AKA Augurs, Birdbrains, Twitchers

Man has always looked up to birds. It has been so since the oldest of times, ever since he first carried up his gaze from the dusty savannah all those thousands of years and saw them soaring above him, and wished to be like them. For man knew, with painful clarity, that he was a creature of the earth, and the earth is a place of bondage, and, therefore, of suffering.

Bound to his earthly body, man is forced to toil each day to draw sustenance from cruel mud even as his soul aspires to greater heights. Bound to the desires of his flesh, he’s distracted by petty things which give him no joy. He’s bound to the rule of tyrants, the laws of society and in the ties of his familial obligations. Beneath all else, he’s chained to the ground, pulled ever downward, ignobly, towards the mundane, by gravity’s merciless chains.

In his despair, man’s spirit cries out to be uplifted, and so he looks up to the bird overhead and, in its graceful, gliding ways, he sees that which he most dearly wishes for above all else: freedom.

Freed, first and foremost, from that most fundamental of bindings that holds down baser beings, the bird is able fly up wherever and whenever it wishes. The bird recognizes no borders and honors no kings. It lets no obstacle limit its passage: the entire, open heavens are its to roam about as it pleases. The bird obeys no laws and is indebted to none. It is unburdened by memory, and therefore is unbound by guilt. It doesn’t dwell on what will come next, and therefore is unbound by fear. To the bird, in its freedom, there is only a singular, timeless Now, and so it knows peace.

Man sees the bird and, in its freedom, sees beauty itself.

And so, all the better to love it, to cherish it, to worship it – he places the bird in a cage.

STATS

Generate a Minor Charge: Ornithomancers generate a Minor Charge each sunrise for each unique species of bird that they own (so having five parakeets is just one charge a day, but having a dove, a cockatiel and a canary is worth three). Harvesting the Charge requires only a brief interaction with the bird – changing its water, giving it a treat or even just a few loving pets. Now, to be considered “owned” by the ornithomancer, a bird must spend at least three days in a confined space, during which the ornithomancer spends at least a brief period each day touching it and no other human does. Several notes on that:

1. An ornithomancer can choose whether or not they actually want to mystically “own” a bird once this initial bonding period is over – it’s a big commitment, and not to be made lightly (see below), so, for example, one who works as a veterinarian wouldn’t necessarily end up owning every bird that stays in their clinic with a broken wing (though, considering the typical Adept’s level of self-control, that’s a definite possibility). The three days of confinement under the ornithomancer’s care is simply the required minimum.
2. Once the initial bonding period is over, there’s no inherent problem in letting somebody else play with your birds. Of course, letting anybody else near them risks them being stolen or hurt. Nobody knows – or loves – your birds like you.
3. Legal ownership of the bird plays no role in ornithomancy. Twitchers can and do steal birds with abandon (not out of malice, of course; out of care! Few things can set their little hearts aflutter like seeing a bird in a pet store or kept by somebody else and knowing that there’s no way it’s being treated as well, as loved or as admired as it could be under their own, tender talons. And don’t even get them started on birds in the wild, all cold and hungry and in danger of predators! With them, these poor creatures would be lavishly provided with all the warmth, safety and food they could need!).
4. Flightless birds don’t count. The Birdbrain keeps an aviary, not a chicken coop. It’s not the dinosaur ancestry that they’re interested in. The unrealized potential for flight is absolutely crucial to the symbolic tension which fuels ornithomancy. A creature that could never fly in the first place has no freedom to give.  

Generate a Significant Charge: Ornithomancers generate a significant charge the first time they come to own a new, unique species of birds. One for their first cockatoo, then one for their first finch, then one for their first cockatiel. Each type of bird gives a significant charge one time once the “bonding” period is over, and then begins laying one minor charge a day (of course, just because they wouldn’t be getting anymore charges out of it is the last thing that’d stop the average Birdbrain from owning twenty parakeets – they’re a very sentimental School).  

