The magic of mementos, keepsakes and personal treasures.

Notamancy

Fetishers, Keepsakes

The magic of mementos, keepsakes and personal treasures.

Other people think that life passes us by, but you know better. You know that for every moment of hate, love or joy there is an object to recall it.

We surround ourselves with things, they have no meaning themselves but they can be containers for greater meanings. The baseball cap your father gave you before he died, within it is everything that was your father, the good and the bad. The blanket you slept in as a child, now a reservoir of the simple, innocent lifestyle that you once had. These objects are solidified moments of strong emotion, frozen snapshots of time. They are the most important parts of being human cemented into physicality for you to hold, and take power from.

Symbolic Tension: Notamancers are obsessed with preserving human experience. They carefully log anything and everything important from there lives in a museum of objects. But in doing so they can’t appreciate the actual experience. They must ignore the sensation of their first kiss while they decide what article of clothing represents it. They can’t turn in a winning lottery ticket because it is symbolic of a great success. Everything that the Notamancer tries so hard to cherish passes them by for that very reason.

Generate a Minor Charge: Wear or carry a token, living entirely through it, for a day. For example, a Keepsake could wear her grandmother’s favorite white gloves for a day but all of her actions would have to be channeled through the object. Perhaps she would acquire her grandmother’s delicate touch, or revert to her eight-year-old self because that is when her grandmother was alive. Whatever she does she can’t be herself; she has to be the girl with her grandmothers gloves on. Multiple tokens can be worn but it can very quickly become hard to maintain different personality traits.

Generate a Significant Charge: Acquire a new token and immediately wear it for a day. It has to be from a significant experience (the dress she wore when she lost her virginity, the suicide note left by a dear friend, the knife someone nearly killed you with…) The process of pulling the emotional significance from the experience and into the object requires your full attention for one hour. In addition the first time you wear a token your mannerisms are exaggerated. You can’t just be excited at your high school graduation. You have to sit down and concentrate on you diploma for an hour or so and then be psychotically ecstatic for a day.

Generate a Major Charge: Acquire a token of a vast historical event that you were centrally involved in—an event that almost everyone in the world knows about, at least fleetingly, and an object that could be easily recognized in coordination with that event.

Taboo: A keepsake may never lose, destroy or replace a token. Further if at any time a Notamancer fails utterly to live into one of the tokens she is wearing she loses all of her charges. Also a fetisher must collect something to represent every important event in her life, even if she is already wearing three tokens, if she suddenly runs into her idol at the mall she must get his autograph and then carry it around for a day.

Blast: Notamancers cement emotions into physical matter and then hurl them at enemies. It can be any emotion and anyone’s emotions, regardless the emotion is sucked out of the person who is feeling it and forced into whomever is hit by the blast. This does no physical damage but very often provokes a madness check. This effect lasts five minutes.
By using the blast creatively the keepsake can activate a persons passion. Note that this doesn’t transfer the passion just the stimulus. If the two people involved share the same passion and one of them has their passion activated then you can deactivate it and activate it in someone else. Or just stop someone from activating his or her passion.

Random Magick: Notamancers tamper with emotion, personal significance and, to an extent, time itself.

Starting Charges: Notamancers start with 1 Minor and one Significant Charge. Newly created Notamancers also have one token.

Charging Tips: Notamancers can gather minor charges fast if they are good at multitasking or clever enough to make three or four personalities not contradictory. This can be done anytime but can be severely detrimental on any sort of mission. During a day of downtime a Notamancer could gain anywhere from 1-6 minors if they have enough tokens. But the more you pile on the more likely you are to taboo. In addition when gaining a new token for a significant charge shifting from the role of a person having a major emotional moment to that of a Notamancer might warrant some Self checks. If you just got married and then began to try to harvest that significance into your wedding ring instead of dancing with your wife their will be social and mental consequences.

MINOR FORMULA SPELLS

I Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: Choose either the Self, Helplessness or Isolation stress. For one hour the Notamancer is considered to have one more hardened notch in that stress for the purposes of ignoring madness checks. A keepsake may cast this spell multiple times to gain buffers from two or all three stresses.

Everybody Hurts
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: This is the Notamancy minor blast. This blast can only transfer the Notamancers emotions to the target.

Tell Me How You Feel
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: Get a general sense of someone’s emotional state. Bare in mind it’s general; you’re only going to get surface emotions with glimmers of what’s underneath. You can tell if someone’s feeling nervous, angry, or depressed, even if they’re not showing it. The best poker face in the world isn’t going to stop the effects of this spell. However, you’re not going to be able to tell much more than that. You can see that Jimmy is really frustrated, but not that it’s because his bus is late; you can tell that the quiet little girl is in deep pain and shock, but not that it’s because she just watched her mother get shot.

Turn Back the Clock
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: Take an object in your hand about the size of a basketball or smaller and close your eyes. Any wear and tear from aging will disappear and the object will look like new. The object has to be fairly intact or at least all of the pieces should be present. The Notamancer may burn another minor charge to increase the size of the object affected to that of a beach ball.

