Mostly Thanatomancy, with one Entropomancy based on random magick I got away with in actual play, and one Plutomancy based on a pun that should have been made by now.
Entropomancy
LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION
Cost: 6 minor charges
Effect: Roll 3 dice over a map stretched on a table – it doesn’t much matter what kind of dice – while thinking of someone you want to find. This needs to be a specific person, but you don’t need to know who it is; this could, for example, be used to find the person who ripped out Elijah McGillicuddy’s heart. One of the dice will land on the person’s position, while the other two will find a way to point at the third – such as the boxcars lining up on normal 6-sided dice, or the 1s pointing at it on d10s, or the arrows if you’re sensibly using dice with actual arrows on them.
Plutomancy
SCREW THE RULES, I HAVE MONEY
Cost: 3 significant charges
Effect: Everyone assumes you’re trustworthy and they don’t need to force you to follow the rules. Any time anyone would normally be required to inconvenience you in the name of the rules (usually the law, but the occult underground has rules too) will save you the bother unless you are being blatantly suspicious. Also, unless you’re blatantly suspect you get a +30% shift to all rolls on the lines of Lying & Charm made against officers of the law and against persons intent on calling you out for breaking their rules.
Thanatomancy
TRUTH BEHIND THE VEIL
Cost: 3 minor charges
Effect: This must be cast over a sacrifice recently used to get a charge. How it works is, you ask one question, and you get a true answer no longer than one simple sentence, whispered into your ear. If there is some sort of mystical protection preventing you from getting that answer, the spell will tell you so, but will not necessarily
ONE MOMENT’S REST
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: One person in sight has the functions of a living person suppressed for an instant. The major effect of this is a few moments of cardiac arrest; the victim loses their next action in combat to the shock, and must make a Body roll every subsequent round to move again
Merely being hit with the spell is a rank-3 Helplessness check as you’re reminded of your own mortality; realising it isn’t something that normally happens as a result of cardiac arrest is good for a rank-2 Unnatural check.
ONE MINUTE’S REST
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: The target makes a Body roll, with the following possible results, in descending order of desirability for the victim:
Matched success – Target is stunned for one round as his heart briefly stops.
Normal success – Target is stunned for rounds equal to the tens die of the casting roll, as all his bodily functions temporarily stop.
Normal failure – Target is functionally dead for minutes equal to the tens die of the casting roll, after which he miraculously returns to life. He does not decay during this period and, being dead, is immune to death until the spell ends.
Matched failure – Target is functionally dead for _hours_ equal to the tens die of the casting roll, after which he miraculously returns to life. He does not decay during this period and, being dead, is immune to death until the spell ends.
In addition, the target takes a rank-5 Helplessness check on waking up. If he passed the roll, he takes a rank-2 Unnatural check as per One Moment’s Rest; if he failed it, he takes a rank-8 Unnatural check as this means he rose from the dead.
STOLEN VITALITY
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: Caster gains (highest of 2 dice) permanent point of Body or Speed, up to a maximum of 85, and (sum of dice) permanent Wound points, up to a maximum of 250, as the strength of the taken life flows into her flesh. Unfortunately, this can only be cast once per being slain for charges, even if you somehow got more than one sig from them (i.e. willing sacrifice, or stupidly split up a major charge into ten sigs).
Nice formulae
The PCs in my game DESPERATELY want something exactly like that location spell right now. And they’re not getting it.
The stolen vitality formula steps a little heavily on Epideromancer and Narco-Alchemist turf but still sounds appropriate for Thanatomancy. I’d like it a little more, I think, if the “permanent” buffs still had some sort of catch or limitation with the potential to take it all away again.
I’d also like some clarification of the “immune to death” elements of One Minute’s Rest. Since the caster will be perfectly aware that the target is only temporarily dead (as though he had a case of necrolepsy), is there anything stopping him from point-blanking the “corpse” so that the target returns to life in a state inconsistent with remaining so?
There’s nothing to stop you doing things to the body which will cause it to die for real when it wakes up, no. It’s just that it won’t actually _kill_ them until the spell ends, because until that time they’re already dead.
Of course, since the caster will be a Thanatomancer, I’d probably taboo him at the end of the spell for causing the corpse’s death if he personally did it. His pet zombies… sorry, demon-possessed corpses made with The Binding etc., on the other hand…
Oh yeah, because I was first exposed to actual game mechanics by D&D 3.5, the rules lawyer in me feels compelled to clarify:
Stolen Vitality has to be cast on someone or something the caster ritually killed in a way that didn’t break taboo. Which pretty much means a charging ritual. Those feeling that “only” having to ritually kill one son, daughter, sister, brother, whichever to get the effect is too zero sum are welcome to boost it to 2 significant charges.
