The Long March, a minor school of magical walking.
There is a story that Ambulomancy teachers tell their apprentices on the long road, or the nature walk, or the hiking trail, or the jogging path, during their important wanderings. It’s demonstrably false – inconsistent with other version of the story, heavy with embellishments, full of geographical and historical mistakes, and not mentioned in any other source – but the Ambulomancers don’t seem to mind that. On long walks, you need as many stories as you can get.
The story always begins with a group of poor pilgrims who make regular trips to Jerusalem. (In some versions of the story, it’s Mecca, or the walls of the Forbidden City, or the court of a holy king, or even Graceland.)
Most pilgrims only went once, then returned home. A few became organizers of the groups, and made a life of bringing others to the holy place and back again.
Different Ambulomancers like to vary their story here, but it has the same general theme. The most devoted of those who walk begin to have holy visions. The visions drive them to abandon their whole life for the hourney. Then, somehow, they acquire more wealth, or more ability to travel. Usually it’s because some visionary was able to save the soul of a wealthy and grateful traveller, or because they impressed a pious boat captain. Sometimes they find horses or camels or elephants. (In one Jazz Age revision of the story, the automobile is invented.)
The pilgrims travelled by this faster means, but the visionary leaders among them found it empty and unsatisfying. They didn’t have their visions. They felt empty. They abandoned their group of pilgrims and went back to their exhausted holy wanderings.
Often, the majority of the pilgrims go on to found some great tradition: the Crusade, the Hajj, Mao’s Long March, even the Deadheads. The mystic few disappear into obscurity and found the school of Ambulomancy, passing down immortal wisdom from teacher to student, often in a traced path down to the teacher who is telling the story.
Generate a minor charge: Walk for an hour.
Ambulomancy is a minor school, and doesn’t generate significant or major charges.
Taboo: Stop walking. You lose all charges if you cease walking for more than thirty seconds. Pacing in the same place is also forbidden. So is riding in a vehicle. Running, crawling, climbing or swimming is fine, though.
Walking Continuously: Walking continuously without even a minute-long break gets tiring fast. Each hour you walk, make a major General Athletics check or take a cumulative -5% exhaustion penalty. If you’re carrying more than fifteen pounds of stuff, or you’re somewhere hilly, make a check every half hour instead. These penalties go away at a rate of 5% per 15 minutes of rest.
Symbolic Tension: Today, walking is the slowest way to reach a destination, but you’d only do it if you had a great desire to travel.
Random Domain: Journeys. Ambulomancy improves the body’s ability to move.
Blast: Walk up to someone and kick them. This can be Dodged, but it doesn’t require a Struggle check, and it can affect objects up to your size (in volume, not mass) as well. In addition to damage, the target is knocked back about twenty feet.
Charging Tips: You can’t charge quickly and you can’t keep your charges, so start walking a few hours before you think you’ll need it. Don’t carry much or you’ll get tired quickly.
Starting Charges: Zero.
Special Note: You can use Ambulomancy to benefit anyone who has walked with you for at least an hour at no additional cost. (This doesn’t apply to the Blast, of course.) As long as they travel with you, you can apply the benefits to them as well. You can help up to a dozen willing (or at least trusting) people this way.
Minor formulas
Fitness
1 minor charge
Use your Ambulomancy in place of a single General Athletics check for any kind of movement. You can use this formula on the same turn as you act. Lasts at most five minutes (so you can’t use it to help stave off walking exhaustions).
Eliminate Obstacles
2 minor charges
This is the ambulomancy minor blast. It does damage equal to the sum of the dice and knocks the target back 20 feet.
Wandering
3 minor charges (but see below)
Pick a goal and start walking aimlessly. You’ll start heading toward your destination. If you’re trying to reach something that’s not accessible by foot, you’ll still wander toward it. If you’re just looking for “an interesting thing” instead of a particular goal, this formula costs only 1 minor charge.
Shortcut
4 minor charges
Walk into an area where no one else can see you except those traveling with you. You’ll slip through Otherspace and arrive in some hidden area appropriate for walking about halfway toward your destination. The transition will somehow seem smooth. If you don’t have a destintion, the formula fails.
