The making and breaking of taboos.

Nickname: Crowleys

There’s a thrill to the forbidden. There’s a power in having your sensibilities violated. A net of psychological energy keeps people’s behaviors in line and when that net is broken, the energy is released and can be harnessed. So say the Anathemancers.

Anathemancers draw their power from breaking taboos. The school is, in this way, similar to many schools which rely on breaking social rules and engaging in egregious behavior, such as Irascimancy and Entropomancy, and many other schools violate social norms in specific ways, including Dipsomancy, Kleptomancy, Thanatomancy, Epideromancy, Eastern Cryptomancy, Narco-Alchemy, and Pornomancy. In some sense, every school relies on having taboos, breaking away from normal behavior obsessively, and breaking the fundamental rule, reality itself.

Many Anathemancers believe that all other adepts are just diluted Anathemancers, since all magic is about breaking the rules. This doesn’t endear them to other schools, since it’s a little patronizing, but Anathemancy is not a school of diplomatic people.

Despite this, Anathemancers get along well with the Occult Underground. They see other adepts as kindred spirits and sources of new options. Furthermore, Anathemancers like recruiting apprentices from the Occult Underground, looking for those who are obsessive, nontraditional and bold. Anathemancers often keep in touch with each other, sharing tips, seeking students, and finding new ways to make trouble.

Sometimes, an Anathemancer burns out. They become so jaded (and Self-Hardened) that they can’t get any serious juice ever again. They might try going deeper and deeper into depravity and horribleness to try to eek out a final bit of power. Among Anathemancers, this is known as “bottoming out.” Most crowleys who bottom out end up dead, sometimes at the hands of fellow Anathemancers, even though this is a major risk of breaking taboo for them.

Generate a minor charge: Break a rule of some kind in front of a witness who endorses that rule. This can be a social more, a regulation or a law that’s been agreed upon or accepted. You needn’t believe in the regulation, but the witness must; walking around naked in front of a hippie won’t gain a charge, but eating veal might. You don’t need to be caught or punished, but someone needs to be in a position to catch it. Cheating at checkers or public belching counts as much as running a red light or grand theft auto.

Generate a significant charge: Break a rule that you hold important, in front of at least one witness. This must be significant enough to cause you a Self check, and must be unforgivable to the witness.

Generate a major charge: Render a moral question permanently irrelevent. Your actions must lead to a moral line becoming erased. This must be a general moral issue, not a specific case. For instance, if you invented a cheap and effective technique to replace animal testing, the moral question becomes moot, and you gain a major charge. You could also gain a charge for killing all the royalty in the only culture in which it’s forbidden to walk in a king’s shadow. Your actions must permanent change society in some way.

Taboo: You must not condemn, prevent or punish any behavior for any ethical system or abstract theory. You can be offended by someone’s actions, but if you speak a word against them, try to stop them, or punish them for it, you have violated taboo. Retributions for selfish, pragmatic or undeclared reasons do not violate taboo – you can condemn or punish behavior as long as it isn’t for ethical, moral, aesthetic, social or theoretical reasons.

Blast: The victim loses physical integrity and the victim’s body comes apart. This feels like flesh can been cut away with a knife, and the results are medically identical to a cutting wound. At a minor level, the victim loses a chunk of flesh, while at the significant level, whole limbs could fall off. This is a gory kind of harm, but the remaining evidence is indistinguishable from that of bladed weapon, and lost parts can be re-attached with normal surgery. The adept cannot control what’s lost; it’s fairly random.

Symbolic Tension: The Anathemancer operates by violating and avoiding rules, but this is, itself just another kind of law. The lawlessness the Anathemancer seeks would leave the Anathemancer totally powerless. They need the sacred cows they kill.

Charging Tips: Minor charges are incredibly easy. Jumping a subway gate, kissing in public, insulting someone or parking outside the lines will do the trick. A good adept can get 8-10 charges a day safely. Significant charges a lot harder, because they always tax the sanity of the crowley. Still, an Anathemancer with a great therapist may be able to gain a charge every week, but without something to keep from becoming too hardened, the Anathemancer will have to violate their own beliefs more and more deeply to get juice.