Postcognition
Cost: 3 minor charges
Effect: When you cast this spell, you gain knowledge of the emotional resonance and significance of a given object. This comes in the form of sensory input. It could show you a picture and some sound. It could produce a strong smell. It cannot produce words that directly spell out its significance “This dress was owned by your nemesis’ daughter before she was shot by your brother” wouldn’t happen. The smell of the girl’s perfume, an image of her death at your brother’s hands and the sound of your enemies name would be acceptable.
You must be able to touch the object, and hold it uninterrupted for at least 10 seconds. This makes the spell unwieldy and impractical in combat, but if you’re really determined, you could, for instance, try and cast it on the weird necklace worn by the mage trying to strangle you…

Family Heirloom
Cost: 1-5 minor charges
Effect: An object you hold becomes a powerful talisman. Choose a skill you have that the item is associated with. A baseball cap could boost General Athletics or, if it was your boozehound father’s then it could booster you Drinking Games skill.
The boost depends on whether the object is a normal object or a token and how many charges you burn. Normal objects grant a 1% shift per minor charge. Tokens grant a 2% shift per charge burned. This boost lasts for 24 hours normally but if can be made permanent on a token for one significant charge. A token modified in this way no longer grants charges when worn. You can still taboo while using an Heirloom if you don’t act into its particular emotional story.

SIGNIFICANT FORMULA SPELLS

Passing Fancy
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: The target immediately loses all interest in a person, place, or thing that is important to them, chosen by the caster. This amnesia or emotional aversion lasts for 24 hours. You must be able to see the object; the target does not have to be paying attention to the forgotten target, or present at its location. You could make the Inquisitor on your tail forget about his gun, or spite an ex by making them stop caring about their new lover. If you’re feeling especially devious, you could make a Boozehound forget about his significant vessel, but you’re going to need at least 1 more significant charge for items with magical, as well as emotional, resonance.

Quit Playing Games with My Heart
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: This is the Notamancy significant blast. This blast can target two people. The first is the person whose emotions are removed and the second is the one who receives the emotion of the first target.

It Hurts to Grow Up
Cost: 2 significant charges
Effect: The mind is a careful instrument and it is always fragile. But an adults mind is susceptible to different stresses than a child’s. Adults are set in there ways and they understand the world as it is. Children are still learning how the world works and, when faced with a stress that would crack an adults psyche like an egg they can bend instead of breaking. The downside is that the child will grow up with a skewed worldview. By gathering energy from tokens that are associated with childhood the fetisher can change the way they deal with stress to that of a child.
For 24 hours the Notamancer may choose to bypass any madness check and instead choose to either take a failed or hardened notch in that stress meter. There is a toll though, just like the child’s mind, the keepsakes mind will bend and grow in the wrong direction. After the 24-hour period is over the Notamancer must take a hardened or failed notch in each stress meter that was affected during day the spell was in effect. By spending an additional charge keepsakes can extend the duration of this spell by 24 hours.

It’s All Coming Back to Me Now
Cost: 3 significant charges
Effect: You suddenly gain an uncanny knack for remembering things. Gain percentiles in the Eidetic Memory skill equal to your roll. This spell lasts until the next time you sleep.

Holdin’ Out for a Hero
Cost: 5 significant charges
Effect: The Notamancer transforms into their personal hero. This spell has a lot of versatility in theory but for each Notamancer it can only make them into one person, chosen at the time the Notamancer gains access to this spell. The process requires that the Notamancer have a personal affect of their hero. It also requires that their hero be real, but not necessarily alive. Historical contention does not play a role though; if people widely attribute something to your chosen idol then it counts as real unless you personally observe evidence proving otherwise.
When this spell is cast the fetisher may move his stats around, swapping Speed for Mind for example, to better emulate their idol. If a skill is higher than its switched stat then it becomes equal to the stat. They then gain a skill that their hero might have at a percentage equal to their Notamancy roll. The skill need not be permanently designated.

Example: Harrison Green pulls out a shell that was used in the shootout that took Ned Kelly’s life. He casts Holdin’ Out for a Hero, rolls a 57 under a Notamancy skill of 60 and turns into Australia’s Iron Outlaw, beard, armor and all. He then swaps his Speed stat for his Body stat and gains the skill Armored Outlaw at 57 percent.
However after a couple months Harry manages to scrounge 5 more sigs and wants to cast it again. This time he rolls 44 and chooses the Speed skill Rifles, Revolvers and Revenge at 44%.

This spell lasts until the keepsake sleeps or wills himself into his normal body.

Major Effects: Recall any experience with perfect clarity, even someone else’s. Permanently preserve an object. Steal the memories, and tokens, of an individual and rewrite them for yourself.

What You Hear: There is a serial killer fetisher somewhere in Texas who kills people and takes important trophies from them. He has a whole museum in his basement of other people’s most cherished belongings. He can’t get charges from them yet, but if he ever figures out how… well who knows what happens when you gain that many significant charges at once…

Completed with the lovely assistance of Dungeon Maestro