You get what you pay for.

AKA: Losers, Manipulators

There are some weird people out there. They destroy their own bodies to master the flesh, or take stupid risks to twist the odds later on. So close, and yet so far. They got something, but they don’t really understand what they got.

You do.

There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. The universe doesn’t have room for freeloading bums. Everything requires sacrifice and exchange. If you want food, water, shelter, or your parents’ love and care, it’s going to cost you — something you learned early on. The greater the sacrifice, the more you can “buy” from the cosmos. It can be money, health, luck, love, or even happiness. For a while, anyway.

What you didn’t realize until later is that you can build up credit with the universe. Saving up your self-destruction and suffering for when you need it. Your loss allows you to gain. People may cheat you, but the universe always plays fair.

When you hit rock bottom, the only way to go is up.

The Paradox of Masochimancy is the same paradox as actual sadomasochism; the masochist uses self destruction and unhealthy/ unwise choices to enter a position of power. Manipulators make sacrifices, putting the universe into an open ended debt towards them. Weakness becomes strength.

Blast Style

Masochimancers have no blast, but some of their spells can be used to hinder or inconvenience others.

Stats

Generate a Minor Charge: Cause yourself some sort of inconvenience, or take the more difficult path to get something done. This has to cause some major inconvenience; walking to work instead of driving when it’s a nice day doesn’t count, but it would if it was raining.

Generate a Significant Charge: Cause yourself a certain amount of physical, emotional, or psychological harm. Cutting yourself is the prime physical example; preventing yourself from sleeping can also count sometimes. Emotional and psychological harm is harder to figure out — getting in a relationship with a shallow person who will eventual break your heart is an acceptable way, but you don’t get the charge until she dumps you.

Alternatively, don’t do anything if some other person does something completely unprovoked to seriously inconvenience or harm you. Jumping in front of you in the line at the supermarket checkout doesn’t count, but getting your car damaged by a self-assured bad driver qualifies.

Generate a Major Charge: No Masochimancer has ever scored a major charge… yet. Possibly it would require massive injury or disfigurement (like for Epideromancy), the end of a very promising relationship, or worse.

Taboo: The masochimancer sacrifices his own health, wealth, and happiness now for security and safety later on. It is not his place to make sacrifices on the behalf of somebody else. Deliberately harming somebody physically or emotionally, without using magick, screws up the balance books of the universe, and the Loser has to start over. This does not include people worrying about you screwing up your life, but you can’t torch your relationship with them if it’ll hurt both of you instead of just you. It also does not mean you can’t mess with anyone using your magick. You’re not making them lose anything with a hostile spell, you’re paying for their trouble with your own loss.

Random Magick Domain: Gain and loss. Masochimancy’s random magick domain covers a very narrow part of the domains of entropomancy, epideromancy, and amoromancy. You could find a dropped wallet or money clip if you needed money, but you couldn’t make an attacker’s gun jam. Similarly, you could heal damage quickly or gain some emotional support/sympathy from someone who might otherwise not care about or actively hate you — but you couldn’t look like somebody else or convince anyone to do any big favors for you.

Starting Charges: New Masochimancers have four minor charges.

Charging Tips: One approach would be to stop using modern conveniences nearly as much. Sleep on the floor instead of the bed. That kind of stuff. Don’t be too picky about who you get emotionally involved with. Move to a bad part of town and wait for the trouble to add up.

Minor Formula Spells

Lucky Break: 1 Minor Charge
Effect: The caster finds something small and generic that he needs, like a wallet or a book of matches. For two more minor charges it can be used to find something more specific, say a scribbled note that fell out of the burglar’s pocket while he was breaking into the museum. This specific effect doesn’t cover something unique, magickal, or worth more than thirty bucks.

Shake It Off: 2 Minor Charges
Effect: The Caster instantly recovers the sum of the roll in wound points. However, the effect functions a lot like first aid; one wound point remains to be healed by time and rest. Any further points are lost.

A Real Trooper: 2 Minor Charges
Effect: The Caster can go one day without eating anything, or one night without getting tired and sleepy. This cannot be cast more than three times in a row for the same problem.

Cut Me Some Slack: 4 Minor Charges
Effect: For the next three hours, people are slightly more sympathetic to you than they might be otherwise. An enforcer told to cap you might just let you go with a vicious beating, for example, or a bouncer might let you in the club against his better judgement. This effect does not work on sociopaths or Avatars of the Executioner.

Turnabout is Fair Play: 5 Minor Charges
Effect: Any person or group out to settle your hash, steal your stuff, or just prank you end up getting the same treatment by another group. This would stop the Executioner in the last spell; she’d run into a friend of a former target out for revenge, or something similar.

Significant Formula Spells

Lady Luck is Fickle: 1 Significant Charge
Effect: For a whole day, all sorts of minor annoyances gang up on you. Your car breaks down, you get called up for jury duty, somebody snagged your wallet, the computer crashes. The upside? While all the minor things are screwing with you, the big stuff won’t even look your way. The Hit Squad or Sleeper Team on your case is completely lost and can’t find you anywhere. The chain smoker in your apartment building drops a lit cancer stick in the trash can, but it doesn’t catch fire (or if it does, the fire is put out long before it can threaten your apartment). You slip on a banana peel when the sniper fires at you and he misses.

Fall Guy: 2 Significant Charges
Effect: The inverse of the Fool’s damage-deflection channel, this spell redirects harm that would happen to somebody else towards you instead. You choose the person you’re protecting when you cast the spell. It lasts two hours or five rounds in combat, and you must be within a number of feet of the target equal to the sum of the roll. The GM decides how the damage is redirected to you.

Mistaken Identity: 4 Significant Charges
Effect: Attackers, pranksters, or tax collectors get redirected to somebody else for a whole day. This person must be someone who has wronged you in the past somehow, say your old boss who took credit for all your hard work, then turned around and fired you. If the people who confuse him for you are not already violent, then the trouble can usually be resolved with a few minutes of discussion and fact checking. However, if the target is predisposed towards confrontation or is angry and irritable when they meet him, he’ll occupy their attention a lot longer.

Enough is Enough: 2 Significant Charges
Effect: Drawing on the connection between sadism and masochism, this spell allows you to perform acts of retribution without breaking taboo. For eight hours after this spell is cast, you don’t lose charges by exacting revenge on those who wrong you. The downside is that you can’t use those charges for the spell’s duration, either. Finally, if you choose to cause physical harm to somebody, the amount of damage you inflict with each attack cannot go above what you rolled for this spell.

Live to Fight Another Day: 3 Significant Charges
Effect: If you’re up against a life-wrecking event, or somebody out to end your life, this spell stops them in their tracks for forty-eight hours. This is enough time for the ambulance to arrive, take you to the hospital, and let them work on you, or enough to cut all ties, get some gear, and go underground. The nature of the delay is related somehow to the force that could kill you or ruin your life. After 48 hours, though, they can try again.

Major Charge Effects: Stop a certain type of minor problem from ever occuring for you again (computer crashes, car breakdowns, power outages, et cetera). Gain some sort of permanent stat or skill bonus, or cause another person to gain said bonus. Save a person you care about from certain death. Survive a catastrophe no normal person could have survived.