A photograph captures the essence of you.

Nickname: Shutterbugs

People come and go if you let them. You need something more permanent. You capture their essence and they don’t know it.

When people are ready to be photographed, they hide themselves. They put on their photo face. They hide their soul. You capture them as they are when they don’t know anyone’s looking.

It’s a form of intimacy you crave. An immutable memory of how someone truly is.

Everyone is special and beautiful when they’re not hiding it. You keep what’s special about them. You collect that human beauty.

You don’t think it’s obsessive and creepy. You see it as a beautiful form of connection, your soul touching theirs and capturing it forever.

Note: All photographs you take for photomancy must be on old-fashioned film with a non-digital camera, and you must develop photographs personally by hand. Digital cameras and videotape just don’t carry the power.

Generate a minor charge: Take someone’s photograph without their knowledge or consent.

Generate a significant charge: Take someone’s photograph without their knowledge or consent, at the moment their life changes permanently, for better or worse. You must clearly capture the change.

Generate a major charge: Take someone’s photograph without their knowledge or consent. The photograph itself (not the events portrayed in it) must alter the course of history.

Uniqueness in Charging: Photomancy requires a measure of uniqueness. You can only gain charges off any person once.

Uniqueness in Formulas: You can use multiple photos of the same person for formulas. However, you can only use a given photograph once – once you use a photo, all copies and prints of that particular snap lose their potency.

Taboo: A photomancer who is photographed with any film camera loses all charges, and cannot gain any new charges until the negatives and all prints are destroyed. (Digital cameras and videotapes don’t cause any problems.)

Blast Style: Destroy a photograph of someone in front of them. The subject feels faint, loses breath and may experience heart problems.

Symbolic Tension: A photograph captures a person in a way that’s more permanent than experience, but it’s really an inert emotionless object.

Random Effects: Photomancy tries to capture a person’s essential nature through surface appearances. All effects require a photograph you took of the subject.

Charging Tips: Taking a photograph is fast, but developing a set of photographs takes a few hours, and people may realize that they are being photographed. An ambitious photomancer can get a minor charge every day, or three times as much if they do it full time, but will probably have legal troubles at least once every few months. If you take a photograph of someone and they know they’re being photographed, you don’t get any charges but you can still use the photo for formulas.

Starting Charges: 6 minor.

Minor Formulas

Cameo Charm
1 minor charge
Burn a photograph you took of a person. While the photo is burning, the person will hear anything you whisper.

The Camera Never Lies
2 minor charges
Doctor a photograph you took of a person. You can’t change the position or expression of any people in the photo, but you can change anything else – animals, clothes, objects, and landscape. You just need to imagine the changes you want to make.

I’m Ready For My Closeup
3 minor charges
Eat a photograph you took of a person. Get a +30% shift to the next appearance-based skill check you make against that person. If you don’t have any appearance-based skills this formula is useless

Scratch Out
3 minor charges
This is the photomancy minor blast. It does damage equal to the sum of the dice.

The Camera Never Lies
4 minor charges
Study a photography you took of a person for ten minutes to see that person’s aura, as the Confessor’s Aura Reading channel.

Significant Formulas

Skindancer
1 significant charge
Eat a photograph that you took of a person. You take on that person’s appearance until you next eat, drink or sleep. You’ll also have any clothing or equipment the person has visible in the photograph, which disappear when the formula ends. (Copies of artifacts are normal items.)

Capture on Film
1 significant charge
Take a photograph of a demon, whether it’s incorporeal or possessing anything. The demon is captured and appears clearly on the photograph. Until the photograph is destroyed, the demon is trapped there. If there aren’t any demons you’ve wasted a charge. If there are more than one you get the most important one.

Make Love to the Camera
2 significant charges
Study a photography you took of a person for ten minutes to find out what the subject was thinking when the picture was taken.

Edit Out
2 significant charges
This is the photomancer significant blast. It does damage equal to the result of the dice.

Souldancer
4 significant charges
Eat a photograph that you took of a person. You take on that person’s mindset until you next eat, drink or sleep. You get that person’s Soul Skills, including avatar skills if you’re not an avatar but never magick, Obsession, Stimuli, and Madness Meters. Unless the subject’s Obsession is compatible with photomancy, you cannot use any magick when this formula is in effect, but you don’t lose charges unless you break taboo. Your voice also matches the subject’s while this formula is in effect. The subject isn’t affected in any way.

Incontrovertible Evidence
5 significant charges
Use while you’re taking a photograph of a person using a supernatural ability. Once developed, the photograph becomes a talisman that you (and only you) can use to mimic the subject using the power (as if you had the subject’s own scores and abilities). If the power is a major effect or Avatar channel of 91 or higher, you also take damage equal to your skill roll.

Major Effects

Heal a subject’s mind or soul, or just alter them it. Bring a photograph to life. Gain all of someone’s memories, or their friends. Switch bodies with someone. Cause a photograph of you to age instead of you. Make any photomancy formula permanent.