Three Schools

    Phobomancy
						 aka
				 Boogeymen, Scarecrows, Fear-Junkies

	Fear is in many ways the primary motivator of not only humanity, but perhaps all life. Fear of dying, fear of hunger, fear of loneliness and of abandonment. These are emotions so powerful that even the most base of beasts seems to understand them clearly, so potent are they that once they reach a certain point, they can literally overpower the most secure of minds and make them flee, freeze or even simply just die. Unique to humans perhaps is the nature of fear as a force of attraction; from ghost stories, slasher flicks and serial killer admirers, to those who chase terror by jumping off of buildings, out of near-orbital aircraft or diving into underwater cave systems, fear can easily become a drug, a rush unto itself. While Panic can be a killing thing, a force of unequaled destruction amongst humanity, it can also be a liberating force, a reaction to true desperation that finally frees men and women from the shackles of their circumstances.

	Many people understand that fear is something that is meant to be listened to, the little, insistent voice that must be acknowledged so that we don't destroy ourselves, but for Phobomancers their fears and anxieties become the fertile ground upon which they cultivate their terrifying skills. Whether the heady experience of pulse-pounding Dread, the subtle pleasures of Paranoia or the perky taste of Shame and Anxiety, the Fear-Junkies want to inflict the whole range of Enyo, Eris and Deimos' delight upon any that they can. This isn't necessarily out of spite or malice (though their victims may disagree with that, as would some of the Boogeymen) but rather that many Scarecrows see themselves as harsh teachers and guides in life, showing through magick if that any fear can be defeated, but none ever conquered.

	 The central paradox of Phobomancy is simple, Fear is an atavistic emotion, one that is strong enough that it can affect nearly any undertaking that someone may turn their mind to; Boogeymen must master a thing that can never be tamed, laughing in the face of the force that they claim to respect and edify. Phobomancers may feel fear, but they can never show it.


Stats


	Generate a Minor Charge: Intentionally cause someone (including yourself) to suffer a stress check in any gauge. It doesn't matter whether or not a Hardened or Failed notch is gained, they simply have to suffer the check itself. The Charge is given upon the test itself, rather than the result.

	Generate a Significant Charge: Make someone do something they don't want to (this can include yourself, luckily, you just have to hit your own Self gauge and probably mutter some rather unkind words for motivation) do through a tangible, hostile method like threats, intimidation or just plain creep-factor. The Charge is given upon the target engaging in the action.

	Generate a Major Charge: Drive someone insane, meaning that they have enough notches in game terms to have developed some permanent form of madness. It doesn't matter whether or not the Phobomancer is responsible for the failed notches that came before the final one, only that they're responsible for pushing them the rest of the way over the edge.

	Taboo: Phobomancers break Taboo if they fail to accept a direct challenge that questions their courage. Most Boogeymen strike others as unshakeable or unperturbed by even the worst sights imaginable, but often this is simply callousness through hardened notches that they've intentionally exposed themselves through charge gathering.

	Random Magick Domain: Phobomancy deals with the things that terrify, unease or otherwise make people feel out of sorts, conversely it also can bolster, embolden or make them near-immune to those same things. Phobomancy has almost no directly physical uses, but the mental effects that it can impart can range from subtle to gross.


Phobomancy Minor Formula Spells


Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf?
Cost: 1-10 Minor Charges
Effect: For the next ten minutes (or round, if your target is in combat) the target of this spell suffers chills, paranoia and a sense of deep unease about their situation, no matter what it currently is. In game terms they take a -5% shift on initiative, rolls to notice fine details and to resist intimidation, this penalty can be increased by another 5% or by another ten minutes (or round) for each additional minor charge that the Scarecrow spends, to a maximum of -25% and fifty minutes (or five rounds).

I'm In Your House
Cost: 2 Minor Charges
Effect: After casting this spell, for the next hour anyone who tries to actively search for you if you're making an attempt to hide takes a -10% shift on their rolls. In addition, if you stick to places traditionally associated with nightmares or monsters, such as Closets, Basements, Dark Woods, etc, you become invisible to everyone but pre-adolescents or dogs.

