TEXT:  the spear
  the spear 
  of destiny
  of destiny 
  BY 
  KENNETH
  HITE 
  
  2
  the spear of destiny
  K E N  W R I T E S  A B O U T  S T U F F
  PUBLISHER: CATHRIONA TOBIN 
  AUTHOR: KENNETH HITE
  ARTWORK: JEFF PORTER
  LAYOUT: CATHRIONA TOBIN     
  © 2015 PELGRANE PRESS LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 
  KEN WRITES ABOUT STUFF
  Ken Hite has joined Pelgrane as a full-time 
  writer, and we’ve come up with a clever way 
  of using his considerable writing talents. 
  Now,  you can subscribe to Ken Writes 
  About Stuff, featuring new and original Hite 
  goodness every month for twelve months. 
  A costs $24.95 and as well as giving you a 
  generous 30% discount on the individual 
  article price of $2.95, we’ll be offering an 
  exclusive extra later in the year to all 
  subscribers.
  Any time you order, you’ll get all the issues of 
  the current KWAS to date. The latest edition 
  will be added to your order receipt page when 
  it is released, so all you need to do is click on 
  the link in your order email. (If you can’t find 
  your receipt email, you can get another one 
  sent to you by entering your email address 
  here).
  Ken describes it as so:
  “A burst of Hite goodness that you can 
  imbibe or not as you see fit, secure in the 
  knowledge that there’s another one coming 
  down the pike in a month at a reasonable 
  price. I’ll be putting about 4,000 words worth 
  of fun together every month — maybe an 
  optional rules system, maybe a longish 
  DramaSystem Series Pitch, maybe a “ripped 
  from the headlines” mini-scenario, maybe 
  a campaign frame or a mini-setting, maybe 
  an extended riff on some worthy intelligence 
  organization or serial killer or astrophysical 
  anomaly. Leave requests in the comments, 
  and I shall take them most indubitably 
  under advisement.”
  CONTENTS
  INTRODUCTION 
   
   
   
  3
  THE LEGEND OF LONGINUS 
   
  3
  PIERCING THE MYTH  
   
  3
  A FOREST OF SPEARS 
   
   
  3
  SPEAR CARRIERS  
   
  4
  SHAFTS  
   
   
   
  4
  THE SPEAR OF ST. MAURICE 
  4
  GUNGNIR 
   
   
   
  4
  SLEG LOGA  
   
   
  4
  RHONGOMYNIAD 
   
   
  4
  POINTS  
   
   
   
  5
  HOFBURG HEILIGE LANZ 
   
  5
  VATICAN SPEAR 
   
   
  5
  SPEAR OF ECHMIADZIN 
   
  5
  SPEAR OF KRAKOW  
   
  6
  SOURCES  
   
   
  6
  SPEAR STORIES 
   
   
   
  6
  TIMEWATCH 
   
   
   
  6
  NIGHT’S BLACK AGENTS 
   
  7
  TRAIL OF CTHULHU 
   
   
  8
  THE ESOTERRORISTS 
   
   
  8
  
  3
  INTRODUCTION
  “There is a legend associated with this spear 
  that whoever claims it, and solves its secret, 
  holds the destiny of the world in his hands for 
  good or evil.”
   
  -- Trevor Ravenscroft, 
  The Spear Of Destiny
  Is it the Spear that pierced Christ’s side, 
  or the Spear of Odin? Does it grant true 
  kingship or invincibility? Who has borne 
  it through the millennia, and who seeks its 
  true whereabouts now? This issue pierces 
  the legend to reach the truth — and then 
  makes the legend invincible.
  THE LEGEND
   OF LONGINUS
  “But when they came to Jesus, and saw that 
  he was dead already, they brake not his legs: 
  but one of the soldiers with a spear pierced 
  his side, and forthwith came there out blood 
  and water.”
   
