Vittles browser spirit (Deadlands: Hell on Earth Classic)

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This post continues my additions to the browser spirits listed in The Junkman Cometh for Deadlands: Hell on Earth, introducing vittles browsers, the spirits of industrialized food.  I've become rather enamored of the idea of Junkyard spawning junker-focused tiny-ass new religious movements with the browsers in the place of various groupings, such as the Tephrists (Hellenists who see the browsers as a new Olympian pantheon), junker astrologists (recasting the constellations as the browsers), or the Junker Church of Jesus Christ of Saints After the End (Jesus Christ as the only junker to have attracted all of the types of browser spirits, until one betrayed him).  Only problem is, I'm only up to 11 browser spirits so far!  Waah!  Do you have an idea for a 12th?

Associated Powers:  Healing, Life Support, Temperature

Vittles spirits are probably the least known of all the tech spirits.  For one thing, a lot of junkers look in the wrong place.  Not everything edible has a vittles spirit. These spirits do not inhabit food harvested from living beings and shaped directly by human hands into a meal, any more than a hand-crafted bow holds a gun spirit within; an appliance spirit must be consulted if a junker wishes to engage with such things.  Twinkies, famously, have been delivered from the usual cycle of rot and decomposition, eternal life gifted by the factory's automated chefs and genetically engineered ingredients, while other foods are built by other robots from petrochemicals.  These are the homes of vittles spirits, and even then they often find their purpose discharged, their life ended between violent teeth.

Vittles browsers nurture and sustain people.  Unlike appliance browsers, they don't overly much care whether those people's lives are comfortable or pleasant, simply that it is long.  Some might find this strange, considering the reputation industrialized food has for damaging its eaters' health.  Indeed, rumors persist that some vittles spirits have turned to maleficent ends, whether by being damaged goods, interacting with a few too many Tainted junkers, or the machinations of Famine itself.  However, it should be remembered that many vittles spirits were born of the desire for ethical cuisine, such as meat that had never been part of an animal, or health concerns, accounting for olives genetically engineered to be lower in fat or Wonderbread's revitalization as a carrier for vitamins in World War II.

White:  By spending a white chip while creating a device, the junker can replace all of the necessary components for the powers in the device with chemical components, resulting in an edible device.  This is an all or nothin' deal, no partial trades!  For example, a tiny little AT-AT walker built with the locomotion power would normally require 1 chemical component, 1 electronic, 3 mechanical, and 2 structural; a junker with a vittles browser could build the same thing out of French fries and a mango for 7 chemical components.  Since many chemical components are liquids (and a few gases), this can occasionally result in some strange-looking devices!
Red:  Any substance which could be used as a chemical component can be made edible with a vittles browser's help.  By spending a red chip, one chemical component can be consumed by the junker or one of their friends to fulfill that person's need for food or water that day, but not both.  Nothing says you can't just spend another red chip to live on a diet of paint thinner and Silly Putty for a day!
Blue:  By infusing something edible with their power, the vittles spirit can help someone who eats that thing push beyond their usual limits.  That person gains an amount of Wind equal to the sum of their Spirit and Vigor die types.  Until their Wind drops below their usual maximum Wind, they cannot regain Wind by any means (they don't need to, after all!).  Unless you pitch in a white chip, too, any dangers present in the eaten substance such as rot, disease, poison, or radiation are still present and affect the eater.
Legend:  The vittles spirit can, with a major effort, kickstart the derailed food cycle.  An area of apocalypse-ravaged land no larger than 50 feet on a side becomes permanently arable and fertile.  Moreover, the influx of energy needed to accomplish this supercharges the land's fertility, producing twice as much food in its first harvest than it normally would.  Later harvests will produce a more typical amount of crops.  It's not just plants, either, as food animals kept in the affected area find themselves benefiting from the magic as well.

Empty Calories: Powers for Less Savory Junkers
White:  By spending a white chip while creating a device, the junker can replace all of the necessary components for the powers in the device with chemical components, resulting in an edible device.  This is an all or nothin' deal, no partial trades!  For example, a tiny little AT-AT walker built with the locomotion power would normally require 1 chemical component, 1 electronic, 3 mechanical, and 2 structural; a junker with a vittles browser could build the same thing out of French fries and a mango for 7 chemical components.  Since many chemical components are liquids (and a few gases), this can occasionally result in some strange-looking devices!
Red:  An amount of food suitable to feed five people loses all nutritional value.  It can be eaten, and will fill the stomach, but does nothing to prevent starvation or dehydration.  Extra chips can be spent in the same way as for the standard red chip power.
Blue:  This power wracks someone with all the ravages of starvation.  Just immediately do 2d4 Wind damage to them and give them the mean as a rattler hindrance until they have eaten a large meal to get rid of that hangry feelin'.
Legend:  When used while producing food, the corrupted vittles browser makes whatever is being produced incredibly addictive.  Anyone who consumes the food will immediately gain a 3-point hankerin' for the browser's junker friend's food.  Though the hankerin' is for anything the junker makes, the new addict will be particularly desirous of the specific food cooked with the legend chip.

