Witch Tradition: Orthodox Witch

Putting my new witch tradition template to use and providing an example of what a tradition ought to look like, I present to you the most basic of witches: like the Orthodox wizard, the Orthodox witch!

The Orthodox witch embodies all the classic tales and tropes of the witch. She appears as a Maiden, Mother or Crone, brews potions in a cauldron, flies on a broom and does all those kinds of things. She's the one in the black robe and the pointy wide-brimmed hat that helps the villagers with herbs, salves, the occasional manual resetting of a joint. You find Orthodox witches in huts at the edge of the forest, typically, and it'd be rather strange if they didn't have a pumpkin patch outside. A lot of what an Orthodox witch does isn't so much outrightly magical, but rather a combination of white lies, cleverness, charisma, and if it really comes to it, a little tweak in the fabric of reality. Magic, really, gets more impressive the less you use it, and Orthodox witches understand this to great effect.

Mind though, that an Orthodox witch is in no sense typically evil, despite what wizards like to say to defame the competition. She might blight a crop here and there, but only when someone's been particularly rude, and she certainly wouldn't have an interest in confectionary architecture. That's a Hag's cup of mandrake tea. A Hag, a witch who has gotten so particularly bitter and estranged about the fact that people are inherently help- and truth-averse, that she's gone off the deep end. A gingerbread cottage, an approximately child-sized oven, and a cackle of a laugh.

Elphaba, or if you're one to believe Wizard propaganda, the Wicked Witch of the West (The Wizard of Oz, 1939)

Maiden:

Maiden Orthodox witches tend to not wear black like their more mature Mother and Crone peers. Green and white are much more common colours for a Maiden witch, but as they age they realise that white robes stain horribly when travelling. A Maiden witch typically prefers a more soft-spoken approach, and uses the words 'organic' and 'all-natural.' Of course, being a witch, she is aware that things like deadly nightshade and bears are also 'all-natural,' but they're words people like to hear. What harm is there in putting a shiny rock on someone's head and reading them their horoscope if that gets them to then take actual medicine, after all?

Perk: A Maiden weighs as much as a duck, as she is not yet grounded by her knowledge and wisdom. This means she floats on water, and can be lifted very easily.

Signs:

1. You ask small creatures like birds, bats, beetles and mice simple questions. Sometimes they might have a useful answer, often they will just ask for breadcrumbs.
2. You make a square foot of plants flourish.

Mother:

Despite the name, an orthodox witch of the Mother type need not actually have any children, though she often does, as they are useful for everything that she cannot be bothered to do herself. The main idea of this type is that unlike the Maiden she possesses the wisdom and strength of her age, but unlike the Crone she isn't yet mind-numbingly stubborn and proud. A Mother is sure of herself, often so much so that she has let go of any notion of shame about who she is or what terribly inappropriate things she might do. This is generally why people dread her as they would their own mother.

Perk: You simply do not take most things seriously enough to be intimidated by them. Gain a bonus of 2 to save against fear.

Drawback: Your legs aren't what they used to be, unfortunately, and the days you could eat anything without a worry in the world have been over for a while. Suffer a penalty of 2 to Movement.

Signs:
1. You make an item of food taste slightly better, or at least bearable. This sign can mask the taste of minor poisons.
2. You can cure a very minor disease, like a cough or a cold, with a touch.

Crone:

An Orthodox Crone is perhaps the most iconic witch there is: she is strongly drawn to dignified black-robe-and-hat fashion choices, tends to have a nose with a wart on it, and has a terribly intimidating stare. She is well-known amongst the people as someone not to cross, though they may have their doubts about how much good she actually does. Of course, she does plenty of good, but it's just that when it's not prettied up, having good done to you doesn't tend to feel good. A Crone couldn't be less bothered by this. She knows what's good, and by the flint in the chalk she'll have it done, whether people want it or not.

Drawback: People are very fearful of your presence. They will be extremely hesitant to say anything they think you don't want to hear, and lie to divert your attention away from themselves.

