Demonology for everyone.
AKA Fausts, Hellhounds, Satanists
You always known you deserved more. You’ve always heard people shouting your name, adoring your every deed. You dove into Satanism and devoured it, and were left hungry for more. You didn’t realize what you could do until you saw some dumb bodybag sitting in the middle of the park, playing a game of Russian Roulette between him and the demon he’d summoned. You didn’t know shit about the Underground back then, but you could see the thing that guy had in his head–and you knew you wanted one. You read Crowley, the Goetia, every book on demonology you could find. But in the end, when you summoned up your first demon, it wasn’t the Church of Satan or Aleister Crowley doing it–it was nothing but you. In time you abandoned the ceremonial trappings, realizing that all it took to call back the dead was sheer force of will. You went into the Underground–there’s not much else you can do when your best friends are dead people. You’ve seen the lows to which some people sink to get their moho–booze-ridden Dipsomancers, junky Narco-Alchemists, suicidal Entropomancers–and you know you rise above them. You ride your pale horse of Diablomancy–and Hell follows after.
The central paradox of Diablomancy is that it is at once domination and submission. Fausts believe that they are in complete control of their lives, as well as what comes after–but at any moment, they could be bound by the will of the demons they once dominated.
The Diablomancy blast is a bolt of hellfire. Nothing spectacular to it, really–point at someone, cast the blast, and boom. The Diablomancy blast can be used to target objects, and can set easily combustible materials, like paper or straw, aflame, However, its firestarting abilities are about on par with a butane lighter–you might burn down a farmhouse or two with it, but don’t expect to be melting through steel doors with it.
Gain a Minor Charge: Deal about $1,000 worth of property damage to any center of worship, or desecrate a religious relic worth the same amount. Spend four hours conducting black masses, or any parody of normal religious rituals.
Gain a Significant Charge: Burn a major center of worship to the ground. Kill a truly devout holy man.
Gain a Major Charge: Burn down one of the holiest places of a major religion–the Ka’abah or the Dome of the Rock for Islam, the Vatican for Christianity, the Western Wall for Judaism, etc. Kill the leader of a major religion–the Pope, for example. Destroy a one-of-a-kind holy artifact of great significance, such as the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant.
Taboo: Worship. If you pray, or enter a house of prayer without intent to do harm, then you immediately lose all charges you’re carrying. The one exception is Satanism–you’re free to pray to Satan or enter Satanic churches if you want, though most Diablomancers feel a bit embarrassed by it. Note that exclamations such as “Oh my God!” don’t count as prayers–technically, they’re blasphemies–so you can get away with them.
Random Magick Domain: Diablomancy deals strictly with demons. You can use your random magick to influence demons, the possessed, and maybe even run-of-the-mill Satanists–but that’s where your sphere of influence runs out.
Starting Charges: Newly created Diablomancers have four minor charges.
Charging Tips: Get the stuff for a black mass together, and you can pull in a minor charge or two a day with no hassle. However, for the bigger stuff, you’re going to have to cause some harm. You’re going to have to be careful with your church-burning and priest-killing, unless you want to end up taking your significant charges with you to the slammer. Also note that you can’t use any Diablomancy in getting charges–you’re going to have to set that church on fire without the benefit of your blast. If you don’t have the stomach for arson or murder, the spell Faustian Bargain can let you rent out your body in order to score some charges.
Brimstone and Hellfire
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: This is the Diablomancy minor blast.
Dance Like the Devil
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: Using this spell requires you to have a demon riding along in your head (which one of you is in charge doesn’t really matter). This spell hands control of your reflexes over to the demon (or, if the demon’s controlling your body, you). For next five rounds, you get a +20% shift to your Dodge skill. For every additional minor charge you drop when casting this spell, the shift increases by 10%, to a maximum of 50% for three extra charges.
Demonic Glare
Cost: 3 minor charges
Effect: For a brief second, you face takes on a horrific visage, looking like what many imagine demons look like. Seeing your transfigured face is grounds for a rank-4 Unnatural stress check. In addition, you get a +20% shift on all Intimidation rolls or similar made to coerce those who failed their checks for the next few hours.