Generate a Major Charge: Become the very first person in the world to own one of a unique species of bird. Generally speaking, this would entail discovering a new, live species and then capturing a sample of it. New bird species are being discovered constantly – 4 were identified in 2024, 5 in 2023 and 8 in 2022 – the issue is getting to and keeping a subject from them. Most of these new discoveries happen in comparatively remote places, and once a new species is recognized, odds are that conservationists, biologists, and other bleeding hearts are going to have issues with them immediately being captured by private weirdos. And, because the Twitcher must be the first person to ever own the bird, they can’t just illegally acquire a sample from an exotic animals trader – it needs to be them out there in the Guinean rainforest getting their mitts over it and shoving it in the (big, nice, comfy) cage before it’s contaminated. Technically, they don’t have to actually be the first human being to touch the bird, but they must be the first one to spend enough time with it to have “owned” it, even in the likely chance that whoever got there first was not a Birdbrain and wouldn’t care about it.

Taboo: Ornithomancers observe a duel taboo, representing the delicate balance between freedom and bondage which is the focus of their obsession. On the one hand, all of their owned birds must remain firmly under their control. If a bird ever flies off to where the Augur couldn’t immediately tell where it is and recover it (and, gently and lovingly, place it back in its cage), that’s a taboo break. Letting them out of the cage to fly around the house is fine – it’s good for their physical and mental wellbeing. If they make it through the window and into the open sky, though – that’s not allowed to happen. Knowing where the bird is and being able to recover it at will are both significant: just because the Birdbrain places a tracker on all of their pets (and of course they do) doesn’t help if they escape through the window because even if they know where they are, they can’t get to them. Conversely, it’s not a taboo break for a bird outside of its cage to be running away from them through the house (but why would it, the precious little thing?) and refusing to go back in because as long as they don’t leave, the Adept is still “in control” the entire time.

One might think that the simplest way to go about keeping the ornithomancy taboo would be to keep all of one’s birds sedated and on a nutrient drip inside a tiny cage with cameras pointed at them, but that’s where the second face of the obsession rears up: the potential for freedom must remain there at all times. This means that the birds must be kept healthy and happy. If, at any point, any of a Birdbrain’s subject birds becomes so ill, injured, or malnourished that it couldn’t fly off if they were to let it out and offer it the option (or becomes so depressed that they wouldn’t – and, yes, this is a real thing, birds can become depressed), they break taboo. Now, technically speaking, this still only means that the Adept has to ensure a certain, minimal standard of living for their birds – good nutrition, exercise, a clean environment, medical care and so on. That the typical Birdbrain will have all of their feathered friends accommodated in big, fancy, custom-made cages, entertained by an endless parade of bespoke toys and feasting on premium treats is purely a matter of choice.

Starting Charges: Most Adepts in Unknown Armies 3e start the game with 8 Minor Charges. For ornithomancers, there’s an added dilemma: they can choose how many birds and of how many different species to start with. It can be any number up to the tens digit of their Ornithomancer Identity. They’re assumed to have acquired these long enough ago to have used up the Significant Charges, but the more they have, the more Minor Charges they’ll be accruing per day.

Charging Tips: It gets exponentially harder as the Adept progresses. The typical pet shop probably has birds of at least a handful of different species on offer, and if you can tell your caique from your conure at a glance (which ornithomancers generally can), there’s a fair bit of mileage that can be very easily gotten out of that. Add-in other pet stores in the city and state and you’re set to be collecting Significant Charges (and establishing an income of Minor Charges) as fast as you can afford the car trips. At some point, however, the low-hanging fruit doves run out, and then things get much harder. Exotic birds are available for sale, but it’s not cheap and it’s often illegal. Furthermore: if a bird isn’t commonly kept as a pet, there’s a good chance that it’s at least in some part because it’s not a nice pet to keep. Owls are vicious, need a diet of live prey to remain healthy and happy, and suffer in captivity. Condors are tough to fit in the living room. Crows are assholes. If the Birdbrain isn’t careful, they might find themselves having to tend to a very finicky, delicate, needy little devil to avoid breaking their taboo. This is also a powerful argument against just buying as many birds at once as mortgaging their house will allow: the more birds you own, the more time, energy and money you have to constantly spend to keep them all healthy and happy. And that’s another thing about ornithomancy: it isn’t cheap. Parakeets are usually around 15-45$ to buy, but lovebirds and conures can cost hundreds of dollars and bigger parrots like macaws or African Grays can easily reach into the thousands (and they’re social animals, too; they’ll suffer and you’ll break taboo if you don’t buy them friends). First year expanses for a bird are another couple hundreds of dollars for things like medical checkups, a cage and some toys, then for each bird that you have you need to set aside at least 35-50$ a month just to provide it with a diet that won’t cause malnutrition. Seeds alone do not a happy budgie make. And don’t forget about medical emergencies: a visit to the vet costs 150$ on average but something like surgery will cost much more and a chronic condition (and, yes, birds can have those, too) are a constant money-sink.

