Exploit

In contrast to Embed, Exploits are not subtle at all. While they use the same metaphysical subroutines as Embeds, they are not relearned or remembered abilities but rather gross applications of the knowledge that the character already has. If an Embed is a word, and a set of Key Embeds is a sentence, then an Exploit is a shouted expletive. As such, Exploits are effective but run the risk of drawing attention.

Consider once again the metaphor of the child using the hole in the fence to sneak through a neighbor’s yard. Applying that metaphor to Exploits, the child might kick the loose board free and use it to shatter the neighbor’s glass patio door. An Exploit takes the knowledge imparted by an Embed and uses it to better, or at least more dramatic, effect. Unlike Embeds, though, Exploits are obvious and flamboyant, and therefore a risk to a demon’s Cover. An Exploit relies on a demon’s knowledge of the world’s metaphysical subroutines, just like Embeds, but instead of gently applying this knowledge, the demon forces Aether into the system, overcharging it and directing the result. While learning to use an Embed is a matter of re-acquiring knowledge that the demon had as an angel, learning to use an Exploit is more a matter of application. Angels therefore do not use Exploits — even their more grandiose powers are perfectly in line with their missions and therefore the parameters laid down by the God-Machine. An angel that decides to emulate a demon, pushing energy through the world’s mystical framework just to see what will happen, is probably on the verge of Falling.

Learning a given Exploit requires that the demon has the knowledge base to do so. For example, in order to learn the Hellfire Exploit, the demon needs to understand how the subroutines work with regards to firearms. This means that the demon needs to know an Embed such as Check Backdrop or Merciless Gunman. Each Exploit lists a few potential prerequisite Embeds, but the demon need not know all of them in order to learn the Exploit. Indeed, if the player can make a convincing case for a why a given Embed enables the character to learn a given Exploit, the Storyteller should allow it. Demons are masters of lateral thinking — they had to be in order to Fall.

Systems

Exploits do not fall into categories the way Embeds do, nor do they require conceptual underpinnings. They rely on the demon forcing the mystical power of Aether into the same subroutines that allow Embeds, and then keeping that burst of power under control. They are more overtly powerful than Embeds, but they draw attention. Every use of an Exploit causes a roll to avoid breaking Cover. The Storyteller should add modifiers to this roll based on how blatantly the character is acting out, how many people (not demons) can see the action, whether any angels can see the action, and whether or not any other Exploits have taken place during the scene. The player can spend a point of Willpower to avoid this roll.

• Addictive Presence: The story of the succubus (or its male counterpart, the incubus) — a demon that feeds on sexual attention — is well-known. Demons aren’t above using sex as a means of enforcing or sealing bargains, a means of persuasion, or just for fun, but some demons perfect the art of eliciting pleasure from their victims with every glance, touch and movement. In this way, the demon can create an addict to her very presence, someone who will do almost anything for a few moments with her regardless of whether the relationship is sexual. This Exploit only functions on living humans (vampires are dead and so don’t experience addiction the same way, and demons are not human). The demon might be able to addict other supernatural beings, but they add their Supernatural Tolerance trait to the number of successes required. Many of them also have ways to break addictions that are not available to humans.

• Affliction: The demon curses a target with boils, disease, madness, spiritual malaise, or any other malady he finds interesting. Some demons find this Exploit useful for revenge or punishment, others as a demonstration of power before a pact is finalized. The player must declare the particulars of the Affliction before rolling the dice. This determines the resistance roll; physical Afflictions are resisted with Stamina, mental Afflictions with Resolve. Example Prerequisites: Deafen, Recurring Hallucinations

• Allies Into Gold: What is the measure of a friend? What worth can be placed, not on a human being generally, but on human contact, of the ability to people to interact on a social level? A demon with this Exploit can shift what that human contact represents, changing a relationship that exists purely on the “exchange of information” level (Contacts) to one that brings in revenue (Resources), or one that induces the other party to level physical aid to the demon (Allies or even Retainer). This Exploit is riskier to a demon’s Cover than most. The compromise roll for Allies Into Gold suffers a negative modifier equal to the number of dots in Merits the demon is shifting.

• Animate: The demon can bring a facsimile of life to an inanimate object, provided that it has the apparatus to allow it to move. That is, the demon cannot animate something with no limbs or appendages, though he could animate a severed arm or an angel’s wing (though its movement would be severely limited). This means that the character can animate statues, sculptures, vehicles, and even corpses and call them to do his bidding. While animated, these objects emit occasional plumes of smoke or steam from joints and licks of fire or electricity sometimes emerge from their eyes.

