A.K.A vidiots, dromers, screeners

Rumours of this school’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

The television is a strange, powerful symbol in modern culture, in a way that few people recognize.  For one thing, it’s paradoxically social and anti-social: a public broadcast for private consumption, social and also isolated. It has a voice with no speaker, and an audience who deigns to watch without being watched themselves. (Or so they think.) Second, it’s inundated with small, unspoken rituals that give it symbolic power. Every day, millions of people with hundreds of miles between them spend hours watching the same sequence of images on different screens, offering up their time in exchange for light and word and sensation, absorbing a plethora of messages without truly understanding almost any of them. They schedule their lives around their favourite programmes like the holy hours of a monastery, preparing feasts in its honour for big games and binge-watches. The TV is an altar, a votive, an electronic prophet; it’s the voice of God in the head of the anchorite, made metal and plastic and plasma. This is what the Videomancer sees, where everyone else sees a square with funny pictures on it.

Videomancers harness the magickal power of television through a totemic relationship with a specific TV show, called their fetish show—“fetish” in the sense of mystical fetishism, not the sex kind (necessarily). The Videomancer isn’t just a fan of their fetish show; they are a spiritual devotee, one of the select few who understands its real power. Many view their chosen show as having some special occult or cosmic significance, treating each episode like a Zen koan or Gnostic gospel, latent with esoteric mystical truths for them to decipher.

As a Videomancer, you may have up to three fetish shows at a time; given the commitment involved, many Videomancers stick with just one. Each of your fetish shows takes up one of the Relationships on your character sheet—either your Guru, your Mentor, or your Favorite—with a Relationship score equal to your Videomancer Identity. This also means that you can’t have an actual Relationship in that slot. That part of your life belongs to the TV, now.

Charging & Taboo

Generate a Minor Charge: Watch a previously aired or released episode of your fetish show from start to finish, without pausing and without missing anything, not even the commercials. You can’t just have it on in the background, either: you must give the show your full attention.

Generate a Significant Charge: Watch a brand-new episode of your fetish show from start to finish. If it’s a show that airs each episode at a specific time on a set day, you must watch it as it airs or as soon as it releases to get the charge. If it’s a streaming-only show that releases the whole season at once, you must binge-watch the entire season in one sitting, with full attention and without pausing, starting as soon as the new season is available to watch. (You still get an individual charge for each individual episode.)

Generate a Major Charge: Star in an episode of your fetish show. A cameo or extra role doesn’t count: you need to have a credited leading role, and play a significant, memorable part in the programme. You get the Major when the episode finishes airing. Unless it’s a live broadcast, you also still need to watch the episode when it airs to get the charge.

Taboo: Fail to watch a new episode of your fetish show in its entirety as soon as it airs. If you miss the first cable broadcast in your timezone, or if your Internet goes out in the middle of your streaming binge, you lose all your charges.

Random Magick Domain: The internal logic of the television programme. That includes tropes and clichés, yes, but it most directly relates to the underlying structures of the media format: time-slots, video tapes, commercial breaks, broadcast networks, streaming services, the steps and stages of production, and so on. More loosely, this domain encompasses things like perception, isolation, voyeurism, and the careful segmentation of time.

Ω: 1

Minor Spells

Fan Theory

Cost: 1 minor charge

Effect: To cast this spell, you need to be watching television. (It doesn’t need to be your fetish show.) When you cast it, you suddenly begin to perceive hidden patterns and messages in the details of the programme you’re watching, gleaning cryptic details about your own near-future. You get a hunch roll.

Laugh Track

Cost: 1 minor charge

Effect: The next time the target of this spell hears you say something, they laugh loudly for two or three seconds. They can make a Fitness roll to try and stifle it, but only if they suspect it’s coming. This doesn’t affect whether or not they actually find it funny. 

Cameo

Cost: 2+ minor charges

Effect: The next time that the target of this spell is watching TV, you appear on-screen for up to 30 seconds as a seamless, diegetic part of the episode and deliver a message of your choice. Only the target perceives your cameo appearance; anyone else watching sees and hears the normal episode. You can spend extra charges to target multiple people with the same message, at one bonus person for every extra minor charge spent. 

Rerun

Cost: 2 minor charges

Effect: Whatever’s currently happening to you seems familiar, unsurprising, maybe even trite. This lowers the Rank of any oncoming Stress check or Coercion attempt by 2.

Film at Eleven

Cost: 3 minor charges

Effect: To cast this spell, you must be holding a blank video storage device, such as a VHS tape, DVD, Blu-Ray disc, or camcorder SD card. (Your cell phone only counts if the SD card is blank, and you can’t use the phone for anything else while the spell is active.) When you cast it, an invisible, intangible “camera” follows you around, filming your experiences and recording them onto the vessel. This “cameraman” instinctively focuses the shot on the details that you would find most interesting while watching the recording, whether or not you see or notice those things in the moment. The spell ends when one of three things happens: when the caster drops the vessel, when the vessel runs out of storage space, or after 22 minutes have elapsed. 

Flesh Wound

Cost: 3 minor charges

Effect: You can cast this spell whenever you’re aware that someone is about to shoot you with a gun. If it hits, the bullet always lands in your non-dominant shoulder, and deals damage like an unarmed attack. (Don’t worry about all the arteries in the human shoulder. It misses those. Every time.)

Narrowcast

Cost: 4 minor charges

Effect: This spell is cast in two parts. First, mentally attune yourself to one TV screen in visual range and spend the charges. (This attunement lasts until you break Taboo or until you attune yourself to a different screen. You can only be attuned to one TV screen at a time.) Second, place your hand on the screen of a different TV and mentally create a connection between the two.

