The power of a broken heart. Weepy, whiny, lonely magick.
Recusomancy
AKA: Heartaches, Broken Hearts, Tearjerks
You know the feeling of rock bottom? You can only go up, but that’s not all. It’s great because you can see everything–you’re not missing a second of the whole grand tragedy. There it is, the power you were looking for, the power to change things. You just had to lose everything first.
You were always a romantic. You saw your first romantic comedy and you knew that somehow that would happen to you. It didn’t. Not for a while anyway. You were alone seeing all these people you wanted, each more special than the last, but you couldn’t have them. And then you found her. She was everything you were searching and she thought you, of all people, were sweet. It was finally your turn.
Then, just as fast, it was someone else’s. She left you. You weren’t just heartbroken; you were destroyed, obliterated, erased. There was nothing left. And it was beautiful.
There is a special kind of clarity that comes with a broken heart. You suddenly know what you want, no, what you need. You need this person. Some special entity that is so perfect for you, they just don’t know it. You know if you had them you could be happy. And you know if you just stopped being such a loser that you could have them.
You’re on the bottom. All those confusing emotions aren’t blinding you. You have one, the feeling of loss. And it isn’t normal loss–it’s the big kind. You can’t explain it to anyone, not even people who have gone through it. It’s different somehow. You had what you wanted, everything you wanted, and now its gone.
Course you won’t get it back.
No, you’re alone and that is how it was meant to be. Now what do you do? Well if you’re a special kind of crazy you can use your broken heart to make reality eat right out of your hand.
Heartaches take their broken hearts and turn them into batteries for cosmic power. They convert their forlorn affections into mojo and subvert their will upon reality. The one thing they don’t do is take the whole thing in stride. They cry, they whine, they beg. They do it all. Not the classiest school of magick but then again I guess you could just go cut yourself or kill people for your mojo.
The symbolic tension of recusomancy is simple. You seek what you secretly hope to lose. The harder the loss the more power you get from it. Heartaches are always looking for someone special but if they find that person they lose their magick.
Recusomancy Blast Style
The Recusomancy blast cracks your heart in two. Literally. The target suffers a heart attack. The attack is short though, it doesn’t persist and the heart starts back up, after the body seizes up and the target nearly passes out with pain. Their blasts work more effectively on the brokenhearted. If a person is genuinely sad or heartbroken, either from life or recusomantic magick, the blast is more powerful.
Stats
Gain a Minor Charge: Fall into unrequited love. The moment your affections for someone get really serious you get a charge. Some tearjerks call these people valentines. After that you can gain a charge simply by obsessing over them for at least four hours. This obsessing could come in the form of writing poetry or you could complain to a friend about your love life.
Alternatively you can ride a “third wheel” to charge town. Spend time with the target of your affections in which you admire them and attempt to impress them. If you do this you only have to spend two hours to get the charge.
Love is strong, it is all consuming. Or maybe you’re just a romantic. Anyway you can’t obsess over more than one person in this way. Choose one and forget about the others.
Gain a Significant Charge: Be rejected by your valentine. This can happen one of two ways. Either they realize your feelings and reject you outright. If this happens you lose your ability to get minor charges from them and then get a sig. In that order. This means you get taboo’d and subsequently get a significant charge.
However if they break up with you, meaning you had a relationship with your valentine, then you gain a sig and you may start milking them for more. This works the same way as the minor charge but it takes longer. Essentially you spend at least eight hours doing nothing but pining for your lost love. You can walk around but you are sullen and unpleasant to be around. You can talk but all you want to discuss is your ex. You can pretty much function normally but you can’t cheer up or stop whining. For every day you sulk for eight hours you gain a sig. The window for charging like this lasts as long as your relationship did. That’s about how long it takes you to get over it. Dated for a week, you can get seven charges. Just lose your girlfriend of two years…
If you fall for someone new while you are heartbroken you immediately lose the ability to charge off of your old flame. You have moved on enough to fall for someone new.
Gain a Major Charge: It’s a school about lost love. So, lose your true love. Your soulmate. You only get one and most people don’t even get that.
Taboo: Broken Hearts have a multifaceted taboo. They get their magick from the strange liminal state of unrequited and unresolved love. Anything that clarifies where they stand with their valentine taboos them. This can be caused by the valentine rejecting them (so the love can never be) or by reciprocating the affections (then it isn’t unrequited). You don’t get your juice from the love, you get it from the pain you feel from the gap between love and a relationship.
Their second taboo is that they can never reject a love they feel. You don’t have to go out with anyone who asks but you can’t turn down someone you are charging off of and you can’t break up with him or her later—they break your heart. Everytime.
Random Magick Domain: Heartaches work with love, attraction, rejection and loss. They can affect people’s feelings or do more literal stuff and make matter reject matter or objects disappear.
Starting charges: Newly minted Recusomancers have four minor charges.
Charging Tips: Essentially there is a big divide between small scale and large scale charging. For minors all you need is a forlorn love and a diary and you can charge all you want. The minors keep coming as long as you don’t go for the gold and ask the person out. If you do you get taboo’d. If you get turned down you get a significant charge as a booby prize. Sorry Romeo. Course maybe they like you, then you get taboo’d and you don’t have access to charges for as long as the relationship lasts. It’s a give and take. You’ll get charges later, and lots of them.