• Behind the Curtain: This is a risky endeavor, but a useful one at times. The demon can call upon his memories of service to the God-Machine, enter a section of Infrastructure, then travel to another section of Infrastructure anywhere in the world. Since all Infrastructures are connected in the sense that they all use the same power sources, traveling between them is a simple metaphysical exercise (angels do it frequently). Unfortunately, doing so for a demon carries a greater-than-usual risk of compromise. Demons can use the Spoof ability when entering Infrastructure and are well-advised to do so in this case. Successfully Spoofing adds two dice to this Exploit’s roll.

• Break to Heal: The principle of “as above, so below” is one that demons understand well, as is the notion of conservation of energy. Every object in the world — in the universe — is made up of the same energy, and so transferring that energy from one form to another should be simple. In practice, demons can’t perform the metaphysical calculations necessary to performing world-altering feats of physics, but they can break one object and transmit that energy to living tissue, healing damage or illness. This Exploit requires that the demon touch the intended target and break an object at the same time.

• Deep Pockets: The demon can pull anything that he can lift out of his pocket, coat, suitcase or any other aperture he can fit his hand into. He doesn’t have to own the object that he is retrieving, but it does have to come from somewhere, so he has to be able to picture it. Since demons have perfect memories, however, even a moderately well-traveled demon has a wide range of objects to call upon. Demons with this Exploit often have a special room in their homes adorned with large objects that they can retrieve at will, seemingly from nowhere.

• Disintegrate: With a single touch, the demon can turn a solid object into dust and vapor. The object vibrates for a moment, and then cracks and disappears with a faint glow. The object in question can be no larger than the demon herself (usually Size 5). This Exploit does not work on living or undead matter. It does function on magical or enchanted items, but the player subtracts the item’s rating from the dice pool. If the target object is being held by another character, the demon must make a touch attack against the character. If the item’s Durability is higher than the demon’s Primum, the player must spend an additional point of Aether for the Exploit. The Demolisher Merit mitigates this effect.

• Echoing Death: The demon strikes a target dead and the death undoes the last action the character took. This requires the demon to warp time and causality, and as such it carries a greater risk of breaking the demon’s Cover (in game terms, the compromise roll for this Exploit carries a –2 penalty). If the Exploit is successful, though, the demon can erase the last few moments of the target’s life, perhaps saving the life of someone that character killed. This Exploit can only affect the actions the target took in his last few minutes of life. Anything longer than that and the effects of the actions he took have already reverberated out into the universe too far to be undone.

• Ephemeral Cover: The demon can craft a Cover out of spirit-stuff, creating a mask that resembles a ghost or a spirit. In order to do this, the demon must harvest raw material — the Corpus of an ephemeral being. The demon needs four points of Corpus for every dot of Cover he wishes the new identity to have, and at least half of that Corpus must come from the type of spiritual entity he intends to impersonate (ghosts if he wishes to create a ghost Cover, spirits if he wishes to create a spirit Cover). He can harvest Corpus using this Exploit; as such, Ephemeral Cover also functions as an attack against ghosts and spirits. Once harvested, the demon stores the Corpus on his demonic form. When the demon assumes this form, the Corpus is visible hanging on his body like a fleshy, translucent cloak. Once the demon has accumulated enough Corpus, he can create the Cover.

• Everybody Hates Him: The value of a scapegoat is indisputable. Having someone for everyone to hate, a target for their collective frustrations, allows unification among people — and for a demon, it allows someone else to take the blame. This Exploit makes a human target into the person that everyone hates. It does so by changing the target, though, not the world at large. The person simply trips the parts of the brain that causes others to read him as the enemy. Depending on where and when the victim falls under this Exploit, he might not live out the day.

• Extispicy: The practice of extispicy is the art of reading the entrails of a slaughtered animal in order to divine the future or otherwise glean information. Demons can use this method to learn information about the world around them, but whether something intrinsic in the act of the slaughter or simply the random patterns formed in blood and tissue grant the information, none of the Unchained can say for certain. In any case, the result is messy and difficult to hide, but yields useful results. Extispicy works on any living creature of Size 4 or greater. Killing an animal (or a person, for that matter) to read its entrails might constitute a separate compromise if doing so would be grossly out of character for the demon’s Cover. As such, some demons prefer to assume demonic form before gutting the sacrificial creature (the claws often make it easier anyway). If the character inflicts enough damage with her bare hands or a bladed weapon to kill someone in combat, she may immediately begin the process of using this Exploit (target number of successes is still the target’s Health, though).

