Creepy-crawley bug sorcerers…
Bugs, Crawlies
Insects are everywhere, adaptive and hardy, they are royalty.
The insects were here before us and will be after we’ve long gone – our superiors and inheritors. There existence is profoundly alien and intrusive; a horrifying act it attacks our ability to identify with its utterly inhuman physiology. Wherever you are, you will find insects thriving in all the dark corners eating the long forgotten.
Scaraomancers know this, they revel in the existence of insects, to be one of them, to feel their movements and idealise their strengths and study their dances, motions, and intelligence. By intimacy, scaraomancers become the insects they worship and are able to express those abilities from within themselves.
Scaraomancers tend to obsess over all insects, especially those which can walk and fly, and not just one group or species or favourites, but most commonly cockroaches and flies as these tend to be the most useful although some stylish scaraomancers are apiarists or ranch noble scarabs.
Generate a minor charge: Free yourself to the whims of the insects for three hours while they crawl and buzz over you usually while you lie prostrate. You cannot engage in any normal, human social activity or the charge is lost.
Generate a significant charge: Allow the insects to climb the length and breadth of your naked body and aura for no less than twelve hours of privation. You cannot engage in any normal, human social activity or the charge is lost.
Generate a major charge: become a hermit from human life and slavishly devote yourself to the six-legged rulers of the world for a period of no less than five years.
Taboo: Insects are our masters, we trespass on their world. No Scaraomancer may allow an insect to come to harm through action or inaction, so even not removing a roach motel or a flyswatter so it cannot be used to harm them, dumps charges.
Blast: Bites. Many, many bites and stings raising itchy bumps and sore welts. It may not cause a vast amount of damage but it is distracting.
Random Magic: The formulae magick mimics insects and their general abilities but the random magick simulates special abilities of individual subspecies.
Charging tips: Keep a messy apartment and rub yourself with greasy leftovers is a sure way to win over some many-legged house mates. In summer, stagnant pools of water breed lots of charge-generating mosquitos (although you must be conscious. Being asleep doesn’t count).
Starting Charges: A scaraomancer starts with four charges.
Minor Formula Spells
Saprophagus (one minor charge)
The scaraomancer can eat rotten, five-day old shellfish during the middle of summer and come out fine and nourished. Basically the bug can eat anything organic and drink the water dripping out of a carcass. This does not protect the caster from manufactured poisons only one’s resulting from normal decay.
Ghost Swarm (two minor charges)
How many wings have you pulled from flies? How many ants did you slowly scorch under a magnifying glass? How many roaches did you stomp? Flies sprayed with pesticide?
Those bugs remember you and are hungry for revenge.
Ghost Swarm is the minor blast and works as such except the target gains one point of damage every round until the time is up. While this is happening, the target must roll a Rank-4 Helplessness and Unnatural check as he undergoes formication – the hallucination that he’s covered with crawling, hopping, biting insects.
Aura Chemistry (three minor charges) Everyone has a stink. It is everywhere. It is your sweat and shed skin. It is the juices under your skin and the grease on your scalp. It is the breath from your lips and the odour from your armpits.
By being near someone, the scaraomancer can read the pheromones and discern a persons recent emotional and physical history: any emotional or hormonal arousal, any mental stress, any injury, any sickness, any lingering shame or fear. A bombed-out stress check or triggered Passion may leave readable traces for a week.
Sprinting Climb (five minor charges) The scaraomancer has the ability to climb vertical surfaces at a sprint and safely fall from similar structures. The wall does not need handholds but the scaraomancer cannot climb or safely fall from more than a three-story wall.
Significant Formula Spells
Ant Conga Line (one significant charge) The scaraomancer can exactly retrace any path he has taken during his life even if he was or currently is deaf, dumb, and blind, from even before he was a scaroamancer.
If the current path is blocked, and the bug magician cannot circumvent the obstacle in one round, the spell ends. Chitin Soup for the Soul (Two Significant Charges) This spell waits until needed. It basically acts as bullet-proofing for one shot or acts as buffer Wound points for hand-to-hand damage. The buffer points are equal to the sum of the Magick: scaraomancy roll.
Wereroach (three significant charges) The caster assumes the form of a cockroach with all the ability and agility but still keeping his human shape. Basically the crawler can scuttle under fridges, under doors, between walls, and up through air ducts while seeing the world through his human shape. Everyone else sees a cockroach common to that area.
