Unknown Armies

Adepts

Effingomancy

Magic is your magic...

Effingomancy

From an early age you knew magic was real, and as an adult you had no trouble confirming that. You discovered the Occult Underground almost immediately, and became knowledgeable about its workings. You spent a great deal of time researching magic, determined to become an adept, but found you just weren't obsessive enough about anything. You didn't like cutting yourself, getting drunk, using drugs, or reenacting the acts of the naked goddess. You just wanted their power. All of it. And knowing that they had it and you didn't filled you with rage and jealousy.
Then, one day, you found yourself able to copy it. Magic itself had become your obsession.

Nicknames: Welchers/Leeches

Trade Charges: Most effingomancer charges come from other adepts. (see “Minor Spells”)

Generate Minor Charge: Study or teach about the occult for a full day of at least 12 consecutive hours. This can mean going out and trying to see it first hand, writing on it, reading your own notes, or anything else that helps you or someone else to learn about the occult underground. You can also use the Charge Trade spell.

Generate Significant Charge: Defeat an adept of another school at a contest involving magic. You generate two significant charges if you beat him with magic exclusively from his own school. The adept is free to refuse, but if he accepts he is incapable of using a major charge until the contest is complete (you are not required to tell him this, and if the contest is unfinished, too bad for him).

Generate Major Charge: You must kill and adept with a major charge in a violent manner. You get two charges if you kill him with spells exclusively from his own school. You must know he has the charge. You are not stealing his charge, you are making a new one from an act of supreme jealousy and rage.

Taboo: Effingomancers must never let another member of the occult underground disrespect his school without attempting retribution. For this reason, most other adepts are reluctant to tell Effingomancers just how pathetic they think they are, welching off the magic of others.

Symbolic Tension: Effingomancers gained their powers from jealousy and hatred for adepts. However, they constantly try to emulate that which they hate, and are dependent on other adepts, both for charges and to learn new types of magic to copy.

Blast: Can copy any with the standard penalty.

Spells
Effingomancers have spells of their own, but can also copy any spell that they have personally seen used with a -15% penalty to all roles directly related to the spell (including damage dealt to others. Any spell dealing damage to the Effingomancer does so normally.).

Minor Spells
Identify Adepts
1 minor charge
For one hour the effingmancer can tell who is an adept, what school he/she is, and how many charges he/she has, by looking at them. This works through binoculars. If you look at a video or picture of the person you will know how many charges they have at that moment.

Charge Trade
1/2 of transferred charges, rounded up
With mutual consent, effingomancers can transfer charges from another adept to themselves or vice versa. Half the charges of each type are lost, but this is often seen as a practical bank among adept schools that frequently break their taboos. This can be used to give a significant or major charge to a school that cannot generate them normally.

Significant Spells
Burnout
3 Significant Charges
An adept losses all of their charges. This does not effect spells already cast. The effingomancer must be able to see the target.

Major Spells
Effingomancers can technically copy the major spells of others, but they'll almost always use a major charge to either improve their own use of magic (ie remove the penalty for copying permanently), or attack someone they're very jealous of (ie block their magic permanently).

Notes: I plan on revising this a lot later. I didn’t want to make the class totally dependent on others for charges, but I wanted to make generating charges very hard. Also, I thought giving them the power to steal charges directly could make them broken. I intended this class to be a player-character at street level, but an NPC antagonist at global or cosmic. My assumption is that any of them that reach that far would most likely have become very anti-social, if not outright homicidal, towards other members of the Occult Underground (although you might be able to work something out with Avatars).

What You’ve Heard: James Donovan is an Effingomancer. He comes from a wealthy family, never needing to worry about anything of real importance in his life, he went out looking for kicks, finally discovering the Occult Underground, and becoming determined to join it. After gaining his powers he worked as something of a mercenary for some time. Later he hooked up with Sean Taylor, professional trucker and Viamancer. They now roam the country, Sean producing charges, and James stockpiling them.

Azazel | profile | Apr 13, 09 | 7:47 pm

Visitor Comments

I dunno about the entire premise - seems a bit too close to the "you can't use magic to make magic" prohibition.

"Parasites that hate their hosts" is kinda paradoxical, but building the OU right into the charging structure seems off.

I'd allow it as an NPC school, though, because the implications are terrifying.

"The Underground itself is well-known enough to base an entire school off of..So who the HELL is waking the Sleeping Tiger that regularly?!"

As a note, though, this could get hilariously broken with just a little teamwork. Get a Dipper to work with you, and have him donate a portion of his charges before he sobers up... You could easily stockpile several dozen Minors a week just because it's harder for you to Taboo out.

Antagonish | profile | Apr 13, 09 | 8:09 pm

Like I said, I'm going to rework this, and I'd love all feedback doing it, and you've brought up some issues that do concern me.

