A precursor to Simon Foston’s post-WWII Phobomancy
Aka: Bogeymen, Nightlings, Haunts
Symbolic Tension: The deeper you look into the abyss, the deeper the abyss looks into you. A good part of Phobomancy revolves around summoning nightmares and monsters, the attention of which gives the caster a good reason to fear the night.
Generate a Minor Charge: terrify one target to the point that you are their sole focus.
Generate a Significant Charge: terrify one target to the point where you have made a substantial change to their life in some regard through fear.
Generate a Major Charge: as for a significant charge, but for hundreds of individuals.
Taboo: Bogeymen can never offer or receive solace or comfort, not even by accident.
Blast Style: Victims of Phobomancy are plagued by heart tremors and horrific hallucinations.
Random Magic Domain: effects associated with childhood nightmares and monsters in the cupboard.
Special: Phobomancy works much better at night than during the day, all rolls are at a -10% shift during the day, a +10% shift during the night, and are neutral an hour either side of dawn and dusk.
Minor Formula Spells:
Suburban Phantom
Cost: 1 Minor Charge
Caster becomes invisible, and remains so as long as they keep to areas traditionally associated with nightmares (underneath beds, in wardrobes, dark woods, etc.)
Haunt
Cost: 1 Minor Charge
One target who can see you will be unable to sleep for the following 24 hours, any attempt to sleep is ruined by horrific nightmares of the caster. Causes a -20% shift from 16 hours since they last slept until they next sleep.
Gravewalk
Cost: 1 Minor Charge
One unknowing target suffers from chills, trembling, and a sense of growing unease. +10% shift on all notice and initiative rolls, -10% to resist intimidation and on any fine motor control (includes firearms attacks). The effect can be increased by 10% for each additional charge but is relatively short lived.
Curdle
Cost: 2 Minor Charges
Does hand to hand damage, and immobilises the target for the same number of seconds
Goblinry
Cost: 2 Minor Charges
creates a minor servitor from the nightmares of a nearby sleeping target. These creatures obey your will as devoted followers, but are small, ugly, phobic of sunlight, and obviously supernatural. They persist until the original target has one good night’s rest at the cost of one charge per day, but may return, unbound, the next time the caster has a substantial nightmare. Invisibility created through phobomancy does not hide you from these creatures, although they must continuously generate their own charges (as above) to live.
Shadowstep
Cost: 3 Minor Charges
Allows the caster to teleport from one location to another that they have seen within the last 3 hours and 5km, as long as both departure and destination are hidden from sight in a shadowy area. Anything electrical taken on the walk tends to fail, but creatures created with goblinry may travel freely using the same routes.
The Stuff Of Nightmare
Cost: 3 Minor Charges
The caster may temporarily utilise shadow as if it were a tangible, taffy like substance that reacts (to some degree) to their will.
Seed of Doubt
Cost: 3 Minor Charge
Any target afflicted with Gravewalk within the last 24 hours is subject to a -10% shift to Soul as their mind is clouded by indistinct whispers and paranoia. Seed of Doubt lasts for the next 24 hours. If cast again on the same target, and during the last hour of that duration, the cost becomes 4 Minor charges, and the shift becomes -20%. A third casting costs 5 Minor, and applies a -30% shift. Further casting simply maintains the effect. If the sequence is interrupted however, effects wither away by 10% per day and cannot be ‘regrown’ once withering begins.
Significant Formula Spells:
Nothing But The Wind
Cost: 1 Significant charge
Retroactively erases the caster from the targets short term memory as nothing but shadows, the wind, or a freakish dream if applicable.
The World Turns To Shade
Cost: 1 Significant charge
Instantly wracks the target with disturbing hallucinations. Is shifted by -10% for one minute. A second charge extends the effect to -20% and an hour, a third to -30% for 6 hours.
Harrow
Cost: 2 Significant Charges
Does firearms damage, and immobilises the target for the same number of seconds
Nightlings.
Cost: 2 Significant Charges
creates the higher of your two dice in servitors from the nightmares of a nearby sleeping target. Otherwise functions as Goblinry.
Walk The Night
Cost: 3 Significant charges
Allows the caster to teleport from one location to another that they have seen within the last 24 hours and 500km, otherwise as Shadowstep
I Am Become Death
Cost: 3 Significant Charges
The caster may assume the form of a target’s worst nightmare, whatever that might be, as long as they remain in sight. The effect is paused, but not ended, if they employ any of the traditional childhood tactics (such as hiding beneath a blanket, chanting ‘it’s not real’, etc.)