The Long March
24 minor charges
Older and less politically correct adepts call this formula “The Wandering Jew.” Preserves your body as you travel. Until you stop walking, you won’t grow tired, you won’t age, and you won’t need food, water, air or sleep. You also can’t generate any charges, of course, but those traveling with you still can. When you stop walking, you’ll start getting old, tired and hungry at a normal rate again, but you won’t catch up for lost time.
What you’ve heard
Ambulomancers talk about a “wandering college” of Ambulomancers, roving in a large group throughout Egypt and Northern Africa. The older teachers stay alive using The Long March but can no longer generate charges themselves – instead, they constantly recruit and direct new students to travel with them. The things they encounter in the deep Sahara defy description.
I love making minor schools! This one started with a name from a list of divination names. I figured that I’d use the oneiromancy/dipsomancy style of charges.
The school has some similarities to the Avatar of the Pilgrim. Part of the point of the first story was to highlight the differences and suggest that the school may be an offshoot.
There’s a big loophole in the school: use the Long March to let other ambulomancers gain charges more easily. I think it ends up balanced and interesting anyway, since even without bodily needs it’s hard to avoid breaking taboo, but it’s kind of a loophole. It would be easy to say that you don’t gain charges if someone else is boosting your travel with magic, which might be more elegant, anyway.
I really like your minor schools. Keep up the good work.
This would be a great fit for a “running man” type avatar. I really like the work you’ve done in making a story and a background for it. The idea of people who cannot stop walking or they will die, and have been walking like this for decades, maybe even centuries is beyond cool, it’s practically a game in itself.
Does The Long March deal with pressure as well? If so, it would be kind of cool to have an Ambulomancer walk up to astronauts, or have one wandering through the Marianas Trench.
Anon, that would be comedy gold!
I was also thinking of an upgraded form of it. Maybe 72 charges (I fully realize that it is nearly impossible to gain that many charges, that’s the point) to also make the person casting it, and only the person casting it, invulnerable or insubstantial. That is, bullets bounce off or pass through the adept, lava makes him incredibly hot but doesn’t harm him or he just doesn’t feel the heat in the first place, a train hitting him gets dented or passes through him, and so on. This would, in my mind, be the equivalent of a Major effect, counterbalanced by the fact that 72 straight hours of walking is essentially impossible.
Google “ultra marathon” for inspiration. there’s stuff like this to be found:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Transcendence_3100_Mile_Race
And various desert races. 24 hours doesn’t seem to much, and 72 seems difficult but possible.
The “What You Hear” Is really interesting as a seed, actually.
And I like the idea of someone walking the Mariana Trench.
Without even a minute’s break? And, in game terms, a penalty of up to 355%? Even if it’s at a very slow pace, the fact that you can’t stop makes it hellish.
Anon, I’m just saying that there are people who RUN for 24 or 48 hours straight. For FUN. 72 hours is a stretch, sure, but 24 hours should be completely doable if you have trained enough and have the right genes.
I should’ve run some math fu on it, but I’m guessing that a starting Ambulomancer with a 50% “Walking” skill will have a really hard time walking 24 hours straight, but with a 70% skill and some tilts or something, it becomes possible to do it and get a moderate-to-high exhaustion penalty.
Are you sure about that, Mattias? It’s a bit hard to swallow the ideathat even with intense training people are capable of that.
Well, if you’ve really trained, have a camelback and some decent high-energy snacks, you could probably amble almost as long as you can hold out against sleep and such.
Also: Drugs
Even with drugs, how long can a person hold out against sleep while carrying out any action that is primarily physical in nature?
You’d really be surprised. I mean, it’s still damned epic and the more than 30 second rest taboo might make it actually impossible (charge-wise), but the human body (or more specifically, SOME humans’ bodies) can be pushed to weird places. Like those self-mummifying monks.
Some human bodies, now we have Ambulamancers making deals with (damn all those latinized words, the body-mages) to get better endurance.
And we get a new skill, “change socks under 30 seconds”.
There were some really epic marches during and directly after WW2. I can see people becoming adepts right there.
Some kind of Vision or Insight spell perhaps? Just realized that most of the spells dealt with walking, might be fun with a spell or two that dealt with goal in a less (or more) than physical sense.
Right, starting to focus on the walking and not the walking TO (re: WW2), to stop themselves from thinking about the horrible things going on.
And I agree, a couple more formulae that are more abstract would be nice particularly since it’s more about the journey than the exercise.
