Curious Item Club: Mindstealer Cypher
Added 2015-08-04 05:53:34 +0000 UTCMindstealer cyphers embody the uncertainty and danger of tampering with the numenera remnants of the Great Ones who stalked the many lands of Earth before the coming of the Eighth World.
At first glance, a mindstealer appears to have the function of some other cypher. Its danger, however, lies in its hidden function (which can only be detected if the check to identify the cypher succeeds at a level 6 difficulty): The mindstealer copies the owner’s brain patterns into itself and replaces them with the personality of the sentient entity stored within it (usually human, but possibly not).
For every week that the mindstealer cypher is carried or kept close, its owner must make an Intellect defense with a difficulty equal to the number of weeks they have been under its influence. On a failure, the owner’s behavior will begin to be modified by the personality which is overwriting their own. Whenever they attempt to resolve a task, there is a 1 in 20 chance that they will take some other action determined by the GM. They may even lose control of their body for a time (as a GM intrusion). If a second Intellect defense check is failed, the owner’s personality is completely overwritten.
Some mindstealer cyphers (perhaps even most of them) have no other function. These pose no real danger because they are usually discarded as trash and are almost never kept in someone’s possession long enough to influence them. (Although if something like a building were to be built above such a device – or, worse, a trove of such devices – it could wreak great havoc.) Far more dangerous are mindstealer artifacts, since they are far more likely to be kept for prolonged periods of time.
