[Mage: The Awakening v1.9] Rules for Familiars

This post is Out of Character (OOC) 
Chronicle: Mage 2: The Dethroned Queen
Venue: Mage: The Awakening
Chronicle Storyteller: Jerad Sayler

These rules supplement Mage: The Awakening to expand upon Familiars and their use:

Mage II: Familiars & Familiar Merits

The Potent Familiar merit is no longer a Character Creation only merit.  Instead it must be purchased when the familiar merit is first purchased and can be bought multiple times to get Familiar specific XP that can be used to increase the Rank of the spirit.  This merit and associated experience costs represent the extra time, care and effort made to summon and bind a more powerful spirit to them.  Approval for taking this Merit more than once must be discussed with the Storyteller. 

Ranks: While it might be possible to strengthen a Familiar to Rank 5 and beyond, it is exceedingly unlikely to get a Rank 3 Familiar or higher it is also dangerous to the mage.  Being spiritually chained to a minor god would not be healthy and the chances of retaining free will also decrease.  At what point does the mage become the Familiar?

Familiars as Player or Player NPCs Characters:

Usually a spirit should never be played by a player, they are special tools scalable for use as a storyteller and usually can only change through growth but never can change their nature (through will).  However, the Storyteller may approve that a Player may roleplay his character’s familiar.  Familiars are linked to their masters but are not limited in distance which they can travel away from their master. 

The powerful binding and nearly indestructible link between the spirit and their master allows for some unusual properties.  First, the link between the Mage and Familiar also links this familiar to the Supernal. Magic quickens the spirit, allowing the Mage and Spirit to both feed off of Mana.  The Mana of a mage holds the same resonance as the Mana source and when it passes through the Mage it also gains the added flavor of the Mage’s personality and magical composition.  This allows familiars to be a bit more dynamic than a normal spirit would.  For instance, they can learn!

Familiars can not have Social Merits but can take advantage in some cases the External Social Merits of their master (Contacts, Allies, Retainers, Staff, etc).  If they possess at least close to human intelligence they may help develop or sustain the relationships represented by these merits. Utilizing these merits usually limits the Familiar to using ones that only interact with other spirits and supernatural sources.  These uses require Storyteller Approval.  If the Familiar is helping build Shared Merits like Sanctum: Security or Social Merits like Allies: Air Spirits, these should be purchased by the Familiar’s Master instead.  Any property or resources that a Familiar develops are really the property of the mage.

Ranks of Spirits increases when they cross the minimum total dots meets the threshold on the spirit hierarchy table in the Mage: The Awakening Corebook:

Rank                      Attribute Limit      Min Attr Points        Influence Limit          Essence Limit

1 (Squire/Lesser Gaffling)         5                      5                   1                              10

2 (Knight/Greater Gaffling)        7                      9                   2                              15

3 (Baron/Lesser Jaggling)         9                     15                  3                              20

4 (Count/Greater Jaggling)       12                    26                  4                              25

5 (Marquess/Lesser Incarnea)  15                    36                  5                              50

Ranking of Spirits is important.  If a Spirit outranks another they can easily inflict significant harm.  See rules in G-M Chronicle Corebook.

Improving Familiars takes the Mage’s own Experience Points.  Arcane Experience points can be spent only on Numina, Influences and Attributes.  If the familiar takes a central role in a story the player may reward experience points as if the character were present and acting where ever the familiar was and may split the experience points rewarded to the Familiar and Master.  If a character was not directly involved they may also opt to have their familiar retain all the experience points they gain. These modifiers also apply to Spirits and Ghosts of any kind.

-          Attribute Costs: Power, Finesse, and Resistance are increased with New Dots x 4 XP, this does not require Storyteller approval unless it automatically increases the Rank of the Spirit.  Arcane Experience points can be used to purchase these.

-          Influence Costs: Influences can be bought up to the Rank of the Spirit and are New Dots x 7 XP for each new influence but are limited in how many dots any one influence can have by their Rank.

-          Numina Costs:  Numina are special tools that allow an ST to represent varied powers of spirits and entities and are not rated based on their rarity or effectiveness.  Since they do not increase incrementally they have flat experience costs.  If a Familiar dedicates themselves to learning a lot of new tricks it is at the expense of increasing the spirits overall power instead.  Each Numen desired must be approved by the Storyteller on a case by case basis and the cost is presented on a case by case basis based on the guidance below:

o    Common Numina – These Numina tend to be like the ones in the Mage or G-M Corebooks that are common to most spirits and ghosts and have relatively weak and limited powers.  If such a power makes sense as part of something at is a Resonant for the Spirit it costs 5 Experience Points (usually justified by having a similarly-themed Influence).  If the power is opposite but still ST approved the spirits nature the cost is 7 Experience Points.  If the power is neither the base cost is 6 Experience Points.

o    Rare Numina – These are powers such as the bulk of the Numina described in the Geist, Werewolf and Mage Corebooks as well as the Book of Spirits and Predators.  The powers are moderate in strength and effect.  If said Numen is Resonant the spirits nature (usually justified by having a similarly-themed Influence) with then it costs 6 Experience Points, 8 Experience Points if it is against their nature but still ST approved, 7 Experience points if the power is neutral for the spirit.

o    Epic Numina – These are powers that are either extremely rare or very powerful and with lasting effects.  These are littered throughout The Book of Spirits, Predators, and random smatterings in many nWoD source books.  If said Numen is Resonant with the spirits nature (usually justified by having a similarly-themed Influence) with then it costs 7 Experience Points, 9 Experience Points if it is against their nature but still ST approved, 8 Experience points if the power is neutral for the spirit.  The ST must carefully decide if certain powerful and rare Numina should be allowed in order to maintain the themes of the Mage Chronicle and overall balance of the game.

o    Spell-Like Numina – Sometimes it makes sense for Spirits to gain powers similar to those of their masters, gaining some aspect of the Supernal transitively through the connection in the Mage and a Mage’s Arcana or Path may justify the Familiar getting abilities that mirror that.  Or sometimes it is just a matter something Resonant with the Spirit that the current books and systems really don’t have a Numina for.  First and foremost, all Spell-Like Numina must Resonant with a Spirit nature and cannot be purchased without that.  Spell-Like Numina usually just take the default effects of a spell with regards to duration and targeting and Numen that would require higher spell factor tables require more Experience cost to buy.   The ST has final say on whether certain powerful abilities can be bought at all.  Lastly, their costs vary based on the number of dots in an Arcanum needed to achieve the effect.

