Powers born of madness…over madness.

A.k.a. Nutters, Freudians, Spartans.

Let it be said that magick is a contary little bugger. You lock up all the delusional weirdos and the jumped-up criminals that make up the typical adept population and what happens?
Why, the very men and women who are supposed to treat them go round the twist themselves and start their own school of magick!
No-one’s quite sure what to think about the Freudians. Sure, it’s been estabilshed that magickal talent seems to be correlated with how insane one is. So the fact that the school of Dementomancy allows people to charge up by dealing with insanity is contreversal, to say the least. Some dukes need only hear the words “insanity based magick” to start going all Spanish Inquistion. On the other hand, madness is one of many brutal realities inherent to the Occult Underground and so making deals with Dementomancers, who are increasing in numbers by the day, may yet become unavoidable. Whetever the troubled school will rise or fall is yet to be determined.

Symbolic Tension: Making cracks in the greater objective reality of the Cosmos through the influencing of individual subjective viewpoints.

Generate a Minor Charge: Either remove one of your Failed notches or gain another. This includes Failed notches cured or gained through non-mundane means. Alternatively, do the same to another person through your direct actions, such as by being their therapist or inflicting stress checks on them that they fail. Inflicting a Madness check on someone who is too Hardened to need a roll (shooting at someone who’s got 3 Hardened notches in Violence, for example) or someone who is already insane in that meter and thus automatically freaks out without a roll does not get you a charge (or break taboo). Each individual notch lost or gained gives one charge. Multiple gains or losses at once yeild multiple (minor) charges.

Generate a Significant Charge: Same as the minor charge, except the Failed notch must be the fifth one in a single Madness meter, thus causing or curing a permanant insanity. Note that causing multiple Failed notches at once will not get you a Significant charge unless they were all the fifth notch in different meters. So if you give someone with 3 Failed in a meter two more Failed notches in that meter at once, you get 1 minor and 1 significant. If someone had two meters with 4 Failed notches and you inflicted another Failed into both of them at the same time, that’s two significants. Same deal with erasing multiple notches, taking 3 notches away from a single filled meter yeilds 1 significant and 2 minors.

Generate a Major Charge: Go permenantly insane in all five meters. Cause at least one hundred thousand people to go permenantly insane in at least one meter through your direct action.

Taboo: Succeeding at a Madness check or otherwise having the gain of a Failed notch negated (maybe through another adept’s magick or a paradigm skill that you somehow have) breaks taboo (but getting a Hardened notch by itself does not break taboo). If you’re too Hardened for a stress check (i.e. having 3 Hardened notches or more when faced with a Rank-3 check) or if you’re already insane in that meter so that you freak out without a roll, you do not break taboo. You lose all charges if both and your therapist fail your rolls when you get therapy (although you can erase Hardened notches with no trouble). You also break taboo if you fail to cure a Failed notch or the target succeeds at the stress check you inflict when trying to charge up off another person. Inflicting a Madness check on someone who is too Hardened to need a roll (shooting at someone who’s got 3 Hardened notches in Violence, for example) or someone who is already insane in that meter and thus automatically freaks out without a roll does not break taboo (or get you a charge).

Blast Style: The effects of the Dementomancy blast spell changes depending on what madness meter the target’s fear passion is tied to. Dementomancy has no Significant Blast Spell.

Random Magick Domain: Manipulating, dispelling and creating madness, delusions, illusions, beliefs and the logical laws of reality. Dementomancers can make people think certain things, make the invisible visible, suspend gravity and, of course, drive people mad. MAD!

Starting Charges: Dementomancers start off fresh with 4 minor charges and may have any amount of Failed and/or Hardened notches.

