I met a Demon City PC today

"1980's It was Glendale--just like a movie--it was dark and it was raining..."

Cat's just sitting there. The boyfriend tells him the girl was a UCLA professor--a former Ms Los Angeles. There are photos of her winning the contest on the walls.  Reincarnation books and crystals everywhere, bullet holes in the ceiling. She's propped up on some pillows, holding a pistol in her hands, her face is almost unhurt...

 The watch stopped at 11pm.

Also, more unbelievable than any of this: his 15-year old son's band does an ELO cover.

Demon City stats for Robert S

Calm 3
Agility 2
Toughness 2
Perception 3
Appeal 2
Ca$h 2
Knowledge 3

Motive: Investigator

Skills:

Occupational: Police - 4
Occupational: Navy diver- 4
Stealth - 3
Drive - 3
Streetwise - 4
Hand to Hand - 3
Local Knowledge (LA) - 4

Contacts: 4, including
Trish the dispatcher
Some guy at an insurance company
Son who is in 3 bands, plays 2nd base and does an ELO cover

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nice spoon it would be shame if somebody bent it

PSYCHIC

The term “psychic” refers to any otherwise ordinary human who, through mutation, experiment or accident, has developed one or more telepathic or telekinetic abilities.

Although they can be any age or walk of life and can have a wide variety of abilities psychics generally have a few things in common:

-They all have at least a low-level passive Sixth Sense making them supersensitive to danger, hostile emotions and signs of trauma or the supernatural.

-Any use of their abilities causes them to make a Calm Check.

-Consequently they are highly prone to paranoia, PTSD and other forms of mental illness, especially (since this is a horror game) the violent ones.

Design Notes:

Typically quite fragile, the psychic is often not the true villain in the story, but may be manipulated by unscrupulous individuals (parents, doctors, criminals etc.) or organizations (cults, treatment centers, pharmaceutical conglomerates, governments, etc). A psychic rarely appears in an adventure without some surrounding scientific or social context, and often this context is as important as the abilities the character possesses. Just as magic implies thousands of years of obscure tradition, psychic abilities nearly always imply some kind of conspiracy to cover-up, control, or cultivate them. Make the surrounding institutions as interesting as you can and the adventure writes itself from there.

Demon City Stats

Typical Psychic

Calm: 0

Agility: 2

Toughness: 2

Perception: 6

Appeal: 2

Cash: 2

Knowledge: 3

Calm Check: 6

Cards: The Moon (18), The Page of Cups (10)

Special Abilities:

Sixth Sense: All psychics are supersensitive to danger, hostile emotions and signs of past trauma or the supernatural.

Psychic Abilities: A psychic usually has one and only one other psychic ability (see Supernatural Abilities later in the Library), but more are possible.

Weaknesses:

NPC psychics are less complicated than PC ones—assume any use of their abilities causes the psychic to make a Calm Check against a 2. Any use of those abilities at a level of intensity they’ve never tried before loses them a point of Calm automatically. If the psychic is at negative Calm, assume any use of abilities at greater than typical intensity loses the psychic a point of Toughness.

Player Character Psychics

Problem-type player characters may elect to start the game while in the process of discovering psychic abilities. 

All PC psychics have Sixth Sense and Precognitive Dreams (see Precognition later in the Library).

In addition, a psychic player may choose their primary ability or leave it up to the dice or Host. If the Host or a throw picks, the Psychic gains an extra +1 to Calm (up to a maximum of 4).

Telepathic Group

1-2 Channeling*

3-5 Delude 

6-8 Dominate Animals 

9-11 Emotion Control 

12-13 Empathy*

14-16 Empathic Illusion 

17-18 Forbid*

19-20 Garble*

21-23 Guilt Apparition 

24-26 Heal the Mind 

27-29 Lie 

30-31 Memory Meld* 

32-34 Possession

35-37 Psionic Drain

38-40 Telepathy

41-43 Traumatic Illusion

Neurokinetic Group

44-46 Blind

47-48 Chill*

49-50 Forbid* 

51-52 Garble*

53-54 Pain Aura* 

55-56 Shriek*

57-59 Sleep Field

60-61 Slow Motion*

Detection Group

62-63 Channeling*

64-66 Detect Entity 

67-68 Empathy*

69-71 ESP 

72-73 Memory Meld*

74-76 Object Reading

Telekinetic Group

77-78 Chill*

79-81 Disintegrate Object 

82-84 Heal the Flesh 

85-86 Pain Aura*

87 Portal

88-90 Pyrokinesis

91-92 Shriek*

93-94 Slow Motion*

95-97 Telekinesis

98-00 Warp Flesh

Note that not all psychic abilities are available to PCs. PCs characters may be able to develop additional abilities in the same group—entries marked with a * appear in more than one group—the player must choose which group they will focus on at character creation.

