AKA Literati, Romantics

The Literamancer.

Great Authors are remembered for a reason. They knew all of the secrets of life and they transcribed them in the pages of their greatest works. For this, they weren’t just ‘immortalised in prose and verse’. They live still, the new Gods of this world, and their paths to enlightenment are plainly written in black and white, for those with the wisdom and devotion to see. Those such as yourself.

You always loved books. Each one that you read had a magical effect on you that took you to a different, better world that made your own reality feel jaded and flawed by comparison. That world, you decided, was more real than the “real” one, for there you found real love, real courage, fear, good and evil. The creator of that world surely hadn’t been writing just for the fun of it: if simple words on a page could conjure up another world in your mind, he was nothing less than divine, and his words were your commandments. By following those commandments, you found that you could bring some of the power of his world into yours.
Reading broadens the mind, they say. The paradox of Litermancy is that it actually does exactly the opposite. Your god is a jealous god who allows you to follow no others, or to aspire to divinity yourself: his power abandons you if you read the works of any other authors, or dare to write more than a sentence.
Blast Style
Literamancers can make bad things from their Authors’ books happen to their victims. Depending on what the Literamancer specifies, this can either happen immediately or once circumstances have conspired to make it possible.

Stats
Generate a Minor Charge: Perform an act of devotion to your Author. You can either read one of his or her books for an hour, or apply your Author’s wisdom to one situation that you find yourself in. That is to say, you do whatever one of the Characters from your Author’s books would do. If you can think of a quote that suitably illustrates the situation, you get another Minor Charge.
Generate a Significant Charge: Convert someone to your faith. This happens whenever another person verifiably reads one of your Author’s books cover to cover, and enjoys it. You must have some kind of confirmation of this before you get the charge, e.g. when they go and buy the book themselves, or read another of your Author’s works of their own volition.
Another way to get a Significant Charge is by impersonating one of your Author’s Characters for at least 1 hour. This must be done in public, and must include changing your clothes, appearance, voice and mannerisms, and going by the Character’s name. This becomes a bit easier if you get involved in some kind of literary enactment group, or have an opportunity to perform in a theatre dramatisation of one of the Author’s books.
Generate a Major Charge: Give up your real identity, leave everything from your real life behind and permanently become one of your Author’s Characters. See George C. Scott in They Might Be Giants for a good example. Apart from the alienation from just about everyone you’ve grown up with and ever known, there are a couple of risks associated with doing this.
First, only one person can be a given Character at any given time. You don’t get the charge for turning into Gandalf if someone else has already done it, so one of you has to back down. If you were the one who had the Major Charge and it’s you who chickens out, you lose it; its effects are cancelled if you’ve used it already. Second, you’re running a big risk of getting committed, and if the shrinks can cure you the charge is gone.
Taboo: You lose all your charges if you spend more than 1 minute reading any written material other than that by your Author. Pity about rituals, isn’t it? Similarly, more than 1 minute spent writing is an unforgivable presumption of your Author’s divine powers.
Random Magic Domain: Litermancy is all about turning fiction into fact. Specifically, Literamancers make the world conform more closely to the worlds created by their Authors, which some have equated to the Platonic realm of ideal forms. They can make things that happen in books also happen in real life.
Starting Charges: Litermancers start with 4 Minor Charges.
Charging Tips: The amount of Minor Charges you can get depends mainly on how long you spend reading, but a minimum of 1 charge a day is realistic and easily achievable.
Getting Significant Charges becomes a bit easier if you can get together with other fans and act out scenes from your favourite books in public, which is why quite a few Literamancers are keen amateur dramatists.

Minor Formula Spells
Memory Like a Book.
Cost: 1 Minor Charge.
Effect: You can cast this spell after you’ve read one of your Author’s books. It allows you 10 minutes of perfect recall of every single word, and is basically just like having the book in front of you.

I Read About This Somewhere.
Cost: 1 Minor Charge.
Effect: If you fail a stress challenge and can think of a very similar or identical problem faced by a Character, you score a success instead if you can cast this spell. You can also cast it pre-emptively if you know you’re about to face something that’s likely to freak you out totally.

