This should definitely be limited to a Cosmic game.
So, the good news is that you’ve got two sets of magic powers. A lot of these compliment each other well – Epideromancer Masterless Men, all Mystic Hermaphrodites, Entropomancer Fools, and Western Cryptomancer Messengers are potent examples. In many cases, there’s great symbolic synchronicity, too.
The bad news is you’re being pulled in two directions at once and it drives you crazy.
Any time you use a formula, channel, or random magic, make a Rank-10 Stress check against your most Failed Madness Meter. If you’re already Hardened-10 in that gauge, pick the second most failed. If there’s a tie, resolve in this order:
Self, Violence, Helplessness, Isolation, and the Unnatural. On a failed roll, you react like any other failed Stress check. Your own magic is terrifying to you.
You don’t have to roll if you’ve reached 5 Failed in any gauge (you just get an insanity), or when you’re sufficiently sociopathic that your Avatar skill goes away.
If you’re starting with both, it’s a little more straightforward: you just get five more failed notches in a meter of your choice, and an insanity to go with it.
I personally don’t think this is applicable in all cases. There’s well over three hundred potential archetypes, so there must surely be one path or another that fits with the view of an adept with minimum conflict. For example, Epideromancers/Masterless Men. The archetype is very heavy on the self-reliance aspect, and so is the magick school (“Doctors?! I don’ need no steenking doctors!!”). In at least one aspect, they fit together quite well.
Now, a Sterno/Trickster might end up less stable than most. Past the destruction, Annihilomancy is about truth, about cutting a path — or rather, burning one — right to the heart of the matter. Tricksters, on the other hand, NEVER take the straight path when they can convince their enemy to dig a tunnel to the destination. Unless all the destructive acts are artfully arranged clues, it wouldn’t work, and it would still rub off wrong on the brain of the adept; many Sternos get into the school because of its simplicity and minimal baggage. Complicated plans count as baggage.
The part about it causing insanity is actually canonical. I just made up the mechanics. If you look at the characters, any character who is an Adept-Avatar has 5 failed notches in something.
I think the reasoning goes as follows:
1. Avatars are channeling Archetypes of the Invisible Clergy, the fundamental basis of reality.
2. Adepts pursue a paradox so obsessively that it breaks reality.
3. You can’t support and subvert reality without a schism.
4. On top of that, yowza, Epideromancer/Masterless Men are ridiculously powerful! They generate an extra fifty-or-whatever wound points a month in pure free profit, and then can just turn it all into significant charges, every month, and heal themselves of the damage again. Ugh! What an insane gamebreaker.
Technically speaking, so is the Freak, being a Mystic Hermaphrodite and Epideromancer. One sig a day, whether it needs it or not. There are a lot of different combinations like that, it seems, but it can’t be easy to make such superhumans; they start out small and as soon as anyone figures out what they’re trying to do, the Sleepers/TNI/Randy Douglas/The Freak/John T. Clued-In go after them. Even if they keep quiet, somebody may find out through random chance.
But I do see what you mean about the conflict between collective reality and adept microreality. Still, that 5-Failed Notch thing doesn’t always apply. In Hush Hush, Vernon the Bibliomancer-Hunter doesn’t have five failed notches. Granted, that may be due to Bibliomancy’s laid back nature compared to other schools…
Still, in Jeeter’s descriptive notes in UA2, it says that many who try to have it both ways are insane, like him. It doesn’t say all.
…wow, I sounded like a real rules lawyer just now. Very depressing.
Personally if the Adept and Avatar taboos don’t clash and the player’s willing to spend the experience, it’s cool.
The trick is not to get to hung up over the philosophy and apply the Bumblebee Clause.
Why can’t people play a Cryptomancer and channel the Two-faced Man?
Cheers,
Chris.
Or a Pilgrim (Goal: Discover Philosopher’s Stone) and Narco-Alchemist? I assume most NA’s would end up this way.
Dude, Narco-Alchemist combines really, really powerfully with any Avatar, since they can quickly raise their Soul to 99.
And? Slip him some street rohypnol in his drink and not only is he clueless, helpless, and unable to remember what happens next, but his Avatar skill is cut way back.
Sounds like you’re mostly interested in limiting power. Which is a fine goal, but it’s not the way I would go about doing it.
