mysterium

weird fiction roleplaying

Text and collage illustrations by

Terje Nordin

Illustrations from Pixabay

Cover by Karen Nadine
Page 4, 42, 56 by Stefan Keller / Kellepics
Page 10 by Nika Akin
Page 16 by Pedram Ahmadi / Pedroom
Page 22 by Dmitri / ds_30
Page 32 by Enrique Meseguer / darksouls1
Page 62 by Joshua Willson

Thanks to:
André Nordin, David Nordin, Jenny Heldestad, Martin
Runnzell, Therese Larsson, Nils Pedersen, David Jenssen
Bergkvist

2022

- BETA -
Table of contents
INTRODUCTION 4
GAME SYSTEMS
THE PLAYER CHARACTERS 12
ACTIONS AND SKILL RESOLUTION 18
VIOLENCE, WOUNDS AND DEATH 24
STRESS AND MADNESS 36
THE CAMPAIGN
SCENARIOS 48
THE DOOR TO THE UNKNOWN 64
LOST AND FOUND 72
APPENDIX
CHARACTER SHEET 79

3
INTRODUCTION
Chaos gives birth to Cosmos; Everything is created out of Nothing; the
Shapes emerge from the Shapeless; Matter, Energy, Space and Time
rise out of the Void. Our universe is just one of an infinite multitude
that has emanated from the Abyss and they all overlap and interact
with each other. Ravenous predators stalk the worlds and powers from
beyond use us as pawns in a game that we can not conceive of.

A GAME OF WEIRD FICTION

AND PARANORMAL MYSTERIES
Mysterium is a weird fiction roleplaying game where ordinary modern
day people encounter the paranormal and the unknown. This is not an
attempt to present the definite interpretation of the weird, but simply
an outline of what kind of weird fiction this game is about.
In his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature HP Lovecraft
proposes the following understanding of the weird:
The true weird tale has something more than secret murder,
bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule.
A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of
outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint,
expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its
subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a
malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of
Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos
and the daemons of unplumbed space.
In the same text Lovecraft writes that The oldest and strongest emo-
tion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear
is fear of the unknown. The known world is a small circle of light
surrounded by a great unknown darkness that can hold any kind of
threat. But the unknown can also be tempting and intriguing, offering
new possibilities and experiences. In another essay, Notes on Writing
Weird Fiction, Lovecraft suggests this perspective:
I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one
of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, mo-
mentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation
of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which
for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite
cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.
5
The power of the unknown and the strange is strongest when the
fear and the attraction are both present. This double nature of the
weird was identified by the theologian Rudolf Otto in his classic work
The Idea of the Holy where he expressed a view of the sacred that
characterized the encounter with the numinous Other as mysterium
tremendum et fascinans - a mystery that both repels and attracts,
terrifies and fascinates.
Mark Fisher writes, in The Weird and the Eerie, that these are two
aesthetic modes that share a preoccupation with the strange, a fasci-
nation with the outside, that which lies beyond standard perception,
cognition and experience. Both modes exist at the crossroads between
supernatural horror, science fiction and fantasy. The weird is that
which does not belong; it is a mode of liminality, it is about the en-
counter between the familiar and the unknown. The existence of the
weird presupposes a normality, a recognizable mundane world into
which the unknown outside can intrude. The eerie is concerned with
the opposition between pressence and absence, existence and non-ex-
istence. The question of why there is something when there should
be nothing, or why there is nothing when there should be something,
means that the eerie is tied up with questions of agency. What kind of
agent is at work here? Is there an agent at all?
In the introduction to their anthology The Weird Ann and Jeff Van-
dermeer talks about the protagonists of weird narratives. The des-
cription is eminently applicable to the player characters of this game.
Usually, the characters in weird fiction have either entered into a
place unfamiliar to most of us, or have received such hints of the
unusual that they become obsessed with the weird. Whether It
exists or not, they have fallen into dialogue with It; they may pull
back from the abyss, they may decide to unsee what they saw,
but still they saw it.
This is the premise of any campaign in Mysterium. How do the player
characters act when confronted with the strange forces of the outside,
the suspension or defeat of the fixed laws of Nature? Are they consu-
med by fear or seduced by fascination? Do they turn their backs and
run, or do they leap into the unknown? And what are the consequences
of their choices?
Mysterium does not assume a specific cosmology or mythos, other
than the basic assumption suggested above. Each campaign explores
a certain concept. Just because you have played one Mysterium cam-
paign does not mean you will know the secrets of the next one.

6
BASIC CONCEPTS
Players and Game Moderator: The participants of the game are
one Game Moderator and one or more players (three to five is usually
optimal). The latter control the Player Characters (PC) who are the
main characters in the game, while the Game Moderator (GM) is in
charge of the rules, the fictional environment through which the PCs
move and the GM Characters (GMC) that the PCs encounter. As the
players interact with each other’s PCs and the GMCs a kind of story
will emerge from the game.

Player Characters (PC): Each player has a character, a fictional

person that is their playing piece, alter ego and interface to the game.
The player decides the actions and lines of their characters.
The strengths and weaknesses of the PC’s are detailed with four
attributes (Body, Speed, Mind and Psyche), and each of these has a
corresponding set of skills (such as Athletics, Education and Charm).
Both attributes and skills are given a numeric value which can range
between 10% - 99%. When a player decides that their PC performs an
action the GM may rule that a die roll must be made to determine the
outcome of the action.

Die rolls: In this game die rolls are made using two 10-sided dice.
The dice are numbered 0-9 and read as percentiles (01-00), with one
die as the tens digit and one as the ones digit. If the dice are of diffe-
rent color it becomes easy to tell which is tens and ones respectively.
The die roll is compared with a skill (or, sometimes, an attribute).
If the roll is equal to or below the skill, the action succeeds, and the
higher the roll is (while staying under the skill) the better you do.

7
8
SUGGESTED MEDIA
Literature C. L. Moore
Grant Morrison - The Invisibles
Robert Aickman Jon Padgett
Nathan Ballingrud Hailey Piper
Clive Barker - Books of Blood Tim Powers
Laird Barron Jean Rey
Matthew M Bartlett Clark Ashton Smith
Greg Bear - City at the End of Time Margaret St. Clair
Jorge Luis Borges Max D Stanton
Ramsey Campbell Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
Matt Cardin Karin Tidbeck
Robert W Chambers Jeff Vandermeer
Michael Cisco Don Webb
Susanna Clarke - Piranesi John Wyndham
Kristi DeMeester B. R. Yeager
Philip K Dick
Brian Evenson Anthologies
Anders Fager and magazines
Kurt Fawver
Gemma Files Ashes & Entropy
Neil Gaiman Bourbon Penn
William Hope Hodgson Dangerous Dimensions
Junji Ito Fungi
Shirley Jackson Nightmare’s Realm
Scott R Jones Nox Pareidolia
Caitlín R Kiernan Screams From the Dark
T. E. D. Klein Shadows and Tall Trees
Joe Koch The Moons At Your Door
Kathe Koja There Is A Graveyard That Dwells In
Leena Krohn Man
Victor LaValle The Weird: A Compendium of
Benjamin Labatut - When we cease Strange and Dark Stories
to understand the world Vastarien Literary Journal
John Langan Years Best Weird Fiction
Fritz Leiber Literary criticism
Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
Michael Cisco - Weird Fiction: A
Thomas Ligotti
Genre Study
John Ajvide Lindqvist
Mark Fisher - The Weird and the
H. P. Lovecraft
Eerie
George MacDonald
Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies
Arthur Machen - The Great God
ST Joshi - The Weird Tale
Pan, The White People
HP Lovecraft - Supernatural Horror
China Miéville
in Literature
9
Science and philosophy Communion (1989)
Crimes of the Future (2022)
Peter Godfrey-Smith - Other Minds:
Donnie Darko (2001)
The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep
Doors (2021)
Origins of Consciousness
Feed the Light (2014)
Robert Macfarlane - Underworld
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)
Timothy Morton - Hyperobjects:
Get out (2017)
Philosophy and Ecology after the
Histoira de lo Oculto (2020)
End of the World
In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
Merlin Sheldrake - Entangled Life:
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
How Fungi Make Our Worlds,
Lord of Illusions (1995)
Change Our Minds & Shape Our
Mimic (1997)
Futures
Nope (2022)
Max Tegmark - Our Mathematical
Pi (1998)
Universe
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
Eugene Thacker - In the Dust of This
Pontypool (2008)
Planet
Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
Paranormal, Occult, Scanners (1981)
Esoteric non-fiction Solaris (1972)
Stalker (1979)
Erik Davis - High Weirdness Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)
Charles Fort - Book of the Damned, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992)
New Lands, Lo!, Wild Talents The Brood (1979)
Jacques Vallée - Passport to Magonia, The Endless (2017)
The Invisible College (aka UFO:s The The Mist (2007)
Psychic Solution), Wonders in the Sky The Mothman Prophecies (2002)
Jeffrey Kripal - Authours of the The Ninth Gate (1999)
Impossible, Super Natural: A New The Quiet Earth(1985)
Vision of the Unexplained (with The Thing (1982)
Whitley Strieber) They Remain (2018)
John Keel - The Mothman Prophecies, Us (2019)
Operation Trojan Horse, The Eight Videodrome (1983)
Tower Village of the damned (1960)
Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier - Vivarium (2019)
The Morning of the Magicians Wounds (2019)
Lucia Peters - Dangerous games to YellowBrickRoad (2010)
play in the dark
Patrick Harpur - Daimonic Reality TV-series
Whitley Strieber - Communion Archive 81
Movies Ares
Brand New Cherry Flavor
A Dark Song (2016) Channel Zero
Altered States (1980) Dark
Annihilation (2018) Feria
Antrum (2018) Hannibal
10
Hellier Weird World Web
Strange Angel
ccru.net
The Children of the Stones
creepypasta.com
The Lost Room
9Mother9Horse9Eyes9
The OA
r/nosleep
The Outer Limits
r/threekings
The Twilight Zone
r/WeirdLit
The X-files
The Anomalist
True Detective season 1
The Backrooms
Twin Peaks
The Ghost In My Machine
Zone Blanche / Black Spot
The Mystery Flesh Pit National Park
Podcasts The SCP Foundation
Weird Fiction Review
Archive 81
Borrasca Role-playing games
Elder Sign: A Weird Fiction Podcast
Unknown Armies 2nd ed.
I am in Eskew
Delta Green
Knifepoint Horror
Odd Soot
No Sleep
Kuf
Pseudopod
Kutulu
Rabbits
Chronicles of Darkness
SCP Archives
Call of Cthulhu
Tanis
Trail of Cthulhu
The Black Tapes
Esoteric Enterprises
The Last Film
Silent Legions
The Left Right Game
Stealing Cthulhu
The Lovecraft Investigations
Stalker
The Magnus Archive
The Esoterrorists
The Outer Dark
Fear Itself
The Saucer Life
JAGS Wonderland
The Silt Verses
GURPS Horror: The Madness Dossier
Udda Ting
Weird Studies
Wrong Station
Wyrd Transmissions

11
THE PLAYER
CHARACTERS
The Player Characters in Mysterium are ordinary people who beco-
me exposed to the weird and paranormal, either by encountering an
intrusion from beyond or being thrust into another world themselves.
The game is about how they handle this confrontation with unknown
forces and entities and in what way they become changed by this.
The players make their characters in dialogue with the Game
Moderator. The group should talk about what kind of game they are
interested in and what type of characters they would like to play. If
the GM has a specific campaign concept in mind they will tell the
players what kind of PC’s are suitable.
One important thing to decide is whether the PCs are a team that
cooperate and strive towards a common goal, or if they have their own
individual stories that play out in parallel with each other, or they could
even be antagonists that compete and fight with one another.
Normally there is one PC per player, but sometimes players can
alternate between several different characters.

