fictitiouswhimsigot: Fractal art that resembles a collapsing stellar object (Default)
(Trigger Warnings: Spiders, Manipulation)

The Mother of Puppets, who is named Destiny, has many arms and many legs. She lives in every small web woven in every dark corner. She lives in the way we convince ourselves that we are weak. She pushes into your mind and your life slowly, robbing you of volition by your own hands.

She is a sluggish, creeping poison and she is always hungry.

She is a great and terrible spider that tells you that power and control are the greatest gifts, because if you do not dominate others then they will dominate you.

Perhaps they already have.

The Mother of Puppets lies, and confesses her lies. She professes false plans and hides the truth. She speaks to you in your own voice. She robs you of certainty and stability. She eats at your mind and drinks your blood. She leaves behind cobwebs.

The Mother of Puppets has already begun to eat you. You just haven’t realized yet.

The name of the Mother of Puppets is Destiny- The fear that you are a passenger in your own life.

The heralds of the Mother of Puppets are webs; the sound of skittering; the sensation of presence when there is none; limbs touching you when you are alone; dreams of red lines in the sky.

The weapons of the Mother of Puppets are lies; premonition; fine grey strings tied to pale limbs; divesting you of responsibility; growing paranoia; an unwillingness to let go; your own hands.

You turn aside the Mother of Puppets by running fast and hard, shedding this life for a new one; by consigning it all to the fire; by the hands of someone else intervening.

The Mother of Puppets kills you by strangling you with your own hands; suffocating you in dark webs; making you drink poison.

The Mother of Puppets is drawn to a sensation of helplessness; a willing cessation of control; a desire for a higher purpose; a fear of spiders.

The Mother of Puppets hungers for your flesh made pale from lack of blood; your life, made hers by your own hand and not her intervention; sycophants who feed her to escape her jaws.

You may kill the Mother of Puppets by living your life without caring if you control it; turning her webs into inescapable infernos; feeding her to herself.

The Mother of Puppets is reborn when someone convinces another to lay down in a grave filled with spiders; one of her servants tries to take her crown in the false belief that she was free; when someone weeps into a shawl of cobwebs over the agony of choice.

You may avoid the attention of the Mother of Puppets by
allowing others to help you without fear of their motivation; burning with passion without forethought; accepting the contradictions of free will and destiny as part of a life you can live with.
fictitiouswhimsigot: Fractal art that resembles a collapsing stellar object (Default)
A watchful eye, a fluttering page.
Discovered secrets of the twilight age.
Fear, pride and cooling rage,
The men who made the mirror.

Molten glass and song of steel
Permit whispered thoughts to reality unreel.
At last their dead hearts fear do feel,
But still they work.
The men who made the mirror.

With hiss and crackle
And muttered word.
With hearts soaked in forbidden verb.
With whisper knife and guillotine ring.
And thousand spiders dancing on ancient string.
They labored their doom to bring,
The men the mirror made.

This is about a perk for CMWGE called Toxic Shine. It modifies the normal Shine skill. You are still charismatic, but it’s a dark charisma. You are not inspiring and uplifting. You are an object of obsession and fixation, and of reverence. Interest in you is sickly and draining and unhealthy.

Toxic Shine functions much like normal Shine, in that other people may use your Toxic Shine to form intentions. However, unlike Shine these intentions act similarly to Magical Skills. They face a natural Obstacle, which renders their use is draining and unnatural. Another character may use Toxic Shine to form intentions that:
  • Uplift, protect or directly benefit you,
  • Sacrifice themselves or their health for your sake,
  • Pursue your stated plans,
  • Pursue what they believe your plans to be, or
  • Endure unpleasant conditions in pursuit of an obsession with you.

These all face an Obstacle of 0 in a place that has been ritually dedicated to you in some way, or while in the Outside. They suffer an Obstacle of 1 in normal places and contexts, and an Obstacle of 2 in places that are notably distant from the Outside or spiritually distant from you, like a place that is consecrated to some principle or ideal that is antithetical to your own paradigm.

If a character uses your Toxic Shine to perform a magical technique with a skill that resonates with your personal ideals, principles, aesthetics or drives- such as one you possess or embody, then that character may claim edge up to the rating of your Toxic Shine.

Access to Toxic Shine is an appropriate reward for a Bindings 4, Otherworldly 3, Emptiness 4 or Mystic 5 quest.  The character may convert their Shine into Toxic shine, or move a point from one of their inherent skills into Toxic Shine. Other perks that raise Shine may also raise Toxic Shine.
fictitiouswhimsigot: Fractal art that resembles a collapsing stellar object (Default)
The Web
(TW: Spiders, Webs, Isolation and Manipulation, Loss of Free Will)
There is a thing that sits at the center of the world. It sits replete upon the wheel of destiny, and the laws of the world it weaves.

A strand of that web has brushed on your life. A bit of the terror of dominance, power, of being controlled and used- of manipulation and lies and paranoia- it has touched you.

How intermeshed will it become?

You may pick up the Web issue by…
  • Loitering in abandoned places filled with cobwebs and hidden spiders.
  • Being affected by, or pursued by, one of the acolytes or monsters of the web.
  • Being so afraid of someone controlling or manipulating you that you become isolated and hostile.
  • Being in the wrong place at the wrong time, because the world is terribly unfair.

Web 1

Omens of encroaching strings

Something skitters just outside of your line of sight. You feel like something far away is.. calling you. You feel an intention that is not your own. Your dreams are becoming strange.

It’s probably nothing, though.

