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HAUNTERS

ARCANOI

A Haunter can learn the following Arcanoi at initiate and common level

PANDEMONIUM          OUTRAGE          MNEMOSYNIS

Any other Arcanoi a Haunter  learns is common level only

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Pandemonium is the Arcanos of invoking marginally controlled chaos on the far side of the Shroud. It has spawned a thousand tales of Fortean occurrences, and repeated exposure has driven many victims into gibbering helplessness. Disturbingly, it also seems to have similar effects on its own users. To outsiders, Pandemonium can seem as much an outward manifestation of chaos as an Arcanos. Haunters have a more nuanced perspective. True, Pandemonium attracts more than its share of broken wraiths, but a lot of them were a little different before they began meddling with weirdness. Like any psychoactive substance, this Arcanos works best for users who already know what they want out of it. It’s a tool of disruption. On the individual level, it messes with events or people’s perceptions. On the macro scale, it wreaks havoc with the Shroud — or so the Haunters hope. No one learns Pandemonium out of a desire for subtlety.

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Guildmarks

Even by the Underworld’s standards, Haunters are quirky, exhibiting peculiar mannerisms that seem calculated to unnerve witnesses. Reflexive meddling and antiauthoritarianism, spatial and temporal anomalies, and eldritch hallucinations (or are they true visions?) nibble at the edges of the wraith’s sanity. Other Arcanoi may sign a wraith’s Corpus, but Pandemonium leaves its mark on the psyche. Many Haunters do affect cloaks, greatcoats, or other flowing garments that can billow dramatically on cue, but this is a fashion statement, not a true guildmark. What marks a true Haunter is the thing seen out of the corner of the eye, the disturbing hint of what’s bubbling under the surface of the Haunter’s self-control.

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The Guild

To the Hierarchy’s rank and file (and most other unaffiliated wraiths), the Haunters are bereft of the organization or defined function of a true Guild, looking more like a social club of misfits and vandals who practice arts custom-tailored to upend the Dictum Mortuum. Their only possible value is in scaring mortals away from places that need to remain unmolested, but their unreliability makes them untrustworthy. Hierarchs who’ve been around a while take the Haunters more seriously — as a threat. Neologisms like “security concern” and “anti-Shroud insurgents” feature prominently in Legion analyses. Taken as a body of data, Haunter activities resemble a multiheaded rebellion against Charon’s laws. They’re not blowing up citadels or hijacking ghost planes but they do lead a lot of mortals to ask the wrong questions about what exactly does happen after you die. And in its own way, that’s just as dangerous. The Hierarchy recognizes some of the symptoms but fails to understand the disease. Haunters have been around in one form or another since the nights when humanity’s evolving religious beliefs first spun a barrier between the living and the dead. Long before the concept of Guilds arrived in the Shadowlands, these wraiths were slamming themselves against the Shroud in vain attempts to sunder it and return the binary states of life and death to their rightful places on a continuum of being. Charon’s decrees were repugnant, if not blasphemous, to these proto-Haunters. They, in turn, took it upon themselves to reopen mortals’ minds to the possibilities whose denial gave rise to the Shroud. As the other Guilds evolved, Haunters mimicked their trappings for protective coloration. Their ostensible purpose — hauntings for hire, have ectoplasm, will travel — became the
reality for most outsiders and even their junior members. Any Guild alliances were tenuous and the War of the Guilds purified the Haunters by soulforging the overly political members. Today, the business of Haunting continues apace. The Guild willingly takes payment for its services because each such transaction is a poke in the Hierarchy’s unlidded eye. Its true agenda, however, is nothing less than constantly making mortals aware of the possibility of life beyond death.

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Factions

Haunters ally for mutual interest or shared breakage. The scientifically-minded Mandelbrots seek new Arcanos manifestations that can manipulate and weaken the Shroud, or that affect the living so viscerally as to dissipate the Fog. The theologically-inclined Dantes explore and study the Shadowlands in search of an escape route. The hedonistic Caligarians create “art” through the transcendence of physical laws, inspiring mortals and fellow wraiths to beautiful insanity, while there’s nothing artistic or beautiful in the Bedlameers’ frothing assaults on mortal minds. The methodical and businesslike Order of the Glass Menagerie indirectly assaults the Shroud by working against the Fog, and its relative lucidity makes it the alliance least offensive to aliens. The Guild’s “leaders,” such as they are, mockingly refer to themselves (this week) as the H.G. Dwellers. Hewing closest to the proto-Haunters’ original ethos, the Dwellers seek the Shroud’s destruction so that they may roll back time, rejoining the living by resuming their own lives.



 

 

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