Amphora of Life

The Necromantic Library of Phineus -x- Level One Rituals -x- Level Two Rituals -x- Level Three Rituals -x- Level Four Rituals -x- Level Five Rituals

Description: The annals of the pale art are filled with numerous reference to the rites of reanimation, the following ritual is one such rote. As the author intended, the title of the ritual is a dark jest, for the 'Amphora of Life' is neither a clay vessel, nor is it really alive. Rather the amphora is the reanimated corpse of a convicted murderer, who was executed for his crimes by asphyxiation and cursed with a paltry form of undeath in which his soul serves as a ritual focus and his body serves as a reservoir for the life force collected from the enervative rituals know as the 'Mists of Death'. The resulting animation breathes in the 'Mists of Death', its lungs and heart turn the life-force into blood and that blood circulates through the animation keeping the corpse from decay and providing the vampire necromancer with a 'fresh' source of blood when hunting proves poor or during times of occult research when hunting is impractical. It is common for necromancers who practice this ritual to have numerous amphora, they tend to become macabre centerpieces and are often treated as collectable souvenirs which can be proudly shown off to other practitioners of necromancy. Those necromancers who regularly host other vampires, may place an amphora in each guest room as an aperitif and there is an unfortunate tendency for necromancers who practice this ritual to become undead couch potatoes. As amphora are essentially ageless, the destruction of a particularly ancient amphora is cause for concern as the evil ghost released from centuries of tortuous imprisonment will likely seek vengeance upon the necromancer that imprisoned it and all those who fed upon its corpse.
Origin: Benesj Cherno is the author of this ritual.
Ingredients: A convicted murderer, the clothing and names of his victims.
Casting: The ritual begins with the naked body of the convicted murderer being tied down to a table with the clothing worn by his victims at the time of their murders. Then the caster invokes the chthonian gods in both Classical Greek and in the language of the convict; its important for the convict to know what he is being punished for, the agonizing death that awaits him and the horrors of undeath to which he will be subject after this curse is cast. Once the grisly details have all been clarified, the caster sears the text of the curse into the convicts torso with a heated knife; the ritualized torture serves the triple purpose of binding the soul of the convict to his corpse, enchanting the body itself and of course as an additional punishment. The next stage of the enacting of this curse requires the necromancer to smother the convict by hand and when he is completely dead of asphyxia to ritually resuscitate the corpse, both physically and with the invocation of the gods of death.
System: The player rolls Intelligence + Rituals at a difficulty of six (6). Successes directly translate into the size of the reservoir's blood-pool; all amphora replenish their blood-pool at a rate of one blood-point per day. Of course, the blood produced by the amphora isn't the blood of the living and thus, each successive feeding after the first, increases the self control difficulties when the vampire next feeds from the living.
Reference: There are no analogous rituals in White Wolf canon.