A school for gadget-worshippers. He who dies with the most toys wins.
Nickname: otaku (singular and plural)
Popular commercial culture has it mostly right. You are what you own. But you don’t care about conspicuous consumption all that much. What you care about it extending yourself and becoming more.
Buy law advice software and you’re practically a lawyer. Buy a Segway and you can move twice as fast. Buy a metal detector and you have a sixth sense. Buy a GPS and you’ll never get lost again.
You encrust yourself in technology, and you’re expanded by them. There’s something sacred in it. When you fly in a jet, when you see the world through a heads-up display computer, when you wear a bullet proof vest, you’re part of something much bigger than yourself. A human is nothing compared to a human made divine by the expansion of technology. You worship what you could be, expanded and improved. You worship at the Toybox Altar.
Generate a minor charge: Acquire a new gadget worth at least half your average monthly income (or half of a month of local minimum wage, whichever is higher.) You can beg, buy or steal it, but borrowing doesn’t count. The gadget doesn’t necessarily need to be electronic – anything that expands what you can do counts. For instance, this could also be a hang glider, a nanofiber winter coat, an expensive piece of software, or a super high-tech set of cookware. Fashionable, artistic and decorative value doesn’t count.
Generate a significant charge: As above, but the device must no be publically available. This might mean illegal technology, an advanced prototype, or a very rare discontinued device.
Generate a major charge: Invent a new device that completely replaces your day job.
Taboo: Any time you can use a gadget to assist with some goal, you must do so. Missing an opportunity to use a gadget costs you all your charges, even if there would be a better way to do it without a gadget.
Symbolic Tension: Technology extends human capability but also renders human capability obsolete. With technology, people are both empowered and humbled.
Random Domain: Extending human capabilities. Despite the charge structure and flavor, Otaku improve themselves, not their gadgets.
Blast: Requires a touch. Causes an electrical charge in the subject, like a static charge or taser.
Starting charges: 4 minor
Charging tips: If you spend wisely and save up, you can gain a minor charge every month. When you need more, you’ll want to steal or max out your credit cards.
Minor formulas
Data Lookup
1 charge
You instantly know one piece of information that would be available with an hour (or less) of searching the publically available internet. You also know the URL of the website that contains the information, in case you need to pass it on or check back later.
Grooming
1 minor charge
You and your possessions immediately become clean and well-maintained. You can restyle or recolor your hair, add or remove hair (head, face or body), change your smell to any natural or commercially available scent, add or remove a tan, add or remove blemishes, and so on. You can’t use this to become dirty, though – only more clean.
Felt Carpet Touch
2 minor charges
This is the Toybox Altar minor blast. It does damage equal to the sum of the dice.
Knife Hand
3 minor charges
You can duplicate the effect of a single handheld mechanical tool you own using your bare hands for up to an hour. This doesn’t include electronic or chemical devices, but can include weapons. Your hands don’t actually change shape or look different, but the results they leave are identical to a popular commercial brand.
Reach Out and Touch Someone
3 minor charges
You can communicate with someone telepathicaly at any distance for one minute. This is two-way voluntary communication, and you can send images, sounds, or words. You can spend 2 extra minor charges to overcome any language barrier with instant translation. You must be able to identify the target clearly.
Significant Formulas
Fitness!
1 significant charge
For the next hour, you can use your adept skill in place of a single Body or Speed skill, including a combat skill. You’ll be really tired afterward, though, and you can’t use the formula again until you’ve slept.
Nerdcore Rising
1 significant charge
This is the Toybox Altar significant blast.
Camouflage Design
1 significant charge
You become invisible until you move from where you’re standing (or sitting). You can use a computer, talk or even shoot a gun, but if you walk or otherwise move out of place, or are on a moving object, you become visible. You’re still visible to all other senses.
Don the Ghost Mask
2 significant charges
Grant yourself a single additional sense available to a machine, such as radar, parabolic hearing, or chemical sniffing. Your normal Notice skill applies. While you have this formula in place, your face takes on an unnerving pallor and you automatically fail all Charm and Lie checks. Lasts until you choose to end it. You can’t have two senses at once – each use replaces the last.