• Force Relationship: The demon can change the connections between people, forging a kind of temporary Cover between them. She can make two people into lovers, enemies, friends, or family. This Exploit doesn’t actually change the targets physically, meaning that if the demon turns two people into “brothers,” they think of themselves as brothers but a DNA test will not show them to be related. This Exploit allows a demon to get around the drawbacks of a low Cover, at least for a short while. This Exploit can be used to alter preexisting relationships, but this is actually more difficult than just creating a relationship out of nothing. This is because human relationships are a tangled web of past events, impressions, brain chemistry, and possibility, putting many more variables in play.

• Four Minutes Ago: The demon can warp time in a limited way, removing himself from the scene four minutes before the moment he activates this Exploit. The time change does not remove all of the effects of his presence in the scene, however. This would be too much risk of a paradox, and the mystical subroutines of the universe that allow this Exploit to function reflexively prevent this from happening. Instead, the events of the scene come to the same results without the character’s presence (at least, without his presence from four minutes before he used this Exploit). The character “appears” four minutes’ travel from his location in the scene. The player decides how their character traveled and in which direction. This Exploit is primarily useful as an escape method, but it can be used to escape not only the physical location of a problemtic scene but some of the personal consequences of the demon’s own actions.

• Frozen in Time: With a glance, the demon alters a target’s relationship with time. From the victim’s perspective, everything around her speeds up, passing by in a blur as she watches helplessly. To the demon (andanyone else), the victim stands stock-still, a living statue. While the victim is frozen, she cannot be harmed. Her body does not interact with the rest of the world (rather, it does, but so slowly that she suffers no ill effects), which means the demon can use this Exploit to save a person who is dying from a poison or a wound. Gravity doesn’t affect the character, either, meaning a target frozen in time while falling does not travel through space.

• Halo: The demon creates a soft, soothing light that acts as a balm — and a soporific — to anyone in the area. The light emanates from the demon’s eyes, if she so desires, but could also simply appear around her with no discernible source.

• Hellfire: The demon forces Aether through her firearms, converting the bullets into magically charged flame. The fire thus created can incinerate victims or destroy material objects, but it does not start fires — nothing touched by the Hellfire ignites. In order to activate this Exploit, the demon must have at least one firearm already drawn and ready to fire. She can use Hellfire on allies’ guns, but must touch the firearm in question. When the Exploit is activated, the gun’s barrel warps slightly, growing wider, and a thin wisp of brimstone smoke drifts up from it.

• Hellhounds: The demon infuses an animal with Aether, turning it into a nightmarish mesh of biomachinery and flesh. The creature is not long for this world (unless the demon wishes to supply it with the Aether it needs to live), but while it lives, it obeys the demon unquestioningly.

• Incendiary: The demon summons up fire from nothing and hurls it at a target. This flame can ignite anything flammable it touches in addition to the harm it causes to a living creature. The demon can use her mastery over the fire to gain temporary immunity to it, but she must leave the area quickly or be consumed as well.

• Inflict Stigmata: Stigmatics are human beings that can see the workings of the God-Machine. Some of them wind up working directly for the God-Machine — hunting demons, facilitating Infrastructure, or performing whatever their unknowable master asks of them. Some of them don’t and wind up terrified of their newfound knowledge or form cults or religions based upon their visions. Some stigmatics are born, but others come to their condition after witnessing the workings of the God-Machine. Demons are able to stimulate this condition as well, though once a human has been turned stigmatic the demon has no control over how he will react to this newfound enlightenment.

• Living Shadow: The demon changes her form into a self-aware shadow, able to follow a person anywhere so long as enough ambient light is around to let him cast a shadow. The demon can switch “hosts” as well, following on the heels of one person after another to gain entrance to heavily secured areas. While in shadow-form, the character can see and hear normally, but cannot speak, feel or otherwise interact with the world.

• Merge: The demonic form is a terrifying weapon and one that demons recognize as a badge of their newfound freedom. But the form is just a physical change, one more state in the demon’s quantum reality, and that allows a demon to merge his Form with that of another demon.With this Exploit, members of a ring of demons can loan each other their demonic form Abilities. The recipient does not have to know this Exploit, but all contributing demons and the one with Merge must touch the recipient. The abomination thus created cannot venture more than 20 yards from any of the contributing demons, or else the Form Ability he received from a given demon is ripped away, leaving a bloodied wound.

