My current mage is home brewed Goetic mage a want to push really dark and then see if it makes more since to redeem or willfully commit to darkness. In his last run one thing leads to another pretty soon he's mind probing a dead guy recently abandoned by a shedim... you guys all no how it goes. It happened after a combat scene and no one thought to milk mind raping a horror tainted corpse for RP value at the time. So now I'm asking you all for suggestions on effects that might have large or small, mechanical or purely RP.

I´m afraid the attempt to mindprobe the body will fail. You need to mindprobe a mind. Try the shedim next time .

Yeah. If it's a corpse, it's a corpse. There's no mind to probe, just like there's nobody home to sit down next to and have a conversation with, or just like a Control Thoughts and Control Emotions wouldn't accomplish much.

You could make a Physical version (Mana spells don't work on non-living/non-magical things, including a dead body) of the spell that pulls the info from the target's neural network. If the target has to be dead you could get the limited target modifier. Tweak it as desired.

BTW, you could probably do the same thing with a Physical variant of Control Actions (but not Control Thoughts) to control the movement of dead bodies.

Aww, come on guys, Weaver asked for our help! Here are some of my suggestions, assuming, as I am from your original post, that you're more concerned with story value and less with those pesky rules that say dead men don't tell tales. As a disclaimer, I actually don't know how it goes, since I have no idea what a shedim is, but hey, the ignorance is half the fun! Right? Err...something...anyway:

- The mage gets feedback of the screaming horror and rage the person felt at being possessed.
- The mage gets feedback of the shedim howling and wailing all creepy-like.
- The freshly dead brain sends a few more electrical signals out and the target starts convulsing, oozing blood from his (pick a body part)
- The target screams a blood-curling scream, creeping out everyone nearby and possibly forcing composure tests.
- The target starts vomiting his intestines. I don't know, go wild.

I can only imagine that a mind touched by a Shedim is mangled and warped and some cold burning heart of hatred still beats within.

Somewhere out there is a Shedim that has tendrils leading back to a mortal husk. Somewhere out there is a Shedim that wanted into the Prime Materia. Somewhere out there is a Shedim that the players can talk to one way or the other.

I'd let them do a preservation type spell on the body, suspend it in some kind of life giving fluid (amniotic?) and then mind probe it to find its most recent memories... These memories are echoes of the Shedim, of broken and lost humanity etc. Maybe through these memories you can lay plot lines for them to follow TO the shedim? Or maybe just giving a spark of life to the corpse is enough to forcibly pull the shedim back to its most recent host, even for a moment, enraging it further.

Maybe combine mine and Gelares... The body reanimates with the terrible force that once occupied it... then goes nuts and starts vomiting its intestines.

Yeah.

That sounds rad.

- der menkey

"Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter."
~ Ernest Hemingway

Ancient History had something like this i think . . i'll look it up and edit it in ^^

hmm, no, not quite . . but close enough:

[minor nitpick] Shedim is a plural word. The singular would be shed (pronounced 'shade'). 'Im' at the end of a word is a common way to pluralize in Hebrew, and shedim is a Hebrew word. [/minor nitpick]

Thats rad. I love learning old languages.

I honestly wasn't sure what the hell he was talking about except that it was some kind of dead / evil spirit.

Shade makes sense.



Minor nitpicks are totally awesome when they teach you awesome stuff.

- der menkey

"Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter."
~ Ernest Hemingway

I just thought it was neat that shedim were in the game. Old Jewish demonology is pretty cool, it's nice to see it get some face time.

Ooh, nifty. I have a friend who's learning Hebrew...and this won't help me talk to her at all. Still cool, though.

*thumbs up to minor nitpick*

thanks for the help all. I wonder if my GM run shedim as actually horrors.... *runs off to his Earth Dawn books*

Any one the subject of minor beef with shedim, does anyone know how roleplaying games (SR, In Nomine, Gothic, et all) shedim came to be associated with possessing and specifically corpses? As far as I know shedim were bull like storm demons.

I'd start by checking the resources for Call of Cthulhu.

::wicked grin::

- der menkey

"Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter."
~ Ernest Hemingway

They come from some metaplane where they yearn for the feel of a body . . simple as that . . they come somewhere they can GET a body and they GET a body as soon as possible. . like insext spirits come to a plane where they can do what insects do . . eat and procreate *g*

The horror, the horror.. chaos, tons of incoherent thoughts and images, make it very hard to distinquish between the shedims thoughts and the corpses memories.. and sometimes make them crystal clear, heck make them even your chars thoughts, like he is thinking them, how he is feeling them.. in the end it should leave your char quite shooken up and reacting to shadows and faint sounds, imaginative or not, for a while.. say force hours or days.. depending on how often he does this kind of thing..

Basicly its a emotional rush of a whole lifetime + one pissed off shedim in the span of a few seconds.. imho.. =) thats why you summon the spirit of man tied to the corpse instead of probing the corpse itself..

One guy in one of my groups used to play a ghede houngan and developed -with gm approval- a "Speak with the dead" spell. It basically was a restricted target version of Mind Probe with some extra fluff for it extracting info from dead neurons. Somehow the dead people resisted (WP) and information was rather cryptic most of times. But hey, it was rather cool.


BTW. Said houngan ended up crazy.

Cheers,

Max