Dug Two Graves [Unknown Armies]

Dug Two Graves [Unknown Armies] – Google Docs

Dug Two Graves [Unknown Armies]

Power: Significant

Description: A gravedigger’s shovel, old, hard-used, but still sound.  It smells faintly of sun, mud, and blood.

Effect: You activate Dug Two Graves in just the way you’d imagine: you dig two graves, complete with markers. One for you, and one for the person that you’re going to kill. Dug Two Graves won’t work if you’re not truly ready to kill somebody in particular, by the way.  You’ll know if it won’t work: more than one person who has held the artifact has dug the graves, and then discovered (usually to their secret relief) that they’re not really ready to go through with it.

You and your target end up combining your Wound scores (usually making the wounds for both 100); you each also calculate your downbeat abilities using you combined hardened notches. So if Bob has two hardened notches in Violence (Struggle at 25%), and Jane has three (Struggle at 30%), they’d both have Struggle at 40% (upbeat abilities are not directly affected). When you’re wielding Dug Two Graves, you also know where the person you want to murder is.  More or less.  You can track them, at least.  And they can track you.

However, every day you and your target each have to make one Self [8] stress check. A success adds a hardened notch to a category of your choice; failure adds a hardened notch.  Once you two have a total eight hardened notches in Self, all further rolls are automatic successes. All of which means that, once you start down this road, it’s either madness or burnout for the two of you.  The only way to break the connection is for one of you to die; but when the connection is broken, so do the extra wounds.  The extra hardened/failed notches do not.

It’s possible to survive using this item, in other words — but don’t bet on it. But then, you knew that already.  After all: you dug two graves.