  -- John 19: 33-34
  The Roman soldier who stabbed Jesus was 
  later identified with the centurion who 
  declared him the Son of God (Mark 15:39) 
  and much later (mid-4th century) given the 
  name Longinus (likely a Latinization of the 
  Greek lonché, meaning “lance”), and later 
  still named Gaius Cassius Longinus (likely 
  in confusion with the conspirator against 
  Julius Caesar of the same name). The Holy 
  Lance or Holy Spear then passed into the 
  realm of legend.
  The Spear, they say, is the secret identity 
  of other famous spears such as the spear 
  Constantine carried from Britain to victory 
  at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312, the 
  spear that Attila hurled at Rome rather than 
  sack it in 452 (or the spear Aetius wielded 
  to defeat Attila in 451), and eventually the 
  spear of Charlemagne. From Charlemagne, 
  it passed down to the later Holy Roman 
  Emperors and into the house of Hapsburg, 
  eventually being stored in the Hofburg 
  Palace museum in Vienna with the other 
  regalia of the Hapsburg emperors.
  Which is where Adolf Hitler saw it in 
  1912, while he was still a would-be artist 
  starving on the Vienna streets. Suddenly, 
  his true destiny revealed itself to him 
  and he resolved to restore the Reich of 
  the emperors to new and greater heights. 
  With the Spear, he would be invincible. In 
  1938, after the Anschluss annexed Austria 
  to Germany, Hitler was able to secure the 
  Spear, removing it to a secret SS chapel in 
  Wewelsburg. He left a forged duplicate in St. 
  Katherine’s Cathedral in Nuremberg, where 
  the Spear had rested until the Austrians 
  spirited it away from Napoleon in 1796.
  The U.S. Army liberated Nuremberg on April 
  20, 1945, and discovered the hidden bunker 
  under Nuremberg Castle holding the (a?) 
  Spear two months later, on Midsummer’s 
  Day. Rumors flew: the Spear in Nuremberg 
  was a fake; the SS had submerged the true 
  Spear at the bottom of Lake Zell, near 
  Salzburg. Notwithstanding, Lt. Walter Horn 
  of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives 
  section of the U.S. Army identified the Spear 
  in Nuremberg and secured it under guard 
  on July 19. By this time, Wewelsburg had 
  also fallen – but the precise whereabouts of 
  the Spear, and which Spear emerged from 
  the rubble of Nuremberg, are questions to 
  which there can apparently be no answer.
  The U.S. returned a (the?) Spear to the 
  Vienna Hofburg on January 4, 1946. 
  General George Patton, who believed 
  himself the reincarnation of Longinus, 
  and who had ordered the search for the 
  Spear across Germany to prevent a Nazi 
  insurgency rallying around it, had died 
  in a freak accident two weeks earlier. Is 
  the true Spear affixed in a trapezohedral 
  chamber in the basement of the Pentagon, 
  entwining America’s destiny with its own? 
  Glowing in some Fourth Reich refuge in 
  Argentina or Antarctica, waiting to emerge 
  again when the next true Führer emerges? 
  Or is it resting in the Hofburg once more, 
  an innocent memetic trap, psychic bait for 
  future monsters?
  In point of fact, we don’t know.
  PIERCING THE MYTH
  In even more pointed and actual point of 
  fact, the modern legend of the Spear is a near-
  complete fabrication. In November 1960, the 
  Irish writer Max Caulfield produced a lurid 
  story for the Sunday Dispatch describing 
  Hitler’s lust for the Spear, its role in “blood 
  lodge” rituals with Himmler, Goering, 
  and Julius Streicher, and the shadowy SS 
  Colonel Conrad Buch, “personal adviser to 
  Adolf Hitler on occult matters.” This article 
  seems to have been the modern source 
  (perhaps even the sole source) of the tale of 
  the Spear’s power to grant victory and fulfill 
  destiny. Caulfield claimed to have uncovered 
  the story in the papers of the late esoteric 
  historian Walter Stein (1891-1957).
  This slapdash hoax would have died 
  without a ripple had it not somehow come 
  to the attention of Trevor Ravenscroft, a 
  former British commando turned occultist 
  and heroin addict. In 1972, badgered by 
  his publisher and desperate for money, 
  Ravenscroft cranked out The Spear of Destiny, 
  making the Jewish Stein into one of Hitler’s 
  occult mentors and inventing ancient texts 
  and modern conversations out of whole 
  cloth. (In 1982, Ravenscroft admitted to 
  having lied about knowing or even speaking 
  with Stein – “except through mediumistic 
  communications.”) The resulting farrago 
  was riveting reading, and a multi-million 
  copy bestseller. Ravenscroft had channeled 
  or churned up a compelling modern myth 
  that has since manifested in a political 
  horror novel, DC Comics, several different 
  anime, and a devoutly bizarre episode of the 
  special-forces TV show The Unit.
  A FOREST OF 
  SPEARS
  “Whereabouts were you roaming
  When our master lost the spear?”
   