Signs: 
1. You can light or extinguish any existing light source that is no brighter than a torch within 30'
2. You can open or close any window, door, or other hinged portal that isn't locked within 30'. They open/close slowly with an ominous creak.

The Witches of Discworld. Orthodox Witches are very Pratchettian. (art by Paul Kirkby)

LIST OF WORKS:

1. Divining
R: 0 T: see description D: [sum] days in advanceUsing either an animal that has been dead for no less than 4 hours, the birds and clouds in the sky, the way a set of fingerbones fall, tea leaves, or other chance-influenced information, you may read the subtle notes the universe passes itself underneath the table. Predict something within the allowed span of days. For things not influenced by humans, like the weather, you get a certainty. For things in which humans at least partially decide the outcome, like the result of a battle, you get a likelihood. Major calamities always force themselves into your prediction if they are somewhat related to the object of your divination.


2. Calm
R: 30' T: [sum] animals D: [sum] minutes
You soothe the emotions of nearby animals, preventing them from panicking, fleeing, or aggression. They will obey commands that they would if they were not panicked (such as from their owner). This has a minor effect on crowds of higher creatures, but cannot target specific ones.

3. Cure
R: touch T: 1 creature or [dice] acres of land D: -
By applying your age-old remedies to a creature or an area of land, you cure it of natural diseases, infections and ails. For incurable afflictions such as age or permanent damage, it will alleviate pains for a [sum]. Parasites on the target's body must save or be driven out, any curses inflicted with equal or less dice than you spend are lifted. Applying your remedy takes [dice] hours

4. Scrying
R: [sum]/2 miles T: reflective surface D: [sum] minutes
By using a reflective surface at hand, like a mirror, water surface, or even a shiny spoon, you may link it to another reflective surface that you are at least vaguely aware of within the range of the spell. Instead of reflective, the two images become windows to each other. For each die invested past one, another sense may travel through the mirror. Prospecting for potential surfaces may be done by reasoning: if you know that a tavern is within your range, it is reasonable to assume that there are glasses and spoons there to which you may project. You may switch between target surfaces within your range, but it will take [dice] minutes off the duration of your spell. Keep in mind that any senses that you allow to transmit, do so in both ways.

5. Blight
R: touch T: [sum] acres of land D: -
Either inflict or lift a blighting curse upon the land, which significantly diminishes crop growth, befouls wells, turns milk sour, weakens animals and children, lowers fertility of both soil and people. Any creature born under a Blight must save or roll a permanent mutation.

6. Borrow
R: [dice] miles T: animal D: [sum] minutes
You release your own spirit from your body and inhabit an animal. You can steer it to a degree, but cannot lead it into mortal danger or otherwise cause it to act against its survival instinct. The larger or more intelligent the animal, the harder it is to control. Humans, apes, and oddly enough camels, inherently resist this effect. While borrowing your own body appears as dead.

7. Witch's Egg
R: 0 T: self D: [dice] minutes
You produce a chicken egg which, when broken, bursts in a cloud of sulphurous smoke, with a [sum]' radius. Any creature caught in the cloud must save or be affected by a d([dice]*2) poison. The cloud blocks vision and hangs around for the duration of the spell. If the egg is not broken when the spell duration ends it hatches into a normal, full-grown chicken.

8. Sleeping Hex
R: touch T: 1 creature D: see description
You touch a creature, and it must save with a [dice] penalty. If it fails, it falls alseep for [sum]*10 minutes. After that, it can save without penalty. If it fails again, it continues sleeping for the same amount of time, and then wakes. A kiss always immediately breaks a sleeping hex.

MAIDEN EMBLEM:
Black Cat
R: 0 T: self D: [sum] minutes
Turn into a black cat without a shadow. You can shift at will between it, and the cat's disembodied would-be shadow. While in shadow form, you gain a bonus of [dice]*2 to stealth, but you can only manifest where there is light to cast shadows. The shadow is as vulnerable to attacks as an actual cat. Casters trying to cast a spell on you in this form always get a Mishap or its equivalent.
MOTHER EMBLEM:
Witch's Cauldron
R:0 T: 0 D: [sum] minutes
This spell summons a witch's cauldron over a fire, filled with a bubbling potion: any caster that fires a spell or magic within 50' of the cauldron must save or have their spell sucked into the pot. The pot can hold [dice]*2 magic dice and [dice] spells. Once it has either hit its dice limit or the duration is over, the cauldron boils over, firing 1 MD versions of random spells it contains as close to itself as possible, until its MD run out.

