[UA] Deadful Things

[Chris Cooper]

Hello Gaston and others

As a fan of Tim Powers and "The Dead" before I started
reading him, I had an idea of how the dead worked for
me [in games]. I think I posted Deadful Things before,
but I’ll go and post it. I enjoyed your take on the
Powers-esque ghost system. I would not create a new
system for pneuma but would use the hedge-magicky
Tilts from Statosphere and colour them with pneumantic
terms. Pneuma means “breath” and could be linked to
the Breath of God that animated the clay Adam from the
Book of Genesis. Perhaps that’s all that souls are -
the exhalations of a Creator…

Otherwise I hope that you (and the others) will read
this and maybe use it. Well some of it at least.

So without further wait here is Deadful Things.

Cheers,

Chris

Deadful Things

When someone dies roll their Soul stat, but add one
for every Hardened and Failed notch on the Madness
Meter. If the roll is under their modified Soul stat
the dead’s soul remains but in a permanent state of
fugue and confusion. If the roll was under the sum of
the dead’s modified Soul stat, the spook is able to
adjust to its state and is now considered a thinking
ghost. Of course many of the dead are unhinged by
their existence and become narcissistic psychopaths
with poor impulse control. Most of the dead retain any
mental problems they had whilst alive. Many of the
confused dead suffer from “black outs” and are unable
to recall any memory from this missing time.

The Corporeal Dead

The demon needs learn a new Body skill: Animate
Corpse, or something similar. Depending on the stage
of decomposition penalties can be accrued. The
penalties are removed from the corpse’s Body and Speed
stats. The ghost’s Mind and Soul scores are also
affected as long as it is in its corpse. A soul is
automatically allowed to animate its own body. A minor
ritual could easily bind a demon to a corpse but if it
does not have the Animate Dead Corpse skill, tough.
Certain GMs may allow the ghost a Soul check, and if
the check is successful but above 30 the zombie
arises. Getting raised counts as a significant
unnatural event.

Fresh (a few hours old) No penalties
Bloated, but intact (a few days old) All stats halved*
Stringy (a few weeks old) All stats quartered
Expired Shelf-life (A few months old) Unable to
restart.
* Skills cannot exceed the stat ceiling.

A body decomposes because of unreplenished and thus
dwindling energy to keep its systems up and running.
By forcibly animating the corpse, the soul hands over
a lot of free energy to keep the systems going. The
soul cannot heal the rot, just try and stave it off.
Every month roll a Body check or reduce all stats by
one die throw. Eventually the retarded decay turns the
muscles and tendons in ropes and the rest of the
tissue becomes leathery.

Zombies have double the number of Wound Points and one
tenth of its improved Wound Points is a new Body skill
called Damage Tolerance (DT). The dead’s DT reduces
any damage taken and shrugs off certain small amounts
as inconsequential. DT may be improved with
experience, but wounds never heal naturally.  Zombies
can take a great deal of punishment!

Exempli Gratia

Eustace “Sticker Stacy” Godwin

Summary: Godwin was a terminal junkie. One bad shoot
and years of the shit sandpapering his immune system
made his body collapse into death. The problem was
that Sticker Stacy needed heroin like no one else.
When he was still studying at college under a
scholarship when something terrible happened.
Mind-wrenchingly terrible things started crawling out
of the woodwork and assaulted his safe whitebread
world-view. Godwin couldn’t handle the events and that
no one believed him made it worse. Everyone dumped the
responsibility on his lap. The police, the due process
of the law, and even the psychologists veered whatever
came out of his mouth and harpooned him. All these
people, even the flaky New Agers gave him the look and
walked away. Godwin served time for something that
gave him headaches and unremembered nightmares in the
early hours. 

He knows his girlfriend and roommate are dead and in a
permanent coma, respectively, he has no clue to what
happened. Even descriptions read out in court became
blurry and vague.

Whilst in prison some Hispanics bailed his arse from a
beating. He was a smart and lonely white boy. They
took him in and he joined up with their crew. He
handled all their trade, creating an exchange rate per
item that fluctuated daily. He started writing a
dissertation on the economic variance with
closed-system economic dynamics. But as the time
passed the nightmares got worse, fingering their way
into his daydreams. Godwin was a made-man in the
prison. He was a fair trade and fucked none over. But
his memories where crawling out of some wound in his
head and they were sniffing for blood. 

One of the gang members gave him a shoot and all the
nightmares and headaches blizzarded away into the
white-hot static that was junk. Godwin became hooked
on the oblivion. His ex-paramedic cellmate
administered the nightly spikes. Godwin was a resource
to be protected in the prison.

Once his five years where spent, Godwin left to rejoin
the world that didn’t care what he was like inside the
joint.

