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| liviu mihai |
The mind is a house party, so said Dr. Anne Helfurther. Hundreds of guests are in attendance, the legions of daemons which guide personality and action, but the chaos is constrained by the prescripts of the event itself. Those on the guest list are bound by etiquette, but others can act freely. Herein lies the source of madness- an uninvited guest.
* * *
On the streets of Pardon, fashionable ladies buy foreign corpses for their parlor rooms. Certain preservation techniques and careful attention to humidity keeps them from rotting on the table; thick perfume keeps the room from filling with death-stink. It's all perfectly sanitary.
When a fashionable lady hosts a party, the corpse in the parlor room is unwrapped and inspected. The fashionable ladies in their fashionable gloves poke and prod at it. They ooo and aaa at its many piercings: those Ouralian women are mad, they titter, how do they even eat with holes in their stomachs?
(on 6th and Freytors, a savvy corpsevendor carves intricate scars into a boring cadaver)
Then the fashionable ladies call a psychonaut, who helps them step into the corpse's dreams. They see the reedboats on the River of Seven Venoms. They walk like tourists on antimony shores. They break for tea in the shadow of the second largest moon ziggurat. They have a grand old time.
Sometimes, a fashionable lady dies in a corpse-dream. It's slightly less common than an alligator attack. It's tragic, yes, but people still keep pet alligators.
* * *
Psychotherapy is as much a martial art as it is a science. Rogue daemons are rarely keen to vacate their hosts, and never fight a straightforward brawl, so a paladin must be ready for anything.
(This is the second class for the Victorian setting collab I'm working on with Nobless Goblige, the same setting as last month's Vampire. There are eight noble Houses, with eight different bloods. It's a whole thing.)
PSYCHOPALADIN
Start with: any weapon; copper-lined vest (as chain); 6 vials of laudanum (3/slot); practitioner’s license; a thick skull; totem, pocket-sized.
+1 to Hit and +1 Save per template
A - Group Psychonautics, Light Sleeper
B - See Spirits, +1 Daemon
C - Self-Assessment
D - Smite
If you aren’t high, drunk, dreaming, or otherwise in an altered state of mind, you lose access to all of your Psychopaladin features except Group Psychonautics.
A: Group Psychonautics
With fifteen minutes and enough drugs to share, you can transport any number of willing people and objects into the dreams of another willing person or corpse.
People are always somewhere inside their own dreams.
If you die in a dream, you die in real life. Likewise for injury, mutations, treasures, and so on. Dreams are dungeons, basically.
A: Light Sleeper
You can keep track of your surroundings even when your consciousness is altered or elsewhere. You can surface from a dream at will, so long as you have your totem.
You sleep with your eyes open.
B: See Spirits
You can see spirits of all stripes, which are usually invisible. You can see a wizard’s prepared spells, perched on their shoulder like overgrown crows.
This is how you notice the daemon on your shoulder. (see below)
C: Self-Assessment
You can transport yourself and others into your own dreams via psychonautics. This is one way to recruit more daemons.
D: Smite
With precise application of sudden blunt force trauma, you can dislodge daemons, spirits, ghosts, curses, spells, and humors from their containers, and forcibly manifest them in the waking world. The target must be willing, or fully immobilized, or you must roll 20+ to hit.
If you hit them with your head, you can force them into your dreams instead. This is another way to recruit more daemons.
d20 Daemons
Daemons start with 2HD, are ostensibly friendly, and whisper lots of (mostly bad) advice in your ear. They inform your personality, or are informed by it: philosophers are still debating this point. Other Psychopaladins can see and hear them, as well as certain sensitive types.
If you're on good terms with a daemon, it will let you cast it like a spell. If you do, roll their HD instead of MD.
- Dolores – An orb of scarred flesh with five simian limbs. Melodramatic, romantic. Isn’t satisfied unless you’re constantly berating her. When cast, reduce the next damage you take by [sum].
- Cambion – A black hare with human hands. Anxious, pleasure-seeking. Other daemons want nothing to do with her. When cast, establish a psychic link between yourself and up to [sum] targets, to share emotional states, sensations, and damage.