I Wouldn't Do That If I Were You
Cost: 2 Minor Charges
Effect: Choose a target and a particular course of action (this must be clearly delineated,
"running away from me" isn't specific enough, but "flee using my 1999 LeSabre" would be) the next time that the target attempts that action they must make a Rank-5 Self check due to the extreme fear of carrying out that idea. If they still manage to perform that action, it suffers a -10% shift due to their anxiety.

We Know
Cost: 3 Minor Charges
Effect: Study someone for at least ten minutes time, this can be as simple as staring at them from across a room, reading their mail, or even Internet-stalking them. After your observation make a Mind roll, if it is successful, you discover a secret that your target would rather keep hidden. This can be something general such as, "I hope my boyfriend Tad doesn't discover my infidelity," to something more complex such as, "Beatrice from Accounting can never find out that I've been stealing from the Pension Fund." Unfortunately the Scarecrow can't specifically name which secret they'd like to find out, but it's generally a more vital secret the better the Mind roll. We Know cannot be cast on the same target more than once per week.

Fears Laid Bare
Cost: 3 Minor Charges
Effect: When you live your metaphysical life at the mercy of others fears, you'll quickly gain the ability to simply sniff them out like a hound. After casting this spell, the Phobomancer chooses a target within view and makes a Soul roll versus the target's Soul. If successful, the Fear-Junkie gains knowledge of their target's Fear Stimulus. The Adept gains the knowledge in the form of a small sensory input, such as the sound of circus music for Clowns, or the smell of burning wood for Fire, it's up to them to interpret it.

Fear Is The Mind-Killer
Cost: 4 Minor Charges
Effect: The Fear-Junkie can steel themselves or others against a specific type of fear for a time, it's not that they forget or rationalize their actions, it's just that they don't make the connection necessary to damage one's sanity. Choose a stress gauge (excluding Unnatural) and roll 2d10. The number that shows on the Tens die is the level of stress check that the target becomes immune to, the singles die is the number of minutes that the target becomes immune to that stress gauge, For example, if Frankie the Phobomancer rolls a 78 to amp his buddy Jimmy up to attack some loser Mak Attaxers, Jimmy would become immune to any Violence checks of 7 and under, and the spell would last for 8 minutes, making his attempt to shoot up a busy restaurant rather easy on the ol' Violence gauge. At the end of the spell's duration, the target must make a stress check on the Unnatural gauge equal to the level of stress that they became immune to during the spell's effect.

Gives Me The Creeps
Cost: 4 Minor Charges
Effect: You may make someone (including yourself) or something into a source of fear for others for an hour's time. By focusing on the target for a moment, it begins to take on a subtly threatening aspect that makes any one in their presence feel uneasy until they leave. Concentrating, or otherwise performing complex tasks is difficult while in the presence of a Creepy thing or person, giving -5% shift to most Mind skills and any Speed or Body skills requiring deliberate thought ( "Assemble Ikea Furniture" would be affected, whilst "Break Yer' Face" would not) which increases by another -5% for every five minutes spent still in the Creepy thing's proximity, to a maximum of -20% if an object, or -10% if it is a person or animal. The GM is encouraged to give positive shifts for People, Animals or Things that are already legitimately Creepy. It's easy to amp up what's already there after all...

Up All Night
Cost: 5 Minor Charges
Effect: Touch the target of this spell. The next time that they sleep they will suffer horrific nightmares, persisting in their mind even after they wake and they'll almost certainly be exhausted the next day. This causes a -10% shift to all rolls involving Speed and Mind for the next sixteen hours, until the target gets some rest or uses a great deal of stimulants.


Phobomancy Significant Formula Spells


Who's Behind You?
Cost: 1 Significant Charge
Effect: With this spell you can convince someone for a short time (fifteen minutes) that someone with malevolent intent is following them closely, just out of their view. This is intensely unsettling and can trigger Violence, Helplessness or Unnatural checks depending on the subject's circumstance and state of mind. If used on a target in combat, Who's Behind You entitles the Boogeyman to a free Sucker Attack without having to use an action first.

Let's Split-Up Gang!
Cost: 2 Significant Charges
Effect: There is strength and safety in numbers and that's something that simply will not do for most Phobomancers, especially if they need to deal with some meddlesome kids. After casting the spell, the Fear-Junkie can target a group of people, no larger than the tens place on their Phobomancy skill. Make a Soul roll, and if successful the Adept inflicts the crowd with the desire to be alone; this is a compulsion that can be resisted only by suffering a rank-10 Self Check, and even if resisted that does not mean that their fellows will be at all happy to see them coming back their way, perhaps necessitating Isolation checks in the searcher, and Self checks to the person hiding.

