say anything more, do I?

The second is the Vertigo Card which, continuing IDA's habit of hiding kinda neat things inside all the other shit, is kinda neat. Well okay, the un-neat part is that it's a piece of folded paper with dried semen on it. The NEAT part is that if you unfold it, time in the area passes twice as fast, and if you, for instance, spin it, everything in the area is spun, flung against walls by centrifugal forces, shake it and everyone in the room you're in will get rattled up and down, etc.

The third is a severed, dessicated finger which, if put on the ground, starts to shake until it's violent enough to trigger an earthquake. HOWEVER, consider this: Once it's on the ground, it just keeps shaking until it reaches that magnitude, nothing says that it can or will stop on its own. And presumably if the entire area is fucking rattling like crazy, it's going to be hard for anyone in the area to pick it up and stop it. So presumably if anyone drops this and doesn't scoop it up again quite fast, an entire country is going to be fucked to gravel by never-ending quakes.

Blessed Objects are stuff given from the rather-incompetent POWERS BEYOND to the human authorities that support their goals. They are: A magical table leg, if you spend most of your day near it you become super-healthy. A whip that flicks a new Psychodynamic into control of a person every time you whack them, allowing you to cycle through personalities until you have one that'll tell you what you want to know. An Islamic vorpal sword. A magical mauseoleum that can be used to revive people with human sacrifice. A magical Cane of Charisma. And a badass skull cup that lets you kick your own soul into the aether to go for trips.

Dances can apparently only produce objects that make people crazy from handling them. The example items aren't very interesting.

Chunks of the Deserted City also count as artifacts, the first type is mementos, which always show perfectly happy androgynous humans. The longer you stare at these, the more you'll start glowing and becoming superpowered, until you explode into ash from being too hotblooded. Literally. The second type is just objects, which are always unbreakable and useless and the only thing they have about them that's interesting is that they turn into stuff that people fear or desire very much when no one's looking. The last category is Tools which are Normal Objects That Do Supernatural Stuff. Like the White Fluid, a vial of milk that makes you vomit up a soul-less perfect copy of yourself. The Black Knife, a knife so sharp it cuts holes in reality. Or the Gray Book, another of these "whatever you're most afraid of will be what you see in it"-objects. Which really just sound like Brian wanted to write something spooky but couldn't come up with anything.

The next category is Subconscious Artifacts, stuff dragged out of the brains of people you've visited, like for instance a Wonderlander's Playland. The example item is a knife from the mind of a woman who secretly hates herself and bangs lots of strangers without using a condom, so anyone stabbed by it becomes irreversibly ill until this lady gets some mental help. We're reminded that all this is because of her parents.

And lastly there are Annotated Volumes, basically these are books so scribbled-up by Scribblers that they can teach you supernatural powers if you can tolerate their Philosophy 101 wanking going on for pages and pages and pages on end. Predictably half the example books are written by Jung, Freud and Nietzsche, that is, before someone wrote all over them.

SECRETS OF OTHER WORLDS

Summarizing the intro: Other worlds are whack shit but our tiny human minds can't comprehend them so we subconsciously reform them into something that SORT of makes sense to us. Linear time, three dimensions of space, that sort of jiggery.

The first line of the next paragraph is that all supernatural skill rolls have between +20 and +60 modifiers, this means that anyone with even a single rank in Untouchable and decent Willpower, for instance, is literally invincible. Dances actually become kind of interesting here, since minds can affect reality and Dances are literally wandering minds, so with a bit of a rewrite of their fluff they could become useful sidekicks rather than monomaniacal parasites. Also remember Masks? In THE OTHER WORLDS, it literally transforms the disguised thing into the thing it is disguised as. So holy shit can you hilariously break everything with that EVEN MORE.

Also since Reapers are both visible and tangible here, technically the party could take turns committing suicide and fighting off the arriving Reapers until they're all Survivors and outfitted with Survivor powers to Be Goddamn Unkillable. But that's just me considering how to break this game in half, not that it needs much effort.

So just to make this interesting, before I wrap up this post, let's hit the first of the Otherworldly Locations: The Deserted City. You ready?

THE DESERTED CITY


Spooooooooooky

This place basically looks like whatever a group recognizes as "urban."

quote:

To a group of hunter-gatherers that have never seen a city it would look like a massive deserted encampment, in an endless forest clearing, filled with huge huts. To a group from Japan, the city would take on a slightly Japanese flavor. For instance, some of the rooms inside buildings would have sliding screens and tatami mats.

Though any cultural exposure, even if only through media, to "Western Cities," sees them as such. It's always night, it's always cold, there are street lamps that keep the worst of the darkness at bay and it's always goddamn deserted. But of course you can hear someone sobbing and moaning in the distance because it's gotta be SPOOKY. The place looks like it was super-fancy once, but now it's pretty run-down and dirty, and everything that isn't nailed down has been removed.

"When the PCs can find a sign that’s not too faded to read, the text is just words like “pain” “horror” and “death” repeated over and over again."

"GPS systems, compasses and cell phones don’t work. Radios play a woman sobbing on every frequency."

The Wound: So something big and awful poked a hole in the city and now THE GROUND IS BLEEEEEEDING. Basically it's a big black thorn and if anyone pokes at it they just die. Either later fluff sections will expand on this thing or it's just added because OMG BLOOD IS SCARY.

The Sewers: Some enterprising architect figured adventurers might drop by and decided to make sure the sewers were spacious enough for people to run around in. Also instead of water they have BLOOD. BLOOOOOOD, SCARY BLOOOOOOD. Also sometimes the blood is replaced by black fluids and if you touch them you die. Sometimes there are immortal people stuck in the walls that do nothing but wail and moan and you can't kill them or talk to them, so they're basically just decor.

CREATURES OF THE CITY: Organic robots that run around "doing tasks" in the city that the PC's aren't supposed to be able to ever understand. Also it's emphasized that they might just randomly reach out and kill PC's. The example creature is a pillar of flesh with a flower of babbling faces at the top. If anyone tries to interact with it, it'll wrap the flower around their heads and scream at them until they die. Also if you don't get someone away from it in two rounds(1 second, remember), they'll be rendered permanently deaf by the cacophony. Much longer and it'll liquefy their brains.

So that's THE DESERTED CITY.

I think I'm going to try to finish off IDA in the next post, because I just read ahead and spoiler: The entire world was created by rape.

~PurpleXVI

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