CONCEPT
Start by thinking about what kind of character you would like to play.
What do they do for a living? What is your character’s sex, gender and
sexuality? What ethnic and social background do they have?
Random suggestions for occupations
01-05 Student 51-55 Artist
06-10 Fast food worker 56-60 Influencer
11-15 Cleaner 61-65 Programmer
16-20 Retail clerk 66-70 Scientist
21-25 Taxi driver 71-75 Medical doctor
26-30 Industrial worker 76-80 Lawyer
31-35 Courier 81-85 Journalist
36-40 Craftsman 86-90 Police officer
41-45 Teacher 91-95 Police detective
46-50 Nurse 96-00 Criminal
13
PERSONALITY TRAITS
Choose four traits that describe your PCs personality, motivation and
attitude towards the world. The traits can each be activated once per
session to gain advantage on a die roll. The GM makes the final call
whether a trait is adequate for a given situation or not.
Here are some example traits. You can choose freely from the cate-
gories as you like. If you don’t find one you like you can make one up
together with the GM.
Personality
Alert, Arrogant, Bitter, Blasé, Brave, Cold, Compassionate, Cool,
Curious, Decadent, Despondent, Diplomatic, Dominering, Eager,
Friendly, Generous, Gullible, Harsh, Hot-headed, Humble, Industrio-
us, Ingratiating, Inquisitive, Intrepid, Jaded, Jovial, Keen, Mendaci-
ous, Merciless, Nervous, Nurturing, Open-minded, Patient, Poetic,
Rational, Righteous, Sceptic, Skittish, Stoic, Suspicious, Taciturn,
Talkative, Thoughtful, Withdrawn, Violent.
Principles
All for one and one for all
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
Might makes right
Mind your own business
The strong must protect the weak
Relationship Objective
Afraid of X Become successful (in what
Despises X field?)
Envious of X Create a true work of art
Friends with X Find God
Hates X Find the truth about X
In debt to X Find true love
Loves X Impress X
Obeys X Master the secret powers of the
Protects X world
Revenge

14
ATTRIBUTES
The attributes are four broad categories that describe a character’s
physical or mental abilities. Each attribute has a base value of 10;
typical adult humans usually have between 30-70.
When you create a new player character, distribute 180 points
between the four attributes in addition to the base value of 10. No
attribute may start at more than 90.

Body: Muscle strength, endurance and physical fitness.

Speed: A measure of the characters coordination, reaction speed and

gross and fine motor skill.

Mind: Mental aptitudes such as memory, intelligence and perception.

Psyche: A character’s moral and interpersonal abilities as well as

self-knowledge and spiritual insight.

Alternative method: Random attributes

If you want you can use this random method to find the attribute
values of your PC. Roll two dice and add them together, then multiply
the sum by 4, thus generating a number between 8 and 80. Add this
to the base value of 10. Repeat for each attribute.

SKILLS
Each attribute has a set of skills, specific proficiencies or competences
within the same broader area.
Buying skills
During character creation you can distribute a number of points
equal to your attribute level among the skills of that specific attribute.
You also get 100 extra points to spend as you like. You can not buy
less than 10 in a skill and the value of a skill may never exceed that of
its governing attribute. A narrow set of skills let you be an expert in
a few subjects, while a broad selection makes you a jack of all trades
but a master of none.
For each attribute there are three basic skills that all characters start
with. They begin at 15% for free (except Initiative which starts at half
your Speed value). You may spend points to increase them further if
you like.
15
 Apart from the basic skills you are free to invent whatever skills you
feel fit your character concept. Make sure to talk with the GM about
what the skills encompass and what they enable your PC to do.

Body skills: Athletics, Stealth, Struggle

Suggested Body skills: Running, Swimming, Weight lifting

Speed skills: Dodge, Drive, Initiative

Suggested Speed skills: Firearms, Pick pockets, Riding, Sleight of
hand

Mind skills: Conceal, Education (specify subject area, level also

indicates mastery of own language, above 40 indicates academic or
other specialist training), Notice
Suggested Mind skills: Any academic discipline not indicated by
Education, Any vocational training not indicated by Education, Crafts
(specify what kind), Foreign Language (specify what), Information
technology, Occult

Psyche skills: Charm, Lying, Read person

Suggested Psyche skills: Acting, Animal ken, Art (specify what kind),
Intimidation, Persuasion, Seduction, Streetwise

BONDS AND IMPORTANT RELATIONSHIPS

Who are the important people in your PCs life? Family, friends, lovers,
colleagues, rivals, etc. This may include the other PCs.
Bonds are relationships that are so powerful that they can help the
PC to handle mental stress. Choose two persons and write down their
names and relationships to the PC.
These relationships are given numerical values that start out equal
to your Psyche attribute.

16
EXPERIENCE AND
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
During the game the PC will experience fortunes and hardships and
change and grow. There are two main ways to improve your player
character; matched successes on major skill checks and experience
points.
It is important to note that a skill can never have a value higher
than its governing attribute.
Successful skill checks
When you have made a successful check (minor, significant or major)
for a skill you get the chance to improve it at the end of the session.
Make a major skill check, and if it fails the skill increases its value by
1. This can only be done once per session for any given skill, but mul-
tiple different skills can each improve once.
Experience points
At the end of a game session the GM can award players experience
points (XP) depending on their accomplishments.
• Participating in the session. 1 XP.
• Coming up with a clever solution to a problem or a creative plan
to outsmart the competition. 1-3 XP.
• Gaining esoteric knowledge, insights into the hidden mysteries of
the world. 1-5 XP.
Receiving 1-3 XP in a session should be standard, 5 or more is excep-
tional.
The experience points can be used to improve skills and attributes
or to gain new skills.
• Raising a bond by 5 costs 1 XP.
• Raising a skill by 1 costs 1 XP.
• Raising an attribute by 1 costs 2 XP.
• Buying a new skill costs 5 which gives you a starting value of 5%.
The GM may rule that you need to take lessons from a teacher to
gain certain skills.

17
ACTIONS AND
SKILL RESOLUTION
SKILL CHECKS
There are three types of skill checks, depending on how stressful the
situation is.
• Minor: If you have a skill level of at least 15% you succeed
without needing to roll the dice. The same goes if the GM deems
that you present a plausible course of action. Minor skill checks
cover situations where you have no time constraints and no risk.
• Significant: If you roll under your skill level you get a strong
success. If you roll over your skill, but under your attribute level,
you get a weak success. You only fail if you roll above both your skill
and your attribute. Significant skill checks are for when you have to
handle a high degree of uncertainty or some amount of pressure,
but it’s still not a matter of life and death.
• Major: You only succeed if you roll under or equal to your skill
level, anything else is a failure. Major skill checks are for situations
where a lot is hanging in the balance, like the trust of your loved
ones, your career or your life. Combat actions are always major skill
checks.
Advantage and disadvantage
Sometimes you will have outside factors that affect the outcome of
your action, such as receiving help from another character, or ha-
ving to make do with imrovised tools. When the GM rules that these
factors are significant enough in a positive or negative way they will
give you advantage or disadvantage on your die roll. This means that
the order of the dice, which one is the tens digit and which is the ones
digit, can be switched, depending on what is more advantageous or
disadvantageous for you.
If it happens that you have both advantage and disadvantage they
cancel each other and you simply make a normal die roll.

19
Shifts
When the GM wants to modify a skill roll with greater granularity
than simply assigning an advantage or disadvantage they may apply a
shift to the roll. This is a positive or negative modifier that is applied
to your skill level before you roll the dice. Shifts usually range from
-30 to +30, and are applied in increments of 10. Modify the skill level
accordingly and roll against the adjusted number.
Unskilled actions
In case your PC doesn’t have the required skill you will have to roll
against the appropriate attribute divided by two.
For minor and significant skill checks, make a roll against the
attribute divided by two. Even if the die roll is a success it will be
obvious to you and anyone else that you barely made it.
For major skill checks you also roll against your attribute divided
by two, but you only succeed if you get matched results below your
attribute level - and it doesn’t count as a critical success.
Skill penumbra
Skills do not only encompass the operational competence to perform
a certain kind of action, but also all kinds of knowledge related to
that activity. If you have a skill in Art you are likely to know people in
the art world, be aware of important galleries and museums, recog-
nize the work of certain artists, etc. This knowledge about the skill’s
subject is called the penumbra. The width of the penumbra depends
on the value of your skill. With an Art skill of 30 you are unlikely to
personally know important people in the art scene, but with a skill
level of 70 you are likely to know who throws the best parties and who
buys stolen art.

CONFLICTS: OPPOSED SKILL CHECKS

When two or more characters, PCs or GMCs, compete with each
other, make a major skill check for each of them. The one with the
highest degree of success is the winner. If the outcome of the compe-
tition or conflict is not binary in nature the participants can be ran-
ked by degree of success.
Degrees of success or failure
Many times, especially when you are competing with someone, it is
relevant to know not only if your skill check was a success or a failure,
but also by how much you succeeded or failed.
20
 If the matter at hand is so important that you need to know how
well you made it, it’s not going to be a minor skill check. If you made
an unskilled check anyone with a skilled success will have a better
result than you. In a significant skill check your success will be either
weak or strong. In a major skill check, your degree of success or fai-
lure depends on what number you rolled; the higher the number, the
greater the success or failure.
If you get a matched result (the same number showing on both
dice), you have achieved a significant success or failure. This usually
means some sort of additional positive or negative effect. The GM
interprets what this means in the given situation, but it could be a po-
sitive shift to your next action in an extended conflict or an improved
initiative in combat.
If the dice show the same number as your skill level you get a
critical success. This means that you not only achieved ecerything
you intended but also got some additional bonus.
If the die roll shows double zeros (00) you get a critical failure, a
fumble. This means that you failed utterly and are worse off than
before.

ON FAILURE
A role-playing game is not a linear medium, it is interactive and just
like real life the game fiction can take many different directions. It is
counterproductive to assume that the narrative will follow a certain
path and move towards a pre-determined endpoint. When the player
characters fail to perform a given action it should therefore not be
thought of as “getting stuck” or reaching an obstacle on some unidi-
rectional road towards conclusion.
Failure simply means that the PCs find themselves in a situation
where their previous course of action is no longer viable and they need
to find a new path towards their goal (or even define a new objective to
strive for). In the end the PCs may find that they failed to achive their
ultimate goal, they lost the race, they did not get the treassure, the bad
guys got away, or whatever - and this is an accaptable outcome of a
game. Play to find out where the emergent narrative takes you.

21
EXTENDED CONFLICTS
Sometimes a simple skill check will not be enough to solve a problem
or conflict. The GM may decide that a task is too extensive or complex
to settle with a single die roll. Or a player might feel that they won’t
accept a failed skill check and ask the GM for an extended conflict.
An extended conflict is run as several rounds of opposed skill
checks. The participants in the conflict have conflict pools that
represents their relevant resources, resolve and endurance. The pool
consists of a number of points equal to the level of an attribute. Each
round the winner of the opposed skill check deals damage to the
conflict pools of the loosers. When a conflict pool has been reduced to
zero that character is out of the conflict.
Resolving an extended conflict
1. Based on the nature of the conflict the GM decides on appropriate
skill and attribute pool as well as an approximate round length,
and whether there is a time limit to the conflict. The relevant
attribute pool is determined by the choice of skill, which in turn is
dependent on what the characters are trying to accomplish.
2. The character with the highest pool declares their action and
makes a major skill check. Every other character involved in the
conflict follows in order from highest to lowest pool. The best de-
gree of success wins.
3. The pools of the characters who lost the roll take damage equal to
the sum of the winners die roll. Critical successes deal double da-
mage. Critical failures deal damage on the characters own conflict
pool. Adjust pool values accordingly.
4. Withdrawals can be declared. Remember that attribute pools are
not recovered directly after the conflict.
5. If any characters pool is halved the GM asks if they want to
withdraw. If not, they get disadvantage on skill rolls related to the
conflict pool.
6. Rounds encompassing steps 2-5 are repeated until there is a win-
ner, either through withdrawal, a time limit being reached or all
pools but one are reduced to zero.
Conflict rounds and time limits
The appropriate length of a conflict round is entirely dependent on
the kind of actions the opponents are performing. Three seconds, a
minute, fifteen minutes, an hour, a quarter of a day, 24 hours, etc, are
all possible.
22
The GM may decide that outside factors set a limit on how long the
conflict can go on. When a certain number of conflict rounds have
passed the conflict is interrupted by this exterior force.
Conflict pool damage and recovery
The reduction of a conflict pool represents loss of focus, upset emo-
tions or fatigue. If the opponents in the conflict are trying to cause
actual physical harm to one another you are no longer in a normal
extended conflict and should turn to the combat rules in the next
chapter.
When a conflict pool is halved the character is stressed and all skills
related to that attribute are rolled with disadvantage.
To restore a pool to its initial value a character needs at least six
hours of restful sleep. A pool can regain an amount of points equal
to half its initial value if the character rests for an hour. During this
rest they will also need to get something to eat (Body), drink water
(Speed), collect their thoughts in solitude (Mind) or have a moment
of friendly community (Psyche).
In the case of conflicts with rounds spanning days or longer, recove-
ring conflict pools can take up to half the time of the actual conflict.
Non-character opponents
Sometimes a player character may be involved in a conflict with a
force or problem that is not an actual character but that is neverth-
eless opposing the PC’s actions. This can be anything from cracking a
complicated computer code to making a way through an area struck
by a natural hazard such as a blizzard, a tornado or wild fire.
Effortlesss Pool 20 Skill 20%
Normal Pool 40 Skill 40%
Difficult Pool 60 Skill 60%
Very difficult Pool 80 Skill 80%
Applications and rulings
This general frame work will need to be adjusted by the GM when
applying it to a specific problem or conflict. The GM may have to
make rulings regarding creative use of supplementary skills or addi-
tional consequences of success or failure.

