How do you keep a poker face when even you don’t know what you’re holding?

Cost: 1 Significant charge

Nobody’s really sure who came up with this ritual in the first place, or how it made its way through the occult underground. Most figure it was a chaos mage who got a little too carried away with his charging techniques; or he was trying to spread chaos even further. In any case, the long and short of it is, this ritual can be used to either give you a single phenomenal poker hand, or an abysmal one. The kicker is, you won’t know until you actually lay the cards down on the table.

To perform the ritual of the Fickle Hand, you’ll need some symbolic objects. First, five jokers from a used Las Vegas casino deck (with the holes punched in the middle of the cards). Next, samples of the blood, sweat, and tears of a retired poker dealer (about 100 ml). Soak the jokers in the liquid mixture for 33 minutes. Then, using small dabs of cold oatmeal from the nearest diner, affix four individual leaves from four different clovers to each corner of each card. Snap a shoelace in half, tie the cards together so that they all face in the same direction, and with a thick pen, draw a 7 on the front of the packet (the face of the first joker) and a 13 on the back (the back of the last joker). Finally, swallow the whole thing. Odds are, this will require a Body stat roll to keep from vomiting: depending on how strong your gag reflex is, take a -10% to -30% penalty on the roll (GM’s call) — possession of the Voluntary Regurgitation skill in Lawyers, Guns, and Money (or similar) at 15+% can negate the need to roll. Once the pack of cards is down your throat, spend the charge.

Here’s how it works. Once you’ve successfully performed the ritual, the next time you play a game of poker (five-card draw only), you can shift and exchange cards all you want; whatever you draw will be replaced by the Fickle Hand in your gut. It doesn’t matter if you’re holding two pair or a Royal Flush, a Full House or a whole lot of nothing; your hand will be completely switched around once you put it down on the table. In game terms, this means that you won’t make a Gamble roll to try and improve your hand. You can make a Lying or Gamble roll to try and bluff your opponents into thinking you’ve got a great or terrible hand, but they’re just in the dark as you are. Once you put your cards down, there’s a 50% chance you’ve either got shit luck and assembled the worst hand possible, or you’re unbeatable. The GM makes this roll in secret and reveals the results at the last minute.

So go ahead, partner: ante up and roll your bones.

What You Hear: I’d be careful with this ritual, my friend. A local duke got his hands on this ritual and decided to give it a try. Unfortunately, he botched it somehow; either got the ingredients wrong, or messed up the use of the charge. In any case, the other night he sat down to play a game of five-card draw. He assembles a hand, puts down his cards like he’d heard, but they were all jokers. The man he was playing with got angry, shot him twice in the chest, but instead of blood, he began leaking rabbit’s feet and four-leaf clovers. I haven’t seen or heard about him since.