Leliel
2016-01-31, 06:36 PM
Just a little project I've been doing on the official Onyx Path boards. I've never played GURPS, but I love SJ Game's creativity with their supernatural elements, in particular Creatures of the Night. So I'm CofDifying them and finding good ways to cross them over with similar gamelines.
I'mma going to post what I have now over here as well, along with the ones that are currently being voted on (A vote which is closing later today). So without further ado, let's start!
Lytherion (Poison Ink Magus)
Come one, come all! Gaze in splendor at the Carnival that Never Ends, where sanity is madness, fools are kings, and monsters do exist! Come and see!
Tattoos are taken to be a sign of deliberate transgression against common societal mores in many cultures. In medieval Japan, for instance, having three bands on one's wrist meant one was a convicted criminal, which eventually led to the yakuza adopting the irezumi, the often beautiful full-body tattoos the proudly criminal culture uses as a sign of brotherhood and and easy identification. In the West, especially America, bikers, punks, and rebels of all sorts may not have their entire torso and arms inked, but the same principle applies-a fundamentally eternal mark of transgression against the idea the body should be unmarred, even if the inked individual eventually decides the rebellion behind said tattoo was a bad idea.
For an ancient fraternity of wandering entertainers, occultists, and anarchists, the tattooes are more than just a symbol of rebellion against conventional society. The toxic paints embedded in their skin are a rebellion against the frailties of the human condition itself, and more importantly, the extremely practiced sense of denial most mundane residents of the World of Darkness has to the supernatural that surrounds them. Every inch of arcane lettering on their skin dares others to at least acknowledge how strange they look, and observing their unique (and to most other people, fatal) diets only turns that into a demand-and should they stay in one place for more than a few days, the world starts to follow suit.
Lytherions (nobody's quite sure the origin of the name, since the individualistic group do not keep written records of the history of their group, only individual members in the belief that a shared history would cause the specter of stagnant tradition to infect them) are an old group, dating back to pre-Spanish Central America, as the distinctly Mesoamerican design of their mystical tattoos might suggest. How they spread to the Old World, and from there back to the New, is a bit more obscure, but most learned in the subject (ie, the lytherions themselves) attribute it to imperial exoticism; there's few more interesting carnival freaks then a group of tattooed men (and more recently, women) who eat poisons. The poison ink magi really don't mind, though-to them, interesting people in the strange is the whole point, with themselves being a window into the other side of the illusion of a sane world. Of course, most of those hypothetical lytherions were in bondage, but the fact that their very presence causes that illusion to grow increasingly unsteady helps; at least one slave ship falling to its cargo was probably due to lytherions empowering said cargo simply by living near them. From there, the growth of early modern carnivals led to a transformation from...whatever they were to the Aztec civilization into what they are now; proudly open carnival freaks, even past the point where freakshows were a common and accepted thing. The strange mix of admiration and revulsion is something they find to be an almost religious experience, one that drew most of them into accepting the tattoos in the first place-and one they sincerely hope to bring to the entire world, because only then, say the lytherions, will the world finally know itself.
In the beliefs of the poison ink magi, the first sin in the world, the foundation of all others, is willful ignorance. There's a reason scientists and scholars are usually among the first groups to be excluded from a truly authoritarian government, mocked as "aloof", "effete", "socialist", and other terms pulled out of the ass of insecure men (and it's almost always men, the lytherions have noticed-the transition from an almost entirely male brotherhood to a slightly female-dominated one was rather sudden, but mostly peaceful); knowledge is a sacred toxin, one that rapidly breaks down internal justifications for warfare, prejudice, and class warfare and leading to a more peaceful society. One that said insecure men can't as easily control and direct, so they invent hackneyed reasons why "the other" cannot be a real person, and why "we" should band against "the other." Unsurprisingly, many lytherions are involved in politically radical causes, but to the poison ink magi, civil rights, recognition of the gender spectrum, and the struggle against the comforting narcotic of anti-intellectualism are all small fry compared to the biggest, and most grotesque, item of willful ignorance on Earth; refusal to acknowledge the supernatural that surrounds it. More self-aware lytherions don't blame the Great Mask, as they call it, for all ignorance in the world, but the Mask is certainly a symbiote with it; a society that fears everyone outside pays no attention to the terrible things inside, and the various societies of supernatural beings are often terrible, parasites that engineer social illness and tragedy purely to hide better within the exposed cracks and exploit the helpless mortals. So, the lytherions say, the most holy thing to do is to break the Mask, and force the world to admit it was never a very good one (the fact that lytherion blood is a flesh-eating acid to vampires surely has nothing to do with this. Surely).. Everything the poison ink magi are is a weapon against the Mask, from their distinctive appearances and metabolism to the strange effect they have on the world around them. They aren't stupid about this; they're fully aware all supernatural societies have at least one group dedicated to repairing the Great Mask, and it seems many mundane humans are almost psychologically dependent on its existence. So the poison ink magi are as subtle as they can be, traveling frequently to prevent a buildup of weirdness that can be traced back to them, rarely initiating new members until completely sure of their loyalty to the mission, and keeping to the poorer (which is to say, oft-ignored and forgotten) segments of society, working to chip away at the Mask scheme by scheme, incident by incident. This is also why lytherions try to travel alone or in pairs (usually a master and apprentice, but sometimes a romantic couple or two magi that happened to be in the same area), but they're far from solitary; according to what few myths they have, the only reason humans in general don't have extraordinary powers is ignorance of them, and exposure to a lytherion's "weirdness field" subconsciously teaches them otherwise; it's a rare magi that does not have his own troupe of fellow, if subtler, freaks of nature, beautiful and strange.
Someday soon, the lytherions hope, the Great Mask will fall, and the Carnival of Life can truly begin, the endless celebration of the world as it is-in all its ugliness and beauty.
Mechanics: Lytherions are built like normal human characters. They have Virtues, Vices, and Integrity like any mundane character-with certain exceptions. For one, the "What have you forgotten?" question is replaced; even before their inking, poison ink magi were people who at least faced the strange head-on in their lives, and now as living weirdness batteries, one gets acclimated to the chaos around them. Rather, lytherion characters ask "What supernatural influence do you fear most?"; the magi are all very aware of the potential for shadow folk to take freedom away, and even worse, make it seem like nothing was destroyed. Common answers to this are "modifying my memory", "unwilling changes to my body", "emotions being controlled", and "ability to spy on me." At their core, lytherions are bombastic rebels, so common Virtues are based around inciting social change for others (Ambition, Kindness, and Paternal), while common Vices are based around personal freedom at the expense of others (Stubborn, Hedonistic, and Rude).
