Easy on the ears, handy with the cosmos.
A.k.a. Mutes, Whispers.
You don’t talk much anymore. Hell, you don’t talk ever, if you can help it. Or make any other kind of noise. When you make noise, you drown out the truth, you make a mockery of the power that ripples through the beautiful silence of the universe’s soft, warm underbelly.
It’s not enough to just survive, making the same damn noise all the time. Survival is for cowards and idiots trapped on a island for the purposes of a semi-popular reality TV show. Take the red pill, open your mind, listen to the nothing, become one with the bare stream of the cosmos that underpins everything.
You are in the blind spot of the universe and you can see everything from here.
Silence is golden.
Symbolic Tension: Silenciomancers manipulate the input of the cosmos by denying themselves their own output.
Generate a Minor Charge: Don’t make any noticable or intrusive sounds (in other words, don’t break taboo) for one hour.
Generate a Significant Charge: Same as a minor charge, only you gotta stay quiet for 24 hours straight. You can also gain a significant charge for completing an important mission without making a sound, at GM’s discretion.
Generate a Major Charge: Do something of great historical or/and mystical importance (like killing the president or saving the world) while remaining perfectly quiet the whole time.
Taboo: You can’t talk about a whisper or deliberately make a sound directly that catches someone’s attention without losing all your charges. This includes talking about a whisper, crashing into things, slamming a door, firing a gun and any other kind of sound that people would find hard to ignore. If it wouldn’t require a Notice roll to hear (or the Notice roll has a positive shift higher than +10%), it’s probably taboo. If no-one’s around to hear it, it’s not taboo.
Blast Style: The target of a Silenciomancy blast suffers a sort of ‘phantom damage’ that they can feel, but not show — just like the Pornomancy blast style. The blast damage can not healed by mortal science and always does HTH-style damage, even though it costs a Significant charge to cast. The blast deals firearms-style damage if the target is not currently making noise when hit by the spell. Healing the damage requires magick, usually.
Random Magick Domain: Silenciomancy is a good magick school for subtly manipulating the way the world reacts to you and the way the world is structured. At higher power levels, mutes can distort reality behind your back — such as changing the locks when you’re not home or erasing a computer file when on-one’s accessing it. Making things or creatures ignored by everyone else is also a typical effect.
Starting Charges: Silenciomancers start with no charges, Fox only, Final Destination.
Charging Tips: Just stay quiet, you schmuck. Hanging around deaf people and/or sound-proofing your room can help. Use a silenced pistol and wear fluffy slippers.
Minor Formula Spells:
Just The Wind
Cost: 2 Minor Charges.
Effects: For a number of rounds (if in combat) or minutes (if not) equal to the sum of the roll, no-one can pay attention to you normally. You’re basically undetectable to all senses, human or no…except hearing. This effect ends permaturely if you break taboo.
Shut Up
Cost: 3 Minor Charges.
Effects: The target of the spell becomes unable to communicate the next message he wants to send successfully, regardless of the medium used. Anyone recieving his message either won’t understand it (“Anyone here speak Spanish? No?”) or they just won’t receive it at all (“Damn, I think I just permantently deleted his e-mail!”). This effect usually takes the form of bizarre and totally random incidents, although the spell may need to go to extreme measures of reality distortion, at GM’s discretion (“Wait, isn’t Spanish my native language? I should’ve understood that, right?”), which causes Unnatural Madness checks.
Hear Without Hearing
Cost: 1 Minor Charge.
Effects: This spell allows you to telepathically communicate with a single target within the range of your five senses for about five minutes.
Matter Shuffle
Cost: 2 Minor Charges.
Effects: Any object that can fit comfortably in one hand can be called into your immediate possession (like your pocket or hand) if it’s within range of your five senses and no-one else’s. So you can’t use this spell on a gun your enemy’s holding, but you can magick a knife into your pocket if no-one’s touching or looking at it.
Eerie
Cost: 1 Minor Charge.
Effects: Anyone in your immediate presence becomes filled with dread, anxiety and wracked nerves for a moment. If you concentrate, you can center these feelings towards yourself, allowing you to use your Magick: Silenciomancy as an Intimidation skill with flip-flops. Most whispers use it to make people generally paranoid so they tighten security, arrest suspicious-looking characters and avoid dangerous or spooky areas.
Significant Formula Spells:
You’re Not Here
Cost: 1 Significant Charge.
Effects: Pick a person who you’re familiar with to be targeted with this spell. For 24 hours, that person can not meet you face-to-face or have any kind of two-way communication with you unless you wish it. No matter what he tries, the target can not call you on your phone or bump into you on the street, even if you share the same apartment. The forces of synchronicity will keep you two apart. He can, however, leave you messages on your answering machine or send you an e-mail or get someone else to play the middleman.
The Silent Killer
Cost: 1 Significant Charge.
Effects: This is the Silenciomancy blast spell. As mentioned above, it deals HTH-style damage unless the target is being quiet and all damage it deals is mental (although that won’t stop it from killing you and it never heals without magick influence).
Fade Away
Cost: 4 Significant Charges.
