Morbidity and Jhor
Rote · Mage
Death’s “sting,” as the Bible put it, comes through as the lingering touch of mortality: the Quiet fascination called Morbidity (see Mage 20, p. 558), and the Elemental Resonance called Jhor (p. 25). Both spread the influence of death into the life of a mage, and each can corrupt someone who’s not careful about them. Essentially, Morbidity and Jhor are aspects of the same thing – a collective metaphysical obsession with death. Story-wise, Morbidity and Jhor afflict a character with awful obsessions and tainted energies; game-wise, they inflict penalties that reflect the darkest side of necromancy.
In game terms, Morbidity and Jhor begin to affect a mage who…
• Relies too heavily upon magicks that involve death and decay;
• Kills too frequently or callously (especially with Entropy and/ or Spirit magick);
• Suffers extreme traumas that involve the threat and reality of death (torture, the loss of loved ones, repression of deathly urges, the damnation of a friend, and so forth);
• Spends unhealthy amounts of time around corpses, ghosts, and the trappings and essence of mortality;
• Continually botches death-related spells, or suffers a Paradox backlash of more than five points while performing a necromantic Effect.
The Resonance and Quiet sections of Mage 20 deal with the accumulation and effects of Morbidity and Jhor in game terms. From a story standpoint, a character who suffers from one or both of these effects soon becomes a deeply disturbing… and disturbed… person – the archetypical necromancer.
It’s worth mentioning, however, that neither Morbidity nor Jhor is inevitable. Some necromancers manage keep a balanced view of death. In that perspective, death is merely an aspect of life – not a subject for dreadful fascination but simply an inevitable part of the Cycle. Ideally, the Euthanatoi/ Chakravanti nurture that balance through their practices. Still, both in both dramatic and systematic terms, necromancy is a perilous craft. Mages who pursue it cannot remain unchanged by such experience.