[UA] New Ritual : The Spider Curse

[Bastien Pilon]

I already posted this on the UA website, but I figured I should submit
it to the list as well. Call it making up for years of unrepentant
lurking

The Spider Curse

Power : Significant
Cost : 3 Sig charges

Effect : In a nutshell, the target of this spell gets a mindfull of
spiders. This is distracting to say the least : having hundreds of
tiny arachnids interrupting your thoughts is good for a rank 5
Unnatural check and makes it very hard to concentrate. Hitting people
with 2x4s is probably ok, but any skill where concentration or deep
thought is required is at a Gm assigned penalty, usually about -20%
but could be worse depending on circumstances. Trying to perform open
heart surgery, for example, would probably be at -30 or an automatic
failure.

It doesn't stop there, unfortunately. After a while the spiders start
to become a bit more litteral and periodicaly crawl out of the
victim's mind through whatever orifices he happens to have in his head
(ears, nostrils, mouth, under the eyelids, that cut he got shaving
this morning, etc...). Seeing this happen to someone is a rank 2
Unnatural check, rank 8 if you're the one it's happening to. The skill
penalties stay in effect as well.

The ritual's effect lasts until someone either smashes the clay head
(see below) or dispells it using Spellbreaker or some other
counterspell of that sort.

Ritual Action : Take a piece of your future victim's body (blood,
hair, toenails, you know the usual voodoo shtick) and mix it into few
pounds of red clay. Sculpt it into a life sized facsimile of his head
; it doesn't have to be perfect but it does need to look like the
person.

Slice off the top of the head and empty out a hole inside roughly as
big as the brain cavity would be. Fill the cavity with 333 live
spiders you caught yourself, seal it up and carve the words "shielm
roai deostrum tol" on the effigy's forehead. After that spend the
charges and stick the head in an oven to cook until it hardens.


What you hear ...
No one's quite sure where this ritual actually came from, but the
general concensus is that some duke might have brought it back with
him from some Otherspace.

The vast majority of people who have come across The Spider Curse
(which is to say not all that many) think it's a neat way of messing
up your enemies, but some find it... I don't know, weird for some
reason.

It might have something to do with those words you have to carve onto the head.

Shielm roai deostrum tol.

They mean "Send these crawling things to this person's dream/mind".

In haltolmish.

-- 
Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the
forces of evil...prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom,
no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat
leaden death, demon...

Terry Pratchett