Scare You To Death
Cost: 2 Significant Charges
Effect: This is the Phobomancy Blast, it does psychic damage that harms the target in their own mind by projecting terrifying images and hallucinations, triggering a massive sympathetic physiological reaction through fear response. The damage is passing in nature however, and the Target need only to get a full night's rest to heal completely. Normally this spell only deals Minor Blast damage, unless you know their Fear Stimulus, in which case it deals Significant Blast damage. Regardless of the amount of damage dealt, the target is paralyzed for next the round as their body is rocked by the horror that is being beamed directly into their skull.

Witch House
Cost: 4 Significant Charges
Effect: This spell is Gives Me The Creeps scarier homebody of a big brother. You cast this spell by walking around a location, it can be as large as a multi-storied house, a duplex would be fine, but an entire apartment complex, school, or large mansion would be out of the question; it doesn't have to be the entire location in a straight line, but you must travel over the majority of the perimeter. After making your way around the location it becomes a conduit for the Unnatural for the next night (or current if it is already night). In game terms the Adept gains access to a pool of Unnatural Phenomenon, 3 Significant and 6 Minor that they're allowed to spend over the course of the night in the Bewitched location at their discretion. In addition to the pool, any being within the locale besides the Adept who cast the spell take a -10% shift to any skills requiring deliberative thought or fine manipulation, as the Bewitched location causes unease on a primal level. Animals will refuse to go near a Witch House and will attack or flee if forced inside. A Witch house only lasts a single night and in addition, if the Location being Bewitched has a reputation or strong rumor of being haunted (say, enough for a Cliomancer to gather a charge from a murder having been committed there...or if a someone had convinced enough people that it was such a site) the cost of the spell drops to only 2 Charges.

Don't Fear The Reaper
Cost: 5 Significant Charges
Effect: Horror, no matter the type, is a thing that can impress itself upon people so deeply that it can define their lives from that point on. Fear-Junkies can destroy these deep-seated fears and anxieties, stripping the trauma associated with the event away from the subject's mind, like plucking a worm out of an apple. The target (including the adept, if they cast it on themselves) of this spell still remembers the event(s) in question, it just ceases to have any deleterious effect; in game terms the subject may erase a hardened or failed notch in the gauge of their choice.

Phobomancy Major Effects: Create a permanently haunted location, Make someone's fear manifest in reality, Cause a city-wide panic lasting weeks. Cause yourself or another to become permanently immune to fear.








Chronophagy
aka
Clock-Stoppers, Day Trippers, Time-Burglars

	Out of all the fundamental forces that govern the world that humans live in, the least harnessed by far is Time; we've tamed strong and weak nuclear forces to produce our power and electromagnetism to store and transfer it. Yet time remains utterly elusive, even with it being the way that we measure other forces in physics such as velocity, there's also a subjective component to the passage of one moment to the next, everyone has felt time quicken or slow, or for a moment to seem like it has come before. Time has always been the topic of scientific, spiritual, philosophical and artistic endeavors, trying to explain or understand the force that pulls, pushes and eventually dooms all of our lives and life's works to dust, memory and oblivion. All is lost under Time's cruel embrace, except to the Chronophage, the time they make others waste they get back from themselves in little starts and snippets. Why, with enough theft, one could achieve immortality. You just have to find a big enough sucker.

	Chronophages, Clock-Stoppers, Day-Trippers (or behind their backs, Time-Burglars) have always been very rare. It's not that the school is difficult to master due to some potency or particular arcane bent, but rather that most people really can't muster the commitment necessary to really become a master (or was it slave?) to time. People don't really respect the time that they're given to begin with, we while away hours watching television that serves no purpose, we read books and play games, none of which really advance us in any way. Not you though, you truly live each and every moment because you know it is precious, you stole it. The average chronophage is a deeply unhappy person, generally one who has reasons to believe that their lives have been wasted in some way. They justify their actions by claiming that they will value it more than their victims.

