Spinal adjustments as magickal power. Would you like a free consultation?

Nickname: Spinecrackers

Something snaps in a person’s spine, at your hands. They feel dizzy, possibly nauseous, as their body is forced out of position. Muscles spasm, nerves jangle. Your healing is done.

Chiropractic is a form of medical service in which damage to the spine is corrected, over time, by controlled acute pressure. Massage relaxes the muscles, and then the adjustment forces the spinal column back into proper shape. The body reacts to this sometimes like a new injury: soreness and dizziness are common. However, over time chiropractors are able to correct damage to the spine and help the body stay strong and healthy.

Chiropractic is still controversial in medical communities: some medical experts endorse the practice as a medically sound way of correcting spinal damage, some claim that it can heal all ails, and some claim that it’s quackery and pseudoscience. In the past decade or two, chiropractic has gotten more mainstream medical acceptance, and these days most mainstream insurance companies will cover it.

There’s a little bit of symbolic tension in chiropractic in general — you shove to heal. But in your case, it’s a little more complicated. You shove to heal, like most chiropractors — but you really don’t like the people you’re healing. They’re customers, and you’re doing your job to help them, but you certainly don’t have to like them to do it. Somewhere in between hate and help, shove and heal, you’ve found some kind of tiny sweet spot of magic. It’s not much, but it’s a little bit of real juice flowing in there.

Best get crackin’.

Generate a minor charge: Spend four hours performing chiropractic adjustments. This can include other work — preparations, consulting, testing, and so on — but must include regular adjustment of patients’ spines. Also, as an odd quirk of the school’s symbolic tension, you can only generate charges if you feel negatively about all your patients: if you adjust someone you like personally, this resets the clock, and if you generally like people and have a positive view of your patients, you can’t generate charges.

As a minor school, chiromancy does not generate significant or major charges.

Taboo: You can only gain and retain charges when your back is in good alignment. You must get regular chiropractic adjustments yourself at least once a week. If you take any Wounds for any reason, you lose all charges and cannot get them back until all damage is healed.

Note: All chiromancy formulas and random effects (including the blast) will only affect those who are lying down on a chiropractic table and cooperating with a chiropractic adjustment. You cannot use these formulas on yourself, but you can use them on other chiromancers. You can use formulas on people you like just fine – you just can’t get charges from it.

Symbolic Tension: Chiromancy jars the body into place. It’s a forceful, shocking form of healing. Chiropractic disrupts the body to make it better.

Random Effects: Health and wellness.

Charging tips: If you have a job doing chiropractic work, and a bad attitude, you can probably get 6-10 charges a week. If you’re a student, it’s probably more like 1-5. If you’re an amateur or you’ve lost your license, you’d be hard-pressed to get even a single charge a week. The good news is, you don’t really lose charges often outside of adventuring.

Starting Charges: 6 minor charges.

Minor Formulas

Ease
1 minor charge
Repairs the subject’s skeletal system. The subject immediately feels reduced pain and greater range of motion. Over the next week, the subject heals damage from existing wounds equal to the result of the dice roll.

Mobility
1 minor charge
The subject gets a +10% check to her highest Body- or Speed-based skill, even if this brings her above normal attribute caps. Lasts 24 hours.

Excite Neural Activity
3 minor charges
The subject experiences a brief vision that gives useful hints or advice for resolving a single question. This gives a mystic vision and a hunch of top of it. The subject feels woozy and dizzy afterward, though, and gets a -10% shift to all Speed-based skills for an hour.

Comforting Words
3 minor charges
Talk with a subject while giving adjustments. Remove a single Hardend or Failed notch from a subject, related to whatever you’re discussing.

Step On A Crack
4 minor charges
The subject’s spine snaps — the damage like a normal spinal fracture that was left to decay for months. The subject takes damage like a Significant blast: the result of the die roll. Note that the subject must still be lying down and cooperating with the adjustment: this blast is great for a betrayal, but useless in a brawl.

What You’ve Heard

The founder of chiromancy is a surly and misanthropic professor of a chiropractic school in Ohio that’s peripherally associated with the University of Ohio. A bitter and angry woman, she pursues her healing magic out of sheer spite. She’s found herself and her school of magic caught in a three-way fight over the local Occult Underground; since her powers as mostly used for healing, she spends a great deal of time playing the two other sides off each other, hoping that they will destroy each other and leave her room to take things over.