Above all else, lytherions have their tattooes, the source of their strange and occult abilities. Applying them is a dangerous, precise process, for the simple fact that, in order to take, the pigments must be laced with powdered feathers of tropical birds and venom from poisonous snakes, preferably those of Central America but any will do in a pinch. While the person applying them is likely a lytherion herself and thus, immune, up until they "mark the soul", as the poison ink magi say, her initiate isn't, and indeed, treating them with antivenoms to ease the toxin actually makes things worse if the procedure was done correctly. Thus, the marking ritual is one extensively planned out in advance, with the lytherion mixing the pigments with as little venom as possible and the initiate taking a steady diet of medicinal herbs, since only antidotes taken after the ink is applied actually have an adverse effect. Creating the proper mixture of pigments is an extended Intelligence + Occult action, capped by three times the lytherion's Medicine score (representing her knowledge of pharmacological dosages, since measurement systems don't change just because it's obscure alchemy rather than proper chemistry). Applying the tats themselves is an extended Dexterity + Medicine roll, as the designs will come due to the mystical nature of the ink-the trick's knowing where to apply the ink in the least hazardous spot. An interesting note on the process is that, like other Extended rolls, the lytherion performing the inking can take a condition to keep making rolls past the normal cap-but these Conditions are Tilts, representing bizarre supernatural phenomenon in the immediate area that fades after about two years naturally. A lytherion hunter can do worse than investigate rumors of tattooed men who appeared just before things got strange in the area. The lytherion candidate to be can have dots in Supernatural Merits, but cannot be a supernatural being with a modified Integrity meter or have any dots in true Dread Powers-they are too different from the mortal baseline for the sacred pigments to safely take.
If all goes okay, the ink sets in its initial pattern (the tattoos shift over the course of the lytherion's life into unique forms in response to major life events) over the course of about three days, as the initiate has strange visions of distant planes and arcane truths. At the end of the process, the new lytherion awakes, likely still sore but feeling more young than he ever did as a mortal. Lytherions lose any infirmities related to age and gain the three dot version of Iron Stamina merit for free. This isn't due to any life-bolstering quality of the ink, precisely; lytherions are actually in the prime of their life, biologically speaking, and more than that will be for a very long time; they live for about 300 to 500 years before the beginnings of age set in, and even then there's still about 200 years left of life in them (not that any one of them has actually died of old age, mind-lytherions in their twilight years take that as a reason to go out with a bang). His metabolism is altered into something quite unlike any others on Earth-poisons and other toxic substances actually become necessary for digestion, while antidotes and antivenoms harm (in game terms, he needs to have a substance with a Toxicity rating in his body to gain nourishment from food and drink, though he is never affected by the poison). This also means that he can eat spoiled food just fine, but while the ink neutralizes the taste of the truly poisonous molds and other contaminants, it still doesn't taste good.
More than that, however, is the settling of what lytherions call the Jaguar's Mantle, an invisible aura of occult and maddening energies that quickens the unseen world around and inside the poison ink magus. All lytherions can buy Supernatural Merits, and gains four free dots to distribute among Supernatural Merits after their initial inking-but their personal abilities are merely a useful side effect, not the intent. No, lytherions are more interested in what it can do to the world around them (the "Jaguar" in question is the sacred animal of Tezcatlipoca, Aztec god of, among other things, magic and chaos. European lytherions also call it the Maenad's Perfume after the wild women who served the equally wild Greek god Dionysus, but the majority prefer the first name, given how obviously Mesoamerican their tattoos are). Within its effect, the supernatural becomes increasingly hard to hide, and what's more, grows more and more prominent as provokes the world to do its strangest.
Lytherions naturally exude the Mantle, causing a unique Environmental Condition to seep into the world around them, not dissimilar to a Promethean's Wasteland. There are four stages to the effect, dependent on how long the lytherion stays in one place and whether she is restraining or encouraging the effect. Either requires drawing power from the tattoos themselves, and that doesn't come from nowhere; it's why the lytherions eat poisons, in fact-they need to replace the toxin in the pigments drained by instinctively exuding the Mantle. Three times the dosage of a poison beyond what is needed to provoke a Toxicity rating consumed by the magus gives her a point of "Maniae", of which she can store up to her Willpower dots in points. This represents the storage of excess occult power in her inks needed to truly control and influence the Mantle.
The four stages are:
Building Tension: The Mantle has suffused an area of (lytherion's Presence x 5) miles around her current domicile. In this radius, things are not obviously strange yet, but the occult laws that hold the Great Mask in place have frayed; if someone would normally forget a supernatural event by the rules (the Dissonance caused by witnessing mage magic, or Lunacy) automatically, the Storyteller makes an automatic Resolve + Composure roll; success means the effect doesn't take, and the person remembers what he saw perfectly well, and merely suffers a mild headache. Deliberate modification of memory is still possible, but harder; any contested roll against a supernatural power meant to erase or modify memory of the occult gains (lytherion's Resolve/2, rounding up) bonus dice to resist/as an extra penalty to the roll, depending on the power. Most supernatural beings notice the latter, but write it off as bad luck with strong-willed mortals, while they often completely miss the former (and in the case of things like Lunacy, remembering events as they happened isn't actually that strange, it just means a person has accepted werewolves exist). Lytherions take advantage of this to hunker down and put their troupes in place for their plans.
Cause: The lytherion sleeps in one general (about the size of a room) location for a week, There is no way to speed the process, and no way to slow it, this is the Mantle actually establishing itself enough to be manipulated in the first place.
Resolution: The lytherion leaves her radius of effect, or spends a point of Maniae upon waking to reabsorb the Mantle. The lytherion staying in the radius for more than a month or spending two Maniae upon sleeping advances the Condition to its next level:
Opening Acts: The Mantle begins to affect the laws of probability and nature, egging on the world to embrace its freakish side. The resistance to the Great Mask's supernatural laws remains the same, but mortals in the area gain the lytherion's Resolve as a straight bonus to resist memory modification. More importantly, the fantastic becomes more commonplace; Essence pools into loci after singular acts of passion, vampiric revenants rise without any input from actual vampires, gates to the Underworld open and close for no discernable reason...it remains subtle at this stage, but it's usually at this point the shadow folk begin to notice something's wrong (but still tend to assume it's one of theirs; the Mantle is clever enough to only provoke phenomenon related to already present supernatural forces). Any sane lytherion has likely planned for this, though, and most of the troupe's missions at this stage is distracting and crippling their investigations, likely by inciting internal struggles. Assume one odd event happens a week on average in the radius of the Condition, and the magus can provoke another by spending a Maniae and imagining the location she wants it (she cannot control the specific event, only where, although there are rumors of experienced lytherions who have developed an expertise in nudging the Mantle into acting in a somewhat predictable fashion-though it's still more rolling a six-sided die instead of working a roulette table, to use a simile). It's also at this point that inherent supernatural abilities among mortals start to spontaneously manifest, but the lytherion cannot consciously provoke their abilities at this stage
Resolution: The Mantle is far more stable at this stage; the lytherion has to be outside of the affected area for her own Resolve in days at once-indeed, lytherions try to spend as little time as possible in the area under this Condition as possible, because the shadow folk are likely looking for something or someone behind the growing chaos. The only reason why they wouldn't is that they cannot provoke effects within the Mantle so long as they are outside the radius, but that's ultimately an ability meant to mislead, and not one a particularly precise one. Ultimately, the goal is to confuse the issue enough to move on to the next Condition, which occurs a year and a day after Opening Acts manifests-though the lytherion can spend Maniae on a one-to-one basis to lengthen or shorten the time needed by a month.
