“And he meets me in the graveyard, the graveyard where they made my bed,
Plants a white flower under cold stars, on the grave of the forgotten dead.”
Frank Turner
A.K.A. Resurrectionists, Bodysnatchers, Reliquarians (Ω - 2)
Bodysnatching is an ancient art. We’ve been exhuming people and chopping them into little pieces since the time of Galen, be it for advancing the sciences, stealing funerary goods or venerating the dead.
Resurrectionists take it a step further, obsessing over cadavers to the point they turn into walking memento mori. Their domain isn’t death itself, but what comes after. The decay of flesh and memories. The person-sized void left in the world. How it changes those who remain.
The contradiction of the cadavaturge is clear. They’re a living person who, instead of contributing to their own life, spends every waking moment haunted by its aftermath. Death cultists and mass-murders are arguably more prosocial than these fucking weirdos; a fixation on killing people can at least be utilised by a state, corporation or cult towards some greater purpose.
Taboo: Resurrectionists must always carry a piece of a human corpse. A lock of hair will suffice, but don’t expect fellow bodysnatchers not to laugh behind your back. Real cadavaturges carry femur bone walking sticks, manskin raincoats, bracelets of teeth and jars of pickled eyeballs.
Generate a Minor Charge: Dissect and examine a human corpse. This doesn’t have to be overly invasive, you can charge while working as a coroner, mortician, or surgeon who removes organs from dead donors. It takes a couple hours if you stitch them back afterwards, or you can grind out a charge in as little as 10 minutes if you don’t mind making a mess.
Generate a Significant Charge: Dismantle a human corpse into its constituent parts and perform a transformative process on the remains. Melting the fat into candles, converting the skull into a drinking vessel, flensing the skeleton and reassembling it with full gilding, tanning skin into leather for book pages. This takes several days of work and mutilates the corpse beyond recognition.
Generate a Major Charge: Die. No joke, I mean honest-to-god clinical death. You get the charge once your brain is starved of oxygen for 33.3 seconds.
Oh you want to spend the major charge? Well you'll need a plan to return from your untimely demise. “Safer” options include stopping your heart with drugs, defibrillation or suffocation, then getting resuscitated. This is still horrendously dangerous and difficult. Even if it does work, you’ll almost certainly come back with brain damage (see Book 1: Play, pg 72-73). And if it doesn’t work? Well, the charge eventually cooks off, manifesting a major unnatural phenomena centered right on your corpse.
Random Magick Domain: Burial. Corpses. Decay. Demonology. Divination. Preservation.
Eric He
MINOR FORMULA SPELLS
A Dead Man’s Tale
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead. That’s no obstacle for you. Touch a corpse and relive its last moments, going as far back as the casting roll in minutes from the time of their death (not the time of casting the spell). This will almost certainly inflict a Violence stress check on you, rank depending on how grisly their death was.
Dead And Lovely
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: Like plumping up a corpse before a funeral viewing, you can cast this spell to temporarily enhance your physical appearance. Rosy cheeks, red lips, white teeth, warm eyes etc. The spell adds a +20% shift to all Status rolls for minutes equal to the casting roll.
Ghostsight
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: Cast this spell to sense the energies of the dead for minutes equal to the casting roll. This means you can detect demons, buried corpses, fellow resurrectionists and anyone else regularly interacting with dead bodies. Unfortunately the spell can’t discern specifics of their interactions - a serial killer will read about the same as a county coroner, weaker even.
I Have Friends Everywhere
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: You’re never truly alone. Sure the living can abandon you, but the dead will always be there - waiting to welcome you with open arms. If you suffer an Isolation stress check, you can cast this spell to automatically succeed it and gain a hardened notch.
Straight From The Horse’s Mouth
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: Source? A dead guy told me. Sub your casting identity for your Knowledge skill, so long as the check relates to recalling information about the past. This lasts for minutes equal to the casting roll.
Through Empty Eyes
Cost: 1 minor charges
Effect: Sanctify a human skull to act as a second set of eyes. For hours equal to the sum of the casting roll, you can see through its eye sockets as if they were your own. Unless you rig up artificial eyelids, you can’t stop the visions without ending the spell. The constant distraction imposes a -10% shift on rolls reliant on eyesight (the penalty stacks with multiple castings).
Touch Of The Grave
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: This minor blast deals damage equal to the sum of the casting dice by lowering someone's core body temperature, leaving them shivering with an unmistakable feeling of impending doom. Repeated castings will kill them via terminal hypothermia, their internal organs cooling to a deadly 33.3°C.
Philippe de Champaigne
SIGNIFICANT FORMULA SPELLS
All These Graves Look The Same
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: Swap places with a corpse. This requires you to have physically interacted with the body at some point. Both of you must be unobserved and in a place where corpses are stored. This typically involves being inside of a coffin, mausoleum or mortuary cabinet with the lid closed.
Deconstructive Forensics
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: This spell completely destroys any traces of a dead body in a given area. Obviously it removes the corpse itself, but also wipes clean any blood, saliva, fingerprints etc. from the scene. After a successful casting, there’s no (biological) evidence the target was ever there.
Die Alone
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: Plunge a target into total sensory deprivation. No smell, touch, taste, sight or hearing. The victim’s perception of time is warped for the duration, days passing from their perspective while the spell only lasts for a few moments. The ordeal inflicts Rank 10 Isolation stress check.
Friends On The Other Side
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: This spell lets you engage in the gridiron game of controlling a demon, either to bind it to your will, command it to possess someone or banish the troublesome spirit from whence it came. You receive a +10% shift to your rolls if you perform the spell over the demon’s original corpse.
Rise Up Dead Man
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: Puppet a human corpse as an undead minion. You’re rendered comatose for the duration, insensate to the world around you. The zombie has a WT equal to your adept identity; the resiliency of a walking corpse is more a question of magickal power than anything resembling anatomy.
Six Feet Under
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: Bury someone a number of feet deep equal to the tens die of the casting roll. This only works on diggable surfaces like soil, sand or gravel and inflicts a Rank 7 Helplessness stress check. There’s no coffin, but the earth gets compacted enough not to immediately collapse if the victim remains calm. Better break out those suffocation rules or hope your buddies have a shovel handy.
Wisdom Of The Alzabo
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: Ritually devour a human brain and gain a 20% rating in an identity the corpse had in life. If you already have a relevant identity, get a free experience check instead. Overusing this spell inflicts escalating Self stress checks as the memories of the dead start overwhelming your own.
MAJOR CHARGE EFFECTS
Achieve lichdom. Reanimate a battlefield of undead soldiers. Open a fissure to the Beyond. Permanently ward an area against demonic interference. Become completely immune to possession.
This post is dedicated to a close friend, who's never missed a chance to play as a corpse-raising weirdo.
Arnold Böcklin
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