  -- Richard Wagner, Parsifal
  So if the pious legend is unreliable, and the 
  modern legend is borderline slanderous, 
  where do we go when we seek the Spear 
  of Destiny? The answer is apparently 
  anywhere we want to: the chorus of 
  antique origin stories to choose from is 
  only matched by the panoply of candidate 
  Spears to wield in the modern day.
  THE SPEAR OF DESTINY
  K E N  W R I T E S  A B O U T  S T U F F
  
  4
  the spear of destiny
  SHAFTS
  The Spear might be the Lance of Longinus 
  mentioned above, which would technically 
  have been more of a pilum or javelin. Or it 
  might be a ritual spear-head (as seen on the 
  Magus’ table in the Tarot) forged by Tubal-
  Cain in 3061 B.C. from UFO memory 
  metal, or the spear hurled at David by Saul 
  (1 Samuel 18:11) later used by the boy king 
  to capture Jerusalem, or any of the spears 
  following.
  THE SPEAR OF ST. MAURICE
  According to pious legend (ca. 440 A.D.), in 
  287 A.D. the Emperor Maximian called on 
  the Theban Legion (recruited from Egyptian 
  Christians) to attack rebellious Christian 
  peasants in the town of Agaunum in Gaul. 
  Under their commander Mauritius, the 
  soldiers refused to kill their fellow Christians, 
  for which crime Maximian decimated the 
  legion and executed their commander. That 
  martyr became St. Mauritius, better known 
  as St. Moritz or St. Maurice, patron of 
  infantrymen and swordsmiths.
  The Lance in Vienna bears the name of 
  Maurice, who supposedly inherited the 
  Spear from Longinus via the Christian 
  underground in the Roman military.
  GUNGNIR
  Cast by the dwarven smith Dvalin, the spear 
  Gungnir (“swaying one”) came to Loki and 
  then to Odin. So well balanced it could strike 
  any foe, Odin further increased its power by 
  impaling himself with it while hanging for 
  nine days seeking wisdom. This may have 
  been how Gungnir became chased with 
  runes of mighty lore – in Wagner’s opera 
  Siegfried the Spear’s runes are the source of 
  the magical contract or spell that gives Wotan 
  (Odin) his power and authority. When 
  Siegfried breaks the Spear, Wotan vanishes.
  The Lombard royal clan was the Gungingi, 
  implying a connection to Gungnir, perhaps 
  as their sacred spear of office. Charlemagne 
  defeated the Lombards in 774, and perhaps 
  took their Spear as his own.
  SLEG LOGA
  The “Spear of Lugh” came from the 
  mysterious island city of Gorias. The Cath 
  Maige Tuired (ca. 900 A.D.) says: “No battle 
  was ever sustained against it, or against the 
  man who held it in his hand.” Which of Lugh’s 
  spears that might be is another question: 
  Gae Assail flew unerringly to its target and 
  back again with the proper incantation, 
  Areadbhar once belonged to the King of 
  Persia and its tip must forever be quenched 
  in water to prevent it bursting into flame, and 
  “The Finest Yew in the Wood” may also have 
  been two other spears in Irish myth.
  RHONGOMYNIAD
  Formerly the spear of Uther, it passed 
  into the hands of Arthur upon his death. 
  Geoffrey of Monmouth calls it Ron and 
  describes it as “long, broad-bladed, and 
  thirsty for slaughter.” If it’s the same as the 
  spear of Celtchar as one poem claims, it 
  must be quenched in poisonous blood (or 
  poppies) to prevent it cutting its wielder. 
  Celtchar, at least, can kill nine men at a 
  throw with it.
  The other Spear in Arthurian legend is the 
  one that deals the Dolorous Blow to the 
  Fisher King, wounding him and desolating 
  the land. Percival doesn’t ask about the 
  king’s wound, forcing the Grail quest. In 
  K E N  W R I T E S  A B O U T  S T U F F
  SPEAR CARRIERS
  A few more unusual suspects have left their grubby fingerprints on the 
  Spear, if only in the fringier zones of history, mystery, and imagination.
  Boudicca: In 60 A.D., the rebel Queen of the Iceni looted the Spear from 
  Glastonbury, where it had been taken by Joseph of Arimathea after the 
  Crucifixion. It availed her not, as the Romans crushed her forces the 
  next year.
  Alaric: The Gothic king sacked Rome in 410, and added the Spear to 
  his own royal regalia. He died that same year, his body buried – with 
  the Spear? -- in the diverted channel of the Busento River, and the 
  gravediggers killed to hide its location.
  Justinian: Supposedly dissolved Plato’s Academy by the power of the 
  Spear.
  Aethelstan: The chronicler William of Malmesbury says King 
  Aethelstan of Mercia (924-939) received the Spear from Hugh Capet 
  (more likely, given the dates, his father Hugh the Great, son-in-law of 
  Henry the Fowler) in 937 and bore it to defeat the Vikings and Scots at 
  Brunanburh that year. His half-sister took the Spear as dowry when 
  she married Otto I.
  Frederick Barbarossa: Died in Cilician Armenia in 1190; like Arthur he 
  sleeps until his kingdom needs him again. Perhaps he clutches the 
  true Spear in his undead slumber.
  Sigismund I: Holy Roman Emperor and founder of the Order of the 
  Dragon. That’s right, the one Dracula’s father was a charter member of. 
  In 1424, Sigismund secretly moved the Spear from the capital at Prague 
  to his birthplace, Nuremberg – another opportunity for a switch.
  Baron Alois von Hügel: Comissioner to the Imperial Assembly at 
  Regensburg, and bagman for the Austrian diplomatic corps, Baron 
  von Hügel was the man who removed the Spear from Nuremberg to 
  Vienna in 1796 and sold the regalia to the Hapsburg family as distinct 
  from the Imperial house. This makes him a key link in the chain of 
  provenance for the Spear, and a conspirator in any attempt to forge or 
  steal it during the Napoleonic era.
  