Multitasking
3 significant charges
This formula lets you be in three places at once. Multitasking creates two identical copies of you, which appear in two separate places familiar to you. All three copies share information, and anything that happens to one affects all three. Ends when any copy sleeps or comes into contact with another copy.
Major Effects
Permanently expand your brain’s capacity. Temporarily gain the technology and firepower of a military tank. Die and inhabit any piece of electronics. Transform a limb into a cybernetic replacement.
What You’ve Heard
A little cabal formed around the Toybox Altar among the journalists of a high-technology magazine after they wrote a series of articles about gadgetry as a religion and found it to be perfectly true. The cabal suddenly found themselves the target of a lot of Occult Underground curiosity. They were just learning the basics needed to stay afloat when the Sleepers approached them with a very uncomfortable deal that they couldn’t refuse.
I love the idea. I’ll be surely considering adding an NPC who worship on a toybox altar. The only thing i think needs a tweek is the minor charging. 1 charge a month is pretty low. Perhaps a slight alteration of the minor charge…say replacing an already working device you own with something bigger and better. You want a standard coffee maker..$30, but you just won’t settle for standard anymore…so instead its going to cost you $180. The thing turns on music at 8am, starts your coffee and feeds you dog. You still need more cash, but its not going to break your bank every time you want a minor charge. The real thing to look at here is eventually they are going to run out of things to replace.
Just another idea. I also see these guys mixing well with the mechanomancers. Which is a really scary thought. Anyway, great idea!
You have now saved me the work of fixing my Neomancy school. Thank you.
Gosh, thank you!
CriticalFault, you have a good point about minor charging being slow. The formulas are cheaper to compensate for it, so if you made an easier charging structure, I’d suggest increasing the costs. The good news is, during play you can max out your credit cards to get more charges quickly.
I was thinking they’d do well with mechanomancers. Actually, as written, a mechanomancer could be a significant-charge factory for a toybox altar guy, which is an unintended but pleasant loophole.
Glad you like it, too, Mr. Sluagh!
I don’t mind the charges being hard to come by since they’re sort of a double bonus- in order to get a charge you have to somehow improve your PC’s effectiveness, which is a reward all on its own.
And frankly, you’re only getting one charge a month if you are a moral, responsible person, able to put what you need ahead of what you want.
How many adapts does that apply to?
Heh, Adapt actually seems like a good name for these guys.
And yeah, charges seem hard to get, except these guys don’t seem to have anything against using magick to get more charges. Being better/faster/stronger/harder has got to help in finding rare betamaxes and getting new blendomatics.
All adepts have the restriction, Nick. You can’t use magick to get charges, no matter what school. It’s a universal game principle.
I like calling them “adapts.”
But, yeah, I’m figuring that plenty of Toybox Altar adepts will end up with a lot more charges than they could responsibly afford.
That makes me want to make a school that can use magic to get more magic, but it all comes back three-fold in the end. Everythiing extracts it’s price.
Anyway, it looks like a pretty cool school to me.
Fun, Nick D!
I like the symbolic tension. Thanks for being a thoughtful writer and paying attention to that point.
I also agree that the charging system is prohibitively expensive: half a month’s pay gets you good grooming? The minor spells are comparable to Bibliomancy, where minor charges cost only $100 (and, like with this school, they can be stolen or begged). Admittedly, Bibliomancy is more restricted in that one can only store charges in books, but there’s still a big gap between $100 and half a month’s income. US Federal minimum wage is $5.85, by the way, so half a month at a full-time job would be just under $500 (and higher in most states, where the minimum wage is often $6.75 or over $7). By the summer of 2009, the Federal minimum will be $7.25, making ten days’ wages $580. If the character has a real job, though, the figure could be double that. I think that’s disproportionate – and, what’s more, all the best gadgets only cost about two or three hundred!
Thanks for posting.
– F.A.R. out
THanks for running the numbers, F.A.R.!
There’s a point to having it be based on your income – it means that difficulty scales with wealth, and it also it works a little with the symbolic tension. If you’re using it, and you’re worried it’d be too hard to get charges, you could probably make it “one-quarter your monthly income” instead and nothing else would get broken.
I’m always glad to do a little research; gaming is my obsession skill.
