That which does not kill you makes you a reality-bending freak.

Also known as “yes men”.

You knew it since you were a child; That we’re spinning alone in the darkness, random collections of molecules in an entropic sea of nothingness from which we arise, and to which we shall someday fall. Maybe you didn’t have the words for it back then, but the concept was there – nothing matters, nothing is fixed. Ultimately, no one shall remember us; our deeds are whispers carried on the wind, lines on shifting sand, and the tide’s coming in – these days more than ever. We’re a cosmological joke no one gets, and good and evil are just circus clowns turning cartwheels while the Big Top comes slowly tumbling down. People chase meaning in the conventions of religions, the thrill of material gain, the promise of love. They search for something they lack in a world full of deficiency, and the harder they strain their eyes, the more their bloodshot faces turn to fanaticism and greed and depravity. You saw the hollowness, but while others embraced the emptiness, or took it into themselves, you saw space – valuable, freeing emptiness that you could fill with a world of your own designs, a life rich with the symbology and importance that you brought forth ex nihilo. You’re an existential demigod arbitrating the meaning of unfixed things. You read Nietzshe, you studied Schopenhauer, and the will to power is your will.

You don’t want to be a man, as other men live, their minds bound up in the expectations of a mediocre society, their souls aspiring to movable states neither higher nor lower, only more aligned to the vices that others label as lofty – you want to be an overman. The guy who stands up and says in no uncertain terms that this is your world, your life, and you’ll choose its own goddamn meaning – glorious, purposeful, concrete value. No universal constant to pin you down? No problem. In a world devoid of purpose, there’s no one to tell you you’ve got it wrong. The purpose you choose for yourself is always valid. The nihilists can indulge in their petty onanism for all you care. The fanatics can follow the pointing fingers to the epicentres of bombs. Let the apathetic languish, let the arrogant shake their fists; this is your life, you’ll call the shots, you’ll see the structure you’ve built for yourself stand as long as you do; the king of your metaphysical castle until the day you die and can no longer care. The king may die, but he’s never dead. Long live the king, and long live life. When life’s what you make it, every experience is your own creation, every snapshot of sensation is a masterpiece of your personal truth.

You don’t scorn nihilism. You reject it, passionately and vehemently. It’s the open space you draw to sketch purposefulness, the counterpoint that builds the complete image. You affirm your love for life, not just in belief, but by action. That’s what separates you from the other, would-be Ubermensches. They love life – you make love to it.

Nietzsche is your man; his philosophy is your meat and drink, and you’re his Ubermensch. Or at least, that’s what you like to think.

Symbolic tension: Your entire philosophy of forging meaning is contingent upon the intrinsic meaninglessness of existence – your will is your power, but that will is rooted in the certainty you gain from knowing your answer can never be wrong because there is no objective standard of correctness. Defining an all important meaning of your existence is meaningless compared to the act of the declaration itself, and in your magickal practices, you affirm your absolute acceptance of life by repeating its most quintessential experiences until they become routine; you repeat your life instead of living it to prove how much you love it. That which does not kill you makes you stronger, even if it reduces you to a broken lunatic unravelling the straight-jacket of reality. Your will to power is exercised creatively in the sense of purpose you build at the same time it is exercised destructively in defying the boundaries of the world and the expectations of your peers.

Gain a Minor Charge: Affirmancers take Schopenhauer’s notion of Eternal Reccurance and put it into practice. The greatest affirmation of life is wishing to repeat it all forever – the good and the bad, the pleasure and the pain. Affirmancers don’t wait – they prove it by re-enacting life experiences. A minor charge is easy. Ritually recreate something you’ve been through that meant something to you – it has to be a specific event that stands out for you. Eating breakfast at the same table you always eat breakfast is just a meal; putting all the details in place to recreate the breakfast when you realised your marriage was over would do the trick nicely. You can recreate a given event as often as once per week, but every recreation of any event takes at least an hour to do it right.