Demonwatch
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: You see dead people. For 24 hours, you gain the ability to perceive incorporeal demons. Demons without a host looking like flying balls of light; a demon in someone’s head is perceived as a glowing third eye coming from the possessed’s forehead. If the demon is in control of the body, the eye is open; otherwise, it is closed.
Faustian Bargain
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: A nifty way of charging up for Diablomancers on the run, this spell summons up a demon. You don’t have any control over it, but it doesn’t make any attempt at possessing you–yet–because it knows what’s coming. Once the demon is summoned, you offer your body to it in exchange for charges, willingly letting it possess you. Before you hand over control, you may negotiate some terms with the demon, laying down the law about what it can’t do. Getting the demon to agree to a term generally requires a successful Charm roll, unless the term is something very minor. Some terms the demon just won’t accept to–“Don’t move at all”, for example. The demon will generally let you set no more than three terms, so choose wisely–“Don’t do anything that causes harm to me” is a good term to shoot for. Once terms are negotiated, you decide how long the demon gets to stay in your body. There’s no room for negotiation on the demon’s part–your choice is final. Once all the decision-making is done, the demon takes over. The possession ends once the agreed-upon time is up, or when the demon tries to break one of the terms of the bargain. When the demon leaves–even if it goes unwillingly–it leaves behind charges. For every eight hours it stayed in your body, you score a minor charge. For every six minor charges you would gain from this spell, you may choose to take a significant charge instead. Even if the demon leaves before the agreed-upon time is up, the amount of charges you gain is based on the agreed-upon duration.
Hellhound
Cost: 3 minor charges
Effect: This spell lets you summon a demon into the body of an animal, which you must be touching at the time you cast the spell. The demon automatically takes possession of the body. The demon is grateful for the body, and will most likely stay with your for about a day, providing whatever help it can, before it takes off to enjoy life.
Open the Gate
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: Probably the most important Diablomancy spell, this simply summons up a demon. If you know the name of a specific demon that you have previously summoned, you may summon that demon without spending extra charges. As with most other summoning methods, this spell gives you no control over the summoned demon, though, as a Diablomancer, you should have a plethora of other ways to do so.
Satanic Inquisition
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: This spell lets you know when a demon lies to you. Whenever a demon you’ve summoned into your head tells you a direct lie, this spell creates a distinct mental “ping,” letting you know that the demon is bulling you. However, the demon doesn’t know that you know anything.
Animate Corpse
Cost: 3 charges
Effect: You summon a demon into a corpse, creating something along the lines of a zombie. The pseudo-zombie has the Mind and Soul scores of the demon, but, being a rotting mound of flesh, has Strength and Speed scores between 10 and 30. The pseudo-zombie keeps on decomposing–every day, it permanently loses one Body Point. In addition, any damage dealt to it is permanent–it can never regain the lost Body Points. If the body you summon the demon into is its own, you can spend one less charge on this spell. Most pseudo-zombies will stay close to you, because they know you’re that you’re the only one who can provide them with a replacement once their fleshbag goes caput. However, they may have some misgivings about being stuck in a decaying sack of flesh, so you may want to make use of the binding pentacle spell.
Binding Pentacle
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: This spell lets you control a summoned demon. In addition, the demon you control need not even be in your own body–a demon possessing another adept, or bound into an item or animal by various Diablomantic spells, can also be controlled. In such a case, you must touch the body of the demon to be controlled. If you control a demon in another body, this spell functions different than normal control. That demon–and its body–do whatever you tell them to do for an hour, assuming you make a successful Soul check to command them. In addition, there’s no danger of being possessed on a failed check. If the demon being controlled this way is one you summoned up, the control instead lasts for a day.
Blasphemous Utterance
Cost: 6 significant charges
Effect: This is one nasty motherfucker of a spell. You let out a frenzied, unholy scream that can be heard clearly for about one hundred feet. Everyone but you that hears the scream takes firearms damage from it, and is most likely momentarily deafened. Hearing the scream is grounds for a rank-7 Unnatural stress check. In addition, those with the Prayer skill or any religion-based Paradigm skill that hear the scream can’t use those skills for anywhere from an hour to a day. Finding out that they can’t use those skills generally calls for a rank-3 Self stress check the first time around. After using this spell, your vocal chords are pretty much totally wasted. You can’t talk at all for a few hours, and even once you recover your voice, you are going to be pretty hoarse for about a week.