Random Magic: Rules and their violation. Morality, society and, to some extent, the Occult Underground.

Starting Charges: 10 minor

Anathemancy Formulas

Minor Formulas

What is the Law?
1 minor charge
Look at a group of people; at least two. You can find out how, on average, they will react to a general situation. This only gauges their moral code, not their practical needs, personal situation, or emotional response.

Justify Yourself
2 minor charge
Targets a single person. They will blurt out an honest explanation of the morals and theories behind what they’re doing. This may just be a general principle. If used on someone breaking into a house, they might say, “I feel like doing this” or perhaps “I have a right to this; life never handed me the opportunities they got” or “It’s every man for himself” or maybe even “humans deserve to suffer.” The target might keep talking once they’ve started, if that’s their inclination, but this formula only makes them blurt out a single sentence.

Schism
5 minor charges
This is the Anathemancy minor blast.

The Do Not Enter Sign
3 minor charges
Enchants the area around you, about thirty feet radius, but matching the shape of any obvious bounds like walls or yards, to be taboo to anyone but you for the next hour. For anyone else, it will feel strange and a little bit rebellious to enter. Trying to enter the area causes a rank 2 Isolation stress check; those who fail the check can’t enter the area until the hour passes.

Free Your Mind
3 minor charges
A single target must violate their own ethical code in some way. The target makes a Mind check. If this check is successful the target may choose what to do – it can be very minor. If the check fails, the target must instead violate their ethics in whatever way is most obviously presented to them. If they’re in a store, they might shoplift. Standing with a man they don’t like they may attack. Presented with a tempting but immoral deal, they may take it. Exactly what behaviors are most likely to surface depend greatly on the target’s personality. The target begins this immoral behavior imediately, but depending on what it is, this could take hours or even days to complete.

Significant Formulas

How Low Can You Go?
1 significant charge
Discerns something a single target wouldn’t do. For an Avatar or Adept, you’ll learn their Taboo. For others, you’ll learn something that they consider forbidden for themselves. You won’t necessarily know if this is a Taboo or just part of a moral code, though it may be obvious: few people have a moral restriction against, say, sleeping, or incorporating modern technology into their inventions, so it would be easy to pick up an Oneiromancer or a Mechanomancer. If the target has multiple Taboos, as might happen for an Adept who’s also an Avatar, or for schools or archetypes with multiple Taboos, like The Fool and Urbanomancy, you’ll learn only one.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil
2 significant charges
For the next hour, a target won’t be able to perceive anything he’d consider immoral. Watching a murder scene, he’d see an empty room. Any external events that would cause a Stress check is invisible, inaudible and totally imperceptible, eliminating the need for a Stress check. Immoral events that don’t cause a Stress check are similarly imperceptible. If the target is directly attacked in an immoral way that can’t be ignored, he’ll lose all senses instead suddenly floating weightlessly in a dark, silent world. This sensory deprivation causes a rank-8 Isolation check.

Break the First Law
1 significant charge
You can summon a demon. You can only vaguely determine what kind of demon you summon, but you can certainly bring one to you and then communicate with it. This gives no ability whatsoever to control or dispel the demon.

Menace To Society
2 significant charges
This is the Anathemancy significant blast.

Beyond Good and Evil
4 significance charges
This target affects a target you can see, who is magically dedicated to violating social norms. This includes adepts like Kleptomancers, Irascimancers, and Entropomancers, avatars for archetypes like the Rebel, the Flying Woman, and the Masterless Man, and some unique special mystic talents related to rebellion. The target will see you as a “kindred spirit” probably a member of the same school or archetype. This may cause friendliness or hostility, depending on the target. More important, though, this allows an immediate single use of any formula or channel of the target, as if your Avatar or magick score were equal to your own Anathemancy. You must know about the channle or formula you are using. You need not pay any further charges, and you are not subject to the Taboo, but you cannot use major effects, random magic, channels above your Anathemancy score, or improve any formula with further charges. This lasts up to an hour.

Major Effects
Put someone on the FBI most wanted list. Win any trial. Plunge a peaceful society into disagreement. Cure a sociopath. Permanent change your Anathemancy skill into Avatar: Masterless Man or Avatar: The Flying Woman.