The Men in Black’s Boss
Bernard Tanner in His Own Words:
(Spoken in a flat, buzzing monotone.)
Sit. Do you have it? Excellent. Bring his payment.
You are curious about my aides? No, they are not human, despite their appearance. They are hollow-biologically human, but no souls. Some call them “non-entities.” They follow my instructions. They follow them precisely. They provide me with funds, run errands.
No. I usually stay in the house. My aides provide me with all I require.
There was a ritual, to gain this control. I will not tell you what it was. There was a cost, but it was minor; trivial, even; I’m not sure why I hesitated at first. Then, the adept I stole the ritual from kidnapped my family, and I overcame my… squeamishness.
The power is incredible. I am served by an army of loyal slaves, loyal unto death. I have money, magick, anything I require.
My family? I’m afraid I don’t recall what happened to them.
Personality: Cunning, emotionless, frigid. All he cares about is power, and his only emotion is hunger for power. The rest of his personality’s been filed off long ago. He always speaks in a flat, buzzing monotone, and his statements tend to the laconic, as though speaking is an effort.
Appearance: He looks like a spider. Thin legs; fat belly; short; very pale skin; black hair; and dark eyes that don’t make eye contact and don’t seem to blink as often as they should. Like his pets, he always dresses like a Man in Black. He moves rarely, but when he does he moves quickly, like a snake.
Obsession: Power.
Fear Passion: None. Formerly having his interest in the occult exposed.
Rage Passion: None. Formerly vandalism.
Noble Passion: None. Formerly his family.
Wound Points: 30
BODY: 30 Pale
General Athletics 15%, Struggle 15%
SPEED: 70 Sudden
Dodge 15%, Driving 20%, Initiative 60%
MIND: 80 Mastermind
Authentick Thaumaturgy 70%, Conceal 15%, Herd Nonentities 60%, Notice 40%, Philosophy 60%
SOUL: 30 Flat Affect
Lying 30%
Herd Nonentities: This is Mr. Tanner’s skill for controlling his creatures. Although he can control as many non-entities at a time as he wants, keeping track of all of them is a different matter. As a rule of thumb, over the long term he can control a number equal to his skill. If he tries to keep more than that number operating at any given time, he needs to make skill checks as appropriate to keep things running smoothly.
Rituals: Back Monkey, DemonStration Tape, Harmonious Alignment, King of the Nothings, Poison Ward, Skeleton Key, Spellbreaker, and others. He collects rituals, and has a big library of minor, mostly useless spells. He has between one and four significant charges at any given time.
Violence 9H 1F
Unnatural 6H 1F
Helplessness 1H 0F
Isolation 5H 2F
Self 8H 3F
Inventory: A black suit; black slacks; white buttoned shirt; black tie. He doesn’t carry a wallet, cell phone, keys, or firearms: that’s what henchmen are for.
King of the Nothings:
Cost: Four significant charges.
Ritual Action: First, catch a non-entity. You’ll need it later.
Burn your birth certificate (representing your biological identity), your social security card (social identity), and a photo of yourself. Take the ashes, mix them with the hair of a non-entity, soak them in white-out, and write “Rex Nihili” on it using a black felt-tip marker. Then wrap tinfoil to make a crown using the piece of ash as a central “jewel.”
Take a ritual bath. As you bathe, you need to be questioned about your identity and nature, and answer by denying that you have any. E.g.: “What is your name?” “I have none.” “Where do your live?” “Nowhere.” You can ask the questions of yourself. At the end, place the crown on your head and declare that you have crowned yourself “The King of the Nothings.”
Then immediately perform a Whole Body Blood Replacement on yourself, swapping your blood for the non-entity’s blood, while wearing the crown. This requires a significant Medical check to pull off, if someone does it to you, and a Major check, if you’re doing it to yourself. If your check fails, you take the roll of the dice in damage and the ritual fails. Needless to say, this is gonna kill the non-entity, so be ready to dispose of the body. Don’t worry about blood type; all non-entities are O-. Spend the charges and make the casting check.
Special: You can improve the effectiveness of the ritual by giving up more and more of your own life. Burn your house down, quit your job, divorce your spouse-make your Annihilomancer friend proud. For every major sacrifice you make in this way, the charge cost is reduced by one significant, to a minimum of one, and you get a +10% shift to the casting roll. The sacrifice needs to be a major loss, enough to provoke a serious Self check, and you need to include a symbolic representation of it in the papers you burn at the start of the ritual.
