Mask Witches Of Forgotten Doggerland [best] -

Second, the masks were psychological armor. To survive in a drowning world, one had to possess a spirit harder than stone. The Mask Witches adopted the visages of predators to intimidate the chaotic forces of nature, standing on the shoreline screaming incantations against the rising tide, a futile but defiant gesture against the apocalypse.

| Mask Type | Power | Cost | |-----------|-------|------| | Drowned Wood | Speak with submerged trees, find sunken landmarks | Witch loses sense of up/down for one day | | Aurochs Skull | Terrify rising sea spirits, walk through floodwater without drowning | Temporary blindness in one eye (the aurochs' missing eye) | | Seal Leather | Breathe underwater for one hour, know all drowning deaths within a mile | Seals will attack you on sight forever | | Child's Toy (rare) | Calm the ghost of a drowned child | Witch hears phantom crying for three moons |

The Dogger people believed that . When a person, animal, or even a tree drowned or was swallowed by peat, its "face-memory" remained trapped. Most spirits forgot they were dead. A Mask Witch would "wear" that memory to communicate, bargain, or banish. Mask Witches Of Forgotten Doggerland

A true Mask Witch never carved a face. They harvested it:

To understand the Mask Witches, one must first understand the world they inhabited. Roughly 8,000 years ago, Doggerland was a paradise of biodiversity. It connected Great Britain to mainland Europe, a rich hunting ground for Mesolithic people. But as the last Ice Age retreated, the waters rose. The meltwater from disappearing glaciers turned low-lying valleys into treacherous swamps, and eventually, the ocean broke through, drowning the land in a series of catastrophic floods. Second, the masks were psychological armor

Voss published a 90-page monograph titled The Sealed Gaze: Ritual Binding in Submerged Mesolithic Contexts . In it, she proposed that the Mask Witches were not a separate species or race, but a specialized caste of shamanic outcasts who practiced what she calls “Resonant Geomancy”—the ability to read and manipulate the subtle vibrational frequencies of the land itself.

This was a time of immense upheaval. For the people living there, the world was literally ending. In such an environment of existential dread, spiritual intermediaries—shamans or "witches"—would have held immense power. | Mask Type | Power | Cost |

The mask was small, barely the size of a human palm. It had two hollows for eyes, but these had been deliberately plugged with hardened resin. The mouth was carved into an exaggerated scream, but the lips were sealed with a second layer of resin.