§  Numina Emulating 1 dot spells cost 6 Experience Points

§  Numina Emulating 2 dot spells cost 7 Experience Points

§  Numina Emulating 3 dot spells cost 8 Experience Points

§  Numina Emulating 4 dot spells cost 9 Experience Points

§  Numina Emulating 5 dot spells cost 10 Experience Points

Summoning & Binding a Familiar (Taken from Hunter: The Vigil “Witchfinders” page 183-185

Prerequisites for ritual (with no Arcana used): Gnosis O, Occult OO

A mage must research a Familiar binding spell, this can be done without the applicable Arcana. Many mages just use Spirit or Death magic to bind familiars to them more easily.  The ritual involves gathering items with sympathy between and representative of both the mage and the designed familiar.  For Ghosts this is usually their anchor and the Mage’s body is offered as the replacement anchor.  Without Death magic at least one anchor must be ritually burned.  While the sacrament/coorespondences burn the mage chants the True name (or at least one NAME) of the entity it wishes to bind. The mage then rolls Resolve + Occult + Gnosis as an extended action (each roll is 5 minutes) while the entity (if unwilling) rolls Resistance or Resolve + Composure.  The first one to net successes equal to the entities willpower dots wins.  To seal the bond the mage dedicates a permanent willpower dot or buys the appropriate Familiar Merit with experience points.

The main types of Familiars are:

1.       Supernal Companion from a Supernal Realm (Covered in Summoners)

2.       Infernal Familiars from Abbadon (Covered in Inferno) including Animals or Imps

3.       Ghost Familiars from the Twilight or the Underworld (Covered in Summoners)

4.       Geotic Familiars from Astral Planes (Covered in Grimorie of Grimories)

5.       Spirits from the Shadow (Covered in MtA Corebook) including Animals or Fetches

6.       Abyssal Familiars (Only approved under ST approval)

Familiar Inherent Traits (Adapted from HtV: "Witchfinders” page 183-185:

In addition to the Familiar creations rules in the sourcebooks, the following traits for familiars are also used.

- 1. Sympathetic Manifestation – (Incorporeal only) Incorporeal Familiars can always “touch” their master even when in Twilight.  They must be close enough to do so.  Also, while a Incorporeal Familiar must manifest to use its Numina it can freely use its Numina on the Master over any distance without materializing at all.

-  2. Numina: Innocuous – (Corporeal Only) Anyone but its bonded mage suffers a –2 penalty on perception rolls

- 3. Familiar Death/Destruction – (All Familiars) If the corporeal familiar is killed or the incorporeal familiar completely destroyed (no corpus, no essence/mana, and the mage didn’t transfer any mana/essence over in time.  The mage loses a Permanent willpower dot to represent the loss of part of the self and that strong spiritual connection.  While the mage does not have to re-buy the familiar merits (Sanctity or Merits or sold back for full xp) the mage will have to perform a new ritual of binding and get a new familiar.

- 4. Twilight Slumber – (Incorporeal only) – When not manifest or if the familiar runs out of Essence/Mana but has Corpus it goes into a slumber, demanifesting into a very haze about the mage in Twilight.  It is not banished across the Guantlet as a normal spirit would so long as the familiar bond exists and only goes into the Shadow using Numina or other methods.

- 5. Empathic Link – (All Familiars) Embodied familiars don’t communicate all that well (most of the time they lack the proper equipment) but the Master and Familiar can always tell how the other is feeling and when they take emotional, physical or spiritual harm.

- 6. Master’s Protection (All Familiars) – A familiar gains the Mage’s Gnosis as an armor trait to protect it from harm.  It also rolls Gnosis to resist or contest magical or supernatural effects cast against it.  No spell or power can make it turn against its master however… at least not directly.  It is part of its nature.

- 7. Manifestation Engine – (Incorporeal only) the familiar can always manifest within sensory range of its master with no roll required.

- 8. Magical Synergy (All Familiars) – Master and familiar are a team, anytime the master is ritually casting a spell and can physically touch their familiar throughout the casting, the familiar confers a +2 bonus to the casting.  This bonus is a Yatra of which the total bonus for spell components does not exceed +5.

- 9. Source Transfer – (All Familiars) – masters can transfer mana/essence or other power source between they and their familiar as a reflexive action but only up to the total mana usable per turn (so in combat these transfers take time).  Because of the tight bond between the master and their familiar the transfer works back and forth with a 1:1 ratio.

- 10. Sensory Sympathetic Connection – (All Familiars) – Over any distance the familiar’s master retains a sympathetic connection to the sensory input of the familiar as if they were physically present at that location.  The master also has an perfect sympathetic connection to its familiar, making it a target for enemies or a superlative spy since the mage can cast its Sympathetic magics through its familiar.  To clarify, the mage still has to cast such spells sympathetically but takes no penalty in doing so due to the strength of the connection.  Also, by spending a willpower point the mage can switch their perceptions to their familiar’s without using a spell.  The switch only lasts as long as the mage can concentrate on it.  With the master’s permission the familiar can also spend a willpower point to see through the master without a magical effect.  Familiars can use their numina to affect the master even when not locally present.

- 11, Perfect Understanding – (All Familiars) Commands issued from the master’s lips or mind (incorporeal) the familiar always understands what the orders given are within its intelligence (which is almost always human-level or better).  Whether or not they perfectly obey is another matter entirely.  This understanding crosses all language boundaries and can only be disrupted if the master doesn’t know what he is saying or thinking (that would be a trick).

-  12. Anchored – (Incorporeal Only) Incorporeal entities have at least one Anchor, their Master, but have no limit on how far away they can manifest or travel from the mage.