Attempting to gain a new ability happens during downtime. If so, the character must choose to skip any other Downtime benefit that time around (they do not automatically gain a new contact or skill, they do not regain an automatic point of Calm, they do not throw on any of the ordinary Downtime tables, etc. The only exception is if they must make an Addict’s Throw.).  Instead they must concentrate and practice.

They throw a d100 on the following table. A PC psychic can gain a maximum of two extra abilities (other than the ones s/he had at character generation) this way.

1-Disaster! Something disturbing has occurred. Lose a point of Calm permanently.

2-89 No results yet—try again later

90 You are confident in your abilities. Gain a point of Calm up to a maximum of 5.

91-94 You realize this isn’t going to work early on in your meditations, choose an ordinary Downtime activity and roll there instead.

95-99 Gain a new ability in the same group as the original of your choice.

00 Gain a new ability in the same group as the original of the Host’s choice.

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heart in hand

New succubus painting for Demon City. Stats here.

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Those Who Bring Strife

by me, click to enlarge

DEMONS OF THE TENTH ORDER—Those Who Bring Strife

The Nephthyd or Nehemoth, The Daughters of Night, The Demons of the Tenth Order come twisting on their long bellies, igniting strange passions. Their bodies have the appearance of beautiful women and of strange beasts. They can be summoned but will also call to lost souls in the night, unbidden. They whisper secrets and advise rash action. Their aspect is pleasant and immoral, their goal universal discord.

Their true names have ten syllables, like Agratma’hlat’li’lit’naama’heish’eth and She Whose Voice Is Red Rich And Merciless. They may be summoned when the semiplanet Eris conjoins the Moon by inspiring ten equidistant suicides in a decagonal pattern.

Demon City stats

Calm: 6

Agility: 7

Toughness: 8

Perception: 6

Appeal: 9

Cash: 0

Knowledge: 8

Calm Check: 9

Cards: Moon (18), Empress (3), Queen of Cups (10), Ten of Pentacles

Special abilities:

Demonic: Demons don’t need to breathe or digest, don’t age, and are immune to poison, etc. and cannot be mentally controlled with psionic abilities. Animals will avoid the demon in any form. Explosives cannot harm these demons but firearms can.

Sixth Sense: All demons are supersensitive to danger, hostile emotions and signs of past trauma or the supernatural.

Shapeshift: These demons can appear to be ordinary women, dogs, serpents, or nocturnal birds of any kind. In any form they will have red specs on their bellies.

Emerge from the Darkness: If unwitnessed, Nephthyds may step into any shadow in the city where they are summoned and reappear through any other.

Claws: These allow the Nehemoth to inflict damage and grapple in the same attack.

Kiss of Frenzy: The kiss of these demons allows the creature to select one of the target’s desires and force it to dominate their personality. The emotion must be one that the target already feels in some capacity. The target may make a Calm check to resist vs Intensity 9 once per hour.

Ten Plagues: The Nehemoth often offer to afflict the enemies of the mortals they prey upon. They may inflict each of these effects once every ten days: Turn up to 1000 gallons of water to blood, cause a rain of frogs to afflict a 100 foot radius for 10 minutes , give up to 10 targets lice for ten days, cause a distract halo of flies to surround up to 10 targets for 10 days, cause anthrax in up to 10 cattle, afflict a target with painful boils (-1 Toughness), cause hail in a 100 foot radius for 10 days, cause locusts to swarm a 1000-foot radius for 10 days, cause darkness over a city-sized area for three days, cause the death of a target’s first-born.

Seduction: Any one who lays with a Demon of the Tenth Order must serve her for 100 days in the form of a beast of her choosing.

