Maple Shade Witch Lore Research

Witch Lore (Main Topic)

Skill: Occult
This Topic opens up the basics about witches, across multiple cultures.

Witch Lore, Basic

Obscurity: Occult 0 (General Knowledge Test applies)
Progress: 3 successes • 0 rolls

• 1 successes: Awareness of pop culture witches and their representations.
• 3 successes: Anthropological studies that suggest witches were either a scapegoat title to justify persecution of "inappropriate" women, or remnants of pre-Christian religious sects. Includes awareness of some groups of so-called Satanic witches, as well as "neo-pagan" witch groups active in Europe and parts of the United States.

Obscurity •

Hag-Ridden

Obscurity: Occult 1
Lore concerning the folklore of witches who fly by night and drink the breath of victims.
Progress: 21 successes • 5 rolls • Completed

• 2 successes: Some old tales of witches who enter the bedrooms and kneel on the chests of sleepers, causing them to wake but remain paralyzed while the witches drink their breath are generally understood to be superstitious descriptions of perfectly natural hypnogogic states.
  • Hypnogogic States (•, Medicine)
• 5 successes: Some occultists do claim that there is an esoteric cause for this, however, possibly related to ephemera of some kind.
  • Spirit Lore (0)
• 8 successes: The truth is that some practitioners of witchcraft may find themselves needing more spiritual power for their acts of sorcery. These witches find a way to master a skill, wherein the spirit is sent forth from the body in the form of a terrifying bloody hag and moves about as ephemera. In this form, these witches can drink the living essence of victims, consuming it to gain magical power. Those who are so fed upon wake listless and half-awake, and often remains so for days.
  • There are signs that someone in a household has been fed upon from a hag. In particular, foodstuffs symbolic of life – eggs, fresh milk – spoil preternaturally, leaving a black and red mucous-y filth behind.
• 10 successes: If these witches feed from a victim too heavily, the lack of breath can carry over into the person's health for days afterwards. Sometimes, people die from it. These symptoms manifest themselves as pneumonia. They say that these witches tear away and wear the skin of their victims to pretend to be them.
• 13 successes: This isn't simply a skill a witch learns–those who explore this power are turned into fully supernatural entities, known by a variety of names in different cultures, all with "hag" as a connotation in it. Not only do they eventually need stolen breath to work sorcery, but they eventually come to need it to live.
• 16 successes: These hags are vulnerable to rowan, which acts as a bane, and hag-stones can protect from their powers. They also cannot help but look at their own strange reflections in glass and crystal balls, often such that they become too distracted to feed in rooms protected by them.
  • Spirit Lore: Bans & Banes (•)
• 18 successes: The transformation these witches undergo is not simply spiritual. The wretched bloody hag body they show as spirits are their natural forms. They can pretend to be human for years on end, but can transform into these monstrous bodies to work mischief and murder. In these forms, their powers are heightened, and their ability to feed on breath does not rely on a victim being asleep.
• 21 successes: The rumors of a hag wearing someone's skin are true, in a way. If a hag kills a sleeper by drinking their breath, the witch's spirit form can then possess the now-empty shell of that corpse, getting up and walking around as that person. This is a form of possession.
  • Spirit Lore: Manifestations (•)

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