(aka Outbreakers, Hypochondriacs)
You were probably a sickly child. Your parents worried and fretted because you were always so sick and weak. The doctor was on speed-dial before your grandparents were. You kind of just flowed with each new disease, taking whatever was coming. It wasn’t so much you wanted to be sick at the time, as much as there wasn’t a whole lot you could do to really prevent it.
Oh sure, you took medication near constantly, and your room was kept immaculate, but you still got hit by the flu bug, the chicken pox, the mumps. It was just something that felt obvious, clear. Disease was very near and dear to you. Where your friends skirted the edges, afraid of catching whatever you had that week, the viruses, bacteria and germs stood by you. They made you sick enough that you wanted to die, but they were there at least. That was what counted.
Then you started getting healthier, your immune system had fought most of the bugs you’d come across, and left you all alone, no longer unique, no longer special. So, you panicked and started faking. You sought out new germs, new viruses. Maybe you even went to medical school, looking for some new disease to add to you collection. What matters is, you made the breakthrough, that diseases are no longer just medical, but social. You can take on the appearance of a very sick person, and then you become that sick. When you’re that sick, people care for you, watch out for you, each one making the disease that more real.
The central paradox is that as much as you fake the diseases at hand, you can never be healthy enough to not be sick. You ignore the diseases do you have, and treat the diseases you don’t have. After all, if you did it the other way around, you wouldn’t be diseased anymore, would you?
Epidemimancy Blast Style:
An Epidemimancer blasts others the way you’d probably expect, turning all the welled-up diseases in their bodies against their rivals, turning them into sickened, diseased husks of flesh. The problem is, disease isn’t exactly that personal and it gets kind of greedy when it comes to who it can infect. An Outbreaker acts as a sort of Patient Zero for the blast, spreading it to everyone in range, including friends, family or allies. Additionally, anyone already sick with something is immune to the blast. Disease has already claimed that one, no need to create conflict over the matter.
Stats:
Generate a Minor Charge: Recover from an untreated virus or germ on a minor scale (common cold, chicken pox, mono). Convince at least one other person that you are sick with a minor disease. Spread an actual disease on a minor scale to at least 10 other people.
Generate a Significant Charge: Recover from an untreated virus or germ on a significant scale (anthrax, smallpox, polio). Convince at least one other person that you are sick with a significant disease. Spread an actual disease on a significant scale to at least 10 other people.
Generate a Major Charge: Recover from an untreated virus or germ that is usually fatal or a death sentence (Ebola, AIDS, the Black Plague). Convince at least one other person that you are sick with a fatal disease. Spread an actual fatal disease to at least 10 other people.
Taboo: Ever letting yourself to get treatment for any diseases you personally have, and not treating the diseases you are just faking. The untreated diseases you carry with you are ear-marked to contain the power of your charges. To get treatment for these diseases would be to destroy the charges you have.
Equally important is keeping up the illusion that you are sick from another disease. If you don’t continue treating it until you “recover”, the illusion is broken and your charges are flushed.
Random Magick Domain: Epidemimancy is about contagion, illusion, disease and infection. At its heart, of course, Epidemimancy is about the perception of yourself and other. An Outbreaker can infect others with a disease and convince them they’re perfectly fine, just as he can convince them that he’s as sick as a very sick dog.
Starting Charges: Starting Epidemimancers begin with 2 minor charges.
Epidemimancy Minor Formula Spells
Just Another Bug (2 minor chrages)
This is the outbreaker’s minor blast, as described earlier. It costs two minor charges to initiate and extends to ten feet. Every minor charge burned beyond the activation cost increases the area of effect by an additional five feet. Any person in the range of the blast takes minor-blast damage in the form of one of the outbreaker’s untreated diseases. The disease is otherwise mundane, and can be treated with antibiotics or the old reliable chicken soup. As said earlier, anyone already diseased (like the Epidemimancer) is immune to the blast’s effects.
Starve a Fever (1 minor charge)
This summons up a demon, who speaks to you telepathically. Keep in mind that the spell does not give you any power over the spirit you called, nor anyway to get rid of it if things get out of hand. Instead, the significant Epidemimancer spell Feed a Cold is used to control the demon.
Mm-mm Good (1 minor charge)
You can perform your next action without the penalty of your untreated diseases. If you use this in combat, remember that you need a round to cast this spell, and the next round you can take an action free of penalty.
