A minor school based on waking people up.
Magic is a product of human consciousness, and the moment when that spark of consciousness appears is the starting point for all magic. There’s a reason why so many adepts talk about what happened when they “awoke to their power,” or why the Sleepers’ greatest fear is that the Tiger will awaken to the existence of magic. Through experimentation, you’ve found it impossible to observe your own awakening, so instead you study the awakenings of others.
The symbolic tension at the heart of egeiromancy (“rising-magic”) is that the adept seeks clarity and enlightenment, but is unable to observe it directly because they’re confused and half-asleep at the time. Instead, they try to observe other people’s moments of awakening, but by trying to control that moment, the adept makes most people grumpy and irritable.
Generate a minor charge: Suddenly wake a sleeping person. Egeiromancers gain nothing from watching someone slowly waking up: in order to control the magick, the adept must control the awakening. Also, you need to study your victim’s reaction to being woken (so if you call them on the phone and they don’t answer, you don’t get a charge). Finally, you cannot gain charges from waking somebody unless you’ve seen them conscious in the past, so that you have something to compare with their awakening.
Egeiromancy is a minor school. Its practitioners do not generate significant or major charges.
Taboo: Falling asleep robs you of all charges. Magic is a feature of consciousness, and while you are unconscious, your magic dissolves.
Random magick domain: Activeness, alertness, increase, ascension.
Charging tips: You share your taboo with Oneiromancy, but unlike those guys, you can always just get more charges tomorrow, first thing in the morning. Charging up is really easy. You’re often tempted to just wake up at 3 am and knock on all your neighbours’ doors, getting dozens of charges all in one go. You’re no Irascimancer, though – you’re not trying to piss anybody off, and if you were so inclined, you could try to find ways to wake people up without making them hate you.
Minor formula spells:
Mars Ascendant: (1 minor charge)
For the next hour, the target gets a +10% shift to all body skill checks. A man affected by this spell also gets an erection which lasts for the entire hour, and he will be constantly aware of this fact.
Psyche Up: (2 minor charges)
Until they next go to sleep, the target is incapable of procrastinating – if they genuinely want to do something, and they know that they’re capable of doing it right now, they’ll do it.
Adrenaline Spike: (3 minor charges)
This is the egeiromancy blast. It does damage equal to the sum of the roll, and presents as intense physiological arousal (sweating, increased heart rate, trembling, etc).
Natural High: (4 minor charges)
This spell makes the target feel euphoric for about half an hour.
Up and At ‘Em: (8 minor charges)
This spell cannot be used on a conscious person, nor on anybody who died more than an hour ago. The target wakes up and is fully alert. If they’re recently dead, they go back to being dead again after one minute. If they’re alive, they remain conscious for at least the next twelve hours, with no impairment penalties for exhaustion.
I really dig this school, but I think you’ve handicapped them a bit. Consider allowing them to get significant charges if they personally witness it. Knocking on the door is enough for a little boost, but being bedside while you wake someone up really helps you grasp and understand what the middle state is between awake and dreaming. Perhaps there major charge could be if they wake someone up who has been afflicted by some kind of sleeping disease. It would be rare of course, but if you worked in a hospital, you may have helped someone come out of a coma and into this reality again. Perhaps even say it requires that victim to have been asleep for more than a year or even longer.
After that you’ll need to dig up some really groovy powers for the significant charges. Something like forcing people who are asleep to become sleep walking zombies, perhaps being able to affect peoples dreams in order to subtly influence them. Finally for the major charge drops, consider waking up everyone on the planet or perhaps not allowing anyone on the planet to fall asleep for 24 hours. Could be a lot of really fun sleep/waking powers. I love the idea that the dead are just asleep. Perhaps consider a pet cemetery power that would allow them to awaken ‘sleeping’ pets as a follower. Given they would need to reawaken them every day, but it would be very fun to have ‘fluffy’ around forever.
…Significant charges are doable, I suppose. I’d say that just being physically next to someone is a bit too easy, though. How about this instead: you get a sig charge by waking somebody who has explicitly forbidden you from doing so.
(Also, the significant spell that turns sleeping people into zombies is called “Catching Z’s.”)