  5
  the spear of destiny
  K E N  W R I T E S  A B O U T  S T U F F
  Wagner’s opera Parsifal the evil wizard 
  Klingsor tries to kill Parsifal with the Spear 
  but the knight catches it in midair, restoring 
  its holy nature and then healing the King. 
  Malory but not Wagner identifies the Spear 
  as the Lance of Longinus.
  POINTS
  If the spear shafts begin in the misty past, 
  their points jab multifariously into the 
  present. Mix and match – perhaps there are 
  several Spears, each with its own magical 
  lineage. Or connect them all: Tubal-Cain 
  forged the Spear that David wielded and 
  the Romans looted and issued to Longinus 
  who passed it down to Maurice until it 
  converted Constantine whose heirs lost it 
  to Arthur who gave it to Balin who struck 
  the Dolorous Blow with it and thus lost 
  it to the Saxons who prayed for Wotan to 
  carve runes in it then saw it captured by 
  to Charlemagne whose successor Henry 
  the Fowler (Himmler’s “preincarnation”) 
  gave it to Aethelstan who returned it to the 
  Holy Roman Emperors who let Wagner 
  commune with it and Hitler grab it before 
  Patton switched it out for the one in the 
  Warehouse next to the Ark.
  HOFBURG HEILIGE LANZ
  The spear in the Hofburg Palace museum 
  in Vienna is the most accessible, and 
  thus the most popular, of the Holy Lance 
  candidates. It’s also the one Hitler actually 
  confiscated and moved to Nuremberg. It 
  has a nearly complete chain of provenance 
  going back to the Holy Roman Emperor 
  Otto I (962-973), when Luitprand of 
  Cremona describes the Spear. In 1354 
  the Emperor Charles IV identified it 
  specifically as the Lance of Longinus, 
  although he may have swapped out the 
  spearhead for a mysterious blade found in 
  the Tyrol.
  Against that, in 2003 the metallurgist 
  Dr. Robert Feather tested the Lanz in 
  laboratory conditions, dating it “only” 
  to the 7th century A.D. This implies it 
  began as a Lombard royal spear, joined 
  with the Imperial regalia possibly under 
  Charlemagne. However, the head of the 
  Hofburg Lance is secured to the shaft by 
  an iron nail, inscribed with four crosses – 
  and Feather argues its size and shape are 
  consistent with a Roman nail used in a 
  crucifixion. Did an unknown alchemist in 
  671 A.D. hammer a Holy Nail into Odin’s 
  spear to break the runes and banish the 
  Aesir forever?
  VATICAN SPEAR
  The potential chain of provenance for 
  the Spear in the Vatican goes back even 
  farther, to 570 A.D. when a pilgrim saw 
  the Holy Spear in Jerusalem. In 615, the 
  Persian emperor Khusrau II captured 
  Jerusalem and broke the spear point 
  off, sending it back to Constantinople 
  but keeping the Spear. The Byzantine 
  Emperor Heraclius defeated the Persians 
  and recovered the Spear, returning it to 
  Constantinople as well. The Latin Emperor 
  of Constantinople, Baldwin II, sold the 
  spear point to King Louis IX of France in 
  1247; the Turks captured Constantinople 
  in 1453 and the rest of the Spear once 
  more left Christian hands.
  However, in 1492 the Sultan Bayezid II sent 
  the Spear to Pope Innocent VIII as a bribe to 
  ensure that the Pope would continue to keep 
  Bayezid’s brother and rival Cem prisoner. 
  Initially dubious about their new relic, the 
  Vatican stashed the Spear by the altar in 
  St. Peter’s Basilica where it rests today. The 
  spear-tip, meanwhile, disappeared from the 
  Bibliothèque Nationale during the French 
  Revolution.
  SPEAR OF ECHMIADZIN
  The Apostle Thaddeus preached to the 
  Armenians, but it was St. Gregory the 
  Illuminator 
  who 
  converted 
  them 
  to 
  Christianity in 301 A.D. After a vision of 
  a miraculous pillar of fire (coincidentally 
  
