In the September 1957 issue of Venture Science Fiction, the American science fiction author and critic Theodore Sturgeon responded to the criticism that “90% of science fiction was crap”, with “90% of everything is crap”. He was right, of course, the vast majority of any field of human endeavor is low-quality dross. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the publishing industry, and it’s been around for a long, long time. While the avalanche of tawdry romances, badly-plotted mysteries, lurid crime and pulp sci-fi may be considered irrelevant – even offensive – by the literary cognoscenti, it serves a very important purpose: it’s the yardstick against which the best is measured.

All those little old ladies gorging on Mills & Boon Georgian romances, wide-eyed kids in the 50s mainlining pulp sci-fi, and bored commuters binging on lurid dime-store crime novels provide the fuel that propels the best-selling authors to fame and fortune. While critics might sneer at the gaudy covers and bad writing, you recognize where the true power driving the literary world lies. You just have to convert it into a form you can use.

There’s spirited debate among arcane scholars whether the minor school of Nugaphagy is an offshoot of Bibliomancy or Picamancy, which is only one of the reasons those guys don’t get invited to parties. While the unenlightened may look askance at your literal consumption of what they consider trash, you know it makes perfect sense. Well, it makes sense to you, and you’ve eaten more ludicrous ideas than they’ve had hot breakfasts. Maybe they should try a diet of tawdry Scottish bodice rippers with a side of jingoistic lost civilization adventure, and then maybe they’ll see the world the way you do. On the other hand, it may just be the all non-food-grade ink you’ve consumed in your quest for power and enlightenment that’s messing with your mind, but either way, you can’t argue with the results.

Ω: 0

Domain: Nugaphagy is concerned with simplicity, distraction, cheap thrills, obscurity, and wild improbabilities.

Generate a Minor Charge: Read a cheap (in the literary value sense) novel, eating the pages as you go along; you get the charge(s) when you finish the book. It must be a physical book, consisting of at least 200 pages, an actual novel (not non-fiction and or a short-story collection) that you haven’t already read, and cannot have been on any best-seller list. You must eat all the pages that contain plot, along with the title pages. Technically, you don’t need to eat the cover – and the covers of most trash novels have little to do with the plot anyway – but many Nugaphages consider the front cover to be a delicacy and eating it to be the culmination of the ritual. The back cover is generally regarded as irrelevant. You gain one charge per 200 pages consumed.

You must be invested enough in the novel to be able to describe the characters and plot to a (likely disinterested) third party. Speed-reading or skimming the text won’t get you any charges, because that’s not the way that novels are intended to be read. You can’t consume any food along with the pages, but you can drink a beverage, such as tea, coffee, vodka, etc., while reading to help it go down. A 200-page novel contains around 55,000 words, so at an average reading speed of 300 words per minute, that’s about 3 hours; with the overhead of tearing out and eating each page, it takes around 4 hours to consume 200-pages.

Taboo: Once you start a novel – even one you’re not eating – you must continue reading – or finish – it within the next 12 hours. And you may only read one novel at a time; if you cheat on the trashy romance novel you’re currently reading with some sexy pulp sci-fi, you taboo (and rightfully so, you shameless hussy). This means you need to be careful about picking up random books and flipping through them; if it’s a novel and you read so much as a sentence of the prose, you’re boned. Reading back cover blurbs is just fine though; they’re seldom accurate anyway.

In addition, you taboo if you read a novel that’s been on a best-seller list, whether you’re aware of the list or not; the novel itself knows, and that’s all that matters. So it’s probably safest to confine your literary consumption to cheap, tawdry, forgettable trash novels.

Starting Charges: 8 Minor

Minor Spells

Blurb
Cost: 1 minor
The text on the back cover usually provides a tease or summation of what you can expect inside the book. As such, it’s a useful quick and dirty divination into what you can expect in your life. Read a back cover blurb of any cheap novel while you cast this spell, and you’ll gain a Hunch that will apply to the next dramatic or exciting thing to happen to you.

Bodice Ripper
Cost: 1+ minor
Cast this on yourself (or someone else for +1 charge) and your… charms will appear to be larger, enhanced, or otherwise more prominent. This will be obvious to anyone you interact with, to the point where you gain +20 on Connect checks with anyone who would be attracted to your gender. The effect lasts for a number of minutes equal to the casting result, after which you revert to status quo.

Penny Dreadful
Cost: 1 minor
A good book can play on your emotions; so can a bad one. Cast this on a target, and the next piece of text that they read will appear to them to be horrifyingly relevant to their Fear Passion, and trigger a rank 4 check against the associated Stress. You don’t gain insight into just what the victim’s Fear is, but maybe you can figure it out from their reaction.

Publisher Remand
Cost: 1 minor
Cheap novels are often subject to remand, where unsold copies are returned to the publisher. Sometimes just the cover is ripped off and sent back in lieu of the entire book, to save on shipping. Cast this on a piece of text – whether an entire book or just a sentence – and the text will either vanish or turn into gobbledygook, as you like. The effect is permanent, though you’re still able to read the underlying text, even if it seems to have vanished.