Weaknesses:

The holy symbols of any faith causes a demon to make a Calm check or flee until they are out of sight. The intensity of the calm check is equal to the degree of fervor of whoever is wielding it (1-9). In the case of an incidentally encountered symbol (a glimpsed church steeple, for instance) the intensity is 2.

Touching a holy symbol, including holy water, does damage to a demon as an ordinary physical attack.

Speaking the true name of demon causes it great pain, and the creature must make a Calm Check against the speaker’s Calm each round to avoid obeying the attacker.

These demons delight in the red glow of true neon light, and must make a Calm check vs an Intensity of 9 to move out of its light should they see it.

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You're gonna wanna get those floorboards looked at

HAUNT (Ghost)

A haunt is a ghost that possesses an entire building as if it were a body, and it has no separate form. Its power is proportional to the number who have perished, terrified, within its walls. It seeks to expand these powers. That is: it terrorizes for the sake of increasing its ability to terrorize for the sake of terrorizing. It is in that way very human. 

Exorcisms performed on haunts require an understanding of the nature of the violence which began the cycle. The haunt’s soul will be housed on the premises in some innocuous and fragile thing present during the originating trauma (a jewelry box, a portrait, a housefly), and this must be destroyed in order to exorcise the house. If the building is destroyed without exorcism, whatever else is on the land will be similarly haunted.

Design Notes:

The basic adventure design for a haunt isn’t too complicated—the party is sent to investigate the building and it can “win” by research into its origins leading to the haunt’s soul, by crawling randomly around the premises until they stumble on it and items relating its significance, or by merely escaping and giving up after a session or two’s worth of amusing abuse.

However, in fine detail it requires some preparation—the Host should either mentally picture a large building they know well enough to describe room-by-room or prepare a map. In both cases, you’ll need to devise traps and effects that could happen in each room—the more variety the better.

Also—Hosts wishing to devise a HAL-like technological artificial intelligence that controls a building or starship should note that such a creature could work, mechanically, very similarly to a haunt—with the (hidden or difficult-to-access) central processing unit taking the place of the soul.

Demon City stats:

Calm: 0

Agility: 4 (represents the agility of creatures inside and the ghost’s ability to act before its victims)

Toughness: n/a (the building material is ordinary, but only destroying it will not destroy the ghost)

Perception: Within the building—n/a, they perceive everything. Outside it they perceive nothing.

Appeal: 0

Cash: 0

Knowledge: 4

Calm Check: 7

Cards: The Tower (16)

Special Abilities:

Disembodied: The haunt itself cannot be harmed except by an exorcism and destruction of the small vessel where its soul is.

Manipulate Architecture: The ghost can control its building in various ways. The object of these manipulation is always to extract as much fear out of its victim before killing it—

-Open or close any door

-Lock or unlock any door

-See and hear everything in the building

-Sense the fears of anyone in the building

-Add a repeating room behind a closed set of doors

-Create disturbing audible and visual illusions (usually requiring a Calm Check on the victim’s part)

-Double or halve any dimensions of a room

-Telekinetically move any object that is “native” to the house (striking with an Intensity of 4)

-Animate any dead in the house as a Drone (see Revenant/Drone)

-Turn patterned surfaces into 100’ deep pools

The ghost may only enact one of these changes per round. The ghost cannot prevent keys from opening locked doors—though it may close and lock them in the next round. 

Weaknesses:

The ghost can sense nothing outside its building.

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Satan.

First: if you were into the Black Panther movie, we did this. Ok, now:

THE DEMON OF THE FIRST ORDER—That Which Opposes

That Which Opposes, The Agonarch, The Star of Mourning, The Other God, Antichrist, the True Demogorgon, The Anticreator is peerless, a fierce demon and agent of every aspect of woe. This one delights in great contests, and seeks division and to divide.

It is said his heir will climb from between the legs of a mortal in birth, and he will be thus his own child—and in this semblance will he conquer.

He will appear in response to only the highest necromancy or the most obscure chain of dark coincidence and often will begin in disguise. His coming will bring portents and birth defects.

To drive him back to the antiverse requires specific and obscure ritual magic. He can be stymied but not ever defeated. He will return.

