Society’s laws are for society’s whores!
Anarchist, trouble makers, punks whatever they’re called they’re all fakers, with their store bought clothes, and market bought food.
Not that that even matters to being truly Free, but they think it does which is why they’re all stupid.
You wanna step outside society? you wanna gain that power? then you gotta take responsibility see, you gotta be prepared to accept the consequences of your actions, and you gotta be good at hide and seek.
If you ain’t prepared to do the time then you ain’t never going to be free, but if you do the time you definatly ain’t free, balance is the trick, and staying one step ahead of your hunters.
So how’s it work?
Generate a Significant Charge: Do something that gets the cops wanting you, wanting you bad, murder, child molestation, bank robbery, whatever, do the big crime, the flashy crime, get seen doing it, or just leave huge clues on the crime scene, and if you have to run, you get your first charge, and the mojo can begin to flow.
(breaking out of jail or out of your capturers hands after tabooing but before you’ve served your punishemnt will immediatly give you one significant charge. A first, primer, significant charge Has to be gained to break the adept out of taboo and before they can gain any minors)
Generate a Minor Charge: Do any non-significant crime and get seen doing it or leave clues that you were the one who did it, it’s about getting people to continue chasing you, but it’s also about just plain flouting the law of the land and rising above it at the same time, showing the world that you are free. Running down the street naked in broad day light will yield just as many charges as robbing a liquor store of all it’s cash so do what you have to do to survive and then do something extra just to grab attention. Can’t have them forgetting you now can you?
Generate Another Significant Charge: After you’ve got that first sig, you gotta take it up a notch, up the ante as it were. You robbed a bank sure, but now you gotta kill, you killed, well now you gotta kill a few more times and leave your sexual fluids in your victim’s eye sockets.
Of course, newbies will do a big crime and try it again, not quite the rush as before eh? doesn’t make your blood sing like it used to? Oh, You don’t wanna kill some innocent? Don’t wanna fuck that little girl eh? Freedom means being Free to do Anything! No Morals, No Laws, nothing standing between you and doing what ever it is needs to be done, but don’t worry, every big one makes it that much easier to be Free the next time, and the next time and the next time, until you’re the worst, until you cannot get worse, until you can’t outdo yourself every again.
They say something Special happens then, something Wonderful.
(Generate a Major Charge: Do something so aweful, so mind numbingly hugely atrocious that you can’t really taboo because you’re either dead/dying or they haven’t killed you yet, and there is no way to get outside your pursuers jurisdiction or to wait for the statute of limitations to run out because they’ll never stop looking no matter where you hide. Become a modern day eichmann in other words, and don’t bother hiding your holocaust, remember, they can’t chase what they don’t know about)
Taboo: You taboo and are unable to gain any minor charges if you are captured by the people chasing you or if for whatever reason the authorities or who ever is after you stops chasing you.
Starting Charges: none.
Random Magick Domain: Being free, rising above things and/or surpassing them, the making, breaking and bending of laws
Blast Style: Creates “stigmata”-like wounds on the target in the form of cuts and bloody chafing from physical restraints like manacles, handcuffs or a whipping/beating. Cigarette burns and other signs of abuse have also been witnessed though not often and generally only on those who’ve escaped some sort of non-state based slavery like an abusive relationship.
Minor Formula Spells:
Flesh wound
Cost: 2 Minor Charges
allows the adept to shrug off any damage they receive for the tens of the magick roll in minutes, this doesn’t mean they don’t get injured just that they notice or are affected by pain or damage until they lose all their health, dangerous but useful when they have to do something regardless of how fucked up their body is. the result of the spell wearing off is that every bit of damage they just received hits them all at once, so add an appropriate negative modifier to any rolls made immediatly afterwards.
1 Better
Cost: 2 Minor Charges
Allows the adept to take result of the last successful roll by another character plus the highest of either of his two dice from the magick roll to perform a similar or identical (mundane) task as the other character just performed, even if the adept doesn’t have a comparable skill.
Scry-B-Gone
Cost: 4 Minor Charges
Causes any attempts to track or spy on the adept to fail for the magick roll in minutes, they’ll become lost in a crowd, their tracks will suddenly be covered over or hidden some how and surveillance devices or magic will be blinded while the effect lasts.
Mr. Nobody
Cost: 2 Minor Charges
Leaves the Adept free of the burden of having a distinct appearance, so people will be unable to remember your appearance as anything more than average build, average height, and will have to succeed a significant notice roll above the adept’s magick roll to notice them if the adept doesn’t want to be noticed. Lasts for the magick roll in minutes.
Bad Dog!