One Louse Can Kill (3 minor charges)
This allows an outbreaker to pass a spell onto another person, who can then pass the spell onto another and then another. And then another. Usually by the time the spell actually goes off, the Epidemimancer is far enough away from the problem that no one would suspect his involvment.
Epidemimancy Significant Formula Spells
Plague (1 significant charge)
This is the significant blast of the outbreaker. Base range is now twenty feet, and each significant charge spent in addition to the first increases the range by ten more feet. It does significant-blast damage, however, and causes a rank-4 Helplessness stress check for contracting such a terrible disease.
On Medication (2 significant charges)
Similar to the pornomancy spell Synchronity or the oneiromancy spell Lucid Dreaming, On Medication allows the caster to put himself into a trance-like state which will take the outbreaker to the solution he needs. The caster has no memory of the trip, and “wakes up” at the location, clue, or puzzle piece that provides an answer.
Feed a Cold (1 significant charge)
This spell allows you to control a summoned demon. Keep in mind that demons tend to be contrary jerkwads and will do their very best to screw you over on general principles-even if they gain nothing by their treachery.
Psycho-Somatics (2 significant charges)
This spell allows you to convince someone of a disease enough so that they truly begin to exhibit symptoms of the disease. The terrifying part is that so long as they truly believe they’re afflicted with the disease, it is just like a mundane example of it. Convincing a person that they’ve contracted AIDS means that they are now capable of passing on the disease to others through exchange of bodily fluids.
Epidemimancy Major Effects
Infect an entire community with a virus. Return from the dead. Create entirely new diseases to be spread at your whim. Convince a community that they are a leper colony.
For me one of the central reasons for paradox is that the magician lifestyle is unhealthy, physically and mentally.
Although fine, a magic school that deals with disease would be more effective if the character had to contract diseases and NOT treat them, let them run riot through his immune system – eventually turning the magician into a incubating vector of the diseases he has.
I’m fiddling with this type of magic school myself for a bunch of nasty plague bombs.
Cheers,
Chris.
One concern to be aware of – Major charges are pretty easy to get. “Hi, I’ve got AIDS.” “Yeah, the hair fell out during Chemo.” etc. Most people will be easily convinced that someone is suffering from a fatal disease – after all, what kind of sicko would fake something like that?
I would say that getting the diseases should be the major charge, but that would make getting AIDS worth a major, and frankly, getting AIDS these days isn’t that hard, and since it leaves you alive for a while it isn’t that bad. (NOTE: I’m not saying that it isn’t bad to have AIDS, I’m saying that if I was going to have to choose a fatal disease, AIDS would be higher on my list than, say, Ebola.)
Ebola kills in a few days, whereas AIDS will take its sweet, sweet time with you. Admittedly, both will straight away do you in, but its a question of speed.
Oddly, when you catch Ebola, *right* away you become the center of attention for epidemiologists. If you have AIDS, you’re a just another statistic.
There’s a guy who lives in the bus station in Portland, with a limp, and a cardboard sign, reading “DYING OF AIDS. PLEASE HELP.”
You see someone holding a sign with “HAVE EBOLA. DEAD SOON”, and you can guess who I’m donating my coffee money to.
AIDS doesn’t actually kill you. It just makes it very, very easy for other bugs to kill you. I wouldn’t let a Major charge go with simple HIV infection, it would have to be full blown AIDS, plus a secondary infection that constitutes a direct threat to your life.
I’d say that having full blown AIDS would screw with the charging methods, making minor diseases more severe. Thus a minor cold bug would lead to AIDS pnemonia, while a significant disease is boosted to major status.
Of course, without a functioning immune system, it’s damn near impossible to actually recover (and thus gain charges) from any ailment without medical treatment, so it’s a mixed blessing.
Now, that’s just sick.
Ha!
In my own defense, the way I pictured Major Charge gaining is more difficult then I may of been able to express. The recovery from the disease is one of those 100 billion-to-one shots, especially sans any treatment WHAT SO EVER for the disease.
Second, convincing another person that you’re suffering from a fatal disease when you’re not would mean you’d eventually have to well, die. And since you actually have to treat the fake disease as the real disease, you essentially have to fake your own death from the inside. Meaning someone “dying” from Ebola is going to have to start forcing up blood from any number of orifices or that someone “dying” from AIDS will have to get weaker and weaker as he takes medication that doesn’t do anything for him and prolly makes him sicker because he’s drugging himself while his actual diseases run rampant and untreated.