I agree that scaling it by income is effective (1/4 is the figure I was pondering, too). It’s like taxes!
Is there a particular reason that half a month’s income stood out to you?
– FAR out
The terrible truth is, I’ve had this school on my Sidekick phone for like 6 months, waiting to be touched up and finished, and I can’t even remember why I said half a month’s income.
Brill school. I particularly like the term ‘adapts’ for these guys.
Not sure about the charging structure either; I’d have to iron it out during a playtest. I quite like the idea that you can’t just buy new shit, it has to be the newest of the new shit. And there’s only so much new shit coming out, even in this day and age.
The thing about having more money than most is that it’s got to come from somewhere. Trust funds and lottery wins eventually run out (especially with a school like this) and high-paying day jobs require pulling 60 hours weeks. Alex Abel, with his ‘Make Gobs of Money’ obsession skill, doesn’t have time to be an adept (or adapt!) between ventures.
Object based adepts (except plutomancers) are better off with careers that feed into their charging structure. Bookshop owners and librarians for bibliomancers, and writers for men’s magazine tech sections. An adept who worked for an electronic company’s R&D division would be swimming in it until he got caught pilfering.
Oh, and, can anyone else see junkomancers latching onto a local adapt like goby fish on shrimp?
I’m very on the “minors too expensive” side, partly because most of the minors are things you could do in half an hour (wage equivalent: $3-$4) but require the effort output of 80 hrs (assuming a full-time job ~ $250-$450). I mean, compare the effort/difficulty of the average adept, like an epideromancer: a minor is a bunch of bruises and scrapes which he’ll recover from in a week or so.
I just think that charging should be allowed to be easier depending on how wide-spread, primal, or intense the paradox is in the overall mind of humanity. Gadget-philia is as old as man, nearly, gaining a particularly mainstream momentum in this last hundred years or so and is something indulged in to various degrees by a huge segment of the population.
It does bring up a good point, though: how does/should pre-existing traits (wealth, skills, contacts, etc.) affect a well-designed school? I mean, a bibliomancer millionaire (or even just one making $80k, something not unlike for this less obviously insane mancy) is a hell of a lot more powerful than say one who even works at a bookstore. A personamancer with a high acting ability is better at charging up than a clumsy amateur improv fanatic.
And then: Mechanomancy. Should a pre-requisite of the school be a tinkering ability OR does the magick skill operate as something like a paradigm skill, allowing mundane clockworking in addition to magickal mechworking?
To be fair, constantly illegally downloading useful software (and their latest version updates) does sort of lessen the harshness a little.
I don’t feel charging has to scale to personal ability/wealth/etc. Some people are just going to be better at doing what they do.
And is kind of the point I think Stolze and Tynes were making with Alex Abel. No-one’s moved through the OU with that much money and mojo before. It’s upset the balance, created waves and made life a lot more Interesting(tm). Which adds to the game background.
It does make me wonder now how the OU would look without Double A and his New Inquisition. A question for the UA list perhaps.
That’s a little different. He’s a mega-billionaire who had a brush with the statosphere, has a knack for organization exploitation and investment, sanity, and a wide enough viewpoint to be able to accept the OU as well as a personal goal that is particularly broad. I’m sure other billionaires have gotten involved, it’s just they were trying to achieve concrete goal A or gain immortality or etc. instead of trying to fundamentally alter the way the world works. I mean, Abel isn’t just about ascending or world domination. A big part of his schtick is that he wants to make things better as well as ascending.
There are a fair amount of wealthy types. I mean “eccentric” is just a polite way of saying “crazy” and “crazy” is just an Non-Occult Mainstream way of saying “someone who might be an adept… or might just be crazy”. Adepts tend to be odd, but also obsessed. Because Abel is aware, but not an adept or avatar though still active in the OU, he’s unusual. Once you’ve seen the Truth (your Truth anyhow), seeing the world through different POVs is more difficult. Abel can still do that. And to be honest, when you’ve reached the level of wealth Abel has you’re usually so caught up in the game of making money and relaxing that even if you have stumbled into magick it might be subsumed by the greater capitalism. Hell, there could easily be a form of Plutomancy that works more like Dipsomancy: The more money you have, the bigger you are, but to get and keep the money you have to sacrifice much of what defines you. And the other schools, when thrown into a multi-millionaire’s context, become more about adding meaning than affecting the world. Most adepts are trying to make up for that bit of insecurity that comes from not having power. Millionaires have power, but unlike adepts they don’t have meaning. When they start down the road that might make them one of the “normal” schools, like Dipsomancy or Entropomancy or Aviomancy (like Howard Hughes), you can bet it’s more self-aimed than world aimed. You can ALREADY control the world, but what can you do with yourself?