Becoming an ornithologist is a good way of getting to regularly interact with captured birds without having to personally pay for it. Working at an aviary or large bird exhibition is even better. You just have to make sure that nobody else gets near your birds while you’re bonding. Think carefully before giving in to the temptation of becoming a veterinarian, a park ranger or a conservationist: rare birds will constantly be coming into your care and probably stay long enough for you to get a Significant Charge, but you’ll be expected to eventually part with them.  

 Symbolic Tension: Freedom is most beautiful when it is denied. To the Augur, birds aren’t merely animals: they’re living embodiments of Freedom, both physical and symbolic. A bird in flight is wasting its Freedom – it dissipates into the winds. But when they’re caged, their unfulfilled potential for Freedom collects around them, and it is that potential that the Adept can harness to work miracles. Ornithomancers are the masters of the golden cage: they truly, genuinely love, even worship, their birds – but their love is toxic and confining. They honestly believe that they’re doing their pets a favor by keeping them trapped because out there they’re not really enjoying their freedom. As pampered pets, the option to fly off seemingly always available but never acted upon, they’re a constant proof that the Adept is providing them with a better life than they could have on their own. They’re safe. They’re warm. They’re fed. And they’re somebody else’s. Ornithomancers “do freedom wrong” because they view it as a transactional quality: one can “gain” more freedom for their own by keeping it from spilling out of a creature that has a surplus.  

Random Magick Domain: Freedom and bondage, release and imprisonment. Ornithomancers are great at binding down others – physically, emotionally or even socially. They’re also quite good at freeing themselves (or, more rarely, others) of whatever ties them down: they lighten burdens and unlock shackles. This is a School of magick with a lot of options for dominating other people’s behaviors. As always, they can’t actually take away free will, but they can provide some serious incentives to do things their way. Compared to equivalent Schools, the compulsions it conjures are relatively weak, but they’re also broad and long-lasting. Ornithomancy Random Magick also deal with actual birds and with the physical and symbolic qualities of birds.

Ω: +1. Charging is quite easy, and the taboo is normally inconvenient but not dangerous to keep unless it gets out of hand.

ORNITHOMANCY MINOR FORMULA SPELLS

A LITTLE BIRD TOLD ME

Cost: 2 Minor Charges

Effect: People have always had a weird thing about wanting to talk to birds. They made up myths about it, like Sigfriend drinking the dragon’s blood, and King Solomon’s divine wisdom was expressed in being able to do so. It was probably the notion that, being able to fly wherever they want, birds must be seeing and therefore know all sorts of things, so imagine what they could tell you if you could only understand? This spell finally provides an answer to the question by allowing the Birdbrain to freely communicate with birds for minutes equal to the successful dice roll. The chirping, clicking and whistling of the birds makes sense to them, and they in turn can chirp, click and whistle intelligibly in return, which looks just as bizarre as one might imagine from the sidelines. The usefulness of this spell depends a huge deal on the intelligence of the bird you’re trying to deal with: owls, dignified symbols of wisdom that they are, are in reality fucking dumbasses whose world of the mind is basically limited to “is it food?” and “where is food?”. Crows, by contrast, are brilliant little buggers who can come up with complicated, long-term plans, spread news among themselves, learn and keep very long memories. Most birds you’re likely to meet are probably somewhere in between. This spell doesn’t automatically makes the birds favorably inclined towards the Adept and it certainly doesn’t force them to do her favors, but it does allow for making Connect rolls to get around that (probably by promising them something in return, which is probably food).

