Attaining true sight through blindness.
The Occulomancer (AKA Oracles, Prophets)
The world around you is contaminated with lies. But close your eyes, filter out the impurities, and you are left with truth.
The world you thought you knew is wrong. Everything you can perceive is a lie, or a half-truth, at best. And worse, this world of lies is perpetuated by the collective vision. So, the only reasonable thing to do is to slow the spread of this false image. Only by getting rid of the lies can you embrace the truth, the world for what it actually is. Or maybe you can make the liars themselves more honest and let you see things the way they were actually meant to be viewed…
Your eyes are the windows to the universe, but these lenses are flawed; they don’t show everything that is to be known about one’s surroundings, let alone the world. Worse still, sometimes they see things that aren’t really there. The Occulomancer strives to eliminate these flaws and create true sight by blocking or outright destroying their vision of the false world. Occulomancers come in two flavors: those who seek to improve their flawed sight and create the perfect eye, and those who choose to start with a clean slate. Regardless of which way you go about attaining true sight, all Occulomancers believe that only blindness can lead the way to perfect, true vision. While you may be unable to see what is happening right now, you can divine the secrets of the future and discover the nature of the astral plane.
Paradox: Practitioners of this school see the truth by obscuring or destroying sight, and they strive to eliminate the veil of our reality by crafting the perfect eye.
Occulomancy Blast Style
The Occulomantic blasts are considerably different from one another, due to the nature of their origins, but they both require the use of eyes to work. Oracles’ minor blasts are very subtle and especially traumatic, but they are also difficult to pull off. Their significant blasts, which come from an ever-changing spell, make quite a scene, but are simple to execute and aim.
Stats
Generate a Minor Charge: Obstruct your own vision for 4 hours straight; be it through a blindfold, or simply keeping your eyes shut for the complete duration (you could gain a charge in your sleep, but any disruption in your period of blindness, including a dream, will prevent the charge from being gained – roll Mind upon attempting to garner a charge before falling asleep; with failure meaning that you start dreaming too early).
Generate a Significant Charge: Destroy the eyes and/or sight of a large animal (at least 70 lbs, includes humans), or spend a 4-day period not being able to see (the no dreaming clause of the minor charge does not apply here.).
Generate a Major Charge: Destroy the sight of a prominent figure or destroy a unique eye or vision enhancer, such as the emerald used by Emperor Nero to watch the gladiatorial games, the Hubble Telescope, or the one of the first prosthetic/mechanical eyes.
Taboo: Using any nonmagickal means to improve or protect your vision (ex: corrective lenses, binoculars, even cameras) only serves to enhance the flow of the illusory world into your perception. Wearing any eyewear that does not act to block sight immediately violates taboo, and prevents charges from being accumulated.
Random Magick: Occulomantic magick deals primarily in sight and truth. Oracles can do just about anything to improve their view of the world and blind others.
Starting Charges: Occulomancers start with four minor charges.
Charging tips: Occulomancers face an extremely tough dilemma when it comes to how they want to get their charges. While sighted oracles get to use the full range of available formula spells, they tend to have difficulties gathering charges and getting things taken care of at the same time. Oracles who take the plunge and blind themselves can pick up a significant charge immediately and are virtually guaranteed 4-6 minor charges a day and 1 or 2 significant charges weekly, they miss out on many of the standard spells, including both blasts, on top of all the normal problems of blindness. Really sadistic occulomancers will realize that they have charges walking all around them, but making a lot of noise is bound to cut the charging spree short really quickly.
Occulomancy Minor Formula Spells
Telescope
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: The caster’s clear sight range is doubled for each charge spent casting this spell, as though looking through a lens. However, resolution for nearby objects worsens at the same time. The effect lasts for at most an hour.
Sharpen Sense
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: The caster can improve one of his senses other than vision for half an hour. The quality of the improvement depends on how many charges are spent to cast this spell. The caster gains a 10% shift to the Notice skill for each charge spent while the spell lasts.
See Through the Lies
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: The caster will know when somebody is lying to him/her for the next hour. Of course, that doesn’t mean the caster will become aware of what the truth is, but the lies will be made obvious.
