“We will all burn together when we burn!” -Tom Lehrer
Nickname: Doomsayers
World War II changed everything. Suddenly, death was something that could come to everyone at once instantly, launched by a distant faceless enemy.
Perhaps this was what ended the school of Phobomancy: with the specter of nuclear war in the united hearts of the world, the nature of human fear changed. The Cold War made this terror a daily event. Children learned air raid drills. The war between communism and capitalism threatened to wipe out both.
For some people, the fear overwhelmed everything else. Their minds broke and the world became nothing but a wasteland waiting to happen.
Rapture and Ragnarok were unleashed into the psyche in the form of a mushroom cloud. Visions of the world’s end, all united in flame, fill their dreams, and they become Eschatomancers.
Nuclear war is closer now than ever before. Rogue nations, Russian mobsters with USSR surplus arms, an arms race or two in India, a rise in terrorism and a fall in diplomacy. If the Cold War was a single big battle, the modern world is a hundred different battles, all big enough to trigger the chain reaction.
Some Eschatomancers claim to have inherited the tradition from medieval mystery cults, and that these final days before the Armageddon show the truth to the dire prophesies of the past. This, though, is the kind of hysteria-laden lie that makes for the bread and butter of Eschatomancy, so such claims must be taken with a grain of salt.
These guys are trouble. The fact that they’re even possible means the world is sick. Even the nicest of them has a motivation to push the button that ends everything. Eschatomancers are especially disliked in the Occult Underground. They have a gloomy outlook of the world, and yet don’t seem to mind the worst possible conclusion. They’re obsessed with the end of the world, without having any interest in the Statosphere or the Invisible Clergy. They are really good at causing widespread panic, which makes them a big target to the Sleepers. On top of that, they’re exactly the kind of power-mad, ill-smelling, wild-eyed extremist that everyone in the Underground is scared to become.
Gaining a Minor charge: Make someone scared about nuclear war. They must feel actual fear they wouldn’t have felt without you.
Gaining a Significant charge: Influence, positively or negatively, the possibility of nuclear war. This can be a tiny change: escalating tensions between superpowers, an influential rally, a sobering intelligence report, new safeguards in a weapons lab, a conversation with a senator, a well-signed petition or an argument between diplomats, as long as it’s large enough to move nuclear war closer or further away.
Gaining a Major charge: Personally detonate an unsheltered nuclear explosion.
Taboo: Acting as if the world will last another month. An Eschatomancer who invests in an optimistic future, owns anything not designed to survive the apocalypse (or at least help prepare for it), or acts on the assumption that the world will definitely continue loses all charges.
Symbolic Tension: The Eschatomancer fears and dreads the End Times, but, at the same time, his life is meaningless without it. Eschatomancers spent 1999 preparing for Y2K, and when things turned out fine, they were surprised and, despite themselves, kind of disappointed.
Random magic: Fear of Nuclear War. More broadly, Fear, Nuclear Power, and War.
Blast Style: A school devoted deeply to thorough destruction, Eschatomancy has a potent blast. The Eschatomancy blast launches a stream of alpha particles from the Eschatomancer’s dramatically outstretched hand, bombarding the target with invisible but harmful hard radiation. A minor blast will cause burns to exposed flesh, as well as nausea, dizziness, and diarrhea. A major blast will cause severe burns, partial or full blindness, internal burns and lesions, and temporary (or even permanent) sterility. As a mechanic for this collateral damage, someone struck by an Eschatomancy Blast takes a penalty to any and all actions, except magical Soul skills, equal to the damage taken. Anyone else nearby will have increased likelihood of cancer. This definitely includes the Eschatomancer.
Charging tips: Any can earn a minor charge or two a day by spending a few hours working a crowd. Those in a position to do so (scientists, military officers, activist leaders, or diplomats) can possibly earn a significant charge every month.
Starting charges: 4 minor
Minor Formulas
The End is Nigh
2 minor charge
You learn a subject’s Fear Stimulus, as well as the most likely way the subject will die. Each comes to you as a vision of what might happens, and you know which is which. The mostly likely cause of death is a rough form of foretelling – it might be avoided, and the subject might die another way, but it will provide some insight into the kind of dangers someone faces. You can use this ability on yourself.
Pocket Chernobyl
5 minor charges
This is the Eschatomancy minor blast.
Rapture-Ready
2 minor charges
Causes a single machine to run normally, even it’s it’s broken or lacks fuel. This lasts an hour.
Fallout Shelter
3 minor charges
Usable on an area around you for a number of feet equal to your roll.
Any buildings, rooms, and walls in the area become completely fireproof, explosion-roof, and radiation-proof. Other attacks take normal effect, and only walls, floors and ceilings are immune. Fires, explosions and radiation will bounce away.
