The magic of the last second.

aka Improvateurs, Procrastinators

In high school, some students had every assignment for the next month recorded in their planner, color-coordinated notes, and a binder for every subject. And then there was you, with last period’s notes scribbled on your arm, a pocketful of “borrowed” pens, and a loose pile of papers that you really should have sent to a college yesterday. Your parents and teachers hoped you’d grow out of it, learn to prepare for life and stop procrastinating. Not likely.

So you ended up living without planning or organization, doing things at the last minute, making them up as you go along. It could’ve stopped there, and you could’ve ended up with a nice life, a relaxed job, a reputation for being a fun, laid-back kinda guy. But that’s not what happened. Something happened to you, something that utterly broke you–maybe your fiance got killed in a freak accident, maybe the big business venture you’d been working out ended up collapsing and leaving you on the streets, maybe the son you’d had so many hopes and dreams for got kidnapped and never came back. Whatever happened, it broke you and your sanity. You started living in the present, leaving behind the painful memories of the past and not making any plans for the future.

And that was your start on the path of Avriomancy, the magic of improvisation, the magic of leaving things for tomorrow. Avriomancers, or Improvateurs, always have just the right spell for a situation. Avriomancy’s no good if you’re looking to plan things out in the long term, gather information, or level your foes with brute power. But when it comes to solving problems and having limitless flexibility, Avriomancy can’t be beat.

Stats

Avriomancy Blast Style: Avriomancy doesn’t have proper blasts. Instead, Improvateurs can enchant everyday objects, transforming them into deadly weapons. A golf club can become a veritable Excalibur in your hands, or you could shoot up a back alley full of thugs with a Nerf gun.

Gain a Minor Charge: Put off doing something with significant consequences until the latest you could possibly do it, or do it after you already should have. Turning in a major essay, paying the rent for your apartment, buying an anniversary present for your wife–all of these would be good for a minor. The thing you put off has to be something you could have planned for or anticipated in advance, not a spontaneous emergency or similar. Note that while doing it late counts for getting a charge, you still have to do it: turning in a paper a day late will get you a charge, but not turning it in at all won’t.

Gain a Significant Charge: Put off doing something with consequences that could alter your entire life. Write the application to your first-choice college the day it’s due, show up to your wedding halfway through the ceremony.

Gain a Major Charge: Put off doing something with consequences that could cost you or a loved one their life. Not getting chemotherapy to treat a case of cancer until you’re within days of dying, or putting off getting a major gas leak fixed until it’s too late would score you one of these.

Taboo: Planning for things in advance is anathema to Avriomancy. Whenever you plan out your actions further than fifteen minutes into the future, whether on paper or mentally, you break taboo. In addition, you have even less time when it comes to actions that are dangerous or significant–getting into a fight, robbing a bank, stuff like that. For those, you can plan a maximum of three minutes and thirty three seconds, exactly, into the future, before you risk breaking taboo.

Starting Charges: Newly-created Improvateurs start off with four minor charges.

Symbolic Tension: By living in the moment, you’re better at spontaneously reacting to events and improvising, but at the same time sabotage your own efforts by not planning them out.

Random Magic Domain: Avriomancy is good for solving physical problems. Picking a lock, refilling a car’s gas tank, turning a garbage can lid into a powerful shield–all this it can do. Avriomantic random magic can’t be put to uses that don’t solve an immediate problem, and it can’t deal with abstracts like information or the mind. It can never be put to direct offensive uses.

Charging Tips: Procrastinate, procrastinate, procrastinate. The more responsibilities you have, the more charges you can rack up by putting them off, so being a student or having a job are a pretty sure-fire way to 2-3 minors a week. Significant charges are harder to get, especially since they risk seriously messing your life up: a more conservative Improvateur might get one or two a month.

Avriomancy Minor Formula Spells

Last Minute Brilliance
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: You’re at your best when you’re out time. When you cast this spell, you can accomplish any one task with superhuman speed–but only if you absolutely can’t do it anytime else. If it’s the kind of thing that would take under ten minutes to do, you can do it in an instant. Otherwise, it takes a quarter as long as it would normally. However, quick work always suffers when it comes to quality: if you have to make any skill rolls as part of the job, you take a -20% shift on them unless you spend two extra charges. Last minute brilliance only applies to mundane, ordinary tasks–you could use it to write a paper in between classes or to fix up your car, but not to speed up a magical ritual or move faster in combat.

The Duct Tape Solution
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: Things tend to break when you put off getting them repaired, but that’s nothing that can’t be solved with the magic of duct tape. When you cast this spell, you must make a cursory attempt at repairing a broken object–bang the side of a TV that isn’t working, duct tape a busted laptop back together, just enough to give the appearance of effort. That item will work perfectly, as if it were new, for as long as you pay attention to it. Once you stop using the item, put it away, or leave it alone, it goes back to its original broken state.

Close, But No Cigar
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: You could work harder–or you could just steal someone else’s effort. You give the target of this spell a -10% shift on the next roll they make. In addition, if they fail that roll, then you gain the benefits of their lost efforts: you can apply a +10% shift to any roll you make in the next 5 minutes.

