Adepts who champion truth, their truth…

Conspiromancy

AKA Spooks, Cranks, Puzzlemen
The secrets of the world are your bread and butter. You see the patterns in newspaper clippings and heed the voices hidden behind the media establishment, grasping your magick from the things that they don’t tell you.

You’ve read all the histories – heard all the stories. Your friends used to laugh at you when you talked about the Reptoid Conspiracy in the Royal Family. The connection to the heroin trade. Who’s going to be laughing when they’re all junkie slaves of their serpentine overlords? Maybe your mind snapped when you made THE connection – the very thing that ties all of the world’s secret masters into one massive conspiracy. Maybe it was discovering the Occult Underground that sent you spiraling out, looking for other conspiracies hiding in the cracks of humanity. Regardless, you’ve found magick in what some people call “magical thinking” – you see patterns and connections that no one else can, but what you need is proof. If you can ferret out the secrets of your enemies (the enemies of humanity, really), then your power to oppose them grows, and exposing even their most tawdry secrets is a great weapon in your arsenal.

The symbolic tension of the Conspiromancy school is that of the Spooks themselves. Tireless champions of “truth”, they ferret out
the secrets of others and drag them into the light of day, but the truth they champion is only their own, personal version of it – a truth coloured by paranoia, arrogance and misinformation.
Conspiromancy Blast Style

The Conspiromancy Blast is like a time bomb. A victim might find glass in their food, or a waiting sniper’s bullet when they least expect it. Minor blasts are single-shot curses that lurk until the victim is at their most vulnerable, and then strike suddenly. Significant blasts take the form of convoluted and, possibly, spontaneous conspiracies to end the life of the victim – with every hand turned against him.

Stats

Generate a Minor Charge: You gather one minor charge any time that you receive “confirmation” (correct or not) that a well-known figure has something to hide. Also, any time you’re able to “connect the dots” – tie together two seemingly unrelated facts into a working theory that explains how both are related, you gain a minor charge. Additional minor charges can be acquired by finding evidence that supports this theory, including connected subsequent events to the initial theory, and you get one additional minor charge for every 9 people that you convince of the truth of one of your theories.

Generate a Significant Charge: You gather one significant charge any time you make a nationally known public figure or celebrity admit to some wrongdoing or mistruth in a national forum. You likewise gain a significant charge when you expose publicly a mundane conspiracy operating at the national level or when you expose the activities of an occult conspiracy that has been actively hiding itself from the Underground at large. Finally, you can gain a significant charge by convincing at least 333 people of the existence of a major occult conspiracy – such as the Sleepers or the TNI. These people must not be part of the Occult Underground.

Generate a Major Charge: You can gather one major charge any time you make a public official or internationally known celebrity admit to falsehood or another failing on an international forum. Additionally, you can gain a major charge by uncovering evidence of a previously unknown occult conspiracy operating on the scale of the Sleepers, TNI or the Cult of the Naked Goddess, or by committing the ultimate self-destructive act of revealing the existence of the Occult Underground to the world at large – with incontrovertible evidence. At least one Spook actually gathered a major charge by convincing enough people of the existence of a conspiracy that they created the conspiracy wholecloth.

Random Magick Domain: Conspiromancy is the magic of secrets – getting them, making them, keeping them and ferreting them out. It’s also about connections, mirroring the interconnectedness of the world in the scribbled theories of madmen and the far-out theories of modern messiah wannabes.

Taboo: Conspiromancers cannot admit to having told a lie or even acknowledge that they were mistaken about a fact without losing all of their charges. This leads many Conspiromancers to create elaborate and convoluted new “theories” whenever their statements are challenged with facts and evidence, working the new information into a new series of connections which reveals how they were right all along if you just look at it like this.

Starting Charges: Puzzlemen start with three minor charges.

Minor Formula Spells

Zapruder Tape
Cost: 1 minor charge

This spell allows the Spook to replay any event that he has personally witnessed in his own head, exactly as it happened (although grainier, and with that sound that a film reel makes as it cycles through a projector). The net effect is twofold: When used to rewatch a past event, the Adept can reroll any perception-related roll he made to pick out new details; alternately, the Crank can use this to “rewind” an event as it happens, allowing him to flip-flop dice on a perception-based roll during the current event.

The New World Order
Cost: 1 minor charge

This spell makes the inner workings of an organization or group apparent to the Puzzleman. Any attempt to obscure the power-structure of a group (either the “official” structure or an unofficial structure formed from blackmail and favor-mongering) that the Spook can observe instantly fails, allowing the Adept to develop a basic understanding of how power flows in the organization.

It’s Just A Red Herring
Cost: 2 minor charges

When confronted with something unexplainable, the Adept can cast this spell to instantly reconcile the event with his theory du jour. This has the benefit of allowing the Spook to pass any Unnatural Madness check he would’ve made for the triggering event without gaining any Hardened or Failed notches. By spending an additional minor charge, this spell can be made to affect one other person.

The Time Cube Spell
Cost: 2 minor charges

This spell allows the Adept to conceal a message inside a seemingly innocuous and completely undecipherable rant. Anyone who reads the rant other than its intended recipient comes away feeling nothing more than vague amusement at the harmless crazy person who wrote it, but when the person the missive was intended for reads it, the words and letters re-order themselves to form the actual text of the message. This spell only functions on written works.