	Many Chronophages live strange, fractured lives due to their powers, warping your past and future while in the present isn't particularly conducive to developing a coherent timeline, and as a result they are often forced to use their magic to give themselves perspective on the oddly de-coupled events that often befall them. No matter how curated their lives become, there's always the temptation to meddle just a little bit more, to craft a more perfect you out of the largely meaningless dross that makes up most people's lives.

	The central paradox to Chronophagy is that by wasting the time that others have, they make an active sham of the time that they purport to value. They spend so much time planning how to efficiently waste the time of others that they forget that life is largely what happens in-between the so called 'important' things.

Stats


	Generate a Minor Charge: Waste someone's time in a marked way. Tying someone up on the phone when they obviously want to leave, make someone late for the bus by distracting them, slit someone's tires and make sure they're not on time for work. As long as at least an hour of their time has been rendered null-effort, you get a minor charge. The charge is given upon the target's realization that they're not going to make their appointment, or that they've spent more time than intended or needed doing a task. Only purposeful wasting of someone else's time is enough, if the Chronophage reads the directions wrong and gets everyone lost on accident, they don't get a charge.

	Generate a Significant Charge: Absolutely wreck someone's day, and we're not just talking in a metaphorical sense. Ruin a long-term project in a workplace through misleading memos, crack the foundation of a building under construction, 'accidentally' tip the cargo of a ship over, drive your car into a store-front window. The more time and effort that is wasted in cleaning up your efforts, the better, especially if it involves multiple people rather than an individual. As with Minor charges, the clock-stopper gains it upon the target's realization of the amount of work and effort that has either been wasted or will be required to repair the situation. As before, only deliberate actions count towards charge-generation

	Generate a Major Charge: Ruin a once in a lifetime event for someone else. Chain call your prey dozens of times before their Ivy-league interview, detain someone on their way to the birth of their child, cut the fuel line of a space shuttle hours before launch. Major charges are hard to predict because you never know when you're going to catch a person on the most important day of their life.

	Taboo: Like time-based Sharks, stagnation and inaction is death to a day-tripper's magick, making them as much of slaves to the passage of time as non-chronophages. A time-burglar must always be engaged in some sort of purposeful, meaningful action at all times. Stuff like doing your taxes, washing your house's windows, organizing your books by their ISBN, all would be fine; playing video games without training for a tournament of some sort, reading for pleasure or simply just sitting around and spending an afternoon drinking would be right out. Sleep is a tricky prospect because it can be considered both a necessity and an extravagance, Chronophages are allowed to rest, but only once they drop from exhaustion. If they do not have at least some sort of exhaustion penalty when they head to bed, they're in danger of breaking taboo. Chronophages must also respect the time that they have stolen, they cannot apologize, nor make amends for taking it from their lessers.

	Random Magick Domain: Simply put, their personal timeline, with a minor in time as a whole. Anything that deals with the exclusive passage of one event to another, or one's perception of those events can be affected by Chronophagy. A Day-Tripper couldn't turn back the clock and make you do something different, since they have no ability to directly control you, but they could make you repeat the same action over and over again. Chronophagy is extremely powerful, but it is narrow in its use and it is poor at effects that directly affect another living being beyond those that can be explained purely in a temporal manner. In addition to that, clockstoppers have issues with trying to affect something (beyond themselves, of course) they have already used their powers on, once they've made a change, it's harder to make another change. In game terms this is represented by each repetition of a Chronophagy power on the same target after the first is successful taking a cumulative -10% shift.


Minor Formula Spells


Backwards Glance
Cost: 2 Minor Charges
Effect: Similar to the Cliomancer spell 'Past Sight', 'Backwards Glance' allows you to examine events which transpired in the past at your current location. Unlike 'Past Sight' you must stipulate a general time frame, so "Show me what has happened here since I was last at this location" works, but, "How did Vinnie the Snitch die here?" wouldn't. The caster can witness up to three hours of time in this way, though to an outside observer it would only seem to take a few moments and longer spans of time can be achieved by casting the spell multiple times in the same place, subject to the normal penalties for that, of course. The vision you receive with this spell is not like reading reports or watching a film, it's more like you suddenly remember having been witness to the events first hand, except your recall is near perfect.