Ritual Effect: First, the cost: you become partially a non-entity. You lose 30 points off Soul and all Soul-based skills immediately; and if you had an Avatar or Adept skill before, you don’t anymore. You no longer have an Aura. In addition, every day you need to make a rank-10 Self check until you hit 5 Failed or 10 Hardened; for each failed notch you gain, you lose a passion or obsession. If you hit 5 Failed, you turn into a non-entity and you’re now an NPC.
In exchange, you gain the power to control non-entities. You can telepathically sense them within a range of Mind x 10 meters and can give them telepathic commands, which they unquestioningly obey. You don’t need to wear the crown to do this, but if the crown is destroyed you lose your power to control them-but you don’t get your passions or obsession back. If two kings are trying to control the same non-entity, they make opposed Mind checks to see who wins.
Possessions:
Mr. Tanner has sixty non-entities total. Of these, 50 are working at a variety of jobs, a mixture of menial and skilled labor, which bring in about $1 million a year after taxes and expenses. He owns the buildings they live in, and the payments are disguised as strangely high rent payments. Normal tenants-he owns two appartment blocks and about a dozen houses-bring in another half a million a year net. He has about $1 million in the bank, and twice that in assorted bonds and stocks. He spends relatively little on himself; most of his income goes to reinvestment in real estate, donations to politicians, or investing in “human capital.” He tries to build up his herd’s skill base and earning power over time, giving them “scholarships” through a fake foundation, and trying to get them into important or useful posts. He has one non-entity in the Boston FBI office (a very junior agent, admittedly), two are in the Boston Police Department, and one is an aide to the city mayor.
Mr. Tanner himself lives in a large house-a small mansion, really-in a suburb close to the city with ten non-entities who act as servants, bodyguards, and muscle. These are the ones he dresses like Men in Black. He’s sent all of them to Blackwater and other private training courses for what amount to mercenaries. Unlike his disposable non-entities he might use as one-shot assassins, he won’t risk his Men in Black without good reason; it was expensive and took a lot of time to get them to where they are now.
Mr. Tanner keeps an arsenal of 60 Glock 17 semiautomatic pistols (legal) and 10 AR-15 rifles modified to be fully automatic (not). His crown is hidden in a fire-proof safe under the floorboards of his bedroom, along with the Second Greater Bible of the Machine God (the book he got King of the Nothings from) and assorted minor and significant artifacts and occult doo-dads; the safe is high-quality and any attempt to pick it suffers a -20% shift. His house is warded with Demonstration Tape and any other warding ritual the GM cares to add.
Man in Black #3 in His Own Words:
Mr. Tanner wants to see you.
No questions. Mr. Tanner wants to see you.
Personality: None.
Appearance: Tall, well-built, Nordic types wearing the stereotypical Man-in-Black costume.
Obsession: None.
Fear Passion: None.
Rage Passion: None.
Noble Passion: None.
Wound Points: 70
BODY: 70 Tough
General Athletics 40%, Struggle 60%
SPEED: 70 Fast
Dodge 45%, Driving 30%, Firearms 60%, Initiative 50%
MIND: 50 Programmed
Conceal 40%, General Education 15%, Notice 40%
SOUL: 10 Robotic
Inventory: A black suit; black slacks; white buttoned shirt covering a bulletproof vest; black tie; cell phone; wallet containing exactly $20; house keys. The carry Glock 17 9mm semiautomatic pistols in shoulder holsters, and two 9mm magazines in their pockets. If expecting trouble, they may add a fully-automatic AR-15 5.56mm assault rifle.
Assets:
He has a fanatically loyal army, and he can make good losses almost instantly. He doesn’t even need to talk to them, just come within half a kilometer. And while your average non-entity isn’t very impressive, combat-wise, he can keep sending them day after day after day.
He’s rich and well-plugged into the systems of mundane power. Most of the beneficiaries of his largesse have never met him (for obvious reasons), but they will not look kindly on anyone troubling him.
He’s a fairly powerful wizard in his own right, even leaving out his army and his riches.
Liabilities:
He doesn’t understand people anymore. He knows that, if he kills your sister, you’ll probably try to kill him, but he doesn’t know why.