Just Like My Hero.
Cost: 2 Minor Charges.
Effect: For the purpose of making 1 skill roll, you can “borrow” the skill rating of one of your favourite Characters, i.e. one that he or she is famously good at. For instance, it’s common for Literamancers with Conan Doyle fixations to give themselves the Notice skill of Sherlock Holmes.

Mightier Than the Sword.
Cost: 2 Minor Charges.
Effect: This is the Literamancy Minor Blast. When you cast it you think of an injury sustained by one of your Author’s Characters, and if the roll is successful the exact same thing happens to the target. You can’t inflict permanent damage with this – you need a Significant Charge for that – but for an extra Minor Charge you can tailor the effects to hit the victim with something seriously hindering, like the flu or a broken limb.

Literal Revelation.
Cost: 3 Minor Charges.
Effect: To cast this spell, open all of your Author’s books and think hard about a problem that’s bothering you. Then close your eyes, open a page at random and read the first thing you see when you open your eyes again. Some kind of answer will have presented itself, although it may require quite a bit of interpretation. You wouldn’t normally think that anything in Pride and Prejudice could help you to avoid getting your fingernails pulled out by people you owe money to, for instance, but you never know.

Significant Formula Spells
The Word Personified.
Cost: 1 Significant Charge.
Effect: Concentrate hard and get a firm mind’s eye picture of what you imagine one of your Author’s Characters to look and sound like. Your appearance and voice will then change to match that image. This effect lasts until you’re alone again – it only works when someone else is around to see you.

Deeds, Not Words.
Cost: 2 Significant Charges.
Effect: To cast this spell, tell your target about something that one of your Author’s Characters did, and then make the roll. The target will then feel compelled to do exactly the same thing unless it’s wildly out of Character, in which case your magick roll has to beat his Mind stat.

Literal Curse
Cost: 3 Significant Charges.
Effect: Choose a ghastly fate suffered by a Character, e.g. the death of Hamlet by poisoning, and cast the spell. The universe will then conspire to inflict the same end on the target, causing damage equal to your successful magick roll. Depending on what happened to the Character in question and your victim’s present circumstances, this spell may or may not take effect instantaneously.

Altered Disposition.
Cost: 4 Significant Charges.
Effect: This spell makes the target behave exactly like a Character that you specify for a duration of 24 hours. First, however, you must make sure that the target is familiar with the Character, or owns a copy of the book that he or she appears in. This can be beneficial if the Character is wise and charismatic, or malign if you choose a total asshole instead.

Ask the Author.
Cost: 4 Significant Charges.
Effect: Literati think this spell allows them to commune directly with the ascended souls of their Authors in the next world. If the Author just happened to become a demon, it does exactly that. More often, however, the spell puts the caster in touch with another demon, often a Ghost Writer (see Postmodern Magick, p. 131). They tend to have enough literary knowledge to manage a credible impersonation of the desired Author, so the Literamancer usually ends up none the wiser. Indeed, common or garden demons rarely bother answering such a summons unless they’re desperate, stupid or actually smart enough to con the caster. Of course, Ghost Writers invariably want the caster’s body so that they can continue writing, leading more than one Literamancer to have woken up and found what he thought was a posthumous epic.

Major Effects:
You can permanently give yourself all of the characteristics of a Character, often causing dramatic changes to your personality and behaviour. As noted above, though, it is not possible for 2 Literamancers to assume the same role at the same time. You can also cause a bunch of peoples’ lives to rearrange themselves until they’re unknowingly acting out a plot from a book.

What You Hear: The Literamancer.
There’s a Parisian Literamancer called Lucien Montjoy with a serious thing for the Marquis de Sade. He’s worked out a formula spell that compels people to start reciting all of the really naughty bits of de Sade’s novels, even if they’ve never read them. He says it’s a great way to embarrass people he doesn’t like, and seriously freak them out at the same time.