Recusomancy Minor Formula Spells
Crushed
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: This is the Recusomancer minor blast. It causes a fleeting heart attack. It only lasts for a moment but in that time the persons heart stops pumping blood. This spell affects a saddened person more effectively. If the target is sad or heartbroken then the spell does +6 damage.
Love Hurts
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: This spell helps remind the target what real pain is. The target is struck for a moment with an amplified feeling of sadness as if the love of their life had just said, “We need to talk”. The melancholy imparts a -10% shift to all actions that require concentration. This spell works with the tearjerks other spells. The sadness lasts for a number of combat rounds equal to the tens place of the roll or for five minutes.
You Don’t Know What Real Pain Is
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: Compared to having your heart ripped out and stomped on getting stabbed is nothing. When cast this spell gives the tearjerk the skill You Don’t Know What Real Pain Is at percentage equal to the tens place of the roll. The skill can be used to resist physical or emotional pain of a mundane nature.
Rock Bottom
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: You gain a special affinity for life when you don’t have anything left. This spell heightens that clarity. For a moment you feel like your heart just got broken and then after a tug of pain you see the world for what it is. You may ignore the effects of the next madness check you fail or retroactively snap out of the effects of a previous one.
I Feel Your Pain
Cost: 3 minor charges
Effect: You peer into the soul of a person and ask a question of it. You get an honest answer as long as the scope of the question isn’t too broad or too secret. The sadder your target is the more you get from this spell. If you cast is on Jack Chipper you might be able to figure out his favorite food or his middle name. Cast it on Dirk Allen and you could get his PIN number, his greatest fear or the location of his significant charging vessel.
Against All Odds
Cost: 5 minor charges
Effect: The target begins to irrationally seek something they cannot have. You could convince someone to try to ask his or her best friend out on a date. You could get someone to dish out everything in his or her wallet to try to buy the Mona Lisa. You can even get a target to try for something, enlightenment maybe, or a major charge for a school of magick they don’t work in. Whatever it is there has to be something gigantic in between them and success. They must not, under any reasonable or safe circumstances, be able to succeed. The spell lasts until it is made clear by outside stimuli that they cannot succeed.
Recusomancy Significant Formula Spells
Heartbreaker
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: This spell works like the minor blast. The target has a brief heart attack, lasting one round this time. This spell works better on people with a bit of genuine sadness in them. A saddened or heartbroken target is stunned for 1 round.
Bound to Break Your Heart
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: The target is heartbroken. They feel like shit and they might not really know why. If they have no reason to feel this way they say, “I just feel really down, you know. I don’t know why.” If they do have a reason to be sad they figure it as the cause. This spell probably confers a penalty to actions, it depends how they take it. It might even call for some Self, Helplessness or Isolation checks. This spell works with the tearjerks other spells and lasts for 24 hours.
I Just Need a Friend
Cost: 2 significant charges
Effect: Your target feels great sympathy for your situation. They empathize, sympathize, they would euthanize if you asked them. They are entirely devoted to making you feel better and they will listen to your requests. “I’m just not doing so well since Ricky dumped me, maybe if you let me into the bank vault…”
Antipathy
Cost: 2 significant charges
Effect: The target area rejects people or animals from its presence. The area affected can be anywhere from the size of a pinhead to area of flatbed truck. Any living thing that enters the area feels a chill of intense sadness and wants strongly to leave. The sadness imposes a -20% shift to all checks that require concentration. Anyone may go against their gut and stay in the area. If they do though they are struck with feeling of melancholy and slowly lose their desire to do much of anything. These affects wear off after someone has been outside of the area for an amount of time equal to how long they were in it. The area is affected for a number of hours equal to the tens place of the roll.
Heartbreak Hotel
Cost: 3 significant charges
Effect: You designate a space that attracts the broken hearted. They come from miles around with the vague sense that the answer they seek is here. The space can be about the size of a flatbed truck. When these people arrive they expect something will be there to help them. Some of them come with money to pay for it; some of them just show up in a mid-life crisis flavored convertible expecting an easy fix. Regardless they are in a fragile state and they think someone, or something has the answers. The area is affected for a number of hours equal to the tens place of the roll.
Recusomancy Major Effects
Break someone’s heart forever. Force someone to reject friends, family, food and water. Cast a permanent Antipathy or Heartbreak Hotel. Make the whole world feel your pain for a moment.
What You Hear:
There is a tearjerk in Atlanta who specializes in curing broken hearts. People pay big money to her to make the pain go away. Thing is that the formula spell she casts doesn’t cure them, it transfers their sadness to their ex. Someone has to ride it out.
I need to go back and read, but it seems like one Recusomancer + one Amoromancer = tons of charges for everyone!
The Amoromancer could charge off the Recusomancer just as easily as anyone else but I wouldn’t worry about them working in tandem.
Amoromancers cannot fall in love, so there is no ambiguity to the emotions. The Recusomancer can’t charge unless love is both possible and uncertain.
