Telltale Murder

From Edge of Darkness Wiki

With the two-dot version of this Merit, you know how to disguise a murder as a suicide, or use the means by which your victims die to taunt your attackers. Roll Intelligence + Medicine before the character ends a victim’s life. Each success allows you to make one brief statement: “The murder symbolizes Pride,” or “The victim is not innocent.” An investigator will pick up on these statements with one success on a Wits + Investigation roll. You can use this capability to taunt the officers investigating your crimes, or to foil their attempts to build a profile.

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The three-dot version of this Merit enhances understanding of murder. You can stage a killing so that it sends a message that isn’t true: “This death was a suicide,” for example. Anyone studying the body must gain more successes on an Intelligence + Medicine roll than you rolled when using this Merit, or believe your lie.

Note that use of this Merit isn’t supernatural: the character isn’t psychically willing a message into the corpse or the murder scene. No, this necessitates work on the part of the slasher: arranging a series of bodies in some grisly display out of Milton’s Paradise Lost, for instance, carving a scarlet letter (“A”) in a dead adulterer’s chest, or some other kind of murderous theatrics.

Drawback

Once you start leaving messages, it’s very hard to stop. If you don’t make use of this Merit when you strike a killing blow, the Storyteller may decide on a single statement that investigators will pick up.

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