Cost: 1 minor charge
Freedomany Minor Blast
Lizardman
Cost: 4 minor charges
Allows the Adept to detach limbs painlessly and without doing any real damage to themselves (no bleeding from the stumps for instance) but freedomancy doesn’t really go in for the reattachemnt of limbs, so you’ll need to seek medical or medickal (epederimancers or some other, magic using, healer) attention to get it reattached afterwards. The body part can go for 24 hours without being reattached before it will start to rot and decay, the minor formula spell Flesh Wound can be cast on the limb to make it last for a further 24 hours, and freezing will keep the part viable for a week or two.
Significant Formula Spells:
Didn’t I warn you what would happen?
Cost: 1 Sig Charge
Freedomancy Significant blast
Hex-B-Gone
Cost: 3 Sig Charge
Causes lasting magical effects to dissipate and stop working near the caster, effects caused by self perpetuating sources (like artifacts and unnaturals) will start to work again once the Adept leaves its presence.
Mind the Gap
Cost: 2 Sig Charges
Allows the Adept to make a person completely phobic of breaking some rule or law that the Adept dictates, no matter how minor or commonly ignored, so that any attempts by that person to break that law will result in a stress check (helplessness, unnatural or
Houdini
Cost: 1 Sig Charge
Allows the Adept to escape something that physically restrains them, whether this is handcuffs, walls, headlocks or the playful grip of a shark’s razor sharp teeth on their midriff.
Loophole
Cost: 2 Sig Charges
Allows the adept to alter reality subtly so that the consequences of a single action doesn’t affect them, generally the actions that can be reworked are those that rely on the adpet being stupid or foolish rather than unlucky, so an adept who walks into an ambush because he thought he could get away without getting shot might get shot, cast this spell and find that by a huge stroke of luck, he happened to be carrying a huge extra thick bible in his jacket that stopped the bullet.
There’s talk of Adepts who died only to turn out to have slipped into extremely deep comas that fooled medical examinations (which they came out of a few hours or days later when whatever killed them has gone away), though if the authorities that are chasing you find out you’re dead you’ll taboo as they’ll stop hunting for you, and thus the magick might not always work in that situation.
Bird Man
Cost: 1 Sig Charge
Allows the adept to fly through the air until they touch down again for the tens of their soul stat in hours. Note that flying isn’t something that humans take naturally to, so some trickier maneuvers (like landing) will require a roll against the adept’s soul stat unless they have a specific “flying” based soul skill.
I didn’t do it!
Cost: 2 sig charges
Transfers one significant charge generating act from the adept to the target, so that all evidence and responsibility for the crime will point towards the target
Major Effects:
Utterly dissolve all law and order in a nation or continent, Ascend to the statosphere, Relieve the entire world’s population of some malardy or sickness or problem.
I’m not sure you’re correct. the strict structure of an adept-style is not fitting with being free – here, the adept isn’t free, he’s constrained rather heavily. he HAS to keep going. this school is about being a criminal, not free.
but, It’s quite fitting for the super-villain to match the super-heroes of the UA universe.
I agree with The Nihohit about the Adept not really being free, but constrained by his school, though I suppose that might work as the Paradox of the school…
However, I feel I should also point out that being free should also include the choice to obey society’s rules if you want.
The charging-structure seems more like Notorio-mancy, or Infamy-mancy.
Actually I would say that the emphasis on disobeying the rules is not necessarily inimicable to freedom. It all really depends on how freedom is viewed.
The negative understanding of freedom views being free as simply being unhindered in one’s actions. In this sense the notion of being an adept may conflict with freedom, at least insofar as it forbids certain kinds of action.
The positive notion of freedom however generally works on some principle of autonomy where freedom is equated with acting in certain ways. So, fixing this to freedomancy, what might be claimed is that the essence of freedom is found in refusing to allow anyone else to make the rules for you. In this case one makes oneself unfree when one obeys the law just because these laws are not one’s own and this even when one ‘chooses’ to obey the laws. Unless one is going to decide individually to obey each law of the land, for reasons wholly independent of the fact that they are laws of the land (unlikely), then one is obeying someone else’s rules and therefore unfree.
What I would say however (agreeing with Chris G. above) is that the emphasis on acts such as rape and murder drive him more away from a notion of freedom and towards a notion of immorality and evil.
“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”
In order to be truly free, a man needs to remove from himself any boundaries. theoretically, this would also encompass the laws of physics and biology, for they are laws too.
But freedom is every option – not “obey or don’t”, but “do what you want, whether or not it coincides with the law”.
There’s an hebrew song that declare: being free is being completely alone.
I would say that the taboo of being free is being affected by someone else’s command. if someone tells you to obey the speed limit, drive at triple-figures. but, if no-one catually told you at the moment to drive safely, it’s as much of a free choice as driving recklessly.
but still, this is a cool school, for criminals.
