Making the world a better place, one friend at a time.
Copyright really to mooshified but partially to Piotyr. Also mad props to Tulpa for help finishing this.
Nickname: Buddies
It’s like this: You, yourself, have no value. You’re a waste of air and skin, not fit to live in this world, unless you can find some way to justify yourself.
But you’re not quite up to the challenge of making the world a better place on a grander scale. No you gotta start small. Take it one step at a time.
You’ve decided you’re going to be there for your friends. Granted, some of your friends are just as worthless as you are. Not all of them though. Some of them are honest-to-goodness good people, people who deserve a better life, people who deserve a helping hand. Your job is to give that to them. You give them cash when they need it, make them laugh when they need cheering up, let them cry on your shoulder when their sad. And then you can rest easy, because you’ve earned your stay on this planet.
The central paradox of Filomancy is its selfishness. The adept’s sacrifice is nothing of the kind: While his goal is to help people if he makes their lives too good they will no longer need him, thus he will no longer be able to get any charges.
Filomancy Blast Style: Filomancers have no blast. It’s against their nature.
Stats:
Filomancers can have any number of friends, just like anyone else. However, they must designate between one and four of them “true friends” these are the people he devotes himself to. Henceforth, the term “friend” indicates one of these true friends. A player character cannot be designated a true friend.
Generate a Minor Charge: Help your friend in a way that inconveniences you. The help can be asked for or not, but you must solve a problem your friend has, and suffer some negative consequence.
Examples: if the adept’s friend is out of town, the adept could gain one minor charge by walking her dog until she gets back. He could gain another charge by watering her plants, and so on. Every charge-earning task must present a separate difficulty to the adept. Walking the dog takes time; that’s good enough. If the adept waters his friend’s plants while checking her phone messages, he is not doubly inconvenienced and does not gain the charge for doing so.
Generate a Significant Charge: Help your friend. In a Significant way
Examples: Convince your friend’s crush, your brother, to go out with her. Give them a gift they truly enjoy (And no the best gift is not one you made yourself). Defend them when someone starts bulling them, Etc.
Generate a Major Charge: Save your friend’s life. You can’t gain a charge by placing her in danger, even accidentally
Make it so your chosen friend no longer needs you, the ultimate sacrifice, the loss of your charger. (Note this is up to your gm, it may be give your friend a million dollars so they never want for anything again or help your friend become dependent of you such as helping her go to the college she always want to go to in another state)
Taboo: A Filomancer must never abandon a friend in need, nor fail to come when called by his friend, even if they are not in need. Also, whenever the adept changes his list of true friends, for any reason, he loses all his charges.
Random Magick Domain: Trust, dependence and help. Humans are easier to magick than animals, which are easier than objects.
Starting Charges: Newly created Filomancers have 2 minor charges.
Charging Tips: In choosing their friends, Filomancers must perform a balancing act. An overly needy friend might make the adept break taboo, but a self-sufficient one will be a poor source of charges. Furthermore, having only one friend is risky she might abandon you, or become too content but multiple friends might call on the adept simultaneously, and they might be far apart from each other. Most Filomancers have one very dependent friend, or a number of stronger ones.
With all this variation, it’s tough to pin down a charging frequency. On average, a Filomancer gains a minor charge once every few days and a significant charge once or twice every few weeks. It all depends on the types of friends you have.
Filomancy Minor Formula Spells:
Friend Of A Friend
Cost: 2 minor charges.
Effect: For the next amount of minutes equal to the roll of the dice everyone in the area you are in thinks you’re suppose to be there (Oh that’s… Bills friend! What was his name?) And will continue to do so unless they suspect you of something or directly come in contact with you (Such as starting a conversation, bumping into you and getting a good look Etc.) add 2 extra charges if the area you enter is a restricted area that even friends of people that are allowed there wouldn’t be allowed.
You’re My Man
Cost: 3 minor charges.
Effect: For the next 8 hours, any domesticated animal that sees you will treat you as an owner. If their real owner shows up, the animal will be visibly heartbroken, but will return to them.
You Inspire Me
Cost: 3 minor charges
Effect: After casting the spell, the adept must ask one of his true friends for a favor. After (and if) they do so, the caster gains five points from an appropriate stat, for the next 24 hours. If the friend lifted something heavy, Body would be good; Mind is appropriate if they helped with the adept’s taxes.
