- Rook: streetwise fixer. Body 30, Mind 35, Soul 35; Firearms 25, Contacts 20.
- Sylvan: occult researcher. Body 20, Mind 50, Soul 30; Occult 30, Investigation 25.
- Petra: former paramedic. Body 40, Mind 30, Soul 30; Medicine 30, Athletics 20.
It starts with a phone call to Sylvan at 2 a.m. A contact has gone missing inside the Hargrove building, a decommissioned psychiatric facility on the east side that the city has been trying to sell for a decade. Someone has been using the basement. The crew decides to go in quiet.
Getting inside means bypassing the electronic lock on the loading bay. Sylvan pulls up the building’s maintenance records on his phone while Rook works the panel. Rook has Body 30 and their Contacts skill doesn’t apply here; the GM lets them roll Body alone, Target 30. The lock is old but the wiring is unfamiliar; Difficulty is 50.
GM: The panel’s open. It’s not a standard install—someone’s modified it.
Rook’s player: I work through it methodically. I’ve seen worse.
Rolls 27. Under Target 30: success. Under Difficulty 50: complication.
GM: The door clicks open, but a light trips somewhere inside. Not an alarm, just a light. Someone in there might have noticed.
The basement is exactly as bad as Sylvan feared. Ritual markings cover the walls, and in the center of the room is something that shouldn’t be possible: a body suspended three feet off the floor, perfectly still, breathing. Sylvan needs to make sense of what he’s looking at. Mind 50, Occult 30, Target 80. The markings are extensive and well-executed; the GM grants Advantage: someone who knew what they were doing made this, and Sylvan can read it. Difficulty is 25.
GM: You’ve seen fragments of this before. Roll it.
Rolls 57. Inverted with Advantage: 75. Takes 57, the better result. Under Target 80: success. Over Difficulty 25: no complication. And 57 ends in 7, so no critical.
GM: You know this. It’s a binding, not a sacrifice. Whoever is up there has been kept alive deliberately, suspended between states so that something else can use the connection. The markings aren’t to summon anything. They’re to keep a door open.
They’re not alone. Something has been in the corner of the room the entire time, and it moves the moment Sylvan speaks. The GM calls for Initiative: roll Mind, everyone is reacting to something they don’t fully understand.
- Rook: Mind 35, rolls 28. Success; they act first.
- Petra: Mind 30, rolls 44. Failure; she goes last.
- Sylvan: Mind 50, rolls 19. Success; he acts before it too.
Rook’s player: I put rounds into it. Center mass, whatever that means for this thing.
Rook’s pistol is Quality 35. They roll 31 against their Body + Firearms (Target 55), a success. Difficulty is 50—this thing is fast and the room is dark—and 31 is under it, so a complication is coming. Impact is the lower of 31 and 35: 31. The creature has no armor. Its Body drops by 31.
GM: The shots connect and it staggers. But the muzzle flash has killed your night vision. Sylvan, you’re up.
Sylvan’s player: I overturn the table between us and put it between the thing and Petra.
GM: Done. That’s going to help her. Petra, you’ve got Advantage on your defense.
Petra rolls defense with Body 40, Difficulty 50. Rolls 36: inverted is 63, so 36 is the better result. Success over Difficulty, no complication.
GM: You drop low and it passes over you, close enough that you feel the air move. You’re on your feet, but it’s between you and the stairs.
The creature is downed, eventually, but not before it got hold of Petra. Her Body is at 18 after the fight. The crew needs to move: whatever that binding was holding is going to notice what just happened, and they need to get the suspended figure down and out before that happens. Petra is the one who knows how to move an injured person safely. Body 40, Medicine 30, Target 70. She’s hurt and working fast; Difficulty is 50.
GM: He’s not conscious, but he’s breathing. Getting him down without dropping him or tearing something open is the job.
Petra’s player: I talk myself through it out loud. Muscle memory.
Rolls 74. Over Target 70: failure. Over Difficulty 50: no complication.
Petra’s player: I push through it. I spend 4 Body to bring it to 70.
GM: Your shoulder screams the whole way down, but you get him down clean and over your good side. You’re moving.
They get out. End of scene: each character rolls 1d10 per Attribute for recovery. Petra rolls 6 for Body, bringing her from 14 back to 20. Rook recovers 8 Mind from the stress of the encounter. Sylvan, rattled but physically unharmed, recovers fully.
Outside, two blocks from the Hargrove building, Sylvan realizes what the binding was actually doing. The door it was holding open wasn’t just connected to the body on the ceiling. It was connected to anyone who read the markings and understood them. He understood them perfectly.
The GM rules that Sylvan has been touched by whatever was on the other side of that door. It functions as corruption: his Mind maximum drops by 15. It isn’t damage, it won’t recover at end of scene, and it will take something extraordinary to reverse.
Sylvan’s player: What do I notice?
GM: Something is sitting behind your thoughts that you can’t look at directly. Your Mind maximum was 50. It’s 35 now. You still know everything you knew before. You just know something else too.