Phlebotinium powered by deeply unethical means in Tabletop Games.
- Deadlands:
- All Arcane (non-Badass Normal) powers work this way. The setting has it as an explicit rule. The soul involved is inevitably your own. Except for Blessed and Shaman powers, which only require adherence to your religion and (in Shamans' case) proper rites. You still do the sacrifice, but it's voluntary and only involves limiting yourself.
- While not known in Deadlands: The Weird West, it is common knowledge in the Wasted West that ghostrock is made up of souls, which scream and wail as you burn it.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- A few creatures such as demiliches can trap souls and fuel spells with these.
- In the Dark Sun setting, use of arcane magic, by default, drains life force from the environment around you, killing plants and leaving the soil infertile for years. Widespread use of such magic led to the world of Athas becoming a desert wasteland. Magic users who embrace this are called Defilers; those who learn to use magic without harming the environment are called Preservers. The respective advantages and drawbacks of Defiling vs. Preserving varies from edition to edition. In second edition, Preservers advanced in power more slowly than Defilers. In fourth edition, Defilers can drain life force from their own allies to empower their magic.
- The creation of permanent enchantments in AD&D2 involved the decrease of the Constitution attribute. The Forgotten Realms (Volo's Guide to All Things Magical) has the "Blood Link" spell, which allows the vitality of another sentient creature instead of the caster's own to be sacrificed for permanency (though this could compromise alignment, like most lifeforce-draining effects). Which also explained how drow and Red Wizards got tons of magic trinkets.
- Vhaerun grants a spell allowing the caster to drain levels (lifeforce) for use as charges for magic items.
- Continued in later editions, with slight modifications. In Third Edition, permanent magic item creation requires spending XP. Note that XP and levels in this game represent life-force: many vampires and similar creatures literally drain your levels when they feed.
- Mystara has a nuclear reactor of some crashed spaceship that became a magical power source, with some training allowing its users to try a divine ascension. Those who fail the attempt are sucked inside and become more fuel. Later, its accidentally ascended original operator made a copy free of other (worse) side effects.
- Too many examples in Ravenloft to mention them all; perhaps the nastiest was Azalin's Doomsday Device, powered by the stolen souls of his murdered enemies and the collective life forces of every living thing in Il Aluk, greatest city in the game setting. Also featured in Dance of the Dead, a Ravenloft novel, in the form of an enchanted riverboat powered by captive fey and magical beasts.
- Spelljammer had the Lifejammer helm, a magical device that allowed ships to travel through space by draining the life energy of creatures placed within it. Death Helm is the same with Charm effect, so the victim who failed a saving throw will fight off attempts to pull them out of this.
- Book of Vile Darkness supplement:
- It features a foe called the Dread Emperor who uses this trope. He wears special golden armor that has four small children attached to it by lengths of chain. When hurt he can drain life from the children to heal himself. Players wishing to take him down (and who wouldn't?) must find a way to deal with this or risk sacrificing four innocent lives in the process. note
- The book also includes the Soul Eater prestige class, which allows the player to gain strength and abilities by bestowing negative levels on their enemies, essentially draining their life force. The player can eventually take their victim's appearance and all of their abilities if they kill someone this way.
- Liches in 5th edition have to maintain their phylacteries with a steady stream of victims' souls or the magic preserving their undead bodies starts to falter.
- Exalted:
- The magical material known as Soulsteel is...well, filled with the aware, agonizing souls of the imprisoned dead (not surprisingly, Wraith was a big influence on Exalted's Underworld).
- And Starmetal is made out of the bodies of (usually) minor gods, although in this case, the gods in question are not conscious (with one non-painful exception).
- Perhaps the most literal case in the setting is the phylactery-womb, the device that the Yozis use as the staging point and storage device for Infernal Exaltations. Her name used to be Liliun once, and she was a daughter of the Scarlet Empress, traded over as part of mommy's botched deal for immortality. Now she's been twisted and violated in a number of senses, left barely lucid and babbling, just so that she can serve as the perfect receptacle for the Infernal shards. Her Dad, however, has never stopped trying to find her, and when he finally does? he hired one of the Anathema (a Lunar Exalted, which the Immaculate Faith teaches are evil monsters) to get his daughter out of Hell. He was willing to throw his lot in with creatures he THINKS are insanely evil, who he's fought against his entire life... just to get his little girl back.
- There is also the 'Mephitic Engine of Desolation', a necromantic device that prevents prayers from reaching gods and the heavens. It's created by the ritual torture and sacrifice of five children... Suffice to say, the details are unpleasant.
- The game Fairy Meat (a spin-off from the Knights of the Dinner Table comic) involves characters eating parts of each other to regain health.
- An almost literal example in Hunter: The Vigil – Dark and Light, where the Magisters of Economie get their powers from using comatose Princesses as power sources.
