AKA Blinkers, Lightbulbs, Sunshines

There’s a reason they call it “enlightenment”.

Since time immemorial, man has acknowledged that reality’s boundaries are drawn by the light. That which is untouched by light’s existence is suspect. Darkness is the uncolor of chaos and uncertainty. Night is the time of monsters and fear. Dwell in the light, for the light is life. Open your eyes to the light, for the light shines over all that which is true, for light is truth and truth, light itself. Light is life: not just symbolically, but practically as well. Living things die in the absence of light. The grain doesn’t grow in the dark, winter months. The sun is the source of sustenance. Wolves and worse circle around the boundary of goodness and realness established by the fire of the camp. Light is the virtue of Ahura Mazda, God’s presence in the Burning Bush and the radiance of the Buddha which draw order from chaos.  

See the light. Go to the light. Open yourself to the light. Glow with content. Be bright.

We’ve known that since our ancestors’ ancestors looked to the light to gauge if it’s right time to climb down the tree. Now, our enlightenment has only grown. Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein and Planck, in their brilliance, have taught us that light not only suffuses the universe – it is the most fundamental building block of energy and matter. Light transcends time and bends lesser laws of reality. The stars above shine with a light from the birth of the universe. Little bits of light are sublimate, cosmologic bodhisattvas simultaneously existent and nonexistent, here and there, past and present and future. Nowhere is truly beyond the light, for all that we are and is around us are merely complex configurations of dancing, vibrating, shimmering light.

To worship the light is man’s default state, whether a sun-priest of a neolithic cult buried under African sands long ago or a quantum physicist at the forefront of scientific advancement. Some, however, are not content with mere, mundane worship.

To some, truly basking in light means taking it into oneself. To have one’s vision filled with the purity of light until everything else is burnt away and grows dim in comparison. To attain the highest levels of enlightenment, it is not enough to have enough light to see. One must take in enough light to see nothing at all.

Photomancers practice the magick light. All-consuming, all-illuminating, blinding light. They claim to be one of the oldest Schools of magick in existence (a claim shared by countless others and almost undoubtedly just as wrong), as well as one of the flashiest (which, in a very typical fashion, they confuse with “powerful”). Nowadays, not unexpectedly (to anyone but themselves), they’re a School very much in decline. They’re not going to go extinct any time soon, because Schools of magick can’t really ever “go extinct” so long as there remain people who could obsess over their subject. Still, their numbers are few and dwindling. You almost only ever hear about them in the context of them having gotten their asses kicked. Sometimes it’s because they went practicing their flashy, spectacular, extremely unsubtle magick in public and pissed off some mundane organization. Other times it’s because they went practicing their flashy, spectacular, extremely unsubtle magick in public and pissed off the Sleepers.

At the moment, the School is divided. A significant but shrinking portion are an aging Old Guard (who, naturally, refer to themselves as the Keepers of the Light and talk incessantly about what darkness will descend once they’re gone) who’ve been at it practically the same way since at least the invention of the lightbulb. They’re stuffy and ritualistic to the point of being often confused with thaumaturges, spout a lot of old-school sounding mystical nonsense and give mythologically-themed names to all of their spells. The other, growing portion of the School is made up of tech-savvy whippersnappers with dark shades and/or goggles on who want to shoot lasers out their eyes. They sometimes like to call themselves “Photons”. One of the surest ways to get either group even angrier than mentioning the other is to confuse them with cameratheurges (which happens constantly, and, frankly, the cameratheurges aren’t crazy about it themselves). 

STATS

Generate a Minor Charge: Give yourself real, short-term vision impairment via means of overwhelming light. Throwing a flashbang at your feet doesn’t cut it – the afterimages and blind spots go away in about a minute (it can be as many as ten minutes or so if it happens all of a sudden in the dark, when your pupils are dilated – but as we’ll soon discuss, photomancers can’t charge at all if that’s the case). You’re looking for the sort of blurred vision, gray spots and color changes that last at least for a few hours. Medically speaking, what you’re aiming to cause yourself is probably either a photochemical retinal injury (meaning that chemical reactions in the photoreceptors in the retinal pigment epithelium are burning it, which is, classically, what happens if you stare at an eclipse without protection) or photokeratitis (commonly described as a “sunburn” of the corneal epithelium caused by UV light, often caused by ignoring workplace safety procedures in certain industries).

Using the common methods of staring at a field of shining snow or into a high-powered LED diode (the kind they use on movie sets or football fields) or working with an arc forge without a welding mask, it only takes a couple minutes of exposure to fuck up your eyes. However, you won’t be feeling it, and you won’t be seeing any charges, until the symptoms occur. This tends to happen something like 6-12 hours later, when you begin suffering from blurry vision, visual artifacts, burning in your eyes, a searing headache and photosensitivity (though Blinkers deeply resent the notion that this is something you “suffer” from – light is good; more light in your head is better). It tends to last about 1-2 days, less with appropriate treatment (cold compress over the eyes, dilating eyedrops, maybe anesthetizing drops to relax the muscles around the eyeball). You get the charge when you stop seeing right. Mechanically, after a period of irresponsible behavior with your eyes, the GM rolls four dice. They then pick any two of them and sum them up: that’s how many hours it’ll be before you start seeing everything in high contrast and can claim your minor charge. The sum of all four dice combined is how many hours you’re going to be suffering from a -10% penalty to any activity which the GM thinks is significantly dependent on eyesight, which should absolutely include but be far from limited to any and all kinds of combat. Basically, you don’t want a sunshine to be driving your car, performing surgery on you or looking after your kid in a crowded theme park.