I guess what I’m saying is money may make things less fair in magick, but why wouldn’t that be true there as it is in everything else? And that, a lot of the time, the money makes less of a difference than you’d think.
And besides, with magick you get paranoid. With money, you get paranoid. Paranoids withdraw.
Guys, take a good look at those two posts by Neville: smart, concise, insightful. That’s the level we should all be posting at on this site.
You’re right, Nev, there’s a lot more to Abel that makes him unusual and interesting than his stock portfolio.
The notion that millionaires, having ‘mastered’ the outside would likely turn to the mastery of the inside when they get hold of magic is a great one. It might be very interesting for people to generate a few millionaire, billionaire adepts and avatars.
I think people might be blanching at money instinctively as it looks like, at a glance, a very nebulous trait to generate for a character at the start of a campaign and hard to keep track of in play, especially when you’re dealing with the million marker.
But, yeah, toning down a school just because money might make a difference would be like snipping points from an American character just because they have better access to guns. Or (even!) have a gun.
I can also see there being some clashes with these guys and mechanomancers. I guess I always pictured mechanomancers being fairly possessive of their more interesting devices and then an adapt comes along… even if the mech is willing to sell the less interesting pieces, you know the adapt will REALLY want the FANCY stuff.
On a more metaphysical level, what happens when you charge up off of someone else’s magick? Can you? The mechanomancer’s devices may seem like a loophole, but they’re really technically just solidified “spells”. They’re not QUITE real. So, either the charges gained by acquiring mechanomancer gadgets act “funny”, don’t work, or cause the effects they’re used for to be strange. Alternatively, with their mojo out of whack by being used to charge someone else up, they clockworks themselves start acting… off. Anything from just more malfunctions (where there never really were any before), odd and unwanted new abilities (waltzing clockworks do some swing, some simple thing gains a piece of but not actual sentience), slow “devolution” into simpler versions of themselves (as their mojo is drained ~ huge many-limbed fighting machine starts losing limbs, starts using fewer tactics, loses ability to move around though can still attack, eventually becoming little more than a sword on a spring), or occasionally “shifting” back into being nothing more than fancy steampunk/clockworkesque statues, hunks of metal that just look neat, and then shifting back (though you never know when the shift away might be permanent…).
Maybe the memories spent to make the device (even if it’s just the day in the workshop required for a minor device) start to leak into the mind of the adapt who acquired the piece.
Maybe all of the above.
After all, there’s no Free Magick.
Gosh! Lots of conversation here!
Neville, I think you can get charges off someone else’s spells. Kleptomancy does some very similar things with stealing people’s charges. As a trivial example, you would totally get an Entropomancy charge for jumping in front of a powerful adept and daring them to blast you.
Yeah, it’s looking like most people are agreeing the minors are too expensive. I scaled costs down low to compensate, but if I put this in play, I’d probably make it a quarter-month’s wages instead of a half-month’s wages. That’s still pretty expensive, I know. Most schools have minor charges take 2 hours to a day. I’m okay with that, since the charge structure and taboo are pretty lenient by comparison.
Kleptomancy is sort of different. Partly, there IS a theft occurring, of a real thing (even if it is a rare thing) and partly because it’s not a double-charge up (with two people getting a charge from the same thing) but a charge theft.
The entropomancer, too, is a bit different. You’re not charging up using their charges, exactly, you’re charging up from that realm of uncertainty where they CAN hurt you but will they? For me, it’s where the focus is. The entropomancer is drawing charge from uncertainty of outcome, but the adapt draws from a specific object which has a function. In the case of the mechanomancer, the object is the end goal of spending what passes for charges for mechanomancers. Now, the reason this is important is that as a precedent it opens the path to someone who can charge up by having magick cast on them. Which sounds benign until you have a munchkin group that casts a bunch of positive spells on the dude who then has the positive effects AND a bunch of charges. That’s a bit cheap and a repeating theme of the UA-verse is that the universe doesn’t give out energy for free.
