Talons
Rote · Mage
(••• or •••• Life; possibly with •• Matter, •• Prime, or both added)
Humans are such soft and fragile things, lacking the claws that distinguish other predators. Thanks to magick, however – or to cybernetic technomagick, anyway – a mage can grow claws (or, with Life 4, install them on another character) that make up for that silly lapse in “intelligent design.”
In its simplest and most traditional form, this spell extends the bones within the subject’s fingers, and perhaps his toes as well. Strengthening them into practical talons, the mage charges them with personal Quintessence, granting those claws a paranormal sharpness. Other applications graft steel, bone, or other substances into the subject’s limbs. Cyborgs, shapechangers, war wizards, and other combative types make deadly use of such appendages, and although the spell’s roots are rather primordial, its effects never go out of style.
System
Life 3 grows the claws on the mage’s own hands, and Life 4 allows him to grow them on – or attach them to – another character. Matter 2 allows the claw-crafter to work other substances into those Talons… an essential element for cybernetic enhancement. Prime toughens and charges the claws, often with a glowing nimbus of Quintessential power
if the mage wants to show off his handiwork. Normally, the claws inflict lethal damage; the Prime 2 component makes this damage aggravated instead. In all cases, this rote allows the character to use the Claw maneuver described in Chapter Nine’s Combat section.
The fearsome powers of a furious witch manifest in this ancient war-spell. Crafting an elaborate poppet, painting, or other image of her victim, the spell caster mutters maledictions at that person, establishes a bond between the image and the real-life target, and then tears into the image, burns it, melts it, or does some other horrible thing to that stand-in for her victim. Meanwhile, the victim suffers crippling pains, catches fire, withers into a skeletal mass, watches as his skin peels off in strips, or otherwise endures a theatrically awful fate.
Despite its witchy name, this spell has many cultural variations: the curses of angry shamans, furious clergy, mystic assassins, Romani elders, techno-punks, bitter artists, and other folks who have a literal bone to pick with their victims. A frightening Data-based variant, Ticktock Man, allows a distant technomancer to age his victim from a distance. So long as he holds a bit of that target’s personal information and has the requisite amount of dots in Data (Correspondence), the mage can input a number of years into his Trinary computer, get a fix on his target, and then use Life and Time to age his target from a distance.
System
Different Spheres inflict different sorts of harm. Entropy corrupts the victim with age or leprosy, Life demolishes the victim’s body in any number of horrifying ways, and Time (combined with Life) lets the attacker age her target according to the Feats of Time Magick chart. Unless the mage employs the Correspondence Sphere (and has at least one dot for every dot in the damage-causing Sphere), she must touch the victim in order to set the curse in motion. All of these attacks, of course, are incredibly vulgar, but they can be alarming for really obvious reasons.