- In Magic: The Gathering, this is a staple of black cards. The whole concept of black mana is sacrifice for selfish, personal gain— even to the point of sacrificing bits of yourself. All colors have some sort of ubercard that's cheap to use but has some drawback. Black, however, is the king of this, with a hideous number of cards that allow one to do quite a lot of awesome things, but cost you creatures, land, life, cards in hand, cards in graveyard (a viable resource for black, so not something to be sneezed at), or something else. One makes you lose the game if you don't win by the end of your next turn. Some especially notable examples:
- Lich
is a classic. It essentially turns you into a Lich— you lose all life, but do not immediately lose the game. Instead, you can discard cards in place of damage taken. If you are unable to discard, then you lose. - Another notable early example is Lord of the Pit, an extremely powerful creature for its cost that requires a sacrifice of one creature per turn or it turns on you.
- The infamous Necropotence allows the player to trade life for more magical power and knowledge (i.e. draw cards). One common combo is creature removal (i.e. killing creatures), discard spells, and the Avatar of Woe, a huge creature which normally costs eight mana (two of which have to be black), but is discounted to just the two black mana if there are a total of ten or more creatures in all graveyards. This card was so powerful it has been banned or restricted in most formats.
- In the game's backstory, Urza collapsed Serra's Realm, killing everyone inside, to activate the powerstone core of the skyship Weatherlight. Also, during the Invasion block, when Urza led a group of planeswalkers into Phyrexia to destroy it, he powered the bombs he planned to use with the soul of the planeswalker he expected to betray them. Which was justified, in that he was right.
- Lich
- Paranoia has this when you ask what the incredibly Dystopian society is eating. Depending on the version, it's everybody who dies, or everybody below Blue clearance who dies. Including children. (Or just bland things like algae and synthetic protein, but even then, people accidentally falling into food vats is disturbingly common).
- Old World of Darkness:
- In addition to preying on humans to sustain themselves, the vampires of Vampire: The Masquerade can perform diablerie— feeding on their elders to improve their generational status, though if the elder has sufficient willpower, they can take control of the diablerist's body and use it as their own.
- Taking it more literally, in order to cast the Dark Thaumaturgical ritual "Sojourn into Hell" (which opens a gate into Hell itself), you must first make sure nobody is waiting to set you on fire for even considering it, and then wash an entire wall with children's blood.
- Similarly, there's the Thaumaturgy ritual Innocence of the Child's Heart, which allows a vampire to hide diablerie lines in their aura. The name of the ritual is... extremely apropos.
- In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, most supernatural items known as Fetishes (no, not that kind) are powered by a spirit that's permanently bound into the item. While most werewolves prefer to strike a voluntary bargain with a spirit, others may skip the "voluntary" part...
- Mage: The Ascension:
- It is possible to extract quintessence (the energy that makes reality real) from the life force of a willing creature. Many mages use their own life force. Some use specially reared livestock. A few villains use specially raised children. (A larger number of villains will attempt to use unwilling sacrifices, but this creates enough "resonance" opposed to the intended effect that it cancels out any potential benefit. They either don't notice or don't care.)
- Characters in Mage: The Ascension with enough skill in the Spirit sphere could bind spirits, and were considerably more likely to substitute coercion or brute force for diplomacy.
- In Wraith: The Oblivion, the spirits of the dead — which would include the characters — can be boiled down and forged into anything from furniture to money. If that weren't bad enough, the unfortunate victims used to make this "soulsteel" remain conscious, and those who carry soulsteel items can occasionally hear them weeping.
- Chronicles of Darkness:
- In Genius: The Transgression, materials like these are called Larvae. They constitute any item that invoked an Obligation roll to obtain, and offer increases to efficiency. Earlier editions followed up the section on Larvae with the quote from Doctor Orpheus at the top of the page. Notably, it is explicitly stated that the power of Larvae comes not from any property of the materials themselves, but from the mental effects of being willing to do immoral things For Science!: If a player comes up with some way to obtain the same items ethically, they provide no special bonus.
- Vampire: The Requiem:
- Since it doesn't have the concept of 'generation', it handles eating other vampires differently: if you chow down on someone more powerful, it boosts the power of your blood, expanding your capabilities. Sufficiently potent vampires, however, end up needing to feed on other vampires to survive.
- Speaking of Vampire: The Requiem, this is the trope around which the Belial's Brood faction known as the Mercy Seat is built. They are based on gnosticism and believe that the world is evil. It is possible to leave this evil world and reach a higher realm of existence, but in order to do so, they must basically damn someone to hell in order to rectify a cosmic imbalance. The more innocent the sacrifice was, the better the chances of leaving this world. Allegedly. The fact that there's a bunch of evidence, both in mechanics and fluff, to back their assertions up is another trope.
