Two extinct Adept schools from the 1960’s, for a game set in the past, or as background flavour for a modern game.

The Jet Set

The new wealthy elite seem to breeze through life, avoiding complications while living a lifestyle like that of a movie character. The price for this is that they must breeze through life, push it further, live right on the edge of losing everything. Thier central paradox is that they must risk everything they have to gain the slightest amount of magical power.

Minor Charge: Get something for free, even though you can easily afford it.

Significant Charge: Get away with breaking the law, even though you are caught.

Major Charge: Unknown, but believed to have to do with getting someone else to break thier moral code in a manner they will regret for the rest of thier lives.

Taboo: If you are unable to pay for something that you have tried to acquire, you lose all minor charges. If you are unable to bail or buy yourself out of a prison sentence, you lose all significant charges. If you are forced to break your own moral code in a serious way, even if it is life or death, you lose all your charges.

Random Magic: Serendipity; getting the last seat on the next jet leaving for your destination, getting the penthouse suite in a packed hotel, meeting an old friend in a foreign land, hailing a taxi in minutes, and so on. Getting away with things; avoid taxes, shift blame, and so on.

Some Minor Spells:

Trunk Call – 1 Minor Charge
You can call anyone in the world. You just need to pick up a phone and ask the operator for the person in question, and you will be put through to the nearest telephone. You don’t need to know thier general location, just thier name and have a basic idea of who they are. Whether it is them who answer the phone is another matter.

Lucky I Packed My – 2 to 5 Minor Charges
You can pull a single useful item from your luggage. It costs between 2 and 5 minor charges depending on the size of the luggage in question (2 for a handbag, 5 for a massive trunk). The item can be anything that can reasonably fit into the luggage. The item cannot have any special properties, or be a specific example of that item. (you can’t get the key to the cell you are locked in, but you can get a skeleton key if you recognise the make of the lock, or a lockpicking kit).

I Once Spent a Summer In – 3 Minor Charges, plus 1 Minor Charge per day thereafter
You will gain a unique insight into the local culture, as though you stayed here with family at a young age. This allows you to speak the local dialect, though with a slight accent, to know the roads, geography and history of the area, and even to get the local jokes. This knowledge evaporates unless you spend an extra minor charge every day.

You Must Know Me From TV – 2 Minor Charges
For the next hour or so, everyone you meet will recognise you. They may not know how, or from where, or who you are, but they will know you are someone famous. This can make things simpler, but there is also a downside, as anyone famous can tell you.

Some Significant Spells:

It’s a Small World – 2 Significant Charges
You will run into a specific named person in the next day. It only works on people you have had at least one conversation with (even if it was a brief back and forth with a shop assisstant), but it works on anyone, from anywhere in the world. Maybe they won a holiday, or they are visiting long-lost relatives, in any case they are here now. This spell does not guarantee that they will be happy to see you, or happy to be here, just that you will meet them.

I’m a US Citizen! – 1 Significant Charge
You get a full and legal passport for whatever nation you like. (though the spell name mentions the US, it can be for any nation that issues passports) People will also recognise you as being of that nation, with all the good or ill will that entails. The spell will last indefinitely, unless it is broken by setting foot in that nation, or by ripping up the passport.

This is Sovereign Soil – 4 Significant Charges
The building you are in becomes like an embassy of your home nation, for all intents and purposes, until you set foot outside it. Local authorities will not try to get in unless they are really mad at you, and even then they will usually just set up a blockade so you can’t escape.

Major Spell Effects: Unknown, but possibly grant yourself eternal youth, give you permanent knowledge of all customs and languages, making it so you blend in anywhere you go, alter the opinions of a whole nation about another nation, making it safe or dangerous to travel there.

The Reds

This is a path based around conspiracy for the sake of conspiracy. The Reds are not united by a single goal, philosophy, dialectic or belief, only by thier desire to remain hidden from the world at large. So while thier ability to charge is based on their numbers, thier cooperation and thier secrecy, many Reds have different and even contradictory goals. This is thier central paradox.

Minor Charge: Conspire with at least two other reds for a night without being interrupted for one minor charge. If there are at least four, you get two minor charges, if there are at least nine, you get three, if there are at least sixteen, you get four, and so on (The square root of the number of Reds, rounded down). This means that you must all take part in a debate, a conversation, a drinking competition, anything really, from dusk until dawn, without any non-Red interacting with any of you.

Significant Charge: Correctly identify another Red without being formally introduced and you will get a significant charge. This still works if you wear a badge you both know to mean that you are a Red, though the problems with this method are obvious. If you bring a new Red into the path, you will also gain a significant charge.

