Paradox?

Admittedly, Mechanomancy has one of the weakest paradoxes in the book. But I don't see a paradox, right now, either.

What I don't like, though, is how you can get a minor charge for a measly Wount Point. And then blast for 2d10 WP. Or likewise, charge up sign. for 2d10 WP and blast for firearms damage. That doesn't make sense, it's a bunch of free lunches, in the sense of the rules.

I don't see a problem with the blast. A fleshworker's significant blast is does the same damage for half the charges and both schools have to touch their target, which is a big limitation.

Getting significant charges for building things is too easy. Temporary damage for the type of devices a clockerworker has to risk permanent damage for.

Suggested changes :

Shuffle mechanomancy around a bit and call it technomancy (shout-out to White Wolf). The paradox can be something about how today's miracles are tomorrow's junk. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magick.

Technomancers can adapt electronic devices into magick ones, but the device has to be cutting edge technology. Adapting a device just takes time and money, but if you turn Zune 30 into a significant magickal device, it stops working as soon as the Zune 80 comes out.

How much you can do with a device depends on how cutting edge it is. If something is still trendy, it's probably good for minor effects. Significant effects can only be built into the newest, best, most expensive version of an item and probably won't last more than a few months before something comes out to replace it. Major effects are like sigs, but you need to get your hands on the first one off the assembly line.

ashwood - the "cutting-edge" limitation is interesting and makes a nice "mirror" to mechanomancy's "old tech only" rule.
It needs a justification though. For Mechanomancy I believe it derives from the school's connection with time - new technology doesn't have the "weight of history" behind it. Electromancy is more about life than time, however.
Which, I think, could form the core of the paradox - electrical devices behave in many ways like they were alive (and there's a conceptual angle too - "live current" etc.) but aren't.

It kind of blows that we can't edit submissions afterwards. It'd be neater to be able to add new ideas directly instead of in comments.

Number five is ALIVE!

Maybe major charges should only comes from being struck by lightning. That's the traditional way for people to bring their creations to life.

Suggestions for possible changes :

Electromancers can spend a sig charge to send a minor blast up to 50 feet.

Instead of building devices for all magic, minor and sig charges can be used to temporarily control or awaken existing electronic devices like traffic lights, computers, and automated tellers.

If you want to build a permanent magical device/servant you need to spend a major charge from a lightning bolt.

Instead of a time limit taboo, electromancers have to be careful around water. You can still drink, but if the water is connecting you to the ground you lose all your charges. No taking baths, going out in the rain, or washing your hands in the sink.

Postscript : To get a major charge without tabooing, connect a wire to the lightning rod on your roof and run it down into your lab.

The 'recent tech only' rule could be justified as follows:

All manufactured devices are ultimately dead, scrap, worthless, but after the initial creation it takes a while for them to stop twitching and notice that they're dead.

From the right perspective, the only meaningful distinction between the last gasping convulsion of a corpse and the first tentative movements of an infant is what happens afterwards.

Mr sluagh has asked it before, and I ask it again: what is the Paradox?

ashwood wrote: "I don't see a problem with the blast. A fleshworker's significant blast is does the same damage for half the charges and both schools have to touch their target, which is a big limitation."
The fleshworker's minor charge is 3 damage minimum (usually it's randomly or wantonly determined by the GM), which allows one blast. The elecromancer's minor charge is 1 damage only, and two of them net one blast.
The significant charge is indeed harder for the electromancer, I had remembered it wrong for the Epideromancer (just looked it up), but the minor charge and possible blast just look all too easy. In fact, from a mechanical point of view, there's no real risk in taking 1-WP shocks--while you never know a character's exact wounds, knowing that every shock does a measly 1 WP seems like cheating the system to me and way too predictable (for example: you have 55 Body so you know that at full health you can get 40 minor charges, very easily!), when it could just as well be structured the same way it is for fleshworkers, and have blasts cost regular amounts instead.

I like the "struck-by-lightning" deal that ashwood suggested for major charges.

From what you said, two possible "flavors" of the school come to mind - one that's focused on history's relationship with technological advances (and thus its predecessor, mechanomancy). Take the lightning-strike-major-charge - The connection with modern collective imagery and a touch of "old-school" flavor (Frankenstein, all those 40s and 50s movies and cartoons with mad scientists, etc).

Tesla's impressive displays of huge bolts of electricity that could be generated simply, efficiently, and to great practical use could have been the birth of this school? A splinter of mechanomancers who thought their school wasn't wrong, just falling behind. Clockworkers were hermits when technology was fearsome and shunned, neither of which is true (in the same way) for an industrialized world, so it's time to stop secluding themselves to dark workshops and move to glowing laboratories.