Self-Published
Cost: 1 minor
With all the cheap novels you’ve read – and eaten – you’ve probably said at some point “I could shit a better plot than that.” Well, now you can put money where your ass is. Write or type out a page of prose that describes a problem or situation that you’re looking for help with, and eat it while you cast the spell. In a number of hours equal to the units of the casting result, you’ll crap out the page, reassembled and with the text arranged to provide some kind of insight into the problem you consumed. The resulting document will be surprisingly legible, through definitely not sanitary.

Writer’s Unblock
Cost: 1 minor
Paper is mainly cellulose and therefore chock full of fiber, which is great for clearing out the digestive tract, so you’re used to good healthy shits. Other people, maybe not so much; but this spell can fix that. Cast on someone – maybe that literary snob on the Metro who sneered at your armful of cheap novels – and they’ll void whatever they currently have in their bowels into their underwear, accompanied by appropriate sound effects (if they’ve recently taken a dump, you’ll at least get a loud fart out of them). There are few people who are okay with shitting themselves in front of others, so this causes them to make a rank 4 check against their Helplessness or Self, whichever is the least hardened.

Paranormal Romance
Cost: 2 minor
What is it with all those novels about hooking up with weird-ass supernatural creatures? Seems super dangerous; is that really what people want? Well, who are you to not lean heavily into the trope. Cast this spell and two things happen. First, the next attempt to summon, free, unleash, unbind, etc. a non-human entity in your presence (line of sight, if nothing else) is flip-flopped in favor of the attempt succeeding. Second, the person in your presence that you targeted with the spell (who need not be involved in the summoning, etc.) becomes like catnip to the nearest non-human entity, and it’ll focus its efforts on possessing, eating, harassing or whatever that person first, before it turns its attention to anyone else. The spell persists for a number of hours equal to the units of the casting result. If an affected unnatural entity is still around when the effect expires, it’ll no longer find the victim fascinating, which don’t mean it won’t stick around for other reasons.

Plot Twist
Cost: 2 minor
This spell can only be cast during an emotional, tense or otherwise dramatic moment, such as a Mexican standoff, Thanksgiving dinner, denouement or the like. Once cast, someone among the assembly who is opposed to you, will reveal – inadvertently or not – a shocking or inflammatory fact that will cause distraction, tension or anger amongst their allies, and reveal something relevant that you didn’t previously know. How things progress from there depends on the situation, but the effect ends as soon as the fact is revealed.

Pulp Fiction
Cost: 2 minor
Pulp paperbacks, such as hardboiled detective stories and erotic fiction, are the bread and butter of the lurid, sensationalized trash that you devour. With this spell, you can leverage the tropes associated with such stories, though you’ll need a prop or two, like a fedora and trench coat, or slinky femme fatale dress, depending on your approach. Dress the part, and you get to flip-flop your next three Struggle, Lie, Pursuit, Notice, intimidation or seduction actions. If you fire a pistol (and only a pistol) as part of one of the three affected checks, you are considered to have the Firearms feature. The effect lasts for a number of hours equal to the units of the casting roll, or until you’ve used the three flip-flops, whichever comes first.

Purple Prose
Cost: 2 minor
The more outrageous the lie, the easier it is to get away with it; huge, steaming helpings of bullshit just seem to short-circuit people’s critical thinking faculties, at least for a while. Cast this while expounding on something in the most melodramatic, flowery way you can (see how many adjectives, adverbs and metaphors you can cram in there). The spell won’t work for a simple lie; you need need to be spinning an overly dramatic story as part of it. The effect grants you +30 to Lie for the check related to the bullshit narrative you just spouted, but anyone who fell for it will wise up in a number of minutes equal to the casting result, or if someone who didn’t hear the story points out the flaws.

Can’t Put it Down
Cost: 3 minor
A novel can really engage your attention, even if only because you need to see how this train wreck ends. Cast this on someone and they must either become engrossed in the next piece of text they see, or suffer a Self-4 check. The spell causes them to obsessively read the text over and over and ponder its deep philosophical meaning; which is funny when they’re just sitting at an intersection in front of a STOP sign. Since they’re paying less attention to the world around them, they suffer a -20 to Notice and associated Identities. The effect lasts for a number of minutes equal to the casting result, or until the text leaves the victim’s line of sight for more than 10 seconds; so be careful about casting it on a target engaged with ephemeral media – like TV – as that text probably won’t be around long.

Mary Sue
Cost: 3 minor
To cast this, you need to establish yourself as having some kind of relevance to the current plot or situation, so that you can steal the spotlight (lying works just fine). For a number of minutes equal to the casting result, you can ignore any difficulty or penalty as long as you hog the limelight and approach the problem with smug confidence. If you get a chance to show up one of your allies and your Nugaphagy identity has a rank greater than the identity or ability they’re using, you can substitute your Nugaphagy for the relevant skill by confidently showing them how it’s done. However, if you try to one-up an ally in this way and fail, the spell immediately ends and you suffer a Self-4 check.