As long as they’re both turned on, the second TV screen shows a live feed of whatever the attuned screen is facing, with both video and audio. The feed cuts if either TV is turned off, but resumes once both are on again. This connection lasts until you dispel it, break taboo, attune yourself to another TV, or until one or both TVs are destroyed.

Significant Spells

Enjoy the Show

Cost: 1 significant charge

Effect: The target of this spell must be watching a TV screen, CCTV monitor, or something similar. (A phone or computer screen only counts if it’s playing a TV show or hooked up to a CCTV feed.) For minutes equal to the casting roll, the target becomes inescapably engrossed in whatever’s on-screen. For that duration, they must make a Self 6 Stress check to stop watching, and take -40% on rolls for any action that would normally require them to look away from the screen. The spell ends prematurely if they suffer Wounds or face a Stress check from another source.

Suspenseful Music

Cost: 1 significant charge

Effect: For the next twenty-four hours, you hear suspenseful background music whenever someone is acting on the intention to physically harm you, with the volume and intensity of the music increasing as the threat approaches. For example, if a hitman on the other side of the world is getting on a plane to come kill you, the music you hear will be almost imperceptibly faint. If the hitman is driving up the block, the music will be slow, but fully audible and clearly tense. If he’s right behind you, or has you in his crosshairs, the music rises to a shrieking crescendo. 

Special Effects

Cost: 2 significant charges

Effect: This spell targets a replica of something—a prop gun, a fake door painted on a wall, a paper-maché statue of Adam Sandler, etc. The replica doesn’t need to be good or convincing, but does need to be about the same size as the object it replicates. For minutes equal to the casting roll, anyone other than you who sees the replica perceives it as the real thing.

A Word From Our Sponsors

Cost: 2 significant charges

Effect: To cast this spell, start giving a monologue where you name and praise an individual or organization that financially supports you. This could be your employer, your rich uncle, your sugar mommy—anyone who regularly gives you money or spends it on your behalf. As long as you continue your monologue, no one can take any action that would risk interrupting you. This means you can’t be attacked, grappled, or targeted by most spells. While monologuing, you can’t cast other spells, and take -40% on rolls for any action that requires your full attention, such as attack rolls. If you stop monologuing for more than a full second, the spell ends.

I Just Play One on TV

Cost: 3 significant charges

Effect: Pick a character from either the last TV episode you watched, or one from your fetish show. You gain a bonus Identity as that character, with a score equal to your Videomancer Identity. This Identity doesn’t get any “Of course I can…!” fiats and can’t gain experience, but otherwise works just like a Mundane Identity, providing Ability subs or other Mundane Identity traits suiting your chosen character. The exact traits provided should be agreed upon between you and the GM when you cast this: Dr. House might get Subs Notice, Medical, and Protects Helplessness, Buffy the Vampire Slayer might get Subs Struggle, Subs Fitness, and Provides Wound Threshold, and so on. This Identity persists until you fail a roll with it, or until you break your Videomancer taboo, at which point it vanishes. You can only have one bonus Identity from this spell at a time, so recasting the spell also replaces your bonus Identity with a new one.

(Be careful: if you pick an Identity that Provides Wound Threshold, exceed your usual Wound Threshold, and then lose the Identity, that will kill you.) 

Tragic Backstory

Cost: 3 significant charges

Effect: You need a blank video storage device in hand to cast this spell, like with the minor spell “Film at Eleven.” You must also be looking a target person in the eyes. A dramatic film montage of every time the target has ever failed a Stress check plays before your mind’s eye, and is simultaneously recorded onto the storage device. You face a Rank 2 Stress check in every shock gauge the target has at least one failed notch in, except Self. Although you don’t experience this in real time, it’s going to be obvious to the target and anyone else watching that something’s just happened to you, even if you pass or skip every check. (A failed Stress check in this state is easily mistaken for a psychotic break.) Anyone who views the recording from start to finish must also make the same Stress checks that you did when you cast it. If the target views the recording, it’s a single Helplessness 10 Stress check. It could make for very good blackmail material, especially if the target failed a Stress check while doing something illegal or illicit.

Life Imitates Art

Cost: 4 significant charges

Effect: To cast this spell, you need to have video footage that you personally recorded, featuring a single target person and no one else, and the footage needs to be playing. This spell turns said footage into a mystical proxy for the target, allowing you to manipulate them by manipulating the footage. Here are some things this can do:

• If you pause the footage, the target freezes in place, unable to voluntarily move. They can still make involuntary movements (like breathing), and other people can still move them by pushing them or picking them up.
• If you slow down or fast-forward the footage, the target’s own movements slow down or speed up to match. This can impose a shift of up to 40% in either direction on Pursuit rolls for foot chases, Fitness rolls for combat movement, or any other roll where speed of motion influences the outcome.
• While rewinding the footage, the target can only move or speak backwards.
• If you edit the footage beforehand to change the target’s appearance, a corresponding change appears on their body while the footage is playing. For example, if you edit it so that it looks like the target has no hands, the target’s hands vanish from their body, and they won’t be able to grab or hold anything. These edits don’t inflict or heal Wounds, and reverse when the spell ends.
• If an Adept casts a spell on the footage, the spell affects the target.

Seeing this spell used on someone else unexpectedly is an Unnatural 2–4 Stress check. For the target themselves, it’s a Rank 5-7 Stress check in either Unnatural or Helplessness, whichever’s less hardened. The spell ends when the playback is shut off, when the proxy footage reaches the end of its run-time, or after 22 minutes have passed.

Major Charge Effects

Make a popular TV character into a real person you can hang out with. Gain the power to travel through any two television screens on Earth, girl from The Ring style, as long as they’re both playing the same episode of the same show. Stop yourself from aging as long as The Simpsons stays on the air. Erase a classic TV show from history, or retroactively invent a new one that everyone else remembers as having always existed.