Maybe the paradox is centered on that idea of progress? They're not creating new technologies nor pioneering new inventions or devices - they're "cheating" at innovation by zombifying a dying school of magick born from a technologically ignorant world. They strive for progress in a way that can't really achieve it.

Then again, you might be tapping into people's anxieties/excitement over the increasingly blurred border between "biological" and "technological" instead. In which case, the paradox would dance on that line: These mages are celebrating and worshiping life (and see electricity as ultimately equivalent to life itself - after all, what are neural impulses, ultimately?), but they celebrate life by building soon-to-be-obsoleted machines; they express the renewing, relentless flow of life with short-lived automatons. They revere the biological success of life by shunning its organic parts for man-made metal and rubber. In charging, they celebrate the power of "life" by risking death.

There's plenty of potential paradoxes here.

Wratts wrote "The significant charge is indeed harder for the electromancer, I had remembered it wrong for the Epideromancer (just looked it up), but the minor charge and possible blast just look all too easy. In fact, from a mechanical point of view, there's no real risk in taking 1-WP shocks--while you never know a character's exact wounds, knowing that every shock does a measly 1 WP seems like cheating the system to me and way too predictable (for example: you have 55 Body so you know that at full health you can get 40 minor charges, very easily!), when it could just as well be structured the same way it is for fleshworkers, and have blasts cost regular amounts instead."

I do agree that getting minor charges is a little too easy, but the blast itself isn't an issue.

There are balancing factors :
Taboo: electromancers can't hold their charges themselves for long. After generating the charge they must either spend it soon, or store it in a battery.
- A minor charge can be retained for up to an hour, or stored in a small, handheld battery.
- A significant charge can be retained for up to a day, or stored in a car battery or equivalent.

Also, a fleshworker is likely to have high Body, high Speed, and the ability to regenerate damage. An electromancer is probably going to be a physically average guy.

Different schools have different strengths, but electromancy is not a strong combat school no matter how many minor blasts a spark can generate. Against a plutomancer or chaos mage they won't live enough to reach their opponent. Trying to win a serious fight with minor blasts just means you die with a lot of unspent charges.

I'm not even really thinking about combat there. Average stats are 45-55. With that you can generate 40 minor charges in an hour, easily. What would minor electromantic "works" need to cost at average, 10-30 minor charges? Adept schools don't make sense when they make too much sense in the sense that they're too easy to get into or have no risks inherent, otherwise everybody would become an adept.

I'm just wondering how this would work out. It sounds like it would be easier to make the charging structure more like it's been done for Epideromancy (more damage for less charges), that way it gets way easier to hammer out the costs for works like they are for, say, big bro' Mechanomancy.

That, or keep minor charges relatively cheap, and make the lifespan of a minor clockwork determined by its charges. So if you can turn out a butt-ton of minor charges (which all need to go into batteries or they'll fade away before you can put them into the machine), that's not a problem, since you'll be spending most of them to keep the thing alive just for a day/a week/whatever seems fair.

Electromancers can do more things than mechanomancers, with access to newer technology - but at the cost of longevity, which fits in with some of the school's core themes.

Just a thought.

How long does it take an electromancer to build a minor gadget? If an electromancer-gadget and a mechanomancer-clockwork that preform the same function take the same amount of time to build, then it doesn't really matter how fast they can make minor charges to power it.

Temptation is getting me to say, they don't take the same amount of time as Mechanomancers. They slap together a bunch of new-fangled electronic parts from a cell-phone, a toaster, and a computer, and voila, they have a device to melt door locks. It goes fast.

I like the idea of short lifespans, as the trade-off. It's assembled quickly, it does its thing, it breaks down.

As said upthread, "today's innovation is tomorrow's trash". Maybe an electromancer's minor works also only work for an hour before breaking down to what they really are: trash. Significant ones might hold for a week or something, they have more substance and "power" in them.

Wratts - I feel like those time limits are a little too harsh, for example, it means that a spark can never use their minor contraptions more than an hour's travel from their labs. Maybe a charge-per sort of structure, like 5 charges per hour of life for a minor, or something like that.

You could also cannibalize the rules for making magickal artifacts to good effect here - buffing up a minor clockwork with a sig charge (or two, again, whatever cost feels fair) means it has enough juice to theoretically keep it going indefinitely (until it gets broken), and so on.