  6
  the spear of destiny
  on the site of an ancient Zoroastrian fire-
  temple) in the capital city Vagharshapat, 
  Gregory built a cathedral on the site, 
  which he named Echmiadzin (“Descent 
  of the Only-Begotten One”). The Spear 
  brought by Thaddeus (or recovered from 
  Longinus’ putative retirement home in 
  nearby Caesarea-in-Cilicia) became the 
  centerpiece of the cathedral, where it rests 
  today. To unbelievers, it looks much more 
  like the finial on a legionary standard than it 
  does a lance-head.
  In the same neck of the woods, the Holy 
  Lance miraculously emerged in Antioch 
  during a siege in 1098. A monk received a 
  vision and dug the Lance up from beneath 
  the Church of St. Peter, breaking the siege 
  and winning the day for the Crusaders. The 
  Lance of Antioch could have wound up in 
  Armenia: the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, 
  among others, recruited Armenian soldiers 
  for his Crusades, and “Lesser Armenia” 
  bordered the Principality of Antioch.
  SPEAR OF KRAKOW
  Yet another Spear rests among the Polish 
  royal regalia at Wewal Castle in Krakow. 
  Both Poles and historians agree this Spear 
  is a replica, created by the Emperor Otto I 
  in 1000 (or Henry II in 1018) and given to 
  King Boleslaw I of Poland. Unless it isn’t: the 
  Kings of Poland and Holy Roman Emperors 
  repeatedly connived for each others’ 
  thrones for centuries, and substitutions of 
  substitutions could have played a part in 
  such machinations. King John I Sobieski of 
  Poland saved Vienna from the Turks in 1683, 
  and might have made the swap then and 
  there while his armies controlled the city. 
  Contrariwise, the Prussians looted the Polish 
  regalia in 1794 (and again in 1939), opening 
  up more opportunities for Spear-switching. 
  Otto (or Henry) also made a replica Spear for 
  the Kings of Hungary, which seems to have 
  gone missing in its own right.
  The larger question of replica Spears even 
  throws Feather’s forensics into question: 
  what if the Spear in Vienna is a Polish, 
  Hapsburg, Nazi, or Patton-commanded 
  forgery made from genuine early medieval 
  materials? The real Spear, again, could thus 
  be anywhere.
  SPEAR STORIES
  “And a spear in his hand he carried, and to 
  each of the walls he stept,
  Red with blood was the spear, as they saw it, 
  the people they mourned and wept.”
  -- Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival
  A spear that spans eternity and at least three 
  gods is a spear that can sustain multiple 
  adventures in multiple game settings. Don’t 
  be afraid to use it as what it should always be: 
  a numinous enigma. Why does its blade cure 
  the ghost flu in Mutant City Blues? Which 
  of the warlords in a Razed Europe that claim 
  to possess it has the real Spear? What is it 
  doing in a shrine on an alien planet on the 
  other side of the Bleed in Ashen Stars? Here 
  are a few other possibilities for Spear stories 
  in GUMSHOE games.
  TIMEWATCH
  The Spear is a truly mighty artifact, one of 
  the axles of Time itself. Or it can be. It’s up 
  to the agents.
  Pick a spear, any spear: a Roman cavalry 
  lance, a Norse thrusting spear, a pilum, an 
  assegai, a yari. Next, make (or change) history 
  with it, spending 2 Timecraft points to do so 
  at just the right moment. You don’t have to 
  give Jesus the coup de grace; you can toss it 
  at the Emperor Julian when he’s not looking, 
  or stab the guy who was going to stab Shaka 
  Zulu, or crown the King of the Jutes with it. 
  Or you can take out Scipio at the Battle of 
  the Ticinum and let the Carthaginians win, 
  or leave it sticking out of a teenage Harald 
  Haardrada to start a Norse civil war, or get 
  Velazquez to paint it into Cristo Crucificado.
  Then steal it back and give it to someone else 
  to make history with (spending 1 Timecraft). 
  A local, not one of you temponaut jerks. 
  Then pick it up and move it to the next guy, 
  or wait a century and carry it back and swap 
  it for itself. Eventually, as your spear gets a 
  name and a nimbus of legend, it gets harder 
  and harder to sneak it out of time: paradox, 
  chronal instability, and more begin to follow 
  the spear down the decades. In a word, 
  miracles.
  Every time the Spear (look, it’s got a capital 
  letter now!) makes history, add 1 point to its 
  Destiny rating. (If it’s a major event, add 2 
  or more. If it’s the Crucifixion, add 8.) The 
  Spears in the Vatican, the Hofburg, even 
  Armenia have got to have Destiny ratings 
  in high double digits – maybe even the 
  hundreds by now. That Destiny rating acts 
  as two things: a Reality Anchor pool usable 
  by the Spear’s wielder, and a Stitch – for 
  history. Using a Spear-Stitch lets the wielder 
  refresh one side of a battle, or an artist’s 
  flagging inspiration. It lets her aid a whole 
  airborne division as though it were her 
  team; increase damage from tiny paradoxes 
  or heal Dolorous Blows to the land caused 
  by untimely dinosaur or alien attacks. Each 
  Stitch spent burns off 4-24 Destiny points; 
  the GM can decide the cost based on the 
  scope of the Stitch, or decide the effect based 
  on the cost she rolled.
  K E N  W R I T E S  A B O U T  S T U F F
  SOURCES
  Anderson, Ken. Hitler and the Occult (1995). Heavy-handed debunking 
  of Ravenscroft.
  Buechner, Howard A. and Bernhart, Wilhelm. Adolf Hitler and the 
  Secrets of the Holy Lance (1988). Adds secret Antarctic bases into the mix, 
  because of course.
  Herbert, James. The Spear (1978). Occult-political thriller about the 
  Spear and the Seventies.
  Maclellan, Alec. The Secret of the Spear (2004). If anything, somehow 
  even less reliable than Ravenscroft, but Maclellan has cast a wider net.
  Ravenscroft, Trevor. The Spear of Destiny (1973). The book that started it 
  all. Obsessively readable and heroin-crazy, always a good combination.
  Smith, Jerry E. and Piccard, George. Secrets of the Holy Lance (2005). 
  Comprehensive, if clunky and goofy in equal parts.
  
