Doll magic – blurring the lines between toy and human.

Nickname: Dollboys and dollgirls

Dolls are toys, and almost everyone played with them as a child. They’re endearing and disturbing at the same time, because we can see a human being in them, but at the same time we can see that they are not realy alive. In this way, a doll is like a dead person: almost human, but not quite.

A pupamancer cares a little bit too much about dolls. Most people see a doll as a toy. A pupamancer does not. In the eyes of a pupamancer, every doll is a person – a safe, compliant person they can move and pose and change and control. The more that a pupamancer can see dolls and people as the same, the more safe and pliant people become, too.

There’s a lot of things that are like dolls that are found in most societies. Statues, mannikins, puppets, artist’s wooden models, and so forth. As long as it’s an object deliberately crafted to suggest or resemble a human being, it’s basically a doll to a pupamancer. Even a human-like clockwork automaton would be treated like a doll to a pupamancer.

Dealing with dolls is an inherently childlike act, and as a result, no child can become a pupamancer – it lacks symbolic tension for a child. Many pupamancers, though, have highly regressive behaviors, sometimes as a means of coping with childhood trauma, and sometimes as an escape mechanism. Others instead hold contempt for the idea that their dolls are childlike, and insist that they do not deal with children’s toys, but serious artistic models of human likeness.

Pupamancers are often simultaneously cheerful and callous, disturbing and charming.

Generate a Minor charge: Spend at least three hours constructing one or more dolls.

Generate a Significant charge: successfully impersonate an inanimate humanoid object for two hours. At least one person must identify you as a manikin (or robot, or whatever), no one can identify you as human, and you must be constantly visible to at least one person. If you’re ever spotted as human, or if you’re ever out of everyone’s line of sight, the clock starts up again.

Generate a Major charge: Create a full human identity for a doll or mannikin. This must include legal status, picture identification, and at least one person identifying the doll as a real person.

Taboo: You must always treat human-like dolls as if they were human, regardless of size or shape. You can’t treat a doll like an animate object. You don’t have to treat them kindly (“I am executing you for your crimes, Mr. Cowboy”) but you cannot treat a doll in a way you wouldn’t treat a human. Note that it’s your behavior that counts, not your thoughts and opinions.

Blast: Pupamancy has no blast.

Symbolic Tension: This school treats people like objects and objects like people. Dolls are objects that can be moved or changed like objects, but they’re also like people and can seem to show personality and desire.

Random Magic: Pupamancy mixes and blurs humans and inanimate objects. Often, it also relates to helplessness and control as well.

Charging tips: Getting 1-3 minor charges a day is easy; it just takes time. A pupamancer willing to take risks can probably wrangle a significant charge every few weeks. Trying for a significant charge requires craftsmanshpi and patience, and will often involve a lot of failed attempts. Going for a major charge is illegal and difficult and involves a lot of complicated endeavors and scams, and often risks violating taboo.

Starting Charge: 3 minor

Minor Formulas

Words From Stone
1 minor charge
Cause a voice to come from any image of a face – a picture, a statue, a reflections, or whatever. You can control what the voice sounds like, and what it says, and this formula lasts for about one sentence. The lips don’t move.

Sparkle!
1 minor charge
If you have a score related to appearance of at least 15%, you get a +10%. Otherwise, you get the “Cute as a Doll” skill at 25%. Lasts for one use.

Glassy Stare
2 minor charges
You become totally mindless and unable to move or experience anything for a period of time. You must specify a condition that would cause you to wake up – the condition would need to be something that you’d normally notice if fully aware. Until that condition is met, you are completely mindless. You won’t remember anything from the intervening time. This formula also ends after eight hours unless you specifically waive this safeguard. You still have all normaly physical needs during this time. Attempts to read your mind, posess you, discern your motives, or anything else related to you as a conscious being will fail during this time. You can only use this on yourself.

Porcelain Limbs
3 minor charges
A target of your choice is paralyzed for a single turn. The target unable to move in any way, and all their muscles go slack. This can cause a rank-3 Helplessness check, and if used at the right time could be very dangerous.

Wardrobe Fun
4 minor charges
Change any and all clothing that a single doll or person (including you) is wearing. The new clothing will be of an appropriate size, and you can’t add or remove any clothes, but otherwise the clothes can be whatever you like. This only affects clothing: if an object has a purpose besides cover, ornamentation, or object-bearing, or if it’s not something that’s commonly worn, it can’t be affected. You could change a dress shirt into a backpack or a pair of pants into a frilly skirt, but you couldn’t change a purse, wristwatch or a bulletproof vest. The resulting clothing will not be extraordinarily expensive (no more than a few hundred bucks) and must make a coordinated ensemble, but it can be stylish or embarassing as you choose.

Significant Formulas

Poppet Strings
1 significant charge
You control a single victim’s next action. You can’t control their words or thoughts, only gross limb motion and body posture.

Patches and Stitches
1 significant charge
Takes about ten minutes, and requires a needle and thread, patches, and possibly cotton stuffing. You repair human flesh as if it were that of a cloth doll, healing damage equal to the sum of the digits of your roll. You can increase the healing by another die by spending an additional minor charge, and can spend multiple minor charges to heal further. The wounded area will look like patched-up cloth until it would heal otherwise.

Pygmalions Wish
2 significant charges
Put a demon into a dead body or a flexible doll body. You can use a statue instead, at an extra cost of 3 significant charges. You summon the demon and put it in the body, and can then attempt to control the demon; see the Demon section for rules on summoning and controlling demons. The body becomes animated, and can then move as if it were a normal animate human under the demon’s control. Its Body score is equal to your roll, with a +30 for statues. This possession lasts until you sleep, at which point the demon is freed or dispelled.

Porcelain Self
2 significant charges
Requires naming a victim and telling them that you are cursing them until they fulfill a task, which you must name. Each day, once per day, you can cast the minor formula Porcelain Limbs on the victim, at any distance, without a roll, by spending a single minor charge. When you do, their Body score decreases by 1 as their body becomes more and more doll-like. If you miss a day for any reason, or if the condition is met, or if the condition becomes impossible for them to choose to meet, then the spell ends, and the penalty goes away at a rate of 1 per day. If the penalty from this ritual exceeds the victim’s permanent Body score, the victim becomes a dead mindless doll permanently.

Fantasy World
3 significant charges
Everyone with whom you interact speaks and acts in a cheerful, simple, friendly, somewhat vapid manner until you sleep or cease doing so yourself. People can attack someone if they’re immediately confronted with something they don’t like, but only one single attack, and they must announce it while they do it. (“You shout too much, Alex Abel, so I’m going to stab you with this knife! Stab!”) Acting in this way will feel intuitive at the time, and if anyone attempts to act in a way that would seem out of place in a children’s puppet show, they will instead be unable to move until they get back into character.

Major Effects
Bring a statue to life permanently. Become an unaging living doll. Remove someone’s personal traits surgically. Graft new parts onto people. Turn a clockwork person into flesh.