Major Charge: Unknown, but believed to be based on either bringing a member of another Adept path into the Reds, or getting elected to a high ranking public office.

Taboo: If you are identified as a Red, or out another Red, you will lose all charges. This happens only once, during the initial discovery, you will not lose charges if your discoverer tells others. However, if a person knows you are a Red, any minor spells you try to use on them will cost a significant charge, and any spells that affect a crowd will no longer affect them.

Random Magic: Inciting the masses to action. You can make a crowd disperse, riot, picket, cheer or boo. Cause someone to act against thier morals, without thier conscious knowledge. You can make someone spill secret information, leave a door unlocked at a secure facility, sabotage a factory, and so on.

Some Minor Spells:

I’m Innocent I Tell You! – 4 Minor Charges
You can make a person inadvertantly incriminate themselves. They will make mistakes remembering dates for alibi’s, seem to be lying when they are questioned, and other minor slip-ups. When combined with forensic examination and other witnesses, they will eventually be cleared, but it may be useful to have the police think they have the right suspect for a while.

I Could Have Swore I – 1 to 8 Minor Charges
You can make a person act under your instructions for one minute per minor charge, up to eight minutes, without remembering what they did. They will do anything that does not totally contradict thier morals. This, for most people, means anything less than murder, rape or suicide.

Would You Like To Take A Survey? – 2 Minor Charges
You can phone someone up and have them answer you as honestly as they would an important government official. This means great accuracy with regards job and official things of that sort, but maybe not so honest with personal matters. They will remember doing this, but will assume it was something important and usually not worry about it.

Some Significant Spells:

Strike! – 1 Significant Charge
This spell convinces the workers in a specific place of business that they are being treated unfairly, and they have to strike. You perform it by simply mentioning to one worker a legitimate grievance that they have, and have him or her genuinely and expressly agree with you. This works on any type of employment, from a diner to a factory to a police station to an army base. And the strike will last until at least the first grievance you mentioned is dealt with, possibly longer.

The Word – 1 Significant Charge
This spell allows you to chant a word or slogan, so that everyone within earshot of your voice will chant along, and do whatever they think that chant means. The effect lasts until the last person stops chanting, which will not be before, but may be hours after, the Red has stopped chanting. This can be anything, a chant of ‘Fight’ would cause the group to descend into violence, a chant of ‘Fight the Police’ would see them direct thier anger against police officers, and so on. The chant does not have to be violent or even active, a chant of ‘Peace’ would see the crowd calm down, a chant of ‘Love’ would fill them with love for thier neighbour, or maybe the Red, or mankind in general, or maybe for thier nation. This is very powerful, and unpredictable, since a chant that means one thing to one person, could mean something else entirely to another. ‘Fight the Power’ could send one man into conflict with the police, another to attack a white man in a suit, another to target the Red who organised the whole thing, or maybe even get one person to try and bring down power lines, if he is particularly obtuse.

Major Spell Effects: Unknown.

Some notes on Modernist Adepts

Keen-eyed players of Unknown Armies will notice that the Jet Set can easily use one minor spell, the ‘You Must Know Me From TV’ to blag free things, and charge up. Nowadays, it is impossible to charge up in that way. Plutomancers cannot use the money they gain magically to charge up, Epidiromancers cannot magically heal themselves of the wounds they need to charge up, magic is a zero-sum game, with some losses to friction.

But in the past, it may not always have been so. The world of the ’60s thought that growth and progress would continue unabated, that you could get something for nothing. This was a time before the oil crisis, before pollution, when even the Soviet Union was experiencing rapid growth, so in my interpretation of how these Adepts may have worked, I allowed for some unfair charging tactics. The whole Jet Set was based around the idea of getting something for nothing, even though you could easily afford it, so I see no reason why that philosophy wouldn’t also apply to magic. The limiting factor here is that every attempt to charge is a gamble, they could also lose all charges if they fail, and even lose thier freedom if they fail too hard at a significant charge.

As for the Reds, they are a more recognisable type of Adept. But they too have great power, requiring relatively few significant charges to bring down a whole city, if they wanted. The Reds are a secretive, covert group, whose best spells are very loud and overt indeed. The Reds are stuck, in a way. They need to be numerous, enough so that despite thier need to know other Reds in order to get minor charges, there are enough Reds they don’t know in the area so that they can get significant charges, and yet the more Reds there are, the greater the chance they are found out, and the less effective thier spells will be.