The only Truth is that there is no Truth.
Nicknames: Blanks, Big-O’s, Burnouts, Nihilists, Altar-less Boys
You did the right thing. You thought and talked, and fought and lost, and gave and suffered and prayed just like they told you to. What good did that do? Did it make for any less death, any less pain, any less personal unhappiness? Where was God and justice and rationality when the shit went down? Nowhere, the answer finally came.
People are wrapped in invisible chains, lies about themselves and everything else, shackles for the malleable mind. You broke free. You will not be pulled by phantom strings of “right” and “wrong” twisted this way and that as suits some puppet master. There is no truth, and that is the only truth there is.
Your Paradox is blatant and obvious – You’re a fanatic devotee of rejecting all forms of fanaticism and devoteeism. Your belief that “there’s nothing out there” is every bit as groundless as the ones you’re trying to shoot down. You claim not to care about artifacts and other people’s absurd opinions, but you’re on a one-man crusade to burn them all down.
What you’re out to destroy is belief in symbols. The idiotic notions that one shape is somehow “holier” than another, that some color sequence is worth dying for, that inanimate objects can be good and evil. If you desecrate (deface, soil, burn, eat, pervert, whatever’s inappropriate) a physical symbol that has abstract meaning to a large group of people you charge up a little power. Maybe it’s from all the belief that’s wrongly stored inside and could finally go to the people who wasted it there if you wouldn’t have harvested it. Maybe it makes you feel validated and wicked-good. Anyway, it works.
At least once, that is. You’ll never get anything from systematically destroying more replicas of the same symbol, other than good laughs and zealots mad at you. Also, the same general type of symbol (flag, religious icon, currency, commemorative plaque, book, medal…) only gives you credit once a week. So get creative. If you got greedy and want Significant power, you can wipe out something that’s one-of-a-kind and has hold on people’s hearts and minds. Something that belongs in a museum, that people travel to look at for its symbolic meaning, or the original that copies of are individually revered will do. It doesn’t work on people: no matter how much faith poured onto them and how shallow they are, they’re still not soulless vessels without lies of their own.
To get Major power, it’s not enough to make a physical vessel that people care about unsuitable for its inane purpose. You have to pervert its assumed meaning. You have to make a significant portion of the people who cherished it look at it with disgust or indifference, even if it means making that people who hated it before worship it. You’re not into belief, you’re into what disbelief, after all.
Naturally, your Taboo is acting on belief. If you do something because it’s “the right thing to do”, if you inconvenience yourself to uphold a law you can’t be caught breaking, if you trust someone just because “they seem like nice people” you prove yourself a sheep just like everyone else. You’re a lame poseur without cred or charges. If you can’t convincingly explain why you did something for purely practical, self-serving purposes, you’re penalized. The one exception, of course, is Nilomancy and all things related to it. Everything’s justified in the name of nothing.
What superstitious fools call “magic” is really negation. Your specialty is canceling belief, and to a lesser degree, making aspects of reality people believe in malfunction. Maybe it shows that causation itself is based on mutable faith. Maybe you just kick ass while everyone else is too scared to break anything. As you are the nemesis of delusions about ephemeral and external things, your powers can’t directly effect how someone sees themselves. On the other hand, a person seeing what they believe in crumble before their eyes will suffer great Self stress. Examples of tricks in Nilomancer’s bags include:
* You Don’t Love Me – Wipe out everything the first target thinks about how the second target sees them, leaving assumed cold apathy. The more the second guy tries to change the first girl’s opinion, the more it seems to her like he’s mocking or manipulating her. The spell only lasts some hours, but the memories stay for a lifetime.
* Bullet Bible – The Nilomancer’s minor blast turns a small symbolic object into a flaming projectile, striking a target. It can also be used to simply ignite such objects, but you won’t get juiced up from doing it.
* Can’t Be Serious – Cast right after someone makes an honest-in-their-opinion statement, this spell makes everyone physically present disbelieve it. They don’t necessarily think he was lying, just that somehow he got it all wrong. If people think about it some more, or are presented with convincing evidence, they might later change their opinion, but doubt will always remain.
* Sacrilicious – Compel someone to destroy or consume a symbolic object. It will probably take them only a short time, as the object has to be small and destructible, but will probably land them in all sorts of trouble. You don’t get charges for making someone break an object with this spell – do it yourself, lazybones.
* It Has to Work – Make an object a lot of expectation is invested in stop working. This can’t make a random car crash into a lamp post, but it could make the trusty sidearm that saved someone’s dad in the war jam only for them. If the object’s function is overshadowed by the idea of it functioning, this spell can break it, making it do precisely nothing.