Paranoiac Blossom
Cost: 3 significant charges
Can only be cast on someone suffering from a -30% seed of doubt and is applied in the same manner. Allows the caster further progression up to a -80% shift with 3 (40), 4 (60), and 5 (80) significant charges. Targets whose Soul score becomes 0 are almost paralyzed through indecision and are incapable of forming new personal attachments to objects or people. Most often, they restrict their exposure only to their most trusted of compatriots, and even then social interaction is heavily strained by distrust.
Major Formula spells:
Mass Hysteria
Requires gathering of 2500 or more people, cause a stampede away from the caster toward any available exit if in side, or entrance if outside – afterward, no-one will be able to say what they were running from.
Web of Fear
Cast a permanent series of barriers around a single feature of the landscape, such as one large house and it’s garden, or an area within a feature, such as a couple of hectares of a larger forest. Sight of the area or building effected automatically applies Gravewalk. Approaching to 100yds increases the effect as if by an additional charge, and the same at 25 yds. At each application of charge, the approacher must make an intimidation check, and flee if it is failed.
Death Rattle
Requires a fresh corpse which died in terror.
Creates a totem which allows the storage of 5 significant charges. Begins empty. Can be charged by one charge every two days, starting two days after creation. Will not be discharged by offensive powers effecting the creator. Contents of the Rattle can be fully transferred to the owner in one action. Charges can only be transferred in or out when the Rattle is wielded in the left hand.
Okay, first off? There is no such thing as major formula spells. Major charge effects are indistinct and special, once you get to that level of power, the distinctions as to what you can or cannot do begin to break down.
Second, although this isn’t a bad thing really, you have 15 formula spells listed, not including the major ones. This breaks form, as having 15 formula spells imposes a -10% penalty on random magick.
Thirdly, I wouldn’t call this old-school. In magick, old-school is Ancient Greece, Egypt, Rome, etc. It definitely isn’t Post Modern, it’s really more of an 19th-20th century thing.
Other then those complaints, you did a passable job. I think the costs of some of the minor spells should be kicked up a notch, especially the minor blast, but otherwise it’s alright.
Hey there, thanks for the comments! In the order you made them:
o I’m aware that there aren’t major formula spells per se, but I didn’t feel like I could communicate the kinds of things major fear affects would do as a logical extrapolation of the lesser effects in a couple of words, I guess that’s a failing on my part, but it kind of fits in a way, because…
o the penalty on random magic is deliberate, because…
o It’s called Old World Phobomancy because it acts as a direct precursor to the Phobomancy write up that you’ll find earlier on in these archives. Simon Foston’s work begins in the 1930s, and mine largely ends at that point. It’s not intended to be post-modern at all, or Ancient, but Old World European, in the sense of a Middle Ages after the classics, but before America got going. Give Old World a quick search on wikipedia, and that’ll show you what I mean. In my mind, Old World magics are the kinds of things that have almost entirely died out because they’re outmodded, and limited, and harder to improvise with, but that you might still find (if you looked real hard) being practiced in the northern-most reaches of Finland, or in small wooded pockets of Bulgaria.
I’m aware that Unknown Armies is all about the post-modern magick, and I do love that, but I also feel that it can benefit from echoes of a bygone age. If you check out my Omniphagy you’ll see that it’s essentially a riff on Old World ogres and trolls, and that’s quite deliberate. I’m a big fan of the fact that the original mechanomancy write up harks back to a time that has to be at least in the mid 1800s, if not earlier. I like the possibility that Springheel Jack might have been, might still be, a mechanomantic nightmare, forgotten by its owner and with up to 170 years of killing in its pocket. Post-modern magick is great, but it’s even greater when it doesn’t exist in a void.
Having said all that, you’re probably right about the minor spell costs!
To better give you a sense of where I’m coming from, one of my favourite adepts in these archives is the Domestic Shaman: http://ua.johntynes.com/content_comments.php?id=429_0_3_0_C1
Seriously, it’s got to be very nearly the best possible combination of creepy old cat lady and Proper Mystick Powarz ever.
I enjoyed the school! I thought it as very interesting!