CRONE EMBLEM:
Transmogrify
R: 30' T: 1 creature D: -
Turn a creature of into a harmless, tiny animal, like a newt or a frog. if it has more HD than [dice]*2, it can save to get better after [sum] hours. If it fails, it can only be turned back by a true love's kiss. Alternatively, turn yourself into any creature with [dice]*2 HD or less for [sum] minutes.

Sometimes a Witch's cottage, like her wart, can be a bit on the nose (Disney's Sword in the Stone)

Attentions:

1. Local fairies have noticed your presence. They won't pass up on the opportunity to mess with you. Your saves for the remainder of the day suffer a penalty of 2. If you put out a cup of milk for the fairies, you may save to prevent this.
2. Local spirits are upset at you disturbing their rest, so they are going to disturb yours. Replenish no health or WD next time you rest. A sacrifice of food and flowers allows you to save to prevent this.
3. Some local peasants have seen or heard about your magic and it frightens/upsets them. Within the next day they will find a moment to throw stones at you and shout profanities, dealing 1d6 damage. Saving a peasant's life or livelihood prevents this.
4. A minor devil or demon tries to steal a bit of your magical power: this spell uses up an extra WD (1d4 damage if no WD left). No save.
5. A local wizard fears your competition and messes with your magic. For the next spell you cast, reroll the WD and take the worse [sum] result. Putting a wizard in his place prevents this.
6. A minor god is insulted by your general being (gods are envious and petty creatures), and smites you. Roll a random mutation, and after 4 hours, save or it is permanent. Making a significant offering to said god before the save for permanence ends the mutation prematurely.

Loss of Grip:

1. You become hateful of the simple-minded, and easily fall into the habit of spiting them out if bitterness. When dealing with people less intelligent than you, reroll any rolls for social situations and take the worse result (intimidation is exempt from this).
2. Your bubbling vitriol for others in general turns you physically ugly and gives you a most bizarre appearance. Roll two mutations, and take the most weird-looking result. Do this twice.
3. You simply don't see the point in even trying to be nice anymore. Remove Charisma from your character sheet entirely. You dementedly try to compensate for this with garish expressions of niceness, such as a house made of candy, laughing (or rather cackling) at inappropriate moments, and giving yourself a overly sweet nickname like Auntie or Missy.
4. You've went and done it. You've put little Timmy into the soup. And it's only downhill from here. You've gone full hag. You lose your humanity and become a child-eating monster. [roll a new character]

Witches like Wizards: A customisable Witch class

Unlike Skreples' Wizard and its many schools, most classes in GLOG do not benefit from a central template which can be adapted into many forms, making that particular class both very diverse and very well-liked. I hope to change this somewhat by bringing you a Witch class that can be fitted with Traditions, just as a Wizard may be fitted with Schools.

Are you ready? If so, put on your pointy hat. No, not the one with the stars. The other one.

Instead of harnessing Spells, which are the bizarre and fickle beings that inhabit wizard brains, a witch has Works. Witches don’t believe in something as gaudy as firing rabid arcane energy ferrets out of your skull. Instead of forcing reality’s hand, like wizards do, they simply give it a suggestion and make it think it was its idea in the first place. Granted, it might have some questions afterwards, but by then a witch has already got what she wanted. Witches have familiars far more often than wizards, as they make for an interesting second opinion that usually a wizard would prefer not to hear, and they're an extra brain to keep track of which alignments of which stars do what to growing crops, the sheep liver colour wheel, and other such knowledge. 

(art by Pat Shewchuk and Marek Colek, aka Tin Can Forest)

A witch can come as three forms, which are typically defined as a progressive dedication to the craft, or if you will, submersion into it. In orthodox witchery these are the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone. The Maiden has Work Dice of 1d4, the Mother 1d6, and the Crone 1d8. The Maiden has a significant perk, the Mother a minor perk and minor drawback, and the Crone has a significant drawback. 

