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URNOVIMy 2d, unasked for but sod it…
IMO less in UA is most definately more. If you were to do TP as a UA game then you have Dale Cooper as an ordinary FBI agent with a Soul stat in the 80s and a skill in Visions or summat similar. Bob and Mike both simply become Demons in the UA sense of the term. Laura Palmer simply becomes a terribly unlucky girl and Leyland an equally unlucky man.
The thing with the blackboard and the rocks is either a ritual, or Cooper being plan weird (another thing to remember when running UA is that people should periodically do things that have no particular occult power whatsoever)
There is no need whatsoever to make anybody a nascent Archetype or indeed even an Avatar.
URNOVIThe Taboo is just “can’t harm a snake,speak badly of snakes, andyou generally have to takeevery opportunity to tell people how totally l33t and k3we1 snakes are.
Yup, you can just cull them afteryou’ve blown all your charges, but I tend to assume that most Adepts really don’t like breaking Taboo, even if they’re “empty”. Ifyou habitually do or avoid doing something for any reason,you’lloften carry on doing or not doing it after the reason goes away.
URNOVINot really, snakes will live, what a couple of decades, and theremust be hundreds of diferent types (remember it’s “do not currently own” not “have never owned) so odds are you can keep a constant throughput of snakes fairly trivially.
Of course even worse, you could buy a snake of a given type, getthe charge, and then give it away to a good home (it would have to be a *good* home, or you’d break taboo),bingo,a sig a week at no risk.
Or for full on farce value,two herpemancers can sell one snake back and forth between the twoof them,gaining a charge each time it changes hands….
The more I think about Herpemancy, the more I don’t like it
URNOVI… continued
And finally, Herpemancy is *far* **too** ***powerful***. Because Herpemancers can do anything a snake could do in mythology, they can do pretty much anything. They can affect the body on a par with Epideromancy, and the mind on a par with Cliomancy. Their Taboo (never be nasty to snakes) is trivially easy to keep.
And they’re immortal.
Sorry, didn’t I mention… their top level spell (that is to say, the one that costs 4 significant charges) makes the subject 10 years younger. Compare this to the Thanatomantic spell of similar purpose, which costs one significant charge and makes you one year younger. The Herpemantic spell (a) gives you ten times as much life back (b) heals all your other wounds and injuries as well. Sure it costs 4 charges as opposed to 1, but lets not forget that to get 4 Herpemantic charges you need to buy four snakes. To get one Thanatomantic charge you need to ritually sacrifice a human being.
Fans of PoMoMa may recall the precise line “this is why this school is so tempting, you can live forever at the cost of one murder a year”. Read that line and the amoral bastard in all of us starts weighing up whether or not it would be worth it. It’s cool, it’s seductive, it’s dangerous. Frankly “you can live forever, and all you have to do is buy a snake every two and a half years” doesn’t compare.
One of the glories of UA is that its magicians are scary on two levels. They’re scary because they can kill you with a glance, and they’rescary because the *reason* that they can kill you with a glance is because they regularly gamble their own lives for shits, giggles and mystical power. Being scary because you own a bunch of reptiles doesn’t compare.
Quite frankly if I’d found Herpemancy on this site I’d have assumed it was written by a well intentionned fanboy who thought that snakes were kewel and didn’t entirely get UA. Seeing it in an otherwise fine sourcebook is terribly disappointing.
URNOVIThey *do* say that the two are often incompatible, and there *is* the bit where they talk about separate Avatar and Adept undergrounds (actually, I’m not a terribly big fan of that section of the book, I think it implies more organisation than UA needs) but it is definately *possible* to be both
URNOVIActually, Adept-Avaters are perfectly permissible, hell it’d be massively hypocritical of them to say “you shouldn’t be an Adept and an Avatar” and *then* give us the Freak, Jeeter, Gerlinde Unger and the half dozen or so other Adept/Avatars that exist as canon NPCs.
Where the Fool/Entropomancer thing becomes sticky is with the second channel (or is it the third…) which allows you to avoid the consequences of taking risks. IMO I wouldn’t allow you to get charges from risks you avoided with this channel (basically it gives you free Bulletproof Chutzpah, and that spell stops you getting charges while it’s up)
The problem with a Fool/Entropomancer crossover is that while they *are* both about walking blithely into danger, they’re about doing it in completely different ways.
The Fool walks into danger because he knows no better, the Entropomancer walks into danger because he *does* know better. These two paths aren’t terribly compatible. That being said, there is a get out. Because an Avatar doesn’t have to actually *believe* in his path, you can combine the two by **looking** like you’re walking blithely into danger when actually you’re building charges. This keeps you on the path of the Fool and of the Entropomancer. However the moment the Fool starts protecting you from danger, you start breaking Taboo for Entropomancy.
URNOVIOn Five fingers then a hand…
Here I’d apply the law of diminishing returns. Losing a finger doesn’t change your life, so you only get a sig. Each subsequent finger you cut off changes your life no more than the last, so you still only get a sig. When you cut off the rest of the hand, you’ve already messed that hand up so much that its loss doesn’t affect you, so you still only get a sig.
URNOVIThe way of it doesn’t matter, and the difference between an eye and a testicle is simple. Losing an eye (a) seriously affects your depth perception and (b) has some serious mythic resonances. By comparison you can function perfectly normally with one testicle.
Yes a man that sacrifices a testicle voluntarily is a freak, but so is a man who obsessively hordes books he never reads, that doesn’t mean that bibliomancers should be able to claim major charges from getting hold of the only extant copy of the book that their flatmate wrote but couldn’t get published because it was rubbish.
Getting a major charge should take, well… balls. Anything that involves half hearted copping out should not give you a major charge.
URNOVIPersonally, I’d only give a significant charge for it. Yes it is **technically** permenant damage, but major charge damage should be a serious issue. It shouldn’t just *hurt*, it should dramatically alter the way you live your life. Similarly I wouldn’t give a major charge for cutting off fingers, because you can get by just as well on 9 as 10.
I’d also note that the **real** clincher is this line…
“I would never go as far as to sacrifice both… Just can’t do it.”
Then dammit you don’t **deserve** a major charge. If you wouldn’t go that little step further, then you aren’t dedicated enough, strong enough, stone-cold-crazy enough to actually pull off a major charge.