Eternal Torment Cage

    Abyssals use this to trap the man's soul inside his body so they can go on torturing him after he's dead. This is one of the spells valued by mortificers as the victim's soul doesn't pass while they're being tortured. Some fasten their victims with soulsteel nails while assembling their creations. Abyssals have shown such a mastery of torture that people's souls escaped only because there was no body left for the to inhabit.
    Some have so much disregard for the etiquette of respect for the dead that they've become notorious. Far from being frightened by an enemy's vengeful ghost they relish the chance of a victim coming back to haunt them. It gives them a chance to kill them all over again.

Casket of Eternal Lamentation

    The suit's edged spikes are designed to tear the wearer's flesh as they move, slowly filling the suit with blood.
   During step 10 of attack resolution reduce the successes on the damage roll by the number of injury levels. If successes still remain apply them as normal. If all the damage is cancelled out, apply all the damage successes to the attacker instead. Resistance Charms can be used against the rebounded attack, but if they depend of variables use the attacker's own traits since they struck the blow, such as Iron Skin Concentration. Since the attack has already hit, Dodge Charms, even perfect defences cannot be used against it.
    When they put on the armour they immediately lose all -0 health levels.

   An alternative idea is the character's number of injury levels is used as the armour's soak value. The armour is unaffected by piercing. When the wearer takes a fatigue roll, if the fail instead of incurring a -1 internal penalty they suffer 1 level of lethal damage. their fatigue rolls are unaffected by environmental factors. At a -1 wound penalty add 1 to the character's soak and the time between fatigue rolls. When their wound penalty rises above one multiply their soak and fatigue duration by their wound penalty.

   The Deathlord who possessed this Monstrance was so impressed by it he created a Black Magitech device called the Blood Reaper Harness based on it to equip suicide squads. As the wearer suffers more and more injuries from the spikes they protrude and move further into the wearer's body as they cut through flesh eventually killing them but make them almost invulnerable until then.
   Activation: the suit must be activated by pouring on sacrificial blood (a typical practice for activating Black Magitech.) the amount needed is generally equal to the object's artefact rating in magnitude of sacrificial victims, or the Essence of a supernatural being.

23rd April

    The Haltans live in the treetops and sleep under the stars. So far to the east the trees grow far higher and more densely than they do elsewhere. The canopy is thick and blots almost all the light from the forest floor making it almost impossible to tell whether it's day or night. In this perpetual twilight lights of the Fair Folk glow in an unearthly wilderness unseen outside the Wyld.
 
   Lunars' spirit shapes don't have to be ordinary, conventional animals. One of them assumed the shape of a giant, twelve legged cat. Some of them aren't even animals that exist in Creation. Such are the expressions of the Chosen of Luna. Knacks are expressions of the Lunar given form by their protean nature.

    Black Magitech- communication device, skulls that talk. Two people have them and when one of them says something their skull can hear the other skull says it.


   Life in Yu-Shan- Spirited Away


   Some Lunars gain names from their spirit shape. Like the wingless Flying Wolfdragon.


   If the thing a god has domain over is lost they lose their power and influence and end up in the slums begging for Essence.
   All the gods naturally live in Yu-Shan and sometimes visit Creation to spend time in their domain. Elementals live in Creation and carry out the wishes of the gods who can instruct them immediately from Heaven.

Black Magitech

"Dangers he met unflinchingly. Crimes he committed unmoved. I think the climax came when he had proved his point that rational life can be restored, and had sought new worlds to conquer by experimenting on the reanimation of detached parts of bodies...Two biological points he was exceedingly anxious to settle- first, whether any amount of consciousness and rational action be possible without the brain, proceeding from the spinal cord and various nerve centres; and second, whether any ethereal, intangible relation distinct from the material cells may exist to link the surgically separated parts of what had previously been a single living organism."