A curious limitation of this spell is that it doesn’t work on a birds owned by any ornithomancer for Charging purposes. Commentators speculate that this is because, if it did, they might’ve been able to hear them begging to be let out to fly free, and that’d be all kinds of awkward.

AUSPICE EX AVIBUS

Cost: 2 Minor Charges

Effect: The original “augurs” were a special class of priests in ancient Rome, whose job was to interpret the will of the gods as it was expressed in patterns of natural phenomena. An “auspice ex avibus” was a reading of the signs in the behavioral patterns of birds to divine hidden knowledge, which was one of the more popular methods. This spell, which requires at least ten minutes of uninterrupted observation of birds in the wild (a city park is fine, or even a large enclosure in a zoo, but not a tiny cage in the Adept’s own apartment), provides a Hunch for the ornithomancer’s next roll, or that of someone else who is there with them for the entire observation period.

BIRD’S EYE VIEW

Cost: 1 Minor Charge

Effect: This spell lets an adept touch a bird, and then see and hear anything that the bird would be. The ornithomancer is blind and deaf to their own surroundings while extending their perceptions through the bird, and the spell ends as soon as they wish to restore their own senses, or after a number of minutes equal to the result of the successful casting roll. It’s suspiciously cheap because not only is it inconvenient, it doesn’t confer any control over where the bird goes or looks for the time period. So, unless you’re sending someone a carrier pigeon from across the city to spy on them, the information you get is almost completely random and is likely to focus on breadcrumbs on the sidewalk. The alternative is to combine this with a casting of A Little Bird Told Me, provided that you trust your potential spy to remember how to follow your orders on where to go.

CLIPPING THE WINGS

Cost: 2 Minor Charges

Effect: This spell traps a person (or other animate being) in place for a few moments. They just feel their legs going weirdly numb and unresponsive for a few moments – it’s actually easy to miss as anything unusual in the heat of a chase or a gunfight (otherwise, it might be enough to merit a rank 1 Self stress check). The spell can be cast on anyone you can see clearly and lasts for a number of rounds equal to the singles digit of the successful casting roll. It has no effect on someone’s ability to talk, think, cry for help or shoot – only their ability to move around.

CRY OF THE HAPLESS CHICK

Cost: 1 Charge

Effect: There’s a reason they call them “ties”: they don’t just connect people, they keep them bound to each other – and ties can be pulled on and tightened. Cast on a target within eyesight, this spell invokes synchronicity to immediately cause somebody in the their life to call upon them to fulfill a familial, friendly or professional obligation so as to stop them from continuing whatever it is they’re currently doing. The gangster looking for the Twitcher inside the warehouse suddenly gets a call from the boss telling him he’s urgently needed elsewhere; the bouncer is called to break up a fight inside the club; the social worker has to pick up her crying kid from school right before she can enter the apartment; the detective investigating the trail of the white-bellied heron stolen from the research station is suddenly informed that their grandma is on her deathbed and wants to talk to them. The obstruction is always one that would stop the target from continuing on their current course of action in the immediate term – it doesn’t keep them from getting back to it as soon as they’re done dealing with it. Of course, the target is always free to ignore their obligations – but doing so forces a rank 3 isolation stress check.

HAVE A LARK

Cost: 2 Minor Charges

All people are bound by base desires. To exist in polite society, most adults are expected to trade this one form of bondage for another: that of interpersonal and cultural norms. That is a paradox which resonates deeply with the philosophical heart of some augurs. Others just want magick to help them get laid. Whichever is the case, this charm briefly releases the inhibitions of a target within eyesight, prompting them to act upon some immediate urge with no regard for politeness: to take their shirt off on a hot day, purchase something they know they don’t really need, slap that rude customer, or just let out a really loud fart. Resisting this impulse forces a rank 4 Self stress check (insidiously, if the target does give-in to it, they might find themselves facing a rank 3 Self check nevertheless if later confronted about it as an out-of-character behavior). Alternatively, a variation on this spell can be cast to provide a +20% bonus on one Connect check to convince someone to make an impulsive decision.