Magic Bullet
Cost: 3 minor charges

This is the Minor Conspiromancy Blast spell. As mentioned above, this spell doesn’t take immediate effect, acting more like a curse that follows the victim around until he finds himself in a situation where something innocuous and “safe” suddenly becomes dangerous and harmful.

This spell will take effect within 24 hours of being cast, usually at the moment when the target is most relaxed and at ease, or otherwise when he feels most secure and at his safest.

Casaubon’s Trap
Cost: 3 minor charges

The casting of this spell creates a rumour of a new conspiracy, a vague hint of new shadowy movers in the Underground, or just hints that something’s not right in the mayor’s office. With the trap baited, the Spook can sit back and wait as a real conspiracy is inevitably attracted to the source of the rumour. This spell grants the Crank a chance to uncover some fact or piece of evidence about the conspiracy, as it risks exposing itself to find out more about a new potential rival, but the Conspiromancer has no real control over which conspiracy shows up – rumours of a cult of necromancers are just as likely to attract the worshippers of the Gray Lord of Asphalt as they are the TNI.

Significant Formula Spells

The Second Gunman
Cost: 1 Significant Charge

The Spook using this spell plants in a target’s mind a completely believable flash of “insight” that is, none-the-less, inherently incorrect. Though the effect is extremely brief, and the subject – as always – decides how they’ll act on the “insight”, this spell is extremely useful as a momentary distraction or to spread tactical disinformation. As an added bonus, the Adept gets a +10% Shift on his roll for every 10 points by which his target’s Soul score exceeds his target’s Mind, but the inverse is true as well – some people are more accustomed to questioning their “gut” than others.

Secret Handshake # 23
Cost: 1 Significant Charge

Upon casting this spell, the Spook is imparted with perfect knowledge of one sentence or action which will convince whomever he’s talking to that he’s a member of whatever cult, lodge or secret society that they may be a member of. The spell doesn’t work on organizations that don’t keep secrets (but then, what organization doesn’t have a few?) and confers no knowledge of what comes next, only the exact phrasing of a countersign or the correct way to perform a secret handshake, or just the right name to drop to get one foot in the door.

(REDACTED)
Cost: 2 Significant Charge

This spell targets a specific piece of information, no matter how large or small (although it must be a single, discrete fact. It’s possible to (REDACT) a person’s real name or address, or even the names of their parents, but erasing their entire past requires multiple uses of the spell and, thus, multiple charges). The affected information is not destroyed, but it IS rendered impossible to discover. The effects of this spell last for one lunar month, plus one additional day.

North by Northwest
Cost: 2 Significant Charges

This is the Significant Blast spell for Conspiromancy, ramping up the seemingly implausible circumstances of the Blast’s “time bomb” effect to draw in actors from the target’s circle of friends and co-workers. Mysterious high school buddies appear and slip a knife in the target’s back, or men in black show up and torture him to death for revealing something that he shouldn’t have, or he’s found dead of hypothermia in his bath tub in the middle of July.

The effects of this spell build slowly, bending random events and, if needed “creating” new actors to play out a paranoid delusion that becomes increasingly convoluted and sinister as time progresses. Random muggings turn into deadly knife fights in back allies, old “friends” that the target can’t quite remember show up and try to kill him, or one night stands end with the target fleeing for his life while his “date” calls forth back-up in the form of silent black helicopters. Strange men in black suits harry the target, stalking him, asking him pointed questions and torturing him until he gives them the answers they want (whatever those might be) or he dies. If, after 24 hours, the target still survives, the Blast dissipates and things return to normal – no evidence remains of what happened except the target’s own memories of the events, which may have sparked Stress tests depending on the circumstances. If the target does not survive the Blast, then the apparent cause of death will not match up with how he died, but will instead be extremely improbable for his circumstances, a fact which most coroners will likely gloss over.

Majestic
Cost: 2 Significant Charges

This spell creates a sustainable illusion over a document of the Adept’s creation. The document, which can be anything from a horribly inaccurate work of “historical fiction” to the supposed “manifesto” of a secret society, is lent credence by the spell, even if it’s only so much guesswork and vague, half-mad ramblings. Those reading the document are supernaturally encouraged to accept its apparent authenticity, glossing over factual errors and other issues with the document unless they find some reason to subject it to more intense scrutiny. Though this spell seems relatively minor, at first, most spooks realize quickly that it applies just as readily to forged legal documents and government authorizations as it does to their Reptite/Gray/Illuminati Manifesto.

Panopticon
Cost: 3 Significant Charges

To use this spell, the Puzzleman must know some personal fact about his target – this can be their true name, their credit card number, social security information, or even a list of their top ten most frequently visited websites – or possess an official document related to the target. Once the spell is cast, the Spook can watch the target out of any closed circuit security camera that the target happens to be near – even if it’s not a real camera. The spell does not require that the Adept know the target’s location, however, only that he have an identifier for the target and that there be a nearby, if non-functional, security camera.

Conspiromancy Major Effects

Permanently destroy all official record of a person or event; Create a connection between two disparate groups that didn’t exist before; learn the inner workings of any secret society or conspiracy.