Chilling Stare
Cost: 3 minor charges
Effect: Minor Blast spell, requires eye contact with the target to perform, but constitutes a Rank-7 unnatural stress check for the target if successfully affected by the blast.
Pierce the Veil
Cost: 3 minor charges
Effect: The caster gets an Aura Sight skill equivalent to the successful roll for a number of hours equal to the ones place of the roll (0 counts as ten). This spell even works for blind occulomancers.
Future Sight
Cost: 4 minor charges
Effect: The caster gets a vision of an event that will occur to him or her within the next week. Depending on what he or she sees, stress checks may still apply. The vision is more useful if the successful roll is a match.
Eye in the Sky
Cost: 4 minor charges
Effect: The target of this spell must be given eye-to-eye contact in order to cast this spell. The caster can then watch what the target is doing, from a third-person perspective, for a few hours.
Hypnotic Gaze
Cost: 4 minor charges
Effect: The caster of this spell can prevent one target from moving, so long as eye contact with the target is maintained and no damage is inflicted upon the target while the spell is in effect. It is vital that the eye contact for this spell is absolute; even glasses or contact lenses will prevent the spell from working. Of course, Helplessness checks apply here, depending on the circumstances.
Occulomancy Significant Formula Spells
Alter Sight
Cost:1 significant charge
Effect: The caster may permanently change one aspect of their eyes or vision (e.g. eye color, being able to see in infrared.)
Share Vision
Cost:1 significant charge
Effect: The caster can make any target have the same stress meters and stimuli as another person whose eye or sight-improving object he has at the time of casting the spell. Any failed or hardened notches obtained during this time will be applied to the target’s original meters after the effect of the spell wears off. The duration of the spell depends on the object being used to cast it, and each object can be used for this purpose only once: while something as replaceable as a set of contact lenses will only last about a day, an actual eye could last for as long as it is not destroyed.
True Seer
Cost:1 significant charge
Effect: The caster bestows upon a target other than himself a vision of the future, in the same manner as Future Sight. The caster is not able to see what is shown to this target, unless a matched or critical success is rolled.
Explosive Tears
Cost: 2 significant charges
Effect: Significant blast for this school, no extra effects. (The nature of this spell has changed greatly over time. When the spell was first formulated, shed tears would turn to gold. Until about a decade ago, the tears had healing properties, leaving several occulumancers quite shocked when their tried-and-true medicine started blowing their friends to smithereens.)
Petrifying Glare
Cost: 3 significant charges
Effect: The oldest trick in the book. The caster can turn any target with whom he or she has eye contact to stone. This petrification lasts for about an hour; while petrified, the target cannot be harmed, but is rendered incapable of action. Once the petrification wears off, the target cannot fall under the effects of this spell for 24 hours.
Occulomancy Major Effects
Assume features of the perfect eye: gain a vast wealth of knowledge, make a lesser spell or feature permanent, do something a famous eye can do.
There are a lot of things that I love about this, but I think there is a massive dealbreaker here: if an occulomancer blinds themselves (which seems quite likely to happen), then they can never again break taboo, but they keep on generating sig charges constantly. That feels kind of wrong. The other thing that I’m not sure about is, if you can’t use a telescope or a camera, what about mirrors? Also, what happens when you look at a photograph? Even if you’re not taking the photo, you’re still using technology to see something that your eyes normally wouldn’t be able to see.
Here’s my take:
Lars Kruger stares at his reflection for four hours straight, making certain that every pore is in its correct position, that this image is really his own face. Jessica King walks around all day with her eyes closed, only opening them to stare directly at the sun whenever she feels its heat on her face. For the last seven years, Adam Harper has been painting a portrait of God, and he lives in constant fear that if he opens his eyes to look at anything but the painting, then he will forget what God looks like.
Generate a minor charge: The Seer must study a visual image which they regard as deeply significant, without looking upon anything mundane for a period of at least four hours. During these four hours, any time the adept is not looking at the ritualised image, their vision must be totally obscured. The image which is studied must be a real, physical image which is perceived using the eyes – it cannot be a hallucination or dream.
Generate a significant charge: As above, but you may not look upon anything mundane for a period of at least one week.
Generate a major charge: As above, but you may not look upon anything mundane for ten years.