I think the charge gathering is a little out of whack because it should be entirely fixed on what the adept does and not what witnesses there are.
C.
I wouldn’t let this allow you to ascend, even with major charges. You might be able to exploit the notoriety of your major charge atrocities to ascend as The Man Who Is Evil Incarnate, but you couldn’t do it with the charge itself.
That said, I can see this guy becoming a real pariah in the OU, with eventually everybody trying to kill him. It could result in the only ever TNI-Sleeper-Mak-GLS alliance, which would collapse instantly in a hailstorm of backstabbing as soon as the guy was dead.
Could make for a great campaign, especillay if your PCs wanna be the good guys.
Well there doesn’t have to be actual witnesses, all an adept has to do is do something that will get the attention of the cops or some other equally dangerous and far reaching group (because even the OU has rules and laws that exist, even if they are unspoken) and to leave some huge clue to who did it.
and it doesn’t have to be used by an adept focused on murder or rape or whatever (well, not at first) I wrote it from the point of view of the sort of person who’s most likely to be explaining to someone how the school works – or in otherwords a crazy burnt out ex-freedomancer who the freedom focused listener has met in prison.
But an adept could start out as serial flasher who occasionally does bank robberies.
It’s only after they’ve scored a couple of sigs and run out of ideas that they’ll be forced to ask themselves how badly they want to be free, and that murder and mayhem will enter into the equation.
It does work better as a NPC, but if you want an adept PC who has a very limited life span (for those players who don’t stay in town too long) then maybe freedomancy might be interesting.
Though I think I may have out thought myself when writing the charging scheme, a freedomancer should be able to get minors by just breaking the law, regardless of witnesses, they got capone for tax evasion after all, the minor crimes should leave enough trails and clues jsut by being committed that it’ll probably help keep the freedomancer from hiding too well and tabooing (which is even better for PCs who are hunting one of course)
This is a good school for the suicidal, but I have several issues with it. It needs a different name; I like Chris G.’s Infamancy. It’s too easy to gain Minor charges. I could see a guy tossing his trash on the ground for a Minor. Going with the different focus from the name, blasts should be some wound reflecting the nature of the adept’s most recent Significant crime. If it’s a murder, the wound resembles the deathblow. If it’s a robbery, some of the target’s blood appears in a bag in the caster’s hand, ready to be sold. If it’s a rape… Well, use your imagination. The third Major Effect could be changed to having the entirety of the world’s population knowing of your crimes, though not necessarily of the one who committed them. Actually, now that I get into it, I’m tempted to revise this school entirely. May I have your permission to take a whack at it and post it?
Oh, and how the hell is Lizardman supposed to be useful?
I think the paradox works great, actually. The whole freedom = not obeying, but actively not obeying means you’re still influenced (and thus, not free).
Part of why it seems to descend into simple amorality is that, generally, that’s the kind of thing that there are increasingly strict laws about. People see it as bad, so they prohibit it. Depending on context, you could probably do increasingly disobedient actions that weren’t necessarily increasingly immoral (for example, in a repressive dictatorship with an overabundance of laws and lots of commands to turn in/execute types of undesireables). Continuing with the Dictatorship example, a Freedomancer in a dictatorship could be just as hunted for freeing a group of political dissidents bound for execution as for raping and killing a five-year old girl, if not more so.
Which isn’t to say there aren’t other possible paradox-ridden perceptions of “freedom” which could provide the power for being an adept. Still, this taboo has a lot of resonance: how many punks and rebels break laws by doing things they aren’t supposed to, things they wouldn’t even care about otherwise? And all to show they’re “free”. It’s fairly post-modern and has a good paradox.
Lizardman is good for A) escaping shackles, arm-locks, bear-traps, anything that constrains the body by inhibiting the motion of a limb, B) setting up someone for a crime they obviously didn’t commit (possibly for revenge, possibly to push them into following the path of Freedomancy), and C) INSTEAD CLUB!
You make several good points, but I still think a different school could be made out of this one. Not a better or worse school, just a different one.
I think so, too. I’m just sayin’, this is a valid one after all.
And you’ve persuaded me. Although I still think Lizardman sucks.
From an outside point of view, well, yeah, but from a view INSIDE, it seems a bit better. Because of the obsession that comes with being an adept, seeing the whole world through the filter of your particular interpretation, values are different. You and I might rather just spend the significant to escape, but you and I aren’t bizarre adepts obsessed with a twisted view of “freedom”. And since the “escape physical things” is a sig and sigs for Freedomancers are mighty expensive, sometimes you gotta just get free. Some traps are just coyote ugly.
After reading many of the schools, I’ve gotten the impression that a formula being useful to a player is more important than the formula being thematically correct, although, quite obviously, formulas should ideally be both useful and appropriate.