23
VIOLENCE,
WOUNDS AND DEATH
Violence is not necessarily an important part of Mysterium, but in
most scenarios there will be conflicts with high stakes and sometimes
it will take more than words to settle those disputes. Violence has
grave consequences, the player characters may very well die or suffer
permanent injuries. Therefore combat receives extra attention as a
special kind of extended conflict.
Of course, even if the PCs walk away physically unharmed from the
fight, they might suffer mental trauma from what they have done to
other people. Such matters is the subject of the next chapter.

THE COMBAT ROUND AND INITIATIVE

For simplicity’s sake we divide the combat into rounds of about 3
seconds. During a round you can perform one action: attack, dodge or
some kind of non-combat action (though, see Simultaneous actions
on the next page). Its an advantage to go first in the combat round
since it lets you choose you actions as you like without having to react
to what others have already done to you.
To find your initiative, either use the value of your Initiative skill, or
roll under your Speed attribute (this does not count as an unskilled
check).
• If your Speed check succeeds, or you use your Initiative skill, you
act before everyone who failed their roll. Your relative position
among those who succeeded depends on the value of your roll or
skill.
• If your Speed check fails, you act after everyone who succeeded.
Your relative position among those who failed depends on the
value of your roll.
• If you are tied for initiative ranking with another character, roll
a die to break the tie. The initiative ranking of the one with the
lowest die roll drops by one.
Ambush initiative
If the PCs ambush their adversaries and succeed to take them entirely by
surprise they get to do the first attack. In the following combat rounds
the PCs act on their Speed value (which counts as a successful roll).
25
Improving initiative
If you want to improve your initiative ranking you can spend an
entire combat round without taking any other action. You choose
whether you want to make a Speed check or use the value of your Ini-
tiative skill, and act on this new initiative ranking on the next round.

NON-COMBAT ACTIONS
Any actions taken during a combat that are not directly related to
causing or avoiding harm counts as a non-combat action.
Any non-combat action takes at least two rounds. On the first round
you declare your intended action, but you still get to attack or dodge.
The second round you peform the action that you declared, which
means you do not get to neither attack nor dodge that round.
The GM may rule that some non-combat actions take longer than
two rounds. These work the same way as short actions: declare
during the first round, and spend the following rounds performing
the action.

SIMULTANEOUS ACTIONS
If your attack skill is 70% or higher and the GM approves, you can
attack and either dodge or perform another action during the same
round. If your Dodge skill is 70% or higher and the GM approves,
you can dodge and either attack or perform another action during the
same round. If both your attack and Dodge skills are 70% or higher,
you can attack, dodge and perform a non-combat action in the same
round.

ATTACKING
Declare what combat skill you will use and roll the dice. Combat
actions are always major skill checks, so you want to get a result that
is equal to or under your skill level, and preferably as high as possible
within those limits.
Drawing a weapon
If you want to attack using a weapon you will have to have made it
ready for use. To draw a firearm or melee weapon takes one round.
All out attack
If you choose to disregard your own safety and focus entirely on
damaging your opponent you get Advantage on your attack roll. You
26
have to declare at the beginning of the round that you will do an all
out attack. However, anyone attacking you during the round will also
get Advantage on their roll.
Multiple attacks
You can choose to make several attacks during your turn in the combat
round, either against several different foes or against one opponent.
Divide your skill rating as you like between the attacks. It is not pos-
sible to make more than three attacks per round.
If you have declared an all out attack you cannot attack more than
one opponent, but you can make multiple attacks against that one
adversary.
Called shots
You can choose to fire at a specific body part (or an object on the
opponent’s body). You must make the roll with Disadvantage.
Aiming
If you spend your action during a round aiming at your target you get
Advantage on your attack roll against that target for the following round.
Suppressive fire
If you want to keep your adversaries down so that an ally can perform
another action unhindered you can lay down suppressive fire. This
means that you fire at least four shots during your turn. Make a single
roll for all the shots, if you get a Crit you hit one of the opponents. In
any case, the targets of your suppressive fire gets Disadvantage to any
skill check for the rest of the round.
Disarming
To take away an opponents weapon, make a successful Struggle
check. If your opponent har a higher level in Struggle you make the
check with Disadvantage. The attack does no damage, but you can
choose to either grab the weapon or let it fall to the floor.
Throwing objects
To attack a target by throwing an object or weapon at them, use your
Athletics skill instead of your Struggle skill. Do not add the weapons
damage modifier to the damage inflicted (but the effects of matched
successes still work as normal).

27
Feinting
To trick your opponent in order to set them up for an especially
powerful attack, declare a feint and describe what fake move you
make to fool your target. Then make your attack roll as normal. If
you succeed you do no damage this round as your attack has no effect
other than to mislead your enemy. On your next round, make an at-
tack at the same target but roll only one die. The result is treated as a
matched success or failure (1 being 11, 9 being 99, etc).
Dodging
If you are not actively avoiding harm during a combat you will get
hurt as soon as an opponent makes a successful attack roll against
you. When it is your turn to act in the combat round you can declare
that you will spend your action to use your Dodge skill.
If someone attacks you during the round that you spend dodging,
make a Dodge skill check. If you roll under your Dodge skill but over
your opponent’s attack roll, you entirely avoid damage. If you fail, but
your opponent’s attack roll is lower than your Dodge skill, the attack
only does half damage.

DAMAGE
Characters have a pool of wound points equal to their Body attribute.
When a character gets hit by an attack they lose wound points. The
amount of wound points lost is determined by the attack roll and the
type of attack.
Hand-to-hand damage
Unarmed damage is equal to the sum of the attack roll (count both
dice as single digits and add them together).
Armed: If you are using a weapon of some sort you add a damage
modifier to the sum. To decide the damage modifier of a melee wea-
pon, concider the following three questions: Is it big enough that you
need both hands to wield it effectively? Is it heavy enough to crack
bones? Is it penetrating so that it cuts or stabs through skin? For each
positive answer the weapon does 3 points of damage.
Crits cause your target to immediately die or become unconscious.
Fumbles means that you either hurt yourself or opened up to a
counter attack from your opponent. You take damage equal to your
roll (0 + 0 = 10 + 10 = 20) plus your weapons modifier.
Matched successes do damage equal to the attack roll (not the sum
of the dice) plus weapons modifier.
28
Matched failures cause you to take damage equal to your weapons
modifier.
Firearms damage
Firearms damage is equal to the attack roll (capped by the maximum
damage of the weapon).
Full-automatic fire: You can fire three-shot bursts (counts as a
single shot) or full-auto fire which counts as ten shots (and automati-
cally qualifies as suppressive fire). When shooting full-auto damage is
equal to your attack roll, ignoring the maximum damage.
Crits cause your target to immediately die or become unconscious.
Matched successes do maximum damage (even if that particular
firearms maximum damage exceeds the skill rating of the attacker).
Fumbles means that your weapon jams or misfires. If you are using
a single-shot firearm it misfires, meaning the bullet was a dud. Your
shot has no effect, but you can fire again next round. If you are using a
semi-automatic or full-auto firearm the mechanics for moving a bullet
through the weapon has malfunctioned. It takes a round and a suc-
cessful firearms skill check to clear the weapon (if you fail you can
keep trying, but each attempt takes one round).

TYPES OF WEAPONS
There are many factors regarding weapons that can be taken into
consideration for combat rules; specifically the calibers and types
of ammunition of firearms. However, this game is not meant to be a
system for advanced combat simulation, and therefore most of such
details will be disregarded.
Melee weapons Damage bonus
Knife +3
Blackjack +3
Light club +3
Light blunt object +3
Heavy blunt object +6
Heavy club +6
Sword or machete +6
Spear +9
Fire axe +9
Chainsaw +9

29
Firearms Capacity Range Max dam.
Light handgun 6 20/40/80 40
Heavy handgun 10 30/60/120 60
Light rifle 15 150/300/600 60
Heavy rifle 30 200/400/800 100
Submachine gun 30 50/100/200 60
Shotgun 2 20/40/80 120
Range: Short, medium and long in yards. Shooting at long range incurs
-20% on attackroll. Short range gives +20% for handguns and +30% for
shotguns.
Additional equipment
Taser: If the target is hit they are stunned (and need to succeed on a
Body check in order to act). After they are released they have -20% on
all checks for 1d10 turns.
Laser sight: Gives you a bonus of +20% on your attackroll.
Telescopic sight: Double the range for the gun if you aim.
Armor
Protective covering that reduces the damage taken when hit by an
attack. It has a protection value that is subtracted from the damage
dealt by an attack.
When hit by an attack that is a matched success or a critical
success the armors protection value is reduced by half (round
down). If this happens a second time, the armor is destroyed.
Armor Protective value
Kevlar vest 8
Reinforced kevlar vest 12
Tactical body armor 16
Bomb suit 20 (includes a helmet)
Riot helmet +4 (only protects against melee damage)
Kevlar helmet +4

30
OTHER TYPES OF DAMAGE
Besides being beaten, stabbed or shot the PCs can be hurt in many
other interesting ways. Here are some examples.
Car wrecks
The GM rolls one die for each 10 km/h the car was going (if two
cars hit head-on, their speeds are combined). They then assemble a
two-digit number out of any two of the dice rolled based on factors
such as seatbelts, air bags, the type of car, etc. If it had not previously
been established that a given character was wearing their seatbelt,
make a Mind check; if successful, they had their seatbelt on.
Cold
When exposed to freezing temperatures characters can last for
Body/5 hours if well prepared and equipped, Body minutes if partially
prepared, or Body/5 minutes if unprepared.
After this they must make a Body check every five minutes. Each
failure reduces Body by 5 points. When a characters Body score sinks
below 10, they can no longer move and suffers firearm damage every
five minutes.
Warmth and shelter restores 5 Body points per minute. Wounds
heal normally.
Disease
A characters struggle with a disease is handled as a sort of combat;
an extended conflict with a potentially lethal outcome. The GM need
to decide an appropriate length for the conflict round (often meass-
ured in days, weeks or even months) and the severity of the disease,
meassured by it’s pool value and skill level (ranging from 20 to 80).
The sick character will make Body checks and take damage on their
wound points pool.
Medicine and medical treatment: Hospitalization grants a
+20% bonus to the character’s Body check. If a physician has the
right antibiotics for a disease, a Medicine test before the ailment ta-
kes effect renders the disease harmless.
Falling
The character takes one die of damage per three meters fallen, adding
the dice together. If it is a deliberate, controlled fall, the highest die is
dropped.

31
Fire
Every round that a character is exposed to fire they suffer an amount
of damage determined by the intensity of the fire. Someone who takes
damage from a fire of moderate or higher intensity risks catching fire
themself. Make a die roll, if the result is below the damage they sustained
they are on fire and take melee damage each round until extinguished.
Intensity Example Damage
Minor Candle 1 point
Moderate Torch 1 die
Large Campfire 2 die melee
Major Bonfire 2 die firearm
Poison
Poisons have two ratings: Speed and Leathality. Speed indicates how
soon the poison inflicts damage. Leathality indicates a negative shift
applied to the victims Body check. A poison inflicts damage once and
then passes from the character’s system.
The victim makes a Body check, modified by the poison’s Leathality
value. Medical treatment grants the victim a +20% shift to the check.
If the roll fails the victim is killed by the poison. If it is successful the
victim takes damage equal to Lethality x 2 . In the case of a matched
success the damage is equal to Lethality, and a critical success means
the victim takes only half Lethality in damage.
If an antidote is administered before the ailment takes effect the
poison is rendered harmless. An antidote given after the ailment ta-
kes effect halves the Lethality rating.
Sleep deprivation
To function at normal capacities the PCs need to sleep regularly. Lack
of sleep will cause lack of energy, trouble focusing, slower reaction
time, irritability and depressed mood.
One night: The GM may demand skill checks for tasks that would
otherwise be considered routine.
Two nights: The PC has -10% on all skill and ability checks.
Three nights: The PC has -20% on all skill and ability checks.
Four nights: The PC has -30% on all skill and ability checks.

32
Suffocation
A character can hold their breath for a number of seconds equal to
their Body score after which they have to breathe of pass out. If the
character passes out from suffocation their oxygen-starved brain will
begin to die. Each round, make a Body check. If successful, they take
melee damage. If a failure, they suffer firearms damage. This conti-
nues until the character is able to breathe again or dies.
Drowning: If a character is drowning they will need to get above the
surface, with a check for the Swim skill. Each success gives the cha-
racter a breath of air that restarts the count down.
Strangling: If a character is being strangled, choked or smothered it
works as described above. Each round (three seconds) the victim can
make a Dodge or Struggle check to break free.

