TMA FEAR LORE

[eyediot]

THE MAGNUS ARCHIVES FEAR LORE AND YOU

The Magnus Archives takes place in an analogous version of the real world in London. The Magnus Institute itself is a 200 year old institute focusing on the study and archival of statements of people's supernatural and esoteric experiences. Seems innocent enough on the surface.

Except it is all real, of course.

The supernatural forces at play in the Magnus Archives universe are the Fear Entities: eldritch entities of fear that live in a sort of parallel/pocket universe just on the edge of ours. All the monsters in our world (werewolves, vampires, unexplained sightings of... things) are bits of the Fears that have managed to slip through physically.

200 years ago Robert Smirke, a renowned architect, cataloged, studied, and put names to the fears. Fourteen of them, in fact. All the things humans fear, all their phobias, can usually fit under one of the Fourteen.

The Fourteen Fears named by Robert Smirke are as follows:

The Buried: Fear of small spaces, suffocating, drowning, being buried alive. Of everything crashing down around/on oneself. The most physical manifestation of the Buried is a coffin that. Literally opens to a staircase leading down into the Buried itself.

The Corruption: Fear of corruption, disease, filth. Fear of the feelings of disgust or things that cause it. Usually associated with bugs, rot, decay and infection.

The Dark: The Dark is one of the original primal fears, the oldest. Fear of the dark and what lies beyond what we can see. The Dark is usually preceded by a smell of rot/sulfur and brown, rotten water before lights start going out. There is a monster in the dark, but no one has actually seen it.

The Desolation: Fear of pain, fear of loss, of burning and destruction with no purpose. Manifests with fire and flame, burning, and wax.

The End: Fear of death itself. Enough said.

The Eye: The fear of being watched, exposed, of being followed. Of having your secrets discovered. But is also associated with curiosity, and the drive to discover knowledge even if it will destroy you. The Eye tends to be considered one of the more "passive" Entities in the Fear Pantheon, just... watching. All it does is Watch.

The Flesh: Did you know that the Fears are not just brought about by human fears? The Flesh began its ascendence during the beginning of the industrialized meat era by animals bred for meat. Fed and mixed with humans' realization that we are all just animated meat and bones. So it gets weird. Think about body horror and you got the Flesh.

The Hunt: the animalistic fear of being chased or hunted. The fear of being prey. This is gonna be more your serial killers and anyone who "hunts" things - be it to kill or for anything else, really.

The Lonely: The fear of isolation, of being cut off and alone, being forgotten. Usually associated with fog, silence, crowds of faceless people, cold empty beaches.

The Slaughter: the fear of senseless violence. Unpredictable, random massacres. Associated usually with soldiers and war, sometimes music on a battlefield or a music band that makes you kill.

The Spiral: the fear of madness, of losing your mind. The idea that the world you know is wrong, that your mind is lying to you. Deception, lying, and deceiving. Manifests usually as spiral patterns, fractals, or hallucinations/illusions.

The Stranger: The fear of the unknown, the uncanny. That something you're looking at is just a little 'off'. This is your uncanny valley type horror, and for TMA it manifests as mannequins, wax figures, taxidermy. Also a looooot of theatre and dance performances, most notably from a Russian circus troupe so toss in your clown fears as well.

The Vast: The fear of heights, falling, of large open spaces (deep water or the open sky, of space). The human fear of insignificance and meaninglessness, of being lost in something so much larger than yourself.

The Web: The fear of being controlled or manipulated against one's will. The fear that the situation you're in was not of your own free will. Manifests almost entirely with spiders, spider-web like patterns, and puppets.

A fifteenth entity was hypothesized and later confirmed to exist, The Extinction: the fear of man-made destruction, of catastrophic change.

Most fears seem to fall more or less neatly in line with a single fear. More nuanced, complicated fears can bleed into multiple, however. A character heavily steeped in the studies likened the Entities to that of a color wheel: you can call them separate or not, but they do occasionally bleed into each other from time to time. They can never be truly separated from each other so cleanly.

With each of these Entities, there are humans in the world who fall to these powers and become Avatars. Those who both fear their Entity but also find a thrill in it. Have you ever found a particular horror story or film frightening but you love the thrill of it? Yeah, that. Once they make the Choice to become fully aligned with their patron, the Avatar must feed their patron. Each one feeds differently, but if they do not feed their patron, the patron will feed on them instead.

Jon is an Avatar of the Eye. As the Eye is the fear of being watched, being observed, his feeding is through ....well. Voyeuristic watching of everyone else's fear around him. The Institute became a place for people to give their statements of experiences, thus being a centerpoint of power for feeding the Eye directly. The Eye uses Jon to see into these experiences and the fear contained within those moments.

The thing about the Entities and their Avatars is... The Fears want to move into the real world. And to do so, their followers have been attempting rituals for centuries now. Ceremonies of built up fear and terror to unleash at once in one powerful moment and shift things a bit, remake the world so their entity can exist on the physical plane. No ritual has worked to date.

Until Jon came along.

Through Jon's working at the Institute, he started being hunted and attacked by Avatars and people of the different Entities, marking him one by one by each Fear. Once marked by all fourteen, he unwittingly performed the Watcher's Crown: the first and only ritual to succeed. In doing so with all fourteen marks, Jon successfully brought all the Entities through. Except being the Eye's ritual, the Eye still reigned supreme over them all. Which meant Jon was the Ceaseless Watcher's Special Boy, an unwilling king of hell.

It's a great time.