Buy! Buy! Buy!
Nickname: Customers.
This is world of providence and consumption. A world of constant need. And you’re in the middle of it, maxing out your credit cards and shooting for the stars.
Bigger, faster, better, more! Excess is rebellion, and the only way to improve your life is to get more! He who dies with the most toys wins!
Life is an empty, bottomless pit, but don’t despair. Fill that void! Stuff it full of the best foods, the latest fashions, the hottest electronics and the fastest cars! You need more, more, more!
People complain about the ads on TV, urging them to buy everything and creating unrealistic expectations, but you live for them. Unrealistic? You bet your third mortgage they’re unrealistic! You go beyond the realistic and into the fantastic! Commercialism and consumerism is madness, but there’s a method in it. Your method.
Who cares about your creeping debt? Who cares about the days you can’t afford rent or food because of the new TV set your bought? Sure, it’s scary – nobody want to feel the weight of debt and poverty. But you know the way to free yourself from it. That’s right: Spend more!
You don’t want more than you can have; you need more than you can have,
And how do you get it? However you can. Going into debt? Of course. Gold-digging? Sure. Crime? Fine. After all, this is important – you need to get just a little more.
Get, take, buy, want, have, need, more, more, more!
The question isn’t “Feast or Famine.” The question is “Cash or plastic?”
Gain a Minor Charge: Purchase something that’s one hundred to one thousand dollars more expensive than what you need.
Gain a Significant Charge: Purchase something that’s more than one hundred thousand dollars more expensive than what you need.
Gain a Major Charge: Purchase something that’s more than one hundred million dollars more expensive than what you need.
Taboo: Economic stability. An Emptomancer must always live beyond their means, no matter how much they have. They must burn through their savings, go on credit, and spend more than they make. It’s okay to have plenty, as long as the Emptomancer is burning through it. If an Emptomancer ever reaches economic sustainability, all charges are lost.
Random Magic: Emptomancy deals with need and excess.
Blast: The victim of an emptomancy blast is suddenly deprived of air – their lungs need more and more air, always emptied out. The victim feels like they’re choking, and takes up to 3 damage from strangulation every turn until the full damage of the blast is taken. Immediate professional medical assistance by someone who understands what’s happening may be able to offset this damage.
Symbolic Tension: Emptomancy constantly seek satisfaction, but can never, ever be satisfied. They must acquire more and more, no matter how worthless it is.
Charging Tips: The amount of charges an Emptomancer can pull in depends on cash flow, and on how much property they’ve got left. An Emptomancer with a good source of income, or who has recently made a lucky break, can pull in a significant charge a day until the money runs out. A typical middle class Emptomancer, though, will eventually peter out to making a minor charge every day or even week, and that gets harder and harder to sustain unless the Emptomancer does something extreme to set things straight. A starting Emptomancer probably has her cards maxed out and is looking for new ones, only earning a minor charge a week until they find new cash.
Starting Charges: 6 minor.
Minor Formulas
Sales Pitch
1 minor charge
You get a +20% to your next attempt to convince someone they want or need something.
Consume and Reproduce!
1 minor charge
Actually, this formula doesn’t really cost a minor charge at all! It’s free, when you stop to think about it. Cast this spell on someone who has a minor charge of some kind, whether it’s from magick, a Mak Attax Special Order, or a charging ritual, or whatever. You gain a minor charge, which pays off the cost for this formula immediately! On a matched success, you get two minor charges instead, and only a critical success, you get a significant. Meanwhile, the target loses the same amount of charges and is compelled to seek a way to regain the charges. If they have a way to get more charges, they’ll start doing whatever is needed to generate new charges until they have regained those they’ve lost. This formula will break up significant or even major charges if that’s what’s needed to get the minor charge stolen. If the victim has no charges for whatever reason, you lose the charge and you’re out of luck.
Urgent Greed
2 minor charges
Whatever the target wants most right now becomes an urgent, critical need. The target will drop everything to get it, in the most immediate way possible, regardless of consequences. This lasts three rounds.
Only the Best
2 minor charges
This significantly improves the quality and performance of a single item you own. The item must already be expensive and high-quality. Every use of it gets a +20% shift to any relevent roll. This lasts for an hour, at which point the item breaks down and is ruined.
Little Void
2 minor charge
This is the Emptomancy minor blast.
Significant Formulas
Orgy of Consumption
1 significant charge
This is identical to the formula “Consume and Reproduce!” except that it steals a minor charge from everyone within line of sight who has a minor charge. They’ll seek out new charges, just as with the minor formula. If you gain 10 or more minor charges with a single use of this formula, you’ll get back your significant charge instead.
The Golden Ring
1 significant charge
Select an object that’s shiny and expensive-looking. For the next day, anyone who sees it will want it desperately, and must make a Rank 6 Helplessness Stress check or immediately do whatever’s needed to get and keep the object. This doesn’t affect you.
Yawning Abyss
1 significant charge
This is the Emptomancy significant blast.