WOUNDS
Player characters (and GMCs) have a pool of wound points equal to
their Body attribute. When a character is wounded they loose as many
wound points as indicated by the damage inflicted. At zero points the
character dies.
The GM is in charge of tracking wound points, even for Player
Characters, taking notes on each separate injury as well as the
total amount of wound points lost. They inform the players what the
wounds feels like for the PC and how it impacts them. However, they
never tell the players how many wound points the PCs have left at any
point during the fight.
Major wounds
An injury that inflicts a loss of wound points equal to 10% or more of a
characters Body attribute counts as a major wound. The exact consequ-
ences depend on which body part was damaged, find out by using the hit
locations table.
Leg: Can barely stand or walk. Movement at half speed. Incurs a
penalty of -10% on all die rolls until the wound is treated.
Arm: The arm can not be used to lift or manipulate objects. -30% on
all attempts to use two-handed weapons. Incurs a penalty of -10% on
all die rolls until the wound is treated.
Torso: Make a roll for Body, with disadvantage, to avoid becoming
unconscious. Incurs a penalty of -20% on all die rolls until the wound
is treated.

33
Head: Make a roll for Body, with disadvantage, to avoid becoming
unconscious. Incurs a penalty of -20% on all die rolls until the wound
is treated.
Hit locations
When it is necessary to know where a character was hit, find the value
of the single digit die of the attack roll on this table.
1 Right leg
2 Left leg
3-4 Right arm
5-6 Left arm
7-9 Torso
10 Head

HEALING
Injuries can be treated through first aid, medical professionals and
by convalescence. No matter how well an attempt at first aid or treat-
ment at a professional medical facility succeeds an injury can not be
healed perfectly and instantly. Therefore one wound point will always
remain to be healed by convalescence.
Minor wounds
A wound that encompasses less than 10% of a characters total Body
points can be handled through first aid as long as it is done within an
hour after the injury occured. To perform first aid a character needs
whatever supplies that the GM deems necessary (bandages, splints,
etc). Then a significant check is made for an appropriate skill (major
check if the situation is unsafe). If the character does not have a suita-
ble skill, make an unskilled check for Mind.
A successful first aid attempt restores a number of wound points
equal to the sum of the dice rolled. If the result is in excess to the
number of wound points of that particular injury, the extra points are
ignored and do not carry over to heal any other wound.
First aid may be attempted only once for each minor injury. If the
attempt fails, the victim may get another attempt from a professional
medical facility, or from convalescence.
Major wounds
An injury that surpasses 10% of a characters Body points is conside-
red a major wound and can only be treated by medical professionals.
The GM makes a major skill check for the doctor’s medical skill
(usually between 35 for a rookie and 70 for a veteran). Each injury re-
34
quires a separate roll. If the victim was brought to the medical facility
within an hour of receiving the injury, a success heals up to as many
wound points as the number rolled on the dice. If the victim did not
get help within an hour, a successful skill check only heals the sum
of the dice rolled. If the doctor got a matched failure or a fumble, the
GM may rule that additional wound points were lost (these count as a
new injury).
Any attempt to treat a major wound without the resources of a mo-
dern medical facility with a skilled staff of assistants will at best result
in healing as many wound points as the sum of the succesfull die roll
(doubled if a critical success).
Convalescence
For each day of rest with regular attention from nurse or doctor, a
character heals 2 wound points (1 point without professional help).
Once 60% of the characters total wound points have been recovered
they can leave bed and perform nonstrenuous activity, while recove-
ring 1 wound point per day. Remaining in bed continues healing at a
rate of 2 points per day.
A player can choose to spend experience points to heal while in
convalescence. Each experience point restores a point of damage. It
is not possible to spend more than three experience points on this per
day.
Permanent damage
When 50% of a character’s wound points or more are lost in damage
from a single injury, the victim will be marked for life even if they
survive it. The GM decides the nature of the permanent injury. Some
possibilities are:
• Permanent loss of 5 - 10 wound points.
• Lose points in a relevant skill or attribute.
• Loss of a limb or significant disfiguring scarring.

35
STRESS
AND MADNESS
Life can be stressful even under normal conditions, and the strongest
minds may buckle when the apparent laws of reality suddenly dissolve
in a flux and you come face to face with the unknown. Just as in the
case of violence, mental trauma can be a threat to the PCs safety and
existence. We want to know how the PCs fare when exposed to this,
and to make it more interesting we don’t want it to be entirely in the
hands of neither the GM nor the players.

THE STRESS CHECK

In rules terms we differentiate between five sources of stress with five
corresponding meters: Brutality, Helplessness, Isolation, Paranor-
mal and Self. Each kind of stress has two tracks of possible reactions.
Hardened, representing stress that the character has overcome and
become desensitized to, is numbered 1-10. Failed, represents stress
that the character has succumbed to and become vulnerable to, is
numbered 1-5.
Stress can be more or less bad, and is given a power level ranging
from 1-10 ranks. If a PC is confronted with stress and they already
have a hardened notch at the same level, and in the same meter, they
automatically succeed in handling the stress. If the character does not
have a hardened notch of that rank and in that stress meter, the player
makes a Mind roll. If the roll is a success, mark the lowest unmarked
“hardened” notch on the relevant stress meter. If the roll fails, the
player marks the lowest unmarked “failed” notch and chooses how the
character reacts - by fight, flight or paralysis.
Using bonds
When you fail a stress check you can let one of your PCs bond re-
lationships take the strain of the stress in order to avoid the failed
notch and the fight, flight, paralysis response. Roll against your
current value for the bond. If the roll is a success you withstand the
effects of the stress check, if not you suffer the consequences. In any
case the bond takes a toll from the strain. If the roll was successful,
lower the bond value with the result of the tens die. If the roll failed,
lower the bond value with the sum of the dice.
37
Fight, flight or paralysis
When a PC fails a stress check the player decides how the character
handles the source of the stress, by fight, flight or paralysis. While in
this state, the character is unable to process further information. The
chosen course of action will not change until the cause of the stress
is gone. The upside is that the character does not need to make any
more stress checks until they calm down.
Fight: The character tries to destroy the source of the stress. They
can not dodge or perform any other actions except full out attack with
or without weapon.
Flight: The character tries to flee from what caused the stress. They
can take no action other than to put as great a distance as possible
between themself and the threat.
Paralysis: The character freezes and can not perform any action
other than being quiet, whimper or scream.

38
BRUTALITY
The fear of death and physical harm. The revulsion towards being
hurt or causing hurt in others.
Sample Brutality Checks
1. Be physically assaulted.
2. Witness and act of torture.
3. Get shot at random. Suffer brief torture.
4. Kill someone in a fight.
5. Witness a massive battle, with hundreads of deaths.
6. Perform an act of torture.
7. Deliberately kill a helpless person.
8. Suffer extensive torture.
9. Witness a mass execution.
10. Watch as a loved one is tortured to death.
Failed Brutality Notches
1. Superficially fine, perhaps a little edgy around weapons.
2. Very aware of violence, and the distinction between how it exists
and how it is depicted.
3. Alert and uneasy when you see blood, even fake blood. You might
have nightmares about violence that you have witnessed.
4. Whenever there is a loud noise or a raised voice, you instinctively
take a defensive posture. You have frequent nightmares.
Hardened Brutality Notches
1-3. You seem like everyone else.
4-5. Your visibly react (with nervousness, an intense gaze or a grim
silence) when the subject of violence comes up in a conversa-
tion unless you work to hide your attitude.
6-7. You are no stranger to violence. Unlike less hardened people
you show no reaction when it is discussed or depicted.
8-9. Unless you make a continuous effort to suppress it, your
callousness is apparent to anyone observing you.
10. The value of life, your own as well as that of others, seems
abstract to you. Unless you work hard to hide it, others will
realize that the most horrifying brutality has become com-
monplace to you.

39
HELPLESSNESS
Loss of control, being exposed, feeling powerless.
Sample Helplessness Checks
1. Public humiliation.
2. Loosing your job.
3. Fail at a task of crucial importance.
4. Being locked in an elevator.
5. Spend a month in jail.
6. See video footage of your spouce committing adultery.
7. Having to choose between sawing of a limb or die.
8. Watch a loved one die.
9. Watch a loved one die because you tried to save them but failed.
10. Watch from behind your own eyes as your body commits unspea-
kable acts against your will.
Failed Helplessness Notches
1. Stil quite normal. Perhaps a bit overly cautious or finicky.
2. Unreasonably nervous and pessimistic. Reacts at even the smallest
things.
3. Intense dislike for surprises, even good ones. Deeply uncomfortable
with anything unpredictable.
4. Difficulty with trusting anything or anyone. Tendensy towards
obsessive-compulsive behaviors, checking several times that the
door is locked or that the oven is turned off. Tries to be prepared
for any eventuality.
Hardened Helplessness Notches

1-3. Slightly pessimistic and fatalistic.

4-6. Fatalistic. Shrugs off big setbacks and unexpected trouble
with a freakish lack of effect. (Can be combined with 2+ failed
notches. Unreasonably calm about big things and irrationally
upset about small things.)
7-9. Expects to be screwed over by chance or fate. Interprets even
the most suspicious circumstances as pure coincidence.
10. Everything is chaos or destiny. Unable to make distinction
between “intentional” and “accidental”.

40
ISOLATION
The lack of human companionship.
Sample Isolation Checks
1. A day without seeing anyone you know.
2. Five hours in a sensory-deprivation tank.
3. Three days without talking to another human being.
4. Be institutionalyzed by a person you love and trust.
5. A week in solitary confinement.
6. See someone you thought you knew intimately behaving in a fashion
completely contrary to their normal behaviour.
7. Spend a month among strangers that do not speak your language,
unable to make yourself understood no matter how hard you try.
8. Be deeply, painfully, and violently betrayed by a loved one.
9. Be treated like a stranger by your family.
10. Spend a month in a sensory-deprivation tank.
Failed Isolation Notches
1. Perhaps a bit shy, but can interact with society with no real problems.
2. Nervous around people.
3. Tries to fill the void with the sound of radio, tv or talking to yourself.
4. Panic attacks when isolated (alone by yourself, or surrounded by
strangers).
Hardened Isolation Notches
1-3. No obvious signs, other than being slightly standoffish or curt.
4-5. Unthinkingly rude, blurting out whatever crosses your mind.
6-7. Impatient with people who do not immediately understand
what you’re trying to tell them.
8-9. You no longer see the point of social conventions such as
clothing, grooming, hygiene, etc.
10. You have realized that everyone is ineherently alone, sepa-
rated by a gulf across which it is impossible to communicate
anything but the most superficial concepts.

41
PARANORMAL
The logic behind the world, the distinction between what is possible
and what is impossible.
Sample Paranormal Checks
1. A strong sense of deja vu or a remarkable synchronicity.
2. Experience an event that is extremly improbable.
3. Witness how a vision you had of the future comes true.
4. Be confronted with convincing proof that 1+1 does not equal 2.
5. Be attacked by a demonstrably paranormal force.
6. See someone you know killed by paranormal means.
7. Have a conversation with someone whom you know to be dead.
8. See a creature or machine whose existence defy logic.
9. See the dead rise.
10. Realize that a close family member is not really a human being.
Failed Paranormal Notches
1. Perhaps slightly superstitious, but nothing out of the ordinary.
2. You might suffer from nightmares and be deeply suspicious of
and/or fascinated by the supernatural, occult and mystic.
3. You feel surrounded by unseen forces. Sometimes it might seem
like there are voices in “white noise”, such as wind or traffic noise.
4. You always feel observed, and sometimes you can almost catch a
glimt of something in the corner of your eye. The nightmares are
frequent and it is only after you jerk awake that you realize you
were only dreaming.
Hardened Paranormal Notches
1-3. You seem quite normal, but might have a tendency to snort
derisively when someone talks about intuition or astrology.
4-5. You tend to listen intently when someone discusses the pa-
ranormal or the occult, in order to decide wether they know
something or if they’re just talking trash.
6-7. You know that the world that most people take for granted is
only the surface of a vast abyss alive with unseen forces.
8-9. Things that are generally considered “mere coincidences” strike
you as deeply meaningful and imbued with hidden connections.
10. You no longer make any distinction between what is “normal”
and not. There is nothing that can surprise you.