To summarize: you can use someone’s opinions on, intent with, and end-mundane-effects to charge up with, but not the spell itself. Normally, that’s not going to be an issue, but with mechanomancy the spell is essentially indefinite in length and manifests as a physical thing. Unlike a rare book, it was scrap metal beforehand and nothing special (except for the now mostly worthless due to being modified for use as machine components historical bits). It’s the magic that gives it the value.
I’m not saying that you CAN’T get a charge, but that maybe those charges won’t be quite the same. I mean, house rules of course, but
The taboo can be either REALLY difficult or not so bad, depending on the GM. I mean, always having to use some way to boost your voice once you’ve bought a microphone, always having to translate the menu with your digital translator (even though there’s a copy in english), getting surprised and not turning on the car alarm/rape whistle, having to go home to grab your old-people-grasper-claw when you want something off a slightly higher shelf instead of just standing on a chair. The thing is, if you’ve been an adapt for any length of time, pretty soon you have a device or program or etc for everything.
With the charging I’m good with a dual system: either a high value gadget (normal chargining) or a gadget that adds an ability you don’t yet have, with minor being a not so useful ability, significant being a particularly useful ability, and major being an ability that mankind rarely dreams of. The reason is that they sound more focused on expanding their capabilities than on simple acquisition. They’re more a modular cyborg with an update fetish, sounds like, and less a conspicuous consumption/new-for-new sake type.
Well gadgets are about increasing one’s capabilities. Consumeromancers would be different. Just owning for the sake owning. Big house, big car, big boat, big tv, generating charges. But what would the taboo be? I mean that stuff isn’t like money. I don’t think you could go plutomancer “have but don’t use” with that stuff.
Heh, speaking of consumeromancers, this reminds me of how when I first read this school it made me think of a Mechanomancy variant: a guy obsessed with 50’s tech (which is odd considering that’s the era they started brash consumerism and stopped making things to last). Which of course lead me to think of a scenario trying to stop this guy from using 50’s appliances to rebuild a 50’s harmless hollowed out a-bomb shell into a fully working version with magick.
Exactly my point, Nick D. That’s why I think the PRICE of the new gadget isn’t as important as its functionality.
Taboo: Time limit ~ always need to be buying new stuff?
I just watched an old Mighty Max cartoon sort of like that, called “Scorpio Rising”. The villain was this half-50’s-era Mad Scientist and half-50’s-era Leave It To Beaver dad type. All of his technology was cutting edge… in the 50’s. The only technology that was still above and beyond was his radioactivity-using devices. So, he had these huge honking b&w video surveillance cameras, an oven and no microwave, that sort of thing, all alongside his atomic-crystals growing in a glass dome and his scorpion cage (which he used to radioactively “mutate” them into giant, obedient, regenerating, laser-stingered monsters) and an… atomic fission beam, I think. He’d turned the state of Nevada into a bomb by linking all the bomb sites and using his crystals to amplify the radiation.
Neville, thanks for all your thoughtful comments! I like the idea of your charging structure better.
(As far as the mechanomancer-buddy-gives-infinite-sig-charges loophole, I’m thinking the best way to close that is to say you can’t gain more than one significant Toybox Altar charge from the same source or supply channel. Boom! Two dozen loopholes closed!)
As far as taboo, though, I’m not so sure I’m with you. Always need to be buying new stuff? Eh. I have to say that I really am not too fond of the charge and taboo being the same. They really should clash in some way that shows the symbolic tension of the school.
The idea with the taboo I wrote is that it humbles human capability while extending it at the same time.
