The magical technique of whatever happens to be nearby.

When humans started using tools, they lost their claws and furs. Ever since then, human tools have gotten stronger and stronger…

…and the humans who use them have gotten weaker and weaker.

You can’t grow claws and fur back, but you can reverse the trend. You cultivate flexibility in yourself. You don’t carry tools – you use whatever’s at hand. You keep the use of tools to make you stronger, without the reliance that makes you weaker.

That way, you’re never without a tool, because you carry all you need in your empty hands.

In some ways, you’re at odds with modern society. You don’t use money, carry keys or attach yourself to the trappings of modern living. You’re deeply attached to your surroundings, though. Your environment provides tools to you as you need them.

Generate a minor charge: Be in needs. Any time your situation is tense or constitutes a serious but not life-threatening crisis, you gain a minor charge. This could be a threat or an opportunity, as long as there’s tension and a call to act.

For example, you’d get a charge if you got the flu, encountered a potentially hostile wild animal, met your boyfriend’s parents for the first time, or got a contract to negotiate.

You don’t get any charges for problems caused by your taboo, and you only get one charge per situation, even if the situation persists after you’ve spent a charge. You don’t necessarily need to be taking a deliberate risk – the important part is that you’re in a situation with consequences for failure.

Generate a significant charge: As with a minor charge, but there must be a death (yours or someone else’s) at stake.

Generate a major charge: As with a significant charge, but at least ten thousand lives must be at stake.

Taboo: You can’t carry anything besides the clothes you wear. You can own stationary things, and even ride in vehicles; you just can’t move while holding or bearing anything. So, you can sit on your couch in your house, watching TV and drinking a beer someone brought you, but wallets, cell phones keys or even a single penny or paperclip will cause you to lose all charges. Using your clothes for anything but clothes is out of the question, too.

Blast: The Apantomancy blast is quite simple. The Apantomancer picks up any nearby object and attacks with it, either as a hand-to-hand or thrown weapon. It doesn’t have to be a usable weapon, but if it is, all handheld weapon bonuses apply to any blast, minor or significant.

Symbolic Tension: Apantomancers are made stronger and weaker by tools. For all their ideals of self-reliance, they’re incredibly dependent.

Random Magic: Adaptability. Apantomancers take whatever’s about, and adapt it to their current needs.

Charging Tips: Minor charges are pretty easy to come by – you can probably earn a charge every day or two just going through a normal level. You’d better have some way to avoid taboo consistently. Minor and significant charges really start flowing during uptime.

Starting Charges: An apantomancer starts with 5 charges.

Minor formulas

Ancient Fighting Secrets
4 minor charges
This is the apantomancy minor blast. It does damage equal to the sum of the dice, plus any weapon bonuses.

Universal Tool
3 minor charges
Change any manufactured non_unique one-handed tool worth less than five hundred dollars into another. You could turn a pencil into a cell phone or a handgun into a rolling pin. The resulting tool is fully loaded and charged. The change lasts an hour.

Panacea
3 minor charges
You need to be holding some kind of medicine to use this formula – even a common aspirin will do. The medicine keeps all it usual properties, but also gains healing powers. Using the medicine heals damage equal to the sum of the dice. For an extra three to five minor charges, the medicine will cure the effects of poisons, diseases and drugs. Others can use the medicine instead, but it loses its potency if you take a step (or crawl, or get carried.)

Manna
1 minor charge
Changes food in your hands. Any food you’re holding will look the same, but will taste delicious, and provide all needed nutrients for a whole day.

Find the Omen
2 minor charges
A cheap divination ritual. Close your eyes and ask a question aloud. When you open your eyes, your vision will fall on something that symbolically or allegorically answers your question. Interpretation is up to you.

Significant Formulas

Instant Expertise
1 significant charge
Use any object in your hands with your Apantomancy skill. Pick a single skill that you’d use with an object you’re holding. You keep that skill until you let go of the object.

Pattern
3 significant charges
You need a pile of some’s stuff – at least twenty objects. Spend five minutes rearranging and inspecting the objects and you’ll find out something you don’t already know about the person. You can’t decide what, but it will always be something powerful and important. Anyone can look through someone’s CD collection to find out that he’s a heavy metal fan, but you can look through someone’s CD collection and find that he buried a body in his back yard for his best friend.

Free Spirit
2 significant charges
Close your eyes and walk. Until you open them, you’ll pass through any walls or obstacles as if you were intangible. If you open them while you’re overlapped with something else, you’ll die instantly and messily, but you know instinctively when it’s safe to open your eyes.

Deadly Everything Technique
1 significant charge
This is the Apantomancy significant blast. It does damage equal to the result of your roll, plus any weapon bonuses.

Animal Finding
4 significant charges
A throwback ritual to old-time Apantomancy. It’s said that Mexico City was founded on the spot where a settler saw and eagle catching an eating a serpent, because it was considered a sign of good luck. This does something similar.
Close your eyes and enter a trance for about 15 minutes. When you open them, the next animal you see lends you mystic power. This gives you a single skill, culturally associated to that animal, equal to your Apantomancer score (even if it exceeds your Body, Speed or Mind score.) This skill lasts until you use this formula again, or break taboo.
For instance, you might gain the skill “Run Fast as a Rabbit” or “Cat’s Grace” or “Ornate and Fanciful.”
Trying to stack the results of this formula will result in automatic failure.

Major Effects
Change your body permanently to grow a tool or adapt to a hostile environment. Change a single object into a hundred stacks of that object. Change a drink into a potion of perpetual youth.

What You’ve Heard
Tommy Francis was a thug for the Cleveland Card Counters, a minor cabal in Ohio. He always wanted to be an adept like the rest of his team. He was the only survivor when the group took a SCUBA dive in the Great Lakes. What he saw there drove him mad, but it also granted his wish. Now, fifteen years later, he wanders homeless on the streets where his cabal once roamed, living off the riches of the slums.