He did a bit of work for the local connected-boys, but
he was merely another addicted gimp. After a year they
cut him off. He substituted his need for crash by
small time cons and few vehicle hijackings. He kept
himself pretty well on the dragon, saving his money,
bunking in condemned buildings, then spending his
money on the best he could buy. Godwin became reckless
during this time, his body’s tolerance demanding
bigger and bigger hits meant the quality went worse.
Three years after leaving prison, Sticker Stacy died
and his junkie friends stripped him as far as they
wanted to.

Four hours after dying, Stacy “woke up” needing a fix
and so went off to buy.

Stacy has been dead for seventeen months now and even
his old connections avoid him as much as possible, but
he always finds the score; sniffing them out like a
bloodhound. Some of them just give the shit to get rid
of him. After a pusher blabbed to an enforcer about
this fucked-up, spooky motherfucker, the enforcer went
to kill him. When Eustace came for his fix the
enforcer popped a nine-mil into his gut, but Stacy got
back up and demanded his heroin. The enforcer started
kicking him a couple of times, fifty to sixty solid
bone-breaking boots. And Stacy just got up and beat
the shit out of the enforcer. He didn’t do karate,
just landed a punch occasionally and the unhurtable
Eustace eventually slapped down the enforcer. 

Suddenly the dealer heard something like the hiss of
an oncoming train and things started moving, dead
gangsters and junkies and other things started
loitering eyeing the scenes. A few of them started
creeping forward and they didn’t like human merely
spidery sketches of arms, heads, legs and torsos,
acting like hungry street dogs.

The dealer decided to run but Stacy grabbed him and
took all his stash and piled it into his syringe and
after muddying it up with tap water, squirted the
toothpaste into his arms.  The figures wandered away
after that. The dealer left town and the enforcer
changed his name and took to tarot cards, wind chimes,
chicken blood grafitti and performing solitaire
seances on home made ouija boards. 

Personality: Godwin’s identity is so corroded he
doesn’t respond to his name half the time and the
other half of the time he’ll answer to a wolf-whistle.
Not even burned-out, his obsession and when he needs
money drives Stacy’s scorched psyche, 

Obsession: Stopping the memories is Stacy’s priority,
heroin is Stacy’s only vehicle to slow those dark
dreams that snuffle up to the dim light of his
consciousness. His habit of shooting up is purely
reflex, but still as real as any living addiction.
Godwin can “sniff out” the closest source of heroin in
the vicinty. This has made him something of a bogeyman
in the criminal community.

Rage Stimulus: Getting stiffed from a dealer. 

Fear Stimulus: his headaches and waking nightmares.
Stacy needs to shoot up to still the crawling shadows
and bad-telephone voices.

Noble Stimulus: Someone as obliterated and
self-serving as Stacy has no good side to his wasted
soul. He might be thankful for a free score, but half
an hour later he has forgotten all generosity.

Wound Points: 80, Damage Tolerance: 8

Body: 40 (Broken by habit)
Skills: Fight Dirty 55%, General Athletics 10%, Damage
Tolerance 8%

Speed: 37 (Shaky with permanent nerve damage)
Skills: Drive Stolen Vehicle 70%, Dodge 25%

Mind: 25 (Scorched)
Skills: Prison Education 60%, Criminal Trades 50%

Soul: 45 (Withered)
Skills: Sniff out nearest heroin 90%, Ultimate Poker
Face 100%

Madness Meter
Violence	3 failed, 3 hardened
Unnatural	5 failed, 1 hardened
Helplessness	5 failed, 2 hardened
Isolation		0 failed, 3 hardened
Self		5 failed, 7 hardened

The Bodiless and revenants

Since demons don’t have a Body score they have to
substitue one. By manipulation they can impose
themselves onto the material world. 

Most ghosts are bodiless and hungry for substance and
sensasation. The astral plane is a hollow and still
place and the dead are tormented by their memories to
such an extent that they build unhealthy desires about
what they cannot possess. The tickle of a drop of
water running down skin becomes the sweetest nectar.
They hover about this dry and listless existance until
they pick up a voice and they close in like sharks for
blood.

Sometimes the nearly departed do no wake up on the
astral plane - they end up landlocked between the two,
not quite there and not quite here.

There it is wandering around, a cohesive collection of
memories holding its form together. The dead can try
and manipulate its form into ectoplasmic substance.
Certain sorcerers call this mollitium.

A ghost can exercise a special Body skill:
Materialization. Sometimes this materialization
affects one sense as the living sense its presence and
its location, the signal from their overly-atrophied
third eye is so denuded that their imaginations dress
the spirit up in easily identified metaphor. But the
ghost finds the stronger its spirit is the easier it
is to manipulate the physical world. The ghost drifts
in an everpresent psychic undertow, a gentle tugging
from the astral plane. 