References:

1.       God-Machine Chronicle “Ephemeral Beings” pg 215+ (should be your first stop for rules)

2.       Mage: The Awakening “Spirits” pg 317-322

3.       Mage: The Awakening “Familiar Merit” pg 82-83

4.       Mage: The Awakening “Spirit 3: Familiar Pact” pg 249

5.       Book of Spirits “Spirit Creation” pg 130+

6.       Summers “Ghost Familiar Merit” pg 39 (We allow up to 5 dots, not limited by 3 dot)

7.       Grimoire or Grimoires “Goetic Familiar Merit” pg 96

8.       Tome of the Watchtowers “Additional Familiars” pg 154

9.       Magical Traditions “Temp Familiars Lu Merit” pg 54

10.       Free Council “Manifestation Machine  Merit” pg 131

11        Tome of the Watchtowers “Potent Familiar Merit” pg 154

12.      Summoners “Supernal Companion Merit” pg 186
13.    Witches’ Familiars - Hunter: The Vigil “Witchfinders” page 183-185 (utilized above only)

14.        Inferno “Animal Familiar Merit” pg 125 (Can adapt this to a Spirit in an animal version)

15.        Inferno “Infernal Demon Imp Familiar Merit” pg 125 (ST approval)

16.         Inferno “Twilight Infernal Demon Imp Familiar Merit” pg 126

Here is a table to export into your excel character sheets.  Hope you enjoy using some of these, or chronicle will be using all of them now.

Inherent Traits of Familiars:
Name:	Effect:
Empathic Link	Empathic Link – (All Familiars) Embodied familiars don’t communicate all that well (most of the time they lack the proper equipment) but the Master and Familiar can always tell how the other is feeling and when they take emotional, physical or spiritual harm
Sympathetic Manifestation	Sympathetic Manifestation – (Incorporeal only) Incorporeal Familiars can always “touch” their master even when in Twilight.  They must be close enough to do so.  Also, while a Incorporeal Familiar must manifest to use its Numina it can freely use its Numina on the Master over any distance without materializing at all.
Innocuous	Numina: Innocuous – (Corporeal Only) Anyone but its bonded mage suffers a –2 penalty on perception rolls. Embodied familiars get this Numen as a freebie
Death/Destruction of Familiar	Familiar Death/Destruction – (All Familiars) If the corporeal familiar is killed or the incorporeal familiar completely destroyed (no corpus, no essence/mana, and the mage didn’t transfer any mana/essence over in time.  The mage loses a Permanent willpower dot to represent the loss of part of the self and that strong spiritual connection.  While the mage does not have to re-buy the familiar mertis (Sanctity or Merits or sold back for full xp) the mage will have to perform a new ritual of binding and get a new familiar.
Twlight Slumber	Twilight Slumber – (Incorporeal only) – When not manifest or if the familiar runs out of Essence/Mana but has Corpus it goes into a slumber, demanifesting into a very haze about the mage in Twilight.  It is not banished across the Guantlet as a normal spirit would so long as the familiar bond exists and only goes into the Shadow using Numina or other methods.
Master's Protection	Master’s Protection (All Familiars) – A familiar gains the Mage’s Gnosis as an armor trait to protect it from harm.  It also rolls Gnosis to resist or contest magical or supernatural effects cast against it.  No spell or power can make it turn against its master however… at least not directly.  It is part of its nature.
Manifestation Engine	Manifestation Engine – (Incorporeal only) the familiar can always manifest within sensory range of its master with no roll required.
Magical Synergy	Magical Synergy (All Familiars) – Master and familiar are a team, anytime the master is ritually casting a spell and can physically touch their familiar throughout the casting, the familiar confers a +2 bonus to the casting.  This bonus is a Yatra of which the total bonus for spell components does not exceed +5.
Source Transfer	Source Transfer – (All Familiars) – masters can transfer mana/essence or other power source between they and their familiar as a reflexive action but only up to the total mana usable per turn (so in combat these transfers take time).  Because of the tight bond between the master and their familiar the transfer works back and forth with a 1:1 ratio.
Through the Eyes	Sensory Sympathetic Connection – (All Familiars) – Over any distance the familiar’s master retains a sympathetic connection to the sensory input of the familiar as if they were physically present at that location.  The master also has an perfect sympathetic connection to its familiar, making it a target for enemies or a superlative spy since the mage can cast its Sympathetic magics through its familiar.  To clarify, the mage still has to cast such spells sympathetically but takes no penalty in doing so due to the strength of the connection.  Also, by spending a willpower point the mage can switch their perceptions to their familiar’s without using a spell.  The switch only lasts as long as the mage can concentrate on it.  With the master’s permission the familiar can also spend a willpower point to see through the master without a magical effect.  Familiars can use their numina to affect the master even when not locally present.
Anchored to Master	Anchored – (Incorporeal Only) Incorporeal entities have at least one Anchor, their Master, but have no limit on how far away they can manifest or travel from the mage.

Ashes to Ashes: Remembering Krem (Part 6/6)

Retold by LoreKeeper Casstiel of the Bridge of Souls on 27 December 2013

Regarding the events on 26 July 2008
Genius Territorialiss at the ghost town of Krem, North Dakota

We waited a subjectively long time crouched behind our two cars and whispered Prodigy up to present events.  Then Prodigy’s car died.  We stopped caring about the shooter because of our outrage.  We thought it was the ghosts killing the engine, frying the celluloid like in War of the Worlds.  I used to watch too many movies.   No it turned out that the old Thunderbird had caught a couple bullets to the engine um hoses or whatever (I’m not a mechanic) and was leaking fluids all over the ground.  Makes sense now, guy was shooting at the lights.

Together about all we came up with was to back track up the road without any light, slowly feeling our way around in the dark till we could get back on the main gravel road and out of ghostville.  That was fun… guns and ghosts and add some pitch darkness and your ready to have a mental breakdown.  We managed, we almost ran into the barbed wire fence on the way out.  The moon came out, Luna was being kind to us I guess.  Things were going well and then we realized Loudon was gone.  Well not gone precisely but way off to the side and heading away from us like he owned the place.  We didn’t want to start calling after him for fear of giving away our position.  So what choice did we have to follow?