Nothing Up My Sleeves
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: Prestidigitation beats preparation. This spell allows you to produce a single object that could be easily obtained and held in one hand. A hammer, a cell phone, or a t-shirt could all be summoned up; a gun, a lockpick, or a car could not be. You can’t conjure up a particular item–you could conjure a key, but not the key to a particular door. The item lasts for as long as you’re paying attention to it. Once you’re done with it, or put it away, it vanishes.

Improvised Weapons
Cost: 3 minor charges
Effect: You transform an object that you could hold in one hand into a lethal weapon. A cell phone might gain razor sharp edges, a golf club could become a brutal maul, and a prop sword might become all too real. The weapon deals normal hand-to-hand damage, and gains a damage bonus as normal for a weapon of its type. You use your Brawling skill whenever you attack with your weapon, not your Avriomancy skill. However, by spending a minor charge as you attack with it, you can roll your Avriomancy for that one attack. This spell lasts for as long as you hold the weapon.

Bag of Holding
Cost: 4 significant charge
Effect: Few Avriomancers have any talent for keeping things organized–but why bother, when you can just magic up enough space to hold everything? This spell can be cast on any container that can be closed: a backpack, a suitcase, even a pocket with a zipper. That container’s internal space is increased: each dimension of it is double, which multiplies the overall volume by 8. However, the external dimensions of the container don’t increase at all, effectively making it bigger on the inside. This spell has unlimited duration, but you can only keep one bag of holding enchanted at a time.

Avriomancy Significant Formula Spells

Last Second Magic
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: Even better than last minute brilliance is last second magic. The spell works like its minor cousin, but speeds things up even faster–any task taking under an hour can be done instantly, any task taking under a day can be done in an hour, and anything else can be done in half the time. In addition, you don’t take a penalty to skill rolls. Instead, you can actually use your Avriomancy skill in place of the other skill for that one job.

What Will Be Will Be
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: Improvateurs are willing to go along with the flow, and just let things happen. Combine that with a bit of mojo, and you’ve got a formula to ride the synchronicity highway. This formula functions like the Pornomancer spell synchronicity.

Too Far Behind To Die
Cost: 2 significant charges
Effect: There’s a certain number of things you have to do in your life, and Improvateurs are good at getting so far behind on these that they’ll never have time to die. Calling on this, too far behind to die buys you three rounds worth of immortality: no matter what happens, you cannot die then. You can still be harmed or wounded, but you don’t suffer the ill effects of injury–such as, for example, dying–until this spell ends.

Let’s Get Dangerous
Cost: 2 significant charges
Effect: You can magically enchant anything capable of launching or knocking around projectiles–a Nerf gun, a tennis racket, even a garden hose–into a magic gun. Any projectile fired or hit by the enchanted item deals firearms damage, with a maximum damage equal to half your Avriomancy skill. Like with the improvised weapons spell, you use your Firearms skill when attacking with the enchanted weapon, not your Avriomancy skill. However, spending a significant charge when you attack lets you both roll your Avriomancy skill for that attack. This spell lasts for as long as you hold the weapon.

Thief of Time
Cost: 3 significant charges
Effect: Making an effort is pretty hard. It’s easier just to steal someone else’s. Thief of time is a curse you can lay on someone to sap them of their initiative and drive to do things, allowing you to make use of their stolen effort. To curse someone, you must be able to see them directly or know their name and what they look like. The victim finds themself overcome by sloth, not wanting to do anything. While they can resist this long enough to actually do things, their natural urge is to just waste time. You gain the benefits of their stolen effort: for each day they’re under the curse, you can use their stolen efforts to accomplish something magically, which works like the last minute magic spell, but without the negative shift to skill rolls. You can choose to save up stolen efforts over the course of the curse, but they all go away when the curse is broken. Each day after the first that they’re under the curse, the victim may attempt a Mind check, opposed by the result of the roll you made to cast this spell, to break the curse. The Mind check is done unconsciously by them, and does not require them to know that they’ve been cursed. In addition, some spells or rituals could break the curse.

Whatevermancy
Cost: 5 significant charges
Effect: The ultimate improvisation, whatevermancy lets you make up magic on the fly. You can use this formula in one of two ways: either to spontaneously create a new formula spell, or to copy a spell from another discipline of magic. If you use it to create a new formula spell, then you must spend the four charges to cast whatevermancy, in addition to the charges required to perform whatever act of random magic you wish to make into a formula spell. If you succeed, you successfully perform the random magic, and retain it as a new formula spell, without having to go through the full process of spell creation. If you use it to copy a spell, you must pay this formula’s charge cost plus that of the spell copied, and then cast it as if it was just a normal formula spell you knew. Whatevermancy is a severe violation of how magic is supposed to work, and using it can be mentally taxing. Whenever you cast it, you must make a rank-5 Unnatural check. For every additional significant charge you expend as part of the second spell’s cost, the rank increases by 1, to a maximum of 10.