The measure of physical effect the ghost can have on
the material is based on Materialization; the ghost’s
Body score is equal to the sum of their
Materialization score. Basically the ghost is a
body-shaped telekinetic field. With this telekinetic
field, the ghost can lift, manipulate and affect
material objects. Certain old and powerful ghosts pick
up pieces of dust and shit and blood and form
“golem-like” solid bodies with proper Body stats. It
is rumoured that certain of these old ghosts have
three to four of these “suits” that they can choose
from to wear. 

Unfortunately ghosts are partly physical and partly
spiritual, trapped like a fly in water, the surface
tension holding it up, but the cool depths underneath
try to suck it under. Ghosts have learned to swim and
can duck and dive under the surface or skim the top.

A character with Aura Sight or similar skill can
perceive the ghost on the physical plane. Although the
spirit is astral it exists in the material; it is
subject to matter. 

Aura Sight
00% - 25%	Nothing there.
26% - 50%	vague, sketchy shadow	
51% - 75%	Breezy-voiced and blurred human figure	
76% +		In all-senses affecting glory. Treat as a
normal person. Unclothed, though.

When the person dies roll a Soul check, if it is
successful use its roll as the skill, if it fails its
skill is the sum of the two dice. This skill can only
be increased by further Madness notches and not by
spending experience points. Every notch gained in the
Madness Meter will add one percent onto the ghost’s
materialization.

Interaction within the Living is difficult. The Quick
and the Dead instinctively avoid each other. If there
is a person in reasonably close proximity, such as in
the same room, reduces the ghost’s effectiveness. This
is fustrating for the dead and spooky for the Living.
Liver is a spook word for the living.

Environment					Modifier to skills
Unaware liver in the vicinty			-10%
Aware liver in the vicinty				-20%
A group of aware or unaware livers in the vicinty	-30%
A liver with Aura Sight in the vicinity		+Aura Sight
Skill

The ghost’s materalization is penalized and so is any
chance of it retaining hold. If the ghost also rolls
under the penalty it is also affected.

Exempli Gratia

NB: Eulegy Barnabus is from the campaign “Let’s Go
Kill Ulrich Steranko!”

A demon, Eulegy Barnabus, has discovered a perfect
afterlife in the world of the living. 

After sating his physical lusts he thought about
becoming a player and carving a niche for himself. He
posited the dilemma of not having a corpse to tug
around, at least for long enough to get settled and
useful enough to avoid those with the ability to put
him down.

He wandered around until he found Emile Cloots, an
unwashed and tripping hippy trying to connect with
Mother Earth in a park around midnight. Eulegy rode
that hippy into the dirt and when the body, collapsing
with exhaustion, finally dragged itself to its gunga
din, he shaved off Cloots’ soul like he did the
dreadlocks shortly afterwards. Using the Cloots’
broken collection of memories, he continued dealing
dope to save some funds and get clean. After three
years of getting out of tight scrapes and overnighters
in holding cells, Cloots left town and was never seen
again.

He changed Cloots name to Eulegy Barnabus and went
straight; the hippy got a job. Barnabus found he
thrived in the corporate environment, his already-dead
attitude gave him a vantage the mundanes couldn’t
appreciate. 

Barnabus found that he retained a number of Cloots’
old hard-wired habits; a taste for soft drugs was one
and so was an aversion to personal violence and
sometimes when the body was nearing sleep, old Cloots’
mannerisms and word choice came out. Barnabus taught
himself a few demon-tricks, such as leaving his stolen
body and flicking himself back. He taught his corpse
to move through its learned routine and it made an
excellent receptionist and clerk. He eventually
allowed it to go shopping, or play a game of pool or
rent videos. And even in its robotic
go-through-the-routines, it actually passed for a
boring and burnt-out mortal. Just like when it was
tired, Cloots’ mindset tended to annoyingly reassert
itself. After a while in the driver’s seat, the Cloot
would start changing voice patterns, facial muscle
structure, and once, Barnabus swears, eye-colour.

Barnabus vultured around New Age book stores and
Occult-Lite circles, planting seeds that he was a
powerful medium. His plan worked. He voiced dangers
that lured bored occult thrill-seekers.

Sitting around a ouija board and going into “trance”
and then he left his body and pretended to be his own
American Indian spirit guide, Red Tears. He would
drift around and probe the room for the weakest and
least-defended psyche. Slowly Barnabus would allow
“Red Tears” to ride him. Then one of the gullible
members eventually would be volunteered by his or her
peers and “channel” Red Tears.