If any three of the four dice the GM rolled came up the same number (to save you the calculation: that’s a 5.4% chance), you’ve given yourself permanent damage. On the bright side (and photomancers love the bright side), you get a significant charge instead of a minor one. On the dark side, 1% out of those 10% penalty-to-a-ton-of-important-rolls you’ve given yourself simply never goes away again, short of maybe specialized medical treatments (photocoagulative laser surgery is a common one; these treatments usually cost 2,000$-4,000$ each time, can only be performed by specialists using specialist equipment, tend to include 2-5 months waiting time, remove all accrued penalties, and are going to start raising questions about your mental competence if you have them too often due to what are clearly self-inflicted injuries). This penalty caps at -30%, which indicates total blindness and means the GM probably shouldn’t be letting you even try some things (but not a lot of others – blind people can do a lot of stuff sighted people would never think). Eye surgery probably won’t cut it anymore by when you get past the permanent -20% point or so, and definitely not once you’ve gone bat-blind.

If you flash yourself more than once in the same period, the GM only rolls two dice. Take a minor charge immediately (unless they match, in which case you get a significant charge and lose another 1% off of your vision), then add the sum to the number of hours you can’t see. You don’t get additional penalties. Your eyesight only gets so acutely bad, but you’re damaging your recovery and increasing the odds of permanent damage. The maximum amount of minor charges a blinker can get this way per day is equal to the tens digit of their Photomancy Identity. Note that none of this is a terribly accurate simulation of reality, and if it offends the GM of the game where people cut themselves to gain shapeshifting powers they’re free to come up with an even more cumbersome system.

Generate a Significant Charge: There are two methods for that: slow and steadily blinding, and fast and highly illegal. The first one is to give yourself longer-term to permanent vision damage through light. This most commonly happens by happy coincidence while the sunshine is aiming for a minor charge. The human eye is a phenomenally complex structure; you can abuse it in any number of ways, and it’s often very hard to predict when it’d exhibit its at times fantastic ability to self-repair and when it’ll stay fucked.

Alternatively, you could deliberately aim to give yourself a photochemical or thermal eye injury. The simplest method is to look at the sun without blinking for a couple of minutes, or less during an eclipse. For the unenlightened, this would probably require a fitness check to fight the instinct to close their eyes and/or avert their face, but it’s assumed that all photomancers know better. A modern alternative is to shine a lower powered laser pointer (class 2 or 3R) in your eyes. The GM rolls two dice and sums them up: that’s as many hours before you begin suffering the familiar -10% penalty to your vision. If the dice match, -1% of this becomes a permanent penalty. Unlike the -10% penalty from the stuff that gives you a minor charge, though, these don’t go away in a matter of hours: they last for weeks or months. Basically, you’re not getting rid of them in the span of a typical Unknown Armies period of action. You need to wait for some downtime. You can’t get another significant charge that way except by giving yourself more, small permanent injuries, so if you’re interested in that keep blasting yourself in the eyes with the laser.

The other way of gaining a significant charge is blinding at least five other people simultaneously, at least briefly (just a camera flash in a dark room wouldn’t suffice, even if photomancers could enter dark rooms; it needs to be at least a strong enough flash for there to be a hazard of injury to the eye, though it doesn’t have to be to the extant necessary for self-harm charges). Stun grenades are optimal for that purpose, as well as being illegal for civilians to possess in the US. Using one, practically by design, is very, very notable and very likely to bring over the police. So would, for that matter, kidnapping a small classroom’s worth of children, tying them to chairs with A Clockwork Orange contraptions on their heads and shining a spotlight at them.

Generate a Major Charge: Once again: two ways. The first one is to flat-out blind yourself. If you think about it, it’s actually so easy that there’s a whole host of rules in some places just to stop people from doing it by accident. Class 3B lasers can accomplish this in literally less than a second (in fact, they’re so dangerous precisely because they cause damage faster than a human can close their eyes to avoid it) and are perfectly legal to purchase, albeit not as toys or pointers – they’re used in light shows and laser surgery, for example. Alternatively, accrue those small, permanent injury penalties mentioned above util they hit -30%. You could be done in an hour. The obvious downside here (besides, you know, being blind) is that once you’ve done that you can never gain photomancy charges again. That’s it. You’ve seen the light, it was glorious, you’ll never top that experience. Guess you die now.

The other option is to give at least 20 people serious eye injuries. It doesn’t have to specifically be a light-based injury, so long as a bright light is involved in causing it. An explosion of some sort usually suffices to check that box. The Halifax Explosion of 1917 blinded hundreds by shattering windows all over the city and getting glass in their eyes. The 2020 explosion in the port of Beirut was another famous mass blinding incident. 20 people suffered an ocular injury to at least one eye in 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Generally, any massive explosion in a crowded area has a good chance of doing the trick. Of course, the crown jewel of mass blinding is nuclear explosions, and it is no secret that blinkers all over the world have been drooling over the idea of stealing or constructing and detonating a nuke somewhere to show everyone the light since July 1945, but thankfully, none has ever gotten close to succeeding.

Taboo: To those who view light as the source of all good, its absence represents the ultimate wrong. Darkness is anathema to photomancers. It doesn’t have to be absolute, pitch blackness. As a rule of thumb, if they’re ever caught in a situation where it’d be too dark for a typical person to, for example, be able to read a newspaper normally, their charges snuff out. Outside at night is fine if there are streetlights around or if it’s a clear sky and the moon is full. A room with a single candle burning in it is probably fine, but embers in the fireplace aren’t. Preparation matters: photomancers can get some mileage out of entering a dark space slowly, looking in from the outside first to give their eyes time to get used to the low lighting. The same is true for conditions where the lights are slowly dimming. By contrast, if someone suddenly turns off the light in the room they’re in, they instantaneously break taboo. Obscuring their vision by some other means, like by putting one’s hands over their eyes or shoving their head in the toilet, works if it lasts for more than a few seconds. They don’t break taboo just by blinking, nor do they have to literally sleep with their eyes open (but they do have to sleep in a reasonably well-lit room, otherwise they’d break taboo during the process of falling asleep in the dark). Some lightbringers who are very far gone down the path of vision impairment have to be particularly careful, because their already dim sights mean anything short of a brightly lit interior is too dark for them to function (GM’s discretion – basically, they get to get meaner about this around the 15% permanent vision penalty mark or so). 