JAILBIRD

Cost: 3 Minor Charges

Effect: Not all prisons have visible walls. This weak but comparatively long-lasting spell harnesses synchronicity in order to prevent somebody with whom the adept has a sympathetic connection from leaving a particular, clearly defined area. Street lights will refuse to go green for them when they try to walk out of the neighborhood, and the alleyway will be blocked with trash. If they try to take the car, the engine wouldn’t start. Their bus or train will leave early, without them. None of these obstacles are insurmountable to a determined individual, but movement that would’ve otherwise been automatic will now require a successful roll of an appropriate sort (e.g. Status to get a new train ticket in time, Knowledge to fix the car, Pursuit to run through the busy street with the light still red, etc.). The consequences of failure at such a roll will, at most, amount to a sum-of-the-dice injury (so, if the target runs into traffic, the spell might cause them to get bumped but it won’t have them ran over). If the Birdbrain is trying to restrain someone to an area the size of a neighborhood, the spell lasts for minutes equal to the successful casting roll. If they’re trying to restrain someone to an area the size of a town or small city, it lasts for a number of hours equal to the singles digit of the roll. In either case, the spell ends immediately if the target makes a successful roll to break through the effect. If it doesn’t, the ornithomancer will be aware when the spell is about to end and can pay the cost again to reroll and potentially extend the duration again even if they don’t currently see the target.  

PECK

Cost: 2 Minor Charges

Effect: This is the ornithomancy Minor Blast. It causes a bird in the immediate vicinity to suddenly freak out – as birds are wont to do – and fly at a target within sight, pecking and scratching, for a total damage equal to the sum of the successful casting roll. Since this is a “natural” effect, it doesn’t rouse any suspicion of magickal foul play (and, consequently, doesn’t force an Unnatural stress check). It can, however, be seriously distracting – the target suffers a -20% penalty to any roll they’re forced to make on the round they’re blasted. Obviously, this spell requires that there be at least one bird in the immediate vicinity, but when is there ever not? (if there isn’t, because, say, you’re in an underground bunker or something, the spell automatically fails)

ORNITHOMANCY SIGNIFICANT FORMULA SPELLS

BURDEN OF THE CALADRIUS

Cost: All Charges (minimum of 3)

Effect: When times are dire, Birdbrains can free themselves and others even from the burdens of injury and sickness. They’re absolutely loath to do it, though, because it requires them to kill one of their birds. The adept must touch the target while holding onto the bird as they cast the spell. The target is immediately, miraculously healed of a number of wounds equal to the result of the successful casting roll, as if it was a reverse gunshot. Alternatively, they can be cured of any one disease – it can even send cancer into remission or hold degenerative conditions at bay for a number of years equal to the sum of the casting roll. It can’t restore missing limbs or organs, but little else besides. Whatever the case, the bird immediately dies a horrible death, accepting (or, rather, “accepting”) unto itself the weight of the target’s suffering. This inevitably breaks taboo and removes any remaining Charges in the augur’s system, but the magick does work before that.

CAGE OF UNCLEAN SPIRITS

Cost: 3 Significant Charges

Effect: Not even death is escape from some chains. This spell summons a demon known to the Twitcher (technically, it can also be used to summon a random demon, but there aren’t many reasons to go to so much trouble just to do that) and traps it within the corpse of a dead bird – optimally one of a species that has the capacity to imitate human speech like a magpie or parrot –  which has been placed inside of a birdcage. The bird returns into a mockery of life: it’s still biologically dead, but it is animated by the demon and stops decomposing. The spell prevents the demon from escaping the dead bird, and if the cage is built any good, there’s little it can do with its body to leave. The adept is free to keep the demon trapped in the birdcage for as long as they wish, and it makes for strong leverage with which to negotiate (bearing in mind that demons are still lying sociopaths who’ll say anything to get their way, etc.). The spell allows the demon to speak with a birdy little voice through the bird’s beak, which may be grounds for an Unnatural stress check if it starts talking in full, intelligible sentences instead of just repeating its own name.  Freeing the demon from its putrescent prison is as simple as opening the cage, which also exposes the freer to an immediate possession attempt.