• Murder by Improbability: The universe has a million ways to kill, even without involving intent from others or infirmity of the human body. Freak accidents claim thousands of lives every day; a demon with the right mystical understanding can snatch some of that lethal improbability from the universe and aim it at a victim. The unfortunate victim might be struck by a falling chunk of blue ice, trip and fall off a platform in front of a train, or stumble through a Rube Goldberg-esque configuration of accidents that leaves him lying on a sidewalk with scissors between his ribs. Against some targets, this Exploit kills instantly and surely. Against others, it makes the world more dangerous, but does not automatically result in death. Demons are unsure what the difference is, but note that the Exploit is useless against the Unchained and beings with strange, otherworldly natures are more resistant to it.

• Play on Words: A particular collection of sounds can have many different meanings in a language. For instance, /rait/ can be “write” (to produce a graphic representation of words), “right” (correct or just) or “rite” (aceremony or ritual). In French, the words “cent,” “sans” and “sang” all sound very much alike, but mean “100,” “without” and “blood,” respectively. In Spanish, the sentence “Está esposado can either mean “He’s married” or “He’s in handcuffs.” A demon using this Exploit can shift the meaning of such a word, and change the situation in the process. This Exploit is challenging to use. It requires that the player pay attention to what other characters are saying and jump on the opportunity to activate the power. It’s perfectly acceptable for a player whose character has this Exploit to have a list of multiple meaning words (do an online search for that phrase; teacher resource websites have them) to keep handy. The Storyteller should not allow players to use this power on phrases more than a sentence or two back in the conversation (though the player is allowed to ask for a “time out” in the conversation while she briefly considers whether and how to use this Exploit).

• Possession: A classic and widely publicized demonic trick is to possess an innocent person and cause havoc, rend the unfortunate person’s flesh, and insult the God-fearing people around the victim. Some demons are indeed capable of possessing human beings, though they can usually find better uses for the stolen body than bouts of profanity and terrorizing the victim’s family. In order to possess a person, the demon must abandon her Cover. The demon becomes insubstantial, flowing into the victim as energy. While possessing the target, none of the demon’s Covers are anywhere to be found.

• Rain of Blood: The demon raises her hands to the heavens and calls down rains of blood, hailstorms of teeth or tiny screws, lighting storms punctuated with the grinding sounds of gigantic gears or any number of bizarre and inexplicable weather phenomena. The residual effects of this weather evaporate into Aether within an hour after the storm stops, and people rarely believe that anyone actually saw a storm of blood —not without evidence, surely. The immediate effects of the storm can be incredibly damaging, depending on how powerful the demon is. The demon can, however, opt to minimize damage to living creatures, conjuring the storm for property damage alone.

• Raise Dead: Resurrection of the dead is one of the things that humans ask for most commonly when demons begin their blandishments. Many a grieving widow or mourning father would sell their soul for the return of their loved one. It is, in fact, within some demons’ capabilities to raise the dead — and it’s even easier for the demon if she herself was responsible for the death. From a metaphysical standpoint, raising the dead is just a matter of repairing damaged tissue to the point that it can sustain the processes of life, and then finding the target’s soul to put back into the body. If the target’s soul isn’t available, another will do.

• Raze Infrastructure: This Exploit might be the ultimate act of rebellion (next to Falling, of course). The demon stands in the midst of an Infrastructure and allows all of the Aether in the area to corrode, severing the connection between the God-Machine and the Infrastructure and reducing the false front to rubble and slag. This act is extremely cathartic, especially for Saboteurs. It is, of course, also a terrible risk, since the God-Machine can easily dispatch angels to collect or destroy the demon.

• Reality Enforcement: For whatever reason, the world generally regards angels and other agents of the God-Machine as “unreal,” and the powers they wield “impossible.” This is clearly untrue — the angels and the mystical subroutines of the universe were woven into the very fabric of reality and possibility, but as far as most humans, even very learned humans are concerned, that’s the end of it. A demon can enforce this limited perception of reality, shunting off the flow of Aether away from an area. This forces the demon to rely only on the Skills that his Cover gives him, but it also confuses and disempowers angels for a short time.

• Riot: The demon stands in the midst of a group of people and screams in defiance to the God-Machine (what words she uses are irrelevant). The people around her rise up in revolt, but it is a rebellion with no focus. They simply riot, attacking the world around them, breaking windows, tearing down statues, and looting whatever is nearby. This Exploit can only be used in a group of 20 people or more. The demon herself is not safe if she remains in the group. While the rioters won’t go out of their way to attack her, they won’t spare her, either.

