A minor school of reveling in the dehumanizing grip of the institutional system.

Gathering power for yourself is not a pleasant rush. It’s just the opposite. You wait and struggle and try to get things done, and the frustration of it is like static in your ears, and it just makes you feel small.

And that feeling goes with you all day, like a tension in your neck and a rock in your stomach, and you feel like you could just disappear and no one would notice.

And then it happens and you really do disappear or someone ignores you and somehow you feel a little better afterward.

It took you a long time to realize that you were working magic. That feeling of hollowness and unimportance is a strange kind of power once you learn to direct it.

The best way to be invisible, you now see, is to lodge yourself in the grey, ugly wasteland of massive human machinery.

Note: For the purpose of taboo and charge generation, a bureaucracy is the records-keeping, customer service, financial or administrative department of any government, charity or corporate institution.

Generate a minor charge: Spend two continuous hours trying to accomplish one single objective in a bureaucracy. It must be some task for yourself, your family, or an organization of which you’re a regular member. Waiting in line and traveling between offices counts. So does spending two hours on the phone with a frustrating ISP getting a website set up, or navigating an irritating online web form. If the task takes longer than two hours, you get a minor charge for every full two hours. If it takes less than two hours, you get no charges; you can’t split up the time between tasks.

As a minor school, bureaumancy never generates significant or major charges.

Taboo: You must be just another cog in the system. If you’re ever employed in an administrative position, or get any special personal favors from a bureaucratic employee, you lose all charges.

Similarly, if you ever personally get the simultaneous attention of 100 people, you lose all charges.

Random magic: Disappearance of individuality. You can make others ignore, bypass, or disregard you.

Symbolic tension: In a bureaucracy, the more you seek to be acknowledged and addressed, the more individuality you lose.

Charging tips: Depending on occupation, a bureaumancer can usually earn 1-3 charges a day. However, after a while the adept risks becoming a familiar face and getting favors or advice from well-intentioned staff, and breaking taboo. If the adept is generating charges constantly, this happens about once a week.

Starting charges: 4 minor charges

Minor formulas

Kill Me Last
1 minor charge
Used in combat when someone attacks you. Doesn’t require an action – you can do this on someone else’s turn, as many times as you can afford. They decide to attack their next choice of target instead, without really realizing it. If there’s no one else they’d want to attack, this formula fails.

Slip Through The Cracks
2 minor charges
A single record about you disappears from a paper, file or database. This could be a written police report, your bank account, a name on a list, or whatever. Human memories aren’t affected, and if someone’s actively thinking about your record this formula will fail – so you could erase a parking ticket but not an APB. Some bureaumancers take out credit cards and then erase their debt, but this can backfire and get you arrested if you do it too much.

Yet Another Apology
3 minor charges
Use after you do something that causes someone to get a Hardened or Failed notch on any madness meter, up to a day after. The notch goes away, and the subject’s memory of your actions becomes very foggy and vague – the subject must beat your success on a Mind check to remember any details about what happened. (Or just succeed on any memory-related skill or power.)

I’m Nobody, Who Are You?
4 minor charges
This is functionally identical to the Dipsomancy formula “Just a Harmless Drunk.” If you’re in a crowd of at least fifty people it only costs 1 charge.

Wave-Through
5 minor charges
Usable when someone (or a whole department) is examining you or your things in a standard way that they’ve done at least fifty times already in the same day. They won’t notice anything unusual about you and will complete the process in the most typical fashion. Great for getting a gun through security, passing counterfeit money, or getting into a bar without getting carded.

What You’ve Heard
There’s vague talk that Alex Abel employed three bureaumancers as an elite assassin squad. Talk is they tried to leave TNI and join the Sleepers, but no one can say if they succeeded or got gunned down trying.