Qlippothic Spheres

By Anders Sandberg (nv91-asa@nada.kth.se)

Introduction

Qlippothic magick deals with the dark sides of the spheres, or rather the forces normal mages do their best to avoid. They are notoriously vulgar and dangerous, but at the same time quite powerful. A Qlippothic mage can use all normal spheric magick (although with a definite qlippothic slant) but also other effects, normally not possible in more balanced paradigms. The Nephandi are the most well known Qlippothic mages, but there are other mages who have been drawn to the unbalanced by madness, lust for power or curiosity. However, once you start to use qlippothic magick, it becomes hard to stop.

Correspondence

Unlike in the traditional paradigm, Nephandi do not see everything as a part of an indivisible unity. Everything can be taken apart, even the Correspondence Point. This makes Qlippothic Correspondence dangerous, both for its users and its victims.

* Detect Warping: The Mage can notice errors and illusions of space or perspective. These weak points of space exist everywhere, and connect all places through secret links beneath reality.

** Watch through the Cracks of Reality: The mage can look through the weak points of space into other places.

*** Move through the Cracks: The mage has the power to slip through the weak points and emerge elsewhere. However, he has to be very careful to hold himself together, so that the different parts of him do not break apart. He can also send out his mind through the cracks, to find something anywhere in the world... or beneath.

**** Take Others through the Cracks: At higher levels the mage can move other objects through space, as a whole or take them apart. He can also create new cracks, and patch them together (this creates creases and strange overlaps in space).

***** Warp Space: The Mage is now able to take apart and rearrange space itself, even changing the number of dimensions. Such rearrangements tend to be rather unstable and very destructive for anything caught in them.

Entropy

This is dealt with in the Book of Madness.

Forces

Qlippothic magic does not deal with the balanced flows of energy the Traditions and Technocracy uses. Instead it creates and controls unbalanced, destructive forces or the lack of energy. The forces a qlippothic mage wield are usually violent or somehow corrupting (electricity is filled with spikes, gravity tugs in different ways at once).

* Detect Potentials: The mage can detect potentials where energies attract or repel each other. At such points the slightest change could break the equilibrium and cause disruption.

** Disrupt Lesser Forces: Normally ordered forces such as light or electricity can be disrupted, losing their usability and becoming irritating or destructive. Electronic devices break down or are destroyed, light becomes gritty and strangely unable to help perceptions.

*** Destroy Lesser Forces: The mage can not only create forces, he can also destroy them. Light can be turned into darkness, electricity drained and sound dampened.

**** Disrupt Greater Forces: Now the mage can make any force begin to counteract itself. Tidal forces can rip apart objects, heat concentrate itself and moving vehicles start to tumble chaotically.

***** Destroy Greater Forces: The mage can now remove gravity or drain heat. In principle he can remove all forces from something, making it dissolve into dead matter.

Life

Unlike normal life, Qlippothic life cannot sustain itself. It needs something to feed on, be it the quintessence flow the mage invokes or other kinds of life. Any life affected by Qlippothic magick becomes slightly parasitic; the cells feed of their neighbors, plants suck out all the nourishment in the soil and animals are filled with a raging hunger to sate the unlife within them. Without a constant supply of external energy it will die (although Qlippothic life has a nasty tendency to take a long time to die completely).

* Detect Disease: The mage is able to find all weak points, potential diseases and wounds within another living being.

** Warp Simple Life: The mage can warp simple life, like blighting plants or forcing insects to grow. Warped life is always slightly sickly and deformed.

*** Warp Complex Life: The mage can change himself (this will of course bind him stronger to the Qlippoth, since he will need the energies of the sphere even more in the future). He can also create simple pseudo-living beings, not able to survive on their own but usually quite tenacious.

**** Warp Person: The mage can warp all forms of life, including other people.

***** Transmute Flesh: The mage can turn living beings into true unlife, like humans into vampires. This unlife is quite potent (as long as it can feed on the quintessence of other life) and strongly tied to the Qlippoth of life.

Matter

Qlippothic matter is the sphere of ruining objects and removing the properties of matter.

* Detect Flaws and Impurities

** Create Qlippothic Matter: Qlippothic matter is notoriously inert and useless; it is not affected by most forces, cannot sustain life or be used for anything. It is also very hard to destroy or get rid of, and just accumulates as dirt or garbage.

