Hey, now that you’re on track, we can talk like fellow GMs, rather than experienced guy and newbie.

tl;dr: Good times. You got it. Now that you get it, don't be afraid to branch out. Just remember to stay internally consistent. Patterns matter. Until you break them as part of a pattern.

So, Perception Tasks/Tests tend to be really “easy” to learn. Like, you either have Notice or you don’t and if you don’t, you really don’t get a non-proficiency penalty for not being “trained in observation.” So, the situation is, under what circumstance is a Difficult or Simple Test appropriate? The answer is whether the character can bring only some of his faculties or all of his faculties to bear. Guess what? A normal gifted only has a secondary sixth sense and the stimuli that ping that don’t trip any other sense: it’s always Difficult. But you can train to make more sense of what little you can perceive, so it should always be Perception and Notice (or the appropriate skill like Surveillance or Research/Investigation).

I know it can get tricky and I often flub it up myself, but I’ve noticed that a lot of the book just kind of says, If it’s an easy challenge, just use a Simple Perception or Perception and Notice. I disagree with that approach. If it’s easy, it gets a bonus. If it uses all (or most) of the character’s faculties, it gets a Simple. If it does all of the above, then it counts as easy and can get a bonus (maybe even limited by the relevant attribute if you really, really want; I rarely want). See WitchCraft p128 for the modifiers.

This means that noticing a docile spirit in neutral ground is “Challenging” so no modifier to the Task/Test. An angry spirit in neutral ground is probably Moderate to Easy, depending on the power of the spirit (that is totally subjective), so +3 to +5. And a spirit taking action within “line of sight” (really, within the easy area of perception which is also subjective but I’d say within 10 feet per Perception without obstructions) is absolutely obvious, making it “Routine” (no roll, but if you absolutely must, give them +6 or something).

So, by the book, the witch would just know the spirit is awake and it would not be a stretch to say that the summoning allows some method of communication. You could explain it by saying that the essence used for the summoning establishes a sort of telepathic connection between the two. If, however, you really want to have a more subtly intertwined mundane and supernatural world, you can try something like this:

When the spirit awakens, there is a sudden rustling of the leaves like a high wind is blowing through the canopy. A mundane can deduce this by hearing the rustling or watching the leaves. To the gifted, the random movement of the leaves and sounds of the rustling are not random. Instead, the whole tree takes on a face and each “gust of wind” changes expression while the rustling is the spirit’s voice. To the gifted, there is a conversation to be had with the living spirit in the tree. If you want to make it possible for outside observers to catch on, maybe there is no wind and this is the only tree rustling about. The cameras won’t see the face and the recorders won’t hear the voice, but a savvy observer will know something is going on.

I agree about Supernatural but it turns out that Conspiracy X and Mystery Codex both accommodate the idea that the presence of a supernatural entity has real world effects. A ghost drives the temperature down and may appear as a translucent image of itself: ConX says this is a telepathic illusion but Mystery Codex says the ghost has the ability to appear as a translucent image if it so desires. Either way, such a frightful experience could allow for a Fear Test and possibly the release of Essence, which the spirit would happily absorb especially if it is of a hostile mind.

On the other hand, maybe you really like the subtle approach and part of summoning things always includes some special factor that allows a spirit to communicate with the mundane world. Like the tree spirit in my example above, the seemingly random is not random to the right senses. Maybe you always need a bowl of water, a flame, a pile of dirt, or some smoke for the right elemental to manipulate and interact with. Maybe you always need that bowl of blood for a fiend or the incense for a celestial. In all cases, a seemingly random event (ripples in liquid, flickering flame, or even just seemingly random patterns in sand) is all the spirit needs to be able to communicate with the gifted. Imagine it like that phone that separates prisoners from their guests, imagine using an actual phone for that because it’s modern times and that’s how your ghost thinks and so operates.

Now fiends are a fun sort. In Unisystem, they’re like spiritual goblins. They just kind of run amok when they get the chance, like a kid in a candy store… or a bull in a china shop. Why? Who knows, they are malicious little buggers and derive enjoyment and satisfaction from the misery, pain, and fear of others. Hey, guess what causes humans to release essence? Intense emotions like misery, pain, and fear. They might just absorb that energy and it feeds them, or maybe it’s like catnip for cats and it isn’t necessary but it is highly enjoyable. Of course, their ideas of malice involve more horrifying murder and mayhem but that’s because they’re basically the weasels and ferrets of the underworld. It’s the fallen seraphim and qliphonim that represent sophisticated terror.

You can make them more or less dangerous. I have taken several different approaches. I have used the malicious hobgoblin approach, where fiends that have the opportunity to manifest or possess something in the real world do their level best to get the highest horrified kill-count they can before they are banished or obliterated. I have used slightly more sophisticated fiends that must be summoned with a sacrifice and the fiend that responds is kind of like a cross between a fiend and a nature spirit associated with the sacrifice. So, one cult ended up sacrificing a crow, a dog, and a bull and got fiends that correlated closely with the symbolic characteristics associated with them. I have yet to use the fiends as evil and powerful ghosts from Supernatural, but I see no real reason not to. About the only binding concept between them is malevolence, how they go about it and precisely what powers they have is highly customizable. You could have the demon in the first season that just likes to wreck planes for a high kill count every few years as sort of a low-level, unsophisticated sort. He’s like a serial killer with a somewhat predictable MO. Then you can graduate up to crossroads on up to Crowley and you still haven’t even touched what happens when a being closer to Castiel on up joins the dark side. You don’t even need to bother with… what do they call it? Crap, we’re both talking about leviathan and whatnot… Well, I call it the Outside and I hope they call it that, too.

