ARCHINT: The Ring of the Defiler

It's pale yellow with a tinge of green and shaped like a cupped hand. Your finger goes through a hole in its center, ringed with little wedges etched into the 'palm.' The words "if you take the pain/no one will take you." are etched onto the back of the miniature hand's fingers in ancient Greek along with a series of nonsense letters. It's hard to make out, but the hand is wearing an even smaller version of the ring. If worn properly, it transmutes mental pain into physical. 

Archeology identifies it as being made of electrum. You're supposed to insert your finger in through the palm side of the ring, so the hand cups your knuckles. The inscription is clearly an aspirational message meant to make the wearer fearless and immune to persuasion. If the Agents don't speak Greek, ancient or otherwise¹, they can roll Archeology to get a better translation: "if you can bear my pain/nothing shall sway you."

Despite technically being a hand with a circle in the palm, Anthropology rules out the hamsa. It's the wrong shape and lacks any apotropaic markings. But the inscription isn't any sort of curse, so it's probably safe to put on.

With Occult, you immediately recognize the 'sinister' left hand. Putting your finger through the hand is obviously supposed to represent some sort of stigmata. That with the recursive imagery of the hand 'wearing itself' makes you think it's supposed to symbolize the eternal calm of the void.

A hand? With a hole in the middle? Surrounded by triangles teeth? If the Agents are already familiar with the Defiler, only 10% Unnatural is needed to make the connection, otherwise they need 20% or a successful test. Playing around with the 'nonsense letters' with SIGINT reveals the hidden message: Y'golonac. A successful Unnatural test (or experimentation) reveals the mechanics described below. Though the Agents can get a +10% bonus to the roll for each of the above clues that they've discovered². Only warn them about its bite if they specifically ask about any potential dangers or if they roll a critical success.

If examined with the Voorish Sign or similar, the ring feels greasy and attempts to gently lick and suckle any flesh it comes in contact with.

The Mechanics

If the wearer would lose SAN, they lose that many hit points instead. If they don't want to take the damage, they can always project. The less HP the wearer has, the tighter the ring gets, until it requires a STRx5 test to remove in the heat of the moment.

The ring lacks the ability to kill, but it can still maim. If the damage would reduce the wearer to 2 HP or fewer, it leaves them at 3 HP instead and bites off their finger. This costs 1/1D8 SAN³. The excess damage is applied as a penalty to the SAN test. The SAN loss also counts as violence, helplessness, and unnatural. Temporary insanity always results in Submit as the wearer hallucinates being bricked up (Cask of Amontillado style) in a dark labyrinth and forced to experience the extreme limits of sensation.

If the wearer is adapted to violence or helplessness, losing a finger to the ring only costs 1/1D6 SAN from the two other sources, or 1/1D4 from unnatural if adapted to both violence and helplessness. The finger cannot be reattached; the ring chews it off rather than simply severing the joint. An Agent can live with a single missing finger. As a rule of thumb, two missing fingers impose a -10% penalty to tests requiring both hands, -20% for three or more missing digits.

Archeological Provenance

This ring is not a unique item. Others of its kind exist, across almost every culture in every age of history, though not all of them possess hypergeometric powers. All bear similar inscriptions, the greatest variations being due to the different languages. Sometimes they resemble a winged octopus that grips the finger with its beak. Other times, the thumb or middle finger resembles a phallus. Some are traditionally shaped, the mouthed hand icon set in the bezel as a signet with a small red gem in place of a hole.

1 And don't want to "phone a friend."  ^↩
2 A fumble just tells them that it prevents SAN loss. Alternatively, it opens them up to possession by Y'golonac as if they had read the infamous passage from the twelfth volume of The Revelations of Glaaki.  ^↩
3 The ring does not protect against this SAN loss, as the wearer is no longer wearing it.  ^↩