The Path of the Graveborn

• Lord of the Flies

  Level 1

  From the moment of death, vermin are attracted to a corpse. By expelling necromantic energies from your body, you beckon a thick black swarm of blowflies. These are quickly followed by flesh flies, dung beetles, and moths that surround you in a thick cloud of carrion insects hungry for dead flesh.

  Spend 1 point of Blood and a simple action to summon a swarm of carrion insects that envelop you until the end of the next turn, obscuring you from your enemies and making it impossible for you to be targeted by a Firearms, Throwing Attacks, or power that requires Gaze and Focus. However, you may make ranged attacks and use Gaze and Focus powers normally. You may choose which types of insects you summon; practitioners with Egyptian ties are known to favor scarabs while South American practitioners often employ bot flies. When this power expires, the insects withdraw inside you and are consumed, healing you for 1 point of normal damage.

• Death's Scythe

  Level 2

  The iconography of Death carrying a scythe is derived from the Greek god Chronos and Cronus, a lesser god of the harvest who carried a sickle used to cut grain. In mythology, Chronos eating his children was an allegory for time devouring all things. The scythe becomes an image that reminds us that death reaps the souls of the living like a farmer who harvests crops from the field. Manifesting your power over death, you call forth terrible necromantic energies and shape them into the visage of Death’s most terrifying weapon.

  Spend a Blood and a simple action to summon an ethereal scythe bathed in a cold blue flame. If you have access to it, you may use the Quick Draw combat maneuver to quickly produce the weapon instead of spending a simple action, but you must pay the cost to activate the maneuver. This weapon is an extension of your necromantic powers and cannot be given to another character nor enhanced by other powers such as Quietus. You may make a successful Melee attack with the weapon it does 1 point of aggravated damage. The weapon possesses the traits Deadly and Brutal. The scythe functions with any Potence powers you have.

  Once created, this weapon cannot be broken even with elder levels of potence, nor removed from your hands with the Disarm combat maneuver, nor can it be handed to another character, picked up or used by anyone else. Once conjured, the scythe remains material for 1 hour.

• Reaper's Due

  Level 3

  Archetypal concepts of death and money are often intertwined, with deities such as Hades and Baron Samedi having jurisdiction over wealth in addition to the afterlife. To these figures, the souls of the departed are theirs to claim, pledged either through willful agreement or ancient laws. By leveraging these debts, you exert power over those who drift closer to death, assailing them with necrotic energies.

  Spend a simple action to visibly point to your target as you make her mortality the subject of your attention. Thereafter, whenever she spends or loses a point of Willpower in your presence you gain a +1 wild card bonus in offensive challenges against her for each point of Willpower she has spent or lost over the next 10 minutes, up to a maximum of 5 points. In addition, she retains your Gaze and Focus throughout this period of time.

  You may only have one designated target at a time. If you choose an additional target, any effects against your previous target fade and the count of how many times she spent Willpower in your presence resets.

• Corpulent Discharge

  Level 4

  There are five stages to the process of decomposition. The second stage, bloat, causes a corpse to fill with an accumulation of gases as the body continues to decay. By wielding dominion over death, you fill your body with necrotic gases causing you to bloat and swell. When struck by enemies, the wounds burst releasing the draining energies of decay in a disgusting eruption of foul-smelling air and ectoplasmic carnage.

  Spend 1 Blood and a simple action to assume a bloated and decaying form, imbuing your innards with a pustulant mixture of blood and ash. Anyone within 2 steps of you who succeeds in a Brawl or Melee attack against you takes 2 points of normal damage as pus and gore sprays out of the resultant wound, showering them in viscera. The necrotic magics present in this secretion prevent the target from benefiting from supernatural concealment, such as Unseen Presence, until they have removed the viscera. Victims may spend a standard action hastily wiping off the ectoplasm to relieve themselves of its negative effects.

  In addition, you may imbue a number of nearby zombies equal to your dots in the Occult skill that you control with a lesser effect that causes them to explode when they have lost all health levels. An exploding Zombie dealings 2 normal damage to all characters within 2 steps. This utterly destroys the zombie’s form, leaving rotted parts and scattered gore throughout the immediate area. Both you and any zombies you control are immune to the damage from this explosion. Treat any exploding zombies as individual sources of damage, such as when triggered by a bomb explosion or Firestorm.

  Corpulent Discharge lasts for 15 minutes. You may only have a single application of this power active at a given time. This power counts as a minor transformation.

• Death Perfected

  Level 5

  To live as a vampire is to deny one’s mortality, holding onto life by drinking the blood of the living. By wrapping yourself in energies from the Shadowlands, you transcend the vampiric state and fully embrace the inevitability of death and the power it brings. To confront you is to oppose mortality itself, a terrifying ordeal even for the so-called Undead. This transformation is a dramatic one as you emerge as an unrelenting force of entropy that is devoid of life.

  Spend 1 Blood and a simple action to channel necromantic energies throughout your body, flooding you with the power of entropy and transforming you into an unmistakable yet undeniably powerful figure of perfect death.

  In this form, the finality and single-mindedness of death drives your actions and purpose making you much harder to control or influence. You may substitute your Physical attribute for your Mental or Social attribute when defending against Mental or Social challenges. You also have the ability to stoke the necrotic energies to restore your form. Whenever you spend a point of Willpower to retest a challenge, you may immediately heal up to 3 health levels, normal or aggravated. This ability does not require an action to activate and can be activated during Celerity rounds and outside of your turn in the initiative order. You must spend Willpower to gain this benefit; abilities that allow you to forego the actual spending of Willpower such as Clear Sighted or Iron Will cannot be used in conjunction with this ability.