42
SELF
Self-image, self-respect, self-loathing.
Sample Self Checks
1. Break a minor promise.
2. Be confronted with evidence that your self-image is incorrect.
3. Secretly gratify an urge that is unacceptable to your upbringing
and background.
4. Lie to conceal some aspect of your personality from a close friend
or loved one.
5. Decide not to stand up for a prominent conviction or belief because
you deem it too riskful.
6. Deliberately deceive someone you love in a way that will cause
them terrible pain if they find out.
7. Discover that you have unwittingly commited an act of cannibalism.
8. Deliberately act completely contrary to your stated principles and
convictions.
9. Kill someone you love.
10. Deliberately destroy everything that you have risked your life for.
Failed Self Notches
1. You only rarely feel uncertain of who you actually are.
2. You question your identity and self-image quite often, especially
when someone mentions “truth” or “lies” or “promises”.
3. You quite often feel like an actor playing the role of yourself.
4. You feel like you are passively watching yourself from outside with
little sense of will or volition.
Hardened Self Notches
1-3. You seem mostly normal, perhaps just a bit “phony”.
4-5. Unless you make an effort to act “natural”, you come across as
dishonest even when you are telling the truth.
6-7. You have lost a sense of connection to those who used to be close
to you and no longer know exactly what you feel about them.
8-9. Truth and lies no longer seem very important to you. Half
the time you can’t really say if you are being truthful without
taking a moment to think about it.
10. There is no longer much of “you” left, and you no longer have
any opinion or preference regarding many things that used to
matter.
43
LONG TERM CONSEQUENCES
In the long run, exposure to stress will mess up the characters. What
does not break them gives them unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Indifference
When a character stack up more and more hardened notches on their
stress meters they get more resistent towards stress by becoming
indifferent, insensitive and callous.
In the end the character may become sociopathic, unable to connect
with other human beings. This happens when a PC has ten hardened
notches in two or more stress meters, or when their total sum of har-
dened marks exceed thirty-five. They are then no longer able to get
advantage from their Personality traits.
Madness
When you get five failed notches in a single stress meter, you no longer
have to make stress checks when confronted with that particular stress
any more. You choose a fight, flight or paralysis response just as if you
had failed a roll. The only exception is when you have sufficiently many
hardened notches so that you would not have had to roll anyway, in
which case you suffer no effects at all.
That is of course not all to it. When you get to five failed notches in
a single meter, you have endured so much stress that your mind suf-
fers indefinite repercussions. Together with the GM you should work
out how this is expressed. Ideally the consequences should reflect the
trauma that caused them.
• Addiction: The PC seeks to smother the memories of their past
by intoxicating themselves with drugs. Alcohol is legal, easily
available and powerful, but there are many alternatives. Depres-
sants such as marijuana and opioids (including heroin) suppress
the pain. Stimulants such as amphetamine and cocaine gives the
illusion of being in control.
• Amnesia: Unable to process or otherwise handle the trauma, the
PC blocks out all memories pertaining to the event.
• Anxiety disorder: The PC is tormented by uncontrollable worry
which manifests in fatigue, restlessness, headaches, sleeplessness,
and savage panic attacks. All skills are at -20%.
• Blackouts: When confronted with any element that was present
during the trauma they must make a Mind check to avoid ente-
ring a semi-conscious fugue state and wander away in an attempt
to flee their past. The blackout lasts for a number of hours equal
44
 to the die roll of the failed Mind check (double if a matched roll).
While in this state the PC is dazed and passive (except for trying
to move away from the triggering stimuli).
• Delusions: The PC invents a belief in order to cover up the
trauma. This can range from a denial of the event that caused the
trauma to elaborate imaginations that rationalize or justify the
experience.
• Depression: The PC is crushed by feelings of despair, hopeless-
ness and futility. All skills are at -20%.
• Intermittent Explosive Disorder: The PC suffers sudden,
uncontrollable fury entirely out of proportion to whatever real or
percieved threat that triggered it. The GM may at any time ask the
player to make a Mind check to avoid exploding with irrational
rage.
• Obsession: The PC develops an unhealthy affection for an indi-
vidual, object or action that they percieve to save them from the
traumatic event or the consequences thereof. This need not have
any basis in reality, but nevertheless the PC sees some sort of sal-
vific connection that is not necessarily rational. The PC may desire
to constantly be around the person or object, or to compulsively
repeat a certain action. If denied their obsession the PC reacts
with fight, flight or paralysis.
• Paranoia: The PC suffers permanent irrational fear of omni-
prescent invissible enemies. They are extremely suspicious of
everything and everyone and are unable to trust even their loved
ones or other PCs.
• Phobia: A debilitating and irrational fear of something specific.
If the PC is exposed to triggering subjects they must make a Mind
check in order to avoid fight, flight or paralysis. If confronted with
the thing itself, the PC automatically freak out without making a
check.
• PTSD: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. When the PC is exposed
to any element that was present during the trauma they must
make a Mind check to avoid reliving the event.
• Sleep disorder: When the PC tries to sleep, make a Mind check. If
it fails, the PC is unable to fall asleep or wakes up from terrible night-
mares.
• Trauma Bond: Like a phobia, but focused on something inci-
dental to the trauma rather than it’s actual source.

45
MENTAL HELP
It is not uncommon to have mental health issues of one kind or
another, and it’s a good idea to seek help from a psychotherapist,
social worker, philosophical counselor, priest or other professional.
A PC who is a mental-health professional can not perform therapy on
themselves.
Pre-insanity: The GM decides the relevant skill score of the coun-
selor. Each session the player makes a Mind roll for their PC and the
GM makes a skill check for the counselor.
• If any one of the rolls get a matched success, the player can choose
to erase a hardened or failed notch of their choise.
• If both rolls are successful, the player can choose to erase a harde-
ned or failed notch of their choise.
• If the player succeeds but the counselor fails, the player can choose
to erase any failed notch.
• If the counselor succeeds but the player fails, the player can choose
to erase any hardened notch.
• If both rolls get matched successes, the player can erase up to three
failed or up to three hardened notches in any one stress meter.
Post-insanity: To free a PC from indefinite insanity the fifth failed
notch of the relevant stress meter must be erased. This can be done
through either normal therapy or through residential treatment in a
specialised institution.
Every month of residential treatment, or every six months of
ordinary therapy, the player makes a Mind roll for their PC and the
GM makes a skill check for the therapist. If both rolls are successful
the fifth failed notch is erased and the PC has overcome their most
acute problems. The remaining failed notches can be treated through
normal therapy as described above.

46
47
SCENARIOS
It is common to compare role-playing games to other types of fiction,
but unlike traditional literature and film role-playing games are
interactive. If we try to shape the experience of role-playing after
the fashion of linear media we are bound to run into problems. If
the players are in charge of the actions of their characters, the game
moderator can hardly be expected to determine the progression of the
game all by themselves. It is a better strategy to embrace the interac-
tivity and view the fiction of the game as an emergent story, a nar-
rative that is shaped out of the encounters between PCs and GMCs,
leading up to an outcome that will be suspenseful and surprising to
players and GM alike.
However, although we don’t want to plan an entire plotline, there
are some things the GM can prepare:
• Background: What led up to the situation that the game will
explore?
• GMCs: Factions, antagonists, competitors, neutrals, allies,
friends - all with agendas of their own.
• Locations: Places of importance. The murder scene, the secret
hideout of the bad guys or the unknown space beyond the barrier.
• Events: The GM can even prepare a list of possible situations
that seem interesting. The trick is to make them openended.
Think of them as questions: “If this happens, how will the players
react?” or “What will the players do when confronted by this?”
Don’t have a specific outcome in mind, but see where the game
takes you.

LINES AND VEILS

Weird fiction is at least partially overlapping with horror, and a Mys-
terium campaign will quite likely include violence, mental health pro-
blems and many other topics and themes that can be disturbing. This
is amplified by the fact that role-playing games are interactive which
makes them more intimate than many other mediums of fiction
that can be consumed passively. It is therefore a good idea to have a
conversation in the group about what subjects you feel are sensitive
before starting a game of Mysterium.
Decide together where you want to draw a veil (include in the
fiction, but with details ”off screen”) and where you want to draw a
line (outright exclude from the fiction).
49
SCENARIO CONCEPT
The first thing for the GM to concider when planning a new campaign
is what kind of weird, strange and unknown phenomenon the player
characters will be faced with. Apart from their own imagination there
are many sources of inspiration the GM can turn to when looking for
ideas to work with.
Weird fiction media
There is a wealth of weird fiction in all kinds of media - literature,
comics, movies and tv, podcasts and radio shows, video games, etc.
Take an idea you find exciting and disentangle it from its context by
expressing it in general terms without the specific details. Try to in-
terpret it in new ways or combine it with an idea from another source.
The City on the Borderland
A small city is shifting from our reality to another universe. It is in an
inbetween-state where no one can leave to the outside world, but it
has not yet entirely been subsumed into that other realm. Creatures
from beyond are intruding and strange phenomena are becoming
more frequent. In this sandbox-style campaign the PCs can explore
and investigate places, persons and creatures in the city in order to
understand what is going on.
Inspiration: Twin Peaks, The Mist, Silent Hill, World of Horror
The Menace from Space
The Solar System passes through a vast nebula which proves to have
unforeseen consequences as the interstellar gas cloud is imbued with
a strange form of consciousness that affects the minds of both humans
and animals.
Inspiration: The Purple Cloud by MP Shiel, Nameless by Alan
Moore, Remina by Junji Ito
Weird history
Real world history is full of strange occurences and beliefs and can be
a rich storehouse of ideas to mine for role-playing campaigns focu-
sing on the weird and paranormal. Some examples are the Veiled
Prophet of Khorassan that is venerated in St Louis, the mysterious
airships of the 1890s, and the Green Children of Woolpit.
The Machine God
The Mechanical Messiah (or New Motive Power) was built in 1853 by
John Murray Spear, a spiritualist clergyman, who claimed to be in-
structed by a group of spirits called ”The Association of Electrizers”.
50
Did the same forces guide Roger Bacon in the construction of his
oracular Brazen Head, and Cartesius to build his automaton daughter?
Was the british engineer Gordon Earl Adams’ attempt to create The
Constant Potential Transformer (which he compared to the Holy of
Holies in the Temple of Solomon) another instance of the same other-
worldly influence? What is this machine deity that seem to be striving
to build itself through the hands of man? Is it the same as John C Lilly’s
Solid State Intelligence and/or the Omega Point of Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin? If the last is true, is the Machine God identical with the Lords
of the Latter Days?
Weirdness in the natural world
Nature is the source and foundation for the human race, human cons-
ciousness and human societies but it is also a great unknown Other.
Some popular examples of weirdness in nature are the Ophiocordy-
ceps unilateralis fungus, slime molds, eusocial insects and the intel-
lects of octopi. Other classics are deep time, quantum entanglement,
black holes and multiverse cosmologies.
Campaign specific rules
Many times a campaign may involve paranormal phenomena that the
PCs can interact with or manipulate to achieve certain effects. In most
cases this can be handled with the rules for skills or extended conflicts.
Sometimes though it may be necessary to devise entirely new rules sys-
tems. The next chapters consist of several scenario frames with examp-
les of such rules for specific paranormal phenomena.

MYSTERIES
Even if the player characters are not detectives, journalists or any
other kind of investigators, many campaigns will nevertheless contain
mysteries of one kind or another. These can be about the nature of
the weird forces intruding on the lives of the player characters, the
secret objectives of the factions of GMCs or who commited a crime
such as a murder or theft.
In a game of larger scope, mysteries can be layered on top of each other
like an onion, the answer to one riddle reveals a new and greater enigma.
Secrets
At the heart of any mystery there is a secret. This can be something
that is purposefully kept from the publics knowledge or something
that has so far not been discovered or understood.