You’re A Real Pal
Cost: 4 minor charges
Effect: For the next half hour, the target of You’re a Real Pal gains the skill “Make Friends” at 20%. If she already has a similar skill, she gets +15% to it instead.
Can I Borrow That?
Cost: 4 minor charges
Effect: You can get someone to let you borrow something. Not only would your friend lend you her coat, a total stranger would lend you his car. You’ll need some sort of story as to why you need to borrow the item, but it doesn’t need to be a particularly good story. The person you borrow the item from expects it back in no more than a day or two. For items like coats, CDs, or pens, forgetting to return them or returning them late is rarely a problem. However, everyone with even the slightest grain of sense wants to know your name, address, and phone number before they let you borrow their car or their
credit card. Items the person is currently using will not be loaned out, nor unique or highly valuable items like top-secret documents or famous works of art. Similarly, items the person can’t imagine you would have any reasonable use for, like fissionable materials or high-powered weaponry, are off-limits. However, almost any normal item from t-shirts to yachts is freely given.
Filomancy Significant Formula Spells:
You Can Trust Me
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: A piece of text or a person gives up one of its secrets. A book might disclose its author, or the meaning of one of its symbols. A computer interface could tell you a password. A person whispers something to himself he does not wish another to know. The caster hears the secret as a whisper in his ear; background noise can make it difficult to discern. The length of the secret in words cannot exceed the tens die of the casting roll. The target of this spell can try to resist whispering the secret but must make a self check in the amount of the tens die of the casting roll
You Deserve It
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: Give someone an object. As long as it doesn’t present an intrinsic, immediate threat (a ticking time bomb, say), they will accept it. They won’t realize what exactly they’re holding until they get home, or sleep and awake.
You’re A Better Man Than I
Cost: 2 significant charges
Effect: The caster selects a (non-magickal) skill he possesses, and a target. For the duration of the spell, the target has that skill at 1% higher than the caster. The spell lasts the casting roll in minutes. Only one skill can be affected at a time per person
Tell Me Your Troubles
Cost: 2 significant charges
Effect: If you cast this spell on someone, you can convince them to talk about their problems with you. You suddenly seem like the best and most sympathetic listener in the entire world. While you can obtain considerably more information from someone in a bar or bus station than from a guard who is on duty, this spell will convince anyone to talk to you. Once the person begins talking, you can ask leading questions and expect to receive at least some answer. However, the target is only interested in talking about people or events which he finds troubling in some moral, emotional, or practical fashion.
You Need Me
Cost: 3 significant charges
Effect: This spell can be cast on anyone in the same room as the adept, or within 15 yards outdoors. If the target leaves the room (or the outdoor vicinity), it suffers a -30% shift to its Soul, and an anxiety attack (treat as a failed sanity check but you can only freeze or move back into the area). If the caster moves, the target must move with him. The target is aware of its situation but is not sure why it is in it. Every 5 minutes the target is away from the caster it can make a mind check to tell itself everything’s ok to remove the anxiety attack but still takes the –30% shift to soul. The spell and the Soul shift, end after one hour.
You Mean A Lot To Me
Cost: At least 3 significant charges (see below)
Effect: With this spell, a Filomancer can keep his charges in his friends for safekeeping. The caster must look into the eyes of his true friend, take their hand, and say, “You mean a lot to me”. At this point he spends two significant charges and invests as many more as he likes into the friend. Any kind of charge can be invested. The friend is completely unaware that anything unnatural has happened. While the charges are in storage, they cannot be lost through the caster’s break of taboo (though if the friend is herself an adept, the charges will be lost if she breaks taboo). Furthermore, they will remain in the friend’s body until 24 hours after her death.
To retrieve the charges the caster must look into his target’s eyes again, take their hand and say “Thanks. For everything.” He then spends one significant charge and regains the stored charges.
Filomancy Major Effects:
Create a piece of advice, which, whenever you speak it, just seems to make sense. Make any one person who can see you need you like oxygen, literally. Know all the real friendships in a given community. Forge a true friendship with your chosen target
Note this is the second in my revision campaign.