* Worthless Bum – For the next day, everybody loses faith in the target. Nobody trusts her words, nobody values her opinion, nobody thinks she won’t steal their tv and strangle their children while they’re not looking. The target is still seen and heard, but she’s seen and heard as something wretched and despicable.
* This Party’s Dead – Make a large gathering of people lose interest in whatever it was that put them there, going back to their daily (or nightly) lives.
* Good Fight’s Not So Good – Cut off a person from their noble Passions, their ideals, their notions of how things should be. For the target, there is no moral high ground until the next sunrise. In the mean time, you find him much easier to relate to.
* Holy Hand Grenade – The significant blast makes a symbolic object explode. It works best if the object is thrown into the air, placed high above, or is simply very large, but using it on an object in someone’s pocket is just nasty. Again, no charges for getting magic to do your dirty work.
* Prayers Answered Wrong – Hear someone pray or plea in earnest, and pervert the power of their faith. The approximate opposite of what they asked for will be made to happen by this force of will. The stronger this will, the more drastic the changes that can result.
NOTE: I tried locating something similar to this in the archive, but couldn’t find any. This entry may be entirely redundant due to previous ones I could not locate, and if so I ask for your understanding (and links).
Very nice idea, although you really should of made formula spells proper, giving them costs and all.
Your central paradox is TERRIFIC — finding a good paradox on which to hang a school is tough. I’d like to see this developed further.
The charging system seems about right for minors, though the no-reuse rule makes it difficult to have a lengthy Nilomancer career. Perhaps change that to another time-limit: you can only get one charge a week from destroying symbols in the same category (eg. holy books) and only one a year from precisely the same symbol repeated (eg. a Bible). Also, you might want to consider changing the one-a-week restriction to groups of followers instead of symbol types, so that a Bible and a Qur’an would work in the same week, but not a Bible and a crucifix. This would force the Nilomancer to gather more enemies at once, at least if he wants more than one charge a week.
The Significant charge requirement might just be TOO tough. Most things that belong in museums, and are venerated by large numbers of people, already ARE in museums or otherwise closely guarded. Also, many such symbols have no original. An original copy of the Declaration of Independence might serve as a symbol of American patriotism, but the Almighty Dollar has no equivalent original. Even the oldest surviving examples of most sacred texts are still nth-generation copies. Trying to collect even a dozen sigs, your Nilomancer would probably end up touring the globe, bombing shrines, temples and seats of government — a task more in line with the degree of effort and sacrifice required for a Major.
Finally (and I’m probably sounding quite critical, but I really do like this concept) your proposed formulae lean too much towards mind-control for my tastes. My understanding of UA is that human free will is a concept so heavily entrenched in the game setting that it should be extremely hard to overcome — your “Sacrilicious” formula is the main offender here, since it forces action from someone, instead of just messing with their emotional state.
Not bad. But you do know there’s already an Anihilomancy, right?
Yeah, but I think they’re different enough in outlook and goals to count as different schools.
The Nilomancer is more interesting in destroying belief and symbolism, while the Anihilomancer is more into physical destruction of posessions and society. One rejects materialism, the other rejects spirituality. One’s more physical, the other more cerebral.
As to forcing someone to eat a religious symbol or book with magic being violating the free will concept – Well, everything is justifed in the name of nothing. Nilomancy rejects your belief in free will as well.
Though I do agree with the assessment of the charges being a bit difficult as written, though it is mentioned you can use the same item on different weeks(not the EXACT same, that’s already been destroyed)
Another nickname I think has a nice ring – Flag burners
If you want to add anything I thinking acting on the Nilomancers Nobel passion should trigger taboo.
Also I’m a bit confused by
“if you inconvenience yourself to uphold a law you can’t be caught breaking”
As it directly conflicts with the idea of doing something for a self serving purpose. Isn’t not getting arrested a self-serving purpose enough to justify upholding a law.
“ It Has to Work” is a bit of a grey area as well. If someone really needs a car they just stole to get them across the border does that qualify as function overshadowing the idea of functioning
I have to say that I really like this school. The charging methods are a bit difficult, though. How about something like this:
minor – Convince someone to go against a religious, political, or similarly idealistic belief that they hold dear. Nothing major, just get them to perform one infraction that will make them feel estranged from their chosen group.
significant – Desecrate an object that a local group of people revere. A bible bought from a bookstore wouldn’t work, but the flag that’s up in front of City Hall would.
significant – Alternately, convince a religious/spiritual/political/etc leader to admit that a core principle of his/her ideology is wrong, and make sure his/her flock catches wind of it.
major – Desecrate an object that is important historically to a religious or political or whatever group. The Shroud of Turin, or the original Constitution.
major – Alternately, disprove or dissuade a global figure of an idealistic group from believing in one of that group’s core principles in front of a global audience.