As short commentaries on the above abusive combos
– there’s no free lunches in magic, so I wouldn’t allow temporary health from the Masterless Man to count for Epideromancer damage (it’s not real damage to your flesh, as evinced by it not counting against your total health % for healing purposes, and it can’t be healed) and you’re not supposed to magically heal Epideromancer damage. All Epideromancers who live through their first couple years are going to end up repulsively overpowered anyway, though, so the Masterless Man fix is only stopgap.
– the Fool’s second channel is a clear violation of the Entropomancer taboo.
All adepts are already insane; it’s written into how you become an adept. You then leap forward into a new concept of reality which semi-stabilizes you (or makes you functionally insane rather than dysfunctionally insane). The example given in UA2, the Freak, is particularly harsh because of the extreme nature of both Epideromancy and Mystic Hemaphrodite, as well as their non-complementary nature (they aren’t directly opposed, but they are certainly not aligned). The text notes on p 96 that few adept/avatar combinations are in sufficient alignment to avoid conflicting goal – but some are. I would imagine Pilgrim would stabilize most adepts, particularly those with looser taboos such as Mechanomancers and Narco-Alchemists (not Jeeter, but the hubris of his goal was his downfall).
“All adepts are already insane”
No they aren’t, they’re just obsessive. An adept can interact with society with little problem other than being potentially boring at dinner parties.
Adepts can easily lose their social training (like hygiene) but that’s not any different from hentai otakus and Trekkie fanatics.
Cheers,
Chris.
Maybe. Certainly Godwalker, most the short stories, and the excellent New Inquisition chronicle on the web indicate that adepts are obsessive (if even that), not insane, while Postmodern Magic paints a bleaker picture of adepts being denied anything approaching a normal life. Whether an obsessive addiction that denies you meaningful relationships, economic stability, and drives you ever onward into paranoia over potential competition is or is not insane (or, “a form of mental illness”, to use a less weighted description) is not a topic I care to venture into.
When I posted, however, I was thinking about the process of becoming an adept – either way you do it you need five failed notches on a single meter. For anyone who is not an adept, that means “bad insane.” For adepts, it means “insane, but in a good way.”
Hello, I’m french thus I will try to express myself clearly.
In my opinion, an adept can become an avatar without real problems. The only one we could see is that which relates to the distance between the Obsession and the Archetype but why a Narco-Alchimist could’nt become an avatar of the “Drugs trafficant”? An Entropomancien and an Archetype which will be named the “Badluck guy”?
I think we can find at least one perfect Archetype by Magick School.
It would be possible to define a simple system:
-one Archetype in perfect unison by school with magic, Adept or Avatar can develop them both in parallel without problem.
– As regards the other schools, the development of competence Magic and that of Avatar will be done with opposite, both limiting the other.
Ex: if the character has 60 in Avatar, he will not be able to have more than 40 in Magic.
Add: It is specified in the description of the iconomancy that Groupies were often brought to become an Avatar of the Archetype represented by their Idol.
Obsession is a madness of a sort. Its in certainly disfunctional. Read “Just Checking” by Emily Colas to see how it can disrupt a relationship, or talk to an obsessive-compulsive.
>>There are a lot of different combinations like that, it seems, but it can’t be easy to make such superhumans; they start out small and as soon as anyone figures out what they’re trying to do, the Sleepers/TNI/Randy Douglas/The Freak/John T. Clued-In go after them. Even if they keep quiet, somebody may find out through random chance.<< Not really. Thing is, most people in UA don't know the setting's metaphysics. This isn't Vampire, where everyone introduces themselves by clan. All most dukes know is "there's magick, it's not what you think it is, different people do it in different ways". A fair number get an inkling about how Adepts work and how Avatars work. Only handful know they're looking at two different paths, one of attunement and one of transgression. If someone meets an Adept/Avatar hybrid, he probably anything unique or dangerous; he'll just go "Wow, that guy's powerful." and react appropriately.
Schools of magick are based on how you think the universe works. Avatar paths are based on how everyone else thinks the universe works.
There isn’t a single school of magick (canon, at least) that conflicts with the idea of the existence of the Invisible Clergy. And any adept who’s run into another adept from a differing school already knows that there are other kinds of magick out there (each adept, of course, thinks that all the OTHER kinds of magick out there are inferior).
Adepts who are also avatars tend to be crazy because adepts tend to be crazy, first and foremost. Secondly, any adept who is channeling an archetype beyond the first channel definitely KNOWS they are channeling that archetype. Therefore, if they want to continue down that path, they are going to do so – within their own crazy vision of how the universe works.