Orphic Disciplines

Orphic Sorceries are collections of spells and occult knowledge that draw their arcane power from Mictlan. The Gloom provides power that is dark, timeless, destructive, and really very frightening to the living. And for good reason, it truly does act as a window into one's mortality. The land of the dead calls inexorably to all living creatures, and sooner or later it will claim them all. When Orphic Sorceries are used, the draw of death becomes even stronger. This effect is not particularly noticeable for large creatures like humans or even dogs. The cells on the outside of your body are in a constant state of death and rebirth anyway, and even the heaviest exposure to the Gloom is unlikely to give you more than a mild frost burn. But for the very tiny and ephemeral creatures whose lives are over in a day anyway, death magic signals the end. A skilled occultist can use a bag of mayflies or the like to spot the moment that death magic is used, and to gauge the strength, distance, and direction towards the source of the Gloom.

Magic of Mictlan is highly antithetical to seeds, and you can counter Orphic Sorceries by throwing grains at them. Rice, wheat, barley, or maize kernels work equally well, but they have to be live grains. Remember that many commercial food products are neutralized with radiation or flash heating to keep them from going bad.

Lure of Destruction

"Lately just gazing into the Abyss has lost its thrill. I'm pissing into it."

There is something distinctly alluring about the end. Not just that we cannot help but eventually reach the conclusion, but that indeed there is always a part of us that wants to. Practitioners of the Lure of Destruction are very well acquainted with doom in all its forms.

Tongue of the Serpent

[Basic]

• Effective Hits: Agility + Potency

Passive: You are immune to poison.

Special: Your bite is toxic. Upon gaining this ability, you must choose whether your poison is a Simple Action toggle or a Passive. A character whose poison is a toggle will have some kind of clear and potentially Vow of Silence breaking physical manifestation of their poison "turning on" while a character whose poison is passive has no outward sign that their bite carries unusual properties. For example: a Strigoi has retractable serpent fangs, and they are perfectly capable of retracting them and kissing people without anything special happening; while a Soulless has a mouth that appears to just be a normal human mouth but their saliva is a deadly venom. You can learn this spell additional times to gain the ability to inflict new kinds of poison.

Touch of Darkness

[Basic]

Passive: Your unarmed attacks inflict aggravated damage. You can scratch and bite into metal even.

Glimpse of the Abyss

[Advanced]

• Dice: Strength + Athletics or Willpower + Expression
• Resistance: Willpower + Edge
• Duration: 1 round

Complex Action: You can show a bit of the inevitable doom that awaits us all to a group of targets. Every victim who is affected is stunned for a turn with awe and despair. Even Doom loses its impact, and a target who is affected will be harder to affect in the same evening - apply a 1 hit penalty to the character for each time a particular victim has been assaulted with this spell already. You can affect any target in a cone out to 100 meters.

Withering

[Advanced]

• Dice: Agility + Combat or Strength + Athletics
• Duration: Scene

Simple Action: You accelerate the rush of death upon a target. They weaken until they cannot stand. The target's strength is reduced by the hits of this spell. More than one Withering will not stack, only the highest applies. If a target's Strength is reduced to zero they collapse.

Necromancy

"Everything ends and everything dies. That is not a good thing or a bad thing. It's simply inevitable. More than any other truth, the end cannot be eternally avoided."

Necromancy is the incredibly creepy sorcerous path of handling the dead.

Compel Spirits

[Basic]

• Dice: Willpower + Empathy or Logic + Bureaucracy
• Resistance: Willpower + Edge

Complex Action: You can send a ghost in your presence from Mictlan to Earth, or vice versa.

Summon Spirit

[Basic]

• Dice: Logic + Medicine or Logic + Operations

Complex Action: By naming a dead person or holding up a part of their body, you can draw their Ghost to themselves unless it has been bottled, destroyed, or subsumed into a Poltergeist. The difficulty depends on how well you can describe the ghost you're looking for.

