Bestiary

The eccentric Farandwee (thought to be named from Arabic firanji: “foreigner”) bedevils mages who disrupt the orderly rules of space and distance. Endlessly shifting size, mass, and appearances, this clown’s indistinct gender seems as impermanent as the reflections it creates.

Hermetic lore suggests that Farandwee is a patchwork of mages whose carelessness bound them together into a swirling trickster of spatial-temporal madness. Early tales depict this en­ tity as a court jester of indeterminate gender. Late-Renaissance incarnations portrayed the spirit as a harlequin figure, while more modern ones embrace the eerie clowns of circus shows and childhood terrors. In every guise, Farandwee manifests in response to people who place their own vanity above the apparent constraints of human dimensions.

As soon as Farandwee appears, the spirit tries to grab the mage responsible for the backlash that summoned it; most often, that backlash comes from Correspondence-based spells, though the clown appears to punish Time-based backlashes as well. If Farandwee succeeds, observers see a large, gray, coffin-shaped capsule appear around the punished mage; sometimes, that con­ tainer looks more like a giant wrapped present, a puzzle box, or a medieval hellmouth attached to a horrifying circus funhouse. Regardless of the container’s appearance, a grabbed mage get pulled inside with appalling and yet somehow comical speed.

Inside that enclosure, the mage experiences a maze of unbreakable funhouse mirrors. These extremely disorienting mirrors increase the difficulty of all Correspondence magick by +2 (up to a maximum of 10). Farandwee then appears within this maze, manifesting in up to a dozen duplicate forms so he can grab the mage and teleport him off to a dangerous location. This location isn’t immediately fatal (like, say, the inside of a volcano), but it does present the mage with a potentially calam­ itous puzzle: How do you get out of here before things get even worse?

The transported mage finds himself in a ticking-clock situation: a remote mountain top, a cell in the brutal prison of a corrupt autocratic nation, high in a burning apartment building, that sort of thing. The location isn’t simply perilous in and of itself (though it invariably is), but it contains an impending threat to the mage’s safety. Farandwee, meanwhile, heals the tears in reality caused by the backlash and its pun­ ishment, and then disappears… along with the mirror-coffin and all hope of escaping the same way.

While in the mirror, the offending mage can try to destroy all of Farandwee’s manifestations before he arrives at the place of punishment. (In game terms, he has one turn per manifestation to do so.) Failing that, he might attempt a mystical departure via the Correspondence Sphere (no telling where he’ll end up), or else escape the situation once he’s been dropped into it. Given the recursive natures of Farandwee, Correspondence, and Time, that attempt might trigger a second backlash, which could lead Farandwee back to the offender, which could result in an even bigger mess the second time around.