Everything

A manifestation of paranoia, Whisper cannot materialize; in the Umbra, the spirit resembles a swirling, shifting mass of colors and shapes. This entity doesn’t approach mages in the Umbra, though. Instead, it manifests within an offender’s own mind — reading the mage’s thoughts and fears, and then suggesting that those fears are coming true.

When conjured by a Paradox backlash, Whisper employs four tactics: First, it locates the offender, wherever he might be; then it possesses people (typically Sleepers) in that mage’s vicinity, getting them to behave erratically so that the mage begins to question their motives with regards to him. From “inside” those mortal minds, Whisper reads the mage’s thoughts and fears; finally, the spirit moves into the mage’s own head, inspiring small paranoid delusions until either the mage cracks or the spirit is satisfied.

When possessing mortal hosts, Whisper sends them against the mage in eerie yet nonviolent ways. People begin to follow the mage; scary toughs might trail him, New-Age weirdoes might follow him, cops might cast wary eyes in his direction. Cars creep along behind the mage, driving off before he can confront them. Whisper never possesses any one person for more than an hour or two, and these people never recall what happened while they were possessed. Sometimes Whisper jumps from one person to another in a crowd, delivering a cryptic and ominous message; each possessed person delivers a word or two of the message while looking directly at the mage, and then the next person continues that message without pause. Attempts to scan the possessed people with Mind magick produce blurs of

indistinct and vaguely ominous thoughts — nothing as obvious as a threat but filled with intimations of obsessions or harm.

Once the mage gets jumpy, Whisper flows into its tar­ get’s consciousness, reading the fears that rise in response to people following him. From there, Whisper begins to seed hallucinations, breed surges of unexpected emotions, and generally drive the mage toward irrational and paranoid acts. These delusions generally last until the mage does something stupidly self-destructive; at that point, Whisper generally departs… at least for the time being, anyway.

To many people, gods are distant, abstract entities — assuming they exist at all. For rare mortals, though, certain gods are family. Favored by these entities, those rare people enjoy special gifts, mystic kinship, and frequent annoyances from their patron beings. That bond can be fleeting, lost by carelessness or disrespect. The folks who manage to sustain such ties, however, retain a sublime relationship with someone greater than themselves. Like kami, the Loa, and other god-forms, totem entities are too vast for simple statistics. Though they’ll assume ma­ terial form, or manifest as members of their “broods,” these spirits are essentially immortal and, if not omnipotent, then at least deeply perceptive with regards to their chosen kin.

For details about totems and their relationship with Mage characters see Mage 20, pp. 326-328 and 633-636.