Bridge Magic: a minor school of connection and obstruction.

Nickname: Tollmen (or Troll-men)

A bridge is the chokepoint of a journey, a narrow path between separated places. Most people treat it as a means to an end, a pathway. A tollman settles into it like a place, keeping it for themselves and impeding the flow of traffic to generate a flux of motion and possibility.

There aren’t many pontomancers out there, and the ones who exist tend to keep to themselves. They’re often homeless recluses. However, it’s pretty common for those who use wandering powers, engage on vision quests, and so on to find themselves blocked by a particular hostile pontomancer. It’s not clear whether pontomancers intentionally (or unintentionally) put themselves in the paths of pilgrims or wanderers, or whether hero’s quests just like bumping into these kinds of magical living obstacles, but either way the most common time others in the Occult Underground meet a pontomancer is when they want to get past one.

Generate a minor charge: chase someone off a bridge — not necessarily off the side, just away from a bridge they wanted to cross. An overpass counts too. You don ‘t have to chase everyone away, and if you chase off a group you get a charge for each. You can’t charge off someone more than once a day, and if you let them cross later you lose the charge.

This is a minor school. Pontomancers don’t generate significant or major charges.

Any bridge you charge off becomes “your bridge” until you next break taboo. You can charge off multiple bridges in a day, bur rhis makes taboo inevitable.

Taboo: You must sleep under your bridge at least once every 24 hours and nowhere else. Missing this sleep, or sleeping elsewhere, means you lose all charges.

Random Effects: Connection and separation. Pontomancers can connect separated things, or break those same connections.

Symbolic Tension: A bridge is both a connection and a barrier.

Charging Tips: Some tollmen get jobs as literal tollkeepers, or traffic cops working on a major bridge. They can generally earn 5-10 charges a day, but lose them again when they go home at night. Others pick an obscure bridge or pedestrian overpass and make trouble there. They usually live as groundskeepers, or camp in a tent as a homeless grifter. These types only generate 5-10 charges a week, but can keep them for a lot longer.

Starting Charges: 5 minor charges.

Minor Formulas

Bridge the Gap
1 minor charge

Pick a target (near or far) and speak aloud a single sentence to them. Your target will understand your message, regardless of distance, language or mental state.

Note, it is possible to send messages to greater abstract entities or other bizarre beings with this formula, but this is usually a terrible idea. You might temporarily damage your Mind score by the sum of the damage. You might earn their ire and have worse things happen. Who knows?

Goat Charge
2 minor charges

This is the pontomancy minor blast, but also a handy if painful way to move around quickly. When you use this formula, you instantly run up and smack headfirst into your target, anywhere within line of sight. You inflict damage equal to the sum of the dice roll, but you take half this damage yourself. Goat charge can transport you up walls or across barriers, or even into midair (but the fall will hurt.) You can target objects with this instead if you like.

Reveal Twisted Visage
3 minor charges

You contort your own shape into a frightening thing. You gain a “Hideousness” skill at level equal to the die roll. (You can keep using this to raise it – if you cast it while it’s already in effect, keep whichever score is highest.) If this brings your Hideousness above your Body, you look genuinely inhuman, which is likely to cause Violence or Unnatural checks in onlookers. Lasts until you leave your bridge, or if you are not at your bridge or have no bridge, until you arrive at your bridge and leave.

You don’t gain charges if you use this Hideousness to chase someone off a bridge, of course, but it can help in other ways.

Burned Bridges
4 minor charge

This formula is a weaponized topography puzzle. Your target cannot cross the same bridge twice — attempting to do so is a rank-9 Helplessness check. The formula requires line of sight to the target, unless your target is crossing a bridge when you use power. You must be on or near your bridge to use this power. Lasts until you leave the vicinity of your bridge.

No Barrier
1-10 minor charges

A handy teleportation spell. Walk across your bridge unobserved. You’ll arrive at any bridge (or bridgelike structure) that you’ve crossed, at any distance, somewhere out of anyone’s direct sight. Costs 1 if it’s a bridge in the same metropolitan area, 3 if it’s a bridge in the same continent, 5 if it’s in the same world, or 10 if you’re travelling to another world.

What You’ve Heard

The Troll of London lives under one of the more forgotten and abandoned bridges across the Thames. He’s an ill-tempered drifter who guards his bridge with a vicious glee. The local Occult Underground tends to avoid him, or to treat him as an obstacle and maneuver rivals into his way.