Taboo: If your eye is ever touched by an object that has not been ritually purified by you, you immediately lose all of your charges. (Giving yourself eye drops is probably okay. Getting a fistful of sand thrown at your face is definitely not okay.)
Merely seeing a mundane image is not a violation of taboo – as long as you’re not trying to charge up at the time, you can still look both ways when you cross the road.
Thank you for taking a look at this and taking the time out to compose a well thought-out comment! I do understand your point about blind occulomancers, and this was something that I thought about for a very long time when I was writing this up. Ultimately, I asked myself whether the benefits of having a very hard time breaking taboo (putting in glass eyes to replace the real deals would do the trick) would outweigh the cost of losing access to almost all of the formula spells and enjoying a large penalty on every action he or she would try to perform. Simply put, I felt that the answer was no. While it’s easier to build charges, they lose out on many ways to use said charges.
Regarding mirrors/photos: I think they’d be fine with mirrors, as they aren’t used to improve sight or protect it. Photographs are an interesting case. Hmm. I would say that it’d be fine to look at photographs, but not take them, for the sake of simplicity.
Your take on a charging scheme is quite neat, though the paradox is a bit less obvious. I think that W. Senter would be tickled to see what’s going on here.
On a side note, are there any spells that could use balance/flavor work? Charge cost is always tricky to determine, and feedback on that would be greatly appreciated.
I’m also uncomfortable about the charging scheme.
Firstly, that if you blind yourself and can’t use certain formula spells, there’s nothing to stop you from learning new spells. Afterall, all adepts can adopt their own spells to flavour their take on their schools. Since that’s not a deterrent, blinding yourself should introduce a new taboo. Not wearing sunglasses to hide your damaged eyes, or not having your eyes coverred at all might work. This is just something to consider.
Secondly, if you gain charges from blinding animals, what’s to stop you from vandalising a cattle farm and gaining upwards of 100 sigs in a night? What is central to the paradigm that blinding them gains you power? should it only work for intelligent animals, or animals who depend on their vision in order to survive? Does this need to be here at all?
Also, a comment on mirrors… we can’t naturally see our own faces. 2000 years ago, the closest you got to seeing your likeness was in a bronze mirror, on still water, or through an artists impression. A mirror gives you that power in a very artificial way. Where a photograph might be justified as creating a whole new image, moving an image from behind you to infront of you is rather deceptive.
(I haven’t had a close look at the formula spells yet)
I would reconsider the tone and effect of your blasts. Do they need to have blasts at all? They are visionaries, after all. What if they give someone the evil eye (for x minor charges, force someone to take a rank-x unnatural check) or possibly curse them (have some effect on their next roll), without having a direct damage spell.
Future sight fits within the paradigm, but does it feel a little overpowered for a minor spell?
Following your idea, but changing costs slightly: What if Future sight and True Seer are replaced with:
Glimpse of the Future
Cost: 1 minor charge
You’ve seen a brief glimpse of the future, and now you’re ready for it. You now have a hunch. It functions in the same way as a hunch roll with the value of your successful occulomancy check but with one exception: You can choose when you use it. The hunch expires at the next sunset. (You can cast this spell a set number of times each day equal to the 10s digit of your occulomancy. You can only have one hunch at any time.)
Vision of the Future:
Cost: 1 significant charge
The caster gets a vision of an event that will occur to her within the next week. Stress checks may apply to this vision, and the future is not set in stone so the GM may decide that circumstances may prevent the event from happening. For an extra charge you may be able to choose what the subject of the vision is (for example, who will win the Superbowl) or give the vision to another person in the same room.
minor spells:
See through the Lies A possible change to the current spell:
For the next few hours, anyone lying to you has to roll lie over your successful see through the lies roll in order to effectively lie to you. You have to cast this separately on someone else for them to see through the lie.
Significant Spells:
Alter Sight:
1 significant charge
You can magically alter your vision, lasting until the next sunrise or sunset, whichever is soonest.
For example, for the rest of the night you have infra-red vision, or for the rest of the night you can see through the back of your head. Anyone who sees your eyes while this spell is active should have to take a rank 3 unnatural check, and you can’t turn it off early (though you can wear a blindfold).
