Abyss Mysticism

[Rule Hound]

The Lasambra are a egotistical clan. They believe in their Divine Right to rule and feel themselves superior to all others. Seekers of knowledge and power they place few limits on where they will seek it. Naturally the unknown of the shadows and the Abyss from which is springs is theirs for the taking. In their arrogance some Lasambra believe that they have enough knowledge and control to pull forth greater strength from the Abyss. It is from this misguided view that Abyss Mysticism was born. But beware, darkness is a primal essence, who is really using who?

Abyss Mystics delve into the darkness and have created their own form of Blood Magic, extending their power over shadow. Obtenebration draws its power and very substance from a darkness known as the Abyss. By drawing on this blood born gift Mystics have learned how to ripe greater holes in reality and draw forth some of this primal essence and shape it to their will.

Always in search of greater, darker secrets, terrible truths, and philosophical answers, they strive to unlock the depths of the Abyss. Those who practice these mystic arts are called "The Shadowed," and their prestige among the Lasombra Clan suffers due to their studies.

Abyssal magic summons entities from another dimension, practitioners attempt to enslave and control these “spirits”, but these spirits are unlike anything else in the earthly world. They are primal but despite where they come from, they seem to have no memory of or association with true demonic entities.

Some Kindred and even the Church and other Occult powers have taken note their existence. To those not practising it Abyss Mysticism is an unknown and as such can sometimes be deemed unholy

What is Abyss Mysticism?
Good question. Lasombra practitioners and scholars have been arguing just that for centuries. If you ever figure it out please report to the circle and let us know.

Some call it Blood Magic but if that is it, it isn't any form resembling that practiced by other clans. It draws on Obtenebration but surpasses the natural bloodborn powers inherant in the clan. There are no paths of Abyss Mysticism like other forms of Blood Magic. Obtenebration itself provides the necessary ability to manipulate the Abyss even though that in itself is not enough to become an Abyss Mystic. A deeper understanding of what the Abyss is and what rules govern its behavior are also necessary. Gaining this understanding requires an exceptional investment of time and research or a capable teacher.

Obtenebration itself involves poking a hole in the fabric of reality, manipulating the energies of the Abyss on the other side. Normally this is rather tightly controlled and predictable, unless the Lasombra botches the effect. With Abyss Mysticism, however, all bets are off. A reasonable analogy would be to look at the Abyss as a beer keg. Ordinary use of Obtenebration is carefully opening the tap and filling a glass just enough. Abyss Mysticism is ripping the spigot right off and trying to catch all the spill in glasses at once. Now picture the same analogy, only the liquid in the keg isn’t beer, it’s an incredibly lethal nerve agent where spilling one drop could kill everyone in a mile radius. Now you are starting to get the picture of just how dangerous the forces of Abyss Mysticism truly are.

As mentioned there are no Paths of Abyss Mysticism, Abyss Mystics do not gain free rituals with the purchase of Obtenebration. Instead, an Abyss Mystic must purchase all Abyss Mysticism rituals at the cost of 2 experience points per level of the ritual (4 experience points for level 2 rituals, and 6 experience points for level 3 rituals and so forth).

You may ONLY learn rituals from the Abyss Mysticism ritual list. Though Thaumaturgy and Abyss Mysticism are both blood magic they vary vastly in practice, as such there is no crossing over of ritual lists. (With the right training ie. Learning both Thaumaturgy and Occult you could learn both). Unlike Thaumaturgy, Abyss Mysticism has Elder level rituals you could possibly learn.

Another variance from Thaumaturgy is that there are costs beyond the invoking of the ritual, you are drawing on dark entities with wills of their own.

Prerequisite
In order to learn even the first two levels of Abyss Mysticism a Character must Gain some Lore. A Lasambra who wishes to practice these rituals must have the following prerequisites:

Lore - at 3 dots. One specialization must be Lasambra. This grants the ability to learn Abyss Mysticism rituals.

Occult – As with other Occult Rituals you must have as many dots in Occult as the level of ritual you wish to learn. (Occult 4 to learn a level 4 Abyss Mysticism ritual)

Obtenebration – You can not learn a ritual that is higher in level than the dots in Obtenebration you possess.

Casting Abyss Mysticism Rituals:
Abyss Mysticism are not as structured or rote as Thaumaturgy. A mystic forces the Abyss to behave in a way different than Obtenebration while using that discipline to provide the initial gateway to contact an Abyssal Entity. Then they must convince this entity to behave as the Abyss Mystic wishes (thus Social is used in the test pool). The Abyss is a mostly unknown world with unlimited distinct Abyssal Entities in existence. Abyss Mystics all use some form of verbal and somatic components but the form varies between Abyss Mystics and the practice/invocation of each ritual is distinct (even thought the resultas are the same).

