If something must be done, it doesn’t matter if a few lives are lost doing it…
From the earliest days, people – well, thanatomancers – understood the meaning and power behind the taking of life. But few had the same respect for life. In fact, many of the greatest had so little respect for life as to believe their actions justifiable, when innocents were killed doing them. If you had great power, you could afford to kill the innocent for the greater good, went the logic. During the Second World War, a group of the Nazis took the logic the other way round, and thus a school of magic was formed.
There’s some debate, among the few practitioners, of what the central paradox of this nightmare of a school is. The more politically minded claim it is the transformation of collateral damage from a symptom of power to a symbol of it, changing unfortunate dirty business into a desirable power source. The more death-minded ones just claim that having power over many lives obviously means having power over many deaths.
Generate a minor charge: Kill between three and nine innocent people… not necessarily all at once, but all in one cogent event, like a single bombing or a single hostage situation. And we mean _innocent_ people; if you’re bombing Iraq, you don’t get charges for the terrorists, only for the bystanders caught in the blast. If you’re in a gang war, the people in the other gang don’t count, and even the police don’t count; it has to be innocent civilians.
Alternately, have a subordinate Collateromancer generate a significant charge under your direct orders; see the minor spell Following Orders.
Generate a significant charge: Kill at least ten, but no more than ninety-nine, innocent people in one cogent event.
Alternately, have a subordinate Collateromancer generate a major charge under your direct orders; see Following Orders, below. (If you were passing on a superior’s orders, and you get a significant charge from doing so, your superior will get a minor charge.)
Generate a major charge: Kill one hundred or more innocent people in one cogent event.
Taboo: Participate in an event at which innocents could plausibly be killed, but less than two actually are. You can go shopping, sure, but if you start shooting and no hostages start dying, bye bye charges.
Random Magick Domain: Interfering with power structures and the fortunes and beliefs thereof. For some reason, it tends to cost less to bolster a power structure than it does to harm it; presumably, this is the reason for the same bias in formula spells. This isn’t much good if you’re not politically minded, and still have half a grip despite being one of the most evil magicks in the world.
Blast style: Collateromancy has no blast. It’s not much good for affecting individuals.
Starting charges: Are you mad?! This whole school is meant to make major-charge Thanatomancers look playable!
Minor formula spells
For The Greater Good
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: One person gains the ability to automatically pass all Violence and Self checks they make for the next 24 hours. This can target the caster. For once, this will actually give them the relevant Hardened notches as if they had rolled the check fairly and succeeded.
Following Orders
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: This is the spell that lets the Collateromancers set up their hierarchy, passing power up the chain along with culpability. The target must be another Collateromancer, and must be your subordinate in a non-magickal organistaion – such as a lieutenant to a general in the army, or an intern to an executive. This designates you as their superior for the purpose of you gaining charges by giving them orders. It also allows them to transfer charges to you, and you to them, by a pseudo-ritual involving the charge-giver washing their hands.
Shock & Awe
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: One person can flip-flop every single roll they make for the next 24 hours.
Who Dares Wins
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: One person becomes very, very difficult to kill for the next 24 hours. They have ten times as many wound points as normal for the spell duration. This does make it really quite trivial for them to rack up enough injuries to die at the end of it, though. In addition, any attack that would instantly kill them at full wound points will kill them while the spell is running (otherwise you’d need to houserule a direct hit from a rocket launcher or similar…)
Significant formula spells
War Against Terror
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: Similar to For The Greater Good, but affects up to 10 people and lasts for 168 hours (ie, 1 week).
Red Scare
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: 1000 randomly chosen people within a targeted organisation or group, within the next 24 hours, spontaneously develop hatred or fear for an idea or (other) group chosen by the caster at the time of casting. Once developed, the ensuing hate isn’t actually magickal and thus cannot be dispelled.
Last A Thousand Years
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: Unfortunately, unlike the advertised duration, this spell does not in fact last 1000 years, but instead only 168 hours. It grants up to 10 people the same abilities as Shock & Awe.
Paper Tiger
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: Choose a group you perceive as opposing your organisation. About 1000 of them, randomly chosen by the spell, will spontaneously lose morale, cowed by fear of your organisation’s power, for the next 24 hours. This is a continual magickal effect and thus can be dispelled.
Attention unfortunate targets: if you don’t realise the resulting depression is supernatural, resisting is a rank-10 Helplessness check; if you _do_ realise that, it’s a rank-2 check against each of Self (you’ve been controlled), Unnatural (by magick), and Helplessness (and you’re resisting it).
The Longest Day
Cost: 3 significant charges
Effect: See Who Dares Wins, extend to group of 10 and duration of 168 hours. In addition, the targets lose the requirement to sleep for the spell’s duration, and only one night’s missed sleep will catch up with them at the end of the week.
Major effects
Turn a crushing defeat into a clear victory. Permanently dissipate a rebel cell overnight. Make the Third Reich hold together for 6 months no matter how much Hitler interferes.
Rumours
The entire War on Terror began because a few influential Collateromancers wanted to ride the sigcharge train.
The pilot of the Enola Gay was a Collateromancer hoping to create a world-spanning American empire with the major charges that would have resulted. That was made somewhat more difficult by the presence of a thaumophage in Hiroshima.
Wow. Just wow.
I’ve been working on an army of saucer-flying, Atomic robot building Fourth Reich Nazis deep in the Brazilian jungle intent on starting a Zombie Apocalypse.
I’ve been trying to figure out what kind of school their leader should have that is ultimately powerful, but immediately very weak. Thanatomancy just didn’t seem quite right.
But this. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for.
I thought I was doign unbalanced schools…
effects are incredibly powerful, gaining charges is incredibly easy and dangerously suicidal, taboo is incredibly easy to avoid.
Basically any adept PC would go berserk and impossible to manage with such a school : Violence gives charges which ease violence greatly. No consequence to assume, very little symbolic tension…
Maybe in a cosmic campaign, if your players are really slothy, that can spice up the story with a lot of action I guess. (If reserved to NPCs)
But hell, once I’m in, I can just grab a firearm, grenade, pipe bomb or whatnot, plant it in the subway and get away with 1S charge ? Without even claiming to defend a cause ?
sorry, I realize my comment might seem hard.
I do like the idea of sacrifice to a cause as a school or channel, but the whole school feels like calling for rampage to ruin any plot to me.
Sorry again if I worded my thoughts harshly, please don’t mind too much.
There’s nothing wrong with an overpowered character class. It all depends on who’s running the game and how the class is being used. Sometimes it’s nice to have a nearly unstoppable force in the story. Sometimes that happens.
This school makes a great compliment to the Monster archetype I wrote. I’d like to see the Collateromancer Godwalker of the Monster go to war against the Freak. That would be slightly epic.