How do you control Fargo?
For the last 20 years, a cabal of three dukes and one avatar have been using this ritual to ‘keep control’ of Fargo, North Dakota. They thought it was known only to them… but there’s rumors that the reason Fargo had a mild winter last year is because someone discovered the details and is using it against them.
Snowblind
Cost: 8 Significant (2 each from 4 people)
Steps: Four people gather in a central location, joining hands in a circle around a snowball made from last year’s first winter snow (the snowball must be kept in a freezer so it doesn’t melt all year). Each person chants a four-line stanza four times, cycling through English, Zulu, Chinese, and Russian, with no two people using the same langauge at the same time. The people then drop hands, turn 180 degrees clockwise, and travel until they reach a point where they form the corners of a square that is five miles on each side. (Math majors, you cna figure out how far that needs to be). The chant must be said again, in unison (Modern technology has made thi smuch easier than it was in the old days). Each person than cuts the second knuckle of their right pinky finger deep enough to bleed, and drips three drops of blood into their left eye without blinking. The blood must dry in place (again, contact lenses make this much easier to pull off) and then be plucked from the eye and buried between that person’s feet.
Effect: If successful, this ritual bestows an interesting ability to the four who perform it. From the first winter’s snow until the last, they turn invisible while snow is falling on their uncapped head. (For purposes of this ritual, “snowfall” implies at least a quarter-inch an hour.) However, if any of the clots of blood are dug up, this effect ends instantly. If all four are dug up and burned at the central point, any snow the region gets for the next d10 years will rarely satisfy the 1/4 inch an hour requirement for the ritual to work again.
so people use this ritual to become invisible to control happenings in fargo? a couple questions: why would someone want to contol fargo, nd? i assume this can be done anywhere that gets enough snowfall? are people just taking over fargo to satisfy their megolomaniacal urges because they know this ritual and it snows a lot there?
p.s. the people would have to walk a little over 3 1/2 miles from the center.
Main reason I can see for taking over Fargo is because of the iconic power of owning a famous “small town”. (Lake Woebegon would be a better choice, but unfortunately that town doesn’t exist.) There is a lot of American myth centered around the small town, from Norman Rockwell through Steven King. If you own a “small town”, you can probably come up with ways to bleed some of that cultural perception into mojo… or use the power to create a little fortess. An urbomancer in a small town can’t fight with the big boys, but if you come to his turf, expect a nasty smack-down.
what book is urbomancer from? is that a standard ua2e school? i am only familiar with 1e.
Urbano-mancer.
I’m pretty sure it was just misspelled.
unless the Urbanomancer wasn’t in 1ed…
Sorry… right. Urbanomancer. It was in Post-Modern Magic. If you haven’t seen it, the core idea behind it is that you get power though studying and changing the city you live in, and your magic focuses upon controling the city. The problem is that you can’t leave the city for long. (And you break taboo if you touch the soil/dirt of the city.) Anyway, I think it’s a really great concept, and I think a ton of the weird things we see in cities can be explained by this. I just want to know what’s up with the Big Dig out in Boston…
There’s a good one. Do Urbanomancer’s break their ban if they touch the snow covering ground/dirt? If there’s a healthy snow in New York City, would that mean Central Park, for yet another reason, is not a safe place to hide from them?
That’s a good question. A straightforward reading of the rules would suggest that only touching the dirt (or touching it through shoes, presumably) would break taboo, since having someone throw it at you is enough. (Very _The Anubis Gates_…) But if asked to rule as a GM, I’d say that the root of the taboo isn’t dirt per se, but contacting something that symbolically hasn’t been brought under control of the city…and since snow is a natural phenomenon (unlike, say, cement) it shouldn’t offer any protection. That’s just my opinion, though.
Shoes protect you from the dirt. It has to touch skin.
Perhaps Fargo is hiding something very, very important… of course there’s not many things there… there’s only enough room for that one, big thing…
Being invisible in lightly falling snow, or any snow, is a really, really creepy power. I like that. And for maintaining control in a town with a lot of snow… yeah.