Took us over a mile to catch up to him and then he wouldn’t stop.  He was being compelled by the Sheriff and he plunged into the Babyshead Mine.  We went after him, ready to use force when some other ghost, the town would be my guess now, pushed Prodigy.  Prodigy and Loudon started fighting like they were going to kill each other with their bare hands.  Prodigy took him to the ground where he was strongest but Loudon was a lean and slippery son of a bitch.  This turned into a dog-pile just inside the first bend of the mine as we tried to wrestle them off each other, our flashlights left streaking light across the passage and our struggling shadows dancing on the wall.

Someone kicked one of our lights off to the side as tempers cooled and as a result we found a shallow grave of a girl.  Alma Kruckenberg would be our guess, we hadn’t seen her buried in the graveyard and when they lynched her they must have dumped her in here.  She was all bones and dried beetles and a straggle of black hair.  But she wasn’t a priority right now.  If we got out of the mine without getting pushed down a shaft by her ghost we could always come back during the light of day and give her a proper burial.  Didn’t that help put ghosts at rest?

As we worked our way back out of the Babyshead mine we noticed some shuffling and falling dirt from the top lip of the cave.  It seems that our human sniper was staging an ambush.   He had taken up a position alongside the baby head shaped rock above the mine, the same stone that gave it its creepy-ass name.

With very little coordination above the gentlest whisper we came up with our first tactic and executed it.  First time the Horsemen were officially on the clock.  We approached the mouth of the cave and began talking loudly, trying to sound confident and perhaps intimidating.  I tried to sound like the deeper baritone of my father.  We took off from the lip at a sprint, leaving only Nergal behind.  At the same time we chucked our flashlights out into the darkness in opposite directions as far as we could.  Donnie started shooting blinding and we dove for cover around the larger rocks and shooting back.  We were very lucky that no one got shot, especially Creepy.

Creepy in his act of stealthy stealthy creepitude that is his namesake hung back and then climbed silently up around the cave mouth.  How he did it without rustling the gravel and rocks around the sides of the hill were beyond me.  He dived on the man and struggled for control of the weapon.  Donnie broke away but kept his gun, swiveling it around at us as we closed in to help our friend.

The rifle shot was deafening, and I frozen in stark terror that one of my friends had a hole in them.  But the only one who was bleeding was Donnie.  I recovered my flashlight, no gun after all, and trained it onto his dirty white wife-beater.  Prodigy had clipped him with the shotgun, carefully aimed to avoid Nergal (still way too risky for my liking, then again Prodigy was always kinda overconfident.

But Nergal had already delivered the coup de grace when he saw there was no other choice.  Stabbed him in the liver with his knife.  Donnie got to rant with manic intensity about his calling being to protect the town and keep people from snooping around.  The guy was clearly haunted, nightmares calling him back here again and again.  He was the Sheriff’s blood after all, blood calls to blood no matter how cold it gets.

We tried to save him but he kept trying to bash us with a rock or kick at us when we tried to apply pressure to the wound.  He didn’t make it and maybe that was the peace we could give him.  Really fucked up that our first hunt we killed a mostly innocent-ish man.  That is why I don’t count it as our first hunt, that was SpearFinger… maybe the run in with Ghosts at my dad’s mansion in the Black Hills haunted by James Magnus but only me, John, and two of my college friends (Kaity and Louis Bennett) were there.  And mostly we just escaped that one.

We talked about it; this whole business would be too hard to explain.  We dragged him into the mine and dropped him into a shaft.  Can’t say I was proud of this.  We also collected up Alma’s remains in one of our spring jackets.  The mine entrance collapsed with some help, that fucking babyhead boulder just needed five people pushing on it at once.

A little ways back on the road we found Donnie’s shitty red truck.  Couple more guns, id, etc.  You could see that he had spent a lot of time camped out near Krem, keeping people out or keeping the dead from escaping.  Ironically we were sort of working for the Sheriff just like Donnie, trying to right things a little.  For Donnie something must have gotten lost in ghostly translation, we were intruders threatening to build the town back up to its former glory.  Helping the Sheriff with Alma, the reverend, and with himself was something we decided to do after reading his journal and talking it over as our nerves began to settle.

No more manifestations out this far, maybe too far from Krem proper.  We decided to go right back through.  As Hell’s Bells began tolling and the reddish light of dawn could be imaged on the horizon we arrived back at Krem to try to something.  We buried Alma near the other Kruckenberg plot in the graveyard.  No time for six foot deep but there were tools in the back of Donnie’s rusted out truck.  We said all the prayers and verses we could remember and blessed her with the bible and the finger bone.  I thought I felt something maybe.  Jittery and exhausted mostly.

Finally a glimmer of inspiration.  Part of this so called curse could have been caused by unfinished business (like the live-action Casper movie).  When Reverend Janssen was buried outside of hallowed ground it could have caused him to come back, or for the curse of the town to fester.  Same with the other option, Alma being lynched as a witch or demon and being buried in the mine that no longer produced coal.  So we also blessed and did our best to sanctify the grave of Reverend Heio Janssen.  We also went back and set the Sheriff’s 5-shot on the Kruckenberg family plot stone.

As we drove away in our stolen truck the sun rose and in the rear-view I could see the outline of the Sheriff vanishing into thin air next to the gun and headstone.  Without magic you never really know if you succeed and sometimes magic doesn’t give you the answers you seek either.  We left there feeling somehow successful even know we didn’t know if we got rid of a single ghost, just killed a man and buried him in a mineshaft.  It felt right somehow, not what happened to Donnie, what we did to try to break the curse.

We ditched the truck in the lake and snuck back into the trailer, crawled into the sleeping bags in the living room in time for the grandparents to get up and start making coffee.  The boys split and I took a shower, checked my bandages.  I still don’t know if my grandparents noticed anything suspicious about my birthday that year.