DENY THE EARTH

Cost: 3 Significant Charges

Effect: This spell is, arguably, the reason that this School exists. The freedom from gravity is the one, archetypal privilege for which birds have become a symbol in the first place, and the one most primally sought after by those who look up to them. With this spell, the Birdbrain can, however briefly, free themselves of their earthly tethers and take flight. Top speed is about 30-50 km/h, depending on wind conditions. There’s technically no maximal altitude, but since this spell doesn’t last long and offers no protection from e.g. low temperatures and thin air, any attempt to use it to touch the sky is doomed to an Icarian failure. It lasts for a number of minutes equal to result of the successful dice roll. Seeing a person flying through the air is normally a rank 4 Unnatural stress check. Needless to say, casting this spell anywhere remotely populated is bound to give the Sleepers an aneurysm and paint a giant, bloody target on the adept’s levitating ass.

EGGSHELL PRISON

Cost: 4 Significant Charges

Effect: This is the scary, big boys’ version of Jailbird. Rather than synchronously confining a target to an area the size of a neighborhood, this spell can confine them to an enclosed area as small as a single room, and it can stretch the limits of believable coincidence quite a bit in order to do so. Casting this can be done from any distance but requires a sympathetic connection to the target. Once it goes off, whichever appropriate, enclosed space they currently are in by themselves or the next one they enter by themselves starts resisting any attempt by them to leave it. Doors will shut and refuse to open. Glass windows will not break even as heavy objects are thrown at them. Attempts to communicate with the outside will also fail: inexplicably, the target’s phone will stop getting a signal, internet and phone lines will fall dead silent, and people outside on the street will hear nothing no matter how hard they scream or bang on the windows. Attempts to contact the character from the outside will also fail, except those made by the adept themselves (all the better to make threatening phone calls and demands in return for freedom). Any attempt to escape will force a roll of some sort at a -30% penalty, and the consequences of even a success may result in result-of-the-dice, gunshot-style injury rolled against the casting adept’s Ornithomancy Identity (e.g. the window shatters but all the glass shards somehow end up in their eyes; or they try to climb out but end up having a nasty, several stories fall, etc.). The same roll with the same penalty would be required by anyone trying to free the character from the outside (e.g. by breaking down the door, which for some reason is unusually resilient). Helplessness checks all around are definitely appropriate, maybe rank 4, as well as Isolation checks if it lasts long enough. If trying to confine someone to a place the size of a house, the spell lasts for hours equal to the singles digit of the successful casting roll. If the prison is the size of a room, it lasts for a number of minutes equal to the sum of the dice. Furthermore: like Jailbird, this spell’s duration can be maintained indefinitely, for the cost of 4 Minor Charges rather than Significant ones per extra roll. Vindictive adepts (and what other kind is there?) have been known to keep their enemies trapped in their own apartments for weeks on end.

FREEBIRD

Cost: 1 Significant Charge

Effect: This spell removes a single, physical, inanimate obstacle to one’s freedom of movement. Handcuffs fall off; ropes are untied; locks click open (even electronic ones are disabled so long as they’re physically keeping a door in your way as opposed to e.g. the cameras on, although that might set off some kind of alarm). The “cheaper” version of the spell only works on things that would actually impede someone from going where they want. They’d work on a door to a room, but not on a jewelry box inside the room. If you want to stretch the symbolic tension to grant yourself the freedom to the diamonds, that’s 2 Significant Charges.

LOVEBIRD

Cost: 4 Significant Charges

Effect: They say that love can set you free, but the wise know that it can also be a terrible, insidious, suffocating prison. This spell forces a target to whom the adept has a sympathetic connection to suddenly develop an overwhelming love towards the spell’s beneficiary (which can but doesn’t have to be the adept themselves). This is not good, compassionate love but rather a toxic obsession rooted in feelings of hopelessness and fear. To the target of this spell, the beneficiary becomes someone whose approval feels desperately important and whose absence would be unbearably painful. To be away from the beneficiary becomes a rank 5 Isolation stress check, as would to refuse a request or otherwise displease them in a way which looks like it might cause them to leave. This spell is expensive to cast because, relative to the level of compulsion it forces, it lasts for long time – the sum of the dice of the successful casting roll in days. Beyond being ethically reprehensible, this spell should also be used with care because it can have dangerously unpredictable results: under its influence, targets (and not always the ones you’d expect) have been known to kidnap and imprison the subjects of their affection – not out of malice, of course, but to keep them somewhere safe where they’ll be well-tended to and cherished and never leave. The irony tends to be lost on ornithomancers.

