Eating your way to power.

A.k.a. Gluttons, Food Bags, Mealworms.

All of life’s grandest beings need to eat and drink. You don’t, and you die. End of story. Food is life. That’s all there is to it.

Entire cultures and sub-cultures can be defined what they swallow at meal-times. There are endless books, paintings, speeches, rituals and manners around the world devoted to the subject of preparing, presenting and eating food. Food is art.

Every sauce, every soup, every beardroll, every grain of rice, every piece of meat, gives you powers from the cosmos because you take the time to really understand the mystical nature of your meal. Food is magick. That’s all there is to it.

Symbolic Tension: Nutriomancers eat to live and live to eat. They recognise both their own magick and universal, consensus views of meals as separate facts of life, but Nutriomancy makes one fuel the other and vice-versa.

Generate a Minor Charge: Have a snack. Downing a single milkshake, candy bar, bottle of water, slice of pizza, coca-cola, packet of chips or hamburger on its own nets you one minor.

Generate a Significant Charge: Have a proper meal in a ritualised context. Usually, this means going through an elaborate routine before, during and after a meal consisting of a fairly filling meal with drinks. Depending on the routine, you may need to do this at home, rather at a public dining estabilshment.

Generate a Major Charge: Sit down and enjoy a mystically and/or historically significant meal, like the scheduled last meal of Osama Bin Laden on death row, a three-course feast served at the official peace conference that permanently ends the Palestine-Israel conflict or Einstein’s uneaten hospital food delivered to him just before he died.

Taboo: Nutriomancy has three taboos. First, you can’t defile your mouth and stomach with non-food. That means no swallowing crumbled-up papers, condoms full of drugs, drug themselves, tracking beacons and other junk. Even just holding stuff in your mouth may violate taboo, if the GM says so. Don’t even think about oral sex. Second, you can’t run on empty. If you don’t eat any good amount of food (typically the amount needed to get a minor charge) within about a minute or two of voiding your bowels, you lose all charges. Third, vomitting in general is taboo.

Blast Style: Blunt force trauma to the belly from some bizarre invisible attack combined with a nasty stomach ache. If your target has recently eaten or is eating, add another die of damage to the blast’s injury.

Random Magick Domain: Social interaction, physical attributes and food or drink. It’s a good school for making people like you, becoming stronger or faster and poisoning or improving meals.

Starting Charges: Nutriomancers start out with no charges. Better get on the phone and order take-out!

Charging Tips: You’ll rack up minors without thinking about it, maybe two or three every four hours if you got the money, taking it slow and don’t want to risk breaking taboo. Reckless binging can yeild about 3 to 5 minor charges a hour, but it practically assures breaking taboo eventually (usually within two hours of starting the binge, unless you have a good stash of food to make up for it). Watch out for that taboo against vomitting when binging. Significant charges are best done at home with your own cooking, unless you get the food home-delivered. Breakfast and dinner can be worth a Significant charge each a day, maybe an extra one for lunch. Don’t get kidnapped or sent to jail, otherwise you’ll either constantly break taboo or watch your charge flow slow to a trickle. Maybe both.

Minor Formula Spells:

Hunger Pains
Cost: 3 Minor Charges.
Effects: This is the Nutriomancy Minor Blast. As mentioned before, if your target has recently eaten or is eating, add another die of damage done to the target.

Metabolism
Cost: 3 Minor Charges.
Effects: You gain back wound points equal to the ones die of the casting roll for a number of combat rounds equal to the tens die of the casting roll. (E.G. A successful roll of 38 means you gain 8 wound points every round for 3 rounds.)

Counting Calories
Cost: 2 Minor Charge.
Effects: You get a list of all the things the target of the spell has eaten or drank in the last 12 hours. This can include drugs, poisons, chemicals and other non-foods the target has consumed.

The Munchies
Cost: 5 Minor Charges.
Effects: The target instantly feels hungry, thirsty or both. He will instantly put eating or drinking the nearest available foodstuff above most other priorities, unless the task takes less than about 10 seconds to do and is fairly important. So the cop will handcuff you, but he won’t bother to fully search and frisk you before going off to the vending machine. The effect ends when the target has consumed enough food and drink to state this sudden need.

Healthy Diet
Cost: 4 Minor Charges.
Effects: All ‘bad stuff’ (like poisons and knock-out drugs) put into your food and drink will fail to affect you for 1 hour. If you’re already suffering form the effects of ‘bad stuff’ put in your meals when you cast this spell, the effects are instantly voided. The GM may rule what is ‘bad stuff’ and what is not for the purposes of this spell.

Hospitality
Cost: 5 Minor Charges.
Effects: Offer someone food and/or drink. Regardless of whetever that person accepts it or eats it, you may flip-flop all social interaction roll regarding making that person like you or trust you for the whole of the conversation. Lying, intimidation and reading emotions are all unaffected, at least directly.

Significant Formula Spells:

Gut Buster
Cost: 2 Significant Charges.
Effects: This is the Nutriomancy Significant Blast. As mentioned before, if your target has recently eaten or is eating, add another die of damage done to the target.

No, Mister Bond, I Expect You to Dine
Cost: 2 Significant Charges.
Effects: Offer a person or group of people a full meal. They’ll automatically accept and won’t take violent action against you until they finish their meal. They may threaten you, trouble you in some non-physical way or call for backup while eating, but they won’t shoot, punch or restraint you. In addition, you can’t take violent action against them while the spell is in effect either.

An Army Marches on Its Stomach
Cost: 5 Significant Charges.
Effects: A number of your allies, up to the sum of the casting roll, gain a +30 shift to all Body and Speed skill and stat rolls for 6 hours after a satsifying meal which left them fairly full and which they enjoyed.

A Lifeline on the Hips
Cost: 2 Significant Charges.
Effects: You immediately gain back wound points equal to the casting roll, but you also become ravenously hungry, like you haven’t eaten in about 6 hours or more.

Flavourless
Cost: 2 Significant Charges.
Effects: For a number of minutes equal to the casting roll, the target of the spell loses the ability to sense the taste or smell of anything. He can feel the texture, temperature and shape of something in his mouth, but wouldn’t be able to tell you if it’s sweet, sour, rusty, fruity or whatever. This is worth both a Helplessness rank-5 and an Unnatural rank-4 Madness check.

Cooking Duel
Cost: 3 Significant Charges.
Effects: You may use your Nutriomancy skill (with flip-flops and cherries available, if applicable) in place of one skill for the duration of one competition against another person. Competition may mean a fight, a ping-pong match, a quiz or a race.

Major Dementomancy Effects: Inflict Tantile’s curse upon someone, dooming them to be ever hungry, incapable of tasting anything and unsatsified. Gain the ability to enchant meals you cook with an extremely pleasing taste. Age at a fifth of the normal rate.