When people think you’re infirm, you can get away with anything.

You gain tremendous permission when you’re sick, or injured, or disabled – or, in your case, willing to pretend you are. You’re weak, and so everything you do is a demonstration of incredible conviction. Your body has failed you, and so your spirit is indomitable.

The original shamans, in the days before cities, were disabled people. Epileptics, blind men, hunchbacks and clubfooted women were the ones who talked to spirits. Their physical flaws brought them magical power. You inherit a little bit of their power.

So what if it’s not actually true? It’s true to you. You need the sympathy; you need the pain; you need the illusion. Your weakness is real enough to give you power.

You hunger for sympathy. Isn’t that what sympathetic magic is all about?

Generate a Minor Charge: Convince someone you have a disease, injury or other physical infirmity you don’t have, enough to gather serious or tangible concern.

Generate a Significant Charge: When someone else is having a real problem, draw attention away from it with a feigned physical infirmity, such that the original problem is igniored and never resolved.

Generate a Major Charge: Feign your death, fooling all authorities, then attend a funeral in which at least five people speak glowingly of your memory. No one present may know or even suspect you are still alive, and at least a hundred people must attend the funeral.

Taboo: Acknowledge anyone else’s weaknesses or problems. You must ignore, deny, trivialize or dismiss any problems someone else is having, or you’ll lose all charges.

Blast: The enervomancy blast has no visible effect. Instead, it causes overwhelming soul-numbing despair in the victim. Damage reduces the Soul score of the victim. This recovers at the same rate as wound points, and reduces the Soul score and maximum score for any Soul skills. If Soul reaches zero, the victim is locked in nightmare-filled catatonia until recovery.

Random Magick: Enervomancy blurs the lines between weakness and strength. Enervomancy heals and weakens simultaneously, makes truth into lies, and turns flaws into strength.

Symbolic Tension: The adept gains power from the image of powerlessness. Because of weakness, she can do anything.

Charging Tips: The more you live the life full-time, the more power you’ll get. An adept who feigns a problem full-time can probably get 15 minor charges a week, which a less devoted adept might make 5 to 10. Opportunities for a significant charge probably come up about once a month.

Starting Charges: 5 minor charges

Minor Formulas

Mirabilis Dictu
1 minor charge
You say something to a single target that will trigger (or at least involve) her Noble stimulus in some way. You can’t control what you say, and it won’t necessarily be true. Most often, it’s something that will enlist the person to aid you, or at least sympathize with you.

Your Truth is a Lie
2 minor charge
Verbally accuse someone of lying about something he just said. For the next minute, he’ll admit he was lying, even if he wasn’t lying, and will elaborate and give further details, even if this means making up more lies.

Walk the Downward Spiral
3 minor charges
While you’re traveling, every object you pass will look miserable and decaying, physically and visibly more dangerous. This gets worse and worse as your travel until a destination is reached or the trip is abandoned. People don’t change, but inanimate objects do: walls will be chipped, increasingly dubious trash will be everywhere, and there will be increasing signs of decay. Useful for impressing, confusing or frightening those who follow you.

Bad Answer
3 minor chargess
Ask a question and perform any kind of divination: I Ching, coin flipping, Tarot Reading, Ouiji, pendulum, whatever. The results you get will always be untrue. You can use this to confuse others, or to perform real divination by a process of eliminator.

The Little Empty
4 minor charges
This is the enervomancy minor blast. It does Soul damage equal to the sum of the dice.

Significant formulas

Minimal Competency
1 significant charge
A powerful temporary healing ability and a crippling curse at once. Used on a target, it will give mobility, four working limbs, and normal sensory ability. It also sets both Body and Speed to a score of 40, whether this is an increase or a decrease. Any Body or Speed skills above 40 get reduced to 40. This lasts about 20 minutes.

Life Audit
1 significant charges
Subject has a one minute vision for each failed notch of any Madness Meter. This is a full sensory hallucination of whatever triggered each original Stress Check. During this time, the subject will still perceive the real world, but it’s distracting enough to cause a -20% to all rolls. After each vision, the subject heals two wound points if wounded. If the subject has been the recipient of this formula before, they’ll only have the visions (and healing) for failed notches gained since the last use.

The Big Empty
2 significant charges
This is the enervomancy significant blast. It does Soul damage equal to the roll of the dice.

Why Even Bother
3 significant charges
Pick someone you can see. The victim of this formula can’t use their obsession skill at all – even minor uses of the skill become impossible. This lasts an hour outside of combat, but ends after two rounds of combat – the urgency of combat ends the effects more quickly.

Your Body, My Temple
5 significant charges
You switch bodies with someone. That is, your mind is now in their body, and vice versa. The GM determines which abilities stay with the body and which go with the brain. Typically, Mind and Soul, and all skills, go with the mind, while Body, Wound Points and Speed (and skills like Distracting Physique and Large) stay with the body. This formula lasts for an hour. If either body dies, the effect becomes permanent (a condition which attracts the attention and hate of the Cruel Ones).

Major Effects
Give a paraplegic person incredible strength. Make a delusion real. Transfer a disease from one person to another.

What You’ve Heard
St. John Bernard, the infamous “Blind Voodoo Man” of New Orleans, can be found on the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse with his saxophone, playing mean smoky jazz for spare change and offering magical advice to those who know to ask him. To the local adept underground, though, he’s a constant pest, creating one panic after another in increasingly desperate pleas for attention. Behind his scratched up sunglasses he’s got perfectly functional eyes, but he never lets on. What most people assume are bouts of epilepsy he sometimes exhibits are attempts at creating a formula to banish the masks of some popular local archetypes. To the casual occultist, St. John is friendly and helpful and smooth, but the real mojo men see him as the biggest pest in town.