You know the truth is out there – way out there. Dormant in other dimensions, parallel universes, other worlds the others are too blind to see. Open your eyes and soul and unlock the gates to these Other Spaces.

A.K.A. SPACERS, WARPERS

The boogeyman in your closet. The worker bees disappearing behind doors marked with “Employees Only.” Doors to restricted areas. Doorways are everywhere, some locked away with keys. You knew and understood this already as a little brat.

Now you know doors that lead to Other Spaces. Places that those ignorant fools cannot reach, but not just a locked tool shed or broom closet or bathroom door – some doors can lead to places they weren’t intended for. Other places. Extra dimensional pockets? Parallel dimensions? You’re not quite sure. But their precise nature never really mattered, anyway.

What really matters is that you can tap into these doorways. They aided you in saving yourself from those harrying bullies. They saved your sanity when you ran from your dad. And they have led you to bizarre places, although these challenged your sanity as well, fully realizing they were beyond your comprehension. Yet you understood, because you know that doors are more than what they’re made to be.

And you know where they might lead.

And you are the key to these gateways.

The central paradox of Tractomancy is that you can control doors to do the things you want them to do, but you surrender control over where the gateways will lead you. You can escape and move freely between “reality” and the Otherspaces, but in this you imprison yourself in constant flight through the unknown and the unexplored.

TRACTOMANCY BLAST STYLE

This school has no actual blasts, but offers the possibility of creating “trap doors” to Otherspaces which could thoroughly injure, maim, kill, or render your victims insane.

STATS

Like Narco-Alchemy, Tractomancy is quite different from other post-modern schools of magick. It furthermore knows a break between the Minor and the Significant spacers. Minor spacers have barely any control over where the enchanted doorways precisely lead them to, while the Significant spacers employ “sigils” and deeper premeditation to more accurately determine destinations of their doorways. In fact, some of the Significant spacers are rumored to possess the capability of shaping certain expanses of Otherspaces to a lesser degree.
There’s one universal rule and limit to Tractomancy – you cannot open and enter doorways that are physically locked, just by enchanting them. If a door was barred, welded shut, or simply locked somehow, you won’t be able to pass through them as a gateway unless you figure out how to open them in a mundane fashion. The powers of the Tractomancy magicks cannot help people open locked doors. However, it’s quite oftenly the case that you can step out of a locked door when passing through a door from another location. The catch is that spacers have little to no control over precisely choosing the doorways they exit from. If, for instance, you wind up exiting from a safe vault’s door that was otherwise locked, a spell might allow you to use the safe vault door again to return to the original location, but if you close the door and the enchantment ends, the safe door will be as locked as it normally would be without outside interference – and you won’t be able to access the safe vault’s contents as long as the spell is active. Still though, a locked door is not necessarily a hindrance to spacers, because they might find a way to “bypass” them. Even if it’s just dumb luck.

Generate a Minor Charge: Intensely study a door or other non-transparent gateway for four hours. A glass door through which you can see the other side won’t work, nor will a jail cell door consisting only of bars, but any door solid enough and unyielding to the things hidden beyond will suffice. Also, because there are apparently no free lunches for this school, either, studying doors that have been marked by sigil (see below) will not grant you any mojo – doors that have been “defined” by Tractomancers are derived of this mysterious force.
The “lesser gateways” caused by investing Minor charges, are one-way only. And only you can pass through them – unless you want to take someone with you. In case of the latter, “passengers” must maintain some sort of physical contact with you while passing through, be it hugging or holding hands. And you impart this ability to those in contact with you, meaning you could form a “train” of people holding hands and pulling all through a single gateway.
Generate a Significant Charge: The significant effects – “greater gateways” – can create doorways to more specific locations. To create greater gateways, the spacer must spend the listed amount of time meditating over the nature of the sigil, and inscribing the appropriate sigil onto the doorway (either by painting or etching them onto it). These sigil can be as tiny and minute as the spacer wants them to be, but they must be visible on the face of the door they’re enchanting, on the side they wish to open the door and step through. When the gateway is used, the spacer’s Tractomancy skill is checked, and even if you fail the check, the effort always yields something – the sigil will do something, but just not anything you intended it to, at the GM’s discretion.
These greater gateways – different than the lesser ones – are two-way doors. Unless otherwise noted, you can pass through them once, and return back from the other side once, each. However, only Tractomancers can use them this way, unless Tractomancers draw someone through as described above for the lesser gateways.
Generate a Major Charge: Some spacers are still trying to figure this one out, but noone seems to be savvy about it working out.
Taboo: Physically locking a door or gate of any sorts drains a spacer of all charges. Barring a door, blocking them, obstructing them, jamming them – any mundane means of making a doorway impassable or harder to open breaches taboo. (However, simply pulling an enchanted gateway shut, which others cannot pass through, will not breach taboo.)
Another breach of taboo is to enter or exit a room or location through anything that was not intended to be passed through – climbing through a window, busting a hole in a wall and barging in, digging a tunnel and crawling out of your mental ward cell, etc., are all serious breaches of taboo.
Random Magick Domain: Because the nature of Tractomancy is rather random in itself and quite fickle even when seeming calculated, there is no domain of random magick per se, only the possibility of exploring the portents of new sigil. Or perhaps finding ways to carve out different and specific Otherspaces, who the hell knows for sure?
Starting Charges: Spacers begin with four minor charges.
Charging Tips: It’s quite easy to rack up around 3-6 minor charges a week while maintaining some sort of job. On the other hand, most professional jobs involve locking down some door or the other, which makes a day-job hard to maintain next to being a Tractomancer (or vice versa). Besides the point that most of the spacers tend to get funny looks when they pop out of nowhere.
Notes: It comes in handy to always be toting around a pocket-knife and a can of spraypaint or a magic marker on you, just in case you get stuck in some gonzo Otherspace or dire straits and absolutely need to enchant doors into greater gateways. It’s fairly easy to create charges and use gateways in general, but every one can be a risk in itself.