Cirque de Etrange; The Great Mask cracks; the concealing laws cease to apply in the area (and before any unsubtle twiddlers of fingers get any ideas, it's only the memory that's affected-Dissonance still aggravates Paradox and Sleepers witnessing magic is still a breaking point-they can even remember the Abyss trying to steal bits of their minds), and any attempt to deliberately conceal memory is much, much harder-even besides the normal bonus/penalty, the Mantle now actively harasses any who make the attempt, a minor supernatural event akin to the ones in the previous Condition occurring in the immediate vicinity of the triggering entity occurs as soon as they activate their power, making the attempt a borderline pointless endeavor. Minor events grow far more frequent-even without the self-defeating memory modification, minor events happen once every other day now, and the lytherion no longer needs Maniae to cause them. It's nothing compared to the major events, which happen about once every two weeks naturally; corpses of particularly sinful people rising with Kindred Clans that reflect their own darkness, mirrors reflecting the Shadow (and the spirits reflected stay on this side of the Gauntlet when the vision ends), the ghosts of apartment buildings rising after their destruction, now inhabited by Underworld shades, and other things inexplicable to the shadow folk and utterly blatant to the mortals. Magi can provoke the major events within about 50 yards with three Maniae, but rarely do so, as their tattoos don't grant any particular safety from said events, only warn them when something's going to happen nearby within the next three days (treat as Unseen Sense, manifests as the designs rapidly moving, a very itchy sensation). However, what they can do is deliberately create new troupers; by touching a willing individual and spending one Willpower and a variable amount of Maniae, a lytherion can give a mundane human (one who lacks Supernatural Merits, in other words) a touch of the strange. Two Maniae equal one dot of a Supernatural Merit, three Maniae one dot of a Dread Power, and one Maniae a dot in an obvious Dread Power, taking the form of a difficult-to-conceal mutation that is obviously inhuman in some way, though rarely ugly. A Trouper with a Dread Power counts as a Horror with a Potency of 1 (which can never be raised) and retains Integrity (this also means they are no longer candidates for becoming lytherions, unlike Troupers who only have Supernatural Merits). These Merits are chosen by the beneficiary's player, as the lytherions aren't lying when they say they simply are helping the hidden strangeness come out. The powers generally reflect the beneficiary's hidden desires and personality in some way, and confer no particular loyalty to the magus, hence why smart lytherions thoroughly invesitgate potential troupers long before approaching them. Too many slashers have been made by magi who didn't look as closely as they should have.
Resolution: The Mantle doesn't want to leave at this point. The lytherion must spend a number of days outside the affected area equal to her Resolve and must spend three Maniae to dispel it at this stage, with every day beyond the radius causing the poisons in the tattoos to slowly become hazardous again; each day is a lethal level of damage that cannot be recovered until the Mantle is dispelled or reentered (in a bit of a mixed blessing, the magus' death does the trick too). Subtlety is a lot harder at this stage, which is why most troupes don't exactly bother in conventional ways; if they can't be invisible, they'll have to go in disguised as other supernatural beings. While the lytherion and her troupe don't look like any known major supernatural being, the very fact they all have strange powers allows them to imitate (a different set of) outside context problems. The traditional method, because lytherions are still entertainers when it comes down to it, is to become the sinister circus folk they like to think they are, with clown makeup and everything. Yes, this signature is known to scholars among the shadow folk as heralds of imminent revelation, but the mystique it's built up actually protects the magi; a not-insignificant portion of those scholars, already afraid of clowns, thinks of the whole fraternity as a natural catastrophe that cannot be averted, only survived. More importantly, it draws a mortal audience, which is the whole point; once enough people are drawn to a convenient area, and an escape route secured (which can take a while, but a people as long-lived as poison ink magi learn patience), the lytherion fills her Maniae to maximum, journeys to the unknowing audience...and spends all of it. So does the Mantle become its final, grandiose crescendo:
A Revelatory Finale!: The Mantle becomes a lot smaller at this stage, only about a city block across at the largest. It's all the lytherion needs. In the affected area, the Great Mask is gone; not only are all concealing laws repealed to an even greater degree (humans do not inherently panic at all when faced with Lunacy, Dissonance does not cause breaking points, etc.), and memory modification outright impossible (any attempts are cut off by terrifying hallucinations of things best left unknown), all supernatural beings, or even those with supernatural abilities, are shown to be what they are; vampires involuntarily reveal their fangs and their eyes glow an intimidating and seductive red, werewolves in human form grow fur and useless claws, the Nimbuses of wizards ignite and dance, poltergeist activity forms halos of dust around the heads of psychics, and so on (this includes the lytherion, whose tattoos cease all pretense and come to life, shifting and changing in ways impossible to miss, often resembling nothing so much as a two-dimensional, colorful jungle). As if that didn't cause enough panic, a truly magnificent and terrifying supernatural event unfolds in the area; in the recent past, this has included the palace of one of the Underworld's ruling Kerberoi to thrust out of the ground and fall to ruin, leaving a very confused and happy set of former prisoners behind along with the remaining pieces, angels from the Supernal Aether manifesting to destroy a sleeping acamoth, and even a flying saucer (actually an aerial God-Machine facility) crashing. In a merciful twist, nothing about the event inherently harms anyone human (or capable of pretending to be human) who happens to be there; all they have to do is run or stand back to watch in amazement. Whether they will, given the pandemonium released by the lytherion...that's more ambiguous.
Resolution; Like a fireworks show, the mature Jaguar's Mantle is gone too soon, just leaving a truly breathtaking memory (and whatever far more concealable relics of the Finale is left behind). The Condition lasts as long as the event does, usually about thirty minutes to an hour. Once that happens, all effects from the Mantle cease, and the Carnival ends-but not its spirit. While the shadow folk can modify all the memories that they want, by the time a lytherion is done it's not uncommon to have upwards of a hundred people who have perfect memories of exactly what transpired that strange night. They could kill them all, but a hundred people just dying brings even more attention-to say nothing of the confusion and panic their own society is likely in, wondering just what the **** happened there, and the blame game for letting it get this bad. There's going to be stories, and those who listen to the stories, see the world for as it truly is.
And somewhere, a poor-seeming tattooed woman rents a room in a city plagued by ignored shadows. Just for a week...