The mechanics of Abyss Mysticism rituals are more or less the same as Thaumaturgy rituals. Once the Mystic decides to cast the ritual, an investment of time is made. All rituals also require five minutes of casting time per level of the ritual. At the conclusion of the ritual casting time, the player of the Abyss Mystic initiates a static mental challenge against 3 traits x lvl of ritual (if not otherwise stated in the ritual itself). Test pool is Social + Occult. If the player wins the static challenge, the ritual functions as written. If the player fails the challenge, the results depend on the ritual. In most cases the Mystic knows the ritual failed (though not always) but does not always realize what happened in place of their failed attempt. Any expenditures required for the ritual have still occurred.

[Rule Hound]

Pierce the Murk (Lvl 1)
It is a simple fact that understand flows from perception and darkness thwarts perception. Most individuals incorrectly assume no answers are to be found in the dark, but that is simply because they do not know how or where to look. This ritual resolves the first paradox, attuning a mystic's eyes to the primordial darkness even as they forsake light.

System: The player engages in three static mental tests at a difficulty of eight traits. Winning two of the three tests provides the caster with “Controllable Night Sight” for the remainder of the evening. This can be made permanent at a xp cost and/or attribute cost (ask ST if you wish to do this). You can use up to 1 willpower per test to retest.

Failing to win two of the three tests, grants the caster “Uncontrollable Night Sight” for the evening.

If all three static tests are lost, the caster of this ritual gets “Uncontrollable Night Sight” permanently, and this ritual is lost to the caster (if they wish to use it again they must relearn it/re-buy it).

Controllable Night Sight
You are able to invert the effects of light and darkness at will. While in effect your eyes appear pure black (pupils, irises and all). Spend a standard to turn Night Sight on or off. While Night Sight is active, pitch-black darkness seems bright and uniformly lit to you, while any light brighter than a candle creates a zone of pure darkness. The penalties for partial darkness instead apply instead to weak illumination. You can not see through another characters Obtenebration created darkness, which glows with pure white light that obscures all details, however you may still use blind-fighting as normal.

Un-Controllable Night Sight
Light and dark are inverted for you. Pitch-black darkness seems bright and uniformly lit to you, while any light brighter than a candle creates a zone of pure darkness. Bright rooms are like walking through very poorly lit areas to normal mortals. This is a very difficult flaw to handle so make sure to role-play it up. Be sure you know what you're getting yourself in for and decide carefully when deciding not to spen willpower to retest failures on the ritual tests. As with Controllable Night Sight you can not see through another characters Obtenebration created darkness.

The Shadow of Hands that Serve (Lvl 1)
This ritual summons a small entity that dwells in the Abyss, granting it brief existence on the material plane. This is not a demons or ghost or even a true spirit but something that defies comprehension. This entity hates light, hungers for life. Creatures summoned with this ritual are harmless, they make excellent spies and are so called the Eyes of Vice.

System: Crush a lit candle in your hand inflicting one level of aggravated damage (and possibly prompting a rötschreck/frenzy check) . If you avoid frenzy you then engages in a static Abyss Mysticism challenge versus six traits. The burning wound in the caster’s hand bubbles with vitae which blackens and drips to the floor opening a small rift to the Abyss with a horrific shrieking emanating from it.

If you succeeded in the static test a small (fist-sized) tentacled black orb is seen to emerge from this rift and jumps into the casters hand. This orb/creature then serves the caster’s spoken commands with unquestioning and unimaginative fervour. At sunrise, the creature will be pulled back into the Abyss.

If you failed the static test a small pool of blackness leaks like water from the rift before dissipating into shadow and the rift closes.

The caster may have as many of these Abyssal creatures under their control as they have levels of the Occult Ability.

Eye of Vice (Stock NPC lvl 1)
Focus: Obtenebration
Special abilities:
The Eye of Vice can fly at 3x normal movement (9 steps).
The Eye of Vice, like all Abyssal Entities are considered an umbral spirit for the purpose of wards and warding circles.
The Eye of Vice can impart the details of a conversation it spied upon in the same language of the original conversation.
+ 5 wildcard bonus to hiding in shadows due to size

[Rule Hound]

Feed the Darkness (Lvl 2)
On successful completion of this ritual he caster may feed through the touch of an Arm of the Abyss. Flaws that affect feeding still come into play if appropriate such as Grip of the Damned Flaw (making feeding excrutiating painful for the victim as though their soul is being sucked out), feeding restrictions still apply, and so forth.

