The magic of faces. A schismatic splinter school of Personamancy, hostile to the original.
The Personamancers of Prague run a theatre of classical Greek tragedy. The theatrical productions there are hit-or-miss: mediocre with moments of brilliance. They only recruit the obsessed, and after a while, they start training them to be adepts as well. It’s a wild ride for the new talent, and the theatre company has a lot of angry dropouts who didn’t understand the spooky mystical reasons behind their unpleasant tutelege.
A few students got as far as discovering the magic before they dropped out. They found out something surprising: they were obsessed enough to do the magic, but they didn’t care about personalities or deception, and they hated the masks. They just really cared about faces. They split off from the theatre and tried to start their own magical tradition.
The face is holy, they claim. It is a bridge between the soul and the world. It is thought molded into form. The face is the source of the self; the self is the source of magic. There is nothing about a person’s feelings, aspirations, or talents, that isn’t on their face.
To this new school, a human is a face with a body attached to move it around, and nothing more. Any philosophy that says otherwise – especially Personamancy – is a foolish lie.
The theatre was (understandably) threatened by this and they moved against the new adept school, spreading vicious rumors about them in the local Occult Underground, harassing them, stealing students, and sometimes laying down unpleasant curses.
Despite all this, the little cabal has done alright for themselves. They’ve founded their own schismatic tradition, Metopomancy.
Generate a minor charge: Study one person’s face, in person, in depth, for two hours straight. You can be doing something while you watch, but only if you’re focusing on the subject’s face the whole time. You need to study a different person each time.
Metopomancy does not generate significant or major charges.
Taboo: You must never say anything (true or false) about any human’s personality, desire, thoughts, feelings or character, exept by describing physical features of their face. This includes yourself. If you do so, you immediately lose all charges.
Symbolic Tension: The face is a completely physical thing, but is also the only expression of the mental world.
Charging Tips: Most Metopomancers hire artist’s models to gain charges (often several Metopomancers chip in together and all study the same face at once.) A few get into businesses where they can get paid for their work – dentist, plastic surgeon, make-up artist.
Minor Formulas
Expression
1 minor charge
You can communicate complex information to anyone who can see your face: about two or three sentences. When you use this, anyone who sees your face (even on camera afterward) intuitively understands the message, no matter how complex. Lasts an instant.
Penny for Your Thoughts
1 minor charges
Looking at someone’s face, you can tell what’s on their mind. Lasts a moment. For an additional five charges, you can also learn the names (and descriptions if needed, but not scores) of all the subject’s Mind-based skills.
Rearrange Your Face
3 minor charges
This is the metopomancy minor blast. The victim’s eyes, nose and mouth suddenly go painfully bloody, doing damage equal to the sum of the dice.
Exaggerated Features
3 minor charges
Change your Notice skill to another skill related to faces. It doesn’t need to be anything related to noticing, or even anything Mind-based. Lasts until you end it, or use this formula to change it again. You fail all Notice checks while this is in effect. Your facial features change to match your changes, but you’re still recognizable as you.
Some examples of possible skills: “Read Faces,” “Keen Sense of Smell,” “Beautiful Eyes,” “Dentistry,” “Intimidating Stare,” “Creepy Bug-Eyes,” “Bite Viciously,” “Poker Face” or even “Take a Punch to the Jaw and Keep Coming.”
You Are Not You
4 minor charges
There is a part of the brain that recognizes faces, and this formula mucks with it. The victim’s appearance doesn’t change, but no one will recognize her. Others might be convinced by shared knowledge or non-photo identification, but her face just doesn’t “click” as the same person. Lasts a day. You can use this on yourself.
What You’ve Heard
The Metopomancers of Prague are starting to move against their former teachers, the Personamancers. They stage “Mallet Parties” – all disguising themselves with You Are Not You to surround lone Personamancers and brutally attack them with hammers, smashing their faces past the point of recognition and leaving them near-dead. The Metopomancers may soon learn the comparative limitations of their minor school of magic.
Another minor school, similar enough to Personamancy that I made a backstory to tie it in. Got the name from a list of types of divinations, and figured I’d write the list from there.
The symbolic tension (that faces are both purely physical and purely mental) is kind of weak, which I figure is okay for a minor school.
Other taboos I considered but didn’t want to use:
Must never mar a face, or an image of a face, or allow one to be marred in your presence. (Didn’t fit with the story.)
Must never show your face. (Stylistically interesting, but there’s already a masks school, and it would spoil some of my favorite formulas, too.)
Must never cover your face. (Doesn’t affect behavior enough or tie into the symbolic tension.)
Man, as a minor school’s taboo, it’s workable but also hilarious (which is not, in actuality, a criticism). I think it’s great that, sometimes, mysticism comes across not as Big Deep Mysterious, but as a little absurd too (like the shamans that do everything backwards or the stories in some Native American culture about mud-people who don’t understand sex and try to learn from an old lady. Armpits and elbows are involved).
But yeah.
“I feel frowny that all my plans have come to naught”
“He is going to be angry-face with us when he finds out we killed his daughter!”
“He’s going to be angry-face with us when he finds out we killed his daughter!”
Oh man, that rules. It’s like troublemaking adept meets perky three-year-old. They could call people things like “Mr. Smiley” and “Miss Shouty-Mouth.”
I also like the idea of them occasionally having to just make faces to be able to fully express an idea. Like “Not like this (makes a little pout) but like THIS (makes big puppy-dog-eyes and huge downward frown).
I really like “Miss Shouty-Mouth” and one year I went as Mr. Smiley for Halloween (huge circular cardboard yellow smiley face onnastick, white gloves, trench-coat, dress-pants).
Unrelatedly, I like that it directly demonstrates how A) what is normally a curse (nobody recognizing or acknowledging you) can be used for your own purposes and B) how a minor school can be dangerous.
Yeah, the taboo is a little silly on paper, but it’s a lot creepy in practice, which discribes UA schools in general.
Do take note that it’s not just emotions, it’s character and personality too.
“What do you think of him?”
“Have you ever SEEN the guy? Those beady eyes, that crooked nose and that CONSTANT fucking smirk!”
“Um, yeah, so..He’s a prick.”
On the too-far-gone end of the spectrum, we get adepts rearranging people’s faces ritually, believing they can control minds by controlling faces, rather than the other way around.
It’s worst (best!) when the adept is also a racist, saying what stereotype parts a person SHOULD have, etc.
But yeah, the whole personality. It would take a while to get used to someone who talked about people that way.
Reverse phrenology plastic surgery!
I wonder how they feel about make-up, though. Bet they don’t like it. A little white lie compared to a mask, but still a lie.