When you help others, you can’t help helping yourself.
You’re here to help.
Generate a minor charge: Help someone in need, without compensation. It can be a friend or a stranger, as long as they have a serious problem and you help solve it. If you help a lot of people at once, you only get a charge from one of them – you choose who.
Salvamancy does not generate significant or major charges.
Taboo: When you gain a charge from someone, you must gain another charge from them within a month or you’ll lose all charges. Better make sure anyone you help keeps having problems!
Symbolic Tension: A Salvamancer helps others parasitically, satisfying them but always keeping them in need.
Random Magic: Need.
Starting charges: Pick up to three people you’ve helped lately. You’ve got two charges per person.
Charging Tips: A fat wallet and a tour of the worse part of town will get you two dozen charges in a single afternoon, but you’re setting yourself up to break taboo a month later. Otherwise, you can usually gain about 3-5 charges a week by helping the same needy people over and over.
Minor Formulas
Entitlement
1 minor charge
A single target will do one favor you ask, as long as it doesn’t cost much or put them at risk.
Quick Patch
1 minor charge
Heals damage equal to the sum of the dice, but the next time the subject takes damage, they’ll take that much extra damage. This could take years to come to pass, or it might never happen.
Little Quest
1 minor charge
Ask someone to do something for you. If they weren’t going to do it until you asked, they get a +20% to the first roll when doing it. If they were going to do it anyway, your charge is wasted.
You’re My Only Hope
2 minor charges
Only usable when you’re in need. Cry out for a single person to help you. They’ll hear your call at any distance – even if they’re deaf – and will know where you are.
Hole in Your Purse
3 minor charges
A single target (who doesn’t need to be nearby) suffers one stroke of bad luck within the next week. The victim suffers from one unfortunate coincidence or random event, and when it happens, you’ll know what it is.
Another “minor school” – designed to be easy to use, but less powerful than the schools in the book.
I didn’t give much description, but I think it’s pretty self-explanatory: the nice-guy altruist as a codependent parasite.
Taboos I considered and didn’t use:
1. You cannot accept help from others.
2. You cannot deny someone in need.
Neither of them really matched the symbolic tension.
🙂
http://www.unknown-armies.com/content_comments.php?id=2107_0_3_0_C1
Your charging works well, Ted. The only problems might occur in a bit of bookkeeping.
Nice.
C.
I think there should be at least some kind of a significant and/or major charge. Perhaps saving someone’s life as major or getting someone out of depression as significant–I think just having minor charges could be a bit redundant and you’re basically a one-trick pony.
Otherwise, clever.
Thank you! The minor-charges-only thing is for simplicity. I wrote about five or six schools, all minor-charges only. The idea is to make simpler magic systems for new players or lower power level games.
Thank you! I strive to be clever.
Taboo: Show any warmth or mirth in any setting. Comfort someone in any way other than fixing a specific problem for them. Apologize for anything. Hugs are out of the question.
Generate Significant Charge: Make someone dependent on your help for one month. This help can take a number of forms, from giving someone money, to doing their homework for them, to taking care of their kids. You gain one charge for each month you perform this service for the same person. You cannot gain more than one charge per month from the same person even if you perform more than one service, but you can gain charges from multiple people at once. You may not accept anything in return for your help.
Generate Major Charge: Save the lives or livelihoods of at least 1,000 people who will not only never know who helped them, but never know they were helped.
Oh, very nice, Mr. Sluagh!