51
The information: What does the secret consist of? Is it something
criminal or shameful or an as yet undiscovered cause of an unexplained
phenomenon?
The carrier: Is there someone who knows the secret or is there a
source for the information or data that can be found?
Agenda: Is someone deliberately keeping this information hidden?
If so, why and how? What lies and misdirections are they using to
accomplish this?
Obstacles: If no-one is actively withholding the information, what is
keeping people from finding out?
Hook: How are the player characters introduced to the mystery?
Why should they care? Is there a threat to them or someone or so-
mething that they care about? Do they need to unveil the secret to
achieve their goals?
A network of clues
Clues point to other clues or to different courses of action, they make
up routes that the PC’s can follow to various places, groups and per-
sons. In that sense, the network of clues becomes a map of diverging
and converging paths that the players can explore during the game.
Detection: As a general rule, player characters do not need to make
a skill check to find clues in a location. The GM should ask the players
to be specific in where they look and how they go about doing it. If the
players say that they search the correct area (e.g. a room) they find
any clues that happen to be there. Even if a clue has been purposeful-
ly hidden the players can find it if they say that they look in the spe-
cific spot (behind the mirror for example). If the players are not very
thorough and specific they can be allowed a skill check to see if they
are lucky and happen to spot something.
Revelation: What information does the clue point to? Clues can be
designed as puzzle pieces so that two or more different clues each carry
only parts of the information and need to be combined to receive the
full revelation.
Container: In what form is the clue conveyed? Is it a document;
digital, printed or manuscript; such as a news paper, private journal
or a pdf file? Is it a web page or an audio or video recording? A foot-
print, fingerprint or something revealed by an autopsie? Is it given in
a conversation with a witness or an expert?
Surprise: The best clues point to a revelation that is not directly spelled
out, and only become clear when the players contemplate the greater
pattern that is implied by the clues taken together.
52
METAPHYSICAL FORCES
These are powers and principalities of godlike stature. Such ultrater-
restrial titans and alien divinities should not be given attributes like
GMCs, but handled like forces of nature. They are rarely encountered
directly, but their influence can shape the events of the campaign and
they may have agents among the factions of GMCs. Those who choose
to serve these entities can be rewarded with miraculous blessings or
given special tools for use in their cause.
The Angels of the Abyss
The firstborn of chaos, messengers of the void. They preceded the
formation of the cosmos and remain outside its confines.
Some human occultists hope to reshape reality by attracting and
directing the attention of these immense and nebulous entities. This
demands massive outbursts of human emotion, the easiest ones of
course being pain and horror. Once the attention of the chaos spawn
has been caught it can be shaped through focused visualisation by the
way of a ritual. If the working is successful some facet of reality can
be rewritten. A failure will at best only mean that whatever acts were
committed were for naught. At worst local reality will be the play-
thing of wrathful gods.
The Lords of the Latter Days
At the end of time, long after the last stars have burned out and the
black holes drift in the dark, the last heirs of mankind are struggling to
seccure immortality by controlling all of space and time, from Alpha to
Omega.
Agents of the A:.O:. are instructed through ideas implanted into
their thought streams. They are given missions of lesser or greater
magnitude, though almost always of inscrutible nature. In order to
accomplish their assignments agents are granted a limited ability
to rewrite time with the skill Teleologic Causality (starts at half
the value of it’s governing attribute, Psyche). When they fail a skill
check, while performing a mission for the A:.O:., they can substitute
the failed roll with a new check but for Teleological Causality instead.
However, if that skill check also fails their level in the TC skill is redu-
ced with as many steps as the value of the single digits die.

53
GAME MODERATOR CHARACTERS
A GMC is any person, or entity with agence, other than the player
characters. In theory this includes every human in the game world,
or at least everyone on the street while the PCs pass by. The GM need
not bother with attributes or anything like that for unnamed persons
in the background. Any such extra that the PCs interact with can be
improvised on the fly. If an attribute or skill should be needed it can
be assumed to be 30-70, or 40-80 if it’s an expert or experienced pro-
fessional of some sort.
Named characters of some kind of importance in the campaign
should be described in more detail.
Agenda: What do they want and how are they going to achieve it?
Motives are important in order to know how GMCs will act and how
they react to whatever the PCs end up doing. Active opponents and
allies are a good thing in any campaign. If the players happen to be
passive and indecisive, an initiative from the opposition or a plea for
help from a friendly can get things going again.
Ideology, faith or worldview: What do they value? How do they
see the world?
Relationships and contacts: Who are their friends and enemies?
Who do they answer to and who do they call for help?
Resources: What kind of tools do they have at their disposal? Mo-
ney? Guns? Secret knowledge? A secure hideout?
Attributes and skills: What are their strengths and weaknesses?
Do they have any particular expertise or proficiencies?
Personality and behaviour: How do they act? Are they outgoing
or introverted? Confident or insecure? Talkative or silent? Joking or
gravely serious?
Appearance: How do they look and how do they dress?
Name: Given name, but also nick names and aliases.
Reaction roll
Roll two dice and find the sum of the result in the table. The play-
er may get +3 if the PC has a relevant positive personality trait or a
Psyche attribute above 70. Adversely, they may get -3 if the PC has a
relevant negative personality trait or a Psyche attribute below 30.
2-4 Immidiate attack or flight
5-8 Hostile or afraid
9-13 Uncertain, cautious
14-17 Neutral
18-20 Friendly
54
FACTIONS
A faction is any GMC or group of GMCs that have a stake in the cen-
tral conflict of the campaign. Cults and secret societies are common
in weird fiction and there are many interesting examples from history
to be inspired by: the Order of Knight-Masons Elect Priests of the
Universe (aka Élus Coëns), the Fraternitas Saturni, the Process
Church of Final Judgement, Aum Shinrikyo and the Order of the
Nine Angles.
For a more modern feel there are government agencies, research in-
stitutes and commercial corporations: the DIA’s Stargate Project, The
Monroe Institue, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR),
Sony’s Extrasensory Perception and Excitation Research (ESPER)
laboratory and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU).
Other factions may be informal such as a family or a group of
friends.
Purpose and agenda: What is the reason for this faction to exist?
What do they want to achieve? What are their long-term and short-
term goals? How do they strive to achieve these goals?
Ideology, faith or worldview: How do they see themselves and
their place in the world? What is important to them? Are they part of
some religious, ideological or esoteric tradition?
Members: Is it a single individual, a handful of people or a giant
organization with hundreds of members and sections all over the con-
tinent or even the world? What kind of people are they?
Leadership: In the case of a group, how is it run? Is it a loose
network of likeminded individuals cooperating as long as they all
want the same thing, or a hierarchical structure with clearly defined
leaders and followers? In the latter case, who are the leaders?
Origin and history: How did they get involved in the situation? In
the case that the faction is a formal group, how where they founded?
What are the significant events and developments in their history? Do
they have an idealized or mythical history that they claim?
Resources: What are the assets that the faction have at their dispo-
sal? Locales, information, skills and manpower, tools and weapons,
money, contacts and allies, paranormal abilities, etc.
Name and symbol: Are the faction known under a name, formal or
informal? Do they use some kind of symbol, such as a sigil or logo?
Alliances and conflicts: Who are the friends and enemies of the
faction? Are they in some way related to someone of the player cha-
racters? Are they under influence frome some other faction?

55
BEINGS, CREATURES AND MONSTERS
If a story or game is to focus on the unknown and strange, traditional
and established concepts such as ghosts, vampires, werewolfes and
their ilk are best eshewed in favor of new and more enigmatic incar-
nations of the fantastic.
What does it feed on? Ordinary organic matter? Minerals? Light
or heat? Human blood? Emotions? Information? And how does it
feed?
How does it move? Does it crawl, swim, fly or walk? Float through
the air? Can it teleport or move through solid matter? Move from
mind to mind through memetic exchange?
What senses does it have? Sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch?
Can it see in infrared or ultraviolet? Can it hear radio? Does it have
echo-location or radar? Can it sense emotions or thoughts? Does it
lack any particular sense?
What does it look like? Like a regular person? Or like a normal
animal? Like some sort of chimera combining traits of many different
species? Can it change shape and mimic others?
How big is it? Like a dog, a human or a horse? Small as a microbe?
Big as a bluewhale? Is it distributed among many small bodies in a
large area? Can it alter its size?
How smart is it? Like a simple animal? Like a smart animal or
small child? Smarter than an adult human? Can it think in several
steps? Can it understand abstracts and symbols?
56
Is it able to communicate, and if so, how? Can it understand
speech? Can it talk? Does it use some other means of communication,
such as pheromones, colored lights or radio waves? Is it telepathic?
Does it have any other special abilities? Can it travel through
time? Become invissible? Control the minds of other beings? Crea-
te illusory sights and sounds? Can it release poison gas or create a
powerful electric shock?
What is it’s motivation? Is it just looking for food or protecting its
young? Is it studying humans? Harvesting some organ or substance
from humans? Is it hiding from humans or from another being? Is it
performing some acitivity, such as mining or producing something,
and just wants to be left alone?
What scares it? Bright light and loud noises? A certain fragrance?
Rapidly shifting magnetic fields? A certain symbol (perhaps related to
another being)?
What is it vulnerable to? Good old kinetic energy? Heat? Cold?
Gamma rays? Iron? Its own name? An old song? Its mirror image?
What is it’s origin? Is it a mutated animal or person? Was it desig-
ned and created for a purpose? Does it hail from another world? Was
it conjured to come here? Did something attract its attention?
Does it have a name? Is there a name for these kinds of creatures?
Does this individual have a name of its own?
Attributes and skills: Creatures that operate at roughly the same
scale as humans have attributes just like PCs and GMCs. Their ratings
should reflect the answer to the questions above. Special abilities
should be handled as skills.
Some possible concepts
• Shape-shifting amoeboid creatures who has come to Earth from
a Counter-Earth on the opposite side of the Sun and who hide in
plain sight by mimicking humans or animals.
• Transhumanists who have found a way to become more, or less,
than human.
• Self-replicating von Neuman drones observing human evolution
and collecting data on behalf of their long extinct creators.
• Primitive macro-organisms that have crossed over from a parallel
universe. Compare the Crawfordsville monster of 1891.
• Humans, ordinary living people, are just the larval stage of the
species. In death the invidual undergoes a metamorphosis, shed-
ding its physical husk and turning into an incorporeal being as
strange to its former self as the butterfly is to the catterpillar.
57
MYSTERIOUS MEDIA
The mysterious tome is a classic device in weird fiction. But it need
not be a book, it could just as well be a record or audio tape, a digital
file, an old newspaper, a stone tablet, a film reel, a photography or
painting or any other kind of media.
Topic: What is it about? What kind of information is covered?
Language: If it is a text or recorded speech, what language is it in?
Has it been translated and, if so, is the translation different in any
important way to the original? Does it include lengthy passages in
foreign languages?
Title: What is the book or work called? Does it have a subtitle or
alternative titles?
Appearance: How does it look? In the case of a book, is it a paper-
back, an old hardcover in gothic typeface or a handbound manus-
cript? Does it have illustrations or graphs? Is there comments made
by hand in the margin? Is it a stack of loose pages with a print out of
an email? A collection of collages made by clipings from newspapers
and flyers? A worn usb-stick with a low quality audio file?
Author: Who wrote or otherwise created it? Is it the work of a single
person or a collaborative effort? Who where they? Is it attributed to
some famous historical or mythic person?
History: Who published it? Where and when? Has it been published
in different editions or translations? What are the differences, if any,
between them?
Availability: Where can the player characters find it? Is it widely
available, restricted, censored or prohibited? Is it lost or only extant
in one or a few copies?

58
On the occultists bookshelf
These are some well known occult or esoteric texts. Most of them are
not hard to find, at least through online bookstores, and many have
been published as mass market paper backs. They mostly contain
myths and the products of fanciful imaginations, but the GM may
decide that some of them has something more to offer. If the PCs find
a book in the ownership of a GMC with actual occult insight there
might be some notes in the margin that contain valuable clues.
01-05. The Book of Coming Forth by Day (ca 1500 BCE)
The so-called Egyptian Book of the Dead is a number of magic spells
written on papyrus and burried with the dead in order to assist their
journey through the underworld and into the afterlife. There were
spells and incantations for many different purposes, such as to give
the deceased mystical knowledge in the afterlife, to ensure that the
different elements of the dead person’s being were preserved and reu-
nited, and to protect the deceased from various hostile forces or guide
him through the underworld past various obstacles.
06-10. Pentemychos by Pherecydes av Syros (7th cen BCE)
This book, which title means Five Recesses, is now lost. It was written
by Pherecydes, a philosopher from the island of Syros. He taught the
doctrine of metempsychosis (reincanation) and described a cosmolo-
gy where three primal forces; Zas, Chronos and Cthonie; created the
cosmos. Zas and Chronos then imprissoned five chaos monsters (Op-
hioneus-Typhon, Eurynome, Echidna, Calirrhoe and Chthonie) in five
chambers within Tartaros and sealed the gate behind the elements of
aether (sky/space) and water (the prima materia).
11-15. The Dead Sea Scrolls (3rd cen BCE to 1st cen).
These ancient Hebrew religious texts were found in the Qumran caves
on the north shore of the Dead Sea. The fragments of the many hund-
reds of manuscripts include Hebrew scriptures, but also apocryphal
texts such as The Book of Enoch and The Book of Giants that tell the
story of how the Watchers took human women as wifes and fathered
the monstrous Nephilim.
16-20. Sefer Yetzirah (1st or 2nd cen?).
The Book of Formation is one of the foundational texts of the Jewish
mystic tradition known as Kabbalah. In the text the topics of mathema-
tics, linguistics, cosmology and theology overlap and intersect as facets of
the same philosophy.