Storytelling Hints: Lytherions aren't (just) being facetious when they call their traveling bands "troupes"; besides the fact that modern lytherion culture has origins in the circus, a poison ink magus' presence is a herald of a very carnival atmosphere-in the sense of the Feast of Fools, where the normal laws of society and sanity are cheerfully upturned and suspended, all ideas of what is "normal" spat upon in a Saturnalian frenzy. As the lytherions like to point out if asked, what this meant in layman's terms was that normal social roles were inverted, with a peasant or assistant priest appointed the head of festivities (the Lord of Misrule) and "respectable" sorts were derided and mocked. So as it is with the chaos the lytherions herald-a quick expenditure of Maniae turns even the weakest person into a mighty force capable of miraculous supernatural feats (Miracle is a Dread Power too, after all), and authority figures how everything is perfectly mundane and normal increasingly come off like blind idiots or piss-poor liars. But where the normal Carnival was intended as a release valve for social resentment, the poison ink magi intend it as a catalyst for true unrest; forcing all involved to confront the world as it really is, where "authority figures" are as untrustworthy as everyone else, sanity is a comforting attempt to believe there is an inherent, understandable order to the world, and (of course) monsters exist. The thing about poison ink magi that makes them antagonists, however, is not the carnival or the social upheaval it heralds; part of their theme is that people's stranger sides are not only acceptable, but to be lauded. Chaos that invites change, not destruction, is their ultimate goal. Rather, it's their naivete; the season of Carnival was traditionally a predecessor to the sober restraint of Lent; the chaos lytherions leave in their wake causes authority to clamp down to control the situation, and the people to thank them for it.
As an antagonist, a lytherion is, perhaps ironically given their goals, a hidden mastermind who relies on Troupers who have a great deal more raw power than the lytherions themselves. In many supernatural societies this would be a recipe for the poison ink magi being usurped in short order, but a benefit to their own actually genuine ideology is loyalty; most of a lytherion's retinue generally respect and like her as a speaker and leader, even if the lytherion herself is far, far weaker than they are (not to mention most of the truly mutated Troupers had said magus as their first real friend in the world; one doesn't subconsciously choose to be an obvious monster unless one had a streak of misanthropy to begin with). More than that, the simple matter is that she doesn't need to have a coherent plan; all she needs to do is lure as many people as she can, preferably followed by at least a few supernatural beings but it's hardly needed. Thus, a magus' plans are adaptable and fittingly chaotic themselves, usually based around humiliating authority and undermining the veil of ignorance that covers the entire Chronicles world, which grow increasingly showy as the Mantle mounts upon itself and the Troupe allows itself to have a little more fun with it (more than once has a Troupe been mistaken for comic book supervillains who were brought to life by errant magic).
A few tips for individual gamelines suited to a lytherion character:
Vampire: Lytherions are the Kindred's nightmare come to life. An entire, superhuman cult of manipulators whose main goal is to expose the supernatural and upset power structures they view as stagnant? If the All-Night Society still had living brains, they'd have a collective aneurysm. If one can get past the "KILL IT WITH FIRE" stage, it's unlikely any friendships are going to bloom; there's almost nothing in common between the tattooed chaos ringmasters and stagnant old undead; vampires victimize others simply in the course of eating, while lytherions' entire moral system revolves around the idea that humans should be given paranormal abilities to even the scales of power. Still, the Masquerade's a personal effort for a reason; an alliance with a lytherion is an excellent "suitcase nuke" plan for anyone who stands to gain from a bit of upheaval. Carthians are a good potential ally, but both the Circle of the Crone and Dragons might enjoy both quietly assuming political power and studying the mystical effects of the tattooes and how lytherions change people for the weirder. A few ghoul domitors might even sympathize with the Troupe, and approach the lytherion as someone who understands. The idea of ghouled Troupers is a frightening one...assuming the lytherions ever find a domitor they wouldn't want to kill on sight,
Werewolf: Pop quiz; if I described to you a cabal of differently powered individuals united by a borderline religious culture and an almost biological edict to seek and destroy that which they regard as corrupt, would I be describing a lytherion troupe or a werewolf pack? Yes, lytherions themselves are usually among the weaker members of their troupes, as opposed to the shapeshifting lineage of semi-gods that are the Uratha, but even their hands-off approach to their schemes isn't far from many Iron Masters. Hunting a lytherion is going to raise some hard questions of empathy with a pack; on the one hand, they act so much alike, but on the other, The Herd Must Not Know is a precept for a reason, and nobody thinks it's possible to contain a lytherion's Mantle easily. Thus, where a lytherion falls on the enemy-ally scale depends on whether the Uratha in question happens to like the local authority figures a magus is focusing on-one that changes easily enough.
Mage: Upon realizing what lytherions are, most mages are going to be rather more interested in how the tattoos came about than any question about getting rid of them. Yes, they're huge Veil hazards, and nobody likes unpredictability, but ink that causes a nexus of supernatural events, all seemingly unrelated? Even the most fanatical Guardian is going to pause long enough to get a good look at that Mystery, even if it's only to develop a toxin that actually works on poison ink magj. Beyond that, the Pentacle is going to feel rather torn; on the one hand, the Mantle's effects mean more witch hunters, and that's going to be hazardous to all involved, but on the other, one doesn't have a long-standing rivalry with the priesthood of the embodiments of societal corruption without developing anti-authoritarian sympathies. To the truly dogged enemies of the Seers, lytherions often come off as well-intentioned but stupid kids who think the beginning and end of social change is beating the bad guys. The world doesn't work like that, and yet, the magi are so genuine that many wizards find themselves agreeing purely because they want that kind of idealism to be rewarded. But in the end, even a lytherion that understands focus and control doesn't have the tools needed to be anything other than an agent of chaos, not easily-but sometimes, perhaps, an agent of chaos is exactly what's needed. Everyone empowered by the Mantle is a Sleepwalker, after all...
Hunter: A not-insignificant portion of hunters always arises in the wake of a successful lytherion, and usually before things reach that point. Poison ink magi tend to view them with a little confusion (why would someone who sees how truly wondrous the world is turn on it?), but they respect the self-honesty required to embark on the Vigil. The feeling is not mutual-but the hunters, upon thinking about what lytherions are, don't hate them either. To a hunter, the poison ink magi are completely baffling; to look upon the horror every day, and call it beauty? That's something most don't understand. Hunters, after all, generally get involved with the most horrific aspects of supernature, and thus, to encounter some witch (already unnerving to most hunters not in danger of becoming slashers-they're humans with strange powers, emphasis on humans) who can and will give detailed explanations on why everyone becoming paranormal will be a good thing, and provide evidence in the form of Troupers? That's a worldview that causes a hunter's brain to start hurting. But in the end, that doesn't change the fact that when it comes down to it, the similarities outnumber the differences; like hunters, lytherions are singular agents with a grudge against corrupt supernatural power structures, no faith in the normal authorities, and above all else, a love of humanity, warts and all. The real danger in matching wits with lytherion is not developing a positive relationship with a supernatural being, if you're going cancer cell a lytherion ally isn't someone likely to puppeteer you. No, the real danger is being so won over you end up becoming one-or rejecting them for the wrong reasons, and deciding that since they seem to be right about all humans being monsters who haven't realized that yet..