The following day was logistics, I took my car and snuck over to the clinic in Beulah.  On the way I called my mom and told her I had been bitten by a mouse at the house and was stopping in to get checked out just in case.  That made a pretty good cover and explained paperwork.  John had appeared at the lake over night but that was his way.  The boys car pooled their remaining car to town and spent the better part of the day getting their cars back…”

I finish my drink, and look at everyone as if I had been in a daze, gauging responses.

Ashes to Ashes: Remembering Krem (Part 5/6)

Retold by LoreKeeper Casstiel of the Bridge of Souls on 27 December 2013

Regarding the events on 26 July 2008
Genius Territorialiss at the ghost town of Krem, North Dakota

“Seemed like a simple enough of a thing.  Surely you have thought about it while out driving at night.  If I break down here I will just head to that farm and someone will let me use the phone and call for help.  North Dakota is full of nice people and accommodating farmers.  The hardest step we took was to get out of the car after watching our first ghostly manifestations.

We did a countdown and then all lunged out of the car.  I refused to sweep my vision up the street where the sheriff had been and hoped the barbed wire fence to our right.  I remember if having four thick strands and could only be crawled over, not compressed by the cheap, thin, spread out shit.  I think at least one of us got caught on the wire because of trying to move quickly away from this haunted place.  After that bit of tom-foolery we wised up and didn’t tear across the field in a dead sprint but at more of a speed walk.  Things were still way too damn quiet around us and all squealing pigs near the farm, Jeez were they slaughtering them or what?

We got to within maybe 300 yards of the thick slabs of wood that made up the inner barnyard when the lights went out.  All that warm light from the farm faded like an afterimage on my retinas.  The squealing stopped too and then the flashlights flickered.  When our flashlights came back up we saw that the farm was nothing but abandoned buildings, much like those gray/black farmsteads you see falling down on the side of the road, full of rot and boards dry and white as bleached bones in the unforgiving sun.  This house looked black.

And then, popping up in our fucking faces was the spectral visage of the pig farmer… also the first time we got that fucking ghost “BOO!” power used on us.  I only saw him for a second but I saw the translucent rotund reflection of a man with empty eyes and a slack-jawed mouth in coveralls.  The noise that man made still chills me.  Worse yet, as I turned and ran away screaming with my future Cabalmates I could hear the hungry squeals of approaching pigs.  We all ran, we all screamed, no shame in it.

What there was shame in was that if we would have been a little smarter we would have seen how the town was herding us back to its territory.  Sure, new property and new ghost but this was the spirit of a place and all the horror that it had been a part of.  Also the pig farmer had a way with animals… from the howlers to the hunters.  We learned a lot in that single night.

As we sprinted and tripped our way back to the car with slashed tires we began to see a new dread horror.  Pairs of faintly glowing red eyes reflecting back the gloomy moonlight filtering down, dozens of them.

You see, in the last couple decades coyotes had been a growing menace in the northern plains.  Filling in the niche and picking up where the Rocky Mountain wolves left off they had become much more aggressive.  Even that year there were stories circulating about cattle mutilations and super packs forming and terrorizing cattle farmers.

I’m pretty sure coyotes aren’t supposed to have red eyes, these things were being pushed, most likely by the Pig Farmer.  That is my theory at least.  They might have just been rabid.  A dozen or more of the mangy scavengers surrounded us.  We tried to scare them off at first but they wouldn’t back down.  Then they began lunging in to the close sweeps of our flashlights and trying to take bites out of us.  I was terrified and now terrified of the subtle fear of catching rabies.  That is what they say isn’t it?  If any wild animal is acting overly aggressive and coming after people you need to be worried about rabies.  So with our tiny armament we began to shoot them, those of us without a fire arm kept trying to blind with our lights, make lots of noise and slash with pocket knives.  It was an impotent fight on both sides except for a few good shots.  In the end they did make us pay for it.  A few of us took nasty ragged bites.  I got the worst of it, they managed to trip me up and pounce on me, biting me across my legs in arms.  I was limping bad after that, and we had to bandage a few of the bites that wouldn’t stop bleeding right away.  I am pretty sure that is when my fear of being mauled to death by canids started.  We killed maybe two and the rest finally took off.

We got back to the car, climbed back into our zone of safety and got patched up.  Surprisingly Kairos finally got a signal on his cell phone.  This, I feel, reinforces the possibility that we were being jammed supernaturally.  Ghosts have displayed a prepotency to tamper or transmit with short wave radio communications.  If not from our occult reading, the Number Station Operators we ran into a year and a day ago attests to this capability.  Kairos called the one guy we knew who would not only find us but show up no matter what hour of the night ready to kick ass.  Before the call cut off Ethen managed to relay our general location and navigation to John (Prodigy).  John of course hopped into his Thunderbird and hit up his Grandparents the Talleys to get another Deer Rifle and a shot gun.  On future operations we usually leaned on our friend Cole Rohde for his dad’s home fucking armory with a few choice pieces.  Gods rest his mother Cindy, killed by the SpearFinger but I digress.

We waited and waited for John to find us and get us the fuck out of here.  Never mind we would all have to cram into the front or in the speaker-filled bucket seats.  While we waited we had our first huntersque planning session while Nergal kept close watch of the surrounding landscape.  We walked through all our speculations and contingency plans, talking about all this weird shit had a way of making me feel better and worse at the same time.  We turned on the car just to get some radio but creepy shit started coming through the static.  I think Loudon accidentally turned on his headlights for a second because before he killed them I could swear I saw young woman in white just out of the range of the highbeams.

This is where Kairos’s Catholic background came in handy.  That vault coffin looking thing sticking out of the ground near the church was a reliquary, when a church was christened and blessed its foundation or premises usually had a relic.  A relic was something associated with a saint, even if it was derived through transferring the holy energy via touch.  Sometimes these included a lock of hair or bit of bone.  There seemed like a strong possibility that Prodigy would take a long while to find us, maybe dawn, and the safety of the car was an illusion.  So we decided to try to find something useful to ward off evil from the Church.  It beat sitting in the car waiting for one to pop into the back seat like the girl from the Ring or something.

