Or how false advertising leads to screwed over ritualists

This is the last of these spider related things I do for now. I mean it.

Don’t make me write another one.

Arachne’s Blessing

Power: Significant
Cost: 1 Sig. Charge

Effect: Supposedly, this ritual gives you the “mystical and spiritual qualities of the spider” or something like that. This is, of course, utter bullshit. What this thing does is sort of a variation on the old “Give a dead guy your body for as long as he feels like” that demons are so fond of giving to the inexperienced idiots who summon them, with one little twist: instead of going into you, the demon gets jammed into the tarantula in a shower of minor unnatural phenomena (the demon’s leftover parts that wouldn’t fit in a brain smaller than a thumbtack). That’s right, the same one you eat at the end of the ritual. Anyone familiar with how lycanthropy really works knows that this is a very bad thing.

The caster gets a Soul check to avoid having his… well, soul torn to shreds, in which case he is now permanently (and retroactively) turned into a large hairy bug. If he succeeds he has life as a were-spider to look forward to. Ain’t life grand?

Ritual Action: Inscribe a pentacle on the floor with red chalk. Place candles made of spider’s silk, bee’s wax and human fat (from a virgin, naturally) at each intersection of it’s lines (that’s ten total). Next, put a tarantula in the very center of the pentacle; you can pin it down to keep it from wandering but it must stay alive until the end of the ritual.

Kneel before the pentacle and recite the words “Alercot Muzhubrat Ernikin Tashim Hermik Tenephrith Herebus” seven times while waving your hands in mystical patterns over the spider. Spend the charge after the seventh recital. If the ritual is working so far there should be signs: a strange smell and a cold draft blowing out the candles are pretty standard, but other things might happen to. Once that happens all that’s left to do is to eat the spider alive and you’re done.

Where did this damn thing come from anyway?
The first thing you’ve got realise is this: if you take away the postmodernism, the fully automatic weapons and TiVo, the occult underground of the dark ages was pretty similar to that of today. One thing certainly hasn’t changed: it’s full of arrogant, mystically obsessed nutjobs, many of which would stab you between the shoulder blades and steal your stuff as soon as you give them half a chance.

One particular archmage of the time was rather worried about this (read: paranoid) and took measures. He filled his tomes (the ones he kept out in the open, at least) with two things: made-up fake spells that didn’t do jack shit and working ones that no one in their right mind would ever, EVER use. The second category, of course, he rewrote to make them seem like useful mojo.

Take a guess which group this one belonged to.

See, he knew that the fake rituals would deter the rubes, but when it came to his fellow magi he figured that he needed something a little more… persuasive. So he did some digging and found an old rite normally used for exorcising demons into animals. Remember that thing in the Bible, Jesus and the possessed guy, the whole “My name is Legion” bit? Same deal, only with a bigass spider instead of a bunch of pigs. A little tweaking here, a little tweaking there and voilà: instant booby trap. If ever his stuff got stolen he could merrily look forward to the would-be thief spending a rather large portion of his life turned into a bug.

What good is this thing? Think of it as the magickal equivalent of sending someone a suitcase of money with a large bomb in it: the poor sucker you give it to gets something he thinks he wants and you get the satisfaction of thoroughly squishing him under your boot heel.

Everybody’s happy.