Gain a Significant Charge: The same principle taken to the next level – you’ve got to recreate a dramatic and difficult experience. It’s much more symbolic of your acceptance of life to recreate something unpleasant than something enjoyable, and to qualify you must have taken an injury worth more than 10% of your body, or blown a check on a stress gauge the first time around. The recreation must be attempted vigorously, but the actors and props don’t have to be literally identical. If you want to recreate the time your girlfriend’s enraged husband shot you in a parking lot with a .38, then you could get your cheated-on friend to shoot you with a different gun of the same model in a similar parking lot. The actors in the recreation needn’t be willing participants – events only have to unfold sufficiently similarly that you can see the same events unfolding, and you have to make a bona fide attempt to turn the situation into an accurate re-enactment. The point of the exercise isn’t to learn from your mistakes, it’s the acknowledge them as part of your absolute self and demonstrate your willingness to undergo your life’s tribulations endlessly. If you weren’t wearing a bulletproof vest back then, you can’t bring one this this time, and if you collapsed into your attacker’s arms as you slowly bled out, your friend can look forwards to getting his clothes dirty.

If you’re doing a recreation properly, your mind’s in the moment. So if you made stress checks back then, you should face ’em again if everything’s going right. You can pass this time if you like…or realise you’ve become so much of a cold fish that you no longer care. Just keep your behaviour in line with the original event and you’ll get your juice.

Gain a Major Charge: No one’s ever been documented as having done it successfully, but the popular theory is that you’d have to re-enact your own destruction somehow. A couple of guys are working on pulling this one off, but the last time a guy with a bright idea about affirmantic major charges gave it his best the CPR that should’ve revived him failed inexplicably. Play with fire, get burned. Emotional, mental and financial destruction are much more promising than physical destruction.

Taboo: Expressing regret. That’s denial of life, rejection of experience. It goes against everything you stand for. If you ever express any regret over anything you’ve gone through, you lose all charges. You’ll also lose your charges if you express regret over anything anyone else has gone through, either. If you’re sorry that your friend got shot or your wife got raped, you’d better not let on.

Random Magick Domain: Affirmation. This school is good at anything that confirms or supports; it’s not useful for magick that changes or denies. You can give someone something they’ve got already – in spades – and you can corroborate existing feelings, but you can’t take something away from someone except as a side-effect.

Blast Style: Affirmancy blasts take trouble and give you real big trouble. They’re generally subtle, as they need some other stimulus to work with. They pick something bad and take it to an extreme. Often this means that affirmancy blasts have delayed effects, a lot like urbanomancer blasts. Many affirmantic blasts actualise as aggravating injury – old wounds open up, or a fleshwound gunshot becomes inexplicably lethal. If the blast subject has an apropriate wound the GM can decide the blast works straight away. In other cases, it whacks him the next time it gets a chance. The subject kicks a door and breaks his foot, or gets into a hot bath and begins to boil. Anything even conceptually dangerous can work as the vehicle for affirmantic blasting to clobber the unfortunate target.

Minor Formula Spells

Make You Stronger
Cost: 1 Minor Charge
Effect: This is the affirmancer minor blast, and it has a special drawback – or advantage, depending on your point of view. It’s never fatal. Your target is always left with at least 1 wound point. It can knock him out or soften him up for a bullet, but in and of itself, it is never a fatal assault.

What’s The Meaning of This?
Cost: 1 Minor Charge
Effect: This spell gives you a flash into the psyche of the principle actor behind a contemplated act. You get a brief flash of how the event relates to his personal sense of meaning. It’s always a one word answer relating to how the target perceives his own motives. You could cast this spell and think about the slashed tires on your car. If you get “boredom” or “rebellion” it was probably a random act of vandalism, but if you get “payback” then you know you’ve made an enemy. It works for ongoing actions, too, although it takes a round to use. Still, it can be useful to know if that gunman with a hostage is acting out of greed, or malice, or desperation.

