A newb question...
I'm toying with the idea of a Huckster posing as an evangelical preacher creating a Harrowed. Is that possible or too far off the scope of what a Huckster can accomplish?
Posted Jun 28, 2022, 2:50 PM UTC
88
Morality is somewhat more present in Deadlands than it is in other games. You can be a hero or you can be an anti-hero, but outright villainy is NPC territory, especially if you’re dabbling in the monstrous side of things. That’s not to say that you can’t make a character who wants to create a Harrowed for their own somewhat-grey reasons, but actively helping the dark forces of this world will eventually get your character taken away from you.
So the question is: why does your character want to create a Harrowed? And how far are they willing to go to do it?
4
It's more of an NPC wishing to create this Harrowed being to maintain his flock under a vigilance of fear...and to hopefully return said Manitou back from whence it came. Barring any (and most expectedly) interference from the main party.
2
Ah, okay. Using an NPC instead of a PC opens things up a bit.
I could see your character working out. Summoning and binding manitou to a task is very on theme for hucksters. It would definitely not be something that is likely included in Hoyle’s book, but Hoyle learned his magic from someone else and there are undoubtedly other schools of magic that could be grafted into his. I would think that the act of summoning and binding the manitou would be classic Hoyle, and then the “spell” would be a custom job that sets the binding task as inhabiting a particular human (which the manitou can already do), performing a certain action, and then leaving the human and returning to the Hunting Grounds.
The person doing this would have to be a very skilled magician, definitely possessing a very good copy of Hoyle’s book and being an expert in its techniques. You could play fast and loose with what else gets incorporated. Voodoo has a tradition of letting humans be possessed by spirits and binding humans to tasks, and voodoo is definitely present in Deadlands already, so that might be a good option, but if you want other options you could use Golden Dawn magic or just make something up related to necromancy. I think the ritual would involve a standard huckster ritual to summon and bind the manitou, a cleansing ritual on the person to be possessed that might be noticeable before the ritual occurs, and some extra elements to bridge the gaps between the traditional Hoyle methods and whatever else is getting worked in. The whole process would likely be fragile and have a lot of failure points, both because it involves combining magical techniques that weren’t designed to work together and because huckster magic has a “fly by the seat of your pants” kind of vibe in general, and one obvious failure could be that the manitou simply doesn’t leave the body once they are done, maybe even pretending that they did so as to maintain the deception.
Edit: also, the Reckoners have their own school of magic specifically for evil people, which could theoretically accomplish anything that spreads fear and furthers the Reckoner’s goals. You pair that with huckster magic as well
2
I went back and looked at the Hell on Earth: Classic book "Cyborgs", since it goes into intentionally creatinging a Harrowed, it really comes down to one big thing:
The deceased soul will have a lingering connection with their body for up to 24 hours. Whatever your means (Huckster magic, Mad Science, etc) of doing so, you need have the Manitou bind itself to the deader in that timeframe, or you will just have is a corpse.
However, that doesn't mean you need to summon the Manitou in that 24 hour window. Spirit fetters as used on cyborgs are basically a storage unit for a manitou (that also can draw power from the manitou), and those were developed from a number of things from the Weird West era, so its perfectly reasonable that a Mad Scientist could develop a way to trap and store a Manitou, likewise a Huckster conceivably could as well.
2
In my opinion a huckster couldn't really create a harrowed, but he could partner with one.
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In Classic, there was a hex that could (maybe) create Harrowed. Depending on the hand, you would draw so many cards. If a Joker appeared, they'd come back Harrowed. Then, if you didn't draw a Joker, you'd draw that many cards again. If a Joker showed up the second time around, they'd be back as a regular Walking Dead.
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Well, the idea within the story is that the huckster creates the Harrowed, so I suppose the cardwork would be irrelevant because he's am NPC. My main question to the idea was if it could actually be carried off by the huckster? Meaning, I don't care HOW....but CAN he do it?
3
Not entirely out of the realm of possibility. There are ways of creating Harrowed, the creation process of cyborgs first and foremost.
That said, there are a LOT of risks involved. A big one, that is delved into in the Cyborg book, is you bring someone back Harrowed and their Manitous is in full dominion, kills the person who brought it back and goes on a rampage (or is more subtle about it, depends on the Manitou).
The second risk, trying to do this via Huckster magic, is the Manitous tricking the huckster about what the spell did or did not do, alongside the normal risks of Huckster magic.