When using Feed the Darkness, the Arm of the Abyss leaves a deep, black bruise on the subject's body that looks similar to the mark of a very large leech, rather than the normal double punctures of a vampire's fangs.

System: The caster must spend ten minutes in contemplation at the beginning of the evening, chanting in Abyssal tongues and calling upon the spirits of the Abyss. Then do a static Abysal Mysticism test vs 6 traits. If successful. The effects of this ritual last until the next sunrise. This is a hidden test and the Castor does not know if they succeed or not until they try to use this power to feed.

Side Effect: The castors blood transforms into a dark, blackish colour causing very noticable dark streaks where her veins and arteries are near the surface of her flesh. (success or failure causes this)

[Storyteller]

A Brief History of Abyss Mysticism
Abyss Mysticism was first practiced in early Roman times. Some say it was the influence of Lasombra himself, active within the great city, others that it was the influence of the Roman attitude of innovation. Whatever the cause, a small cabal of young Lasombra (the forerunners of those who would eventually become the Abyss’ Children) began their own experiments to attempt to expand the power they were tapping with Obtenebration. The Lasombra had long been aware that they were tapping a vast power source with their black art, a source that could potentially be used for far greater effects than they were currently capable of. It just took a few reckless Roman neonates looking to gain the awesome power of their elders to attempt to widen the bores they made in the walls of reality.

The forces those early experimenters found on the other side changed them forever. Before then, no one (with the possible exception of Lasombra himself and perhaps his protege Montano) had ever communed directly with the Abyss. The experience came very close (and some say succeeded) in breaking their minds, overwhelming everything they were. They unleashed powerful entities, creatures of absolute oblivion that wreaked havoc in the streets of Rome before the elders of the Lasombra along with some help from the Ravnos sorcerer Durga Syn, the Salubri Warrior Samiel, and the Malkavian magician Necross finally managed to banish them back to their realm. The uproar this caused nearly broke the power of the Lasombra in Rome as Prince Camilla called the Lasombra to account for the destruction they had caused. Only the direct intervention of Lasombra himself, appearing before the Prince prevented full on clan war. The Amici Noctis promised that no further experiments of this nature would be conducted and those who initiated it would be dealt with.

Needless to say, they lied. The Amici Noctis spirited away the initial experimenters to their secret vaults and set up a series of controlled experiments to determine everything they had done. The Amici were far more careful than the young Mystics when they started, leaving many safeguards in place and having experts standing by before anything was attempted. They officially formed a cabal of the first Mystics around the first experimenters and called them Abyssus Filios, or the Children of the Abyss. Their mandate was to delve deeper into the mysteries of Obtenebration and the Abyss than had ever been attempted before to determine just what it was Obtenebration was tapping. For a time, Lasombra himself oversaw their progress, mostly through his protege Montano.

Over the centuries the Abyssus Filios made many great and terrible discoveries, all kept well hidden from the world. For nearly a thousand years, no one else in the Cainite world had any idea that this new and terrible power even existed, even among Clan Lasombra. Very few, even among the Amici were permitted to know the secrets of the Abyssus Filios. The Lasombra realized from the very beginning that they were tampering with the primordial forces of the universe and one tiny misstep could end reality as they knew it.

The first anyone outside the Lasombra knew of Abyss Mysticism came during the Umayyad Conquest of Castille, when the Assamites along with their Moorish armies invaded and sacked the Lasombra strongholds in Spain. In desperation, during the Siege of Narbonne in 719, the Lasombra Prince made use of the Abyssus Filios to summon Hungry Shades to cause mayhem among his enemies in the city he had already lost. The Assamites eventually destroyed these nightmares, but not without suffering great casualties. They executed the Prince for an Oathbreaker, but now the cat was out of the bag. There was some uproar, but the world was a very different place than it was in Roman times. The courts of Europe were far more concerned by the Assamite invasion of Iberia and subsequently of France than of some secret super weapon the Lasombra had attempted to use in their own defence, and to no great effect. The reappearance of Abyss Mysticism was noted, but quickly forgotten in light of more important events.