(Furthermore the above list of familial relationships was meant only to emphasise how fucked up Thanatomancers are and how much harm they’d have to do to get sig charges, not imply you need majors instead. Apparently this is more interesting than revision.)
I like Stolen Vitality as it is; it goes quite well together with Stolen Life.
Seems to me that Stolen Vitality provides about Five times the benefit of the similar Epideromancer spells for the same cost. So yeah, I’d have to increase that to maybe 3 Sig Charges.
But I’ll throw in a Statewide manhunt for Free!!!
I like the one-sig cost, because I feel it better implies that you’re stealing life from your victim, rather than that you’re just buffing yourself with power you’ve accumulated. Perhaps game balance would be better restored if (a) the formula could provide the Stat boost or the Wounds boost, but not both from the same casting, and (b) the formula can only be used immediately after the ritual that gave you the sig, and not later down the road.
Going by the charge-up rates suggested in PoMoMa, Epideromancers are getting – assuming they’re obsessed enough to not bother with minors when they can get better than 10 minors in the same time as 2-4 – 52 significant charges a year, whereas Thanatomancers are getting _FIVE_, and that’s if they’re Ted Bundy. Add to that the difference in insanity and hardening between cutting yourself and murdering other living, breathing people, and I’m not convinced the “it’s a multicast of another school” is that big an issue.
The intent was indeed that Stolen Vitality would be cast over someone you’ve just sacrificed, hence the “one casting per kill” restriction. Further restricting it to the ritual that gave you the sig stops you from just hacking up a kitten ten years after the fact because you need more powarrz, which is good for GMs wanting to have really evil NPCs so the players don’t feel too bad tenderising them.
In terms of numbers:
Let’s assume our Thanato has his magick skill at 99, allowing for the most biased results.
The expected stat-up from Stolen Vitality is near enough 6 once you factor in that it’s the highest die (since the expected d10 value is 5.5 and thus silly), so more than 1 but less than 2 Epideromancer charges.
The expected boost in HP from Stolen Vitality, besides being deliberately higher to emphasise that you’re stealing the person’s living-ness rather than their strength, is 11. So, in the worst case scenario, you’re getting the effect of just over 1 of whatever the Epidero stat-up spell is called and just under 4 Body Like Irons. So, about 5 significant charges for an Epideromancer… and at current rates 1/5 of a year of Ted Bundy’s charging, compared to less than 1/10 the annual charges of your local The Freak wannabe.
EDIT: OK, the stat up is more like 7 per casting. Still doesn’t make Stolen Vitality worth more in terms of charges you’re likely to get without being arrested, at least not by a whole other murdered person.
I have to disagree here. One significant charge is one significant charge. If you start down the murky road of “School ‘A’s sigs are worth X many of School ‘B’s sigs,” then you open a huge kettle of worms. It calls into question the constant 1:10 ratio between minor, sigs and majors, and suggests that ratio should be calculated separately for every school depending on the assessed difficulty of attaining those charges. It suggests that significant ritual costs should vary by the school of the charges used. And creating a system of charge “exchange rates” would spawn huge disputes if any means of swapping charges between dukes enters your game.
If you think Thanatomancers have it unfairly hard in terms of charging, it’s better to just adjust the charging structure than to price formulae on the premise that their sigs are “bigger” than other sigs.
It’s stated in the UA rulebook that if you’re balancing a school, one way to balance out an easy charge structure is to make effects proportionately more costly in number of charges.
I don’t have a real problem with the idea that some schools have enough symbolic tension to do more with one significant charge than other schools, but in turn can’t generate charges as easily. Magic A is not Magic B.
To be fair, this is grounds for avoiding power overlap between schools (and, frankly, making it difficult to impossible to exchange sigcharges; minors I don’t care as much about unless the Holy Prole’s ascended) rather than making some flat-out better at using charges than others in a strictly comparable way.
I will say, though, this was revised from the version where Stolen Vitality gave you _one_ stat point in addition to the pile of wounds.
Got to say, it’s a pleasure discussing these things with people who understand math.
The charge-up rates suggested in PoMoMa are handy as a guideline, but a bit off from what I think most GM’s will encounter in actual game-play.