Design Notes:

One does not conjure Satan lightly. The principle question for the Host to ask is “Why here?” “Why now?”—either events have naturally transpired such that the Evil One himself has taken notice (it’s the millennium, there’s been a genocide, the city has finally reached peak corruption, a unique alignment of planets has occurred, etc) or someone has worked very hard to bring him here. If the latter, why did they succeed where so many others failed?

At any rate, an adventure featuring the genuine actual Devil should feature a lot of atmospherics and disturbing scenes long before his hooves hit the pavement.

Demon City stats

Calm: 10

Agility: 6

Toughness: 9

Perception: 9

Appeal: 9

Cash: 9

Knowledge: 9

Calm check: 10

Cards: Devil (15), Emperor (4), King of Pentacles (10), The Magician (1)

Special Abilities

Demonic: Demons don’t need to breathe or digest, don’t age, and are immune to poison, etc. and cannot be mentally controlled with psionic abilities. Animals will avoid demons in any form. Technological contrivances like firearms and explosives can hurt but never kill The Agonarch—he cannot be brought below 0 Toughness by these means.

Sixth Sense: All demons are supersensitive to danger, hostile emotions and signs of past trauma or the supernatural.

Aura of Adversity: When undisguised, the Agonarch’s presence is accompanied by constant minor disasters and disturbing phenomena of any kind—rain erupts, floors become swallowing pools, doors between Him and his victims lock, newborn goats with 6 legs drag themselves from the engines of cars, etc. Generally these will occur at a rate of one phenomena per round in addition to whatever He is doing otherwise. The Intensity of these effects is usually 6.

Domination of the Wicked: This One’s has psychological, biological and telekinetic control of any being proportional to its sinfulness. A target who wishes to resist must Throw Toughness or Calm (as appropriate) vs an Intensity equal to their sinfulness (Host: estimate on a scale of 0-9).

Near Omnipotence: There is little This One cannot do, if he decides to. He can mimic nearly any magical ability in the Supernatural Abilities section at an Intensity of 9. The limits on this ability are: He will only take one action per round (outside the Aura effects above), He cannot directly affect the body or mind of any mortal except within the limits of the Domination of the Wicked ability above, and he is, above all, fond of torture, temptation and play—he much prefers to abuse, pervert, transform and debase than to merely destroy.

Near Invulnerability: This One can only be harmed by magic, or by one who is without sin.

Unspeakability: Unlike most demons, the Agonarch’s true name can never be known, consisting of a single unholy sound in a unlanguage so blasphemous its suppression is itself the fragile spindle which binds into one whole all the living universe.

Weaknesses

The holy symbols of any faith causes a demon to make a Calm check or flee until they are out of sight. The intensity of the calm check is equal to the degree of fervor of whoever is wielding it (1-9). In the case of an incidentally encountered symbol (a glimpsed church steeple, for instance) the intensity is 2.

Unlike most demons, touching a holy symbol, including holy water, does not damage to This One—though it will cause Him to pull back.

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These Artifacts Imply...

Heward's Mystical Organ implies...

1. Ivory-bearing creatures.
2. Chords and intervals that rend the fabric of reality.
3. A composer named Heward.
4. Sheet music that contains spells.
5. An ancient church.
6. A method of transporting an organ the size of a room.
7. Someone or something Heward feared or hated or wanted that caused the creation of the organ.
8. There's a way to lose a grand organ, which is basically like losing a room.
9. Heward's notes about using sound to breach the barriers between this world and others
10. A paper trail about the location of the organ.
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The Hand of Vecna implies...

1. An ancient archlich with a now-vanished lich empire.
2. Remains of said empire.
3. The possibility of being both dead and undead, or at least an interface between the two.
4. Allies or worshippers of the lich, Vecna, that keep relics.
5. A reliquary. A monstrance.
6. Rites of Vecna. Taboos and practices specific to the cult of Vecna.
7. A reason that an archlich would bother to have an empire rather than just kill everyone and make them skeletons.
8. Architecture of the Vecna era.
9. Methods of keeping an undead body part "viable" when the rest of the body is gone.
10. (Undead creatures which use this ability? Like evil arms which fall from the ceiling and rip your arm off and replace it and strangle you?)
11. Powerful NPCs who desire the Hand--who may already have it and keep it a secret.
12. Magic gestures which have gone unknown and unperformed for millennia.
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