59
21-25. Corpus Hermeticum (2nd to 3rd cen).
A collection of seventeen treatises on Hermetic philosophy in Greek
written during the second or third centuries CE, compiled by Byzantine
scholars in the eleventh century and translated into Latin in the fifteenth
century by Marsilio Ficino and Lodovico Lazzarelli. The texts take the
form of dialogues between such mythical personae as Hermes Trisme-
gistus, Thoth and Asclepius on the nature of and relation between the
divine, the cosmos and human beings.
26-30. Nag Hammadi Manuscripts (3rd to 4th cen).
In 1945 thirteen leatherbound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar
was discovered near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. The codices
contain Gnostic, Christian and Hermetic texts written in the Coptic
language during the 3rd or 4th centuries but likely based on earlier
sources. Much of what is known about the various gnostic sects comes
from codices such as The Gospel of Thomas; The Hypostasis of the
Archons; The Thunder, Perfect Mind; The Trimorphic Protennoia.
31-35. The Chaldean Oracles (3rd to 6th cen).
A mystery-poem on spiritual and philosophical topics. The original
text has been lost, but fragments have survived in the form of quotes
and commentaries made by Neoplatonist philosophers. The poem
describes how the world is created and ruled by a complex series of
divine principles such as the Father, the Intellect and the World Soul
Hecate; and how the soul can be freed from the confines of matter,
as well as how to defend it against the demonic powers lurking in the
realms between Gods and mortals.
36-40. Zohar (13th cen?).
The title of this foundational work of the Kabbalah means Splendor
or Radiance. It is written in a obscure and cryptic style of Aramaic.
The book contains discussions of the nature of God, the origin and
structure of the universe, the nature of souls, redemption, the rela-
tionship of Ego to Darkness and ”true self” to ”The Light of God”. The
Zohar was published in the 13th century by a jewish writer named
Moses de León in the kingdom of Leon in what is today Spain. It may
have been based on older works.
60
41-45. The Voynich Manuscript (13th cen?)
This mysterious manuscript of unknown origin is written in an uni-
dentified alphabet. The cryptic illustrations show plants and women
bathing, possibly alchemical allegories. There are several theories
regarding the nature of this book, and there have been many attempts
to decode the writing, but the meaning and origin of the manuscript
remains unknown.
46-50. The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage
(14th cen?).
This grimoire tells the story of a jew named Abraham in the 14th cen-
tury, who travels from the German city of Worms to Egypt where he
meets a mage named Abra-Melin and is taught his system of magic.
Abra-Melin teaches an elaborate ritual, encompassing many months,
whereby the would-be magician obtains the “knowledge and conver-
sation” of his “guardian angel”. When this has been achieved the ma-
gician can conjure the 12 kings and dukes of Hell and bind them, thus
removing their negative influence from his life. The bound demons
also deliver a number of familiar spirits that ensure the magician
many special powers and abilities.
51-55. The Three Books of Occult Philosophy by Cornelius
Agrippa (1531-1533).
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486 – 1535) was a
German polymath, physician, legal scholar, soldier, theologian, and
occult writer. His Three Books of Occult Philosophy cover such topics
as the four elements, astrology, kabbalah, numerology, angels, God’s
name, scrying, medicine, alchemy, etc.
56-60. The Lesser Key of Solomon (17th cen?).
This grimoire, also known as Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis or
simply Lemegeton, is divided into five books; the Ars Goetia, Ars
Theurgia-Goetia, Ars Paulina, and Ars Notoria. The first book, which
is undoubtedly the most notorious, is a catalog of 72 demons along
with the sigils necessary for evoking them. The grimoires title makes
reference to the tale about how the biblical king Solomon binds infer-
nal spirits to build the Temple of Jerusalem and then seals them in a
vessel of brass.
61-65. A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many
Yeers between John Dee and Some Spirits (1659).
Parts of the diaries kept by Elizabethan mathematician, polymath
and ritual magician Dr John Dee during his experiments with sum-
moning and communicating with angels. The book was published by
61
Merric Casaubon in an attempt to expose the scandalous and pos-
sibly heretic practices of Dr Dee. The text describes the language of
the angels (sometimes referred to as “Enochian”) along with magical
rituals communicated by the angels. The Calls, or Keyes, a series of
incantations of angelic and celestial forces, are steeped in distinctly
apocalyptic imagery.
66-70. The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairi-
es by Robert Kirk (manuscript 1692, published 1815, re-edi-
ted and published 1893).
Robert Kirk (1644 – 1692) was a Scottish minister, Gaelic scholar and
folklorist, who collected stories about fairies, whitchcraft, ghosts and
the second sight (a kind of extrasensory perception). He was unable
to publish his work before his death, and it was not until the 19th cen-
tury that the book was finally made available to the public.
71-75. Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual by
Éliphas Lévi (1854–1856).
Alphonse Louis Constante (1810 - 1875) took the name Éliphas Lévi
and wrote more then twenty books on magic, kabbalah, alchemy and
occultism. In this work Lévi proposed a theory of magic based on a
blind universal force called the Astral Light (akin to the Luminiferous
Aether) that could be influenced by human Will and Imagination.
76-80. Oahspe: A New Bible by John Ballou Newbrough
(1882).
A message, received by automatic writing, from the “Embassadors
of the Angel Host” in the name of the Creator, the divine Mother-
Father, named as Ormazd or Jehovi. Oahspe reveals how the Sun
and Earth where created, how mankind was born on the primordial
continent of Pan in the pacific ocean and how the passage of the solar
system through various interstellar zones governed by different gods
or archangels gives rise to distinct ages with varying conditions on the
Earth and cause the rise and fall of civilisations.
81-85. The Secret Doctrine by Helena Blavatsky (1888).
The seminal work of the founder of Theosophy. It relates how super-
human entities guide the physical and spiritual development of hu-
manity through a series of “root races”; from astral beings who repro-
duced through fission, through formless ethereal hyperboreans who
multiplied via budding and egg-laying lemurians to atlanteans and
modern man, and further to yet more advanced future races of man.

62
86-90. Magick by Aleister Crowley (1912).
This is the magnum opus of Aleister Crowley, enfant terrible of the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and prophet of Thelema. It is
divided into four parts: I. Mysticism. On the practice of meditation
and Yoga. II. Magick (Elemental Theory). Deals with the many ac-
cessories of ceremonial magick, such as the magick circle, the wand,
the sword, etc. III. Magick in Theory and Practice. Defines Magick as
“the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with
Will”. Contains essays on magickal formulas and practices (banish-
ing, consecration, invocation, divination, etc). IV. Thelema - the Law.
Deals with the Book of the Law, the sacred text dictated to Crowley by
a preternatural entity calling itself Aiwass, whose primary command-
ment is “Do what thou whilt shall be the whole of the Law”.
91-95. The Typhonian Trilogies by Kenneth Grant (1972-
2002).
Kenneth Grant, a disciple of Aleister Crowley, made a radical reinter-
pretation of his masters teachings (heresy or plain insanity according
to orthodox Thelemites) in three trilogies with the following titles:
The Magical Revival, Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, Cults of
the Shadow, Nightside of Eden, Outside the Circles of Time, Hecate’s
Fountain, Beyond the Mauve Zone, The Ninth Arch.
96-00. The Voudon Gnostic Workbook by Michael Bertiaux
(1989).
An eclectic synthesis of many different esoteric systems expressed
in a highly idiosyncratic fashion with an abundance of neologisms.
Covers such topics as Experimental Theology of Osiris-Leghba, Zot-
hyrian Metapsychology, Imagination and Physics in Shintotronics
and much more.

63
THE DOOR TO
THE UNKNOWN
Suggested reading: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, The
House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgeson, The Hollow
Places by T. Kingfisher

The PCs share a house together. One morning they wake up to disco-
ver that someone has been rumaging about in the kitchen during the
night. All doors are locked, and no windows have been broken, but
the intruder has left a trail of crumbs behind. The tracks lead towards
a door that was not there before. A door that opens to a place that
could not be there. A place that might not even be on Earth.

THE PLAYER CHARACTERS

The PCs share a house together, other than that the players are free
to come up with what kind of people their characters are and wether
they own or rent the house. For example they could be a family living
in a house they built or renovated themselves or they could be stu-
dents sharing the cost of rent.
In case of casualties
It could happen that a PC dies during their investigations - or the PCs
could decide they are in over their heads and let someone else deal
with the problem. This does not need to spell the end of the game,
simply make new PCs who have a reason to find out what happened
to the previous characters - relatives, neighbours, police, journalists,
social workers, agents of secret organisations, etc.
The house
The GM can leave it to the players to decide how the house looks and
draw a plan of the interior. This will create a sense of ownership and
establish the house as familiar and safe. When the players are done
creating their house the GM decides where the door appears.

64
THE PLACE BETWEEN THE WORLDS
The alien structure that has connected to the PC’s house is a kind of
craft that can open up doorways to different worlds of the multiverse.
A disaster has left the main crew dead and the craft partly destroyed.
It has now drifted to the local space-time of the PC’s house.
Inhabitants
The primary crew, members of a species of 4 m tall humanoids, are
dead. However, their servitor drones, diminutive semi-intelligent va-
riants of the same sort of beings, are still alive, although in a state of
confusion. There are currently 10 of these drones abord the craft.
In addition to the crew there is also a population of small crab-things
who clean the structure from organic waste and eat eventual pests.
Drones
Schimpanzee-like humanoid with short legs, long arms and crouching
posture. Covered with carapace ranging from milky white to light
grey in color. The face is a pink mass of feelers and antennae, usually
protected by a fold-down face shield. The drones see quite well in low
light, and can see the infrared parts of the spectrum.
The servitor drones have been trying to find food for the prisoners,
since the green goo that the drones eat themselves has proved unsu-
itable. They have therefore ventured out to seek anything eadible in
the PC’s house.
The drones are quite terrotorial and will likely be aggressive
towards intruders.
Body: 70, Athletics 60, Stealth 70, Struggle 60
Speed: 70, Dodge 50, Initaitive 60
Mind: 40, Conceal 40, Notice 40
Psyche: 30
Natural weaponds: Claws +3
Crab-things
Six-legged animals covered in pearl white carapace. They eat organic
waste and small creatures. If possible, they prefer to flee rather than
fight.
Body: 40, Athletics 40, Stealth 40, Struggle 30
Speed: 50, Dodge 30, Initaitive 35
Mind: 30, Notice 30
Psyche: 10
65
 Control
room

Bio-reactor Engine room

Collapsed
area

Power source

Dormitory Central hall Prison cells

Airlock

Door

Random encounters
1-4 Nothing.
5-6 Noise in adjecent room, +3 on next roll.
7 One crab-thing.
8 D10 crab-things.
9 One lonely drone.
10+ D10 drones

66
Rooms
Floor, walls and ceiling is made from polished pitch-black stone. A soft
blue light shine from points in the ceiling. There is a smell of ozone,
like from chlorine or as if there has been an electric spark.
Airlock
A narrow passage with low ceiling, 1,5 x 1,5 m, leads from the door to
an airlock. The lock has two doors that can only open one at a time.
Central hall
A round hall, fifteen meters in diameter with as much from floor
to ceiling. Along the walls are six tall statues, ten meters in height,
depicting beings looking like the crew. Each statue has an object in its
hands: a sphere, a tetrahedron, a cube, an octahedron, a dodecahe-
dron and an icosahedron.
Collpased area
The corridor is entirely blocked by debris. It is completely dark and
the air is filled with dust.
Prison cells
A round room with four translucent doors and a hatch to the right of
the entrence. Each door can be opened by tapping a glowing button
on its left side.
• Cell 1: Empty.
• Cell 2: The grotesquely bloated and mutated remains of a wo-
man, dressed in the rags of a kaftan. Her name was Tanith and
she was a citizen of Taured, but now she is hardly recognizable as
a human anymore. Her body has swollen and transformed into
what can be described as a mass of luminescent sea anemones.
Next to the body is a bowl with a thick green liquid.
• Cell 3: A man with light brown skin, short dark hair and neat
beard, dressed in a blue kaftan and sandals. His blood shot eyes
with dark shadows reveal a lack of sleep. Hamilcar is a citizen of
Taured who was kidnapped together with his partner Tanith and
placed in this cell a week ago. On the floor of his cell are the rema-
ins of food stuff that he was recently fed after the drones looted it
from the PC’s kitchen.
• Cell 4: Empty.
• Trash disintegrator: There is a hatch in the wall behind which
there is a cylindrical compartment, inclined at 45 degrees, filled
with asorted trash. To the left of the hatch there is a round button.
If it is pressed, the contents are disintegrated.

67
D10 Contents of the trash disintegrator
1-5 Various rags.
6 A small statuette of a coiled centipede with its head raised.
Unknown gold red material, reminiscent of amber.
7 An english language tabloid paper from 1983 that does not
look more than a couple of weeks old.
8 A large knife with a ceramic blade.
9 A small green glass bottle decorated with an intricate floral
pattern. Contains water with several exotic and unusual (though
non-toxic) minerals.
10 A fist-sized orb, one half brass hiding an intricate clockwork
and the other a glass cover with a tiny orrery beneath.