Starting Charges: 8 minor charges, as usual.

Charging Tips: Firstly, be cautious. Always have a flashlight at hand, and maybe another one (and probably keep one of them hidden in your shoe or something in case they take away the other one), on top of your phone, just to be certain. Make sure they’re properly charged and try to find one’s durable enough that they wouldn’t break down under the rigors of life in the Occult Underground. You don’t want to be caught without some kind of light, ever. Just forget about sneaking anywhere under the cover of darkness without some magickal help. It’s not happening.

When it comes to timing your charging rituals, you can take one of two approaches: one is to try and be clever about it. So long as you’re dealing with minor charges only, you don’t have to spend all of your team with vision impairment. If you suspect that you’re going to need to use your sense of sight in the near future, refrain from blinding yourself in the preceding 24 hours or so you can meet the challenge with eyes open. The other option is to give up on it and just accept that you’re going to spend the majority of your time squinting. Keep it in mind when you consider what physical tasks to take upon yourself, and try to plan ahead to give yourself advantages that’d make up for the blurriness. Do things slowly and carefully if possible; take time to aim in combat; acquire high quality tools before attempting a technical task. Some of the strategies used by people who live with visual impairment for non-fucked-up-magickal-self-harm reasons could help you, too. Learn to do things by touch; set your digital devices to large, easy-to-read fonts. Learn about assistive technologies. Rely on audio cues. Sooner or later, a lot of photomancers end up getting an Identity related to living with limited eyesight (some even start off with it, with eyesight deteriorating due to injury or illness being what drives them into obsession with the remaining light in their lives). There’s no one way for such an Identity to work. It could look something like this:

I’m a vision impaired person, of course I can read braille and use a braille typewriter; expect special treatment and sympathy from some institutions and people; be regularly underestimated

Substitutes for notice

Feature: Resists helplessness shocks

Feature: Overcome blindness penalties

“Overcome blindness penalties” means that you can roll your Identity before making a roll where you’d be penalized due to impaired vision. On a success, you can cut the penalty in half or down to -20%, whichever is higher. On a matched success, you can ignore it if you’re anything less than totally, legally blind or reduce it to 10% if you are. On a crit, you completely ignore the penalty. The GM is free to roll that there are some things that a blind person just flat out can’t do, no matter what (there’s no reading a normal newspaper by touching the printed letters; you aren’t Daredevil), but keep their minds open. In 2009, Eşref Armağan made a shockingly realistic painting of an S60 Volvo that sold for over 3,000$, and he was born without eyes. Also note that, besides “Overcome blindness penalties”, which is almost universal, the features of this kind of Identity vary enormously. For some vision impaired people, Of Course They Can listen on conversations through closed doors. For others, Of Course They Can bring their dog everywhere. Some can assess helplessness (because they’ve been there), while others can coerce self or isolation (through expert guilt-tripping). Some can substitute for struggle because they really want to become the 21^st century Zatoichi. Some vision impaired people don’t have an Identity like that all – it’s just not that crucial a part of who they see themselves as being.

Eye surgery to repair damage to your vision is costly, draws a lot of attention – you’re signing up for a procedure in a hospital, there’re going to be records created – and unless your work involves a lot of arc welding and you don’t mind coming off as an incompetent moron, you can only justify getting them so many times. Think of it as a singular chance to “reset” the permanent eye damage bar so you can squeeze more significant charges through filling it up again throughout your career. If you can, plan in advance to get the treatment when you’re approaching the -20% penalty limit beyond which a surgery won’t help.

Remember that it will usually take you several hours between when you act to charge and actually get your charge. Charge up before you’re likely to enter a situation where you’d need to use magick, because it’s generally impractical to do on the spot.

In terms of charging practices, you’re in a good place: the sun is available half the time or so in most places, and for when it’s not, a flashlight powerful enough to give you eye damage by looking directly into it could be bought for as little as 20$ (or something like 60$ if you want a fancy tactical wannabe flashlight with all the bells and whistles). You can carry it everywhere and blast yourself in the eyes when you’re feeling down. A laser pointer can do the job even faster and costs about as much. The people selling these to you as a completely legal toy are just counting on you not to go stare into the beam, the fools. You couldn’t realistically use one as a weapon (as mentioned above, the types of lasers you’re allowed to buy as a toy are that precisely because they don’t damage the eye fast enough that anyone who isn’t crazy couldn’t just close it if you shone them at them), but they’re compact and easy to get.

Producing the first significant charge of a given time period through self-harm is a much bigger decision than producing, perhaps, any other kind. Once you’ve done that, you have a few hours before you’re going to start suffering penalties and from that point it’ll stay that way for a coming several weeks, so the issue of when and how often to charge otherwise becomes a lot less complicated. You should still consider the risk (and rewards) of further permanently damaging your retinas, but in terms of acute performance you’ll be on mostly even ground.

Finally,  keep in mind is the possibility of charging via blinding other people. It’s probably the more effective option in the long-run, because you can only blind yourself so much. The most reliable method is almost certainly flashbangs. They’re not legal for private citizens to possess in the US, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t floating around less illegal markets, much like most types of weapons. You could probably get one for maybe 100$ (they’re actually cheaper for police departments, but then, you aren’t one). The thing to consider is when and how to use them. They produce a lot of noise and light – on purpose – so anywhere near a populated area tells everyone around you’re doing something notable and very likely illegal. Consider ambushing hikers in the middle of the woods, or maybe finding a few friends who don’t mind being bombed every once in a while so that you can charge (fellow photomancers would probably agree; they wouldn’t get any charges off of it because the explosion isn’t powerful enough to cause even minor charge-worthy eye damage through self-harm, but you could take turns throwing the grenades at each other).  