Am I Right or Am I Right?
Cost: 2 Minor Charges
Effect: Use this formula on someone who has a theory. If you know what the theory is, you can affect just that notion. Or you can fire blind, and have it work on the next theory that the target thinks about. Whatever the target hypothesises or suspects becomes certain in his mind. If a jealous spouse thinks his wife is cheating on him and you hit him with this, all of a sudden he just knows for certain that she’s being unfaithful. He doesn’t know why he knows, he hasn’t got any evidence to back it up, but he’s just…sure. He can be talked out of it, or not, as well or as poorly as he could be talked out of any similar natural feeling. For many people that means they’ll still be suspicious even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, even if they back down on the surface. Always trust your instincts.
If you use this on some dumb theory a guy told you when he was drunk – “Chocolate is God’s way of fattening us up for Judgement Day!” – then he’ll be absolutely convinced he’s right if he ever thinks about it again, but he’s no more or less likely to focus on the subject than he was before you put the whammy on him. The spell manipulates the target’s conviction, not his focus.

Yes Man
Cost: 2 Minor Charges
Effect: You use this on yourself when you’re talking to somebody else. For the duration of the conversation you have with the nominated individual, you can tell them exactly what they want to hear on an emotional level. This will let you be very ingratiating, and it’s usually good for an automatic charm skill success, particularly if the person in question is feeling vulnerable or persecuted. It’s also ideal for talking someone into doing something they were thinking about doing anyway. It won’t let you tell people what they want to hear on a practical level – you can’t pull passcodes out of the ether with this, and it won’t advise you to confess to a policeman who really wants to catch a criminal; but you could sweet talk a lonely guard into feeling appreciated and hope he forgets to check your credentials. You don’t have to go with what the spell tells you to say – you might end up breaking taboo if you did – but the spell isn’t broken unless you outright deny what he wants to hear. If he wants to hear that you’re sorry his wife left him for you then you can tell him that his wife misses him instead – but tell him you’re really happy his wife became your girlfriend and you won’t get any further magickal help convincing him not to beat the snot out of you.

A Man’s Gotta Do What A Man’s Gotta Do
Cost: X Minor Charges
Effect: This spell reinforces a subject’s sense of the rightness and purposefulness of his actions. You can use this on yourself or someone else when the subject’s own actions cause him to blow a stress check. The check is retroactively altered so that the subject passed – his personal convictions tell him that his behaviour was necessary and justified. He doesn’t fight, freeze or flee, he just marks a hardened notch. The cost of the spell is x minor charges where x is the level of the stress check that was modified. The kicker is that the target is filled with immense personal conviction until he gets a chance to calm down. He acts like he’s got as many hardened notches in the affected meter as charges required to cast A Man’s Gotta Do What A Man’s Gotta Do. If you use this on a shakey office hand who got involved with a hostage situation so that he didn’t freak out when he tried to beat information out of a security guard, he’s going to be a 6 hardened-notch cynic until the situation is diffused – even if the spell only gave him his first hardened notch in violence, for the time being he’s perfectly cool with killing people, so long as they’re not helpless.

This spell doesn’t take up an action to employ. You can’t deliberately invest more charges than necessary in order to turn someone into a really dangerous hardcase – if you want to make someone disregard life so completely that it doesn’t bother him to shoot sleeping people in the face, he’s got to pointblank someone on his own to give you a rank-7 violence check to work with, and what’s more, he’s got to be pushed into the vulnerability of failure that allows you to fill the void with an excess of purpose. You can’t use this spell with a check someone passed in order to make them extra-hardened. Remember, it only works for actions undertaken by the subject. It won’t help you deal with things other people do to you.

Significant Formula Spells

That Which Kills You
Cost: 1 Significant Charge
Effect: This is the affirmancer significant blast. It has its own peculiar quirk, the opposite to the minor blast – it’s all or nothing. If you don’t roll enough damage to kill the subject, you don’t hurt him at all, and your charge is still gone.

Adduction
Cost: 1 Significant Charge
Effect: This works a lot like the Pornomancy formula Synchronicity, but is used to find evidence. Pick something you want to prove, cast the spell, and events will conspire to bring you in to contact with a clear and useful piece of evidence relevent to your target goal. Need to clear your friend of murder charges? This spell will manipulate events so that you get to meet the eye-witness the police missed. If evidence is being kept from you this spell will give you a shot at accessing it; if evidence was overlooked, this spell will pick it right up. The spell can’t create evidence that doesn’t exist, but even if your friend’s guilty it will lead you to the closest thing that will dispute anyone’s ability to prove it. As always, caution is advisable – ask a stupid question, receive a stupid answer. There are tales of an affirmancer using this spell to search for evidence of the existence of an afterlife. He got hit by a bus.