This Magic Moment
Cost: 2 Minor Charges
Effect: You can charm a single moment of time to break in your favor, not exactly ensuring success, but certainly stacking the deck. The next roll you make can be flip-flopped. If this spell is used in combat, it does not take an action. You can only use this spell on yourself.

Paradoxical Familiarity
Cost: 3 Minor Charges
Effect: With this spell you can push your senses outwards and synchronize them with the environment around you for the next three hours. This has several benefits:

You 	are always aware of exactly what time it is.

You 	can, with a fair degree of accuracy, estimate how long any given 	action would take, barring exceptional success, failure or luck. 	Smaller actions are easier to read, and it helps to have enough 	information to at least make an educated guess. You could guess how 	long it would take the guard to get from the security station to the 	office you're looting (93 seconds) or how long it would take to run from your apartment to Francois the fear-mage's house (8 minutes, 24 seconds), but estimating how long it would take for say, an objective to be completed would be impossible without at least some corroborating information.

You can cast this spell as a reflexive action when presented with evidence that your personal timeline is not the same as that of the objective  one around you. If successful you can save yourself from having to make tests on your shock gauges, though not from any other unfortunate consequences that may arise.

How About We Try That Again?
Cost: 3 Minor Charges
Effect: The Chronophage may make a target repeat the same exact action that they did the previous round. So, for example if Terry the time eater were to slap 'How About We Try That Again?' on Gladys the sweet old lady in the supermarket while she is testing the weight of two melons and he rolls under his 'Chronphage' identity, she would be stuck there weighing fruit twice as long than she would have otherwise. If cast in combat, this spell doesn't ensure that an attack that was previously successful would be again, as the circumstances around the target will have certainly changed, but it does force the target to waste an action. You can also cast this spell on yourself, which can aid you in completing a task that you've already succeeded once at.

Just A Second Of Your Time
Cost: 3 Minor Charges
Effect: The Day Tripper can yank a bit of time from their target and as a result they can take an additional action for one round, and their target takes none. This extra action can be 'banked' for use at the adept's discretion, but only one moment at a time may be held in such a way. Using the spell more than one round in a row on the same target imposes a -10% shift on all actions per each round above the first, this is in addition to the normal penalty that Chronophages suffer for iterative uses.

Remember What It Used To Be Like?
Cost: 3 or 4 Minor Charges
Effect: You can turn back the clock on an object by touching it and infusing it with a bit of time mojo. This has two effects, depending on the age and condition of the object in question. If the object is broken down from age and use, then it can be restored to working condition in the adept's hands, a rusted and busted gun could would work like it's new, a car on cinder blocks in your yard could be drivable within moments. If the object in question is currently in good working order, and you're willing to spend an additional charge, it can be reduced down to its component parts. The well-cared for glock can be turned into an unassembled pile of gun parts, the brand new Jaguar can be turned into a mass of metal ingots, lengths of rubber, plastic beads and glass panes.

I Already Slept Tomorrow
Cost: 3 Minor Charges
Effect: Drawing upon the timeline of a version of yourself that has eaten & slept recently (Sunday mornings are especially popular) you obviate any requirement for a night's rest, a single meal and whatever hydration that you'd normally consume to feel at your best. This spell only can be used once every 48 hours, your body can only exist on stolen sleep for so long.

Ironing The Wrinkle In Time
Cost: 4 Minor Charges
Effect: There's so much to do in a day, and so little time in which to accomplish everything. When you're honest with yourself however, most of what we do in a day amounts to little more than maintenance or busy work; mowing the lawn, washing the dishes, taking out the garbage, all to get back to where we were before we started in the first place. This spell cuts down the time take up by any mundane, repetitive tasks by half for a full day. Only prosaic, simple and well-known tasks can be affected by this spell; counting grains of rice that you have spilled, arranging your dishes by size, cooking dinner with a recipe you’re deeply familiar with, etc.


Significant Formula Spells


I've Seen This Before
Cost: 1 Significant Charge
Effect: By spending a turn in rapt concentration the clock-stopper can gain insight what will happen in the next turn of combat. The combat round unfolds as normal, but the time eater is allowed to simply change their action after being informed of what everyone else intends to do. This can cause bizarre situations in which someone who was once shooting a gun is now pulling a trigger and cradling a firearm that is no longer in their hands, or someone feeling like they're perfectly fine only to look down and realize that they have a knife sticking out of their chest. This of course can cause Unnatural and Violence checks depending on what is happening. The clock-stopper remembers both sets of events.