Admittedly, the spreading of a fatal disease to 10 other people is relatively easy given the character flaws of an Epidemimancer, but I’d be remiss to not mention that all a Thanatomancer needs to gain one is ritually sacrifice one of his children or a spouse to gain one. That’s just one person, an Epidemimancer would have to directly contribute to the deaths of at least 10 other people to gain one in that fashion.
Still, I appreciate everyone’s comments on the matter, and I’ll take them into consideration if I ever draw this school up further.
I think the minor charging is to easy:
“Convince at least one other person that you are sick with a minor disease.”
Get on a bus, cough a few times and blow your nose, loudly, that’s twenty charges, right there.
If I would run this school I would not use the “convince” as charging, but rather as an adittional taboo.
As some people have pointed out, there are a few areas that could use some cleaning up…
But I just wanted to compliment you- this is a GREAT idea for a school, and is well thought out and written.
Very UA. Good job.
Oh, I agree – I like the core concept. That’s why I’m commenting – I like it enough to want it to work -better-.
I’m not sure what I think of the “convince” charging. It feels a little too easy. But you want the adept to always look sick. That’s the “cool visual” for this school: the thin, pale, sickly looking guy who coughs into his hand and then throws the wet sick at you – and when it hits, you just _know_ that he gave you Ebola.
Maybe change the taboo: you cannot ever look healthy – the perception of illness keeps you strong, nobody cares about the sick person who looks fine, and if you aren’t sick you won’t be special any more.
But what about the treatment question? I’m not sure. I see two different paths for this school: the hypochondriacs and the Petri-dishes.
The hypochondriacs get their charges from making people think they are sick – but they only care about people who they will interact with. Who cares if you convince some joe on the bus that you’re sick – you need to convince your coworkers, your family, the people in your life. But there are two catches. First, you can’t ever get well from your “disease”. Second, after you convince someone that you have a disease, to charge off them you need to convince them that you have a different disease as well. Hypochondriacs charge quickly at first, but then they run out of people to convince… and they desperately look for another disease.
Petri-dishes charge off actually catching the disease. They have a different catch – they only charge off a disease once. You want to get another hit? Get sick with something different. Petri dishes can also rack up a ton of charges at first – but they also start to desperately look for new things to catch.
I’m not really happy with these, but maybe they will spur someone else into something interesting.
I too would split this into two branches, the dishes, and the fakers. As for the fakers’ major charging, since they focus on the social aspects of being sick, I’d say that they would have to become personally associated with a disease they do not actually have.
It might not be have to be national, but in some large population, you would have to become the posterboy for a disease. Imagine that “Pedro” guy from one of those Real Worlds, but without actually having AIDS.
Perhaps replace the demon dealing with a form of astral projection, as it ties in better with fever-visions and being a the alienation felt by the sick.
And what is up with all those demon-dealing spells anyway? Control over demons doesn’t really call out to me from the concept in general. Isn’t it about surviving disease?
Well, looking at it, the school is about surviving diseases, but coming as close to death’s door in the process as possible. Demons are esentially just what’s on the other side of death’s door, so it had made sense at the time I wrote it to have demon-dealing spells.
Still, the astral projection bit sounds pretty good too.
Something I’d add to the hypochondriac branch: perhaps they could also get charges by having unnecessary medical procedures performed on them? (There are people in the real world who’re obsessed with being hospitalized or having surgery performed on them, and will do anything to convince doctors they’re sick, including swallowing all manner of inappropirate objects.) Adding this as a charging method would tie that in, and would also be less ambiguous than just convincing someone you’re sick; either you get the procedure or you don’t.
As I picture it, you’d get a minor charge for getting a prescription for a medication that’s prescription-only, or minor out-patient surgery. A significant charge would be in-patient surgery or a major medical treatment (chemotherapy, for example). A major charge would require seriously life-altering treatment (a heart transplant to replace your perfectly healthy heart, or a bone marrow transplant to treat your non-existent leukemia). For balance reasons, you’d have to convince the doctor(s) you actually need the treatment; you couldn’t just have your friend the psychiatrist abuse his prescription privileges. The minor charge method might also require you not to repeat doctors in, say, a three-month period, since it’s probably not that hard to find a soft touch who’ll prescribe antibiotics for anything.
Something I forgot to add; you’d also need to take the medication to get the minor charge, since not doing so would be an admission you’re not actually sick.
Perhaps you’ve only truly “convinced” someone to you’re sick if you get them to act in a way that shows they belive you; the busload of charges wouldn’t count unless they either avoided you (like the leper you so desperately want to be) or offered you kleenexes.