Each level a witch can move one step: Maiden <-> Mother <-> Crone. She can also stay the same, and always start at Maiden. Each of the three has a separate set of 2 Signs, which are minor magics that a witch can cast at will without the use of WD. Rules for WD returning are identical to those of a Wizard. At Level 4, the Emblem Work a witch gets depends on which of the three she is. The three Emblem Works are not supposed to be equal in power: despite all being significantly strong Works, a Maiden's is the weakest Emblem work, a Mother's is quite powerful, and a Crone's is very powerful.

Instead of Mishaps, Witches gain Attentions. Instead of Dooms they Lose Their Grip.

While a wizard's Mishaps are a result of the Wizard himself, a witch's Attentions are not like this: think of an attention as having gotten on some local spirit, demon or god's radar. A Wizard rams his face headlong into reality, which is usually tolerated because it's easy to keep track of. A witch tricks reality when it isn't looking, so supernatural forces consider her far more dangerous on account of being unable to keep tabs on her. Attentions can often be solved, not with a save, but with a sacrifice. An example: "Local spirits have noticed your Working and will come to drain your power tonight. Make a sacrifice of blood (2 HP) or do not replenish any WD when next you rest."

Losing Grip implies that a witch's hold on her humanity is slipping. After all, high strangeness is involved with all kinds of witchcraft. There are four levels of Losing Grip, with the last being a final and irrevokable descent into inhumanity, at which point the character is lost. A Maiden can Lose her Grip four times before this final stage (going through 1 to 4), a Mother three times (2, 3 and 4) and a Crone only twice (3 and 4).

(art by Mike Mignola, Baba Yaga, Hellboy comics)

WITCH TEMPLATES:

A: +WD*, +2 Works, Covens
B:+WD*, +2 Works, Crafts
C:+WD*, +2 Works, Wyrd Transport
D:+WD*, +2 Works, +1 Emblem Work.

* = The Maiden has one more Work Die than her Level, the Mother has an equal amount to her level, and the Crone has one less.

Covens: Witches benefit from being part of a coven- that is, going about their business as a group rather than on their own. Starting from three, Witches can pool their WD into a Work that they all know, to cast it as one Work, using all invested WD. However, any resulting Mishap or Doom affects all witches casting.

Crafts: Witches can, instead of immediately having their Work take effect, 'store' their Work in a potion, a wicker doll, or in an element of the area, like runes painted on a stone or a circle of stones arranged in a certain order. Creating and imbuing such an item with a Work requires an amount of hours equal to the WD invested, and the item must also be larger per WD that is invested. For example, a 1 WD potion fits in a bottle than can be held between your fingers, while a 3 WD potion fills up a whole milk can. 

A Craft activates its Work when a certain thing happens to the Craft: the condition for the Work's activation can be chosen by the witch, but it must involve a direct interaction with the Craft. The Work in a potion cannot activate because it rains two miles south, but it can activate because someone drinks the potion, for instance. If the work has a creature as target, it will target the creature(s) most related to the activation condition (the creature that drinks the potion, touches the wicker doll, etc). If it has other specific target requirements, the witch must decide these when she makes the Craft. 

Work Dice the witch spends making a Craft cannot return to her until the Craft has activated or has been destroyed/exorcised. When the Craft is destroyed or exorcised, the WD it contained are depleted as though it had activated.

Wyrd Transport: Witches are notorious for their bizarre ways of getting around the place. A witch may bewitch one mundane item to become mobile in some way. If the item is person-sized or smaller, it may fly. If it is larger, it must be earthbound. The size limit of these transports is the size of a hut. The smaller the transport, the faster it can move. For example, a flying broom may be as quick as a galloping horse, but a hut on chicken legs is clearly a slow transport.