Over a year Barnabus has honed his invasive possession
to a dangerous psychic martial artform.  

After a modest salary and spartan living and smart
investing, his floating ideas where sewn together,
Barnabus left to work for himself or rather
him/herselves. Barnabus had a modest collection of
personnel. All five of them moved into a
loft-apartment commune and pooled their earnings.  

Barnabus let most of the personnel go about their
jobs, only cleaning their easily addled minds which
they needed frequently.

Barnabus’ collection of bodies were seen as a growing
cult and attracted attention from strange sorts.
Barnabus made his mark. He noticed the attention of a
stupid young gun. Some of those strange sorts were
watching this young gun. Apparently he suddenly
dropped out of sight. Barnabus tracked them down and
left an offer and an e-mail address.

A few days later he sent a reply. One thousand
dollars, half now and half after, to be left in empty
video boxes left at a drop off. They asked him to
bring in a supposed shady suspect. He received the
details and went off.

The first “repossession” was difficult, but three days
later the mark strolled in to the agreed holding
place. They had set up the mark to kill Barnabus.
Barnabus told them through the mark to owe up the
remaining money. They did. And a month later another
cash-filled videocassette box was dropped off.

 Thus started Barnabus’ new carreer. His personnel
handle the minimal paperwork when at the loft.

Eulegy Barnabus, Demonic Repossessor

Personality: Virgo

Obsession: Holding onto your life. Keep being grounded
by tending your vehicles. One slip up and you become
the feral and howling impotent banshee you once were.
Essentially a smooth thinking fleshy-junky.

Passions
Rage Stimulus: The potential ease of losing your
integrity is what keeps you fustratedly pissed off in
the small hours.

Fear Stimulus: Drowning and smothering make you piss
your pants with ectoplasm to such a degree that you
won’t even sit in a body while it takes a bath or
swim.

Noble Stimulus: You have taken on a protective
attitude to your personnel. You catch yourself making
a fuss over them sometimes - like they were children
not merely the vehicles you think they are.

Wound Points -

Body	-
Speed	55 (Accurate)
Mind	60 (Deductive)
Soul	65 (Snake)

Body
Get Back Up [Host Body Stat]%

Barnabus uses the current host’s Body stat and
associated skills.

Speed Skills
Elastic Astral Cord Sling Shot 60%
If Barnabus needs to jump bodies in a hurry he can
roll E.A.C.S.S. If the roll is successful he jumps
immediately and can still roll initiative for the new
host body in the same round if not he needs a round to
adjust to his new vehicle.

Barnabus assumes the host body’s Speed stat and
associated skills.

Mind Skills
Ungeneral Education 40%, 
Ungeneral Education includes knowledge of astral fauna
Barnabus has dubbed Chakravores, psychopathological
disorders including schizophrenia and DID/MPD, and a
slew of ghost stories. 

Notice 45% 

Program Autoroutine Existence 47% 
This allows Barnabus to set up his personnel a fake
Soul stat equal to the sum of his Program Autoroutine
Existence roll. It also allows him give commands to
his already running host bodies. 

Pillage Memories 61%
Barnabus can plumb his host body for privy information
by rolling Pillage. He can try and use the host’s Mind
skills but fails if he rolls under 30.

Soul Skills
Charm 32% 

Lie 58%

Psychic Television Monitoring 59%
Psychic Television Monitoring allows Barnabus to
instantly gather any recent short-term memories and
current running viewings from a host. Although he has
to roll Elastic Astral Cord Sling Shot to “tune in” he
does not have leave his current host body.

Kwei Fu 42%
When Barnabus wants in he does not try to possess he
uses his spook karate. When he rolls Kwei Fu he does
hand-to-hand damage that is taken off the victims Soul
stat. Although not immediately dangerous, enough blows
will eventually tear away someone’s soul to spiritual
ribbons. The reduced Soul stat is the current one the
victim uses, although it does not lower any skills.

Aura Sight 90%

Au Naturale Camoflauge 3%
Barnabus has discovered that sometimes he can alter
facial muscle tone, voice patterns, and even
eye-colour if he concentrates long enough.

Madness Meter
Barnabus takes on the host’s notches in the madness
guages as unwanted baggage, But whatever the notches
are they will at least have two failed notches in
Violence and Helplessness.

Barnabus has very sketchy memories of what his life
was like and seeing those flashes-of-memories makes
him happy that they are sketchy. But whatever
forgotten trauma there is Barnabus has pieced together
that his death was not pleasant and involves his Fear
stimulus…

Barnabus is scrounging information on ghosts. He is
keen on how the other dead folk are able to
materialize.for long periods and not just in
happenstance split-second occasions.  



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