Nightcry

[Advanced]

• Dice: Willpower + Empathy or Logic + Bureaucracy
• Resistance: Willpower + Edge

Complex Action, 4pp: You scream a wail of pain into the deepest portions of Mictlan, drawing a poltergeist to you. You can compel it to begin its rain of destruction upon a target of their choice. What else the Poltergeist does from there is totally up to it.

Reanimate

[Advanced]

• Dice: Logic + Medicine or Logic + Operations

Extended Action (Base time 1 day), 1pp: You can turn a body into a Shambler or Soulless. A Shambler comes into existence under your control, and a Soulless does not. If the body was once a Luminary, their spirit is drawn back into their body and they become an uncontrolled Revenant. You can only maintain control of 2 Shamblers per point of Willpower. If make more Shamblers than that, you lose control of some of your Shamblers at random at some inconvenient time in the next day or so. Reanimating the dead is hard (Threshold 3), and net hits reduce the time taken. Remember that Shamblers don't have the capacity to follow complex orders. Reanimate can only be dispelled during the casting. After that, the Zombie will have to be dealt with normally.

Play of Shadows

"Spooky. Seriously."

Play of Shadows is a sorcerous discipline that governs and depends upon shadows. Darkness is in no short supply in a game called "After Sundown", and areas with no light at all can be thought of as being like some singular giant shadow. Even extremely bright lights cause objects to cast shadows that are really quite noticeable. As such, in a general sort of way, the fact that Play of Shadows requires shadows to function is pretty much a formality. However, if characters are in the process of sky diving or are in the areas of exceptional ambient light, the powers of Play of Shadows can be neutralized.

Eyes of the Night

[Basic]

• Dice: Intuition + Empathy or Intuition + Perception

Passive: You can see in darkness as if it wasn't there.

Complex Action, 1pp: You can see and hear out of distant shadows. You can draw your senses from a shadow location within 100 meters per Potency, with a threshold based on how accurately you can describe the shadow you wish to peer out of.

Shadow Casting

[Basic]

• Dice: Intuition + Empathy or Intuition + Stealth
• Duration: Scene.

Complex Action: Your lighting is as if it was done by professional special effects technicians. You can manipulate shadows and to a lesser extent light as well. This gives a +3 bonus to any attempt to become the center of attention or to escape unnoticed.

Cloak of Shadow

[Advanced]

• Dice: Intuition + Empathy or Intuition + Stealth

Complex Action, 1pp: You can wrap light around yourself completely, becoming transparent along with everything you are carrying. You still cast a normal shadow while the cloak is in place. The cloak works on anything that uses light - including cameras - but has no effect on sounds or smells. You can dismiss the cloak as a Simple Action.

Solid Darkness

[Advanced]

• Effective Hits: Intuition + Potency
• Duration: Twilight

Complex Action, 1pp: You can fashion steel hard tendrils of solid shadow and use them to grasp, carry and tear. The darkness can extend out to a meter per Potency from its source Shadow, and has Strength equal to your Intuition. The source shadow must be within line of sight of you and the origin of the shadows can move along continuously shadowed paths at the rate of a Careful Walk (10m/round). Solid Darkness is completely silent, and can rather easily grab someone by complete surprise. Directing the tendrils of shadow is a Simple Action. The Solid Darkness can grab or disarm using its own Strength and your Combat skill.

Path of Blood

"Given time, blood does become thicker than water."

The Path of Blood delves into the intricacies of life and death from a very liquid and visceral standpoint. It is important to note that not everything creeping in the night has any blood. A character or object without any blood cannot use Gift of Health or Blood of Acid, and cannot have Theft of Vitae or Blood Puppets used against them. Golems and Androids generally do not have blood, nor does any kind of Ghost. However, even really gross blood like that found in Zombies or gooey sap like the stuff that oozes from cuts in Dryads or Evil Plants totally counts.

Gift of Health

[Basic]

• Duration: Permanent

Complex Action, Variable pp: You can place power points into a sample of your own blood. Others who consume the blood gain the power points (up to their normal PP limit). The gift comes at a price, because the blood is also horrendously addictive; like freebase cocaine. If you also know the Vigor or Revive The Flesh you can spend additional power points to add their effect to the blood. The magic will last in the blood until consumed or dispelled, but the addiction is a non-magical one and cannot be dispelled.