Where I've Been Tomorrow
Cost: 2 Significant Charges
Effect: If you've been to a place in the future, that means that the you the exists in the present will be there eventually, which means that you've already been there – from a certain point of view. After using this spell you can gain a decent idea of what awaits you in the structure that you're intending to enter, you get a rough idea of the lay out and which doors are locked, as well as how many people are currently inside. The knowledge isn't like a magic schematic or tracking device, it's more akin to the sensation of having been to a place several times and knowing the routines of the people inside.

So It Goes
Cost: 3 Significant Charges
Effect: This spell is cast in two parts, (the charges are spent when you first cast it) in the first part you take a magickal snapshot of your form at that moment, your bodily condition, your clothes, even how hungry or thirsty you are. From that point onwards, this snapshot acts as a template that can be accessed and then assumed at your discretion, as long as you succeed at another Chronophagy roll. So if you're bleeding out on the floor from a gunshot wound to the chest you can use the second half of the spell and return yourself to the temporal snapshot you took when you in your pajamas, right after breakfast last Wednesday. This magickal restore point stays around for a week before it has to be renewed. Please note that this can only affect your body and the clothes that you have on, so no stacking yourself up with twin assault rifles and body armor, the most you can get are the standard things that have in your pockets. Watching this unfold from the outside would certainly warrant an Unnatural check, with the severity depending on how big the shift is to your clothing and condition.

That's Not What Happened
Cost: 4 Significant Charges
Effect: Looking at the universe with a sneer - the time mage engages in the one of the oldest and most venerable arguments from the world of childhood make beleive, "Nyu-uh, that's not what happened!" Using this spell the time-burglar simply reverses one distinct action of their choosing that happened within their proximity. This is a terribly powerful effect, but it comes with several limiting factors, the most important is that they have to be a personal flesh-and-blood witness to the event in question that they wish to reverse, the second is that it has to be a particular action, rather than a set of actions. So if Francois the phobomancer kicks your door down in a halloween mask, knocks out Rocko the Muscle in the process and then bashes your cellphone into pieces with his baseball bat, you would have to choose between changing either Rocko being knocked out, or your cell phone being smashed, but not both. You could also choose to keep the door from swinging open that turn, but Francois could simply try again next turn. Being a witness to this spell is a Rank-5 Unnatural check.

Passed Discrepancies
Cost: 4 Significant Charges
Effect: When you think about it, most of what defines us as people are the various anxieties, traumas and negative experiences that have been inflicted upon us throughout our lives. These scars shape the types of reactions that we have to further stresses, and those reactions strongly govern how we choose to spend our time. This spell allows you to tug upon the underpinnings of your traumas and shift them around. You can reassign your hardened and failed notches across your shock gauges, two per usage of this spell. These changes can affect the various types of normally permanent madness if you knock yourself below 5 in it, but those points have to go somewhere. The changes to your personal timeline necessary to underpin these shifts are made instantaneously upon the casting of the spell, you are the only one who remembers the new version of events however, which almost certainly sets you up for a bevy of Unnatural, Isolation and Self checks when you are inevitably faced with evidence of your original timeline.

That's Not Who I Was
Cost: 4 Significant Charges
Effect: Almost all of our identity is bound up in how we spend out time throughout our lives, it's not as if you're going to become a master of target shooting if all you do all day is fix cars, and being a world-class athlete is right out if you're not willing to run 10Ks while also holding down a 9-5 office job. This spell lets you change the time you spent in the past, so all that time making pointless money as a stockbroker? You spent it training Judo. All that wasted effort chasing after a man who would just leave you five years later? You were in the army instead, learning how to field strip a rifle and kill for Uncle Sam. Upon the casting of this spell, the adept can shift a number of identity points around equal to the dice rolled, with a maximum being their Chronophage identity. The player is allowed to supplant old identities, come up with new ones and reinforcing ones they already have; the exception is their Chronophage identity, which cannot be changed with this spell. The time-burglar is the only one who remembers the changes, so anyone in your life who knows you still thinks you're a stockbroker who's husband left her, but the actual skills underpinning that identity would be gone and replaced with those of a bad-ass who spent years training her body and mind for murder. Living a stolen life makes it difficult to maintain relationships, and every casting of this spell reduces all of them by 5% - in addition to that, any direct evidence that the life that the adept remembers is not their own causes Shock Gauge checks, with the severity dependent on how overwhelming the proof in question is.