He also has limited flight in this form. Scooting around a house is fine, zooming across streets is not.
The bonus is that his Body and Speed are increased by adding his Magick: Scaraomancy to them.
The problem is that the caster cannot use items a cockroach couldn’t manipulate: dragging around a cigarette, fine; pushing a touch-screen button, okay; dialling someone on a phone, not okay. Guns are a no-no.
This spell lasts until the caster lets his bug-shape lapse.
Kephramancy (Four significant charges) The scaraomancer can partially immunise himself from pain. Pain now only hurts in a vague, conceptual way. The scaraomancy heals the sum of the Magick: Scaraomancy roll while reducing his Speed by the same amount. The Speed heals one point per day.
Beetled Endurance (Five Significant Charges)
Basically the sorcerer is protected from hunger and the need to sleep and their subsequent penalities for as many days as the sum of the Magick: Scaraomancy roll.
Because of swaying and starving, the scaraomancer cannot generate charges due to the exhaustion and starvation.
Scaraomancy Major Effects
Turn yourself into a swarm of insects, permanently immunise yourself to toxins and disease, invade a city with pestilence.
What, nothing about Kafka? Nice school, though I think that it might be nice to do something a bit different for the major charge thing. Something other than a time limit, some action might be more interesting maybe.
Another good idea. some of the effects are a bit confusing, but overall I like it.
Well, give advice.
Despite the appearance I found this school remarkably difficult to put together.
C.
Ant conga line should be minor, I think, as it’s nearly coincidental and sprinting climb maybe one significant instead?
The paradox is that to be more than human, they emulate the less than human? Or were you thinking something else for the core paradox?
I guess I would like to see the charging also be something more active (or with the OPTION of being more active, like the dual-charging paths of urbanomancy). Depending on the paradox, it could be appropriately emulate an insect (cosplay or making a hive or sucking someone’s blood without killing them but maybe giving them malaria) or tend to insects or make the world a better place for insects (to different levels, minor might be buying a ton of good beef and throwing it out where bugs can get it, significant might be seeding a large potato field with potato bugs, minor = making messes, sig = decreasing the funding of the Health Department, significantly wound or kill an exterminator)
Thanks NYC. I had ideas about the bugger feeding the insects, even building open terraniums but I just let it go into interpretation.
Thanks for the heads’ up about the spells.
C.
Spells: the blast, how long does it last? Similar problems with other spells. Self-checks for being a roach?
It would be kind of nice to have a significant charging sceme around serving a bug (not just feeding and making the world better) but really following its will. I just can’t figure out how.
A familiar-type spell would be nice to.
Build it a roach-car. Burn down the part of store selling pest-control products. Break into a construction site and pour honey into all the cracks, crevices, foundation-holes, and crawlspaces. Attempt to interpret the squiqqly lines left by insects as they chew through wood. “Free” a good deal of captured insects (from a pet store or etc). Infect someone with parasitic insect eggs. Depending on if you include spiders in your pantheon, killing a spider might be a good thing. Feed part of your self (enough that you’ll miss it) to your insect masters (bunch of blood = minor, finger = significant). Be an “insect diplomat” and set up a symbiotic relationship between two species of insects that did not exist before (if only in a local area). Introduce insects to an area that is entirely bug-free but that would be a tempting place for insects to live. Import a foreign bug that would thrive in a new environment, preferably one that would displace some non-insect species but not displace already-existing insect species. Interrupt garbage-pick up in a neighborhood. Provide high-quality nest-making material. Keep the area around your house free of bug-eating animals. Get a building condemned AND forgotten. Build a pheromone-reading chemical analyser, figure out what the bugs are feeling and respond appropriately. Build them an optimal living arrangement, at cost to your own comfort. Host a pound’s worth of parasites. Get a cartoon insect to be a popular mascot. (with bees) Blow up a cell-phone tower. Dress up as an insect, perform ritual dance gathered from insect’s actions. Let insects eat their fill from your plate first, then you eat what’s left.
Get an insect species good press. Get a tattoo of an insect or insect part. Build a house modeled after an insect nest. Feed insects (or make into their home) an object of great worth to mere humans.