As for the OU being well-known enough to spawn its own adepts, aren't most members of TNI and the Sleepers just regular people? Not to mention that most of these people would start out street-level anyway, so even knowing that the guy down the hall from you can make his pet rat find things he lost would be enough. Also, it seems like magick would be something people would very likely to obsess about. Although, I might want to redo the description, so it doesn't sound like finding out about magick was easy. (if not I could change it to specify that they can gain the class and a minor charge from investigating BS that they believe to be real, and then they just have to be in the right place at the right time and cast Identify Adepts)

As for the broken, yes that concerns me alot too, and I'd appreciate any advice on ways to rewrite it without making them too weak (make them lose more than half and it would be almost impossible to get charges WITHOUT a dipper). It's why I put the penalty on non-class spells. I also assume that role-playing could help to balance things here. They hate other adepts, other adepts hate them, so both parties would likely be reluctant to trade too many charges.

Azazel | profile | Apr 13, 09 | 9:23 pm

BTW, yes, I do realize now that this class as it is does violate the Law of Obedience, at least when they give charges to others. But since getting charges from others IS part of their path, that they can do. Changing that could help to balance the class a bit, since they'd be limited to Effingomancy spells, and other spells which they had a penalty to perform.

Azazel | profile | Apr 13, 09 | 11:37 pm

The Trade Charge spell/feature? I'd ditch it altogether, personally. For one: it violates the spirit of this adept school. If Effingomancers really despise adepts, they wouldn't bank it for them, they'd rather just keep it. For another: the cosmos says no to other adepts cashing out banked charges (while it somehow doesn't break the Law of Obedience for Leeches, it breaks the Law of Obedience for all other adept schools). Something more like pure spell-stealing would seem more appropriate to me... maybe to do that, they'd have to look into another adepts insides or brain (very literally!), or suck in the last dying breaths exhaled by an adept they're strangling to death.

Burn-Out. 3 sigs and you wipe the slate entirely clean for any adept you can perceive somehow? Really? I'd rather say, make it so there's a sort of Burn-Out spell for each magnitude (Soul Gash, Burn-Out, Mojo Nuker?). 6 minors wipes out all of the adepts minor charges (it seems like Leeches can get minors easily, but so can most other adept schools), 3 sigs wipes out all of the adepts significant charges (these may be a bit trickier for a Leech to rack up), 1 major charge can wipe out another adepts major charges... sounds more right to me, but that's just me.

There's no reason for the cosmos to go easy on Effingomancers, after all they're straining the unnatural boundaries as far as they can possibly go.

Awesome idea for a school, though! I'm amazed nobody else came up with the concept before. And yeah, I'd re-word the intro too. Boil it down to the fact that these adepts simply study, analyze and (sometimes literally) dissect people with real unnatural power. Because that's what they do -- they don't even have to be aware of the Occult Underground, they're simply aware that there are people who can work real mojo. They realize that they can steal that mojo with mystical thievery and passionate murder. They covet the secret powers of the freak-o's living down the street.

Wratts | profile | Apr 14, 09 | 5:14 pm

I'm already frantically revising here, but the issue with stealing charges directly is that it could, conceivably, make the school even MORE broken than trading.

As an alternative, though, what if I made the charge trading exclusively one-way (they can take them, but can't give them back), and limited it to minor charges. This would have two advantages:

1) They'd have alot more trouble giving people good reasons to give up charges (often times resorting to literally buying them by providing the means to another charge).

and

2) As they became more advanced, and start looking for sigs and majors, they become increasingly anti-social. For sigs they have to beat other adepts in some magical contest, and for majors they have to (possible change here) kill an adept with magic from their own school (putting the effingomancer at a disadvantage).

This would also help to ensure my original intent of ensuring that protagonist effingomancers appear only in street level campaigns. Above that they'd be so intent on trying to get sigs and majors, and so much of a nuisance (why should I waste my charges on this pointless contest in which I stand to gain nothing?)/danger to all other adepts that the only way to get minor charges would be to torture/threaten people in agreeing to a trade.

Azazel | profile | Apr 14, 09 | 6:30 pm

Just throwing this out, but i would make the taboo a lot more of a bitch for the player, possibly to the point of making them adhere to other schools taboo rules depending on where they got the charges. It also seems odd that this school can generate charges at all when the whole premise is to leech charges.

LiquidXlr8 | profile | Apr 21, 09 | 4:54 am

I think there should be a spell for stealing spells. The "use any spell you have seen at -15%" is quite powerful, and might be better tempered if you have to steal the ability to cast it first.

Mattias | profile | Apr 21, 09 | 7:09 am

What would happen if two Effingomancer's met each other?

Spoonbridge | profile | Apr 27, 09 | 8:42 am