A rewrite of the charging structure and symbolic tension of Michael Keenan’s Dementomancy school, with no new formula spells.
If your hand sins, cut it off. If your eye sins, gouge it out. But what if your hand’s “sin,” to you, would have been even more painful than the cleaver to your wrist? You could live without a hand, but could you live after abandoning that friend? After killing him? That is the test of the true ascetic: only when no walls remain, when there is nothing you can’t do, can you achieve perfection. Only after you realize that you, like everyone around you, are worthless dust, God’s discarded gum on the pavement. Every inhibition and moral, everything you can’t stand to do or see, is an illusion blocking you from enlightenment. To break that curse, you will witness every horror, commit every atrocity, make everyone you love hate you. When you are homeless and friendless, when you have redeemed yourself of every pretension of goodness and dignity, when you are one of the blessed few who know they are monsters, who know that peace is unattainable, then you will know peace.
Irony: Teichomancers are psychic epideromancers: they defile their minds and souls in order to master them, and thus can’t stand to lose control of themselves on someone else’s terms.
Generate Minor Charge: Convince someone to do something that gives them a stress check. You get the charge whether they fail or succeed.
Generate Significant Charge: Deliberately do something that gives you a stress check. You get the charge whether you fail or succeed.
Generate Major Charge: A teichomancer can get up to two major charges in her career, one by getting five failed notches each in four different madness meters, and another by becoming a sociopath (that is to say, having 35 total hardened notches or filling up three hardened meters). Of course, after becoming a sociopath, you can’t gain significant charges anymore, but on the bright side you can’t break taboo, either. Congratulations, you’ve “won.”
Taboo: Fail a stress check from an experience that you weren’t trying to bring on.
Oops, I was going to give this a different name (“Teichomancy”), but I changed my mind at the last second and forgot to switch it in the write-up. Ignore that.
I like it, at a glance. I take it the deliberate act for gaining the Major charge would be taking the last step to meet the criteria?
Have you had any thoughts on spells or random magick domains? It seems like the kind of school where there wouldn’t be a blast, but you could transmit visions orautomatic thoughts that would induce a stress check of your choice.
Hi there, it’s the creator of the original Dementomancy. Crazy as it seems, I’m actually working on this kind of thing myself, except for two big differences;
1) The school itself would be based around psychology and the study of the madness, although you could get minors from both inflicting stress checks and curing Failed notches (on either someone else or yourself, it doesn’t matter), just like the original idea.
2) I had a good number of tweaked and new formula spells.
If you want to post stuff about it, say so.
Still, your ideas are quite interesting