How about this:

Part of the taboo for sparks - they can never repair any gizmo, mundane or magickal, for any reason. (They can make gizmos that self-repair to a degree, but when that fails, it's kaput.) Obsolete is obsolete, period. The mage can take apart their contraptions and rebuild them to similar purpose, on one condition: they are rebuilding something better than the first incarnation. If Fruit Fucker 2.0 isn't doing the job, and you disassemble it, but if you're making another Fruit Fucker you have to go beyond 2.0. This means you have to use more and/or better parts, and you have to spend more charges on it.

This is cumulative: The first time you break-apart-then-upgrade something, it costs one more charge of the appropriate type. The next time, 2. The next time, 4. And so on. Who was it that predicted technological progress would double every X years? Sparks live that out daily.

iPod breaks? You were waiting to get the new Nano. TV's fucked? You could always use a bigger screen. Robot sentry dogs torn up by unspeakable servants? Hm, how about tigers this time...running out of money to pay for all this? Figure something out, smart guy - progress ain't gonna wait up for you.

(Incidentally, and I feel kinda silly for just thinking of this now - but recovering from 40 damage takes a significant amount of time and/or money, plus they gotta spend time working on their gizmos, so it's hardly overpowered.)

Bsushi wrote Wratts - I feel like those time limits are a little too harsh, for example, it means that a spark can never use their minor contraptions more than an hour's travel from their labs. Maybe a charge-per sort of structure, like 5 charges per hour of life for a minor, or something like that.

I'm guessing the time limit on the gadget would only begin once you start actually using the gadget instead of just carrying it around.

Maybe instead of time for charges like mechanomancy or life for charges like fleshworking, it should be money for charges like plutomancy. The spark would have to buy expensive components to make his fancy gadgets which would quickly burn out and become useless junk.

Maybe a mix of both. Only when it's working, the lifespan clock starts ticking. Like Fruit Fucker 2.0. Every time you use it for 5 minutes, that's 5 minutes shaved off of the hour it lives. Sure, you can beef it up with extra charges, probably immensely with sigs. But to me, the most comprehensible paradox and symbolic tension for this school is that today's invention is tomorrow's trash. It's not like the mechanomancers, who make stuff to last an eternity by sacrificing their own past. Sparks... sacrifice their present and future for the now.

Case in point: light switches. You know, they used to be mechanical, and could last for decades. And basically, you can replace fine parts and keep the switch. But now? They're just a pile of electronic junk. If they break down, most professional electricians don't even know what the problem exactly is, and don't see the point in bothering because the price to exchange it is less than the time and fees to examine it and repair it, so they just exchange it. Same goes for computer parts, or devices like an MP3 player or cell phone. Our society throws away electronic bits and pieces all the time, because they're not meant to last a lifetime--the industry also wants you to get new stuff every few years, max. So yeah, Sparks? They can harness the true power of these new machines. But the darned things aren't meant to last, and they have to give themselves up for it.

The money angle might actually be a good match for this school. But I'm unsure about that doing it alone because to a certain degree, it makes it sound more and more like something very mundane where magic just happens incidentally. Getting zapped for that little amount and blowing money on the parts would fit, though, because it sounds alot more like you're sacrificing your future for your present. Even if it's just the power of today and trash tomorrow, you've gotta give it all you got, otherwise alot of people would have figured this school out already.


On an absolute side-note, 40 WP damage, if it's composed of 40 times a 1 WP wound (a jolly riot for the GM, by the way), will heal with a good night's sleep, no sweat. You heal 1 WP per wound, per day or night of rest, and 1 WP wounds are minor wounds, requiring no medical attention whatsoever.

I know, I know. It sounds like the exploit of the rules could be simply remedied by the GM saying something like "well look at that, you zapped yourself silly! Take a 'Growing Heart Failure'-debilitation skill at 10 under Body now, why won't you?". But still, it sounds like it's too much hassle when you could just say, take a shock wound, 3 WP minimum, blow $500 cash, say hello to your minor charge--and get some nice new electronic toy for it.

Wratts wrote "On an absolute side-note, 40 WP damage, if it's composed of 40 times a 1 WP wound (a jolly riot for the GM, by the way), will heal with a good night's sleep, no sweat. You heal 1 WP per wound, per day or night of rest, and 1 WP wounds are minor wounds, requiring no medical attention whatsoever.

Run a thin strip of sandpaper over your skin. 1 WP no big deal, heals overnight. Now run it over you skin again in the same place as before. That's not two 1 WP wounds, that is one 2 WP wound. Electromancers are frying their nervous systems the same way sitting in the front row at a rock concert damages your hearing. It adds up.

I can't find anything that suggests convalescent healing happens "per injury" like that in the rules, but either way the body is not a chain of independent parts; injuries are somewhat cumulative. Your body doesn't have unlimited resources to spend on recovery at any given moment.