-H.P.Lovecraft, Herbert West-Reanimator

     The Black Art

     Black Magitech started among several unrelated sources. usually it was researched in poorly organised hospitals, especially during times of great catastrophe when hospitals were swamped by the number of afflicted and there was a plethora of patients and human material and disposing of evidence was very easy. The chaos and conflict of the Usurpation cast a dark shadow under which some of the most dedicated and derranged mortificers worked, researching at a fevered pace knowing discovery would come soon. Inevitably stories of gory surgeries were circulated when uncovered by the Sidereal directed Dragon-blooded. Stories of depraved post mortem experimentation mixed with exagerrated and fictitious tales spread during the world shaking chaos. Some of the most horrific legends of the First Age are based on experiments in Black Magitech.
   Unfortunately the science did not die with the fall of the Soar Deliberative. Dragon-blooded potentates, freed from the overbearing presence of the Celestial Exalted uncovered a great amount of information about this forbidden art and now had the world to themselves. The increasing frequency with which warlords vied with eachother made resorting to Black Magitech an attractive option in the dwindling remains of the First Age. Operations like the relocation camps that were used to dispose of the creatures created by Solar breeding programs offered an opportunity for a new generation of mortificers, educated by the information gained by picking over what the Solars left to ply their trade and hire their services and servants to competing warlords.
   The final cataclysm of the Great Contagion and the would be world destroying attack of the Fair Folk almost put an end to Black Magitech for good as most of the mortificers themselves ended up in the grave pits. However a few of them did survive to capitalise on the tide of death and almost completely unsupervised conditions. But with the appearence of the Scarlet Empress and the universal rise of the Immaculate Order they were forced to go underground or give up their research entirely.
   There was however a group of individuals in a position to investigate deeply the secrets of Black Magitech without interference: the Deathlords. Some of them were almost certainly mortificers during their lives as Solars. The aptitude of Mask of Winters and his ability to make an infrastructure to support the creation of Black Magitech marks him out as an experienced expert in the field. Deathlords with a mind for Black Magitech take Abyssal Exalted into their services as apprentices and assistants. Those with no interest in pursuing it but consider it too important to ignore simply allocate resources to talented Abyssal servants and tell them to make progress on their own. Of course one more efficient way of doing that is to steal someone else's secrets...which leads to employment of other Abyssals who otherwise would have no involvement in the black art.

Dreams of the First Age

    Guided Essence weapons would need some way of transmitting and receiving information and a way of tracking it's movement. Black magitech weapons could use a bound Hungry Ghost and try to use their risen hunger to try to guide it onto their living enemy before it explodes. They would have to be careful it didn't turn around from it's distant target and move towards living (or dead) targets in their own army.
   In Jade Elementals can affect physical objects while remaining dematerialised. Water Jade submarine: the whole vessel is an Essence engine allowing it to move through water. It can dematerialise in water allowing it to travel to any depth.
   Dematerialised-  something becomes composed solely of Essence. Water has the power to crush, air has the power to float. The deeper in water (or the closer to the water's bottom depending on how you look at it) the greater the power of water gets. The higher up in the air you get the harder it is to float.
    Travelling to Yu-Shan means travelling across the infinite distance to the other side of the night sky which is the face of the Celestial Incarnae.

Undead

    Necromancy offers ways to raise both the lesser and the greater undead but there are times when Abyssals and other nefarious agents of death need access to more immediate or more unusual followers.
   The still living blood of the unfortunates used in it''s construction is then fed to the beast filling it with a relentless thirst for blood.
   These spells are also helpful in making soulsteel as they can torture their victims for much longer so they are ready to be transubstantiated into that ethereal material or just for recreational purposes.
   Zombie Motivation Consume the flesh of the living
   They'll keep eating corpses they've killed until all the flesh is consumed. They usually don't bother killing the before eating. Although their intellect is limited, driven by one of their most basic desires they are extremely strong in pursuing what they want and frighteningly resilient as their minds and partially reanimated bodies no longer sense pain. 'They are created en masse by a spell with limited effect, it's doesn't do a very good job of reanimation or the process of reanimation is not perfect or as developed as used for skeletons or other undead creations. But despite their poor (read negligible) intelligence and undisciplined hunger they are quite effective on the battlefield and in war, particularly as terror troops.'
   Zombies are often raised then a Necromancer immediate servants although they are often retained for as long as they can sustain themselves afterwards. They are the lowest form of undead reanimation with necromantic power and possessed by only the most basic instincts and absolutely no intelligence. 'This may be a result of an early necromantic formula that worked on a more physical level literally restoring incomplete and imperfect life to the dead rather than more advanced spiritual magic that was created later for use on skeletons. Perhaps the presence of the roughly complete victim's corpse prevents use of different Necromantic principles, or the limited age after death and something to do with the proximity of the body's spirit limit the intelligence it can possess. Much older bodies can be imbued with a element of the deceased's soul, and the greater the age or the strength the dead had in life the more complete the link.'
   Skeletons are far too decomposed to reanimate in such a way. Instead the Necromancer locates a trinket associated with the victim's soul and binds a fraction of it to the newly risen deceased. As a result skeletons can function as servants, perform basic tasks and hold weapons and wield them in battle. Skeletons of warriors are used to staff undead legions following instructions hammered out by their greater undead leaders.
   The horrid magic that reanimates these things allows for the most unnatural creatures. The twisted genius of the Mortificers shape amalgamations that work in ways that were never intended, or even conceivable to onlookers.