He thinks small. He thinks of power in terms of money, influence, rituals, artifacts. The idea of engaging in an Ascension War or dealing with the Statosphere simply wouldn’t occur to him. And it won’t occur to him that someone else might be playing a bigger game, either.
Using Bernard Tanner:
Bernard Tanner can be used in a variety of roles. He can act as a buyer and seller of rituals: he collects them, and he’s quite happy to trade for them. If you need a way to break the Dreaded Curse of Marilyn Monroe, he probably knows how, and is willing to tell you-for a price, of course. On the other hand, if you have a ritual that he wants, he’s willing to pay, in either cash or secrets. He’s also willing to break your legs if you’re not interested in trading.
He can be used as an employer. He’s well aware of the limitations of non-entities, and some tasks require more than they can offer. Again, he can pay in cash, secrets, or both.
He can be used as a villain. He’s completely ruthless and amoral, and if he needs a few hundred kidneys for his Immortality Ritual, he’s perfectly willing to start killing random people to get them.
Whatever he does, Bernard Tanner will act solely in his own interests, with them of increasing his stock of power, money, and knowledge. He will also, to the extent possible, act at a remove: many of his nonentities have never even met him in person, he just communicates with them by driving by their street in a blacked-out van. He values his own hide very greatly, and will not willing risk it, either physically or legally.
This. Is. Sweet.
Minor note: Self Hardened notches should have been 10. (This is what comes of posting at an internet cafe).
Very nice.
Very, very nice. I like this guy a lot.
Lovely idea. It requires tweaking the rule book’s version of Non-Entities, though. A lot. GMs playing this against players who know about non-entities may find them nonplussed.
For starters, non-entities don’t have blood (or any internal organs), so that part of the ritual is impossible according to the core rules.
Also according to the core rules, non-entities are definitionally impassionate, and so none of their stats or skills can exceed 50. In your case, though, that just means toning down Body, Speed, Struggle, and Firearms a little bit. Non-entities have 100 wound points, so cutting the Body down from 70 to 50 isn’t a big loss. (And yes, the rules specify that all non-entities have the same stats – 50 on everything but Soul, and a big fat 0 on soul. Remember, they have none.)
Hmm. I wonder what happens when someone with 30 or less Soul successfully casts the ritual? Maybe if the ritual reduces their soul to 0 they just immediately become a non-entity (I would put this as a result of a matched failure to cast it), and if it reduced their Soul under 0 (if some sap with 27 Soul pulls it off), or get a critical failure, they cease to exist entirely. So sorry.
Sounds fine to me.
To be honest, I don’t have any of my rule books with me-I’m serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uganda.
Not sure what to replace blood with. What would be a good thematic equivalent?
Maybe that part of the ritual can be swapped out (full-body blood transfusions typically require being put on bypass, don’t they? I’m not sure it’s even possible without a surgical team and well-equipped hospital – neither of whom would ever do it unless it were absolutely necessary).
How about this:
You must be standing in the ritual bath (it should be saline), during the question period. Set up a double-sided standing mirror (both sides are reflective) in front of you. Standing immediately on the other side, facing you, must be a non-entity, not in the bath – the non-entity must ask the questions, you must answer.
The first question is, “What are you?” Do not answer. The second question is your set of self-denial exchanges (“Who are you?” “Nobody.” etc.). After each question/answer, you must remove an amount of blood from an appropriate part of your body (e.g. near your heart after “Who do you love?” “No-one.”), then, with a second syringe, inject the exact same amount of saline into the exact same injection site. A new syringe must be used for every injection (so two per question). The blood syringes must all be discarded, but they cannot land past the mirror, in the bath, or break. The empty saline syringes must all be discarded into the bath you are standing in.
The last question is again “What are you?” This time, put the crown on your head (without leaving the bath), and read the reflection of what you wrote aloud – i.e. if you wrote “Rex Nihili,” the reflection is backwards and you must say it backwards; if you wrote “ilihiN xeR” with the letters backwards too, you must say Rex Nihili. More on this in a minute. Right after answering the question, cup some of the saline in your hands, and pour it down your head and face. Spend the charges. Here we go.
If you succeeded, AND “Rex Nihili” was written forwards – normally – on your crown, words “Rex Nihili” bleed off the crown, but the ink disappears when it reaches your face; the glass in the mirror explodes outwards towards the non-entity on the other side – the effects mentioned in your post happen – and when you look around, all the discarded blood-filled syringes are now all filled with saline, and all the syringes in the bath are filled with the white-out/ash mixture. (The crown is just tinfoil now.)