Within the Lasombra, the uproar was far greater. Knowledge that the Children had kept such achievements secret from the rest of the clan for so long was a great insult to their pride. It took a great deal of convincing and many heated arguments among the Amici before a new resolution was reached. The Abyssos Filios would remain the arbiters of Mysticism within the Lasombra. However, their power and influence would be checked, and no Mystic would ever be allowed to rise high in the clan. The elders of the Amici who remembered the devastation in Rome and who had seen the terrible changes the practice of Mysticism caused in its users were afraid that the entire clan would lose sight of their purpose in favour of this new dark and incredibly seductive power. By this point very religious in a way they hadn’t been before, the practice of Mysticism was equated with the temptations of the devil, and the Lasombra were determined to be Devils, not their thralls.

The Abyss
What exactly is the Abyss? Well we aren’t going to give all the answers here. Mostly because no one entirely knows. However in brief, the Abyss is the primordial nothingness that existed before God said “Let there be light.” Banished back from the borders of reality at the creation of the Universe, the Abyss forever hates creation and desires to bring about maximum entropy.

The Abyss has an intelligence, but no one is entirely certain as to what that is. It certainly is not a human intelligence, or an Umbral one, or any other form of life that the material world can safely comprehend. For a long time this mind was dormant, its will only loosely expressed through its Abyssal entities that are sometimes summoned to the material world.

The Abyss extrudes into all known realms, leaking into the Underworld, Umbra, and even the artificial Yellow Springs through imperceptible gaps in the walls of reality. Because of this, Obtenebration is always usable, no matter what realm the Lasombra is in.


Abyssal Spirits
Much of Abyss Mysticism deals with summoning “Abyssal Spirits”. This is really a misnomer. They aren’t spirits at all, nor are they demons, fae, ghosts or any other kind of immaterial being. The entities summoned by Abyss Mysticism are semi-intelligent protrusions of the Abyss into the material world. They aren’t entirely separate entities, more like an artificial intelligence subroutine of a mind-bogglingly powerful supercomputer.

Abyssal creatures are utterly alien. They don’t share even basic concepts in common with any creature of any other plane. Even Umbral spirits which are already greatly divorced from human concepts seem normal and sane when compared with these creatures.

Abyssal Entities of any power level only want to destroy. They have no other concepts. The more powerful and intelligent ones can understand the idea of creating in order to cause greater destruction, but the end goal of any action they take will always be moving the world towards maximum entropy. They hate the light of creation and will not stop until it is utterly extinguished forever, the universe returned to the way it was before the blight of material was inflicted on it.

Anything about these entities that appears remotely human (speech, movements, etc.) is a bizarre mockery of humanity that they pick up from observation. They can never truly understand how humanity thinks anymore than humanity can understand them.


Mystics and the Lasombra
Within the Lasombra clan, Mystics are looked on with caution and suspicion. The vast majority of the Friends of the Night are not Mystics and believe that those who do practice the art are reckless fools who will destroy the universe one day. Whenever anything goes seriously wrong, the Mystics are always the first blamed (usually correctly), and if brought up before a Court of Blood, usually find they have few friends.

Luckily for the Mystics, along with being the proximate cause whenever something goes seriously wrong, they are usually the solution as well, including to many problems that they didn’t have anything to do with causing (at least provably). As such, however mistrusted they often are, the Friends of the Night have been forced time and time again to admit how useful and even necessary they can be.

All official Mystics are registered with the Friends of the Night. They are watched over and regulated by the Abyss’ Children. Any Mystics found by the Abyss’ Children who have not registered are usually brought in, educated, and formally registered. Any Mystics found by the Friends of the Night who have not registered are usually kidnapped, tortured, dominated, and eventually killed in any number of unpleasant ways after the extent of the possible damage they have caused has been determined. There is notably however no exception for Mystics, even obviously rogue Mystics from the laws of accord that bar one Lasombra from killing another without sanction. However Courts of Blood are more often than not predisposed against an unregistered Mystic on the grounds that if he had nothing to hide, he should have registered himself.

Other than the registration, most of the Friends of the Night follow an unofficial policy of ignoring the Mystics as much as possible until they absolutely have to deal with them. All Mystics are very strange and disturbing in ways that make even other Lasombra cringe. They have looked into the Abyss for far too long and most of them have been warped by it. Most Lasombra look at a Mystic, see his shadow flitting unnaturally behind him and taunting passersby and think, “There but for the grace of God go I”.

The Lasombra have taken great care to not let it get out how mistrusted Mysticism is within their clan, in fear that their quite reasonable paranoia might be misunderstood by those who cannot truly comprehend the Abyss and start a witch hunt, particularly from the Inquisition who really are just waiting for an excuse. No non-Lasombra should be aware of the state of regulations and registration requirements around Mysticism. Indeed, no one outside the Friends of the Night or the Abyss’ Children should know very much about Mysticism at all.