Charging Tips: Nutters are unique amongst adepts in that their school’s charging style actively punishes them for trying to charge up and FAILING. Working as a psychiatrist (and being good at it, of course) will get you about a minor charge every one or two hours on a good day with no slip-ups. Significant charges may require working at an asylum and each month of residental therapy yeilds between 3 to 6, assuming the place is fairly packed with people over the edge AND you’re good at your job. Causing stress checks is much riskier but is a much faster and simpler way of charging (firing a gun wildly in a crowded place, for instance). Keep in mind, though, that you’ll probably be getting those charges in the middle of a more demanding situation (like combat)…

Minor Formula Spells:

That’s Crazy Talk
Cost: 2 Minor charges.
Effects: The target of this spell is immediately perceived by all around him as unreliable somehow. Any Charm and Lie rolls or the like are penaltised by -20%. Even if the target manages to put forward a convincing arguement or ruse, the target/s will still have nagging doubts and will probably double-check the facts as soon as possible. This effect lasts a number of minutes equal to the casting roll.

Stop the Madness
Cost: 1 Minor charge.
Effects: Anyone suffering a fight, flight or freeze trauma reaction from an failed Madness check can immediately be calmed down so they may take normal action with this spell. This does not stop the target from getting a Failed notch. Note that new Madness checks can still be triggered after the target calms down thanks to this spell.

Trading Lost Marbles
Cost: 2 Minor charges per notch.
Effects: You may move one Failed notch of the target or yourself to another person you can see or yourself. Each notch you move costs you 2 Minor charges. You can not move Hardened notches with this spell.

Mind Crush
Cost: 2 Minor charges.
Effects: This is the Dementomancy Blast spell. The blast deals damage equal to only the higher die in the roll, rather than the sum of the two dice. However, it also inflicts an additional effect upon the target depending on what madness meter the target’s fear passion is tied to, as below.

Helplessness: The target feels suddenly constricted to the point of being crushed and rope burn marks appear, loses his/her next action and can’t move much at all for one round. In addition to the Unnatural rank-5 check, the target suffers a Helplessness rank-4 check.
Violence: If the target has at least one Failed notch in Violence, the damage from the roll is multiplied by the number of notches. Blood pours from every orifice in the target’s body when he/she is attacked with this spell.
Isolation: The target disappears out of existence for one round and pops back into existence cold and shivering, with frost collecting on his/her extremities. The target is aware that he/she just disappeared but has no idea where he/she went. In addition to the Unnatural rank-5 check, the target suffers an Isolation rank-4 check.
Unnatural: If the target is an adept whose school has a blast spell, the Dementomancy blast mimics the target’s own blast spell. Otherwise, the blast spell damages the target by random sudden injuries of any kind.
Self: For the next rounds equal in number to the sum of the casting roll, the target cannot use his/her passions or flip-flop his/her obsession skill. The damage manifests as resembling an injury that the target either suffered recently or attached special menaing to (i.e. a car accident that left him/her paralysed).

Destablize
Cost: Variable Minor charges.
Effects: The target’s next Madness check suffers a penalty equal to five times the charges spent on the spell. (i.e. 3 charges spent means a -15% shift.)

Significant Formula Spells:

Mass Hysteria
Cost: 2 Significant charges.
Effects: Causes a crowd of at least 100 people that within a number of feet equal to the adept’s Soul stat to start a riot. Double the result of the casting roll and use it as the riot roll, with the normal modifiers added and subtracted.

It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
Cost: 4 Significant charges.
Effects: The target may cause one Significant unnatural phenomena or ten Minor unnatural phenomena of his/her choosing to manifest nearby.

Delusion
Cost: 2 Significant charges.
Effects: The target of the spell thinks he/she witnessed or experienced something that she/he didn’t, such as the death of a loved one, getting assaulted by a monster and finding proof that Elvis is alive. You choose exactly what delusions are implanted, which must be explained simply in a single sentence, so big elaborate stories are out of the question, although the target may create such stories to justify thinking what you made him think. This can have effects similar to the Cliomancy spell I Believe The Lies, causing stress checks if the delusion. The spell lasts a number of minutes equal to the casting roll. This spell cannot erase memories or affect memories that were already there.

Major Dementomancy Effects: Gain the ability to always treat all Madness checks you or someone else face as one to three ranks lower. Make someone else go permanantly insane in all five meters. Rob an adept of all his magickal power for a week. Create an Otherspace of your own design.