Effects: The target is temporarily erased from physical reality, unless someone else (aside from you, of course) senses him somehow when you cast the spell. He just flickers out and disappears for a while. The GM rolls two dice; the first die is the number of minutes or seconds he is ‘away’ for and the second dice determines if it’s minutes (even number) or seconds (odd number). It doesn’t harm the target or strip him naked (anything the target is carrying or wearing goes and returns with him) or erase any memories or trace evidence (such as bloodstains and footprints), but it does inflict an Unnatural-6 Madness check. The target will realise he was somehow removed from reality, but he won’t remember where he went when he was ‘gone’. He ‘returns’ to the general area he was orginally when the spell ends, although if something makes putting him exactly where he was impossible (the room been filled with quick-dry cement, for example), reality may displace him somewhere nearby and possible. Seeing someone flicker back into reality is an Unnatural-4 Madness check.
Do Not Disturb
Cost: 2 Significant Charges.
Effects: You may mark out a single room or small building to target with this spell. For 6 hours, anyone who isn’t you tries to subconsciously avoid that area. If they’re already at the target place when the spell is cast, they’ll start looking for excuses to leave and stay away until the spell ends.
Our Little Secret
Cost: 3 Significant Charges.
Effects: Pick a piece of information that isn’t publically available — a secret, in other words — that you know. Then target someone with this spell. You instantly learn a secret that the target knows that you would want to know (GM’s discretion as what secret you learn, but it must be useful or at least pretty interesting to your character). In exchange, the target instantly learns the secret you picked.
Major Silenciomancy Effects:
Destroy anyone’s memories of you at will. Erase someone or something from reality forever. Make the whole world completely silent for one day.
“Silenced” pistols still make some noise. Stick with a knife.
How much noise?
I’ve heard it described as comparable to dropping a hardcover book onto a concrete floor from shoulder height.
Well, I guess that *might* break taboo then.
Not if the first shot disables the only witness before they can consciously register the sound. In that case, the silencer narrows the radius which must be cleared of observers.
Still, non-explosive-based weaponry is the way to go.
If noone’s around to hear it, it aint taboo? So if you head out to your isolated cottage in the woods and spend a week doing primal-scream therapy and playing drums by yourself, you get 7 sigs or 168 minors, your choice?
You could kill anyone in the world in about two weeks that way, especially if you target them when they are sleeping and not snoring. (If I remember correctly, long-distance blasts uses 1 additional sig. 2 weeks equals 14 sigs equals 7 blasts with a decent chance that most of them make firearms-style damage with no easy means of healing).
The “If no-one hears it, it doesn’t break taboo” thing feels wrong for this school.
Other adept schools whose taboo is dependent on audiences (Personamancers, Irrascimancers, Pornomancers, etc.) function that way because their magick is based in registered human interaction; their spells and random magick domains all reflect this.
But Silenciomancy has a broader focus on the cosmos – it’s about being able to perceive everything truly by being silent. That would be contradicted if you break taboo at all, not just to witnesses, because the magick is introspective.
There’s also the issue that it works as a passive bug-sweeper.
Yeah, I guess you’re right, it would work better if you took out that bit…
Also, a minor charge per hour is far too lucrative. You get 8 minors just for sleeping? No way.
First, I would say you have to be awake – i.e. consciously suppressing your sounds – to charge. (Whether or not you break taboo by snoring, I think can go either way. I’m mean, so I’d say you can’t charge while sleeping and can break taboo by snoring.)
Second, up the cost, in time, for minors. Four hours sounds better for a “passive” charge like that (I’m thinking of Urbanomancers, who can also gain minor charges by doing something relatively passive).
I’m a little surprised there isn’t a spell that mutes someone or something outright.
I thought it would be pretty obvious to any one familiar to UA that Silenciomancers can’t charge while asleep (since it’s constantly emphasised that adepts can’t charge up ‘by accident’). I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear.
I cut down the charging time because I figured that the taboo was fairly harsh, so Silenciomancers who maintain any kind of contact with people break taboo every 4 to 8 hours unless they try really hard.
I didn’t put in a ‘mute’ spell because I think the school’s philosophy equates silence to a tool/weapon of cosmic importance. Muting someone magickally could be done, but no Whisper would do it to an enemy. It’s like handing out guns and knives.
Privately, I see Silenciomancers as control freaks and power-mongers, even more so than your average adept.
Makes sense. I’m used to looking out for ways that min-maxers and other players can monkeywrench the system; didn’t mean to sound too harsh.
It’s not particularly difficult to last a full day without making a sound (grade school students do it regularly), though it does take effort. What’s “difficult,” in UA terms, is that keeping this up constantly will start bringing out stress checks (predominantly in Isolation) by the bucketload. But even that doesn’t necessarily drive you to speak to anyone. It just makes you (more) crazy.
Hey, feel free to be harsh now and then. I know I am.
I really like this one. I agree that the idea of simply never making sound ever would be a good idea. If you make a sound even when nobody can hear you, then you’ll know you made sound.
Also I think to make a balance between the minor charges and significant charges, you would have to know exactly what charge you were aiming for… otherwise what’s to stop a player from aiming for 24 hours silence, but claiming 11 minor charges as you go, using them and then breaking taboo.
It’d be better if the adept aimed for the 24 hours to get the significant charge ignoring all other time past.