Maintaining dignity and purity through compulsive cleaning.

Nicknames: Cleaning agents, neat-freaks, Cathars.

This school is riffing on similar ideas to PrivateI’s Cleaner (eliminating filth at the source, by punishing the people responsible) and TC’s Eluomancy (soiling yourself in order to make the world clean), but I wanted to do something that’s just about good old-fashioned ablutomania. A lot of people are obsessed with cleaning, and I think this school is the kind of thing that a whole bunch of self-taught adepts would arrive at independently.

Symbolic tension: The Great Work of ablutomancy is to clean ALL the things, but this task is impossible, and every ablutomancer knows it. In the end, all things become vile. Every clean house will be polluted with dust, and every clean body will be fouled by putrefaction. Cleanliness is not an end-point, but a temporary and fragile state of affairs which can only be maintained through tireless effort. Entropy always wins.

Generate a minor charge: Dedicate two hours to productive cleaning. If something is already clean enough that your efforts do not produce any observable difference, you have to go find something else to wash. Rinsing one cup over and over again for eight hours is not worth four minor charges.

Generate a significant charge: For 24 hours, keep a large space perfectly clean when it would normally be soiled by regular use. If anyone so much as sticks a piece of gum to the bottom of a chair, somebody needs to start cleaning it up within the next few minutes. You can get as much help with this as you need, but you have to personally spend at least 12 hours on-site, ensuring that your standards of cleanliness are being met.

Some spaces might generate sig charges more quickly or slowly, at the GM’s discretion, depending on how much work is required to maintain them. However, if the space would stay clean for a whole day without your attention, then it’s not worth a sig charge. You only get your charge because the forces of entropy are trying to undermine your work, and you are defeating them through active effort.

Generate a major charge: Keep a large space impeccably clean despite the actions of an unhelpful crowd of people. If anybody notices even for a moment that there is a mark or spill which nobody is cleaning up, then you don’t get your major charge. Keeping a crowded baseball stadium perfectly clean during a game would probably do it.

Taboo: Ablutomancers lose all their power if they become noticably soiled. If someone puts gum in your hair or throws an egg at you, you’re not doing any more magick today. Also, if you’re injured and bleeding, you’ve made a mess of yourself and violated your taboo.

If you want to clean anything especially filthy, you can avoid breaking taboo by wearing appropriate protective gear. That’s what gloves and aprons are for, after all.

Random magick domain: Guilt, contamination, and the preservation of fragile purity.

Charging tips: Obviously, your first source of minor charges is going to be your own home, but if you can keep a job as a house cleaner or janitor, you can get paid to generate minor charges. Significant charges are much harder, but once you have a system, you can strive for a significant charge every day. However, whatever level of power you work with, storing up charges is risky. At some point, you will break taboo – you’ll just be walking down the street and a bird will poop in your eye, and there’ll be nothing you can do about it. The most powerful ablutomancers often make magickal artefacts – things like homemade soaps or perfumes – rather than carrying around too many charges.

Minor formula spells:

Blessing of Hygieia – 1 minor charge
For the next 24 hours, the target of this spell will not contract any diseases or infections.

Blessing of Aglaea – 1 minor charge
For the next 24 hours, the target of this spell will not go to the toilet, sweat, menstruate, or become sexually aroused.

Flawless Reputation – 1 minor charge
One person in your presence becomes incapable of contemplating anything unpleasant that you might have said or done more than 15 minutes ago. Their attitude towards you doesn’t change – if they came here to punch you in the nose, they’ll have no idea what you did to deserve it, but they’ll still remember that punching you in the nose seemed like a good idea.

The Home Advantage – 2 minor charges
You must be in your own clean home in order to cast this spell. While this spell is in effect, everybody present will want to treat you with respect. Anybody who upsets you must make a rank-5 self check. The spell lasts for one hour, but ends prematurely if you or the house are soiled in any way, or if you are rude to one of your guests.

Clean Conscience – 3 minor charges
By thoroughly cleaning the space where an event occurred, this spell allows a neat-freak to destroy all physical evidence of the event. The event must be something fairly uncontroversial – as a rough guideline, even if everybody in the world found out about this event, fewer than 50 people would ever actually do anything about it. Note that the magic only destroys physical evidence: witnesses still remember what happened, and the spell doesn’t create alibis.

Caught Red-Handed – 4 minor charges
In order to cast this spell, you must notice that a person is symbolically unclean in some way. You can compel this person to confess to something that they are currently feeling guilty about. Resisting this compulsion provokes a rank-4 self check.

Significant formula spells:

Scour the Soul – 1 significant charge
The target of this spell, whether you or another person, must endure an hour-long ritual of cleansing, which must be conducted in a room which you have cleaned thoroughly beforehand. When the spell is complete, all lingering magickal effects on the target are completely dispelled.

Without A Trace – 1 significant charge
This is the significant version of Clean Conscience. It can eradicate the physical evidence of any single event, no matter how important. Murder weapons go missing from police storerooms, security footage gets corrupted, and dead bodies wink out of existence. (One ablutomancer is trying to find the location of the Naked Goddess’ ascension, so that he can give the place a good scrub-down and destroy every copy of that disgusting tape.)

Cleaning out the Skeletons in the Closet – 2 significant charges
This spell compels the target to either reveal their darkest secret, with the following qualifiers:
– In order to cast this spell, your target must be noticably unclean. (That said, if you splash your glass of wine in their face, that’ll do it.)
– In order to cast this spell in front of witnesses, you must pay an additional 2 significant charges.
– The target does not necessarily need to feel any conscious guilt over what they are confessing: all that matters is that it is something they would be extremely reluctant to admit. (In some cases, it’s possible they haven’t even admitted it to themselves.)
– If the target tries to resist the compulsion, they must make a rank-7 self check. However, even if they resist, they know what it is that they were about to reveal.

Next to Godliness – 2 significant charges
In order to cast this spell, you must be in your own impeccably clean home, and spend at least one hour ritualistically washing and beautifying your own body. The effect lasts for 24 hours, but will end prematurely if you are soiled in any way. The spell’s effects are:
– Any time you would make a stat roll (Body, Speed, Mind or Soul), you can just say “I roll a 49,” or whatever number you want. You cannot declare a match or a 01.
– You may use your Ablutomancy skill in place of Initiative, Notice, or Charm.
– You are immune to magickal blasts.
(Instead of casting this spell directly, Cleaning Agents often prefer to make artefacts which perform the same function. Even if you break taboo, you’ll still have your ritualistically purified soap.)

Major effects: Cure one person of any disease. Rewrite history so that a single unseemly event never happened. Make one person and all of their immediate family sterile.

What you hear: There’s an pair of magicians, a Cleaning Agent and an avatar of the Confessor, who are offering psychological counselling to members of the occult underground. Rather than helping you work through your problems, they help you to bury them so deep that they’ll never trouble you again.