Mortgage
2 significant charges
This is a risky formula, but who cares? You gain an additional number of significant charges equal to the ten’s place of your roll. Every day, you’ll lose a significant charge, until you pay back every charge you’ve gained – the two initial charges for this formula are lost as well. if you don’t have a significant charge, you will instead be affected by a significant blast that day, taking damage equal to your original roll for this formula. If you spend an additional charge for this formula, you can use it on another willing adept instead – that adept must pay the significant charges back day by day, or you’ll both be affected by the blast. (If the target’s school has a blast, it’ll be that type of blast; otherwise, it’s an Emptomancy blast.) This may not work for some schools.
Bottomless Pit
2 significant charges
This is identical to the minor formula “Urgent Greed” except it lasts a full day. During that day, the subject will constantly be seeking out their need, wasting or consuming it immediately and seeking more. This need cannot be satisfied.
Major Effects
Make a whole nation crave something of your choice. Steal a major charge from someone else. Create a permanent need for someone that’s as vital as oxygen.
I really like the idea of the school, but I think the charges for the significant and the major are almost impossible for a character. It only seems possible to get a significant if you’re extremely lucky at robbing a bank or selling that which-should-never-be-in-the-hands-of-man.
But the taboo almost seems like the opposite of plutomancy. So, as my idea, why not make the charging the opposite of plutomancy?
Just make it so that you take the plutomancy charge requirements, and apply them as how much you must spend on the item in excess.
And then the taboo can be concrete as well: Ever having more than 1000 dollars in the bank or on hand for more than a day (or whatever) without spending it breaks your taboo.
Hopefully that helps.
These guys must have an overlapping underground with the Valued Customers…
These adepts seem to automatically fit the first of the VC taboos. I’d say that, at the very least, charging purchases don’t count for the second VC taboo. (Even though the adept is spending the tangible assets, they are receiving equal intangible reward, which makes the exchange cosmically neutral.) If they could maintain a steady unnecessary purchasing habit below their big-ticket spending, it might be sufficient to let them be maintain both.
I don’t like this actually. the whole cocept would look better as an avatar-the consumer, but: and this is the big one, I just don’t think the entire concept is a good idea. It’s far to much like plutomancy, just the reverse. Maybe you have a nasty NPC in your campaign who really needs this school, but otherwise… no.
Actually, the link is to “The Plutophage” adepts, from “Break. Today.”
Plutophagy seems to handle the exchange a bit more costly (as an adept-obsession should be), making the adept eat/destoy the purchased commodity. Don’t have the book in front of me, so I can’t give a spell-by-spell comparison. Seems to deal with the same issues of progressive obsolecence and all empty materialism.
this school also… Ok, in my humble opinion, if a certain feeling or phenomenon is something that can be shared and understood and in some way related (in the old hippie sense) to by most people (like: I want to have cool, expensive,luxury stuff), it is, if you insist on making something supernatural of it, best suited for an avatar path. If something isn’t understood and can’t be related to by a large %-age of the people (like: I want to eat money and expensive non-fod items) it’s best used – if at all – as a magic school.
In it’s favor, though, this concept goes beyond wanting to have alot of stuff. The resonance is better afixed to going beyond your means. But yes, it you can keep the stuff you buy, it seems less like losing something here to gain something spiritual, not much of an exchage. In fact, it seems more like changing out your liquid and getting a charge. You’re not actually losing anything in the process.
Example: you buy an expensive diamond bracelet, get your charge. However, you can turn around and sell the bracelet; you haven’t lost an asset, just changed its form. I agree that patterns of behavior like this are fine for an Avatar path, but they do seem a bit light for a School.
Maybe if you add a prohibition on ever selling something tangible? But it really comes down to a intuitive sense that the adept isn’t really exchanging anything for his charges.
That said, you can have this be a twist on some other school by making you buy things for strangers or give them to charity or somesuch. Get something a little extra with your tax-deductables.
The idea I was going for was the destructive irony of seeking more of something that can never satisfy you.
I structured it so that it would be an opposite to Plutomancy, different from Plutophagy, which seems like a pretty obscure act.
Menzoa, the Valued Customer is awesome! I’d use that instead of Emptomancy any day of the week.
The NPC (or PC) I had in mind for this was a desperate consumer, constantly buying more and more, hungry for money and the stuff it buys. Probably getting into crime.
This could also just be an alternate charging structure for Plutomancy.
Thanks for advice and commentary, y’all!
hmm… the concept might be saved by a relatively small change to the taboo. Instead of needing to spend all your money (that’s the wrinkle where the Avatar-Adepts can shine in their self-destructive glory), try this one:
Finding lasting value in anything you buy is at odds with the core values of this school. So……..
By all means, let your old acquisitions rot into disrepair or squirel them away in storage somewhere. You don’t have to prevent all theft, but must take reasonable precautions. Even though they are worthless to you, they are still yours. (Losing them in the divorce is fine.)
There’s an irony in there as well: the only things you can keep using with impunity are the ones too cheap to give you any juice in the first place.
If you think that’s too harsh, you can play the backward Plutomancer and pay for the repeat utility item on an installment plan, in order to avoid generating a charge. (How long to wait between installments is something to tweak through play-testing, if you use the rule at all)