(art by Phobs)

FORMAT OF A WITCH TRADITION:

Name Witch Tradition

[Tradition Description]

Maiden*
[Description]
[Perk]
[2 Signs]

Mother*
[Description]
[Perk and Drawback]
[2 Signs]

Crone*

[Description]
[Drawback]
[2 Signs]

WORKS LIST

[8 STANDARD WORKS]

[MAIDEN EMBLEM WORK]
[MOTHER EMBLEM WORK]
[CRONE EMBLEM WORK]

ATTENTIONS AND LOSS OF GRIP

[d6 Attentions]
[4 Losses of Grip]

* = These names apply to the Orthodox Witch, which is coming soon as a standard example of this template. For other traditions, they will also be different.

The Witching Hour

Midnight is often attributed with relations to the supernatural, being a notable moment in our day cycle where one day transitions into the next, simultaneously twelve (or twenty-four for the modern kids) and zero. It's situated in the middle of that strange and liminal period we call the night, during which we are not supposed to be awake, and which feels less touched by the civilisation and certainty of daytime. Nighttime is full of mysteries and unknowns, of dangers and strangeness. 

So, this fixation with midnight is not at all surprising. It is however not entirely correct, any witch will tell you. No magical ritual ever takes place at midnight. It simply seems that way. In fact, they take place during the time between exactly 00:00 on the machine clock, and exactly 00:00:00:00[...]:01. Any scientist will try to tell you this is impossible. Any wizard will try to tell himself this is impossible, but knows better. Any witch and possibly some park rangers take it for granted that between midnight and exactly after midnight, there is a timespace crammed into that picosecond called the Witching Hour.

How long the Witching Hour exactly is, is uncertain, because clocks are stuck on midnight in it. Most witches are not terribly concerned with precise measurements either, so it is called an Hour for the sake of convenience. Another question is how to actually experience it. After all, usually there is no trace of it, even when staying awake overnight. 

There are plenty of dream rituals, awake rituals, slightly drowsy rituals, and nervously caffeinated rituals to end up in the Witching Hour, but they all have to be performed, unsurprisingly, at Midnight. At the end of this post there are a few rituals you could do to enter the Hour. Sometimes, normal humans will wake up into the Witching Hour by accident. It's uncertain who easily ends up in the Hour, but it seems to favour the unhappy, the lonely, artists, children, and park rangers. Cursed people such as Lycanthropes, and supernatural creatures like vampires, devils, spirits etc. can always enter the Hour.

During the Witching Hour, also called the Thirteenth Hour or Witch-Time, the world is submerged in a liminal torpor- the feeling of a foreign gas station at night, or a broad avenue being empty and silent. Creatures, Faeries and Cryptids that normally conceal themselves come out of hiding. Devils, Familiars and other shapechangers must take their true form. Ghosts and spirits are visible. Some animals can talk. Some magical gates or portals only open during the Hour. There are entire locations and even swatches of land that solely exist in Witch-Time.

Nocturnal nature spirits thrive during the Witching Hour (art by Alexandra Dvornikova)

During the Witching Hour, witch magic is significantly more powerful. This is why it is such an important time of day for witches. If you are a witch, a druid, a shaman, or a similar type of caster, treat all your spells during Witching Hour as though they had an extra Magic Die spent on them. More scientific or high-fantasy casters like wizards, alchemists, or sorcerors rarely gain this benefit, and paladins or clerics certainly do not. (If your system does not use Magic Dice, come up with another buff for these casters). 

Rituals have a much higher chance to succeed if they happen during the hour. Any rolls made for activating a ritual or summons you can reroll and take the more favourable result. However, magical forces also become more wild and unpredictable. Any rolls made for aborting a ritual, containing or dispelling magic, or banishing a magically summoned creature, you must reroll and take the worse result. If you are affected by a curse, you cannot resist its effect during the Witching Hour. It may even become more powerful. However, this also applies to blessings of a witchy nature. Some items made by witchcraft work differently, or only work, during the Hour. Some plants or ingredients must be harvested during the Hour to be effective in potions. They may even only grow, blossom or exist during the Hour in the first place.