Demon Machine
Cost: 3 significant charges
Effect: This spell summons a demon into an item. Most demons are not terribly happy about this, because they can’t do much to enjoy life while stuck in a senseless, inanimate object. They can do some things, however. If an item can communicate somehow, the demon can make use of this–if bound in a TV, they control the picture, and if summoned into a pen, they can communicate via automatic writing. If an item has moving parts, the demon can move them. Note that the summoned demon is going to generally be very, very mad about its state; if you plan on making yourself a sweet demon-powered motorcycle, make sure you cast binding pentacle freely and frequently on it.
Glimpse of Hell
Cost: 3 significant charges
Effect: You give any one person you can see a momentary glance of “Hell”, exactly how they have always pictured seeing it. Seeing your own personal Hell before you calls for a rank-7 Unnatural stress check. Even those that succeed the check can’t do anything on their next round but stand, stunned by their experience. Those who fail the check immediately fight, freeze, or flee, going for the third option most often.
Hand of Satan
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: This is the Diablomancy significant blast.
Hell Hath No Fury
Cost: 4 significant charge
Effect: To use this skill, you have to have a demon riding along in your head. For the next 10 minutes, your Strength and Speed scores becomes equal to that demon’s Soul score, assuming the demon’s score is higher. You get a positive shift to all your Strength skills equal to the difference between the demon’s Soul score and your Strength score, and a similar shift to all your Speed skills. You don’t gain any additional Body points.
Induce Possession
Cost: 4 significant charges
Effect: You summon a demon into summon else’s body. In order to do this, you must be touching them. If you summon it into someone that’s neither an adept or an avatar, the demon automatically takes over them–ouch. If you summon it into an adept or avatar, it’s similar to most demon-summoning spells, except that they don’t know why there’s suddenly a demon in there head. If the demon succeeds in getting possession of the body, he’s going to be very grateful to you, possibly becoming a long-term ally or contact.
Infernal Rumors
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: Demons know things–and this spell lets you ask them all about it. When you cast this spell, you simply ask a question. That question is relayed throughout just about every demon within a few miles of you in a matter of seconds, and you’re left with their consensus opinion. The answer’s most a “yes” or “no” affair, and you aren’t going to be getting anything more than a short sentence at the most. In matters of simple fact, the demons are just about always right, but when magick, adepts, and suchlike get dragged in, there’s always a chance for uncertainty.
Psychic Expulsion
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: This spell gives the boot to a summoned demon. If the demon you’re expelling is in your head, all you have to do is cast the spell, and *boom*–no more demon. If it’s in another person’s body, then you have to touch the body to exorcise the demon, which generally requires a Martial Arts or Struggle roll.
Resurrect a demon in its own body. Summon a demon into the mind of every inhabitant of a city. Set a city on fire.
It seems like there are a lot of blasts and charges to the Diablomancer, but beyond that, I love the flavor of it. I’m also happy to see that you included the whole legand of Faustus and his pact with the Devil. Real good story, it is. Very well done.
I like the flavor a lot. I personally feel the faustian bargain needs some work though as using a spell to charge is unusuall in UA. You might just want to add that as a method of charging instead of making it a spell.
Normally, it’s supposed to be impossible to use magic to make magic. This seems like a reasonable exception, since the mojo is really coming from the demon and the spell just sets up the circumstance. The rule is to prevent someone from setting up an infinite loop, and you’d have to be kind of an idiot to make an infinte loop out of getting yourself posessed for extended periods of time.
Another good term might be “Don’t do anything that results in blood or phlegm spilling on human skin.” Your body might still end up doing something you’ll regret later, but it forces the demon to be creative and allows your freinds to bring you out of it in a hurry, since sneezing or getting stabbed will break the deal.
It also protects you, your cabal-mates, and any innocent bystanders from most physical harm with just one of a possible three terms.
You should probably shift some of the significant charges into the minor ones. Or slightly down grade some costs of spells.
It kinda tends to be hard to charge siggies regularly on a normal basis…..