I did already include a potent divination spell (Wandering). But you make a compelling point! Here’s five more (I always do ’em in fives):
“Mirage” – As you walk, you begin to encounter elaborate and symbolic dreamlike hallucinations that reveal information about a subject of your choice. (4 minor)
“L’Esprit D’Escalier” – You are immediately reminded of some important piece of information that you learned but forgot or disregardded. (1 minor)
“A Mile in Your Mocassins” – Usable only with a willing group (of up to 12 as usual). Everyone learns one important fact they didn’t know about each travelling companion, including you. These revelations come every five minutes, in seemingly random order, even if you stop walking. (3 minor charges)
“Historic March” – Within an hour, news of your walking will become displayed in the mainstream media, including where you are and why you’re walking. Usually this happens due to a chance encounter, curious reporter, human interest story, or so on. (5 minor charges)
“Zen Garden” – Only usable while you are walking in some natural setting or well-tended garden. You get a +10% to all Mind-based skills you already had at 40% or more. (3 minor charges)
I think this needs to be turned into a full school. Yes, the idea of the wanderer fits far better as an avatar than it does a postmodern school of magick, but there are so many good ideas. I’m sorry about this one, Mattias, as I’ve read your piece on it and I agree completely with just about everything except the excessive anger.
I love Mattias’ piece.
Anon, if you think it needs to be turned into a full school, go for it! I’d love to see what you do with it.
(There already is a related-but-different Avatar: the Pilgrim.)
A full school actually could be nice, if we can find a way to disentangle it from the avatar path (which I think is feasible)
I also really like the idea that though practitioners claim it goes back to Holy Pilgrims, it was really developed (possibly a few times) by those marching to war, away from devastation, or Trail of Tears scenarios, that they walk as a distraction from their destination and origin rather than as a way of getting from point A to point B. And the semi-communal aspects, though not universal to the viewpoint of many practitioners, makes sense because the types of situations that would encourage movement-as-distraction in an intense enough way to trigger adept-hood are often group oriented (marching to war, etc.).
There could even be a splinter group which focuses on the exhaustion, somewhere between epideros/dipsos/ambulos and the dream-adepts. They exercise not to improve themselves or achieve a goal, but to distract themselves from their goals. But that might be pushing it.
TedPro, I would if I were any good at writing.
Neville, that’s super interesting! I like all ideas mentioned.
I tried to make an exhaustion-based school once, but I really couldn’t make a good symbolic tension or mechanic for it. I suspect it would work best as an alternate epideromancer charging scheme.
(Hmmm…. it’d be pretty fun to do a post that just has a heaping heckload of alternate charging schemes.)
Anon! There is one and only one way to get good at writing!
And that way is Eating Pumpkin Pies.
LOTS of them.
Or taking writing classes which force you to do that which you hate. I’m in one of those, and strongly considering withdrawing because of the asinine literary analysis involved. Although, I do like the sound of this interesting alternative.
I’m a professional writer (and make good money at it) and I have never taken a writing class. Classes are no substitute for the actual experience of Eating Pumpkin Pies.
…just like Neville said.
“(Hmmm…. it’d be pretty fun to do a post that just has a heaping heckload of alternate charging schemes.)”
Stick it in mods, it will make a good read.
(I wasn’t really angry when I wrote it, I just felt that writing it that way gave it a bit more impact)
The reason I think this doesn’t… (hmm, right word here, “deserve” aint it… “fit” perhaps) as a full school is that firstly:
this IS avatar:The Pilgrim (or The Running Man) we are talking about here, just more bells and whistles. Really, really nice bells and whistles!
Secondly: The symbolic tension doesn’t quite work strongly enough for a full school, imho.
Thirdly: I have no idea what the sigs and majors would be about, unless some completely vanilla walking somewhere famous/difficult/for a really, really no seriously really long time, na dI think something like that would sillute this little gem of a minor school.
That said: never mind me, go ahead and write it, post it, use it, love it.
TedPro, have I read anything of yours?
Charging schemes looking for a school in mods? Great idea!
Mattias, probably not. I’m a technical writer, not the sexy kind.
(But I’d be happy to send you some of my novels if you like! They’re all NaNoWriMo novels, and kinda unedited.)
Mattias, probably not. I’m a technical writer, not the sexy kind.
(But I’d be happy to send you some of my novels if you like! They’re all NaNoWriMo novels, and kinda unedited.)