*** Remove Properties of Matter: The mage can remove properties such as cohesion, color, strength or nourishment.

**** Transmute Matter into Qlippothic Matter

***** Create Pure Qlippothic Matter: Pure Qlippothic matter is very hard to affect by any form of magick, and almost indestructible. It just ties up Quintessence so that it cannot be used.

Mind

Qlippothic Mind deals with disorientation, imbalance and insanity.

* Warped Mind: One of the first things a student of the sphere learns is to gain insight from madness, how to twist his own thoughts around and gather power from the dark recesses of the mind. He become is capable of jump of insight and vision, at the mere price of sanity.

** Emotional Insecurity: The mage can affect the emotions and drives of another person, turning them against him or against each other. Love can turn into obsession; self-confidence can break down into doubts and hidden fears brought to life. Neuroses can be created.

*** Disorientation: Consciousness and thought are quite unstable entities, and can easily be broken. He can derail trains of thought, induce hallucinations, force a victim into a coma or psychosis.

**** Break the Mind: The mind of a victim can be permanently warped into unrecognizable patterns.

***** Shatter the Mind: At this level, the mage not only can break away minds from their bodies, but also parts of the minds. Memory, cognition or thought can be removed or sent away to other places. Things from the Astral plane can be brought into reality.

Prime

Qlippothic Prime magick is among the most unholy arts of magick in existence. It corrupts and transmutes Prime into non-existence, removing it from reality or curdling it into a useless entropic state. Quintessence fed into patterns will have a Qlippothic resonance, which will affect them in subtle ways. They will become more unstable, less efficient and often spread their corruption further.

* Detect Paradox: The mage can detect paradox and other strains in reality, weak points where it can unravel further.

** Drain Quintessence: The mage can leak out Quintessence from a magickal pattern, weakening it. Normal patterns are usually too strong to affect, but they can be slightly destabilized.

*** Dark Talismans: Talismans created by Qlippothic magick are both dangerous and nasty. Their effects are strongly Qlippothic, and they also tend to attract paradox. However, their nature also makes them very good at destroying, corrupting and warping things in unpleasant ways, even if they were not intended for it.

**** Drain: By draining away the quintessence of a pattern it can be undone, and its existence is converted into Qlippothic quintessence. It is of course possible to just undo some parts of a pattern, leaving the rest unstable and decaying.

***** Destroy Quintessence: This apparently removes the Quintessence from reality altogether, turning being into un-being.

Spirit

Qlippothic spirit is quite similar to normal Spirit magick, although it deals with the more malevolent aspects of the Umbra.

* Find Breach: Qlippothic mages often seek out weak points in the gauntlet to widen them further, gradually undermining it.

See the Nether Realms: Qlippothic mages are able to perceive the Qlippothic realms beneath reality, and summon beings from them.

*** Breach the gauntlet: The mage can now pass through flaws in the gauntlet into the uppermost nether realms, and perceive the Abyss below.

**** Destroy the Gauntlet: The mage can disrupt the protective shell of the gauntlet, opening the way for the darkness below. He can also bind and warp spirits, forcing them to become Qlippothic entities themselves.

***** Enter the Abyss: The mage is able to enter the spiritual abyss below reality unharmed, and to contact its denizens.

Time

Just as space can be taken apart or cracked, the chains of causality can be manipulated by a Qlippothic mage. It isn't possible to get anything useful done during Qlippothic time, and it seems to stretch on for a grey eternity or speed up just when it shouldn't.

* Find the Angles of Time: Qlippothic mages have an strange tendency to find the exactly wrong moments to do something; the results are unpredictable and often dangerous. They can find the wrinkles and angles of time, and use them to make chains of events to go wrong.

** Peer through the Wrinkles: All the angles and flaws in the timestream are linked together, and Qlippothic mages have a fantastic ability to predict bad news or discern past events better left buried.

*** Dead time: The mage can make time more or less useless. Nothing important can happen, or it just flies away before anything useful gets done.

**** Unlink Time: The mage can remove things from the timestream, partially or as a whole. If an object is only partially removed, one part will age indefinitely while the other is preserved or vice versa. They can also be thrown into a timeless limbo.

***** Destroy Time: The mage is able to break the flow of time and causality; events do not have effects or time just passes without anything happening. Time can also be broken apart and put together, forming endless causal loops.