Merits & Flaws

Also known as the Reaper’s Touch, this dreadful curse makes you a life-force siphon. Your presence consumes vitality from your surroundings and the living things who happen to get too close to you. Unless you do so, however, your own life-force withers. Despite your best intentions, you’re essentially a walking void into which life itself pours in order to sustain your own existence.

Story-wise, you’re a drain on the energy of your compan­ ions. Insects and small plants perish in your presence, while children and animals smaller than a horse feel ill when you stand near them. System-wise, any character who’s in physical contact with you for an hour or more loses one health level per hour to bashing damage. If you’re unable to soak up someone else’s life-force, though, then your own vitality drains away. In system terms, you lose health levels in the reverse order that you would heal lethal damage, dropping to Bruised after one day, to Hurt after three days, to Injured after one week, and so on. (For details, see Mage 20, p. 406.)

If you employ Life Sphere magicks, your difficulties for healing or improvement-type Effects are raised by +2, while your difficulties with corrupting, damage, or illness-related Effects are lowered by -2. (In both cases, the usual maximums and minimums still apply.) Each health level you inflict on someone else with Life Sphere magick heals you of one health level if you’re injured, or else forestalls the “starvation” loss of your own health levels by one day per health level inflicted.

An inversion of the Merit: Spark of Life (p. 78), this Flaw darkens your aura, makes your blood taste awful as far as vampires are concerned, and keeps your close associates constantly sick with low-level ailments. Life-affirming mages consider this to be a mark of profound misfortune or outright evil, while folks who love corruption (Nephandi and the like) see you as a ripe candidate for recruitment. Mundane science can’t do a damn thing about this metaphysical malady, and dismisses such fluffy concepts as “life-force energies.” The Technocratic Union, on the

other hand, takes this sort of thing seriously, and tends to view psychic vampires as Reality Deviants of the most unfortunate kind.

For a potentially related metaphysical application of this

Flaw, see the Chapter Three Expanded Instruments entry Cannibalism, pp. 206-207.