For feeding, I’d say bodily fluids (including blood) would be a minor, skin (about a square foot per charge) would be a sig, and whole limbs or organs would be a major. It counts as one degree less if it’s someone else’s; stealing a kidney and burying it in an anthill would be a sig, for example, although you’d have to be careful not to mash the ants in the process.
I’m not sure about the taboo. It’s fairly standard for animal-focused schools, but insects are archetypically seen as very ruthless and unempathetic. So would someone trying to emulate them pay any courtesy to them?
As Seth “The Fly” Brundle put it, “Have you heard about insect politics? Neither have I. Insects don’t have politics.”
I dig it so much!
Lots o’ suggestions, though, if you don’t mind ’em:
1. Shouldn’t the name be Entomomancy?
2. Significant Charge. The significant charge doesn’t seem really much harder than the minor to get. I’d suggest change it to something a little more intense:
“Get stung, bitten or poisoned by one or more insects in such a way that you take at least 10 points of
damage.”
2. Taboo. Honestly, the taboo doesn’t seem to do much either – it’s unlikely to come up in a game, and if it does, it’ll be either inconsequential or game-stopping. I’d suggest you take the qualification for minor & significant charges and make that into the taboo:
“Taboo: Human social interaction. If you have any kind of normal human social interaction, including
speaking or responding to any spoken words, you lose
all charges.”
The “don’t harm a bug” (modeled I assume after the Herpetomancy taboo) always seems to fall flat to me, since it really doesn’t affect game much. No human interaction, though, is totally in-theme and affects
play in a really interesting way.
3. Saprophagus is rad. Ghost Swarm is rad. Aura Chemistry is powerful, but really interesting and awesome.
4. Sprinting Climb, I’d suggest some more clarity and make it a little cheaper.
“Crawl (3 minor charges) You can climb walls and even ceilings at full speed without handholds, as if you
were on the ground. You also take no damage from falls less than three stories. Lasts an hour.”
(continued in next comment)
5. I’d also suggest adding another minor formula (I always go for 5 minor and 5 significant, as mentioned
in the book)
“Freakout (4 minor charges) You exude an aura of alienness that repulses people. Anyone who tries to
touch you or come within five feet of you must first make a Rank-6 Isolation Stress Check. Lasts until you next bathe.”
6. Ant Conga Line is awesome.
7. Chitin Soup for the Soul is more complicated than it needs to be, and a little overpriced for what it
does. I’d say it should give bonus Wound Points equal to the dice result, exactly like the first channel of
the Masterless Man.
8. Wereroach. The way this is listed seems hard to puzzle out, and a little hard for a GM to get a good idea of what’s happening enough to answer other questions that will come up.
I suggest a variation:
“Kafka’s Metamorphosis (2 significant charges)
You take on the form of an enormous human-sized bug. You can still speak in a weird warbling voice, but
your abilities are otherwise those of an enormous cockroach, and you can’t hold object. Your bite does
as much damage as a normal Struggle check. You gain a bonus to Body and Speed (and all related skills) equal to the dice roll, and you can fly at about the same speed as you can walk, in hops of up to twenty feet. You clearly look unnatural and horrible, and you gain
the benefits of the Crawl and Freakout formulas while you’re in this form. Lasts until you next bathe.”
9. Kephramancy is rad, but way too expensive. It should only be one significant charge, since it also
causes Speed damage.
10. Beetled Endurance is also rad, but way too expensive and the drawback makes it not worth it. I’d
suggest the following:
“Beetled Endurance (3 significant charges). You can go without food, water and sleep for as many days as
the sum of the dice roll. You’re also immune to radiation during this time.”
Hmmh. Would 8’s ability to talk sort of be against the taboo?
One thing I was never clear on: If taboo is broken while a spell that lasts for a while is still operating, does the spell breakdown, too? Personally, I’d say yes so long as its effects are such that they require magick to maintain rather than just a shift (for example, fleshwarping stays but the “Curse of the Cancerous Eyes” abates).
Of course, if it DID break the interaction taboo, the question would be if the bug changes back to human… or gets stuck as giant roach.
Also, I figured wereroach worked like this: You shrink, gain the abilities of a roach while keeping those human abilities that the human form gives (though with the problems of being tiny), other people see a particularly competent roach. I could easily see it making you shrink and be roach-like-but-human-shaped