Making contact with with strange.

You are a perfect extrovert, open to the outside world. You welcome it. You love to meet strangers, and the stranger the better.

But there’s a risk in meeting strangers, too. When you open yourself to them, you risk becoming them, and if you become them, then they’re no longer strangers. To keep your sense of wonder, you must stay firmly rooted where you are.

You are a bridge between the normal world and the wild. You can meet people from the other side, and you can like them, but you must never become them, or you will no longer be a bridge. Wander out but stay at home. Love everyone equally, but remember where you belong.

Generate a minor charge: Spend two hours meeting strangers. This could be at a party meeting many strangers, or chatting over coffee with a single new friend, but you must learn new things about people you’ve never met before.

Generate a significant charge: Meet someone radically different from you. This could be someone from a culture you know nothing about, or someone who is extremely radical and strange. The narrower your worldview, the more people can qualify.

Generate a major charge: Make peaceful social contact with a nonhuman sentient creature unknown to any human, even humans in the Occult Underground.

Taboo: You must be an accepted member of a community that is familiar to you, and you must uphold the norms and mores of that community. If you stray or become ostracized, you lose all charges.

Symbolic Tension: People are most comfortable with the outside world when they can feel confident about the consistency of their own life. We can only explore the alien when our home is safe.

Random Domain: Communication between the familiar and the strange.

Blast: You overwhelm the victim with alien thoughts. The victim loses Mind (not wound point) as strange alien images fill their head. The victim does, however, get insight into your recent experiences, though sometimes in an oblique or confusing way.

Charging Tips: Just being friendly and outgoing can earn you 1-2 charges a day if you have the free time. Getting significant charges might be easy or hard, depending on your community. A small town Xenomancer could get charges from chatting with an out-of-the-closet homosexual or a Swedish exchange student, while a New York Xenomancer might need to meet a Jivaro tribesman or an Aristasian separatist. Overall, 1-2 significant charges a month is typical.

Starting charges: 4 minor

Minor Formulas

Fireplace Charm
1 minor charge
You are charismatic to strangers. Use the result of your roll as a single successful Charm skill use, but only with those outside your community.

Gestures and Drawings
1 minor charge
You can communicate a single idea, no matter how complex, with a drawing or a gesture. Anyone viewing it (or a copy of it) will understand, even if they do not understand your language or culture. Even alien intelligences will follow your drift.

Fairytale Scream
3 minor charges
This is the Xenomancy minor blast.

Swap Stories
3 minor charges
Younger Xenomancers sometimes call this the “Vulcan Mindmeld.” Requires a willing subject and about four hours of conversation. You learn the subject’s Obsession, Passions, Skills and Madness Meters with perfect confidence, and they learn yours as well.

Diplomatic Immunity
5 minor charges
Usable during a direct conflict of any kind. Everyone involved in the conflict will assume that you’re their ally until your actions clearly show otherwise. Lasts until the conflict ends.

Significant Formulas

Crisis of Discovery
1 significant charge
This is the Xenomancy significant blast.

Blend In
1 significant charge
You can pass as a member of another group. Everyone will perceive you as a member of that group, both physically and in your mannerisms, and will assume you belong in the group you’re imitating. You could walk among Venezuelan crime syndicates, tribal gorillas or a cult of madmen, and somehow fit in just fine. You don’t gain any knowledge with this formula – you can’t speak the language, but people will assume you can. However, if you meet anyone you know personally while using this formula, the formula ends and you have broken taboo. Lasts until you end it consciously.

Tower of Babel
1 significant charge
Usable against any number of targets in your line of sight. The targets are unable to communicate with each other, even through external means. Any message that originated from one of the victims is meaningless to all the others, even if relayed by a third party. Lasts a day.

Wanderlust
2 significant charges
Transport yourself instantly to any location, as long as you are unable to describe it clearly. You can’t use this to go someplace familiar to you.

Third Culture
5 significant charges
Choose a community and a subject within sight range. “Bless” another person with permanent membership in that group. The subject gains a new Soul skill, equal to the higher of their Charm or Lie skill, that lets them integrate smoothly with the community you choose, including language and cultural skills. However, the subject will always be seen as a member of that culture, as well as their original, for better or worse. Lasts indefinitely, but you can only use it once per subject. If you use it on yourself, you lose all charges and can never use Xenomancy again.

Major Effects
Protect a whole culture against being assimilated. Gain the permanent ability to speak any language. Grant intelligence to an inanimate object. End a war between cultures.