• Rip the Gate: The demon can tear open the fabric of reality, traveling to planes of existence unknown to most humans. The demon rips a literal hole in thin air, making a portal that anyone can travel through for as long as it remains open. Demons with this Exploit can automatically open gateways to the Hedge, the Shadow, the Underworld and Astral Space. These planes of existence each pose their own particular challenges for demons, but one advantage they do have is that the God-Machine is much more limited in these places. As such, a demon with this Exploit can provide a safe place for demons to meet. Many Tempters believe that the path to Hell will be found in one of these strange realms. The World of Darkness encompasses many different planes of reality, not all of which are accessible by demons and many of which are described in other games.

• Sermon: Calling upon intimate, metaphysical knowledge of the workings of trust and awe in the human brain, the demon can deliver a speech worthy of the Sermon on the Mount. Any humans who hear the demon’s words take them as, if not literal truth, then useful moral guideposts. If the demon delivers messages to the same group of people over time, he can use this Exploit to start his own cult. Longtime listeners are more than fanatically loyal — their moral framework is whatever the demon wishes it to be. This Exploit affects what actions a human sees as breaking points, allowing them to act with perfect moral clarity so long as their actions reflect the demon’s teachings.

• Solitary Confinement: The demon gestures at a target and opens a rift in reality — a black pit of nothing where the person remains trapped. The oubliette doesn’t keep a victim incarcerated indefinitely, but it creates a place of perfect sensory deprivation. The victim cannot hear, see or feel anything, even sound or sensation that he creates. Even if the target only remains in the oubliette for a matter of minutes, the experience saps his will and can drive him mad. The target must be within the demon’s Primum rating in yards, and the demon must be able to see the victim for this Exploit to function.

• Stalking Horse: What is a demon’s greatest fear? Above all, the Unchained fear exposure. They fear being recognized by traitors to the Descent and by the still-loyal angels of the God-Machine. They fear that humanity — blind though it may still be to the truths of the universe — will find a way to see through their Covers and drive them back into their creator’s cold workings. This Exploit, then, exposes another being. The demon chooses (or in some cases creates) the attribute he wishes to highlight, then then touches the target. Anyone who comes into contact with that person knows that he carries the attribute that the demon underscored. This might be met with indifference, fascination, or murderous rage, depending on the specifics.

• Stimulus/Response: The demon can manipulate the target’s brain’s ability to draw connections between actions, classically conditioning the target in seconds. The demon simply has to observe the target performing the behavior she wishes to train and then couple it to an external stimulus — one that she controls. After that, she can stimulate this response at any time.

• Summon: Some intrepid souls believe they can summon demons. What they probably don’t realize, though, is that demons can summon them. A demon with this Exploit can call upon any human being she has met, and that human finds that circumstances, snap decisions and luck bring her to the demon. This doesn’t happen instantly; the farther apart the demon and the target are, the longer it takes. If they are in the same city, the target might find that that she chooses a new restaurant on a whim and finds the demon eating there as well. If they live in different regions, a missed flight or a rerouted train might be to blame. This Exploit doesn’t make the target well-disposed to deferent to the demon; in fact, unless the demon tells her, the target probably has no reason to assume the demon was responsible at all.

• Swarm: Folklore is replete with stories of demons summoning up plagues of flies, worms and other horrible creatures. And, indeed, the Unchained are quite capable of doing so. With merely a gesture to the air, the little beasts appear, boiling out of holes in the earth, from underneath cars or porches, or out of the demon’s pockets or sleeves. The swarm will obey the demon’s commands, but the commands can’t be any more complicated that “attack that target” or “fly into that window.” Depending on the creatures summoned, the swarm can inflict minor amounts of damage to living targets, but their true value is in their ability to distract or terrify. Demons, of course, consistently find other creative uses for this Exploit.

• Swift Resolution: Strange things happen, especially when demons are involved, but for the most part it’s not hard to figure out how a given confrontation will end. The bigger, stronger, or better trained combatant probably winds. The police probably break the suspect. The researcher probably finds what he is looking for. This Exploit allows the demon to cause such an action to happen quickly, by the numbers, and be over in seconds.

• The Word: The demon issues a short, simple command that must be followed. This Exploit does not allow simple mind control, however. The target responds on a metaphysical level. If the demon commands the target to “burn,” he will — he skin blisters and he drops to the ground in agony. Commanded to “sleep,” a target will not awaken until the demon permits it. The command must be a single word, but in that single word is contained the simple, potent power of the God-Machine.