Saturday, October 31, 2020

Clothing browser spirit (Deadlands: Hell on Earth Classic)

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As I said last month, I have long been dissatisfied with the list of browser spirits offered to junkers by The Junkman Cometh for Deadlands: Hell on Earth (appliance, building, car, computer, gun, and tool).  It seems so incomplete, despite the admirable breadth built into each of the spirits.  This post is the second in my series doubling their number.  The first browser spirit I described was the toy browser, so I give you now the clothing browser.  Look forward to future installments outlining drug, vittles, and sex aids browsers.

While watching old movies with my father as I write this, the brief idea of recording browsers came to mind.  It struck me while the host on TCM was talking about an old Hungarian-American director's mastery of the camera.  Upon further examination, I daresay that filmmakers were interacting with a particular subset of (originally) tool spirits or (eventually) computer spirits.  But I'm open to being convinced that they represent a 12th type of browser spirit, opening up the possibility of, like, a junk zodiac or Iron Oasis Olympians!

Associated Powers:  Armor, miniaturize, mirror, spit & polish, temperature

Empowered by the constancy and intimacy of their relationship with humans, the spirits inhabiting all of the many things we wear can be some of the most devoted browser spirits.  By the time the bombs fell, the antique fabrics like cotton, wool, linen, and silk had retreated into the closets of the wealthy and pretentious, giving way to a bewilderingly wide array of synthetic fabrics, children of crude oil and ghost rock.  Any number of technological innovations were built into these outfits, allowing their wearers to program patterns across the clothing, track their vital signs, fly, float various adornments seemingly unconnected around their body, and more.  They are not the only items to house clothing spirits, however, as jewelry, cosmetics, perfume, PPE, and even suits of armor gave rise to this species of tech spirit.  The ritual garb of many types of clergy and faithful did as well, of course.

Clothing spirits display a sometimes off-putting mix of knowledge about the most intimate details of a person and an absorption in communal identification and functioning.  They can be almost motherly to those they help, and to those those junkers help.  The web of relationships that make up a social ecology drives their every action.

Rumors ride across the Wasted West of a junker Librarian travelling with his husband, a Templar dedicated to Eliot Ness, the Saint of Morality, who builds the two of them the prettiest durn armor you ever did see.  Supposedly, this drag queen has also built suits of clothing with the spirit trap power which contain ghosts and the like, if they can be convinced to don the outfits.  Another legendary junker by the name of Piston Sophia, known to be an initiate of the Chamber, focuses on building prosthetics, mobility aids, and other adaptive technologies to help disabled survivors make their way through the post-apocalyptic landscape.  One of the most elusive rumors about clothing browsers concerns a Catholic priest who became a junker after the Apocalypse; it is said that the aid of his vestments in the form of a clothing browser has opened new magics, blends of his blessed miracles and his junker devices.

White:  The clothing browser alters the junker's appearance to help them in social situations, whether by enhancing the junker's appearance, establishing them as being of a particular socioeconomic class, or emphasizing their position.  This can include the tailoring, style, color palette, and other qualities of their outfit, as well as make-up and the like.  The junker gains a +4 bonus to persuasion, leadership, and overawe rolls for the next hour.  This has the side effect of preventing observers from noticing potentially embarrassing things like nudity.
Red:  The junker chooses a single group, organization, or gender.  Subtle modifications to their adornments utterly convince everyone who sees the junker that they are a member of that group, organization, or gender for the next hour.
Blue:  Confidence in the strength of their unique identity floods the junker's mind, leaving no room for doubt or fear.  Others looking upon them find hope that they, too, can take the strength needed to do the same.  Immediately end any negative or damaging effect affecting the junker or one person who can see them, as long as the effect is purely mental or social in nature.  If the effect is somehow constant, consider it paused for four rounds.  Using this power on a Harrowed gives the Harrowed immediate control, reducing the joker's Dominion to 0 and forcing it to lose any time left in its control.  The Harrowed can gain no other effect from this power.
Legend:  The junker can make use of the coup power of any abomination they either have encountered for 1d4 hours (rolled by the GM secretly).  They can do the same to make use of the coup power of an individual abomination of which they are aware and with which they are engaged.  Everyone knows Mojave rattlers exist as a species, so unless the junker is currently fighting or maneuvering around a Mojave rattler, that's not enough for this ability.  In this latter case, the junker can use the coup powers for slightly longer; roll 1d6 instead of 1d4.  Spending a legend chip does not reveal what the power is, it simply gives access to it to the junker.  Of course, the junker is likely to have an idea, since they know what abomination they're invoking.  If the junker already has access to the coup power of the abomination they're trying to invoke, its effects are doubled (if possible).


Queer Spirits:  Costumes and drag of various types blur the line between clothing and toy spirits, while various types of gender-affirming wearable devices such as pack-and-play packers for transmasculine people link clothing and sex aid spirits.  Edible lingerie, of course, is more of a clothing-and-food-spirits kind of thing, as are certain trends in sustainable clothing that were popular at times before the Fall (descendants of the 60s paper-clothing trend).  Clothing and tool spirits combine in prosthetics, the complicated headgear of magnifying lenses worn by anyone who does very fine work, and things of that nature.  Of course very similar devices end up mixing gun and clothing spirits; spy movies popular before the Fall featured many inspirations for these.  Mad scientists have been queering car and clothing spirits almost since the Reckoning with devices like jet packs, rocket skates, SCUBA gear, and astronauts' EVA suits.  Anyone who has seen a medical disaster movie has seen objects that serve as the home of appliance spirits, clothing spirits, or spirits that partake of the nature of both ~ they're what the doctors wear when they go into hot zones.  On occasion, their patients (or just disabled people of certain types) wear the auto-injectors and medical systems that allow clothing and drug spirits to mix.  Parkas, stillsuits, and other such environmentally adaptive clothing are the shared domain of clothing and building spirits.

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