Witch’s Vengeance

Rotes by Craft / Tradition

Description: The fearsome powers of a furious witch manifest in this ancient war-spell. Crafting an elaborate poppet, painting, or other image of her victim, the spell caster mutters maledictions at that person, establishes a bond between the image and the real-life target, and then tears into the image, burns it, melts it, or does some other horrible thing to that stand-in for her victim. Meanwhile, the victim suffers crippling pains, catches fire, withers into a skeletal mass, watches as his skin peels off in strips, or otherwise endures a theatrically awful fate.

Despite its witchy name, this spell has many cultural variations: the curses of angry shamans, furious clergy, mystic assassins, Romani elders, techno-punks, bitter artists, and other folks who have a literal bone to pick with their victims. A frightening Data-based variant, Ticktock Man, allows a distant technomancer to age his victim from a distance. So long as he holds a bit of that target’s personal information and has the requisite amount of dots in Data (Correspondence), the mage can input a number of years into his Trinary computer, get a fix on his target, and then use Life and Time to age his target from a distance.

System: Different Spheres inflict different sorts of harm. Entropy corrupts the victim with age or leprosy, Life demolishes the victim’s body in any number of horrifying ways, and Time (combined with Life) lets the attacker age her target according to the Feats of Time Magic chart . Unless the mage employs the Correspondence Sphere (and has at least one dot for every dot in the damage-causing Sphere), she must touch the victim in order to set the curse in motion. All of these attacks, of course, are incredibly vulgar, but they can be alarming for really obvious reasons.

Source: Mage V20 -- pg.610