- Evil Jack – An eight-fingered fist with a mouth in the palm. Tells you to kill everyone. Isn’t satisfied unless you hurt at least one person every day. When cast, make [highest] attacks. They can’t be nonlethal.
- Frontalis – A wolf’s head with the eyes stitched shut. Political, smug, dumber than sand. Needs to be the smartest person thing in the room. When cast, witness what happened here exactly six (choose [dice]) seconds, minutes, hours, days, and/or years ago. Be warned: observing the past can change the present.
- Titivillus – A wretched, puggish little man with blue skin and horns. Insufferable nerd. Openly resents you for having a social life. When cast, exchange the contents of two texts. If cast with two or more dice, one of those texts can be a painting, engraving, or similarly major work.
- Vainglory – A kingly greatsword, constellated with rubies and emeralds, blunt as a brick. Prolix, gossipy, jealous, superlatively evil. Demands dramatic monologues. When cast, sharpen a blunt object; it loses its edge after dealing [sum] damage. He’s invisible to anyone who can’t see spirits, but that doesn’t mean he’s weightless.
- Leviathan – A dead, stinking angler fish, chopped up like sashimi. Foul-mouthed, delusional. Demands you treat him like a KING, DAMMIT!!!! When cast, [sum] peasants, guards, soldiers, goons, or dumb animals follow your next order without question.
- Hugo – A hanged policeman’s corpse. Has a black sense of humor. Fascists are attracted to him like flies to a… well, to a carcass. When cast, become immune to the law until you blink [sum] times.
- Subclavius – An eagle with abs, biceps, and a cock. Commanding, paternal. Has deeply sexist and racist views which they expect you to share. When cast, perform a feat of strength as if you were [sum] strong men.
- Yeqon – A chorus, in the Greek theater sense, of rats. Musical, critical, professionally distant. Reports on your imminent (imaginary) demise in the third person. When cast, give [sum] animals the ability to sing with Yeqon’s voice.
- New World Order – A humming pyramid of black glass. Personable, poetic, utterly insane. Babbles incessantly about conspiracy theories, and makes your dreams weirder. When cast, fire a [sum] damage beam from each open eye; you’re blind in that eye for the rest of the day.
- Agares – A crocodile-hawk with terribly human eyes. Merciful, thoughtful, pacifistic. Randomly trades places with her sister/alternate personality Agreas, who is her complete opposite and only speaks Daemonic (French). When cast, learn [sum] words in another language for a fleeting moment.
- Monkey – A monkey-shaped hole in the world full of static and bad ideas. Wants all the things a monkey wants. Makes your body hair grow thicker and darker, just by existing. When cast, force any machine that can hear you to obey a [sum] word command.
- Kosmos – A broken marble bust of a handsome woman, draped in multicolored silk. Educated in the social rituals of other, inferior cultures. Disdains all displays of genuine emotion. When cast, turn [dice] of your body parts into immobile stone until you laugh.
- Zelos – A ticking apocalypse clock. Fatalistic, raving, but not unintelligible. The only thing that cheers her up is the cold eventuality of complete anthropogenic catastrophe. When cast, rewind an object’s position and state to where it was [sum] seconds ago.
- Beatrix – A skeletal amber finger. Replaces your trigger finger on your dominant hand. Only speaks in the presence of royalty, whom she hates. When cast, automatically reload a weapon the next [sum] times it is fired.
- Paracelsus – An undulating fungal mass, constantly changing its shape and color. Fidgety, easily bored. Will point at things and demand you lick them to find out what they taste like. When cast, create an illusion which affects [dice] senses.
- Indicis – A bone-and-skin dreamcatcher. Feral, reactive, barely sapient. Hates moving at “dungeon speed”. When cast, emit an ear-splitting scream that reveals shapes and movement up to [dice] rooms away.
- Ladyfingers – A sourceless shadow puppet cast by clawed hands. Hates when you spend money, unless you’re doing it to make money. Full of get-rich-quick schemes. When cast, teleport [sum] slots of things your shadow is touching into your hands.
- Xiomara – A disembodied stork’s wing. Understands you, gives actual good advice. Will never give up on you. When cast, nothing happens.