THE RAPTOR’S DESCENT

Cost: 1 Significant Charges

Effect: This is the ornithomancy Significant Blast. Like Peck, it makes a bird or birds attack the target, which is distracting enough to cause a -20% penalty to any rolls made on the turn of the attack. Unlike Peck, it causes gunshot (result of the casting check) damage, and does force a rank 6 Unnatural stress check on the target in addition to rank 5 Violence because it tends to result in any or some combination of A. huge birds of prey not even remotely native to the area swooping out of nowhere to attack before disappearing B. entire flocks of local birds rising up in rabid fury to swarm the target and slice them to ribbons and C. the birds attack with unnatural precision and strength (e.g. trying to cut through a target’s stomach specifically to remove their kidneys). This spell could even, at the GM’s discretion, be used to cause damage to certain inanimate objects, provided that they could be reasonably torn apart or broken by a sufficiently determined colony of seagulls freaking out for a bit.

TORMENTS OF PHINEUS

Cost: 3 Significant Charges

Effect: If trapping the target in their room with unbreakable windows isn’t quite your style, a perfectly adequate alternative is strongly discouraging them from setting foot outside it with the promise of immediate, feathered rebuke. This spell, which can be cast on any target through a sympathetic connection, makes it the subject of the patient, directed malice of birds everywhere. Whenever the target is outside, any bird who notices them will go out of its way to harass them. In a typical city, the effect would trigger about once every 10 minutes unless the target makes Secrecy rolls to hide or (after the fact) Pursuit rolls to run. A failed roll might result in up to one die’s worth of damage, but more likely to involve torn clothes, stolen valuables, being covered in shit, and unbearable noise. Trying to drive a car while under the effect of this spell is practically suicide. The target could hide in an enclosed space, but the birds would just wait right outside it for them to go out, all the while staring at them evilly through any windows, occasionally pecking at the door, and cawing ominously. Stress checks (usually Helplessness, but possibly Unnatural if the effect is maintained long enough) might be in order. Like some other ornithomancy spells, this is a long-lasting curse: its initial duration is the sum of the successful casting role in days, and it can be extended with additional rolls each time for 3 Minor Charges. This spell is not behind the occasional story of a person who once messed with a crow and then spent the rest of their lives avoiding attacks by a hostile murder (crows are perfectly capable of being this vengeful on their own) but they’re a fair example of what it can feel like.

UNCAGE THE HEART

Cost: 1-3 Significant Charges

Effect: Guilt and regret can hold one down as strongly as any chain; fear and doubt form prison walls in the heart. With this spell, an Augur can free themselves or a touched target from the bondage of their past trauma by either removing or turning a failed notch on one of their stress gauges into a hardened one. The spell costs 1 Charge to turn a failed notch into a hardened notch, and 2 Charges to remove it entirely, and in either case costs an additional Charge to cast on another. It can also be cast in real-time in response to a failed stress check in order to immediately change it to a success.

ORNITHOMANCY MAJOR SPELLS

Command every bird in a city-sized area for 24 hours; permanently enslave someone such that disobeying your direct commands will cause them unnatural pain; trap someone in a house forever, foiling any attempt to free them until the adept’s say-so; permanently gain the ability to turn into a bird for 1 minor charge and back into a human at will; trap someone in the shape of a bird while keeping their mind intact; free someone of the bondage of their past and self by freely redefining their Identities; undo and thereby escape a past event in your own life

What You Hear

Some Birdbrains have encountered birds who, when spoken to, insist that they used to be human in a previous life.

Every single pigeon in the city is actually working for one, specific old lady.

Alfred Hitchcock was briefly the victim of an ornithomancer’s fury. So was Edgar Ellen Poe.

The Emu War of 1932 was caused by an ornithomancer with a major charge and an axe to grind with George Pearce.

Ornithomancy is among the top-ten oldest Schools that still have power.

An Egyptian ornithomancer calling himself “The Phoenix” has been alive since the 12^th century by using magick to break free of death.