Candles and lights are important guides to enter the Witching Hour (art by Julia Nikitina)

D10 List of Witching Hour Entry Rituals

All of these rituals have Condition [C]: This demand must be met while you are in the Hour. Once it is broken, you fall asleep on the spot and awaken when the Hour has passed. 

1. Fall asleep in a fairy ring to tambourine music after drinking a potion of inky herbs. You awaken in the Hour.
   [C]: You cannot hear music.
2. Kiss someone while wearing a crown of the appropriate flowers and the pelt of an appropriate animal. Close your eyes while you do it. When you open them again you are both in the Hour.
   [C]: You cannot lose contact with the person you kissed.
3. Cry in your bedroom while the moon shines through your window, after a bad day. After blinking the tears away you realise you are in the Hour. This has an [amount of friends you have]% chance of not working.
   [C]: you cannot laugh of mirth or at anything funny, only of sadness.
4. Walk into the forest alone wearing no clothes on a quiet night. No one can notice you. Pass through a brook of water with your feet exactly on midnight. You have entered the Hour. If you follow an animal this will certainly be succesful.
   [C]: You cannot wear any clothes or touch a person wearing clothes.
5. Drink a drop of Mandrake root sap and burn certain herbs. Inhale the fumes. Your dreamy hallucinations will suddenly clear.
   [C]: You must keep inhaling the fumes.
6. Spend the evening listening to the strange susurrusses of your surroundings. Focus on this and be alone. After a while you will see strange humanoid shadows beckoning you. Follow them, but not too far. Stop exactly once you have lost sight of the spot where you were listening. You are now in the Hour.
   [C]: You cannot make eye contact with your listening spot.
7. Meditate in a circle of pebbles, with both of your hands cut, and a pebble balanced on your head. At a point you will notice that the wounds on your hands have disappeared. You have entered the Hour.
   [C]: Your hands cannot be wounded to the point that they spill blood.
8. Paint a painting of your full self, with ink made of certain herbs and oils, or take a polaroid photo. Leave the face blank or remove it.. Fall asleep in front of this painting. When you wake up, you notice the painting or photo now has your sleeping face. You have a smooth face. You are now in the Hour.
   [C]: You cannot see your own faceless face.
9. Trap a luminescent insect like a firefly in a glass bottle or jar. Cover it and take it outside, find a place that is completely dark at midnight. Unveil the container so that the only light you can see is that of the insect. You have now entered the Hour.
   [C]: The insect must stay in its container.
10. Dance around a cauldron filled with hot wax. Dip a wick made of your hair in it and let it cool down into a candle. Light the candle on midnight. You are now in the Hour.
    [C]: The candle must stay lit.

The Witching Hour empowers rituals (art by Alexandra Dvornikova)

Cosmic Necromancy: the Cult of Unfission

“The stars are muses to many wizards across the globe, who peer into that high wilderness every night, fantasising about how their astral self may flutter between the constellations. An arcane mind is like a buzzing moth to the void-light of heaven's soaring and gargantuan mysteries, craving the extasy of being zapped by the lightning of the expansive cosmos. It is in fact safe to say that nearly all arcane savants in some way seek after the higher spheres.

However, certain categories of thaumaturges are seemingly exempt from this desire. The necromancers, like the druids, the shamans, and certainly the witches, do not point their eyes towards the sky but rather towards the soil and the earth, their ambition not superseding the limitations of our pitiful planet’s ash and dust. Indeed, it can be said that this is what separates them from the outstanding wizard and reveals them as being part of the less reasonable folk who approach the arcane mystery not with a scholarly interest, but rather with a narrow superstition.”

-Excerpt from Thaumoturgical Aphorisms by ‘Prilaxiom’ U. C. Vallance

Necromancy, over the centuries, has been a guilty pleasure of most wizards at one point or another. After all, there is nothing more enjoyably gaudy than an army of skeletons with horned helmets clacking their jaws as they charge the meat-brain adventurers that are after your jewel-encrusted skull and your staff that shoots flaming snakes. Naturally they prefer not to admit this to one another, instead writing dismissive and pretentious articles in their almanacs and grimoires like Prilaxiom the Unrefuted here. Let it be known, by the way, that when Tuweyn the Brave showed up to steal the enchanted crystal from Prilaxiom’s tower, the first thing he ran into were ghost skeletons. Ghost skeletons that were on fire.