- Mage: The Awakening:
- The Sourcebook detailing the Seers of the Throne includes their special servitors. The Myrmidons are fairly standard inborn Super Soldiers (although they are cursed to have to follow any command given to them in a certain language) and the Hive-Souled are Exactly What It Says on the Tin. The Grigori (a kind of ghost spy that can sense and follow the connections between people and things) and the Hollow Ones (people who can have their personalities rewritten), on the other hand, are created by wrapping a person in a shroud which tears out their mind and reworks it, and exposing someone to an Eldritch Abomination which eats the part of their soul which lets them have any semblance of individuality (and the personalities they can be given are inevitably temporary), respectively. Neither process can be reversed.
- And, as in Ascension before it, a mage can gain mana from sacrifice. Most sacrifice their life force or their physical capabilities (both eventually get restored), but they can also sacrifice other living creatures. Trouble is, to do so they have to kill the victim— and humans give more mana than animals.
- Princess: The Hopeful:
- The Court of Tears leeches the very possibility of goodness and hope from the world to fuel the magical lanterns that protect their fortress city of Alhambra from the Darkness.
- The Court of Mirrors has the gems created by Enduring Beauty. They are one of the most powerful magical resources in the setting and can be used for any number of impressive feats, but in order to create them, you have to literally peel the beauty off someone's face, leaving them permanently disfigured.
- Leviathan: The Tempest: As befits their Lovecraftian nature, the power of a Leviathan's Ritual is in part determined by how depraved the Ritual is. So (for example) killing an animal would generate very little power (if any), killing a human and cutting out his heart would generate more, and having one of your followers kill his sister and eat her heart would generate even more.
- Shadowrun introduces technomancers in 4th Edition, an evolution of the earlier Otaku concept who are fully capable of manipulating the Matrix with nothing more than their brains. Many megacorps have a standing bounty for technomancers. As of 5th Edition, the Matrix has evolved to the point that Hosts, or website equivalents that can be fully accessed, are woven out of a formless sea of evershifting concepts known as Foundations... and it's strongly implied that this new form of the Matrix is built on the brains of thousands of dissected technomancers.
- There's also a form of bioware that works just like a wireless version of a datajack, allowing a more direct connection to Matrix-enabled devices without having to plug in. Guess where that came from.
- Warhammer 40,000 universe:
- The Imperium of Man has the Astronomican, a giant psychic beacon essential for warp travel. Originally powered by the Emperor's immense psychic strength, the device is later powered by the souls of ten thousand psykers (daily) trained for the purpose. The Astronomican's extreme psychic energy requirements cause the psykers' deterioration and death in only a few months. A constant stream of sacrificial psykers is therefore required to power the Astronomican.
- Although at least the psykers who power the Astronomican are trained, and see the giving of their lives as their last and greatest duty. A similar process of soul-draining is used to feed the Emperor, and their compliance is... not so necessary.
- Psykers are also required to maintain a ship safe during Warp travel. They are intentionally put into a coma and kept in hybernation, and their dream-state in this particular condition projects a bubble of realspace (the Gellar field) that's essential to shield the ship from the evil entities that roam the Warp. Needless to say, this treatment eventually kills them.
- In the Ciaphas Cain novels, there is a mention of "tasty, nutritious Soylens Viridians".
- It's also implied that some of the longevity treatments that allow even Puny Humans with enough wealth or ranking to live for a few centuries are made from children. Even sympathetic and otherwise heroic characters are known to use them, just to show how fucked up the setting is.
- There is one variant noted in the early fluff which involved cloning a person, applying some phlebotinum to cut-and-paste said person's soul into the clone, then spending a couple of decades (re-)teaching it skills and brainwashing it to think it was the original. Sure, it runs afoul of the Continuity Problem, destroys the soul of an innocent, and wasted 20 years back in school, but hey, what with the other treatments out there, this body's good for another 2-3 centuries or so...
- Then there was an infamous incident with "Sororita" brand armor paint, where Grey Knights responded to a daemonic incursion by flaying a group of Sisters of battle alive and using their blood in wards. This rapidly became Fanon Discontinuity on account of one sample of Incorruptible Pure Pureness using another this way out of fear of being less than incorruptible jumping the line between "grimdark" and "moronic". A later novel somewhat rectifies the incident, claiming that Grey Knights asked Sisters politely and Sisters willingly sacrificed themselves to finish off the daemon army. They are zealots raised in a culture that worships martyrs after all. The same novel claims that a LOT of Grey Knights magic war gear literally works on the souls of innocents.
- To say nothing of the Drukhari (Dark Eldar) rejuvenation process. They literally feed on the suffering of other sentients. Are they conflicted about it? Fuck no.
- The Imperium of Man has the Astronomican
- Yu-Gi-Oh!: In the "Duel Terminal" plot, the Allies of Justice used the Genex creatures to power their armor, until they started getting desperate. Then they skipped asking the Genex for help and straight-up lobotomized them.
