An ancient, dying shamanic Adepthood path, the natural enemies of demonic Lycanthropes.
The Lycanthromancer:
AKA Werewolves (and Werecats and etc.),
Humans are only animals that walk upright, and have thumbs, and huge pretensions. You have walked the inner city, where the illusion breaks down, and once again life becomes a drama of predator and prey, the quick and today’s entree. The players change, but the drama remains eternally the same. You know. You can play the part of the ravenous monster so well.
Description: Shamans have been learning how to transform themselves into animals for millennia, but with the growth of Freudian psychology, and the popularity of Crowley, the philosophical underpinnings of Lycanthromancy have become more popular. The essential paradox of Lycanthromancy is that in order to physically transform into an animal, one must give up the psychological elements that made them human in the first place. As one might expect, this Adepthood path is popular with Avatars of the Savage Archetype.
All Lycanthromancers must choose one form of animal; that is their totem, and their specialty. The Lycanthromancer cannot transform into or use any other form of animal except their totem.
Lycanthromancy Blast Style: Lycanthromancy has no blast. Instead, its practitioners transform into animals and rip your throat out.
Stats:
Lycanthromancy powers cannot be used to generate charges.
Generate a Minor Charge: Do something embarassingly or strangely animalistic (should require a Self, or maybe some other, check). Have sex with someone unattractive, or someone you normally hate, just because you want sex (not because it’s convenient, they’re drunk, etc.) and express no regrets over it. Eat a steak, raw and bloody (not even rare). Chase a runner, growling and snarling. Swim naked with the dolphins.
Generate a Significant Charge: Do something illegal or dangerously animalistic (should require a Self, and maybe another, check). Kill someone with your bare teetch and fingernails (no fancy martial arts allowed, although you could go all kung-fu and deliver the coup de gras with your pearly whites).
Generate a Major Charge: Do something blatantly or grotesquely inhuman (requires a Self-10 check, and maybe some other check at 5 or higher). Copulate with an animal. Live naked with a wolf pack for a month. Take a permanent vow of silence (like, with a knife). Cut off your thumbs (darn shame about hitchhiking).
Taboo: The Lycanthromancer must not restrain themselves from showing their true emotions. All Violence, Helplessness, and Self stress checks are at -10%, and if the character ever has less than 10 total hardened notches in these three gauges, the Lycanthromancer loses all charges and cannot gain more.
Starting Charges: Lycanthromancers start with one Significant and two Minor charges.
Lycanthromancy Minor Formula Spells:
Bestial Endurance:
Cost: 1 Minor Charge.
Effects: The Lycanthromancer can heal themselves of injury, by licking their wounds (or just dabbling their saliva all over them, for those hard-to-reach areas). This is exactly like the Epideromancer spell Regeneration.
Foe of the Forest:
Cost: 1 Minor Charge, or 2 Charges to ingratiate one’s companions as well.
Effects: This nifty little trick is one of the few in the Lycanthromancer bag that heightens one’s human attributes, specifically that of the human’s smell. The Lycanthromancer projects an aroma of danger and threat, that warns other animals (of all kinds) to stay away.
Leader of the Pack:
Cost: 3 Minor Charges.
Effects: The Lycanthromancer can impress their dominance on the members of a pack (or herd, or murder, or whatever) of their chosen creatures. They will accept the Lycanthromancer as their chosen sovereign, and generally follow the Lycanthromancer about, doing what they say. The spell instantly elapses if the Lycanthromancer leads the pack into an action that is blatant suicide, or completely against the species’ instincts, unless they pay an additional minor charge for each 1d10 rounds of performing the proscribed action.
Power of the Beast:
Cost: 2 Minor Charges, or 3 Minor Charges if the attack is also poisoned, electrified, etc.
Effects: The character temporarily gains one natural combat ability of their chosen sort of creature, through a minor act of shapeshifting. The character cannot gain gross physical changes in this way (such as growing a scorpion’s striker tail), but can make minor modifications to their anatomy (such as growing claws).
Senses of the Beast:
Cost: 1 Minor Charge, or 2 Charges to gain all of the animal’s senses.
Effects: The character temporarily gains one sense of their chosen sort of creature, through a minor act of shapeshifting, or all senses if the character spends 2 charges. The character cannot gain gross physical changes in this way (such as growing antennae), but can make minor modifications to their anatomy (such as modifying their eyes to process ultraviolet light, or modifying their noses to make them more acute). This power can grant a shift of up to +50% in combat against certain adverse conditions (such as fog, darkness, etc.), but cannot increase the chance to hit beyond the base normal for the character.
Summon the Pack:
Cost: 2 Minor Charges.