I am currently taking things already posted on the site and either enhancing them or changing them to fit more in line with unknown armies way of doing things. I am mostly doing it for my own use but I thought I would post them here with full props to the authers for others to use, abuse, or disregard.
Really Filomancy didn’t need too much work. mostly charge tweaking but it still needed something. You can compare this to the original here http://www.unknown-armies.com/content_comments.php?id=2107_0_3_0_C1
Majors are still a bit too common, but the relative weakness of the major effects makes up for it.
It occurs to me that Filomancers and Annihlomancers would probably hate each other on contact. The friendships that Filomancers rely upon are the exact kind of connection that Annihlomancers exist to destroy.
“…need you like oxygen, literally” brings up a gruesome scene: some poor schmuck, lungs full of filomancer blood, pureeing flesh to inhale later, a bag full of powdered hair to huff later.
Good times.
Pretty nice, though I think the paradox could be a bit stronger. Adept schools tend to generally be somewhat self-destructive – ones based on positive behavior should either take that behavior to unhealthy extremes, or pervert it somehow.
Perhaps the taboo should include a “clingy” factor – lose charges if you don’t visit each and every of your True Friends every day. Or better yet, you _have_ to help them out of some trouble every day, so if they don’t have trouble yet, you need to _make_ some…
Well the unhealthy factor would come in you put them first no matter what, working to better their lives above your own no matter what. Most Filomancers tend to be rather poor and can’t hold down jobs because they put all their time and money into their friends. You are worthless your friends are everything is their mantra.
I will think of some more things to add and how to phrase the above better so I get the entire point across that you don’t just think of helping them whenever they need you, you think of helping them or how you can help them at all times. The only reason you don’t is because if you get too clingy they might ditch you as a friend.
And to the guy who thinks the Major is too hard. Really the Major all depends on the gm. You can never get a major from putting your friend in danger, you have to make sure that they are safe no matter what so no asking her to help you on the big case you are working on or carelessly leaking their name to the enemy. If it’s your fault it don’t count (In other words unless you’ve done everything to prevent it you don’t get the charge) so it’s all up to the gm when you get a charge.
(Hi, I wrote the original school. It’s really nice to get some feedback, thanks.)
Hey, this is interesting. You’ve made some pretty cool additions (all the new spells are awesome). Are the balance changes based on a playtest? I like the changes overall, but I have some issues…
Why can’t a PC be a “true friend”? I always thought the true friend would HAVE to be a PC. Otherwise the Filomancer’s player would feel like the GM has too much control over his life, and the NPC friend would be too important — and she would be important only to the Buddy character, which might get annoying.
The new significant charging method is probably better balanced, but it’s a bit less interesting. I have a thing against charging schemes that differ only by degree — I like the significant charging method to be objectively different from the minor. However, this is an issue of taste.
Speaking of charging, I was just thinking about the Filomancy major charge, and I think the “saving a life” bit really is too easy in an action/horror game. I posted my suggestion in the original page, you can look it up there.
Why is You Deserve It a significant spell now? It seems pretty limited to me. It can be used to get rid of incriminating stuff, to give someone something that is indirectly harmful, or… that’s about it, I think.
Despite this long, long rant, I really like what you’ve done with this, Piotyr. Let me know if you end up using the school in a game.
Oh, another thing: I’ve been thinking about the paradox, too, and I don’t like the way it references charging — a paradox should be independent of magick. I’d change it to:
The central paradox of Filomancy is the Buddy’s attitude towards her friends. She dedicates her life to their wellbeing, and yet she thrives on their suffering. She exists to help her friends succeed, yet she waits expectantly for them to fall so she can have a tiny moment of glory as she catches them. She dreads the moment when they will be truly happy.
(Of course, that doesn’t work so well with the new major charge.)
Well the buddy having to be an npc makes it so its a lot harder to get a major charge. Also it makes it so its not so depended on another player. Its for gameplay balance more than anything.
The other stuff I will think on and get back to you. I’m glad you like the changes and I hope we might be able to work together to make it perfect.
You Deserve It is a significant spell now because I looked up other spells by other adept schools that are close and it is just about the same power level as another spell I found thats 2 sigs.