I'mma going to post what I have now over here as well, along with the ones that are currently being voted on (A vote which is closing later today). So without further ado, let's start!
Lytherion (Poison Ink Magus)
Come one, come all! Gaze in splendor at the Carnival that Never Ends, where sanity is madness, fools are kings, and monsters do exist! Come and see!
Tattoos are taken to be a sign of deliberate transgression against common societal mores in many cultures. In medieval Japan, for instance, having three bands on one's wrist meant one was a convicted criminal, which eventually led to the yakuza adopting the irezumi, the often beautiful full-body tattoos the proudly criminal culture uses as a sign of brotherhood and and easy identification. In the West, especially America, bikers, punks, and rebels of all sorts may not have their entire torso and arms inked, but the same principle applies-a fundamentally eternal mark of transgression against the idea the body should be unmarred, even if the inked individual eventually decides the rebellion behind said tattoo was a bad idea.
For an ancient fraternity of wandering entertainers, occultists, and anarchists, the tattooes are more than just a symbol of rebellion against conventional society. The toxic paints embedded in their skin are a rebellion against the frailties of the human condition itself, and more importantly, the extremely practiced sense of denial most mundane residents of the World of Darkness has to the supernatural that surrounds them. Every inch of arcane lettering on their skin dares others to at least acknowledge how strange they look, and observing their unique (and to most other people, fatal) diets only turns that into a demand-and should they stay in one place for more than a few days, the world starts to follow suit.
Lytherions (nobody's quite sure the origin of the name, since the individualistic group do not keep written records of the history of their group, only individual members in the belief that a shared history would cause the specter of stagnant tradition to infect them) are an old group, dating back to pre-Spanish Central America, as the distinctly Mesoamerican design of their mystical tattoos might suggest. How they spread to the Old World, and from there back to the New, is a bit more obscure, but most learned in the subject (ie, the lytherions themselves) attribute it to imperial exoticism; there's few more interesting carnival freaks then a group of tattooed men (and more recently, women) who eat poisons. The poison ink magi really don't mind, though-to them, interesting people in the strange is the whole point, with themselves being a window into the other side of the illusion of a sane world. Of course, most of those hypothetical lytherions were in bondage, but the fact that their very presence causes that illusion to grow increasingly unsteady helps; at least one slave ship falling to its cargo was probably due to lytherions empowering said cargo simply by living near them. From there, the growth of early modern carnivals led to a transformation from...whatever they were to the Aztec civilization into what they are now; proudly open carnival freaks, even past the point where freakshows were a common and accepted thing. The strange mix of admiration and revulsion is something they find to be an almost religious experience, one that drew most of them into accepting the tattoos in the first place-and one they sincerely hope to bring to the entire world, because only then, say the lytherions, will the world finally know itself.
In the beliefs of the poison ink magi, the first sin in the world, the foundation of all others, is willful ignorance. There's a reason scientists and scholars are usually among the first groups to be excluded from a truly authoritarian government, mocked as "aloof", "effete", "socialist", and other terms pulled out of the ass of insecure men (and it's almost always men, the lytherions have noticed-the transition from an almost entirely male brotherhood to a slightly female-dominated one was rather sudden, but mostly peaceful); knowledge is a sacred toxin, one that rapidly breaks down internal justifications for warfare, prejudice, and class warfare and leading to a more peaceful society. One that said insecure men can't as easily control and direct, so they invent hackneyed reasons why "the other" cannot be a real person, and why "we" should band against "the other." Unsurprisingly, many lytherions are involved in politically radical causes, but to the poison ink magi, civil rights, recognition of the gender spectrum, and the struggle against the comforting narcotic of anti-intellectualism are all small fry compared to the biggest, and most grotesque, item of willful ignorance on Earth; refusal to acknowledge the supernatural that surrounds it. More self-aware lytherions don't blame the Great Mask, as they call it, for all ignorance in the world, but the Mask is certainly a symbiote with it; a society that fears everyone outside pays no attention to the terrible things inside, and the various societies of supernatural beings are often terrible, parasites that engineer social illness and tragedy purely to hide better within the exposed cracks and exploit the helpless mortals. So, the lytherions say, the most holy thing to do is to break the Mask, and force the world to admit it was never a very good one (the fact that lytherion blood is a flesh-eating acid to vampires surely has nothing to do with this. Surely).. Everything the poison ink magi are is a weapon against the Mask, from their distinctive appearances and metabolism to the strange effect they have on the world around them. They aren't stupid about this; they're fully aware all supernatural societies have at least one group dedicated to repairing the Great Mask, and it seems many mundane humans are almost psychologically dependent on its existence. So the poison ink magi are as subtle as they can be, traveling frequently to prevent a buildup of weirdness that can be traced back to them, rarely initiating new members until completely sure of their loyalty to the mission, and keeping to the poorer (which is to say, oft-ignored and forgotten) segments of society, working to chip away at the Mask scheme by scheme, incident by incident. This is also why lytherions try to travel alone or in pairs (usually a master and apprentice, but sometimes a romantic couple or two magi that happened to be in the same area), but they're far from solitary; according to what few myths they have, the only reason humans in general don't have extraordinary powers is ignorance of them, and exposure to a lytherion's "weirdness field" subconsciously teaches them otherwise; it's a rare magi that does not have his own troupe of fellow, if subtler, freaks of nature, beautiful and strange.
Someday soon, the lytherions hope, the Great Mask will fall, and the Carnival of Life can truly begin, the endless celebration of the world as it is-in all its ugliness and beauty.
Mechanics: Lytherions are built like normal human characters. They have Virtues, Vices, and Integrity like any mundane character-with certain exceptions. For one, the "What have you forgotten?" question is replaced; even before their inking, poison ink magi were people who at least faced the strange head-on in their lives, and now as living weirdness batteries, one gets acclimated to the chaos around them. Rather, lytherion characters ask "What supernatural influence do you fear most?"; the magi are all very aware of the potential for shadow folk to take freedom away, and even worse, make it seem like nothing was destroyed. Common answers to this are "modifying my memory", "unwilling changes to my body", "emotions being controlled", and "ability to spy on me." At their core, lytherions are bombastic rebels, so common Virtues are based around inciting social change for others (Ambition, Kindness, and Paternal), while common Vices are based around personal freedom at the expense of others (Stubborn, Hedonistic, and Rude).