 Symbolic Tension: Light provides you with a clearer view of reality until a certain point, past which it starts obscuring it. The notion that the brighter it is, the easier it is to gain information about one’s environment – symbolically, to grow in knowledge and wisdom – is nothing if not intuitive. Humans are visually oriented animals. Much of our psychology, and, in turn, our culture, is based around “light good, darkness bad”. However, for most people, just as intuitive is the understanding that there is such a thing as too much a good thing, and if the environment’s too bright, it becomes harder, rather than easier to tell what’s going on. It works on the metaphorical level as well: obviously, certainty’s a good thing when one is attempting to study the world. A good scientist wouldn’t publish low-significance findings. Yet, there comes a point past which overwhelming certainty transforms into dogma. A good idea becomes a caricature of itself. Photomancers “do light wrong” by refusing to acknowledge this logic. As far as they’re concerned, more light is always better – always more enlightening. Following this line of (dubious) reasoning, blindness must be its own form of higher understanding to be pursued, provided it’s accomplished the right way (by bombarding oneself with ever greater amounts of glorious, burning, dizzying, eternal light). They’re not flashbombing the world because they want to see it burn, they’re doing it because they want everyone to see. See the light, that is. See nothing but light.

Random Magick Domain: Light both physical and metaphorical. At its simplest (but by no means least powerful), photomancy generates and manipulates light and its properties: color, heat, reflection, or various subatomic phenomena. At its more rarified, it deals’ with light’s symbolic and mythological associations: truth, knowledge, peace, healing, or purity. A lot of photomancy spells deal, directly or indirectly, with knowledge – either providing more information to the adept and their allies or denying true information to their opponents. Generally speaking, the old-fashioned Keepers of the Light tend to favor (somewhat) subtler random magick which emphasizes light’s occult significance, whereas the firebrand photons prefer to base their spells on modern, scientific concepts of light as a physics phenomenon: wave, particle, neither and both (they’d be the first to bore you to tears gushing about how “it’s proof” that light is the purest manifestation of magick in the universe; at the most fundamental, cosmological level, it is paradox itself).  

Ω: +1. Charging is self-harmful, but at least in the short-run that harm isn’t terrible, it’s not hard to do, and there’s always the safer (for oneself, that is) option of blinding other people for them. The taboo might’ve been much worse maybe two centuries ago, but in the age of electric lighting and cellphone flashlights, a blinker could go for years without breaking it so long as they’re not caught by surprise by someone specifically looking to neutralize them.  

A Note About Spells: a lot of photomancy spells have two names: an older, pretentious one favored by the Keepers of the Light, and a “cooler” (for a very certain measure of cool), more casual one used by the more modern-minded photons. In all cases, these spells do the exact same thing, no matter what argumentative lightbulbs tell you.

PHOTOMANCY MINOR FORMULA SPELLS

ARCHEOSPECTROSCOPY/QUESTION THE HESPERIDES

Cost: 2 minor charges

Effect: It’s hard to wrap one’s mind around just how fast light travels, but doing so only gives one that much greater an understanding of the vastness of the universe it’s traveling through. We don’t see the stars in the sky; we see the light they emitted millions or billions of years ago by the time it’s approaching our eyes. The sun could go out the next moment and we wouldn’t know about it for about eight minutes, because that’s how long it’d take the last of the light to finish its course. This spell draws upon the timeless quality of light viewed from the future (or, depending on who you ask, calls upon the knowledge of esoteric spirits of light, possibly as a metaphor) in order to provide the adept with a vision of what happened before in the place they’re in now. The blinker can set their sight as far into the past as a number of minutes equal to the result of the successful casting roll (or any number below that); they then see their surroundings as they were at that moment, for up to a number of minutes equal to the singles digit of the roll. The adept is blind to the present while viewing the past, but they can end the spell whenever they like if it is imperative that they see what’s going on around them right now. Note that the spell affects only the sense of sight; it doesn’t provide auditory knowledge from the past, and the adept can still hear the present just fine while using it.

BRIGHTEN UP/PLACATING DANCE OF UZUME

Cost: 2 minor charges

Effect: Light is good for you. On this much, even normal people agree. Studies have repeatedly shown a strong correlation between the brightness of one’s environment and their overall mood. Light makes us happy. It’s why the Finnish are all sourpusses. By invoking light’s uplifting quality and an invisible, magickal glow, lightbulbs can briefly present themselves as the sort of person who’s simply good fun to be with. They come off as pleasant and calming – the kind of guy who just makes you want to smile while you talk to them. Mechanically, this simply gives the adept a 20% bonus to connect rolls involving pleasant, good-natured interaction (e.g. no threats, hostage negotiations, or hard-assed business dealing; no seduction, either – this spell makes you come off as a nice friend, not a hunk) for a number of minutes equal to the result of the successful casting roll.

DISCO BOMB/RA’S BURNING SCOURGE

Cost: 4 minor charges

Effect: One of the ways they’ve been wanting to use lasers for riot control was the “pulsed energy projectile” (PEP) idea. Rather than keeping the laser on the target for long enough to burn a hole in it, you fire an extremely short, concentrated pulse – enough to ablate a very tiny amount of it into a ball of exploding plasma. It barely causes any physical injury, but it makes for a flash, it makes for a bang, it makes for an electromagnetic distortion that interferes with the nervous system and causes a sensation of excruciating agony, and that’s more than enough for lightbringers (honestly, they’d have been happy with just the flash; everything else is a bonus). This spell utilizes a somewhat similar principle to produce a brief, stunning audiovisual “fuck you” centered anywhere within the adept’s eyesight. It’s about as loud as a nearby gunshot and the flash of light is bright enough to leave anyone looking its way seeing stars for a moment. There’s a blazing hot burning sensation, but it only lasts for an instant. Closing your eyes to defend yourself isn’t really feasible because there’s no indication the explosion is coming and the flash is too strong; you have to have been coincidentally looking another way when it happens (and you might still be shocked by the bang). Mechanically, anyone within a few meters of the blast (the size of a typical room or so) faces a rank 3 violence stress check and needs to make an additional roll for fitness. If they fail, they still face a -20% penalty for any action involving eyesight for a number of rounds equal to the singles digit of the adept’s successful casting roll. Of course, even outside the immediate range of the explosion, using this in an urban setting (or at least, some urban settings) is bound to still cause a panic and possibly get the police involved, because as far as most normal people could tell, some kind of bomb just went off.  