  7
  the spear of destiny
  A Spear has a few minor powers as well:
  • 
  For 3 Destiny, it also lets the wielder 
  travel through time without a travel 
  test, to anywhen the Spear has been.
  • 
  For 2 Destiny, it points the way to the 
  closest other Spear in space and time. 
  (A 2-point Timecraft spend lets the 
  wielder home in on a specific Spear 
  rather than the closest.)
  • 
  It’s a really good spear: it does +2 
  damage instead of +1. Spending 1 
  Destiny increases the damage by 1, up 
  to the limit of the Destiny pool in the 
  Spear.
  Destiny never refreshes; it has to be rebuilt 
  with temporal shenanigans.
  Naturally, full-fledged Spears are coveted by 
  all manner of ill-wishers in the timestream. 
  And also naturally, creating a Spear is very 
  much against TimeWatch regulations. The 
  specific time-space geometries to which 
  to conform the spear  are highly classified, 
  although certain ancient runic and goëtic 
  texts might put clever time-tinkerers onto 
  the correct pattern.
  NIGHT’S BLACK 
  AGENTS
  The true Spear of Longinus, needless to say, 
  is the ultimate vampire bane. (For Damned 
  and Supernatural vampires, at least – and 
  maybe Mutant ones, if vampirism has any 
  psychic component.) The wooden shaft 
  drenched in the blood of Christ can drive 
  the metal head through the skin, shadow, 
  or mist of any vampire: Dracula, Lilith, 
  Zalmoxis, or Judas Iscariot himself. It 
  damages the vampire (+1 damage plus 
  effects of being staked if driven through the 
  heart) regardless of the vampire’s form or 
  other defenses.
  Since Night’s Black Agents is all about 
  the style, it’s probably most fun if you 
  begin with a heist of the Spear from the 
  Hofburg Palace. Security in the Kaiserliche 
  Schatzkammer Museum is very good 
  for a museum (Difficulties 6-7) but not 
  unbeatable. Anything from a night-time 
  high-tension sneak past laser alarms and 
  pressure sensors, to a daytime chaotic 
  extraction under cover of smoke grenades 
  and a helicopter-zipline rendezvous on the 
  roof of the palace should work, as long as 
  the agents keep things moving.
  The fun really starts once the agents have 
  the Spear. Because while it’s great at killing 
  vampires, it’s even better at attracting 
  Heat from their minions. Stealing the 
  Spear of Destiny is a guaranteed Heat 5 
  nine days’ wonder of an incident – but 
  unless the agents killed a lot of people, the 
  Heat should die down fairly soon. It’s the 
  agencies that don’t let it go, that seem more 
  than usually intent on hunting the agents 
  and recovering the Spear, that look more 
  and more like nodes on the Conspyramid. 
  Why does the German rezidentura of the 
  SVR want the Spear? Why is that reporter 
  from Le Monde still chasing the story? Who 
  is this Bulgarian arms dealer who’s offered 
  a million-euro reward for the Holy Lance?
  Even if the hunters aren’t all vampiric 
  minons, the theft of the Spear opens up 
  passage into a subculture or even a sub-
  ecosystem of those in the know about 
  vampires. And perhaps about other things 
  – maybe that Bulgarian wants to hire the 
  agents to go back and hit the Hofburg 
  again, and this time steal him the unicorn 
  horn displayed in the same room …
  K E N  W R I T E S  A B O U T  S T U F F
  