Affirmative Action
Cost: 2 Significant Charges
Effect: This spell can be cast on any individual involved in a dramatic but static situation – for example, a woman stunned wordless by a marriage proposal, or a person holding another at gunpoint. The spell forces the subject to act to resolve the dramatic tension on their next move. What’s more, the spell strongly encourages the subject to perform an action that fulfills the inherent promise of the scenario – the woman accepts the proposal, the gunman shoots his hostage. The compulsion is so strong that unless it contradicts one of the victim’s passions, or he succeeds at a mind check, he has no choice – he must bring the tension to its suggested affirmative climax. The spell causes the subject to expiate the situation’s drama in full – a guman can shoot, or (on a sucessful mind check) drop the weapon / allow his hostage to leave, but he can’t just shift the gun to his other hand or some other cop-out. When the promise of the situation does contradict a passion or the subject passes a mind check, he still has to resolve the situation in full but he can choose how he does it.

This spell can be used on someone who froze as a result of a stress check, but it forces them to fight or flee instead. You can’t use this effect on yourself.

Recurrence
Cost: 2 Significant Charges
Effect: This spell makes someone relive an experience. The vision takes up only a single action of the subject’s, but he experiences the entirety of the event in his mind, complete with full sensation played out in an illusion of real-time. The sorcerer must have witnessed the first occurrence of the events he wants to make the target relive. The subject can’t change his own actions during the replay, and he may suffer stress checks when he emerges from the vision – either from the experience itself, or from helplessness caused by going through it all again without being able to change anything. The experience to be relieved can be as short as a minute or as long as an hour, and it only takes an objective moment to reoccur regardless of length. The person experiencing the vision can’t act while it’s going on, even to dodge, but opponents get no special bonuses to injure him. The subject may be able to pick out details from the experience he’d missed or neglected the first time through, but if didn’t see something originally he cannot look elsewhere on the mental journey – that would be changing his actions.

Ubermensch
Cost: 4 Significant Charges
Effect: When you cast this spell, your sense of the meaning you have chosen to give life overwhelms your target so that his own existence is re-interpreted in light of yours. He gains a sudden understanding that he only exists to play a role in your life. It’s his whole purpose for being, and he takes it very seriously. What the spell doesn’t guarantee is that the subject will be in any way friendly – whether the interpretation is a helpful one or an antagonistic one will depend upon the target’s passions and your past history with him – if any. If you cast this on a security guard he might decide he lives purely to protect you. Or maybe he decides his sole worth is in guarding his existing charge from you – hassling you at every opportunity, but ignoring everyone else who wants to get at the thing he’s supposed to be protecting.

If you cast Ubermensch on someone with a soul stat higher than your affirmancy skill, it lasts only while you remain in their presence and for no longer than an hour. If you cast it on someone with a soul lower than your magick score, then it lasts for twenty four hours.

How the subject will regard the experience depends on just what he did while under the influence of the spell. Intense but unexceptional experiences will usually be rationalised, but if a person’s newfound sense of meaning caused them do to something really drastic then they’re more likely to fixate on the “whys”, and the self checks that can lead to go all the way up the scale. This spell manipulates how a person relates to their own existence, and there are few more intimate forms of violation.

Affirmancy Major Effects

It’s all conjecture, but most affirmancers think they could do things like allow someone to relive their entire life without variation; force someone to relive their entire life without variation; enable someone who was dying to be reborn as an identical person; cause a credible, existing theory to become widely regarded as fact, or redefine a person’s sense of life’s meaning permanently.

What You Hear

Thinking of taking a flight over the Bermuda Triangle? Watch out for a particularly dangerous yes man. His plane went down in 1975 and he was the only person on board to ever be seen again. He’s been charging up by recreating the fateful flight ever since; watch out for an aging man in flares wearing gaudy jewellery and sitting in seat 33.