The Pistonic Prophecy. A pamphlet printed by an auto worker at the Highland Park Ford Plant. He was beaten into a coma by a coworker over a pack of cigarettes, and awoke months later to build a printing press out of stolen and wholly unsuitable parts in the back corner of a warehouse, producing several hundred copies of the pamphlet before dying of a brain hemorrhage.
Folded and re-folded as instructed, the pamphlet tells a story about the original life of the Earth being metallic and machinic in nature, naturally-formed pistons, levers, and so on emerging from the molten form of the primordial crucible and assembled by chance over eons into self-replicating inorganisms. This is followed by a telling of the slow downfall of these inorganisms' civilization after the technological invention of biological life. The final re-folding predicts the infiltration and weakening of human bodies by "minute inorganicisms" which will enable the reclaimation of the Earth by autonomous machines.
- Automobilaudlation Synchronicity. Attune your vocalizations to an automobile. Growl to wake the engine to life even without fuel, sputter to burn it out, roar to make it explode, and so on.
- Masticant Shell. Pull out a tooth - after casting the spell you will be able to do this as easily as plucking a hair out of your scalp. Stick the tooth into a gun - this too will be unnaturally eased - and shoot it at something. A creature, an object, a structure, doesn't matter. So long as the tooth remains lodged in it the thing will be slowly but surely chewed away at - by one pair of jaws the first day, two the second, four the third, and so on until the tooth is removed or the thing destroyed.
- Crimson Generator. Transform blood into an electrical current or an electrical current into blood. I can't think of a good rate of conversion but this seems like a fun concept to me.
The Testament of Pox. Its original text is said to have been written in syphilitic sores on the skin of brothel-johns who frequented a particular establishment in Seville in the mid-16th century, though modern occultists consider this a luridly scandalous tale meant to shock and entice flappers. Also making its dating suspect is its prediction of spermatoza more than a century before their discovery by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek.
The thrust of the text is generally agreed to be that sexual reproduction is a parasitic, alien imposition on an originally pure and sexless form capable of self-sufficiency and self-replication, driving this form into discord and mortality. Discerning this from the text through the weight of annotations, attempted disambiguations of smudged sections, believed-satirical passages, and so on is however fraught.
- Warding Idol. Curse a pregnant woman to give birth to a lithopedion instead of a child. When brandished at a being that has harmed mothers or children, they are transfixed as if they were encased in a layer of stone. This includes you.
- Roomwombtomb. Familiarize yourself with every inch of a building, and put a drop of your blood in every one of its corners. Thereafter you can cast this spell to gain poltergeist-like control of its contents - slam or open doors and windows, fling small objects, slide around furniture, etc. Requires two sanity checks if the building's bigger than a house.
- Paradise Regression. Merge with as many willing participants as you can find into an immobile protoplasmic blob which experiences perpetual bliss.
Studies on the Cultivation of Honey-Bees. An agricultural investigation of apiaries in and around the city of Strasbourg. The book is dated to 1521, and includes plentiful illustrations of beehive cross-sections which resemble no known natural formations.
It is these illustrations rather than the text itself that occultists study. The cells form glyphs, the glyphs can be measured, the measurements translated into magical formulae. Those who study the book will never know true silence again - they will always hear a noise, not quite like buzzing, too rhythmic, with rises and falls.
- Finger Worm. Cut off one of your fingers and feed it to someone. It latches onto their guts like a tapeworm. You can hear anything they hear by pressing the stump of the finger to your jaw, and if displeased tickle their innards to cause tremendous discomfort. After three months you can cause your finger to emerge as a creature like a serpent with a nail-face and a many-jointed body, which you may still listen through and command from any distance.
- Mellifluous Torpor. Hold royal jelly under your tongue, sew your mouth shut, and retire to a hiding place of your choosing, which must have some hymenopteran population nearby. Bees, ants, and wasps will gather to entomb you, and feed and water you by carrying bits and droplets down your nostrils. Your thoughts and metabolism will slow to a crawl. You will be able to remain in this state for a very, very long time, but you will be unable to wake from it without outside assistance.
- Witchlight. Mix your spittle into a candle. Anything the candle's light falls on, or anyone holding the candle if it's too bright for candle-light, will be hidden by "noise" - effectively invisible so long as there's something more interesting happening around them, like a crowd.
Records of the Sacred Blood. A royalist cult in revolutionary France made contact with members of a condemned family who claimed descent from angels and Jehanne Darc, and convinced them to place talismans under their tongues before they died by the stroke of the guillotine.
Their heads were recovered by the cult, then boiled in wine and peeled of flesh. The writing that was on the inside of their skulls was transcribed into this text.
- Beauty Water. Requires pure water and ingredients such as rose petals and exotic spices that in total cost $100 in 1920s money. Living flesh and bone soaked in the beauty water become as malleable as wet clay. A sculptor's skill is required to perform cosmetic alterations with this spell without producing an uncanny appearance, and a surgeon's skill is required to use it to heal or graft flesh together without killing those affected.
- Pureblood Coupling. An incestuous pair affected by this spell are sure to conceive, and the usual negative effects of inbreeding are inverted - instead of producing feeble and deformed imbeciles, their children will be stronger, sharper, more beautiful. The spell's effect is unnoticeable over a single generation, but cumulatively significant over many.
- Path of Gold. Requires two casters to perform the spell simultaneously while staring into mirrors. The casters' eyes will leak their fluid as golden dew, and the mirrors will become portals through which the casters and anyone holding their hands can pass through instantaneously. The casters will be blind for a week as their eyes recover.
These are awesome! Conceptually the first one is probably my favorite but I like all of them, and they have nice gameable hooks too.
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