We proceeded as a group back down the road to the church.  When we went through the front door again I kept seeing the half imaged form of Father Janssen.  We managed to pry the reliquary open.  Turns out that when the town was cursed some of the congregation tried to dig up the reliquary and bail with all the holy stuff but must have taken off hastily before succeeding.  In the vault was a wrapped bit of lily white linen with a tiny brown finger bone.   In the half-collapsed lower level we helped each down and also found a German bible (which I keep to this day in the library), a part of a rosary.  These small trinkets combined with the Sheriff’s Bible with no cover made four potential holy items.  But how would we know if it would affect these apparitions?  I had read that sometimes it was the faith that powered these weapons rather than the items themselves.  I think part of me still felt like all this was our imaginations gone wild into a form of mass hysteria but I was slowly coming out of the fugue in realization that we were not messing around here.  I would have rather had a gun than a bible at that point, the coyote bites were real enough and hurt like a mother.”  Casstiel rolls down his left sleeve and shows a scar on the inside of his left forearm and then rolls up one leg of his jeans on the right ride to show a tight mesh of white scars along the right calf.  “See?”

“Kairos almost broke his neck when, while climbing back up the slick stone floor of the collapsed church the Reverend appeared.  He slowly became opaque a few feet from me and I was struck dumb with the sight of the ghost.  Tall a thin like Ichabod Crane he had this one polio-stricken arm (like the guys hand from Scary Movie 2, sorry I try to joke about stuff that scares me).  They didn’t have the cure back then you know?  His face was pulled into a tight rictus and he began shrieking what I could only parse as religious verse about fire and brimstone.  I felt a tingle on the book I held in my hands.  I couldn’t read German, what are you supposed to do with a blessed relic anyway?  Without thinking I fucking hit him with the book as hard as I could.  It flared up in a flash of phosphorous and the priest discorporated like a popped flaming balloon (creepy white eyes and all).”

That’s when I saw Loudon pointing that corroded 5-shot revolver at where the priest had been, and I felt cold seeing the Sheriff’s features overlain for the shortest flash over his own.  Maybe he drove the priest off with the help of the Sheriff.  I was starting to feel like we were fleshy play actors for these spooks.  He checked up the road and saw the sweep of headlights. Prodigy had come in record time.

We ran up to the car hollering in terror and relief, glancing behind us to see if we were being chased by ghosts.  We had nearly reached the Thunderbird when shit got deadly.  John was leaning on his open driver’s side door and making some arrogant remark about how awesome he was.  And man the guy definitely got props for this, I had never been so happy to see the gapped grin.  Just then came a sound of a bug zipping by, a bit of displaced air over the hood of the card.  Then the boom followed it, the sound of a rifle shot.  We were getting shot at!  All these ghosts around and it had been a man who slashed our tires, the same guy who was sniping at us now.  John ducked behind his engine block and started rooting around to get his trunk (where the guns were) open.  Luckily he was on the far side of the shots.  Sounded like he was far off whoever it was.  Loudon and Kairos made it to the car on the wrong side.  Loudon jumped over the trunk (closing it again) and Kairos ninja’d into back somehow without opening the door (jumped through the window like a Mexican jumping bean).  I and Nergal weren’t there yet and dove into the slight ditch on the far side of the street opposite the shots.

When I say slight I mean like the road maybe gave us about a foot of wiggle room.  We had to low crawl the rest of the way.  John was trying to get into the trunk without getting his head blown off and it wasn’t going well.  We should have cut the lights.  In retrospect we didn’t want to plunge ourselves into total darkness or resort to handheld flashlights which would be like putting giant bull’s eyes into our hands.  When we caught up to Donnie Kruckenberg all nice close and personal like we discovered that he hadn’t had any cool night vision goggles like Grampa Schwindt, he had simply been taking pot-shots at our flashlight beams we had been using all over the center of Krem.

My heart was thudding in my chest so hard it hurt; I was going to be suffering from adrenal fatigue after this.  Little did we at the time that I only had one kidney, and therefore one adrenal gland, I can’t help but remain calmer than others in any situation.  The gland was working fine by itself though.  It is nerve wracking trying to peek out into the darkness and not knowing whether or not you’re about to catch a 30 odd Six round to the eyeball.  I remember sweating and panting into the grass.

Prodigy did manage to get the deer rifle, even spotted a muzzle flash and through some back.  That allowed Nergal to throw down some suppressing fire.  I just held up my bible lamely to try to block the top of my head from rising above the ditch level.

The shooting stopped as soon as we started firing back.  Donnie hadn’t been counting on that.  Chances are he only took seven shots, the max you can get in one of those 30-30s he was using.  But it felt like a firefight.  Mage Armor would have been swell.

Ashes to Ashes: Remembering Krem (Part 4/6)

Ashes to Ashes: Remembering Krem (Part 4)
Retold by LoreKeeper Casstiel of the Bridge of Souls on 27 December 2013
Regarding the events on 26 July 2008
Genius Territorialiss at the ghost town of Krem, North Dakota

After that, things seemed to become surreal; it must have been the stress and shock.  We had reached some kind of breaking point and each one of us dealt with it in our own way.  It drove an eternal bond between us, this place where the Horsemen had rode, and maybe that is why later we Awakened and decided to espouse and contrast their legacy, even though at the time we didn’t know it.

Like I said, we never considered a human was lurking around slashing tires.  After seeing those specters we were down the rabbit hole and anything could be stretched to be blamed on the ghosts.  Any mundane misfortune that followed was seen through the paranoid lens of hysteria.

Kairos fiddled with his phone, trying to get a signal.  We turned on our flashlights and leafed through the journal. Turns out it was the final legacy of John Kruckenberg, the town Sheriff and we quickly recognized as the shooter ghost.  He had made his final journal entry before strangling his wife and putting a bullet through the top of his head.  It filled in some of the pieces, over time I painted a picture of the reasons for the events that followed.