Queer Spirits:  The line between vittles spirits and drug spirits is famously unclear, with 5-hour energy shots, garlic pills, and artificial sweeteners straddling it.  Beyond this strong connection, however, queer vittles spirits can be the rarest of the rare.  Edible lingerie stands at the intersection of clothing, vittles, and sex aid spirits, while many forms of candy engage their consumers in more kinesthetic ways that blend traits of vittles and toys.  Biodiesel, made from human food into food for cars, holds the most powerful hybrids of vittles and car spirits, though all fuels can be seen as such, honestly.  Goat milk is a foodstuff, and cabling is a tool; animals exist which were developed to produce something which is both.  Efforts to design buildings with ecological sustainability in mind led to the use of constructed ecosystems for temperature regulation, water reclamation, maintenance of air quality, and the like.  Food from the plants therein can queer the line between vittles and appliance spirits.  From time to time before the bombs fell and the Reckoners scoured the earth, corporations and wealthy folk would find some way to build life-size gingerbread houses and the like; what few still stand might be vittles/buildings spirits.  DNA computers verged on revolutionizing the information technology just before the War, and some of these computers were edible, if unappetizing and gooey.  And, finally, of course, there is the classic case of corporations selling shitty food to the poor, knowing that it will kill them but knowing that they have little financial choice.  The spirits of these are vittles or gun spirits, depending on the angle with which one looks at them.

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.

Toy browser spirit (Deadlands: Hell on Earth Classic)

The Junkman Cometh is one of my most beloved books in the Wasted West line.  Which is kind of odd, frankly; toxic spiritworkers and Doomsayers tend to be more my style in a lot of ways.  Something about post-apocalyptic kitbashes of scrounged junk that shouldn't be able to do the things they do just lightens this little anti-civ eco-anarchist's moldy heart.

The idea, of course, is that junkers use traditional spiritworking methods to interact with the tech spirits.  Everything has a spirit, but the less involved people are with the production of the object, the less it resembles what it might have been had humans not involved themselves, the more its spirit changes.  Eventually, these changes build up to enough of a difference that the object's spirit can no longer be called a nature spirit.  It just doesn't play by their rules or have their relationship with the world, divorced from its components' original contexts.  These are the spirits the junkers talk to and negotiate with and convince to make their devices do things.

The Junkman Cometh, the splatbook for junkers, introduces the idea of browser spirits.  Tech spirits who have braved many battles with the fear spirits that serve the Four Reckoners, the gremlin spirits that sneak into devices, and the nature spirits grow more and more powerful by absorbing these opponents.  Once they get large enough, they can serve as mentors and familiars to junkers who are particularly good at what they do.  

Five types of these browser spirits are described in the book:  appliance, building, car, computer, and gun.  While these seem particularly appropriate for the wandering and adventuring survivors of the ghost-rock apocalypse, they don't seem to cover all the possible types of tech spirits out there.  This, then, is the first post of mine trying to rectify that by introducing five more types of browsers (and, thus, of tech spirits):  clothing, drug, sex aids, toy, and vittles (industrialized food).

Associated Powers:  Agility, brains, finish, jerry-rig, miniaturize

Almost as powerful as car spirits, the spirits of the toys given to and enjoyed by children (of all ages!) have long enjoyed the caring devotion of their organic friends.  Anything which might have been given to another for their amusement and laughter had one of these spirits inhabiting it, from teddy bears to the two-inch plastic dinosaur the 5-year-old carries everywhere to complicated robot amusements that moved and lit up and made sounds.  Sports equipment, as well, provided them a home.  

Toy spirits often seem unintelligent, as they often know naught else but silliness.  Junkers with particular kinds of hearts can see that this silliness is often the best way to communicate some essential bit of wisdom from the spirit world.  It's certainly the most fun.  Every toy spirit pursues their goal, to lighten the day with smiles and giggles, with a dedicated and obsessive focus seen in few other beings.  This often results in toy spirits and the junkers who have befriended them seeming limited or overly self-contained in scope, even more so than most junkers.  Tainted junkers can never have a toy browser; they're just no fun.

The past 13 years since the g-bombs fell have seen another element of their work grow to prominence.  So many people in the Wasted West are lonely.

White:  The junker gains a +4 bonus to all tale-tellin' and ridicule rolls for an hour.
Red:  Friends of the toy spirits live a charmed life.  Reduce a single roll on the Backlash table by -4.
Blue:  If the junker succeeds on a Hard (9) leadership roll, they can allow a Tainted junker to act as if they had one level less of the Taint for 1d20 minutes.  The TN of this roll is increased by +2 for each of the following Hindrances possessed by the junker: mean as a rattler, bloodthirsty, and vengeful.
Legend:  With great exertion, the browser can flood an area no larger than 25' on a side with its joyful essence, lowering the Fear Level of that area by 1 for 1d4 hours.

Queer Spirits:  Categories are useful bullshit, and the edge cases are the most fun.  Toy spirits (and other kinds of tech spirits) can occasionally resemble or shade into other kinds of tech spirits.  For example, drones and other types of RC gizmos can be inhabited by toy spirits, car spirits, or spirits that are kind of both.  Robots can lend themselves to a similar situation involving computer spirits and toy spirits, as can things like video game systems,  Building spirits find themselves merging with toy spirits in engineering kits, the flashy sort of Legos marketed to parents who want their kids to go into STEM when they're older; bits of those kits might instead resemble a cross between tool and toy spirits.  EZ-Bake ovens and the like hold within them spirits that resemble both toy spirits and appliance spirits, while clothing and toy spirits intermingle in costumes and clothes intended for dress-up games.  It can be hard to find the queer mixture of toy spirits and vittles or drug spirits, but candy (and the sort of medicines designed to mimic candy) is the best place to look.  I don't think I need to mention that sex aid and toy spirits blend and intermingle both easily and often.