Bestiary

For some folks, the Path of the spirits requires potent hallucinogens, fasting, painful ordeals, complex meditative sigils, or hours of dancing and chanting. Other people find a swift and beautiful path to the world of the spirits using the creative power of music. Many folks think of shamans as residents of the Siberian wilderness, remote corners of the Amazon jungle, or other isolated and indigenous locales. Certain seekers, however, call upon the spirits of streetlights, pigeons, and skyscrapers rather than the spirits of rivers, wolves, or forests.

Jamming in bars and coffeehouses, asking advice from urban spirits, an urban shaman seeks to bring balance and harmony to humanity’s ever-growing cities. In doing so, she must fight the efforts of corrupt Technocrats, vampires, and other urban monsters, as well as the far more common problems like despair, apathy, greed, and the shitty income of a working musician.

Suggested Attributes: Strength 2, Dexterity 3, Stamina 3, Charisma 4, Manipulation 2, Appearance 3, Perception 4, Intelligence 3, Wits 3

Suggested Abilities: Academics 1, Alertness 2, Art (several musical instruments) 4, Athletics 1, Awareness 3, Brawl 1, Computer 1, Cosmology 3, Drive 1, Enigmas 2, Esoterica (various disciplines) 4, Firearms 1, Occult 2, Stealth 2, Streetwise 3, Subterfuge 1, Technology 1

Suggested Arete: 3 or 4

Suggested Spheres: Forces 2, Prime 1, Spirit 3, Time 2

Willpower: 6

Health Levels: OK, -1, -1 -2, - 2, -5, Incapacitated

Armor Rating: 1 (leather jacket and pants; four soak dice, total)

Equipment: Aging subcompact car, guitar, knife, light revolver, motorcycle leathers.

Image: Decked out in urban-tribal fashion, our shaman could be distinctly ethnic, culturally ambiguous, or an apparently standard-issue, white-bread suburbanite whose Path has led her away from mainstream Americana and into a more bohemian life.

Roleplaying Notes: The world is alive, and it speaks to you in a million voices – some harsh, some ugly, and others gorgeous beyond measure. Help give the best of them a voice in a world that has lost the gift of hearing them, and step carefully around the malignant ones so as not to fall into their traps.

Focus: Guided by a paradigm like Creation’s Divine and Alive or It’s All Good – Have Faith, the urban shaman specializes in practices drawn from witchcraft, medicine work, gutter magick and/ or Voudoun in addition to her obvious shamanism, channeled through music and other related (and probably disreputable) instruments.