Excellent ideas pheeed. The only part I didn’t like about the school was the incredibly difficult significant charge requirement.
You make me look deeper into my thoughts, make explicit and coherent that which was half-formed, and for this I thank everyone who participated so far. Let’s dive into the dark and see what lies underneath:
The insanity is all around you, understandable and detestable at once. People want a world when there’s right and good and just and holy, but they can’t really see or touch any of these things. The precious doubt that maybe there’s nothing beyond their sight eats at their convictions. So they make something they can grasp, an altar they can bow in front of, a bridge between the sublime and mundane, absolution and happiness they can rent. They take pure, yet groundless, faith, run it through the mud and call the earth consecrated. You wouldn’t have given a damn, but too many people are hell-bent on taking you and everyone else along for the ride. Blood is shed to raise one arrangement of colors over another, lives are happily given and taken for useless objects, earth is easily turned into hell when one holds a promise of heaven right between the fingers.
It’s hilarious, really. You want people to get the joke, so they can laugh too. Or, it’s aggravating and proves the falsity of all gods and ideals and needs to be put in the ground, fast. You can’t really decide. There’s no one you can talk to about these things, no one understands. It’s just you, fighting for nothing.
People claim to have free will, but that just makes them willing slaves. They try to put all their belief into a physical vessel (a ‘symbolic object’), but deep down they still fear it may be wrong placed. Deep down, they resent the control an object has over their lives and want to prove to themselves that they’re stronger than it. Deep down, they have animosity even toward the best code or system or society, and that thing sitting on a shelf represents it in a form they can harm. Deep down, they may just want to see what happens and if lightning will strike them where they stand. You can negate what’s stopping them from acting on these passions, let them act out their frustration over a tyrant of paper or stone or plastic and destroy that object (‘sacrilicous’ formula spell). If there are no hard feelings, it wouldn’t work, but you’ve yet to meet someone so entirely at peace with a national flag. You don’t believe there are such people.
It’s a hard fight, maybe intentionally so. Your bullets (‘minor charges’) are made of false faith, and you must never forget that it’s not really the objects themselves that matter, or you’ve become once more one of the misguided. To repeatedly gain power from destroying copies of the same symbol would be to acknowledge its validity, the very thing you’re against: if you ritually burn crosses on a daily basis, you’re just as controlled by them as someone ritually prays holding one every night.
Your bombs (‘significant charges’) are made of stronger stuff, naturally harder to steal and re-cast. You have to be smart and creative. A fire in a building that houses a relic works. Trampling a monument during a street protest is fine. Graffiti on stained glass windows, releasing termites under the foundations of a wooden statue, scratching the golden finish on a plaque are all valid lifestyle choices. You don’t have to pulverize the object into fine powder, you just need to defile it, to make it seem dirty and fragile and down-to-earth just like any other of man’s works. Even if someone later restores its shape, it still works as long as enough people witnessed it reduced, and thus can never look at it the same way. Naturally, a run on a historical museum is a treasure trove, just don’t spend it all in one place.
Your Taboo touches on basic disrespect for things that cannot be touched or explained. Driving under the speed limit because you might get caught or may crash into a pole is perfectly fine, but avoiding speeding because it’s somehow “wrong to break the law” is not. You don’t do things because “you’re a good person at heart”, you don’t “treat others as you’d like to be treated yourself” because people are just as likely to screw you over no matter what, and you specifically don’t buy into the whole crap of “respecting different viewpoints”, as they’re just wrong. As noted, Noble passions are very tricky – unless they involve negating or canceling something that’s false, acting on them breaks Taboo. Flag Burners are not nice people, I suppose.
Your concept is rock-solid, your prose is terrific, and this reworking makes it even better. Now, how about some mechanics to go with it? (Formula costs, Random magic domain, possible major effects…)
Also, the Taboo isn’t really any better than before — it fits the concept perfectly, but it’s just too easy for a clever player to continually escape Taboo by coming up with explanations of how his behaviour – whatever he may have done – was ultimately self-serving. Then the GM has to argue that his justification is transparent sophistry, and the inevitable bickering commences. I think that a workable Taboo, for game purposes, needs to be based on something more concrete than the character’s motivation.