Petrifying Glare
This seems okay only if you have to share eye contact with them, not just someone who you have line of sight to (I was unsure of your wording).
(Sorry, still going)
Share Vision
This one I am uncomfortable with. It’s too powerful, too cheap, and you could do a lot of psychological damage by stealing a pair of glasses from a child. So; Why does the occulomancer have this spell?
What if the caster uses it to give the target her stimuli? Make someone believe in her Noble stimulus, fear her Fear and flip out at her Rage? Because only she has seen the true vision. Make it cost 2-3 sigs and last a day, and that’s a spell.
If you want to keep the idea of stealing someone’s glasses:
It could possibly require getting your hands on the target’s spectacles, sunglasses or something relating to their senses. Then casting the spell by returning the object to them, (possibly altered in some way). The spell then lasts until they clean, repair or discard the item (for example, contact lenses get cleaned every night, but glasses or sunglasses are rarely run under water unless you know it needs cleaning). The spell doesn’t have to use the item, but it can fit with the idea that these things make our vision prone to be altered.
A spell to temporarily alter stress meters would want to be a separate spell. Would this also give them target the occulomancer’s stress meters temporarily, or how do you choose the new gauges?
Both spells should cost more than 1 sig. I’d say it’s up to the individual adept how you cast the spell on another person and whether it requires a personal item or not. Maybe it’s a 3 sig spell, but using something personal relating to one of their senses reduces the cost to 2 sigs?
I really like the idea of an occulomancer formula spell for sharing their vision, but it’s complicated.
Tink, I am amazed that anybody would offer such an extensive comment on anything I’ve written, and I’m equally amazed that someone would make an account to make this many comments. But holy cow, it’s an awful lot to address all at once. I’m gonna need some time to take a look at all of that.
I will start by saying that yes, a clause on the Significant charging scheme should state that you can only get one sig charge per day via the blinding method, or that it only works on animals that depend heavily on their sight (I must say that I did not consider rural rampages when I wrote this up, we’re currently playing in a very urban setting, so that’s the mindset I’m in. Whoops!). As for the mirrors, there are so many surfaces that give off a reflection, from water to most polished materials, that seeing a reflection is easy enough to accomplish without a mirror. It’d be a royal pain for both GM and player to have to keep track of every place that has a mirror, or even who has a mirror on them. I might suggest that taboo is violated for using a personal mirror, though.
Regarding blind occulomancers: yes, the taboo would shift over to recovering their sight or covering up their damaged eyes; I didn’t make that explicit enough. It’s kind of funny how that makes it so that a blindfold is an invaluable tool for one set of oracles and a hazard for the other.
(More comment coming up later, but I really appreciate the critique. Next up: Blasts and Why Oracles Have Them)
I’m likely just dense, but what is the minor blast? And why has the significant blast changed over time?
Also, in the intro, you brought up the idea of making the perfect eye as a route to charging, which brings up another possibility, albeit one that doesn’t work with the spells, that of using tools and technology to expand upon the flawed and/or limited view with which nature has bequeathed us:
This is essentially a totally different school, but screw it.
Minor Charge: Spend 4 hours working on a device to improve vision.
Significant Charge: Spend 4 days working on cutting-edge vision technology, such as new infrared goggles.
Major Charge: Build a cybernetic eye that can see in multiple wavelengths or the like.
Hmm, yeah, the sig blast sounds iffy. Adept magick only works because of the power of the adept’s intense belief. If an adept really believes that their tears should have magickal healing powers, then they probably do.
That said, I don’t think that tears with healing powers or exploding powers really meshes with the obsession of “blocking out your sight in order to protect yourself from all the false and unclean images.”
If you want to use that particular magickal obsession to blast somebody, how about if the adept makes a cursed image? Take a photo of your junk and slip it in their mail box, or print out a photo of Honey Boo Boo and thrust it into somebody’s face as they’re trying to attack you. As soon as somebody looks at the image, they get hit with an awful migraine, and a bunch of blood vessels burst in both their eyes (or if it’s a sig blast, their eyes melt out of their face, Raiders of the Lost Ark style).
Possibly also relevant: The Cult of the Braille Encyclopaedia