The Epideromancer takes a wound averaging about 11 points (Sum of 2d10, +3 for matches, 11.3 I think) that he can offset somewhat with first aid to bring the average down to about 10, for the sake of argument. So around 35 Significant Charges per year seems a reasonable expectation. Most importantly, he can never appreciably accelerate this, and nobody can really help him with it.
By contrast, the Thanatomancer can theoretically charge every 2 hours (with appropriate breaks for meals/rest), assuming he can procure victims, or they are provided for him. Granted, getting them may trigger the aforementioned manhunt, but Players, and Player Groups, are notorious for finding ways of surprising GM’s with their ingenuity. If the group is in accord (rare, but it happens) then the Butcher’s prospects increase considerably. With a little persuasion and some trading of promised favors he can probably get his buddies to dedicate a session or two to helping achieve his goal. After all, he only needs 20 or so victims to get to 250 Maximum Wound Points. At one a day, 3 weeks gets it done. And it might even be worth it if he has avoided leading the police/FBI to his front door.
So upon reflection, I think I’ll handle it like this:
Stolen Vitality
Cost: 1 significant charge
Gain 1 permanent point each of Speed and Body (which does increase Max. Wound Points), up to a maximum of 85, and 3 permanent Wound points, up to a maximum of 250.
Using this, he’ll need maybe 50 or so victims to Max-out Wound Points instead of 20, compared to the Skinner’s nearly 2 year minimum for self-inflicting slow-healing wounds 70-ish times. Still comes out about 1.7 times as much benefit for the charge, but I’m willing to cut the Butcher a little slack for the inherent risk of ruining his own life when he takes someone else’s.
I’m not telling anyone else how to play, I just tend to err on the side of anticipating power-gaming on the part of the players, i.e. if they can exploit it they will.
And because I neglected to say it before, excellent work Omegonthesane. Awesome Spells.
3.4 times the benefit per kill, if he can get a string of willing victims. I can see Thanatomancers frequenting suicide-pact forums, euthanasia clinics, and the like, both to be able to pretend they’re only killing people who want to be killed and simply to have a source of faster charging due to how willing sacrifices work.
‘Course, the really creepy image would be a Butcher having a child and explicitly raising them to be sacrificed on their Nth birthday (adjust N to taste), such as to get two major charges from the willing sacrifice.
Thanks for the commendation of spell awesomeness. 😀
I was going to crunch serious numbers about Epideromancers getting charges, then I noticed that just my number crunching was more than the entire rest of the length of this post, so I decided your result’s probably significantly closer than “1 a week” to the real situation. (Unless the dirty, magic-whoring, Self-check-passing epideromancer lets a friend operate on his self-harm once he’s spent all his charges, in which case it becomes massively easier to spam Preternatural Prowess & Body Like Iron since the effects don’t just fade away when you taboo like Narcoalchemy.)
I’ll keep the one-cast-per-victim limit. I neglected to state it explicitly in my earlier post because let’s face it, it was was already long enough.
Oh, I just got an idea how to tone Stolen Vitality down in a logical manner.
What if the increases were capped to the victim’s equivalent stat?
Making your stat-ups depend on the person you’re sacrificing sounds like a request for a book keeping nightmare, even given that seeking out the most appropriate specimens sounds awesome. If you’re going to rebalance by reducing the stat-increase caps, just reduce the hard cap from 85 to like 70 or something.
Honestly, I’m happy with the “1 Body 1 Speed 4 wound points” version posted by Orion_Magnus.
With “One Minute’s Rest”, if the person is functionally dead, a Thanatomancer could go the whole route of turning the corpse-for-the-moment into a “Zombie”. When the corpse uncorpsified, the demon would still be in there and possibly with a much stronger/deeper hold than would be normal (since, after all, it was there while the other person was completely gone).
Relatedly, in a situation like that where the soul (of which UA has many different ways of going, which is actually something I quite like) is going to be more thoroughly perturbed and have a harder time settling back in just right (like two people trying to share a small chair), it might be enough to A) give them a glimpse of “something” (afterlife, Statosphere, a metaphysical view of their surroundings, the “faces” of the Kindy Ones far off in the distance but still somehow clear in detail…) and/or B) Catch the attention of those who are appropriately sensitive to such things (adepts, certain avatars, and, again, the Kindly Ones).
“‘Course, the really creepy image would be a Butcher having a child and explicitly raising them to be sacrificed on their Nth birthday (adjust N to taste), such as to get two major charges from the willing sacrifice.”
*A* child? As in, just one? Much more efficient to have a kid every 1-3 years in continuous rotation, so older siblings take over some of the load of looking after infants and passing on the indoctrination.