GO TO THE LIGHTS

Cost: 1 minor charge

Effect: You didn’t really think the flickering of streetlights and the buzzing of neon lightbulbs were just random noise, did you? They’re messages, sent in the language of light. Subatomic particles traveling at the speed of light exist outside of our mundane understanding of time, and they’re trying to tell us what happens in the future – what, to them, already has and is happening right now. Sunshines are fluent in Light, and this spell lets them flex their understanding by making sense of the messages. By spending about ten minutes carefully studying a lightbulb, streetlight, lamp, etc. the adept can get a hunch equal to the result of their successful casting roll. Alternatively, they can get the answer to a simple question regarding something that happened in the immediate vicinity of the light between now and when it was last turned on. This allows for more precise investigation than archeospectroscopy, but the results are much vaguer – you don’t get to see things for yourself, you get a “verbal” response from a bunch of electrons whose view of the world doesn’t differentiate between people and objects and whose existence is unbound by time(“they’re moving from the transparent to the opaque; one is attached to something glistening”). This spell doesn’t have a traditional name because it’s not a traditional spell. Some say that the Keepers of the Light have a version of it that works on gaslamps, or maybe even the sun itself, but they don’t like to be seen talking to streetlights.

HEAT VISION/ARROWS OF APOLLO

Cost: 3 Minor Charges

Effect: This is the photomancy minor blast. It’s one of the School’s signature moves, and it does exactly what you’d imagine: shoots harmful laser beams out of the adept’s eyes. They’re invisible under normal conditions, since the beam is focused (after all, if any photons from the beam are hitting your eyes and allowing you to see it, that means they’re not being driven in the direction of the beam, which is the whole point) and both the wavelength is too short for the human eye anyway. You might be able to notice it under the right atmospheric conditions (say, if it’s very foggy, drizzly or dusty), but otherwise you won’t be seeing it unless it’s going right into your eyes (in which case, you won’t be seeing much of anything else ever again). The beam can go straight through transparent objects, like clean windows, but not opaque ones. On a person, it causes damage equal to the sum of the dice of the successful casting roll, injuries that’d normally be characteristic of an extremely severe, strangely localized sunburn, and having to make a rank 6 unnatural stress check. On a matched success on the casting roll, something the target’s wearing (or possibly their hair) catches fire. They must spend their next action making a successful dodge roll, or by the next turn they’ll start taking 1d10 in injuries per turn until they do or somebody else puts them out. If the fire is allowed to spread to the point it starts causing damage, that’s a rank 4 violence shock to deal with (before that, when your shirt is just smoking ominously, you’re probably still too busy processing the unnatural attack to care about the fire bit). Against a target that’s reasonably flammable and not running away (as one should hope most inanimate objects would be), this blast just sets them on fire. It’s not strong enough to cut through steel doors or liquify locks, but it could burn out some electrical sensors. Unlike a lot of blasts, this one actually shoots a (very  thin, very fast) physical phenomenon at the target, not just pure magick, so it technically needs to be “aimed”, but somehow, even completely blind sunshines exhibit a preternatural ability to do so in order to hit their targets with this. Its range is (basially by definition) eyesight.

HIGHLIGHT/HORUS’ PIERCING GAZE

Cost: 2 minor charges

Effect: The visible light forming most human being’s entire visual experience is but one, short step on the great scale that is the electromagnetic spectrum. Some animal species out there can perceive colors and visual phenomena literally unimaginable by the human mind – we can emulate the results well enough using technological assistance, but these devices merely translate these unfamiliar wavelengths of light into colors we know. This idea frustrates and fascinates photomancers, who, for decades, have been using this simple charm in order to briefly gain brief, limited glances at the invisible colors of the higher and lower lights. It extends the adept’s perception into the infrared and the ultraviolet for up to a number of minutes equal to the result of the successful casting roll. Handily, it also allows them to instinctively make sense of the various wavelengths and automatically integrate them in whichever way would be most beneficial, so they won’t miss out on details that are swallowed by ultraviolet color contrasts or become unable to say through infrared-opaque windows. All in all, besides giving them a funky experience where birds and flowers show extra patterns and people’s teeth glow blue, it comes together to allow them to see clearly even in conditions where most people would be blind. In particular, seeing long infrared waves allows one to “see heat”, meaning heat-emitting objects (like people, plants and animals) appear to be glowing and stand out very easily in the dark. This defeats any darkness-based penalties. Furthermore: it allows the lightbulb to detect heat-based phenomena which they wouldn’t normally be able, letting them make normal notice checks in order to, e.g., recognize that an object has been recently touched, follow someone’s bare footsteps by the lingering heat, or identify someone hiding behind a trashcan by the heat of their warm breath trailing upwards.