Hamilcar from Taured

The man in cell #3 is named Hamilcar and hails from a place called
Taured. Located on a parallel Earth, Taured is a nation situated in
what we know as Western Sahara, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya
and the Iberian Peninsula. The historical and cultural successor to the
great empire of Carthage, it is a modern industrial society of a kind that
we might characterize as a democratic and socialist republic.
Hamilcar, and his lover Tanith (the woman in cell #2), discovered
a similar entrance as the PCs and were captured by the drones. He is
confused, afraid and distraught over what has happened to Tanith. If
freed he wants to return home.
Like all people of Taured Hamilcar speak a semitic language evol-
ved from Punic, with loanwords from Berber and Coptic. He also
speeks Greek and understands a little bit of Persian and Mandarin
Chinese.
Body: 55, Athletics 40, Stealth 25, Struggle 25
Speed: 50, Dodge 25, Drive 30, Initiative 25
Mind: 60, Conceal 20, Education 45, Notice 30
Psyche: 55, Charm 30, Lying 25, Read person 35

68
Power source
A large oval chamber with three glowing pillars in the middle. The
left-most one alternates between flickering and going dark. The entire
room is charged with static electricity.
Touching the malfunctioning pillar will cause melee damage. If the
shell of any of the three pillars is broken (by gunfire for example), a
plasma discharge will cause d100 damage to everyone in the room.
Dormitory
The walls are lined with twenty hexagonal sleeping pods. There is a
trough for feeding, with a tap for dispensing the green goo from the
bio-reactor. This is where the drones rest and eat.
Bio-reactor
A complex machinery of tubes, receptacles and vats filled with
viridescent slime. The goo is a living organism capable of processing
carbon dioxide and organic refuse, as it grows it releases oxygen as a
by-product. It serves as nourishment for the crew and their drones,
but to terrestrial animals it is severly mutagenic (as evidenced by the
fate of poor Tanith in cell #2) and causes flesh to bloom into what
looks like colorful bio-luminescent sea anemones.
The green ooze can be manipulated to grow into a kind of fruit
from which creatures of the same species as the crew are hatched (or
drones, if harvested prematurely). There are three such fruits in a vat,
their leathery skin dark green vergin on black.
In another vat the carcasses of four drones are dissolving into the
goo along with the half-melted remains of a human body.
Engine room
A huge spherical chamber, thirty meters across, circumpassed by a
walkway. Revolving around the center of the sphere at a leisurely
pace are four large orbs of what looks like mercury. These are seven
meters in diameter each and float through the air three meters out
from the walkway.
There is a deep humming vibration and a sense of great pressure.
The smell of ozone is stronger here.

69
The control room
The entire wall opposite to the entrance is a window towards hyper-
space. The boundless abyss is alive with radiant auroras and psyche-
delic fractals that burn with strange unearthly colors; their glow is
wild and painful but also shade into dreamlike, feverish, and volup-
tuous. Complex many-angled shapes traverse the void, continuously
transforming.
Stairs, with uncomfortably steep steps, lead up to a circular plat-
form. Six huge creatures are seated in thrones around a round table.
The six beings are the crew of the craft, travellers in the multiverse,
explorers of infinities and eternities. They are 4 meter tall bipeds with
short legs and long arms. Their bodies are covered with milk white
carapace and their heads consist of a pink mass of feelers and anten-
nae. They are integrated with their seats, tubes and pipes running
from their bodies into the walls and floor. They are quite obviously
dead, slumped and unmoving. Black ichor has oozed out between
their porcelain pale chitin plates.
The control system
In the middle of the table there is a glowing holographic model of the
PC’s house, looking like a dollhouse made from pink laser light. The
hologram is surrounded by a circle of buttons, nobs and switches.
These are the controls for navigating the craft through the infinity of
worlds.
Working out how to use the controls is done through an extended
conflict. The controls have a conflict pool 0f 80 and a skill value of
80%. Rolls are made with any skill relating to technology, mathematics
or science, or unskilled in case the PCs lack such skills. The relevant
attribute pool is Mind. Several PCs can cooperate, with their common
attribute pool based on their single best value in Mind.
Should the PCs choose to disengage from the conflict they have
simply failed to understand how the machine works. If they are de-
feated the consequences are worse and they will somehow have acci-
dentaly caused the craft to navigate to an unknown world. In the case
that the PCs loose due to a critical success on the part of the control
system, or a critical failure of their own, the craft moves to another
world - and the navigation system becomes broken and can not be
used until it is repaired!
If the PCs are successful in the extended conflict they manage to
understand how the controls work and can now operate them any
time they like with a significant skill ckeck.

70
ENDS AND LOOSE STRANDS
This scenario can end in many different ways. The PCs may decide to
hide the mysterious door and moove as quickly as possible. Some sort
of authorities may become involved, most likely deciding to quaranti-
ne the house and set up a top secret research project.
If the PCs try to experiment with the navigation system of the craft
they might end up in another world (quite possibly for a permanent
stay). What kind of place that might be and what they may encounter
there is left in the hands of the GM.
There are several questions that will likely be left unanswered at the
end of the game. One such is who the travellers are and where they
come from. It is perfectly alright that this remains a mystery to both
the PCs and the players.

71
LOST AND FOUND
Recommended reading and viewing: Lost Room (2006), Roadside
Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

To the casual observer reality may seem pretty solid and stable. This
is unfortunately not really the case. Ours is just one of infinitely many
universes that has risen from the abyss of unformed chaos. Worlds
float in and out of each other in non-space, often entirely separate but
sometimes interacting in various ways.
When universes collide, interphase or become entangled with each
other reality breaks down - if only locally and temporarily. Natural
laws change, time and space twist and warp, the logic of cause and
effect become confused.
These events always leave a trace. Items that have been exposed to
such breakdowns can become infected and carry with them a remai-
ning anomaly. The relation between such paranormal properties and
the everyday function of such objects is entirely arbitrary. The forces
of primordial chaos are not bound by mortal concepts of sense or
meaning.

THE PLAYER CHARACTERS

In this scenario the PCs become involved in the search for and trade
with paranormal artefacts. Here are some concepts that could work:
• Antiques dealer
• Collector of rare and valuable objects
• Occultist or student of the paranormal
• A dealer in stolen art and antiques
• Art thief or cat burglar
It is important to have an idea about the PCs motivations. Why is
it importent to the to acquite these artafacts? What do they want to
achive?
The group should also think about whether they want the PCs to
work together as a team, or if they are comfortable with the PCs being
competitors who might come into conflict with one another.

72
73
ARTEFACTS
The GM should prepare a number of artefacts before the start of the
game. The significant factions start out with some, but there should
also be a handfull of lesser players who have one artefact each, as well
as some objects that are lying around and waiting to be discovered.
Roll twice on the table below, once for item and once for property.
Then consider the following questions.
How is the items power activated? Does it affect anyone who
comes into contact with it? Is it activated when the item is used for its
mundane function? Must the object be manipulated in a specific way
– such as rotating or shaking it?
Who is affected? For how long does the effect last? Is it permanent
or does it stop after a short while?
What is the items history? When and where did the event that
created it take place? Did any witnesses survive? Who owns it and
who wants to get hold of it?

D100 Object Property

01-05 Glass eye Teleportation to, 1d10: 1-4. Anywhere within
the line of sight, 5-8. Somewhere the user
has been, 9-10. The place where the item was
created.
06-10 Dentures The ability to hear and send thoughts within
12 m.
11-15 Spectacles The target becomes paralyzed.
16-20 Playing card Anyone who hears the users voice wishes to
comply with their command.
21-25 A die The target or user is thrust 24 hours into the
future.
26-30 Flash light Any two persons touching the object trade
minds with each other.
31-35 Cell phone The user becomes invisible.
36-40 Book The target cannot recall anything from the
last 24 hours.
41-45 Toothbrush Everything within a cone (9 m long, 3 m
wide) ceases to exist until the object is poin-
ted another way.

74
46-50 Hat The temperature within a small point is
doubled every 10 seconds.
51-55 Glove The user can move through up to 3 m of solid
matter.
56-60 Photography The user or target can levitate.
61-65 Pen The user can use telekinesis to lift and mani-
pulate objects of up to 12 kg of mass within
18 m.
66-70 Radio Normality field. Paranormal abilities are can-
celled within a circle with 100 m diameter.
71-75 Coin Anyone touching the object is transported to
a place where nothing else exists (not even
air to breathe). When the item is released
anyone affected returns to where they were.
76-80 Key The user can see and hear all that has occur-
red within 9 m. A Mind check is necessary
to find anything particular in the deluge of
sense impressions. Events that has provo-
ked strong emotions are more distinct. The
further back in time one looks the harder it
becomes to discern anything.
81-85 Necklace The user can project hallucinations visible to
all conscious creatures within eye sight.
86-90 Spoon The user gets a limited precognition. Make a
die roll, save the result and use it at any one
roll later in the game.
91-95 Cup The user can see through illusions and invisi-
bility.
96-00 Gold tooth The user can not be killed by anything less
than the total destruction of his or her body.
Serious wounds stabilize automatically, inju-
ries heal within hours or days.

75
Interference
When anomalous artefacts are gathered at the same location they risk
disturbing the fabric of the universe and can cause paranormal phe-
nomena, or even another local breakdown of reality.
For each artefact placed within thirty meters of another there is 1%
risk of interference (x2 if the objects are in physical contact with each
other). Roll d100 against the level of interference once per week, or
every time an artefact is added to the collection. If the roll is below
the thresshold paranormal phenomena may spontaneously occur.
Switch places on the tens- and ones-digits and find the corresponding
entry in the table below. If the roll was also a matched result the phe-
nomena are powerful and constant. If the result of the roll was equal
to the level of interference local reality temporarily breaks down.
Paranormal phenomena
01-20. An intense feeling of being observed.
21-40. Weird sounds, almost like mumbling voices.
41-60. Strange shapes in the peripheral vision.
61-80. Time distortion. Time spent within the affected area may
pass faster or slower than outside its boundaries.
81-00. Poltergeist. Objects move or are hurled within the area.
Reality breakdown
A local and momentary violation of time, space and natural law.
Any PC present must make a level 10 paranormal stress check. Then
switch places on the tens- and ones-digits and find the corresponding
entry in the table below to find how the PC is affected.
01-20. Seemingly alright. May develop sixth sense or similar ability.
21-40. Total amnesia. Does not remember who they are.
41-60. Reversed chirality. Looks like ones mirror-image. Normal
food stuffs become toxic.
61-80. Turned inside out, compressed to a small sphere, sponta-
neous combustion, or other spectacular demise.
81-00. Snuffed out of existence. No one even remembers them.

76
MOVERS AND SHAKERS
Aside from the PCs there are several other factions searching for arte-
facts. They can be rivales, allies, clients, customers, etc.
Spiro Oswald - A billionaire who owns an IT bussiness catering
to the US defence department. After witnessing a reality breakdown
event he has become obsessed with gaining insight into and power
over paranormal forces. He currenty has two artefacts in his posses-
sion and can mobilize quite significant mundane assets, including a
squad of armed thugs.
Hermetic Temple of Ascension - A cabal of elderly occultists.
Hardcore zealots hellbent on achieving immortality and godlike
power. The order is lead by a married couple, Jeremy and Margareth
Seymore. They have moderate economic funds and control no less
than five artefacts.
Josephine Wu - A paranormal researcher. She does not collect
the items, but catalogues and documents their mundane and pa-
ranormal qualities as well as their origins and ownership.

EVENTS AND INCIDENTS

Here are some story seeds suitable for this kind of scenario.
Break and enter. The PCs receive information about the location
of an interesting artefact, or perhaps they are being hired to acquire
the object.
Retrieving a stolen object. An artefact has been stolen, either
from the PCs or from someone who hires them to find the goods.
Rumours. There is talk about a lost artefact, who used to have it
and where it might have ended up.
The auction. One or several artefacts are being sold and the PCs
have been invited.
The event. A reality breakdown occurs and the PCs must race aga-
inst competitors to get hold of any new artefacts.

77
78
 mysterium
weird fiction roleplaying
Name:
Background and description:

Personality traits:

Body Speed Mind Psyche

Athletics Dodge Conceal Charm
Stealth Drive Education Lying
Struggle Initiative Notice Read person

Brutality Helplessness Isolation Paranormal Self

Failed: Failed: Failed: Failed: Failed:
☐☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐☐
Hardened: Hardened: Hardened: Hardened: Hardened:
☐☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐☐
☐☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐☐
Bond 1: Bond 2:

Mental issues

79
Weapon Capacity Damage

Armor Protection

Wounds

Important persons

Equipment