  8
  the spear of destiny
  TRAIL OF CTHULHU
  To accompany our multifarious candidate 
  Spears throughout history and legend, 
  herewith 
  a 
  multitude 
  of 
  possible 
  explanations or uses for the Spear in a Trail 
  of Cthulhu scenario.
  • 
  The Spear is the Spear of Nodens: 
  Nodens’ Welsh name Nuada is a 
  version of the Irish Lugh. Those 
  whose blood the Spear drinks can 
  Dream themselves into Nodens’ Abyss 
  and ride night-gaunts from there to 
  anywhere in the Dreamlands. Those 
  killed by the Spear become Nodens’ 
  night-gaunts.
  • 
  The head of the Spear is meteoric 
  iron, specially forged and shaped by 
  alchemist-smiths of late antiquity, 
  deadly 
  to 
  constructs 
  of 
  Shub-
  Niggurath or even to all terrestrial 
  Mythos horrors (Yig, Mordiggian, 
  possibly Han or Byatis).
  • 
  The head of the Spear is volcanic 
  iron, hurled from the depths of the 
  Earth’s core by the Crawling Chaos 
  Nyarlathotep. It exists to destroy 
  and enervate the constructions of 
  sapient life – it toppled Valusia, it 
  rove Hyperborea and K’n-Yan in civil 
  wars. Borne by Hyksos invaders, it 
  fragmented nighted Khem; as the 
  Lance of Maurice it collapsed Rome; 
  not even Charlemagne could use it to 
  unify the Franks and Lombards. The 
  Hapsburgs sealed it away and lost their 
  degenerate empire much more slowly; 
  Hitler unleashed it and destroyed 
  Germany and Europe in seven years.
  • 
  The Spear is a living geometrical 
  construct mapped into a spear shape. 
  It is a lemma of Daoloth in the living 
  world, and can be tapped for eldritch 
  power. It provides Magic pool points 
  equal to 7 times the holder’s Physics 
  rating; lose 1 Stability pool point per 
  gained Magic point. It refreshes its pool 
  completely after blinding someone (a 
  cruel Keeper might rule it can only be 
  refreshed by blinding its wielder).
  • 
  The Spear is of Muvian construction, 
  and exists to transfer knowledge from 
  alien minds to human ones. Simply 
  stab the alien in the braincase with 
  the Spear, then stab the human in 
  K E N  W R I T E S  A B O U T  S T U F F
  the spine (1 month to heal per point 
  of Health lost). The human gains 
  an Investigative pool (Mi-Go Lore, 
  for example) equal to one-third the 
  Health damage suffered (minimum 
  1). He also gains 1 Cthulhu Mythos 
  rating point.
  Where the Spear is associated with a given 
  god or titan, wielding or touching the Spear 
  lowers the Stability or Magic cost of casting 
  the corresponding Contact or Call spell to 
  1 point. This makes the Spear horrifically 
  dangerous if, for example, it’s in truth the 
  Spear of Cthugha, forged in the fires of the 
  Magi by blind Persian smiths …
  THE ESOTERRORISTS
  The heroin-fueled fabulations of Trevor 
  Ravenscroft opened a pinprick in the 
  Veil – and the millions of copies of The 
  Spear of Destiny sold since 1973 have 
  rubbed its fabric thinner. Tying the potent 
  Freudian image of the spear to both Christ 
  and Hitler, through half-remembered 
  Wagnerian fustian and late-night History 
  Channel marathons the Spear abrades 
  the fabric of the world. Hold this and you 
  are invincible. The Spear’s might makes 
  you right. You can rise to power if you 
  impale your doubts, drive them deep into 
  the wound and never let them surface. 
  Believing makes it true.
  And, of course, it does. Especially when 