Another twist that I like is the idea that a fiend is not a single entity but a swarm of disparate, broken spiritual fragments of a being that has been cleansed. This gives purgatory it’s supposed benefit (of purging the spirit of sin so it can move on to kether) and it turns out that fiends are something like a byproduct of that process. That makes them into nifty schizophrenic murderer monsters kind of like what might happen with Ermac (check out the ending for Mortal Kombat 9 to get a glimpse of what I’m getting at) but you could combine that with other strategies like making demonic possession more like an infection (contagious only from the first one, we’re trying to make a subtle and supernatural mystery/thriller not a demonic zombie apocalypse). I was going to use that in my last WitchCraft game and tack on the need for real-world actions to correlate the infection (so the demon would force feed its subjects its own blood or something similarly gross; I recognize that’s a higher MPAA rating than many people do but the idea came from Evil Dead and I thought it was a pretty solid approach).

Now, I’m all for easy wins but try to avoid making any fiends “easy.” One of the biggest issues with Unisystem is that there is no real way to convey to the players via their characters that something is extremely dangerous like you could in DnD. You know that system, right? You know a creature is powerful when it can do half your hp in one hit and you either avoid getting hit or you run away. You do that sort of thing in Unisystem and you get one corpse, an impaired game, and several players that may or may not be up to the task of continuing to play through that. The problem, of course, is that redshirts don’t get much respect so even showing that bit of mayhem tends not to compute. It’s a challenge I’ve yet to figure out but maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree (my players are both Australians so their sense of danger is slightly off).

However, the idea of a weak fiend is delightfully relative. I tend to make my weak fiends more than a match for 10 normal people but I also like to tack on fringe benefits and rebuilt fiends pretty aggressively to suit my style. So, while Baal Jr. is the equivalent of an amateur among the ranks of the underworld, he way outclasses most mortals and a great many spirits. Remember, living in the underworld is like going to prison: you don’t typically come out of prison a gentler sort.

Personally, I prefer to avoid fiends because of how I use them. I treat fiends as the worst of distilled malice. You trap a fiend in a circle after it possessed a love one and it will literally threaten to gnaw its hosts arm off in an effort to get you to intercede (and hopefully violate the circle). Imagine one gutting itself for the purpose of using those pieces to disrupt the circle and then ditching the body when it does, leaving the Cast with a disemboweled, confused, and horrified former host. How does one explain that in the emergency room especially when I would say that Lesser Healing is not enough to treat that sort of trauma? Of course, maybe that sort of fiend is not your cup of tea. Maybe you like the kind of dumb violence that makes fiends a scary but simple sort. That’s up to you. But let me tell you, start your players with the dumb violence and then upgrade them to something like I use is a pretty good recipe to turn your supernatural mystery/thriller into horror.

Now, upgrading to things like qliphonim and fallen seraphim is also a good way to up the ante. I actually redid seraphim as spirits so that I could bring them somewhat closer to the Supernatural version. Not quite that close, though. I think the qliphonim are really good for psychological thriller games because you can convey a definite and directed intelligence with a powerful malevolence, someone who doesn’t just do it for profit but because they actually enjoy causing pain and watching the world burn. It’s not even to prove a point, it is their art and they love doing it. On the other hand, maybe they treat it like a cold assignment and take calculated actions that are meant to maximize the evil.

When you get to the Outside, though, I’m against conveying it as evil. It’s a hard thing to do but my angle is to convey it as distinctly “wrong.” Not wrong as in it violates the law or social mores but wrong on a fundamental “this should never happen and it hurts to conceive of this” sense. You can make sense of a fiend in its various incarnations, you can make sense of qliphonim, wildlings, and relentless dead but when it comes to the Outside, there is nothing so much as messed right the hell up to go on. The closest thing to an MO I tend to give Outsiders is lashing out in wild pain (after all, their very existence in our reality is a violation of their being and our reality). They might get a desire to change their surroundings to be more hospitable but whatever they do, it doesn’t follow any proper rule. It’s hard to do that, though. There’s a reason they tend to fall into the category of “secrets man was not meant to know” and why the books tend to treat them as Evil To The Nth Degree.

For me, the Outsiders are hostile because they are in constant pain. Enslaving them is the only way to get them to behave in any particular manner. Now, this is not the case when a normal creature is corrupted by the Outside. In that case, the normal creature retains some of its behaviors but is rabid and displays nearly unpredictable actions based on the remnants of its original self (when they crop up between waves of mind numbing agony). I haven’t gotten it down. It’s part of why I rarely use it. The other part is that it is treated as just Evil +1 and that doesn’t jive with me. I could do that with smarter or more violently malicious fiends and whatnot. Moving on…

I’m glad I could help despite throwing down more words for this post than I do for most essays.

Clarity of purpose. Clarity of conscience.