If you fail, nothing happens. However, if the non-entity you are using is “virginal” (i.e. has never been near someone experiencing a powerful emotion), then your palpable disappointment at the end of the ritual is enough to imprint it. Congrats, you’re standing naked in a room with a non-entity addicted to your disappointment. Have a beautiful life.
If you get a matched failure, or you wrote “ilihiN xeR” and read it forwards, or your soul is reduced to 0 by the ritual – the glass instead explodes towards YOU. You become a non-entity instead of the normal effects of the ritual (and immediately take damage equal to the sum of the dice+3; humans would take more but you’re not human anymore). The syringes, all of them, are empty. The crown is unaffected.
If you get a critical failure, or your soul is reduced below 0 by the ritual – you cease to exist entirely. Entirely means ENTIRELY: you retroactively never existed. Anyone who didn’t directly witness this happening no longer has any memory of you existing. No written or photographic records of you exist. Your ex-wife married and divorced someone else. Your house was leased to someone else (or, if you burnt it down, was never built). And so forth.
If you were part of a team of PCs, well, this might make things interesting for the rest of them, since they’re down one buddy, AND the reality-erase is a major unnatural phenomenon – so it will attract the attention of every clued-in in duke in the area with ears to hear, so to speak. You, however, are gone beyond all knowing.
So, what’s the deal with “Rex Nihili” backwards or forwards?
It’s simple: The symbolic efforts of the ritual are trying to turn the non-entity on the other side of the mirror into a “reflection” of you. The symbolic difference is the crown. If you wrote the words normally (“Rex Nihili”), and read the reflection appropriately, that means the crown is on your side of the mirror – you are the Rex Nihili. But if you wrote it backwards, you’re symbolically putting the crown on the other side of the mirror – you are the reflection. This doesn’t turn the non-entity into a King of Nothings, but it does constitute you symbolically surrendering yourself wholly to such a King, and thus becoming a non-entity yourself.
Why would anyone do that?
Virtually anyone would NEVER knew they – if they knew what it did. But the occult underground is full of contrary assholes, and crazy freaks, and a general wealth of dangerous misinformation. With all the other weird stuff you’re doing for the ritual already, someone wouldn’t think twice if they were told to write the words backwards or forwards. This really stresses the danger and mystery around ritual magick that the core rulebook emphasizes so much.
Annihilomancers, of course, LOVE this ritual. If they successfully cast it on themselves, they might gain a major charge (if they become non-entities, they lose their magick, though – and either way they lose 30 points from their Soul stat, which governs their magick use). However, if they convince someone ELSE to do it – and that someone else becomes a non-entity, or erases themselves from reality – then that Annihilomancer gains a major charge almost definitely.
It’s also, obviously, in the interests of the current King of the Nothings to make sure others don’t successfully cast this ritual (no-one knows what happens when someone is “usurped,” but it can’t be a good thing, right?), so they’d do their best to ensure that the wrong versions of this ritual spread around – it’d even net them more servants. (By the way, people who become non-entities in this way remember their past lives, but attach zero emotional significance to them – they don’t feel loss, yearning, betrayal, sadness, relief, nothing – they just know it as an abstract fact, like “I live in Pittsburgh,” “My dog is brown,” “I used to be an actual human being with a wife and family”…)
One last thing:
If you think taking out the full-body-blood-transfusion makes this ritual much easier, you’re mistaken: finding a non-entity AT ALL is an extremely difficult prospect; convincing one to do this for you is doubly-so. Remember, non-entities are stand-ins for normal people; they don’t know anything about magick or the occult (unless they picked it up along the way).
Be very, very careful who you get this ritual from.
What do you think?
Oh, and of course – Best of wishes and luck over there.
Sounds good to me. I really like the idea of the Nonentity imprinting on the character-salt in the wound. 🙂 And I definitely think all rituals should have some way for the whole thing to blow up in your face if you get a tiny detail wrong.
One thing-there can be more than one King of the Nothings. Besides Barnard Tanner, there’s at least one other, who’s part of a mechanomantic cult in Siberia. If they argue over control of a non-entity, they make opposing Mind checks.
And thanks. 🙂