The things we saw were not ghosts I later discovered in my occult studies, these were illusions created by the cursed terrirtorialiss of the town. See I believe now that there ere only two ghosts in what was left of Krem.  The Sheriff Kruckenberg and the town itself.  Either the undying ameba of the town itself or a violent joining of the guilty townsfolk as they died.  The ghost of the town was a hurt thing that wanted to continue to harm anyone who crossed its path.  It either wanted to be put to rest or return to its former glory.  Sheriff tried to keep it in check as the town crumbled around him.  By his actions, he wanted the place put to rest and the curse finally ended.  They were two forces in counterweight, tied together by fate and a necromantic bond.

You see, the bad luck started when the North Dakotans of Krem settled along the railroad (the same unused track that made up that bridge).  They also started to mine after spotting coal in a nearby cave.  The Babyshead Coal Mine was a place of hearth for the town, coal mining for heat in the harse winters.  But they found something in the earth, something akin to the Darkness That Thirsts in the Bakken Oil formation.  Maybe this darkness was related to Nergal’s Acamoth and maybe not.  A rock that looked like a carved baby’s head set just above the cave’s mouth.  Creepy thing.  This small token of Native American power was created from the heart of the underground and left there.  The miners started mining where Mandan Indians had explored and dug first.

The Babyhead mine passed its darkness on to 16 year old maid, Alma Kruckenberg, the Sheriff’s daughter.  John Kruckenberg went to the church to have Lutheran Reverend Heio Janssen perform the holy rights of Exorcism.  The priest was a fool and the darkness of this dark force passed on to him.  Demonic possession, maybe a spirit, an Infernal, or even something associated with the Gentlemen or other Abyssal entity.  The Priest raped her, being driven by this evil, became pregnant.  The exorcism was a failure.  In fact the force stayed with him.  He tried to cover up Alama’s pregnancy by poisoning her.  After two doses she died in a bed in the priest’s house and the reverend tried to burn down his house to cover it up… but the Sheriff was relentless.

He later claimed he didn’t know why he did it, said he was “driven by the devil.” Heio was arrested and charged with murder after he tried to cover up what he did.  It wasn’t until John placed the burned body of Alma and the unborn baby that he confessed what he did.  This is where the Reverand’s story ended.  He was left to himself to rot in North Dakota jail system for ten years until he killed himself in prison 10 years after the murder.  He tried to live a life of penance but was tormented by his or other inner demons.

The preacher charged and incarcerated the town never returned to normal.  Before he was sent from Krem there was a riotous outcry from the Krem population.  There was no way that Reverand Janssen could have done such a thing.

But then Alma came back, before the sheriff, and he kept it a secret.  Not very well though.

The town went into decline and sightings of the resurrected Alma fueled the hysteria and bedlam to take root.  Eventually the town was so desperate that they lynched young Alma (they recognized her as the center of this curse) and hung her from the railroad bridge and buried her in the Babyshead Coal Mine.  Before she was pushed over the side with the noose around her neck she vomited a gout of flies and planted her curse upon the town with her death cry.  Soon after the railroad company sent notice that the tracks would be moved.  The grieving sheriff John Kruckenberg watched Krem descend into ruination as the curse of the horsemen descended upon the town.  A massive dust storm and plague of locust tormented the farmers there, the usual badness spoken in hushed whispers of gossiping teenagers keeping up the oral tradition that the older folk long forgot.

The Sheriff’s mounting hate and need for revenge was great and when things got their worst he gunned downed the townsfolk in the street.  The Sheriff tried to keep his own version of order but was eventually driven into his jailhouse by rioters.  The place was lit on fire by maniac rioters and he put a bullet through the top of his head to escape the flames forever.  No doubt to find the flames of hell instead.

Then again, maybe there was no curse and no dark force.  Only the evil of men and the ghosts created by their violence.  We assumed that there was actually a curse and the Sheriff certainly collaborated that.  But maybe this was a century old witch hunt.  Maybe the town’s spirit or ghost is what awoke first and started pushing people.  Maybe it broke all its toys.  Perhaps we should take another trip to Krem and ensure that the place is now silent.  With our Awakened eyes we could finally put the pieced together.  I know that Indra recently took a visit there with Kairos and Nergal.  They took auditory readings and dosing that suggested that the Genus Territorialiss or ghost of the town was now slumbering or gone forever.

Those that had already moved away returned to a desolated town but they took the wood and useable materials with them.  The Kruckenberg family of cousins and relatives still flourishes for one thing.  Perhaps this is why Beulah is the site of a peculiar darkness tied to the coal mining and oil production of the region.  Perhaps the Hellmouth is a dumping ground for unusable supplies from Krem or the like The curse was distributed but the core of the town remained and the Sheriff forever repeating his actions to prevent and destroy the darkness that took his daughter’s life.

The journal was bad enough, a haunting all its own when we read from the back moving backwards in chronological entries, but the old corroded revolver was even worse.  Loudon held it, and was plagued by urges and nightmare imagery.  As for as intelligence goes it was gold but even through it helped provide context for the hauntings it was terrifying.  I kept worrying that somehow the revolver would work, the sliding chamber would not open but perhaps there were four bullets left and ready.  Maybe the Sheriff would push him to rampage on us.  By the time we took it away from him our trip was almost done.

We didn’t get a signal but we again spotted the nearby farm and welcoming lights…

Ashes to Ashes - Remembering Krem (Part 3/6)

Ashes to Ashes: Remembering Krem (Part 3)
Retold by LoreKeeper Casstiel of the Bridge of Souls on 27 December 2013

Regarding the events on 26 July 2008

In one of the burned structures Nergal spot a small unburnt bolt-hole.  One we found the seams under all the debris and plant matter we just had to find some hard implements to pry it up.  Inside was a half-burnt bible with no cover, a worn leather journal with dry yellowed pages, and a five-shot revolver.  Now here was something!  We hung onto these items and took a quick glance through the journal and its spidery cursive.  Hard to tell what was written, there was a lot to read there and in the poor lighting conditions it was better to wait.