LIGHTEN THE MOOD/LAKSHMI’S RADIANT TRANQUILITY

Cost: 3minor charges

Effect: Light is peace. Light is goodness. No one wants to hurt the source of goodness. No one wants to hurt anyone – not really, not enough – when the light is shone on them. The light brings out evil thoughts to shame and leaves serenity in their absence. This spell (to some sunshines’ disappointment) does’t make them glow with a visible light, but it does make them emit an aura of peace that makes those around them think twice about punching someone, at least while they’re looking. For a number of minutes equal to the singles digit of the successful casting roll, this spell makes it so that acting with overt violence (punching and stabbing and shooting, definitely; but also swearing loudly or screaming for the manager count. Conversely, dripping a bit of poison into someone’s drink doesn’t) requires making a rank 3 self stress check of anyone within range (say, meters equal to the tens of the adept’s Photomancy Identity). The zone of peace moves with the adept. Naturally, it does nothing to stop anyone standing more than a few meters away from shooting them (nor from leaving the zone of peace and shooting them from outside of it, provided that they know how the spell works).

RAZZLE DAZZLE/WITHHOLD THE GIFT OF SIGHT

Cost: 3-4 minor charges

Effect: Everyone should see the light, but when dealing with the most unworthy, it’s fine to confiscate it from them for a bit for educational purposes. This spell temporarily strikes a target to whom the photomancer has a sympathetic connection completely blind. For 3 charges, it works for a number of rounds equal to the singles digit of the successful dice result; for 4, it works for a number of minutes equal to the dice result, or until the lightbulb decides to end the effect. The second version also requires a rank 4 helplessness check – going blind for a minute is absolutely terrifying, but it ends before you can really process the depth of the horror. When it lasts for several minutes, you start imagining the rest of your life without seeing your children’s faces again. While blind, targets suffer a -30% to actions that would force them to rely on sight (including virtually all forms of combat), and the GM is free to automatically fail them at some. Because this spell doesn’t produce any visibly magickal effects, it doesn’t force unnatural checks under most circumstances. Someone hit with it is much more likely to assume they had a stroke than have been the target of witchcraft. Still horrific, but not in the same way. Bloodthirsty blinkers will use it on people driving, probably requiring an immediate pursuit check (with the -30% penalty) to avoid some kind of accident.

THE LIGHT FANTASTIC/WEAVE THE PHANTASMAL TAPESTRY

Cost: 3 minor charges

Effect: All that we see is literally light. Our perception of light generates the configuration of hues and shades that we call the image of our field of vision. To think about it another way: if light is truth, then to be able to control light is to be able to bend it. Whether you prefer to focus on the physical or symbolic interpretation, this spell does the same thing: it lets the adept create a visual illusion. Unlike some other spells of illusion, this one doesn’t necessarily require that there be anything there in the first place to change the appearance of, which is why it’s costlier to cast. Done that way, it can produce an image of something up to about the size of a briefcase or a dog. The image can’t move, and it’s purely visual – it makes no sounds, produces no odors and if you try to touch it, your hand will pass right through (which could justify a rank 2-3 unnatural stress check). Alternatively, it could be used on an existing object up to around the same size and change its appearance. In that case, the object can move (the proverbial banana-turned-pistol will appear to realistically turn as you wave your hand around), though the illusion is still strictly visual. Anyone touching the “pistol” will feel banana.

UNDER THE SPOTLIGHT/HORUS’ UNYIELDING GLARE

Cost: 1 minor charge

Effect: There is no hiding when the light is shining in your face. It burns away lies and deceit. With this spell, it also allows lightbulbs to use their Photomancy Identity against something like lie or Counterfeiter or Con Artist in order to detect any attempt to mislead them, whether spoken or in text. It doesn’t actually reveal the truth, but it makes it obvious that whatever it is they’ve just heard or seen isn’t. The spell remains in effect for a number of minutes equal to result of the successful casting roll. Note that this spell only reveals deliberate and active deception – it won’t ping a misunderstanding, an omission, something untrue that the target nevertheless genuinely believes in, etc.

PHOTOMANCY SIGNIFICANT FORMULA SPELLS

CASTIGATION OF SHAMASH

Cost: 3 significant charges

Effect: At night, the Mesopotamian sun god Shamash was said to preside over his court in the underworld, hearing the pleas of the unappeased dead and punishing those who’ve unjustly troubled the living. This spell calls upon that and other associations between light and cleanliness and safety to kick demons screaming back beyond the Veil. It can be cast through a sympathetic link to the demon (generally being an object that mattered to them in life) or at their host within eyesight range if they’re presently possessing them. The results of the successful casting roll are compared to those of the demon’s Urge roll. If the sunshine wins, the demon is immediately cast out of the material realm – and any host they might be possessing at the moment – and can’t return for at least a number of days equal to the sum of the adept’s roll. On a matched success, they can’t return for that many weeks. On a crit, they can’t return for that many years. This spell doesn’t have a newfangled photon name, because these guys don’t like directly confronting demons often enough to have come up with one. Exorcisms are such an old-school kind of magic.

IMA FIRIN MAH LAZOR/TEN SUNS’ FURY

Cost: 2 significant charges

Effect: This is the photomancy significant blast. Now you’re burning holes in things and slicing people’s limbs off with a terrible sizzling sound and the stench of charred flesh. Like the lesser-powered version, it hits a target within eyesight (possibly through a window), the beam itself is normally invisible, and it requires you to be able to move your head and keep your eyes open to aim. Unlike it, it causes gunshot-results-of-the-successful-casting-roll damage and forces both a rank 6 unnatural and violence check. Like Heat Vision, on a matched success the target is also set on fire for good measure. Used on inanimate objects, this spell can set just about anything on fire and could be used to cut a window through a few centimeters of steel, reduce a lock into runny, glowing-hot liquid metal, or instantly destroy the insides of an electronic device.   

