Written by Greg Stolze, © 2013

The Evil Eye (Cruelty)

Sometimes, you just want to put a hex on somebody, preferably from a distance and undetectably.  That’s a job for the Evil Eye.  It has roughly the range of a pistol and when you glare at your foe and mutter something glottal under your breath… nothing happens.

That’s the beauty of the Evil Eye.  Nothing happens.

If that beauty is a little subtle for your tastes, consider that the Evil Eye hangs around.  Your accurséd victim tries to charm the pants off the UPS guy and nothing happens.  She bucks for that promotion at work and nothing happens.  She tries to get a search warrant for your lair, to no avail, and then she tries to shoot you and just misses.

The Evil Eye is not infallible, it can’t stop everyone from doing everything, but it can slow down just about anybody.  Here’s how it works.

Make your Cunning Cruelty roll and, if you get a set, the target labors under the shackles of misfortune.  Specifically, he takes a –1d penalty on every dice pool and, worse, if he has access to a Master Die somehow, that’s the die that gets removed. 

The curse lasts for a number of scenes equal the Width+Height of your roll.  You can curse someone more than once, but it doesn’t deepen the penalty, it just resets the duration.  If you rolled really well with the first curse (say, Width 2 and Height 10 for 12 scenes of impediment), a second curse might actually shorten the duration (if it was Width 2 and Height 3, say). 

GMs, be sure to have lots of pesky unrolled hassles fall upon the cursed also. Stuff like bank errors, car trouble, an embarrassing case of ringworm…  GMCs who get the curse should suffer these quotidian dismays as well as more serious setbacks for which you didn’t necessarily roll.  Anything you can do to make sure the villainous PC knows the curse seems to be working is good too.

Written by Greg Stolze, © 2013