Above all else, lytherions have their tattooes, the source of their strange and occult abilities. Applying them is a dangerous, precise process, for the simple fact that, in order to take, the pigments must be laced with powdered feathers of tropical birds and venom from poisonous snakes, preferably those of Central America but any will do in a pinch. While the person applying them is likely a lytherion herself and thus, immune, up until they "mark the soul", as the poison ink magi say, her initiate isn't, and indeed, treating them with antivenoms to ease the toxin actually makes things worse if the procedure was done correctly. Thus, the marking ritual is one extensively planned out in advance, with the lytherion mixing the pigments with as little venom as possible and the initiate taking a steady diet of medicinal herbs, since only antidotes taken after the ink is applied actually have an adverse effect. Creating the proper mixture of pigments is an extended Intelligence + Occult action, capped by three times the lytherion's Medicine score (representing her knowledge of pharmacological dosages, since measurement systems don't change just because it's obscure alchemy rather than proper chemistry). Applying the tats themselves is an extended Dexterity + Medicine roll, as the designs will come due to the mystical nature of the ink-the trick's knowing where to apply the ink in the least hazardous spot. An interesting note on the process is that, like other Extended rolls, the lytherion performing the inking can take a condition to keep making rolls past the normal cap-but these Conditions are Tilts, representing bizarre supernatural phenomenon in the immediate area that fades after about two years naturally. A lytherion hunter can do worse than investigate rumors of tattooed men who appeared just before things got strange in the area. The lytherion candidate to be can have dots in Supernatural Merits, but cannot be a supernatural being with a modified Integrity meter or have any dots in true Dread Powers-they are too different from the mortal baseline for the sacred pigments to safely take.
If all goes okay, the ink sets in its initial pattern (the tattoos shift over the course of the lytherion's life into unique forms in response to major life events) over the course of about three days, as the initiate has strange visions of distant planes and arcane truths. At the end of the process, the new lytherion awakes, likely still sore but feeling more young than he ever did as a mortal. Lytherions lose any infirmities related to age and gain the three dot version of Iron Stamina merit for free. This isn't due to any life-bolstering quality of the ink, precisely; lytherions are actually in the prime of their life, biologically speaking, and more than that will be for a very long time; they live for about 300 to 500 years before the beginnings of age set in, and even then there's still about 200 years left of life in them (not that any one of them has actually died of old age, mind-lytherions in their twilight years take that as a reason to go out with a bang). His metabolism is altered into something quite unlike any others on Earth-poisons and other toxic substances actually become necessary for digestion, while antidotes and antivenoms harm (in game terms, he needs to have a substance with a Toxicity rating in his body to gain nourishment from food and drink, though he is never affected by the poison). This also means that he can eat spoiled food just fine, but while the ink neutralizes the taste of the truly poisonous molds and other contaminants, it still doesn't taste good.
More than that, however, is the settling of what lytherions call the Jaguar's Mantle, an invisible aura of occult and maddening energies that quickens the unseen world around and inside the poison ink magus. All lytherions can buy Supernatural Merits, and gains four free dots to distribute among Supernatural Merits after their initial inking-but their personal abilities are merely a useful side effect, not the intent. No, lytherions are more interested in what it can do to the world around them (the "Jaguar" in question is the sacred animal of Tezcatlipoca, Aztec god of, among other things, magic and chaos. European lytherions also call it the Maenad's Perfume after the wild women who served the equally wild Greek god Dionysus, but the majority prefer the first name, given how obviously Mesoamerican their tattoos are). Within its effect, the supernatural becomes increasingly hard to hide, and what's more, grows more and more prominent as provokes the world to do its strangest.
Lytherions naturally exude the Mantle, causing a unique Environmental Condition to seep into the world around them, not dissimilar to a Promethean's Wasteland. There are four stages to the effect, dependent on how long the lytherion stays in one place and whether she is restraining or encouraging the effect. Either requires drawing power from the tattoos themselves, and that doesn't come from nowhere; it's why the lytherions eat poisons, in fact-they need to replace the toxin in the pigments drained by instinctively exuding the Mantle. Three times the dosage of a poison beyond what is needed to provoke a Toxicity rating consumed by the magus gives her a point of "Maniae", of which she can store up to her Willpower dots in points. This represents the storage of excess occult power in her inks needed to truly control and influence the Mantle.
The four stages are:
Building Tension: The Mantle has suffused an area of (lytherion's Presence x 5) miles around her current domicile. In this radius, things are not obviously strange yet, but the occult laws that hold the Great Mask in place have frayed; if someone would normally forget a supernatural event by the rules (the Dissonance caused by witnessing mage magic, or Lunacy) automatically, the Storyteller makes an automatic Resolve + Composure roll; success means the effect doesn't take, and the person remembers what he saw perfectly well, and merely suffers a mild headache. Deliberate modification of memory is still possible, but harder; any contested roll against a supernatural power meant to erase or modify memory of the occult gains (lytherion's Resolve/2, rounding up) bonus dice to resist/as an extra penalty to the roll, depending on the power. Most supernatural beings notice the latter, but write it off as bad luck with strong-willed mortals, while they often completely miss the former (and in the case of things like Lunacy, remembering events as they happened isn't actually that strange, it just means a person has accepted werewolves exist). Lytherions take advantage of this to hunker down and put their troupes in place for their plans.
Cause: The lytherion sleeps in one general (about the size of a room) location for a week, There is no way to speed the process, and no way to slow it, this is the Mantle actually establishing itself enough to be manipulated in the first place.
Resolution: The lytherion leaves her radius of effect, or spends a point of Maniae upon waking to reabsorb the Mantle. The lytherion staying in the radius for more than a month or spending two Maniae upon sleeping advances the Condition to its next level:
Opening Acts: The Mantle begins to affect the laws of probability and nature, egging on the world to embrace its freakish side. The resistance to the Great Mask's supernatural laws remains the same, but mortals in the area gain the lytherion's Resolve as a straight bonus to resist memory modification. More importantly, the fantastic becomes more commonplace; Essence pools into loci after singular acts of passion, vampiric revenants rise without any input from actual vampires, gates to the Underworld open and close for no discernable reason...it remains subtle at this stage, but it's usually at this point the shadow folk begin to notice something's wrong (but still tend to assume it's one of theirs; the Mantle is clever enough to only provoke phenomenon related to already present supernatural forces). Any sane lytherion has likely planned for this, though, and most of the troupe's missions at this stage is distracting and crippling their investigations, likely by inciting internal struggles. Assume one odd event happens a week on average in the radius of the Condition, and the magus can provoke another by spending a Maniae and imagining the location she wants it (she cannot control the specific event, only where, although there are rumors of experienced lytherions who have developed an expertise in nudging the Mantle into acting in a somewhat predictable fashion-though it's still more rolling a six-sided die instead of working a roulette table, to use a simile). It's also at this point that inherent supernatural abilities among mortals start to spontaneously manifest, but the lytherion cannot consciously provoke their abilities at this stage
Resolution: The Mantle is far more stable at this stage; the lytherion has to be outside of the affected area for her own Resolve in days at once-indeed, lytherions try to spend as little time as possible in the area under this Condition as possible, because the shadow folk are likely looking for something or someone behind the growing chaos. The only reason why they wouldn't is that they cannot provoke effects within the Mantle so long as they are outside the radius, but that's ultimately an ability meant to mislead, and not one a particularly precise one. Ultimately, the goal is to confuse the issue enough to move on to the next Condition, which occurs a year and a day after Opening Acts manifests-though the lytherion can spend Maniae on a one-to-one basis to lengthen or shorten the time needed by a month.