That, in fact, has been the fatal flaw of necromancy among the orthodox wizards. Not the inherent nature of the practice, but the lack of imagination with which it has been wielded. The fact that even the most powerful necromancers could not think themselves out of the Venn diagram of “undead minions” crossing with “summon demon of undeath” and, for the creative ones, “postmodern fleshcraft.”

This has been changed.

Consider the following simple tenet: Necromancy is bringing what is dead, back to life. As happens in every school of thought, once some devout necromancers grew tired of skeletal dragons and flesh golems, they began pondering this axiom for the furthest extents of its meaning. Thus began Second-Age necromancy: soon, powerful conjurers brought long extinct plagues back from the dead, turned chalk back into floods of living micro-organisms, and even resurrected dead jokes back into funny-ness. And they did not stop. The necromantic masters ascended past the atmosphere to smash together entire planets and moons, resurrecting the dead star that had given birth to them. Under the light of these Lich-Stars, the final truth of the necromantic axiom became clear to the necromancers, who at this point had become a force of backwards running time, defying all natural currents.

The Cult of Unfission’s purpose, its desired masterpiece, is the resurrection of the singularity that gave birth to the universe, at the moment of the Big Bang.

Art by Peter Ellenshaw, The Black Hole concept art

To achieve this purpose, the sole tenet of the Cult of Unfission is that two must always become one. Separate entities must always be re-fused into singular ones. This makes the Cult of Unfission an extremely dangerous ideology, as many of its believers will simply fuse themselves with anyone and anything in their vicinity into an ever-growing polymerisation of matter and power. It is unclear what exactly they imagine the singularity-before-the-universe to be like, or whether they attribute divinity to it, but they are all convinced that it is the only perfect thing that can ever possibly exist.

Unfortunately, as this doctrine of necromancy is the product of a thinking exercise turned cosmic disaster, its notable practitioners are almost all highly schooled, if deranged, arcane masters. Small-minded necromancers may easily be swayed with the promise of giving up their miserable lives to become part of a perfect entity. They become blindly fusing entities that suck up everything around them like small black holes. The masters, however, are cunning enough to wait out immediate small steps of fusion, so that they can arrange for greater events to take place.

Art by Jesper Friis

Save for a few purists, the masters tend not to fuse blindly: they will distinctly seek out powerful entities to fuse with, thus making their journey in greater and more controlled leaps than the rabid fusion acolytes under their control. The great founders of this doctrine, who are of such power that they create undead stars, as mentioned before, are cosmic amalgams of stars, gods, archons, planets, and other entities of the heavenly spheres. The Cultists of Unfission on this and likely various other planets commune with them and follow the will of their gargantuan minds, exacting their plans towards the desired perfection.

Perhaps the only positive when dealing with this particularly outlandish and destructive brand of necromancy, is that you can likely count on traditional necromancers to put aside their differences from you for a while and aid you in the fight against the Cult of Unfission. After all, “those new-age brats just don’t appreciate a good skeleton anymore!”

ENCOUNTERS:

• A city-sized black hole is ravaging the landscape, heading for a town. It’s a bunch of Unfission acolytes who came across one another and, instinctively, smashed together into one big fusion monster. A nearby Unfission master appears and offers to move the acolyte-cluster away, but what does it want in return?
• A town is beset by an alien force that controls their minds, forcing them to attempt to fuse together. Could be townsfolk confusedly bumping into each other all the time, could be Junji Ito’s Army of One, depending on how much horror you want at play. The influence stems from a hidden Unfission master nearby.
• Someone is spreading Unfission manuscripts around the city, and the alienated and self-loathing are turning themselves into rabid fusions at the promise of becoming part of perfection. Confront the master that is orchestrating this propaganda campaign.
• For cosmic adventures: A Founder of the Cult of Unfission is approaching the solar system of your home, threatening to rip it and many surrounding planets and matter apart to resurrect the star they were born from. Somehow, it must be stopped.