To the West as we proceeded down the road we could see off to our left a railroad bridge over a ravine.  That was no doubt where the stories about the hanged girl came from.  The one who was raped or possessed and then driven into the arms of death.  Maybe she had been lynched.  But it was just a bridge and we had no intention of crossing all the way over there to check it out.  We wouldn’t be able to substantiate anything anyway.

Heading down the dirt road away from our parked car about a quarter mile was the church.  Perhaps with the curse on they wouldn’t dare disassemble the closest holy place.  It was the typical country fashion, steepled and white.  Weather and ruin had not been kind to it.  The ceiling had collapsed and water running under the building broke through the foundation.  The floor of the old church was perilously rotten, broken into a basement of sharp rocks.  We never did anything but look into the empty front door.  It was way too dangerous to go inside and the whole small structure sagged off-kilter.  A hole gaped in the lower back side below the basement line and scattered bricks down the hill-side.  Jutting out of the right corner stone of the church was a casket sized vault.  It legitimately looked like a coffin.  Later we figured out what it was.

The hill sloped down slightly past the church.  Directly behind the church and next to the curving road was a small cemetery.  53 headstones, all with German names and epitaphs.  Now I was getting a little creeped out.  The hair on the back of my neck prickled.  A lone grave stood on the far side of this little graveyard, on the lee of the decaying fence line.  It was by itself and outside the bounds of hallowed ground.  Oh my God the stories were true!  I waited for the gang to catch up with me, every nerve ending on edge as I stood stock still in the middle of the rutted road.

Once we were lined up like the gang from the Wizard of Oz we approached to headstone and illuminated its face without flashlights.  The headstone was also in German, Heio Janssen, 1890-1946, below that was the epitaph. My ex-wife had been told by friends of friends what was on the coffin, so her friends had been here.  She could speak German and while I couldn’t the words made me remember what it meant:

Das ist meine Wahl (This is my Choice)

Dies ist mein Heil (This is my Salvation)

I pulled out my cellphone to take a picture but the stupid thing froze and I had to reset it.  Nergal pulled out his phone and it started beeping at him.  I was getting kind of weirded out, it was too perfect, too much like the start of a horror movie and I was in denial.  After all, nothing happens in Beulah North Dakota, bad things only happen to dumb city folk.

Our hackles went up after that, heebie jeebies in full swing.  Despite this we managed a very brief glance over some of the other headstones.  Many of them had the year 1938 or 1939 on them… the last year mentioned… 30 or so of them!  Too much death and in a horrible way it tracked, Beulah celebrated its centennial in the summer of 2014.  When I crossed the boundary of the bone yard I stepped on a cold spot, like the air of the little depression of dried grass was somehow below a thermocline.  My chest felt tight and I became dizzy, my forehead broke out into perspiration and the heat of the start of a fever radiated out from me.  The others looked sick.  It was time to leave.

As we hurried back, flashlights sweeping as we jogged.  Kairos said he got a whiff of decay near the graves that made him want to vomit. Imagination and darkness were perhaps starting to work against us.  Nevertheless I felt like I was getting a cold and snot was running down the back of my throat, chest heaving.

In the distance to the east we could see some kind of farmstead, maybe a mile and a half away across the open wild prairie.  I don’t remember seeing it before but maybe it was because I was so distracted by the immediacy of the ghost town we found.  A wooden fence lined the barn area and I could hear the squealing of pigs that made me stop in my tracks and look to my friends to confirm they heard it to.  One of the creepiest sounds I ever heard was the squealing of pigs in the middle of the night.  Between the singing coyotes to the Northwest, the pig farm to the East and the bugs making racket it was a loud night,

We got back to the car, it slumped to one side.  All four tires were flat.  Loudon thought maybe we had drove over some sharp rocks.  Then we saw the slashes and puncture marks in the sides of the tires.  The darkness of night pressed in all around and I felt as if we were not alone.  Who or what had done this? 

We climbed in and locked the doors.  This was absurd.  We were really lost and trapped.  We sat back in the darkness of the car with the door locked and tried to dial out for help.  Naturally such an off-the-beaten path wouldn’t have any reception (and in the last 10 years cell phone towers have developed nicely, reducing these moments).  Once again, too perfect, it was almost funny.  The imagination and logic were painting a picture for me and they were starting to match.  But the acts of the supernatural at work here were still subtle enough to dismiss.  Nevertheless it never occurred to me that a man in the night had flattened them.

I sat back in the back seat, fear feeding off of the darkness.  Then we stopped our chatter without prompting.  Something had changed and it took a little while to figure out what it was… the insects had ceased their nightly noise.  In fact there seemed to be no noise coming from the outside, no noise but for our breathing in this small space.

Part of me still is not sure I saw what I did then.  We have come a long way, faced down monstrosities and been granted sights to understand the hidden ways of the world.  But then our sleeping souls were suppressed by a tiny bit of the Abyss and we doubted our senses.  It feels silly to talk about it because my rational mind didn’t want to believe it.  We were just here for cheap thrills.  I hadn’t counted on my whole view of reality breaking when it did.

The full moon came out from the clouds and illuminated the road and grove surrounded by the remnants of buildings.  In the dimness of the silver gray light the buildings appeared to be restored to a fuller shape.  We saw the town as it was and we gasped, holding our breathes as the white shapes of people drifted through the center of town.  The more you stared at these ghostly shapes the more their features formed in the empty spaces of the imagination.  We were witnessing our first manifestation.

A man appeared in the road, holsters at his sides, worn sun-crisped features and indistinguishable clothing.  He was so clearly a law man my imagination filled in the vest and badge for him.  Maybe that is how manifestations work. 

So we saw him there and he saw us, he wields around and pulled a shining revolver from one of his holsters.  He gunned down the shapes.  The shots were silent as the grave but we could hear the cries of children “He’s coming for us!” and on the heels of that “He'll murder us again!”  Perhaps the separation of the windshield helped isolate us from this supernatural display.  He chased after them and after a time the figures and cries vanished when the moon was blotted out again.