Cirque de Etrange; The Great Mask cracks; the concealing laws cease to apply in the area (and before any unsubtle twiddlers of fingers get any ideas, it's only the memory that's affected-Dissonance still aggravates Paradox and Sleepers witnessing magic is still a breaking point-they can even remember the Abyss trying to steal bits of their minds), and any attempt to deliberately conceal memory is much, much harder-even besides the normal bonus/penalty, the Mantle now actively harasses any who make the attempt, a minor supernatural event akin to the ones in the previous Condition occurring in the immediate vicinity of the triggering entity occurs as soon as they activate their power, making the attempt a borderline pointless endeavor. Minor events grow far more frequent-even without the self-defeating memory modification, minor events happen once every other day now, and the lytherion no longer needs Maniae to cause them. It's nothing compared to the major events, which happen about once every two weeks naturally; corpses of particularly sinful people rising with Kindred Clans that reflect their own darkness, mirrors reflecting the Shadow (and the spirits reflected stay on this side of the Gauntlet when the vision ends), the ghosts of apartment buildings rising after their destruction, now inhabited by Underworld shades, and other things inexplicable to the shadow folk and utterly blatant to the mortals. Magi can provoke the major events within about 50 yards with three Maniae, but rarely do so, as their tattoos don't grant any particular safety from said events, only warn them when something's going to happen nearby within the next three days (treat as Unseen Sense, manifests as the designs rapidly moving, a very itchy sensation). However, what they can do is deliberately create new troupers; by touching a willing individual and spending one Willpower and a variable amount of Maniae, a lytherion can give a mundane human (one who lacks Supernatural Merits, in other words) a touch of the strange. Two Maniae equal one dot of a Supernatural Merit, three Maniae one dot of a Dread Power, and one Maniae a dot in an obvious Dread Power, taking the form of a difficult-to-conceal mutation that is obviously inhuman in some way, though rarely ugly. A Trouper with a Dread Power counts as a Horror with a Potency of 1 (which can never be raised) and retains Integrity (this also means they are no longer candidates for becoming lytherions, unlike Troupers who only have Supernatural Merits). These Merits are chosen by the beneficiary's player, as the lytherions aren't lying when they say they simply are helping the hidden strangeness come out. The powers generally reflect the beneficiary's hidden desires and personality in some way, and confer no particular loyalty to the magus, hence why smart lytherions thoroughly invesitgate potential troupers long before approaching them. Too many slashers have been made by magi who didn't look as closely as they should have.
Resolution: The Mantle doesn't want to leave at this point. The lytherion must spend a number of days outside the affected area equal to her Resolve and must spend three Maniae to dispel it at this stage, with every day beyond the radius causing the poisons in the tattoos to slowly become hazardous again; each day is a lethal level of damage that cannot be recovered until the Mantle is dispelled or reentered (in a bit of a mixed blessing, the magus' death does the trick too). Subtlety is a lot harder at this stage, which is why most troupes don't exactly bother in conventional ways; if they can't be invisible, they'll have to go in disguised as other supernatural beings. While the lytherion and her troupe don't look like any known major supernatural being, the very fact they all have strange powers allows them to imitate (a different set of) outside context problems. The traditional method, because lytherions are still entertainers when it comes down to it, is to become the sinister circus folk they like to think they are, with clown makeup and everything. Yes, this signature is known to scholars among the shadow folk as heralds of imminent revelation, but the mystique it's built up actually protects the magi; a not-insignificant portion of those scholars, already afraid of clowns, thinks of the whole fraternity as a natural catastrophe that cannot be averted, only survived. More importantly, it draws a mortal audience, which is the whole point; once enough people are drawn to a convenient area, and an escape route secured (which can take a while, but a people as long-lived as poison ink magi learn patience), the lytherion fills her Maniae to maximum, journeys to the unknowing audience...and spends all of it. So does the Mantle become its final, grandiose crescendo:
A Revelatory Finale!: The Mantle becomes a lot smaller at this stage, only about a city block across at the largest. It's all the lytherion needs. In the affected area, the Great Mask is gone; not only are all concealing laws repealed to an even greater degree (humans do not inherently panic at all when faced with Lunacy, Dissonance does not cause breaking points, etc.), and memory modification outright impossible (any attempts are cut off by terrifying hallucinations of things best left unknown), all supernatural beings, or even those with supernatural abilities, are shown to be what they are; vampires involuntarily reveal their fangs and their eyes glow an intimidating and seductive red, werewolves in human form grow fur and useless claws, the Nimbuses of wizards ignite and dance, poltergeist activity forms halos of dust around the heads of psychics, and so on (this includes the lytherion, whose tattoos cease all pretense and come to life, shifting and changing in ways impossible to miss, often resembling nothing so much as a two-dimensional, colorful jungle). As if that didn't cause enough panic, a truly magnificent and terrifying supernatural event unfolds in the area; in the recent past, this has included the palace of one of the Underworld's ruling Kerberoi to thrust out of the ground and fall to ruin, leaving a very confused and happy set of former prisoners behind along with the remaining pieces, angels from the Supernal Aether manifesting to destroy a sleeping acamoth, and even a flying saucer (actually an aerial God-Machine facility) crashing. In a merciful twist, nothing about the event inherently harms anyone human (or capable of pretending to be human) who happens to be there; all they have to do is run or stand back to watch in amazement. Whether they will, given the pandemonium released by the lytherion...that's more ambiguous.
Resolution; Like a fireworks show, the mature Jaguar's Mantle is gone too soon, just leaving a truly breathtaking memory (and whatever far more concealable relics of the Finale is left behind). The Condition lasts as long as the event does, usually about thirty minutes to an hour. Once that happens, all effects from the Mantle cease, and the Carnival ends-but not its spirit. While the shadow folk can modify all the memories that they want, by the time a lytherion is done it's not uncommon to have upwards of a hundred people who have perfect memories of exactly what transpired that strange night. They could kill them all, but a hundred people just dying brings even more attention-to say nothing of the confusion and panic their own society is likely in, wondering just what the **** happened there, and the blame game for letting it get this bad. There's going to be stories, and those who listen to the stories, see the world for as it truly is.
And somewhere, a poor-seeming tattooed woman rents a room in a city plagued by ignored shadows. Just for a week...