Thaumaturgical Forensics

[Basic]

• Dice: Logic + Medicine or Logic + Research

Extended Action (10 minutes): You can make accurate pronouncements about biological samples and give weird CSI-style tirades given access to creepy magical equipment. The kinds of information gained varies by the number of hits. Examples follow of investigating the origin of a lock of hair and investigating the source of a lethal wound:

Blood of Acid

[Advanced]

• Effective Hits: Strength + Potency
• Duration: Permanent

Complex Action: You bleed like a Xenomorph. Anyone within melee range of you when you are injured has to soak a Damage 3 attack. If you're bleeding you can try to get your blood onto a target as a melee attack. You can cast this spell again to disable the effect.

Theft of Vitae

[Advanced]

• Dice: Agility + Larceny or Logic + Medicine
• Resistance: Strength + Edge

Complex Action: You suck the blood directly out of a victim. Not like through their neck with a bite, just from everywhere all at once. The net hits of the spell become Lethal damage, and the target also loses an equal number of power points. The extracted blood flies toward you in a suitably dramatic way, and you absorb it, gaining the power points extracted from them, if any. If you have a Feeding power schedule you can gain power points even if the target does not have any.

Symphony of Silence

"Silence is Deafening."

The Symphony of Silence is a set of magical music that brings things to a frozen stop. Supposedly it constitutes portions of the inevitable music that ends all of existence. In order to use any ability from the Symphony of Silence, the character must be capable of making music - although whether through playing a musical instrument or singing is irrelevant. Learning the Symphony of Silence gives you perfect pitch, for as much as that's worth.

Frozen Note

[Basic]

• Dice: Logic + Artisan or Charisma + Expression

Simple Action: You can play a song that sharply reduces the temperature in an area or object. The temperature drops by 5 degrees per hit. When focused on a living creature, this can be quite damaging. Cold blooded creatures pass out, and warm blooded creatures resist one Normal Damage per hit. This has no adverse effect on undead creatures or Animates. Temperature dropped in this way returns to normal when exposed to heat sources (such as those contained inside a mammal), but there is nothing preventing the character from maintaining the song round to round to keep the temperature low (continuing to damage living creatures). Multiple songs played in rapid succession do not stack. Frozen Note can be focused out to line of sight and cannot be dodged. Making the Frozen Note is a Simple Action, but it can only target each thing once per round.

Missing Voice

[Basic]

• Dice: Logic + Artisan or Charisma + Expression
• Duration: See text

Simple Action: You can alter the apparent origin of sounds. The required music appears to eerily come from empty space, and you can decide the origin of any other sounds as well. You gain control of the apparent origin of every sound you are aware of within 3 meters per hit for as long as you continue to play (a free action).

Silent Toll

[Basic]

• Effective Hits: Logic + Potency
• Duration: See text

Simple Action: You can suppress all sound up to the volume of the music generated, including the music itself. The noise suppressed equals the local peak amplitude, you don't have to keep track of potential spaces between notes and the like. So long as you continue to make the music, maintaining the Silent Toll is a free action.

Prison of Ice

[Advanced]

• Dice: Logic + Artisan or Charisma + Expression
• Resistance: Agility + Edge

Complex Action, 1pp: You create ice sufficient to hold someone in place or build something out of. You can create a cubic meter of ice within 10 meters. The ice can be in any shape, forms instantly, and can cover someone's wrists, feet, or even head. Targets can attempt to get out of the way with their resitance test, but the ice forms even if they do escape. Net hits on the spell improve the workmanship and solidity of the ice. Once created, the ice is real ice and cannot be dispelled.

Death Note

[Advanced]

• Dice: Logic + Artisan or Agility + Combat
• Resistance: Intuition + Edge

Complex Action: You play the song that ends life. The music counts as a ranged attack to determine the base Threshold, and inflicting Lethal damage with a based damage equal to your Edge. Death Note is resisted by the spell's resitance test instead of a normal Soak Test. This spell can only be cast if the character has already been playing for a minute or more.