$500 is expensive for a minor charge, no? Bibliomancers and plutomancers both get minor charges for a fifth of that amount, without needing to damage themselves.

Money seems like a weird thing to add to this school. It makes sense, maybe, on a societal scale - but not on a cosmic scale. Adept magick has to convince the universe to work differently; equating short-lived gizmos with creative life force is one thing, but I don't see similar symbolic strength in "the newest iPod." Compare the ideas of "the newest iPod" and "the latest technology" - money seems like an accessory to me.

Maybe it can come in at the sig level, similar to the way mechanomancers incorporate parts of special artifacts; sparks incorporate stuff that is very expensive, new, and part of an electronic device (or a whole device). Mechanomancers can get away with using non-machine equipment, like a bugle, because they don't know what they're doing, in their heyday the idea of technology itself was magickal. Not anymore.

On which note, the differences in viewpoints of technology probably have more implications for this school. Mechanomancers can spend an additional sig to make their sig clockworks a quarter of their size without losing power/functionality/etc. That cost is certainly cheaper for electromancers, in a world where technological progress and size reduction go hand-in-hand.

Mechanomancers can also make their sig clockworks intelligent, self-aware, and creative for only one more sig charge...I'm a little wary of new adepts making Cylons relatively cheaply, but the flavor's there (who hasn't heard of robots?)...maybe a similar effect (granting consciousness) drastically reduces its lifespan?

And, of course, creating a self-aware computer only to watch it rapidly degrade and die would be grounds for some serious Self and/or Helplessness checks.

How about just going off the fact that electrical devices require a power source?

Electromancers build gadgets that do stuff. That's fine. But those gadgets require charges to operate. Maybe you build a battery into the thing to hold a few charges' worth of operation but ultimately they're dependent on the spark to keep running. And only their creator can reliably charge them up, just like Personamancers can only use stolen masks for a little while.

Then you get the paradox that the mage builds machines to do things for him, but ultimately those machines are worthless without the mage.

On the convalescence per injury thing, I mixed that up, that's a house rule we've been using for forever now, I see it isn't in the rulebook at all. (Mainly to reflect that someone can heal up quickly from alot of crummy little wounds, but takes forever to convalesce from the real deal.)

Our house rule aside, though, my main problem with knowing that a wound deals 1 WP damage is that it contradicts the simple statement from the rules that players aren't allowed to know the point-value health status of their characters. 1 WP precisely of damage automatically implies that the player knows exactly what's going on behind the veil. Contradiction in terms, I'd never allow that kind of thing in my games. It also sucks the entire feeling of risk out of knowing that you're going to shock yourself. If anything, I'd phrase it as, "it has to deal at least 1 WP of damage".


On the cash thing. I'm not sure if I was even thinking of it as part of the charging structure, but it should definitely be part of electromancy's works. You can't use old stuff for it. It has to be unwasted, fresh, ready to take the energy and burn it all up. So it's going to cost you. $500 was something I grabbed out of the air, basically you could say that the price is flexible, it depends on what kind of work you're going to produce. Computer parts are probably a must, lots of different cables, and cutting edge electronic appliances. I guessed that $500 wasn't a bad starting point if the work would be doing something fairly complex. If the work just boils eggs, I guess $10-$50 should be more than enough.

My, this one's generating a lot of replies.

I think the life/obsolescence thing works best as core of the paradox.
On one hand, an electromantic creation is almost alive, and powered by the adept's own lifeforce.
On another, it's just a mockery of life that can't grow, flourish, or reproduce. So the Spark is really making a mockery of life while feeding entropy by turning real life (his own) into false life (the gadget's).

About the minor charges - I was trying to avoid the "break-down problem" inherent in Epideromancy: when one sig can be turned into 10 minors the difference between minor and sig costs needs to be proportionately great. I agree that "at least 1 WP" works better, though.

I like the idea of needing a lightning bolt for the major, it works on a lot of levels.

I prefer the blasts as touch-only for many reasons. It makes more sense (real electricity just doesn't spontaneously arc across rooms) and, more importantly, it restricts their usefulness. The zaps are intended more as a "side effect" than a central part of the school.

For the longevity of the works - perhaps an electromantic gadget should need periodic recharging? Say, one minor per day for the minor works, and one sig per month for the significant ones.

I like "can't repair, must build something new instead" as part of the taboo, it works with what I outlined for the paradox above.

As a side note on the wound points tangent here - for GMs who are nutty and feel like getting wacky to get closer to realism: The effects of zapping yourself are not necessarily simply punishments in wound points.

