The Bone Path is concerned primarily with corpses and the methods by which dead souls can be restored to the living world — temporarily or otherwise.
• Tremens
Tremens allows a necromancer to make the flesh of a corpse shift once. An arm might suddenly flop forward, a cadaver might sit up, or dead eyes might abruptly
open. This sort of thing tends to have an impressive impact on people who aren’t expecting a departed relative to roll over in his coffin. Depending on the number of success you are able to issue specific commands under which the body next animates ("When I enter the room, i want the body to open its eyes.") Under no circumstances can Tremens be used to make a dead body attack or cause damage.
The necromancer can spend 1point of Willpower per corpse to permanently animate them. They are still affected by the ravage of time however and can be destroyed as normal. Once their initial task is competed however, they will stand still and wait for new instructions.
Zombie Stats:
Strength 2, Dexterity 2, Stamina 4
Brawl 2
They always act last no matter what.
They always have 0 Willower to spend, but resist attacks as if they had a score of 10.
Zombies have 10 health boxes and treat damage as if undead, but unable to heal any of it.
Immune to powers such as Dominate or Presence.
Once created the control of the original Necromancer can only be usurped by special rituals.
••• Shambling Hordes
Shambling Hordes creates obvious results: reanimated corpses with the ability to attack, albeit neither very well nor very quickly. Once primed by this power, the
corpses wait — for years, if necessary — to fulfill the command given them. The orders might be to protect a certain site or simply to attack immediately, but they
will be carried out until every last one of the decomposing monsters is destroyed.
Cost: 1 Willpower + 1 blood point per corpse raised.
The player rolls and can create 1 Zombie for every success attained by the roll. He can chose not spend blood and the leftover successes are simply lost. Zombies created by Shambling Hordes will wait forever if need be to fulfill their functions. Long after the flesh has rotted off their mystically animated bones, the zombies will wait and wait and wait, still able to perform their duties.
•••• Soul Stealing
This power affects the living, not the dead. It does, however, temporarily turn a living soul into a sort of wraith, as it allows a necromancer to strip a soul from a living body. A mortal exiled from his body by this power becomes a wraith with a single tie to the real world: his now-empty body.
Cost: 1 Willpower
Dice Pool: Resolve + Occult + Necromancy – Victims Willpower
Successes indicate the number of hours during which the original soul is forced out of its housing. The body itself remains autonomically alive but catatonic. This power can be used to create suitable hosts for Daemonic Possession. It has no effect on Kindred or other supernatural creatures (except ghouls) until such creatures are dead – in the case of vampires, this means Final Death.
If the vampires choses to spend a permanent Willpower, he can force a soul out of a mortal body indefinatly.
••••• Daemonic Possession
Daemonic Possession lets a vampire insert a soul into a freshly dead body. This does not turn the reanimated corpse into anything other than a reanimated corpse,
one that will irrevocably decay after a week, but it does give either a wraith or a free-floating soul (say, that of a vampire using Psychic Projection) a temporary home
in the physical world.
The body in question must be no more than 30 minutes dead, and the new tenant must agree to inhabit it — a ghost or astral form cannot be forced into a
new shell. However, most ghosts would gladly seize the opportunity. Should the vampire, for whatever reason, wish to insert a soul into another vampire’s corpse (before it crumbles to ash), the necromancer must achieve five successes on a resisted Willpower roll against the original owner of the body. Otherwise, the interloper is denied entrance.
Note: The soul can use whatever physical abilities (Athletics, Brawl, Potence) his new fleshy home possesses, and whatever mental abilities (Computer, Law,
Presence) he already possessed. He cannot use the physical abilities of his old form, or the mental abilities of his new one.
The number of corpses animated is equal to the number of successes achieved. The necromancer must then state the task to which he is setting his zombies. The cadavers turn themselves to their work until they finish the job (at which point they collapse) or something (including time) destroys them. Corpses animated in this way have no initiative of their own, and are unable to make value judgments. They respond to very literal instruction. Thus, a zombie could be told “sweep this room every day until all the dust and cobwebs are gone” or “transcribe this manuscript” with an expectation of reasonable results, while a more open-ended command such as “fix this motorcycle” or “research this Necromantic ritual and write down the results” would be doomed to failure. Bodies energized by this power continue to decay, albeit at a much slower rate than normal.
With Apprentice’s Brooms, the necromancer can make a dead body rise and perform a simple function. For example, the corpse could be set to carrying heavy
objects, digging, or just shambling from place to place. The cadavers thus animated do not attack or defend themselves if interfered with, but instead attempt to
carry out their given instructions until such time as they’ve been rendered inanimate. Generally it takes dismemberment, flame, or something similar to destroy a corpse animated in this way.
•• Apprentice’s Brooms