Effects: The Lycanthromancer can summon the nearest members of their chosen type of creature to their side. the effect only lasts for about 10 minutes, so trying to summon a timber wolf in Saharna Africa might not wok too well. If the creature arrives, the Lycanthromancer typically casts Leader of the Pack immediately (for 1 less minor charge than normally needed).
Totem’s Eyes:
Cost: 2 Minor Charges.
Effects: The Lycanthromancer can see through the eyes of one of their chosen animals. Otherwise, this is identical to the Urbanomancer spell Vermin’s Eyes.
Lycanthromancy Significant Formula Spells:
Become the Beast:
Cost: 1 Significant Charge.
Effects: The character transforms bodily into a creature of their chosen sort. The character canot do this while “normal”, i.e. non-Adepts, non-Avatars, and non-Unnaturals, are looking on. While transformed, the character has the typical Skills and physical Stats of a typical member of the species, but their Mind score is at -1/2, or -20, whichever is worse (to a minimum of 1). The character can transform back into a human at any time, provided no one is looking (as stated above).
Born Free:
Cost: 2 Significant Charges.
Effects: Lycanthromancers and demonic Lycanthropes are dire enemies, since Lycanthromancers want humans to fulfill their “ultimate” nature by returning to a natural state, but demonic Lycanthropes just want to tear shit up. This spell dissolves the tripartite soul of a demonic Lycanthrope, releasing the demon and animal spirits from the human to which they’re bound. The demon is granted a Soul roll to resist, but for each additional siggy charge, the roll is at -15%.
The Dolittle Trick:
Cost: 1 Significant Charge.
Effects: The character can speak to animals of their chosen kind. Of course, most animals have limited intelligence, and what interests a human isn’t likely to interest them that much, and the creatures might still be a lot more interested in eating you than in chatting.
I Want to F*** You Like An Animal:
Cost: 1 Significant Charge.
Effects: You fill the target human with an unreasoning lust, that overcomes their reason and sense of composure. This is identical to the Pornomancer spell Number Nine.
You’re All Pigs!:
Cost: 3 Significant Charges for the first 5 people, plus another Significant charge per additional 5 people.
Effects: You transform others bodily into an animal of your chosen sort. If the targets are not Lycanthromancers, they are shaken and confused, and their Mind score is therefore at -2/3 (or -30, whichever is worse). They must make athe following Stress checks: Self-10, Helplessness-8, and Unnatural-5. The effects lasts only about 30 minutes, but during this time the targets are fairly vulnerable, and afterward they’re pretty likely to be pretty freaked-out. This spell cannot go off if there are any “normals” in the area that the spell will not affect; Adepts and Avatars may make a Soul check to avoid being transformed.
Lycanthromancy Major Effects: Transform someone else into an animal, permanently. Gain the natural powers of the animal in your human form, permanently.
Here’s the path the way it was Supposed to be.
Kinda wish I’d read the “So You Want To Write A School?” first, I could have really emphasized the “Everything is permissible!” / modern psychobabble aspect of the school more.
Ok, I’m flattered:-)
and some more psychobabble would have worked, yes.
Also, it would have been cool to have something about the effect the “dying” (it’s supposedly a dying path) has on the… I dunno, the charging system, maybe…
Cryptomancy (PoMoMa) is dying, and has some limitations, check ’em out and invent your own!
No way should any path fork out a major charge just for screwing a cow.
I dunno… I’d interpret that as ‘screwing a cow in full public veiw, acting in as many respects as possible like a cow yourself, and not acting all embarassed afterwards.’
Still, Menzoa has a point. Ok, so you fuck a cow in full view of… say, the farmer (what, should you send out invitations?), acting like a cow, not being embarrased about it, making the required rolls… Ok, might be tricky, but….
I can do it all again tomorow
and tomorrow
and tomorrow…
A better charging for major charges is to become a beast, without magic of course. In UA it’s doable, but really, really tricky.
Or perhaps, better yet, scratch major charges altogether. It’s a dying school, makes sense. With some rumours about how it was possible, but noone knows how anymore, or that it had something to do with Dragons, the Pheenix, Roc, something like that…
As a paranthese, to many of these do-it-yourself schools have major charging ready. I like Oneiromancy, where it’s more metaphysical and perhaps impossible. Small schools just beginning should have Major charging under the “what you hear” or rumours section. (I like how in the beginning of Weep, Violet, an adept of the fairly well-researched school of Plutomancy, has no real idea of exactly how much money is needed for a major charge)
I could see leaving out Major charges altogether …
OTOH, I don’t see that Lycanthromancer Major effects would be all that impressive.
Permanently change someone into an animal? More humiliating than death, but removes you from the action just the same. Give yourself permanent night vision? So what, get a pair of UV goggles. Summon a LOT of animals? Unless your totem is squirrel or pigeon, they might take months to arrive in a major city …
Other schools can blow up buildings with major charges, but not this school.
