Torma (Spirit Trap)
Type: Item / Rules Visibility: Private
Entry
Torma (Spirit Trap)
A torma is a dense ritual object — typically a cone or stepped pyramid of packed ash, salt, charcoal, and carved bone or antler, bound with red cord and marked with symbols specific to its intended target class. The word comes from the Old Velkari tradition, where it meant roughly "offering made solid." Rootstone Keepers have used torma in various forms for as long as the tradition can document. The Demon Hunters adopted the practice later, at the Church's quiet encouragement, for reasons the Church has never fully explained to them.
The torma does not destroy what it captures. This is the point.
Construction
A Demon Hunter or Rootstone Keeper (Druid) may construct a torma during a full rest given access to basic materials: ash or charcoal, salt, bone or antler fragments, and cord. No roll is required for a general-purpose torma.
A torma targeted at a specific named entity or known entity class — a particular Qliphoth, a Named spirit with known history, a demon lord's lieutenant — requires materials gathered from that entity's territory or associated with its history, and a successful Intelligence check (target 12) to prepare correctly. Failure wastes the materials but does not cause harm.
Demon Hunters typically carry 2–5 torma. Materials for construction are available in any settled area and most wilderness hexes. A Rootstone Keeper camp, working monastery, or Church supply depot can provide materials at no cost if relations are cooperative.
What a Torma Can Capture
Torma work against entities that operate through presence, influence, and possession rather than through a physical body. They are useless against creatures that are straightforwardly corporeal — skeletons, ghouls, bears, hobgoblins. The torma offers a structured container; an entity that has no tendency to inhabit structures simply ignores it.
Qliphoth — The torma's most important use, and the only reliable means of capturing a Qliphoth. A Qliphoth does not receive a saving throw against a torma. This is not because the torma overpowers it. It is because the Qliphoth does not recognize the torma as a threat. The Qliphoth operates by suffusing, influencing, and inhabiting — and the torma's interior resembles, at a structural level, the kind of organized containing architecture that the Qliphoth was once part of before the gods fell. It enters the way water enters a familiar channel. By the time it recognizes what has happened, the binding is complete.
This makes torma the only known means of capturing Qliphoth, and therefore the only means of eventually reuniting them with the divine architecture they separated from. The endgame of that process is not yet fully understood by any living tradition, but the Wandering Tantrikas believe it is the correct resolution of the Kali Yuga crisis. Destroying Qliphoth, by contrast, redistributes their weight to the remaining ones, accelerating the problem.
Demon spirits — When a demon is defeated in combat, its animating spirit does not die. It withdraws from the material plane and reconstitutes elsewhere over days or weeks. A torma placed at the site of a demon's defeat, within one round of the creature's collapse, captures the withdrawing spirit before it can disperse. A demon whose spirit is sealed in a torma cannot respawn. This is a permanent removal. Demon Hunters who understand this use torma as a standard practice after every significant combat with demonic entities, not because they were told to, but because experienced hunters noticed that uncontained kills had a habit of producing the same demon again three hexes away six weeks later.
Incorporeal undead — Shadows, Wraiths, Spectres, Ghosts, and similar entities that operate through presence and touch rather than physical body.
Against these, the torma functions as a directed trap: When an incorporeal undead is below half it's hit points, place or throw it into the space the entity occupies and it must save vs. Spells or be drawn in and held immobile for 1d6 turns. While held, the entity cannot act but can be spoken to, studied, or transported. An incorporeal undead that succeeds on its save is not harmed, but the torma is consumed in the attempt.
The torma contains rather than disperses. This distinction matters when the entity is a spirit of someone known to the party, when negotiation is possible, or when the party needs to transport a dangerous presence without fighting it.
Named spirits — Upper-tier entities from the spirit ecology (see Spirit Ecology entry): presences that have accumulated sufficient weight to have identity, territory, and memory. Against Named spirits, the torma functions as it does against incorporeal undead: save vs. Spells or be held. Named spirits are more likely than undead to recognize what the torma is and to attempt the save with full awareness. A Named spirit that enters a torma willingly — which occasionally happens during Rootstone Keeper negotiations — requires no roll.
Mechanical Summary
Torma cannot capture: Corporeal creatures of any kind, fully material demons still in active combat, or active high-tier Qliphoth that have fully manifested in physical form (this situation is extremely rare and represents a late-campaign crisis state).
Torma automatically capture (no save): Qliphoth in their normal operating state (influence, possession, diffuse presence). Withdrawing demon spirits in the round after their material form collapses.
Torma capture on failed save vs. Spells: Incorporeal undead at half their hit points or less. Named spirits. Any entity of the above categories that has reason and awareness to resist.
