An over-hauled and reimagined version of my original idea.

A.k.a. Nutters, Freudians, Shrinks.

The school of Dementomancy has infamously messy origins. It first started as a result of other kinds of adepts who went insane. Naturally, this led to them being instituitionalised and studied by mental health professionals. Unfortunately, the magickal nature of their bizarre obsessions caused their caretakers to start coming apart at the seams. The ones not quite commited enough to their work resigned, burnt out and fearful. The ones who truly believed in the virtues and practises of their profession broke through to the other side. From there, the school of magickally ritualised psychology has been mostly practised by mentored adepts.

Dementomancers see insanity differently than normal people, although different in what way depends on how the dementomancer views the nature of magick in relation to insanity. Some see it as the only true source of magick, others know it as an independant entity who similarly resembles ‘normal’ madness when it is channeled through an adept in the form of a school. Still others claim that magickal obsession is some mutation of the mind’s brain. Naturally, of course, this has led to Dementomancers constantly bickering with each other over whose ritual experimentations prove them right.

Symbolic Tension: Insanity is both a completely alien thing which only exists in the subjective spaces of individually twisted minds and a measured scientific variable that we can objectively diagnose, study and cure like any bodily disease. Dementomancers want to make sense out of the senseless and subvert science into magick.

Generate a Minor Charge: Either get closer to the brink of madness yourself by failing a Madness and gaining a Failed notch or do the same to someone else by directly forcing a madness check on he/she which he/she must fail. You can use your own magick to inflict the stress check. If you or the person gain a fifth Failed notch in a meter, you gain an additional Minor charge (not to mention the permanent madness). Successfully removing someone else’s Failed notch through therapy is also worth a minor charge, one per Failed notch removed.

Generate a Significant Charge: Conduct a ritualised psychological experiment, carefully recording and analysising the results and drawing some conclusion based on, OR gathering new information that influences, how you see magick and madness. This may involve word assotiation games with avatars, ink-blot tests with adepts, hooking up a duke being leeched by an astral parasite to a lie detector or using an artifact to cause mental stress. These tests will probably take some time and demand close observation. Using your own magick in these tests won’t give you a charge. These experiments may inflict stress checks upon subjects.

Generate a Major Charge: Successfully manipulate magickal forces through insanity in a significant way. This means finding a way to change an adept school’s formula spells, random magick domain, charging structure, etc, or an avatar’s channels and symbols purely by inducing the right kind of insanity. This could take years of research, experimentation and racking up lots and lots of notches on all madness meters.

Taboo: Have someone else successfully remove any amount of your Hardened or Failed notches, with or without your premission, in any way but Dementomancy. This includes magickal effects, such as the first channel of The Mother.

Blast Style: Dementomancy has no blast.

Random Magick Domain: Dementomancers can create and affect madness, delusions, illusions, beliefs and, to a lesser extent, the logical laws of reality (i.e. gravity, physics and time).

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

Charging Tips: If you’re a mental health porfessional or a conselor, minor charges can come in at the rate of one to three minors per patient per day. Significant charges can be made as a legitimate researcher who has access to the right equipment, but will be a problem if you’re worried about the board of ethics and patients suing you for mental abuse. No-one said Doctor Frankenstein had it easy. Finding a duke willing to play lab rat could net you two or three significant charges a day, depending on how long the experiment takes and how badly you mess up your subject in the course of learning.

Minor Formula Spells:

Psyche Profile
Cost: 1 Minor charge per bit of information.
Effects: You instantly learn information on the target’s inner thoughts and motivations, such as what a given person is expecting, thinking, feeling or wants at the moment, in addition to what his passions, obsessions, religious beliefs and goals are. Each request for information after the first one does not require another casting roll, just spend the extra charge immediately. Note that switching targets for this spell requires another casting roll.

That’s Crazy Talk
Cost: 3 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 suffer a -20% shift. 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.

Pressure
Cost: Variable Minor charges.
Effects: Every two Minor charges spent on this spell causes the rank of the next stress check the target faces to go up by one (so 4 charges means a rank-3 check becomes rank-5 and so on). This also has the effect of making it difficult for the target to concentrate on Mind-based tasks (not including stress checks), increasing the minimum roll of any such task by 5 for every two Minor charges spent (so 4 charges means the next roll must be over 10 to succeed, for example). This effect lasts until the target has faced a stress check, made a Mind-based roll (not including a stress check) or a hour has passed.

Significant Formula Spells:

Aversion Therapy
Cost: 1 Significant charge.
Effects: For a number of minutes equal to double the sum of the casting roll, the target of the spell (may or may not be the caster of the spell) suddenly becomes ‘difficult’ to be around and thus finds creatures distance themselves from him as much as they comfortably can.
Depending on how they see the target of this spell, this behaviour may be rationalised as disgust (“Oh, god, I can’t stand this guy any longer! I’d better get lost before I do something I regret!”) to intimidation (“This guy’s wwaaay too much for me to handle, I’m outta here!”) to heartache (“That man reminds of my late husband. Oh, Joshua, I miss you so much. I…I need to be alone…”) to feelings of inadequacy (“Wow, this guy makes me look like crap. I can’t stand it, I have to go.”) or whatever else is appropriate.
The target will generally be given a wide berth, unless his actions somehow press the issue (like trying to blatantly steal a painting under the gaze of a security guard in the same room), but even then the people and animals around him will try to make as little contact with him as possible.
Being the target of this spell may cause low level Isolation checks if you’re trying to socialise and/or work with trusted allies and friends. Of course, those under the spell’s effects will probably suffer a Helplessness rank-1 check if they are forced into staying in close contact with the target (like being trapped in an elevator with no way out), not to mention the Unnatural, Self, Helplessness and Isolation checks they suffer if they realise they’ve been magickally influenced into feeling this way.

Mass Hysteria
Cost: 6 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. The caster of the spell chooses the ‘focus’ of the riot, usually a building, person or persons, which the rioters will try to attack.

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: 3 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.

Head Trip
Cost: 2 Singificant charges.
Effects: The next stress check the target faces must be rolled, regardless of how many Hardened notches he has and no matter how low a rank the stress check is. Even if the target has 10 Hardened notches and the rank is 1.

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 permanently insane in all five meters. Rob an adept of all his magickal power for a week. Create an Otherspace of your own design.