NIGHTLIGHT/INVIOLATE SPLENDOR OF SHAMASH

Cost: 2 significant charges

Effect: When the unquiet dead wouldn’t stop bothering you and yours, sometimes a preventative approach is required. This potent warding spell is cast on a source of artificial light – a lamp, a spotlight, even a candle in a pinch – and imbues it with a magickal virtue that is unbearable to demons. It acts as a barrier whose boundaries are the literal boundaries of the light cast by the warding object. For a typical, residential LED bulb, this can be about 12-15 meters in radius. It can also be much less, but the boundary is literally drawn by the light – it won’t extend through opaque walls, a closed door, or even a couple of turns of the hallway. Outside on an open plain, though, it is quite easy to get an impressively large area shielded with something like a campfire. Or you could cast this spell on a spotlight and have it reach in a cone shaped area dozens of meters long, though you wouldn’t be able to change its angle – the spell ends if the light source is moved or manipulated. Any demon wanting to cross the barrier or to use any kind of unnatural ability on something inside it must roll Urge against the adept’s successful casting roll. Yes: this does mean that if the lightbringer rolled higher than the demon’s Urge, the demon is just out of luck and is stuck outside for the duration of the spell. If for some reason a demon is past the barrier, whether because they broke through or because they were close to the light source when the spell was cast, they must roll Urge every single turn, with failure forcing them to do nothing that turn except flee as fast as they can back beyond the edge. A demon currently possessing someone is still bound by the need to roll Urge to cross the boundary and avoid having to leave the protected zone, but they won’t be forced to leave their host by it. The spell lasts for up to a number of minutes equal to the result of the successful casting roll or until anything happens to the light source, whichever comes first. It can, however, be extended indefinitely without additional Photomancy rolls so long as the adept has charges to spare and nothing happens to the light. Some believe this spell somehow reminds demons of the Cruel Ones. It’s hard to say, and, like so many things about demons, there aren’t any reliable sources to ask.

LIGHTBULB MOMENT/ALL-ILLUMINATING BRILLIANCE OF THE ORACLE

Cost: 2 significant charges

Effect: At its core, light is knowledge pushing back against the boundaries of ignorance. “Revelation” works as a metaphor because it represents light’s way of exposing previously hidden things to sight. This simple but very powerful spell provides the lightbringer with a moment of cosmic enlightenment. They just make a query of the universe, and the universe – whether one believes that through the mouth of God, an angel, Thoth, Apollo or the Invisible Clergy, responds with an often-vague-but-generally-accurate-and-helpful symbolic vision. It can concern the past, the present, the future, Alex Abel, the Mak Attax or secret vampire rulers of Bulgaria. It generally can’t provide good answers to cosmic questions, though – nothing on the true nature of First and Last Man, the plans of the Archetypes or what’s hidden in the House of Renunciation. The GM is basically free to provide as much or as little information as they feel would help move the story forward, leaning towards “more” (the player is invoking some pretty big magick here), up to and including just saying that the heavens are silent if they can’t come up with anything (though in that case the photomancer should probably get their charges back). The one hitch with using this spell casually is that the visions are very intense, forcing the adept to make a rank 6 unnatural stress test to contend with them. If it fails, they may not even remember much of what they’ve seen.

PHOTOTHERAPY/CLEANSING LIGHT

Cost: 1 significant charge

Effect: As was already mentioned, light’s good for you, even from a medical perspective. It improves your mood, induces the release of important hormones and the generation of vitamin D, and gives a good kick to the immune system. Spiritually, the light burns away the stains and impurities of sickness and chases off any evil spirits which might be causing it. This spell lets photomancers shine a light on someone or something to immediately rid them of physical corruption. It doesn’t heal injuries – in fact, it causes damage equal to the tens digit of the successful casting roll and leaves behind clear burn marks – but it makes those less visible physiological and/or metabolic issues go away. Diseases and toxins are flushed right out. Drugs in the system immediately evaporate: this can mean that, for some types, the addict goes into pretty much immediate withdrawal. Infections and the like are sterilized instantly, although if the wound is still open and bleeding that only does so much good. Conditions like multiple sclerosis or Alzheimer’s disease or cancer aren’t fixed, but are suspended for a number of days equal to the sum of the successful casting roll. Cast on an inanimate object, this spell immediately sterilizes it as if it’s been subject to intense radiation bombardment. Any germs, fungi, etc. are disintegrated. It won’t make a broken radio work or moldy bread good to eat, but it could make water from a puddle not give you brain-eating amoeba.

QUATUM LEAP/OUTRUNNING THE JAWS OF SKÖLL

Cost: 3-4 significant charges

Effect: This is another one of those highly theatrical spells that blinkers love and most others in the Occult Underground hate. As it happens, they’re sometimes forced into using it when said others show up to express their displeasure with a heavy object. It invokes the omnipresent nature of light and the movement of the celestial objects – or, for photons, the speed of light and the non-position of electron clouds – to teleport the adept somewhere else. For 3 charges, the destination can be anywhere the adept can see (even in a mirror or through a window – it’s all just light, man). For 4 charges, it can be anywhere they’ve ever been. The teleportation happens faster than the blink of an eye and is accompanied by a distinctive “pop” of displaced air and a flash of light about as strong as an old-fashioned camera’s at both their departure and arrival points. Nothing that blinds or deafens (to many photomancers’ disappointment), but certainly which makes it impractical for leaving unnoticed or sneaking anywhere except a closed, empty room. The adept teleports with all their immediate belongings (etc. the clothes on their backs, anything in their pockets or worn backpack, anything they’re holding) but they can’t take other people or pull large objects with them. As usual, seeing a person vanish into or appear out of thin air calls for a rank 4 unnatural stress check.

