Page 202 - Hunter - The Vigil

D
RELIC R&D
&
enlightening. Sometimes, an Ascending One consumes a The Artifact Trade
substance that rocks her soul right off its foundations. While Dealers who do occasional business with the Aegis Kai
only the most perverse or adventurous will actually enjoy the Doru look for the oldest, strangest objects they can find...or

experience, the skewed perspective’s really something, and it do their best to manufacture reasonable forgeries. Aegis cells
can go a long way toward understanding how drugs and poi- and libraries have quite a backlog of acquisitions, and even
sons course through the body and can hopefully be shaped by most genuine artifacts don’t possess any unusual abilities. Un-
one’s will and faith. der those conditions, fakes can pass undetected forever. How-
R&D: A significant drug trip or poisoning experience

can lead to enlightenment. Assume that for every dot in the ever, truly lucrative Relic trading comes from having a product
you can demonstrate, or at least point to alleged demonstra-
Elixir, the hunter must suffer for two hours of drug trip or must tions of. The Antikythera Warhead has never been activated,
take two points of damage from the poison. If he seeks to cre- nor has the Hauser Clock, but certain natural disasters cor-
ate a three-dot Elixir, a six-hour heroin “adventure” (called relate with their provenance. For the dealer, provenance is
“chasing the dragon”) will do the trick, as well 3 damage from money. Being able to deliver a historied, demonstrated Relic
poison taken in tandem with a three-hour acid trip. This re- is worth so much it’s not even worth counting in cash...pro-
duces the total Practical Experience expenditure by two.
vided whomever you took it from isn’t waiting outside. For
Relic R&D the Shield and Spear, Relics are next to useless without a lot
of information about where they came from. Like the Luci-
You can’t create a new Relic, or if you can, the Aegis fuge, they’re willing to lay out a lot of money to acquire them

Kai Doru hasn’t figured out how. What it can do, however, is on principle, and so that no one else does, but nothing beats
find hidden Relics, or draw new power from discovered (and hard, historical data.

potentially inert) ones. That might mean following the writ- R&D: If the hunter has Academics or Occult at three
ings of some heretic cenobite or piecing together the esoteric dots as well as three dots of Resources, he can attempt to fi nd

scraps of a shredded map to find an as-yet-unfound Relic. It what he’s looking for from reputable gray- or black-market an-
might mean taking a sigil-carved Viking Age torc and trying tiquarians. That’s not to say the cost will always be so plainly
to research its history or somehow “provoke” it into a reac- in cash, but most deal that way. Approaching a new Relic in
tion (pouring blood over it, whispering entreaties to whatever this fashion earns the hunter a -1 discount to the Endowment
might be trapped within, even attempting to harm it). Equation.

201
201