For instance, a boxer who keeps taking hits to the head for his career is likely to develop dementia pugilistica, regardless of how much they heal up their wounds between each individual bout, unless they take other actions to mitigate the cumulative damage. If, in UA, you treat electric shocks only in terms of wound points, you are avoiding that punishment.

This isn't to say that one can't recover fully from a shock or blow to the head, but if you submit yourself to it repeatedly, underlying damage builds up that is beyond the scope of convalescence or first aid, and will take extensive medical treatment and probably some lifestyle changes to undo.

An adept wouldn't care about these things, in-character, but for GMs who want to make sure the school is appropriately insane, and thus psychologically "expensive," enough that most people don't become adepts, they may want to consider a more comprehensive penalty.

Weak shocks (like minor charges) have their effects most directly on the part of the body that the current passes through. Repeated shocks to the same part might incur loss of feeling in that part of the body, at least temporarily. Someone who keeps grabbing a live wire might start taking penalties to do delicate things with their hands.

Someone who chomps down on a wire for their charges is asking for a whole lot of brain damage, very quickly - after five or so consecutive shocks to the head in one day, minor or sig or any combination, start taking points out of mind and/or speed skills as appropriate. Reaction time and the ability to process thoughts quickly, or recall distant memories, gets injured relatively early on, so things like Initiative, Eidetic Memory, Juggling, Brain Surgery, etc., are going to lose at least one point.

And so forth.

Charging for this school might be kind of a pain for the GM committed to realism, because the lethality and harm of the shock depends on the current, frequency, voltage, and person. On the other hand, I do like the idea of a school whose magick has to do with something other than their body, pays for it with their body - generally, it's one or the other.

Sorry, that got longer than I'd planned. Bio nerd.

Actually, it's quite easy to track a bit of realistically nasty damage in UA. Take a debilitation skill: it's a skill you write down under a stat. Whenever you roll under it, bad stuff happens. Depending on what it is, you can't buy it off with XP. Lung Cancer (Body), Motorically Dysfunctional (Speed), Nervous Breakdown (Mind), Irritating Twitches (Soul), etc. If you roll under them at the same time as rolling the stat or related skills, you screw up. We've had them in our games at one point or the other, for instance when someone takes 50+ WP at once and survives, or has some really weird lifestyle which leads to significant health problems (adepts are usually prone to that).

Personally? Any adept school which significantly bends reality, should be taking some real damage from it (mental, physical, social, spiritual, financial, sexual, etc.). After all, if it were so easy that they could just bend reality for fun and no consequence for it, everybody would be an adept. Taking permanent cuts on stats and skills can be a high price. But if we're talking about an adept whose power is fairly limited, it doesn't have to be so harshly cut down on. I was just arguing for the sake of uncertainty with WP ratings.

I think what I was really on about was that WP are one way to hurt an adept who wants to charge up, but we have to keep in mind that WP aren't always that horrible, in terms of the game. Alot of UA games end up not involving any physical violence, so getting hurt a scratched or cut a little bit is only a marginal to non-existant threat. Social repercussions, let's say for example for an Epideromancer, can sometimes be greater than the actual WP ratings!

So, just an idea, but maybe instead of taking WP from self-shocking, it may be possible for the adept to take up debilitation skills. Maybe, to some degree, you can buy it off with XP. After all, Mechanomancers can buy their lost Mind points back too. If it's that painful, it probably wouldn't have to hide itself behind Mechanomancy or other adept schools, power-wise. Just be different.


As for re-charging the spark's works, I think it's pretty cool if it just stops working altogether when it runs out of juice. You could just build the same work again, and you can keep one working for a little while, but you can't re-charge one that stopped working.

Maybe I'm a big meanie, but I like the idea of the "sparkworks" dying for good when they run out of juice - and it being a violation of taboo to rebuild them (as above).

I'm with you on the "WP isn't the only price, or all that taxing always" train. That's what I was trying to get across.

Debilitation skills are handy (I've used them mainly for severe smokers, etc.), but a little limiting: while it's safe to say that lung cancer isn't going to drop your mind score, electroshock-induced neuropathy can mess with virtually anything.

From the lazy-GM side of things: I think UA is trying to be as streamlined as possible, and I think cutting points out of stats or skills, or penalties, are much easier and smoother to work with on-the-go than adding new skills, which modify a whole bunch of existing skills on top of that.

But this is now more a personal-choice thing than a kinks-in-the-system thing.

"Injury is more than WP loss" is realistically true for more than just electric shocks, of course. It's just complicated enough that it's hard to make any hard-and-fast rules for it.

Realistically, Dipsomancers would be facing all kind of permanent harm down the road too (this is even acknowledged in the book - think of Dirk Allen and his liver), but few folks active in the Underground live long enough for such things to matter.