Escalate
3 minor charges
You can only use Escalate on someone who has a choice to make. You can use it at any distance, but you must know what the choice is and be familiar with the situation. Eliminate one choice – the subject just can’t choose it. The choice eliminated must be the most peaceful, mild choice, if possible. If the target isn’t making the choice you thought they were, you can still eliminate the option you’re proposing, as long as they weren’t pondering a milder choice.
Significant Formulas
Mutually Assured Destruction
1 significant charge
A single target takes damage whenever you do, and vice versa. This lasts about ten minutes.
The Big Fear
1 significant charge
Your victim is overwhelmed with nameless fear and dread. Everything, to the victim’s eyes, seems temporary, meaningless, and doomed to an awful fate that cannot be comprehended or avoided. For the next hour, he will only act in response to threats or cajoling, and even then, it’s at a -30% shift. Oddly, this causes no Stress check – after the feelings fade, the whole experience seems in retrospect to be dreamlike and harmless, even amusing.
Doomsday Clock
2 significant charges
An area – one city block, several suburban blocks, or a few rural acres – will suffer a terribly destructive disaster within the next week. Alternately usable on a single utility (communications, power, sewers) citywide. You can’t decide exactly when it will happen, or what the disaster will be, but you’ll know it’s going to happen about five minutes beforehand.
I Am Become Death
2 significant charges
This is the Eschatomancy significant blast
The Sky is Falling
4 significant charges
This is the formula that really gets under the Sleeper’s collar. Pick an event that has occurred most people would agree is shocking or tragic, no matter how small. The event will attract public attention and spread through the media like wildfire, earning comment and commentary in national and possibly international news. Millions will hear about it and respond. Sleeping Tiger rules are very often immediately applicable.
Major Effects
Cause a permanent mutation, benign or harmful. Transfer terminal cancer from one person to another. Make everyone who meets you afraid of you for the rest of your life. Survive ground zero. Create a giant monster in Japan.
A pretty good idea, but with one small snag: it’s about ten or twenty years out of date. If one was running a Cold War-era game it would be marvellous, but if it was modern, there would be problems.
Might I suggest a minor thematic modification: rather than Nuclear War, perhaps any sort of WMD-related attack might be usable for this. Don’t just convince people that the Nukes are about to start dropping, tell them that there’s a ‘Dirty Bomb’ being sent by Al-Qaeda. Tell them there’s Anthrax in their letters. Tell them there’s Sarin Gas on the underground. Go the whole hog!
Also, perhaps a minor addition to the Major Charge accumulation: you can either detonate the bomb, or disarm one permanently. This fits more with the Significant Charge accumulation, where you can move war either closer or further away.
Have a nice day!
nuclear weapons are disarmed permanently all the time. Every time we had a strategic weapons treaty. It shouldn’t be that easy.
Then, of course, there are the “Left Behind” eschatomancers who get their kicks convincing people that the Rapture is coming within a few years, and have been doing so at least since the turn of the last century. For the most part their blasts are more weird than nasty (“We will not all die, but will all be changed”) but rumor has it there’s one guy who’s convinced he’s the son of God and just one more charge away from slicing up heathens with his Messianic eye-lasers.
Oooh. This school needs revising, it seems. I love the ideas.
Fallout Shelter: How long does it last, how long does it take? I ask because I could see this working as a short protection effect, or as a permanent personal sanctum type effect. I’d go with the latter, a one-per-mage mystically reinforced sanctum, be it a fallout shelter, a cave in a mountain, or a church with divine protection, but it would seem wrong for such a mage to not have one. New ones can be made, but then the old ones lose their mojo.
I also see three distinct internal factions for this school.
-First are the old guard doomsday prophets. From town criers to religious cult leaders, they focus on religious armageddon, the rapture, the day of judgement. They’ve been around almost as long as magick itself.
-Next are the Dr Strangeloves, the kind you describe above, they are the first division within the school. They’ve stopped worrying and boy do they love The Bomb.
-The most recent division is the true terrorist. The first two don’t like them because they don’t care where the fear comes from. They don’t care about Divine Judgement, they don’t care about The Bomb, they just want to make people afraid. Terrorists are the most like classic phobomancers, but operate like Eschatomancers. They aren’t just Arabs with AKs and anthrax, they’re on the news every night telling you what the next thing to worry about is.
Fortunately for the rest of us, it is this internal division that has kept anyone from this school from succeeding in ending the world. They’re so fanatical and egotistical that they’re usually distracted by preventing another faction from pushing The Button first. If they are trying to end the world, people have to know about it or they won’t get any charges for their actions, so the closer they get, the more people know what they’re up to. In short, if a duke’s got a nuke, then everyone in the occult underground is gonna know about it.
In your revision, you might want variable blasts for each faction, if not factional formula spells. I also just get this feeling that cell phone radiation has something to do with these guys.