Storytelling Hints: Lytherions aren't (just) being facetious when they call their traveling bands "troupes"; besides the fact that modern lytherion culture has origins in the circus, a poison ink magus' presence is a herald of a very carnival atmosphere-in the sense of the Feast of Fools, where the normal laws of society and sanity are cheerfully upturned and suspended, all ideas of what is "normal" spat upon in a Saturnalian frenzy. As the lytherions like to point out if asked, what this meant in layman's terms was that normal social roles were inverted, with a peasant or assistant priest appointed the head of festivities (the Lord of Misrule) and "respectable" sorts were derided and mocked. So as it is with the chaos the lytherions herald-a quick expenditure of Maniae turns even the weakest person into a mighty force capable of miraculous supernatural feats (Miracle is a Dread Power too, after all), and authority figures how everything is perfectly mundane and normal increasingly come off like blind idiots or piss-poor liars. But where the normal Carnival was intended as a release valve for social resentment, the poison ink magi intend it as a catalyst for true unrest; forcing all involved to confront the world as it really is, where "authority figures" are as untrustworthy as everyone else, sanity is a comforting attempt to believe there is an inherent, understandable order to the world, and (of course) monsters exist. The thing about poison ink magi that makes them antagonists, however, is not the carnival or the social upheaval it heralds; part of their theme is that people's stranger sides are not only acceptable, but to be lauded. Chaos that invites change, not destruction, is their ultimate goal. Rather, it's their naivete; the season of Carnival was traditionally a predecessor to the sober restraint of Lent; the chaos lytherions leave in their wake causes authority to clamp down to control the situation, and the people to thank them for it.
As an antagonist, a lytherion is, perhaps ironically given their goals, a hidden mastermind who relies on Troupers who have a great deal more raw power than the lytherions themselves. In many supernatural societies this would be a recipe for the poison ink magi being usurped in short order, but a benefit to their own actually genuine ideology is loyalty; most of a lytherion's retinue generally respect and like her as a speaker and leader, even if the lytherion herself is far, far weaker than they are (not to mention most of the truly mutated Troupers had said magus as their first real friend in the world; one doesn't subconsciously choose to be an obvious monster unless one had a streak of misanthropy to begin with). More than that, the simple matter is that she doesn't need to have a coherent plan; all she needs to do is lure as many people as she can, preferably followed by at least a few supernatural beings but it's hardly needed. Thus, a magus' plans are adaptable and fittingly chaotic themselves, usually based around humiliating authority and undermining the veil of ignorance that covers the entire Chronicles world, which grow increasingly showy as the Mantle mounts upon itself and the Troupe allows itself to have a little more fun with it (more than once has a Troupe been mistaken for comic book supervillains who were brought to life by errant magic).
A few tips for individual gamelines suited to a lytherion character:
Vampire: Lytherions are the Kindred's nightmare come to life. An entire, superhuman cult of manipulators whose main goal is to expose the supernatural and upset power structures they view as stagnant? If the All-Night Society still had living brains, they'd have a collective aneurysm. If one can get past the "KILL IT WITH FIRE" stage, it's unlikely any friendships are going to bloom; there's almost nothing in common between the tattooed chaos ringmasters and stagnant old undead; vampires victimize others simply in the course of eating, while lytherions' entire moral system revolves around the idea that humans should be given paranormal abilities to even the scales of power. Still, the Masquerade's a personal effort for a reason; an alliance with a lytherion is an excellent "suitcase nuke" plan for anyone who stands to gain from a bit of upheaval. Carthians are a good potential ally, but both the Circle of the Crone and Dragons might enjoy both quietly assuming political power and studying the mystical effects of the tattooes and how lytherions change people for the weirder. A few ghoul domitors might even sympathize with the Troupe, and approach the lytherion as someone who understands. The idea of ghouled Troupers is a frightening one...assuming the lytherions ever find a domitor they wouldn't want to kill on sight,
Werewolf: Pop quiz; if I described to you a cabal of differently powered individuals united by a borderline religious culture and an almost biological edict to seek and destroy that which they regard as corrupt, would I be describing a lytherion troupe or a werewolf pack? Yes, lytherions themselves are usually among the weaker members of their troupes, as opposed to the shapeshifting lineage of semi-gods that are the Uratha, but even their hands-off approach to their schemes isn't far from many Iron Masters. Hunting a lytherion is going to raise some hard questions of empathy with a pack; on the one hand, they act so much alike, but on the other, The Herd Must Not Know is a precept for a reason, and nobody thinks it's possible to contain a lytherion's Mantle easily. Thus, where a lytherion falls on the enemy-ally scale depends on whether the Uratha in question happens to like the local authority figures a magus is focusing on-one that changes easily enough.
Mage: Upon realizing what lytherions are, most mages are going to be rather more interested in how the tattoos came about than any question about getting rid of them. Yes, they're huge Veil hazards, and nobody likes unpredictability, but ink that causes a nexus of supernatural events, all seemingly unrelated? Even the most fanatical Guardian is going to pause long enough to get a good look at that Mystery, even if it's only to develop a toxin that actually works on poison ink magj. Beyond that, the Pentacle is going to feel rather torn; on the one hand, the Mantle's effects mean more witch hunters, and that's going to be hazardous to all involved, but on the other, one doesn't have a long-standing rivalry with the priesthood of the embodiments of societal corruption without developing anti-authoritarian sympathies. To the truly dogged enemies of the Seers, lytherions often come off as well-intentioned but stupid kids who think the beginning and end of social change is beating the bad guys. The world doesn't work like that, and yet, the magi are so genuine that many wizards find themselves agreeing purely because they want that kind of idealism to be rewarded. But in the end, even a lytherion that understands focus and control doesn't have the tools needed to be anything other than an agent of chaos, not easily-but sometimes, perhaps, an agent of chaos is exactly what's needed. Everyone empowered by the Mantle is a Sleepwalker, after all...
Hunter: A not-insignificant portion of hunters always arises in the wake of a successful lytherion, and usually before things reach that point. Poison ink magi tend to view them with a little confusion (why would someone who sees how truly wondrous the world is turn on it?), but they respect the self-honesty required to embark on the Vigil. The feeling is not mutual-but the hunters, upon thinking about what lytherions are, don't hate them either. To a hunter, the poison ink magi are completely baffling; to look upon the horror every day, and call it beauty? That's something most don't understand. Hunters, after all, generally get involved with the most horrific aspects of supernature, and thus, to encounter some witch (already unnerving to most hunters not in danger of becoming slashers-they're humans with strange powers, emphasis on humans) who can and will give detailed explanations on why everyone becoming paranormal will be a good thing, and provide evidence in the form of Troupers? That's a worldview that causes a hunter's brain to start hurting. But in the end, that doesn't change the fact that when it comes down to it, the similarities outnumber the differences; like hunters, lytherions are singular agents with a grudge against corrupt supernatural power structures, no faith in the normal authorities, and above all else, a love of humanity, warts and all. The real danger in matching wits with lytherion is not developing a positive relationship with a supernatural being, if you're going cancer cell a lytherion ally isn't someone likely to puppeteer you. No, the real danger is being so won over you end up becoming one-or rejecting them for the wrong reasons, and deciding that since they seem to be right about all humans being monsters who haven't realized that yet..