Mage-Nephandi
From Metro Wiki
Nephandi Background Story
Everyone has heard the old saying: "Be Careful What You Wish For."
Ascension is dead. Stagnation is here, and a living thing, or a living race, that stagnates, decays. Descends. The Nephandi and their Barabbi allies should be capering about in glee. Ultimately, they have won.
The question is now, can they keep what they have won. In many Third-World countries, rebel groups have had great success undermining the governments and getting rid of the organizations that oppose it. However, the guerilla movements find that once they have destroying the opposition, enjoying victory is more difficult than they might expect.
First, the Nephandi realize that while the war is won, it could easily start up again. Any slip on their part and the Technocracy could open the door. The Traditions, always a wild card, could pull a surprise move. Now, the Nephandi have to make sure no one tries to drag Humanity back from the brink they are trying to push them over. Getting humanity to the brink seems to have been the easy part.
Then there is the infighting between Patrons. There is an old saying: Evil Feeds Upon Itself. With victory so close at hand, the Patrons are now beginning to eye each other, jockeying for the position of ultimate power.
Then there are the Barabbi. These are mages who serve Patrons but have not taken that final blind leap into the abyss. They are bound to their Patrons, but they still possess weaknesses. They wanted power or revenge or freedom, but now they are finally beginning to see the price of that freedom. Will the barabbi stay loyal, or like Judas, will they hang themselves from a tree? And since there are three times as many Barabbi as there are true Nephandi, can the Dark Ones keep ahold of the earth?
What happened to darkness being the easy path?
Nephandi Notes
We will be using the infernalist rules from the Book of Madness Revised. However, there will be no "soul shearing" by your demonic masters. To remind you of what that is, it is what happens in the book eventually to all Invested mages. After arete+avatar years, no matter how many investments your mage has, your Patron starts taking one point of avatar per year, and the one point of arete until both reach zero, at which point you are incapable of using true magick. I have several reasons for this ruling.
1. It is beyond the scope of the MUSH. Metro 1.0 went eight years, which would be ten years IC time. The chance of a character lasting for that length of time is miniscule
2. It seems to me foolish for a Patron to destroy a servitor who can do true magick for no benefit whatsoever. Patrons have different motivations, and there may be one or two that would find the ability to manipulate the fabric of reality unnecessary, but they are cracked in the head. A Nephandi/barabbi servitor means /power/ for the Patron.
3. It goes against established White Wolf precedents (imagine that!). I can name three Nephandi from White Wolf canon off the top of my head (Lo Pan, Jody Blake, and Ibn Fariq) who have served their dark masters with True Magick for /centuries/. Using the "soul shearing" effect in the book, the maximum length of time a mage can still do true magick after an investment is 30 years.
In other words, this rule is not an actual well-thought out rule, but something White Wolf slapped in there to reinforce kindergarten-level concepts of Evil and Badness (tm). They do that.
You can have only as man Pacts as your Avatar Rating -1. No one will be frozen when they first start.
In addition, you can only have as many soul points in a pact (only when you start) equal to a fraction of your soul points discovered by 1/Avatar Rating. Thus, if you have an Avatar rating of 3, you can have two pacts when you start, and you can only have up to 1/3 of your soul points in any one pact. This is only to /start/.