Duration when held: 1d6 turns, after which the torma must be destroyed to release the entity or sealed permanently (see Sealing, below).
Torma consumed on failed capture: Yes, if the target succeeds on its save. The torma is not recoverable.
Sealing and Deposit
A torma holding a captured entity can be sealed permanently by pressing heated wax over the binding cord and speaking the entity's name or class. A sealed torma is stable indefinitely and can be transported, stored, or deposited.
The Church maintains intake structures at every functioning mandala city — architectural features integrated into the mandala infrastructure at the base of the stupa array, marked with an orange-red sigil that Demon Hunters are taught to recognize as "the deposit point." Sealed torma brought to these structures are accepted by Church functionaries without explanation or receipt. Demon Hunters are told this is "final containment." They are not told what happens after.
What happens after is that the sealed torma is fed into the mandala system as fuel.
The psychic weight of captured spirits — the accumulated force of demonic will, Qliphoth shadow-mass, the density of Named entities — converts within the mandala architecture into a stabilizing current that flows through the ley system and helps keep the cities warm, lit, and functional. The intake structures are, in the language of the Rootstone Keepers, breath-sinks: sites where unresolved spiritual weight is converted to current rather than allowed to disperse or reconstitute.
This works. The mandalas run better during active hunting seasons. Experienced Demon Hunters notice the correlation. Most conclude there is a practical purpose to the deposit protocol they were never told about. They are correct.
The Church's Interest in Demon Hunters
The Great Church publicly supports Demon Hunters as protectors of civilization against demonic corruption and undead incursion. This is true. It is not the complete reason.
The complete reason includes the intake structures.
The Church's institutional leadership — not parish priests, not most bishops, but the Dharmasena and the senior mandala custodians — understands that the mandala cities cannot sustain themselves on relic-core power alone. The relic cores are depleting. The Kali Yuga crisis is, among other things, an energy crisis. The intake structures were built into the original mandala architecture as a supplementary power source, intended to convert the psychic residue of a troubled world into something useful. This was always part of the design.
What the original designers did not anticipate was that the relic cores would deplete this fast, or that the supplementary system would become load-bearing.
The Church trains, sanctions, equips, and protects Demon Hunters because Demon Hunters produce sealed torma, and sealed torma keep the cities running. A Demon Hunter who deposits regularly at an intake structure is, without knowing it, acting as a fuel harvester for the civilization they believe they are protecting. This is not a lie, exactly. They are protecting it. The mechanism is simply not what they were told.
The Rootstone Keepers have known about the breath-sinks for generations and have opinions about the conversion process that they do not share with Church representatives. Their concern is not that the process is wrong. It is that converting unresolved spiritual weight into current, rather than properly releasing it, accumulates a kind of structural debt. The weight does not vanish. It changes form. What it becomes inside the mandala system is not fully understood even by the Keepers, and that uncertainty is what troubles them.
The Wandering Tantrikas have a sharper opinion: that the Church is feeding the mandalas with exactly the kind of unresolved material that produced the Qliphoth in the first place, and that the long-term consequences of this practice are not separable from the Long Winter itself. Whether this is correct is a question the campaign may eventually answer.
Referee Guidance
Torma as plot infrastructure: The Qliphoth capture function makes torma campaign-critical items by the mid-tier of the game. Players should understand early that torma are how Qliphoth are dealt with, not combat. A party that reaches a Qliphoth encounter without torma should face a different kind of problem — not death, but the Qliphoth escapes, moves, and the players have to find it again.
The deposit revelation: The moment players learn what the intake structures actually do is a significant campaign beat. It reframes the Demon Hunter class, the Church's motives, and the mandala infrastructure simultaneously. Drip the evidence — the correlation between hunting seasons and mandala stability, the Church functionary who knows too much, the Rootstone Keeper who goes quiet when intake structures are mentioned — before the explicit revelation.
Qliphoth and the torma: When a Qliphoth is captured, it does not struggle. It does not rage. It goes quiet in a way that feels wrong. Players accustomed to defeated enemies being dead or fled will find this unsettling. The torma holding a Qliphoth is warm to the touch and occasionally hums at a frequency that is felt rather than heard. These details should be narrated.
What to do with a captured Qliphoth: This is the question the Wandering Tantrikas have the most complete answer to, which is one reason the campaign eventually points toward them. The Church's answer — deposit it at the intake structure — is not the correct answer for the endgame, and players who have figured out what the intake structures do will know this. The correct answer involves the Radiant Vault, the relic cores, and the structural truth that only the Tantrikas possess in full.