(In the same way, I’m not too crazy about the following also-considered taboos: cannot harm a machine, cannot throw a machine away, cannot allow an insult to a machine)
The taboo was meant for the consumo-mancers, not the gadgeteers. Sorry, that wasn’t really clear. Sort of like kleptomancers. The other way I’d look at it, with the consumomancers, is the time limit in the same way the cliomancers have a time limit: a charge from a new purchase only lasts so long (which isn’t a new idea, I swear I saw a consumo-mancer type somewhere in the archives)
No, I like the taboo you wrote. I’m just saying that over time it becomes increasingly difficult. Which is fine, given the paradox of the school.
The only time I like the also-considereds is when it makes sense for the paradox. Like if the school charged up by defending people that were bad to you, por ejemplo. Or if it were a school based on miserliness, not throwing anything out would be fine. Not allowing insult to a machine would be a fun taboo for a mageekian who is obsessed with the idea that machines are like people/in getting good PR for technology. But otherwise, yeah, they’re often a bit soft for taboos.
As for the mechanomancer: I’d say there’s enough metaphysics involved that it’s best to vary by house rules. For example, I tend to be in the “Anything… for a price” school with UA. So I’d probably allow from the same source (otherwise, you’re going to run out of tech catalogues, and it doesn’t really figure into the paradox of the school). So I’d probably allow it, but make it have Unexpected Side-Effects (see above). Hardline rules-wise, looking at the book it very much sounds like it wouldn’t be possible to do so, but there’s enough shifty areas that it could be possible.
Do you really need to prevent Mechanomancers giving their gear to Adapts? After all, a Mechanomancer is putting effort into their items. A minor Mechanomancy item should only give an Adapt one charge. And what adept gives something for free? After all, the Mechanomancer could charge the Adapt a few hundred dollars – or better still, demand favours, which are a trickier beast. (‘Sure you can have my dancing can opener. All you gotta do is get me the antique telephone that’s going up for auction this friday’).
Getting significant charges from Mechanomancers will be even rarer. These guys had to sacrifice their actual memories, or go racing around town looking for historic artefacts. They aren’t going to let those gadgets go cheap.
To be honest, it’s more of an investment in the metaphysics than a metagame necessity, but it’s also a concern from a meta-level in the case of a group of mixed adepts that are abusing inter-locking abilities to munchkin around a little. Also, as far as significant goes, it doesn’t require the mech to spend a sig of his own (or the memories required), but instead just spend more days (and associated minor charges) to make a more interesting and useful but still technically minor clockwork. A week worth of minors can make a clockwork that has a much bigger bang than anything you could buy for that much wage, if designed well.
I think the “one sig charge per source” is the best way to close the loop. It allows the kind of plots that work well (“Hello, Mr. Clockworker. Yes, I’ll happily sell my friend out in exchange for your clockwork pencil-sharpener!”) while not including the kind of plots that cause problems (“Our party consists of an Adapt and a Clockworker. We’ll spend two months and sit in the lab, producing endless significant charges!”)
By the way, speaking of consumermancy, I wrote a school of that a while back, but it kinda fell flat.
For your consideration, Emptomancy:
http://www.unknown-armies.com/content_comments.php?id=1805_0_3_0_C1
Another possible alternative if you have a mechanomancer and an adapt in the same party helping each other out is to sow a little distrust. Spend some time as a GM talking alone with each of the pair/group, and pass lots of secret messages.
Then, later in a story, innocuously mention that someone’s gadget/ toy has gone missing. Remind the adapt how many charges he could get at once if he stole the mechanomancer’s gadgets while he’s out of town. Remind the mechanomancer how hungry the adapt looks when he sees anything the mechanomancer owns. (For comparison, imagine a Bibliomancer left alone at a book warehouse with really bad inventory tracking).
Where two schools have overlapping territory, they’re often hostile to each other (see Urbanomancers and Cliomancers).
Sorry, a thought just occured to me: Mechanomancers make items that are *not* technologically advanced, technically. If they use anything modern, it can’t function as such, but can be structural or decorative etc. Maybe you could rule that Mechanomancy devices don’t count as the cutting edge, and therefore shouldn’t allow Adapts to charge up?
Does that sound better?
Dominus, those are interesting and cool ways to use plot to handle a weird loophole in the rules. It’s usually better, if you can, to fix the rules loophole instead.
Really, the same problem occurs if another PC takes the Mind skill “Make weird prototypes of advanced office equipment,” for instance.