Eye of Mahakala

From The World Is A Vampire
Revision as of 20:07, 3 January 2014 by Auggy (talk | contribs) (1 revision)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to: navigation, search

Sadhana

This ritual, one of the most powerful known to India's vampires, invokes Shiva as Mahakala, Lord of Time and Final Destroyer, to annihilate a small part of the world's illusion. What the magician commands Mahakala to look upon, ceases to be and never was. Everyone except the sadhu himself forgets the target's existence, because they never knew about it in the first place.
System: This ritual requires that the magician fast in the midst of an elaborate mandala. As the character starves past the Incapacitated health level, the player spends a permanent Willpower point for the character to hold off torpor for a few minutes. Only then, when the sadhu hovers at the brink of death, can she see Mahakala's face and guide the Destroyer to his target. A wise sadhu keeps an acolyte on hand with blood to revive her after this most fearsome sending.
Mahakala's glance can unmake anything up to the size of a skyscraper, or any one person. The magician needs the victim's full name and the full names of both parents. The few sadhus who even know of this ritual's existence also say that it probably cannot unmake gods or creatures of commensurate power, such as the vampire pitris.
The world adjusts to conceal whatever Mahakala destroys. Unmaking a skyscraper does not leave a big hole in the middle of a city. Someone would have build something there, so that plot of land holds another building instead, or a park.
People have become much more difficult to unmake in the last century. Modern folk spread causal links around the globe, from mortgage payments to Internet chats, and the weave of maya tries to preserve as much as it can. If a person has too many connections to too many people and events, even Mahakala cannot remove them from reality; or perhaps reality replaces the person with someone almost identical. If a character becomes a target of Mahakala's Eye, the player rolls a dice pool of the character's two highest social Backgrounds (Allies, Contacts, Fame, Herd, Influence, Resources or Status) at difficulty 9 to resist annihilation.