The Eight Legged Death of the Mind

Level 5 - Storyline Rituals / The Way of the Spider

With this powerful ritual, the caster can cause extreme and debilitating nightmares, that can kill a mortal, and even drive a Vampire into torpor with intense terror.

System: The vampire must put his hand into a cage containing exactly eight spiders whose venom is strong enough to kill a mortal. He must harass them, and otherwise provoke them to bite, but all eight spiders must survive to the end of the ritual. After the spiders have each bitten the hand, he withdraws it, and pierces it eight times. He then expels one point of blood through the wounds into a cauldron containing some of the blood of the intended victim. After stirring the concoction for twenty-five minutes, the caster must breath out the smoke of kalif, intoning the victim's name. Intoning the victim's true name reduces the difficulty of the ritual by one.

The ritual invokes a nightmare so terrifying that if the victim awakens, he or she looses dice equal to the caster's successes from all pools. This penalty is reduced by one per night of uninterrupted sleep. If the caster achieves successes equal to the victim's stamina (+ fortitude if any), the victim dies of a heart attack. Vampires enter involuntary torpor instead. Werewolves, due to their supernatural health, cannot be killed with this ritual. A botch affects the caster as if each "one" rolled were a success.