Either no major charges (dying school), or unimpressive major effects, either should work.
Also: it occurred to me that I may have contradicted myself; this is a dying path, and yet becoming more popular.
The “demographic” of the school has drastically broadened in the past few centuries, from aboriginal peoples to industrialized (and neurotic) nations. However, there are still almost no Lycanthromancers around compared to, say, Amoromancers or Entropomancers.
Animals are just not relevant to the mass urban consciousness anymore, except maybe as pets, cartoon characters, stuffed animals, and subjects of episodes of “Crocodile Hunter” and “When Animals Attack”.
Were-Poodles
I think the major charge could work as written.
“No way should any path fork out a major charge just for screwing a cow.”
Surely it would have to be the right sort of animal. If your totem animal is a cow, then your magic is going to be pretty pathetic.
A Weretiger, on the other hand, you get some power. But how easy is it to screw a tiger, while in human form, without using any of your smaller spells to pacify the animal?
My dog used to dance on two legs when I would feed her energy, then make my face into that of a wolf, she would freeze, or growl, or turn away her face
You can try this charging scheme too:
Minor Charge: Modify yourself to look like some animal cosmetically and go about your normal business for an hour. This may include face paint, sticking on false whiskers etc. Alternatively, eat a vital part of an animal (i.e. heart, groin etc) raw: note that this may force various Self and Violence checks, in addition to opening yourself to potential blood poisoning.
Significant Charge: Undergo surgery to make a part of your “animal totem” part of yourself. Anyone remember the tiger guy who had whiskers attached to his face, complete with tattooed stripes? That’s what we’re talking about here.
Major Charge: Undergo surgery to make a huge part of your physical self similiar to your animal totem. This may include drastic business such as realignment of your innards to become that of your totem animal’s etc. GMs, feel free to slap on permenant drops to stats, hit points etc.
Let me give my two cents on how you can change this:
Minor Charge: Behave in a way normaly associated with you animal totem. Example:
– Cat: Lick yourself to clean a dirt spot on your clothes.
– Dog: Bite to cure an itch.
– Crow: Stop what you are doing to pick up shiny objects (that are not yours, and not necessarily valuable) and take then home.
– Cow: Take some grass from the ground and munch it for some time.
– Wolf: Eat raw meat and without the aid of utensils.
Remember, you can’t cause the situation knowingly (So no throwing random shit to the floor so you can pick it up). It need to be something normal happening that your character respond by acting like an animal.
Significant Charge: The same as above, but do it with a public being aware of it. Alternatively, pass a whole day with just the company of you animal totem and try to mimic his behavior.
Major Charge: Go a full year being a savage, only getting company from your animal totem. Alternatively get a full body surgery to look like your totem.
Taboo: You can never let anyone change your behavior other than yourself. Being changed means that you are being tamed, neuthered and turned into a pet of a bigger person. You can never allow that, you are free, free like the alley cat, like the stray dog, like moking bird. Rules worth, you can never fail a self check caused by someone else trying to change your behavior. Every time someone try to convince you to not act like and animal, it causes a self check.
I have a serious problem with both methods of charging proposed.
The original makes getting major easy as hell. You shouldn’t be able to stack majors simply by working. Porn actors who work for the Zoo Philia (the filter doesn’t let me use it together) market would get those atleast monthly. And it’s the point of their work to be seen. So you actually are giving them godlike powers for working on their normal jobs. Also, no weakning the effect of Majors. Majors are called Majors for a reason. They are capable of shifting reality, and should remain at this level, anything under that must stay at sig or minor level.
The looks based one is just to impractical for anyone. Surgeries require atleast 3 months in between them for recovery of damaged tissue. Serious surgeries, like facial restructuring would require around a whole semester. So, only two sigs a year would be too slow. Sigs must be acquired at in a weekly base. When slow, at least 1 a month. Also, you will probably be locked to 20 sigs for your whole life (There’s only so much money and space in your body to cut). Something that is this hard should grant a whole set of sigs.
And the last, the whole changing your body internal structure. Majors are supposed to be one in a lifetime, not automaticaly fatal. Biology would never allow you to do such a thing. And you can’t use your powers to survive, or else, you could just use the spell that let you change your body for the same purpose. Getting a major this way would just mean you wouldn’t be able to live long enough to wake up and use it. We need to remember that the player is still a normal person, there’s the old colorary: A bullet is a bullet. So anything that would kill in real life, kill here. No super science can save you.
I’m not fighting anyone here, it’s just that people don’t think through when making the charging and taboo, and as such, make it completely unusable. Either it’s too easy to abuse, or it’s to impractical to use. Both methods show examples of this. And need to be adressed. I know that because I did it too. Maybe a rewrite should be handy.