  a Falken grabs you as you grab the 
  metaphorical Spear. They only appear as 
  shadows, sharp-cut wings and beaks cast 
  against the cheap pale paint of the walls or 
  reflected briefly in the light of the monitor. 
  They feed on their hosts, and addict them 
  to the drip of certitude. Only let my beak’s 
  blade sink into you, they rasp, and you can 
  never be defeated, because you can never 
  be wrong. The Falken don’t care what the 
  argument is: they feast on belief, in climate 
  change or 9/11 Truthism or My Candidate 
  or Your Racism or which Star Wars movies 
  are best. They eventually leave behind 
  hollow shells open to opportunistic 
  infections and infestations of all realities, 
  including those of the Outer Dark.
  FALKEN
  They only appear when injured, and all 
  attacks on invisible Falken first go through 
  the human it has symbiotized. Gassing 
  or 
  otherwise 
  rendering 
  the 
  human 
  unconscious gives the attacker one round 
  to act directly against the Falken before it 
  fades with its symbiont. When the entity 
  finally appears, it seems to be a cloud of 
  gold-wrapped Spear-heads – feathers, 
  pinions, talons, beak – driven by a staring 
  golden eye.
  Abilities: Athletics 
  11, 
  Health 
  4-9, 
  Scuffling 8
  Hit Threshold: 4
  Alertness Modifier: +0
  Stealth Modifier: +2 (mostly invisible)
  Weapon: +1 (Spear-talons, Spear-beak)
  Armor: All attacks on a Falken first go 
  through its meat puppet. Its iron feathers 
  then absorb +2 vs. Shooting or Scuffling.
  Dedication: The act of attacking an 
  innocent to get at an invisible demon is 
  the kind of certainty Falken love to feed 
  on. “Don’t worry. Shooting that girl is 
  the right thing to do.” The attacker must 
  make a Stability test against a Difficulty 
  equal to the Falken’s Health. If he fails, 
  the Falken switches hosts (and another 
  smaller Falken spawns in the former host’s 
  belief cavity) and infests the attacker. If he 
  succeeds exactly, he can see the Falken for 
  the remainder of the scene, clinging to the 
  back of its symbiont. If he succeeds by 1 or 
  more points, he loses Stability points equal 
  to his margin of success – forcible doubt 
  grinds the gears of your true self.
  Infested player characters know they’re 
  always right. About everything. The GM 
  should lie to the player, adjust information 
  he gets, and do everything possible to 
  make those who disagree seem like 
  unreasonable idiots. Admitting wrong 
  in word or action costs that operative 2 
  Stability.
  Killing a Falken does at least destroy all 
  other smaller Falken in the area; Falken 
  with lower Health ratings than the dead 
  Falken evanesce, leaving their hosts to 
  lose Stability rating points equal to the 
  vanished Falken’s Health.
  Tracking the etiology of the Falken back 
  to the Spear comes not through tracking 
  outbreaks of insane-sounding certainty on 
  the Internet – much like tracking outbreaks 
  of sand-burn in the Sahara – but by 
  recognizing their beaks and claws as Spear-
  heads with Art History. What to do about it 
  is another question: the Spear and its Hitler 
  associations have already been debunked to 
  no avail. Ordo Veritatis operatives just have 
  to be sure to keep an eye out for Falken 
  stigmata – but not too sure.
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Ken Writes About Stuff/Ken Writes About Stuff Vol. 3/The Spear of Destiny.pdf