I really like the flavor here, actually. But it feels like some things need to be worked out.
I don’t quite get charging. You can only ever get more than one sig charge from a person if you were in a relationship with them, but later on you state that requited love, or even asking someone out, breaks taboo. How does one get into a relationship where the other person never liked you, and you never asked them out? (Arranged marriages aside.)
I’m confused about “You Don’t Know What Real Pain Is.” Does the skill stay after the first time you use it? Do successive uses also pump up the skill permanently?
Charges for this school are pretty expensive, but a cheap minor spell that gives you a resisting-pain-skill like that seems too easy. It feels like “You Don’t Know What Real Pain Is” and “Rock Bottom” should be one spell – 2 minors to ignore the most recent effects of physical or emotional pain from a specific source, or immediately after failing a madness check to re-roll it.
Incidentally, “You Don’t Know What Real Pain Is”, is an awesome name for a spell in this school.
The effects of “I Just Need A Friend” seem a little out of flavor, too – maybe it shouldn’t be so much about suggestibility as getting-away-with-things-ness? i.e. It doesn’t get the guard to open the door for you, but it does get the judge to look favorably (if pitifully) on you – or make a friend be less apprehensive and more understanding when they find you’ve just killed someone. Since it’s a pricey spell, maybe it covers nearly everything in that department: Your mob boss finds out you’re an undercover cop (in love with his daughter, of course), but doesn’t see you as a threat, because you seem too pathetic, heartbroken, emotional, harmless, etc.
Okay, I see what your saying. Allow me to clarify. You do get taboo’d for asking someone out. It is an inherent part of the school that in order to get significant charges you have to get taboo’d. You cannot fall spectacularly if you do not rise spectacularly.
The person can like you. In order to get minors it just has to be ambiguous. It’s possible to charge off someone who digs you as long as you don’t know it.
I know it is a little strange, normally getting taboo’d is something you avoid at all costs. I wanted the school to be about loss, and in order to lose you have to gain. Essentially Recusomancers spend long periods in a positive place, in a happy relationship. But eventually things end, their crazy after all, and then they get charged.
I can see what your saying about “You Don’t Know What Real Pain Is”. The idea was that the spell would last for a number of hours equal to the tens place of the roll. So the skill is temporary. I like the idea of combining them:
You Don’t Know What Real Pain Is
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: You may ignore the effects of physical or emotional pain from a specific source. If cast preemptively then the next time physical or emotional pain would cause you an ill affect you may ignore it. You could ignore a single madness check or a negative shift caused by ongoing pain. You may cast this after a failed madness check to re-roll it.
Yeah, that looks nice.
I like your twist on “I Just Need a Friend”. I was having trouble coming up with significant formula spells. The school seemed lacking. I Just Need a Friend was supposed to be a really versatile spell that would make trying to get significant charges worthwhile.
If you have any ideas for significant spells I would really appreciate them.
I really like Antipathy and Heartbreak Hotel as very, very cool sig spells.
For ideas – the idea is pain through loss.
For instance, the target feels as though their loved one(s) have just dismissed them. In game terms, that’s forcing someone to make a high-level Isolation check (and possibly Self, too). The book lists being “deeply, painfully, and violently betrayed by someone you love” as rank 8, and “being treated as a total stranger by your friends” as rank 9. If the check is failed, they can only choose to freeze (or flee to go cry in their pillow), and in combat, the target must spend their next round making the check (rather than make it immediately – similar to the Executioner channel). They don’t get any hardened notches for passing this one. The pornomancer spell Inner Torment is similar.
The simpler version is to just create the situation: the target’s closest friends and family – especially and spectacularly their lovers – treat them as a total stranger at best, and an unwanted, pathetic annoyance who can’t take a hint at worst. Initially, they simply act like they’ve never met the person before (either genuinely or pretending badly, whichever hurts more). No amount of charm rolls can get them to warm back up to you until the spell is over, even the most compelling evidence that they’re really your friend is flatly ignored (“This is the bullet you took for me! I still wear it around my neck!” “Looks like a cheap clump of tin to me. Who’re you, again?”). This entails madness checks, similar to the personamancy spell Identity Crisis.
A far simpler spell is to have someone whom you don’t care about at all place their trust and attentions entirely in you for a period of time. This is probably the closest this school gets to mind-control, but the target has to be someone you don’t care about in the slightest. They become highly suggestible, trust/respect/desire you above all others (with all the self checks that entails for, say, married folk), and face severe self checks to intentionally harm you. (It can be cast in combat, though it won’t necessarily save you; if it is cast in combat, the target must make the stress check before each attempted attack, and it takes a round to do so.)
Good names for the spells could be things like “To Have Loved And Lost,” “All’s Fair,” “All You Need,” etc. I’ll leave the flavor & details up to you.
I quite like that the taboos are built into this school. After all,it is about messing yourself up.
I also now suspect a few people I know of belonging to this school. Clearly they’re deliberately whining and sabotaging their relationships.
I also think that there should be a ‘pity lay’ spell of some description. 🙂