TRACTOMANCY MINOR GATEWAYS

Egress of Escape
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: Leads to a completely random location, either in “reality” or an Otherspace.

Portal of the Neverlands
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: Leads to a random Otherspace.

Fool’s Arc
Cost: 3 minor charges
Effect: Leads to a random location in “the real world.”

Aperture of the Damned
Cost: 3 minor charges
Effect: Leads to a random Otherspace hosting demonic spirits. Try not to stay too long.

Doorway of Clairvoyance
Cost: 4 minor charges
Effect: Lets you witness a vision of a possible future within the open door, for roughly as many minutes as your die result provides in its sum. It will show you things out of the perspective of a door nearby to the location or people you concentrate on when casting the spell.

Gate of Synchronicity
Cost: 8 minor charges
Effect: Leads to wherever the cosmos, or the Pillsbury Doughboy, or whatever the hell thinks wherever you “should” be. (Pretty much like the Pornomancer’s Synchronicity spell.) Considering the mojo you put into it, you might not like the result it yields.

TRACTOMANCY SIGNIFICANT SIGIL

Note: Although the sigil sometimes let you specify the destinations of greater gateways more precisely than with the lesser gateways, this does not mean you can choose the exact door from which you exit your gateway. You can only be as specific as designating a location, for instance – “this door will lead us to mobster McAvery’s bar,” – and you can never be sure if you’ll come walking out of McAvery’s safe in the backroom, a restroom door, the bar’s front entrance, a fridge door, or a trap door to the cellar where the corpse you’re looking for is hidden. Use the greater gateways with at least as much caution as you’d use the lesser ones, not at last because they could bar you from some place you’re seeking to enter.

Sigil of the Gatekeeper
Cost: 1 day’s meditation
Effect: This sigil yields two effects. a) It makes another sigil on the same door continuously function for an amount of hours equal to the sum of your die result – in other words, the doorway can be used more than once for each side you pass through; and b) it makes another sigil on the same door function for anybody – not just Tractomancers.
Note that this sigil is useless by itself. Except for marking your “turf”, if anything.

Sigil of the Doorway of Desires
Cost: 1 day’s meditation
Effect: Leads to a specific Otherspace desired by the conjurer. However, the Conjurer must have a clear image of the destination in mind – either by having been there, or by committing it to memory via aids like pieces of photography or accurate artwork.

Sigil of the Pilgrim’s Arc
Cost: 2 days meditation
Effect: Leads to a specific location in the “real world” known to the conjurer. Just like the Sigil of the Doorway of Desires describes, the conjurer must be familiar with the destination and possess a clear mental image thereof.

Sigil of the Prisoner’s Hatch
Cost: 2 days meditation
Effect: Leads to a specific Otherspace or “real world”-room with a single door. The door therein always leads the traveler back inside to that same targeted room. (Much alike the way the Pilgrim’s channel of passing through doors can be used to trap people.) This effect has a duration equal to the sum of the die roll in hours and is likely to provoke stress checks to the person imprisoned by it.

Sigil of the Aperture of Judgement
Cost: 3 days meditation
Effect: Leads to a random Otherspace where beliefs, obsessions, even personalities are challenged. It’s widely assumed that this sigil will lead someone into a Room of Renunciation or other similarly “changing”/”challenging” places. Unless you intend to give your life a wholly new direction, you probably don’t want to use such a gateway yourself. This gateway is one-way-only.

Sigil of the Abyssal Gate
Cost: 4 days meditation
Effect: Leads to a highly dangerous (hazardous to both health and sanity), random Otherspace, from which nobody has been known to have returned. Not at last because it’s a one-way-only gateway.

Sigil of the Portal of Divination
Cost: 5 days meditation
Effect: Allows you to witness a vision of a possible future within the open door, for roughly as many hours as your die result provides in its sum. Like the Doorway of Clairvoyance, this spell will show you things out of the perspective of a door nearby to the location or people you concentrate on when casting the spell, but you also have the possibility to focus on a specific time in which you wish to peer into. It might actually work, at the GM’s discretion.

TRACTOMANCY MAJOR GATEWAYS

There are several theories of what spacers could do if they found out how to generate a major charge within their school. One is the possibility of creating a doorway out of nothing, simply by painting the frame of a door onto a solid wall. Another is shaping an Otherspace according to the spacer’s whims. Yet others believe in busting through the time-space continuum and effectively traveling through time, or even catching glimpses of the statosphere. Let your imagination run wild, but not too wild.

WHAT YOU HEAR

The Tractomancers’ existence must date back several millenia ago. A century, or so, back, one of them went mad and is to blame for the existence of the House of Renunciation. However, none of the spacers could possibly be agents of the House, because they seem to have more control over its doorways than the agents. It’s entirely unclear if this school is truly post-modern, or simply re-discovered and reformed from ancient traditions.
A slew of aboriginals in Australia are a weird variant of Tractomancers, somehow based on other things than actual doors as we know them from civilization, and you shouldn’t mess with them. Or else they’ll fuck you up. Or rather, send you somewhere you can’t escape from without completely unfucking yourself.
Word has it that there’s a crew of mobsters who regularly hire this guy called “Nathan Nowhere” to hide dead bodies for them. The cops can’t tack anything about the disappearing people onto anybody, because those corpses are rotting away in a parallel dimension. More word has it that Nathan has been selling body parts into the Occult Underground for God-knows-what-reasons. Doing such involves him travelling the globe, pawning off the “black bags” in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Russia, and even Kuala Lumpur – within a few hours per day. There are photos to prove this, but some duke has been collecting them.