Pangothicon (Empowerment)
Not advanced empowerment, yet. We'll tackle that next chapter.
Choose a new Aspect to incorporate:
[ ] Aspect: Eldritch - Inside of your meager form, an elder power has taken root: research into the forbidden finally bearing fruit as a cohabitator from beyond our stars. The Aspect manifests primarily as a symbiote within the Enrolled's body, an existence that slowly congeals into more dangerous, intelligent, and independent alignments. It feeds off of the Enrolled's mentality and brainwaves, absorbing foremost their least flattering traits. Its presence within the body confers baseline physical benefits: improved condition, accelerated healing, and even rapid restoration of blood. In return, as wounds accumulate, the Enrolled's inhuman truth is revealed, and the symbiote gains more control.
Its Techniques manifest foremost as spellcasting assistance: it can form extrusions that act as capable familiars, enhance the Enrolled's casting reserves, or more crudely, as offensive and defensive tendrils.
[ ] Aspect: Vision - The Eyes That See Dark Truths, an artifact of Gothic provenance and immense Thematic influence, is woven into an Aspect. It metamorphoses the Enrolled's eyeballs into starlike ponds, as black as the cosmic void, with enthralling pinpricks of variegated starlight. Prolonged eye contact produces fascination, eventually developing into suggestive states. Effort channels insanity and madness through the eyes. Passively, they grant enhanced awareness of abstract concepts and ideas with a negative valence: weaknesses, addictions, horrifying secrets, and above everything, dark truths.
Its Techniques allow for the deployment of more permissive madness, as well as improved control: temporary states, instead of permanent breakage; even channeling specific manners of psychic shattering to inflict amnesia, aphasia, dysmetria, and similar conditions.
[ ] Aspect: Transgression - A superficial guise of humanity concealing moral turpitude and depravity, stemming from an ultimately inhuman nature. In transgression beyond moral limits, strength. As the Aspect's level increases over time, so does your despair and vulnerability diminish, improving the effects and gathering of Will, until you resemble a being of average motivational capability. However, you're also blithely accepting a slow degradation of your moral faculties, every step further down an invitation to continue down the dark path.
Its Techniques center around enhanced charisma, the spread of deviance and corruption, and instincts for inflicting lawlessness on nations and causing the dissolution of social mechanisms in groups.
[ ] Write-in (12 Credit)
The new Aspect will not be available immediately. It'll be inculcated during your next set of classes with the Educator.
Furthermore, you can select two (2) of the following artifacts:
[ ] Red Athame - Found in a cultist's atelier, any cuts made with this crimson-gripped athame do not bleed naturally, instead producing an outpouring of scarlet flame. Its sensation is agonizing, an overwhelming assault on the senses; capable of rendering even the most powerful men insensate with utter torment. The magus responsible for dealing the cut can psychically direct the flame, stoking further injury or assaulting the foe's allies. Flames are fed by blood; inoperational on non-hematopoietic organisms.
It seems to have at least several other properties you have not discovered yet.
[ ] The Necronomicon - Or a workable copy of the original, at least. It contains over a hundred pages, each one inscribed with tidbits of forbidden lore: summoning invocations for eldritch monsters, binding sigils and alchemical procedures for dealing with and controlling the same, and a cornucopia of surprisingly innocuous and non-malevolent spells, ranging from a one-phrase incantation that shoots forth a bolt of dissolving acid to a dance that creates a field of impassable mud.
It doesn't inflict madness, as it seems the cognitohazardous sections were ripped out by one of the previous owners.
[ ] The Spirit Lantern - A metal-and-glass lantern with a hovering azure wisp locked within; the form of an ancient spirit, now made into a flashlight that shines on your way. It can speak to spiritually sensitive individuals within its vicinity, and whispers to you, introducing itself as Frederick von Zonenzarzern. It'll attempt to cajole and convince you to release its seal with a plethora of rhetorical machinations: something your divinations inform you would be unwise.
Its presence strikes absolute fear into spirits lesser than itself, and can even induce a mild, creeping doubt that mounts over time into peers. Furthermore, its light can be released in order to progressively inflict ruin and harm on those same entities, and it can be tapped for energy in a pinch. It also repels mosquitoes.
[ ] The Revolver - A six-shooter embossed with unrecognizable sigils. As long as the shooter says the words, "I deliver your retribution in steel," before squeezing the trigger, a nearly unbreakable mental effect will compel the target to stand still. Furthermore, it contains six magical rounds that contain the weaknesses of every supernatural creature imaginable, from blood-drinking vampires to howling werewolves to vile magicians, and even the Enrolled. However, nothing can restore the rounds once they are spent, unless you learn to manufacture extra.
[ ] The Brass Cube - A rather literal mystery box: six-sided and made of brass, each side demarcated into three sections, each with its own glowing seal. It has stubbornly refused even your most thorough divinations, and so you've not the faintest clue what its contents may be.
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Will: 25
Credit: 4.1
XP: 1,640+
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