Web 2

Signs and portents only you believe

You see them now. You see.. Something. Maybe fleeting dreams fill you with an unsettling sense of déjà vu. Or, just for a second, you see thin grey strings wrapped around your friend’s arms, vanishing up into the sky. Or you wake up every morning with webs woven between your hands.

Something is happening, you just can’t understand the pattern yet.

...but no one else sees it. No one else understands it. They can’t face the encroaching web.

At this point, traditionally, you begin to experience supernatural changes to your being. This manifests as a level 1 Superior skill. Often this is Superior Affinity to Spiders, but it can be any Superior skill that conveys extrasensory awareness, mental control of others, precognitive powers, skittering movement, lying prowess or affinity for webs and silence.

If this is the first time you are experiencing the Web issue, you may not manifest any power at all.

This superior skill remains until the issue is resolved.

Web 3

Establishing what’s controlling your life.

You see it all the time now, inescapably. You find yourself doing things sometimes, things you don’t really want to do, or you didn’t plan to do. You make decisions and find they somehow get passed over.

You see the lights in the sky that tell you what you are going to do in excruciating detail. You see the puppet strings that connect everyone and everything, winding into buildings and down streets. You see the men in black suits watching everyone and you see the people they take away.

The web is all around you.

At this point, you should establish what, specifically, is controlling your life.

What has your fear writ wide across your world?

Is it something like…
  • Premonitions that unfold in your waking dreams and extinguish any illusion you may have of your own free will?
  • A vast conspiracy that weaves through everyone and everything you know, revealing them all to be part of some organization or power that wishes you ill?
  • An unseen puppeteer that moves people by invisible strings, crouching like a vast spider in some unseen celestial web?
  • A vampiric cult that calls innocent people into the dark streets, only to suck them dry?
  • Something else?

This level of the issue intensifies your supernatural affinity with dark forces. You may raise the Superior skill granted by this issue to 2 and choose one of the following:
  • An affliction that revolves around destiny, your loss of control or the physical changes to your body and mind that are happening. It scales with the Web issue.
  • A bond representing your fear, fascination or desire for power and control. It scales with the Web issue.

If you choose to bear more of the power of the web, you may also complete the Acolyte’s quest to solidify your connection. The powers granted by this Issue typically vanish soon after it is resolved, but they may linger in much the same way you might keep a wound (Chuubo Core book, 129).

Web 4

A final moment of freedom

Despite the strangling cords of destiny. Despite the feelings of helplessness that wash into your soul- you have a moment, a chance to escape.

Perhaps you fought and marshaled your will. Perhaps a friend came through when you least expected. Perhaps the web just loosened, unexpectedly.

When your Issue reaches this level, you may make a choice to escape or to remain.

If you choose to escape, you may close out this issue by...
  • Choosing a fiery baptism, immolation, and reconstruction from the ashes.
  • Choosing desperate, sudden violence against them. Turn the tables.
  • Choosing to run away from this life, abandon order, embrace chaos and live.
  • Choosing to accept help, to put yourself at another’s mercy, to trust again.

It is possible that your choice may embrace another power to escape this one.

If, in this final moment, you falter and choose to remain, then your fate is sealed. It’s only a matter of time now.

Web 5

Make peace with how your dark fate will manifest.

The world seems so unreal.
The world seems so gray.
It wasn’t like this. It wasn’t like this.
You are surrounded by it.
Your body is not your own.
Your mind is not your own.
You do not control your thoughts, but-
Mercilessly your feelings are still your own.

They’re going to take you soon. They’re going to eat you. They’re going to render you down into whatever they wanted from you.

And the worst is, you know that the entire course of your life has been leading up to this.
Destiny is the tool of a dark and evil god, and you never had a choice to begin with.

This issue is resolved when you are taken by dark powers. The character disappears for a time, at least a chapter or so.

They may be dead, but they are always gone.

 If they return, they are not the same.

Their player may move points from mundane skills into a Superior skill representing these changes, or rewrite Bonds or Afflictions to suit this. These changes always mark their connection to dark and insidious forces, to spiders and to consumption. They typically interfere with the character’s free will.

The Spider Acolyte’s Quest [30 XP]
Blue 1

This is a quest about cleaving to the dark powers. It is about becoming part of the spider, of the mother of puppets, of the web. It’s about giving in before you are eaten.

It is about forging a bond of fearful reverence with something that controls the world.

Major Goals

The HG may reward you with 5 XP when…
  • You wield vicious lies, rumors, cruel jibes or similar horrible tricks to hurt or coerce someone, or when you bear through and accept the same as an inescapable part of life.
  • You are subject to some kind of terrible psychic or mental trauma associated with isolation, spiders, authority figures or distant gods.
  • You begin to act, physically or metaphorically, like a spider.
  • Your Web issue rises to 4 and you choose to embrace, rather than reject the Web.
  • You accept, in your heart, that even an evil god is better than none.

You can earn each bonus once, up to a maximum of 15 XP.

Quest Flavor

1/chapter you may earn an XP towards this quest when:
  • [Green] You feel sick and terrible, and then see that it’s part of your metamorphosis. Describe the horrific changes in as much detail as you can bear.
  • [Green] You open a window or leave an external door uncracked so that spiders can enter.
  • [Blue] You experiment with wielding social conventions, power dynamics and lies to make your environment better for you.
  • [Gold/Green] You feel ecstatic joy at your body and mind doing things without your input or decision.
  • [Red/Gold] You flee from an alien being of burning hatred or ecstatic violence.  

The reward for completing this quest is an Acolyte perk:

  • Acolyte Perk: You gain a Connection 1-2 for the Web as a concept. In addition, you are so deeply connected to it that you can never really escape- After resolving the Web Issue, you gain a point in it at the end of the current scene.

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