TERRIBLE AS THE DAWN/MANTLE OF OVERWHELMING GLORY

Cost: 4 significant charges

Effect: As religious iconography from around the world demonstrates, nobody likes messing with a guy who’s burning with such radiant light you can barely look their direction. It’s a lot like Lighten the Mood, except with very little “opposite of heavy” lightness and a lot more “I could turn you into a pillar of salt” spiritual-retina-searing light. This one actually does produce a visible aura – not blinding by itself, but still clearly noticeable, especially in an otherwise dark environment (or at least as dark as a photomancer could be in and still keep their charges). This halo of holy light doesn’t force anyone to make unnatural stress checks, but that’s only because its effect is already rolled into the overall one, which is imbue the blinker with the presence of a stern angel, prophet or buddha and fill anyone seeing them or hearing their voice with holy terror. Looking directly at the adept forces an unnatural stress check at a rank equal to the singles digit of the successful casting roll. So does refusing to obey their commands, so long as they’re short and clear (something that can be said in a single breath and which can be done relatively immediately, e.g. “drop your wallet and leave” but not “go home and call your mom”). People will definitely remember this spell being used. It is a traumatizing experience. You could even video the whole thing if you want to make the Tiger extra awake, although nowadays it’d probably just be dismissed as fake (I mean, come on: an aura of light and a reverberating voice? That’s editing 101). The effect lasts for a number of rounds equal to the sum of the successful dice roll.

TRICK OF THE LIGHT/SUBLIME PRESENCE

Cost: 3 significant charges

Effect: This spell draws upon light’s governance over perception (or possibly just bends electromagnetic waves in a very specific way) in order to render the adept and their immediate belongings (as per Quantum Leap) temporarily invisible. Not transparent, not glassy – plain not visually there. They still make sounds, they still leave footsteps in wet mud, they still break twigs, and a dog could still smell them, but since humans are so visually-oriented this can still make them very hard to find. You could try to throw paint at them or something, but for that you’d first need to know where to throw the paint at (and even then, trying to fight someone based on the position of paint splatters that appear to be floating in midair bobbing and weaving would nevertheless be at a hefty penalty, maybe -20%). Trying to punch, shoot, catch, etc. a somebody invisible is done at a -30% penalty most of the time, and it assumes that you at least have a very general notion of where they should be to even make the attempt. If an invisible adept is trying to sneak by someone, odds are they just automatically succeed (how many people are on the lookout for invisible infiltrators?), unless said person knows what they’re dealing with and paying attention specifically to nonvisual or indirect clues (e.g. the pattern of raindrops being pushed aside by the adept’s invisible-but-still-solid body) or are simply on a general state of high alert, like soldiers patrolling a hostile area. They may not know specifically that there could be someone invisible coming up on them, but they’re not assuming they’d see anyone who did either so they’re all about listening for those rushing bushes and spotting movements in the grass. Being confronted with irrefutable proof that you’re dealing with an invisible person – where the encounter can’t possibly be dismissed with “it was dark” or “I must’ve missed her” is a rank 4 unnatural stress check. Note that turning oneself invisible by bending light would normally result in all sorts of logistical inconveniences (such as being blinded oneself), but, magick being what it is, this is spared the busy photomancer.

PHOTOMANCY MAJOR SPELLS

Cure blindness of any kind or any disease, injury or condition affecting vision; Be granted a piece of absolutely true knowledge of cosmic significance; Make it so it remains a bright noontime over a city for 24 hours straight regardless of season, latitude or hour of the day; Create an area about the size of a small town where it’s permanently daytime; Summon a flash of laser down from the sky on a building, person or object enough powerful enough to cause damage equivalent to a military missile strike; Permanently become sustained by light, so that so long as you’re not trapped in the dark for long you no longer need food, water or air; Create and control a lifelike hologram the size of a building for up to an hour; Create a flash powerful enough to momentarily blind everyone in a city sized area

What You Hear

In the catacombs beneath Paris (I mean, come on – it’s called the City of Light) there exists a hidden room, filled with so many lightbulbs that not a single square millimeter of it is ever dark; the illuminated masters of the school gather there each summer equinox.

Photomancers have been fighting a centuries-long shadow war (pun intended) against a secretive School of darkness-adepts who gain power from sensory deprivation. They’ve been losing for the past few decades, and it makes them desperate.

A Washington, D.C.-based Cabal of photomancers has recently made contact with a conspiracy of immortal bureaucrats within the Pentagon; they’re looking to convince the latter to give them information about where and when the US military would next be moving their nukes so that they steal one.

The September 2024 Lebanon pager attack, which blinded nearly a thousand people almost simultaneously, generated a major charge for an Israeli photomancer. She’s used it to rapidly advance her militant Cabal’s goal of hurrying the development of combat-ready laser weapons.

A sunshine from Jakarta had the bright idea of cutting a deal with a local epideromancer so that he could rapidly burn his eyes out for charges than have the fleshworker heal them each time so he can do it again. He disappeared shortly after.

A blinker from Jakarta somehow traded her eyes for those of a mantis shrimp. They look terribly freaky, which is why she’s always wearing big, dark sunglasses, but they allow her to see forms of light unimaginable by lesser beings (some say they can also hypnotize, but that sounds just crazy).

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Final Note: This School is a bit of a joke. That’s the excuse I’m going to go with in regards to the wonky mechanics, the goofy rumors or the terrible charging balance (I know – it’s broken as hell; my original idea was you’d charge by doing risky things while blinded by bright lights, but it felt too close to entropomancy). That, and finding out accurate information about light-based hazards, vision impairment and eye injuries has been tricky. Do tell if you have any better ideas. In any case, the point was that I thought to myself suddenly “how would a ‘typical’, fantasy gaming wizard – one with dramatic, flashy, largely combat or ‘adventuring’ oriented powers do in the Occult Underground?”. The obvious answer is “not well” – they’d either Wake the Sleeping Tiger and get themselves lynched or annoy the Sleepers and get themselves creatively dismembered – but I still wanted to go with it. It had to have the “feel” of one of those wizards, with spells that make illusions, teleport and physically blast their enemies with energy beams – but it also needed to “feel” like Unknown Armies. It still needed to scream, on some level, from the perspective of a normal person, “this guy might be powerful, but he’s not cool; he’s self-harming for power and observes a ridiculous restriction that makes it hard to fit into society. For God’s sake, he sleeps with the lights on!”.