Chronophagy Major Effects: Trap someone in a 'Groundhog Day' scenario, render a person or object immune to the ravages of time, bring someone else (or yourself!) back from the dead, permanently shift to any particular day in the history of the world - it takes another Major Charge to get back.






















Sponsamancy
aka
Objectifiers, Doll-Humpers, True Reborners, Puppeteers & Pygmalions (Self)

	The only thing that we make of ourselves is what we leave behind. But most people focus on the small things like family, fame or fortune, you focus on the one thing that really matters: Love. The truest form of love to you isn't some churlish lust like the men of Cyprus had for the Propoetides. It's clean, pure and selfless in a way that loving another person could never be, because what you love is beyond mere men and women - it's divine. The recipient of your love is as eternal and unchanging as the elements that make it up, after all, objects don't age like us mere mortals. You know that your crush can never let you down, because it has been invested with the power of the gods. You know that's true because You did it.

	Humanity used to respect it's idols. In the cities of ancient Mesopotamia, the gods were believed to inhabit the statues of their images, which were housed in the ziggurats that lay at the heart of the settlement. Only their direct servants, the priests, were allowed in these sacred structures, and only they were allowed to attend directly to the divine ones. The priests would treat the statue as if it were alive; feeding it, clothing it, bathing it, even taking it out of it's home and parading it around the streets so that it's worshippers could see that their divine benefactor was a part of their lives. When a city was conquered, the deity would be dragged down from it's pedestal and then back to the victor's city, to sit in acquiescence at the feet of their new ruler's god. The Semites and their god changed that for a time, but the idols came again in the form of the icons and representations of the Lord, his Saints and the Mother, the words were different, but the veneration was the same and the icons became almost ever-present in religious art. As the renaissance dawned, the art of sculpture flourish once more and the objects of the Sponsamancer's affections became ever more commonplace. In the modern day we no longer even need them to even be wrapped in the accoutrements of the sacred, they are all around us in the form of mannequins, statues & sex dolls. The religious aspect was never important to the true believers anyway, it was always about the Devotion, the Love & the Moe.

	 The odd members who make up this school, often called "Objectifiers", "Doll-Humpers", "True Reborners" or when among one another, "Pygmalions" or "Puppeteers", are generally people who have been unable to establish fulfilling and lasting relationships with others, but especially those of the opposite sex. Instead they began to invent one, usually out of whole cloth and with a subject generally derived from an external source - anime, television or video-games are almost overwhelmingly the most common, though dead relatives and deified statues are represented amongst their ranks as well. The rise of the internet was a huge boon to the puppeteers, at first, they were always social and the community-focused aspects of the school by which it was founded have never entirely faded, though it definitely has taken on more of a misanthropic cast as it came into the present day society. The new form of communication allowed them to identify and then organize with one another in a way that they hadn't since the old days of Uruk and Babylon. It seemed to most of them involved in the project that they were on the cusp of gaining a nearly limitless river of charges from their fellow Pygmalions, working together to conduct their rituals, but it wasn't to be. The nature of their school demands that the objects of their adoration must be supreme, and the idea of not just tolerating, but venerating the Crush of another filled most of them with profound disgust. The ensuing magickal brawls from the few meet-ups sealed the fate of the endeavor in the minds of most of the objectifiers - the wounds are still too fresh for any forgiveness yet.

	The central paradox of Sponsamancy is that it's about forging a connection that can never, ever fail you – though conversely it will never allow you to truly connect with another. By heaping their affection and love upon something that cannot love them back, they lose the chance to truly love another in the way that most of us understand it.

Stats

Generate a Minor Charge: Make another person (or small group of people) treat or acknowledge one of your idols as if it were a real person. This doesn't necessarily have to be willing, but it cannot be coerced from a position of violence. Acknowledging for our purposes is something like giving up your seat to a cardboard cut-out on the bus, asking them if they'd like to be included when buying tickets to a movie or having groceries specifically bought for them. The object in question must be the one that is recognized as having agency in regards to the request or accommodation, asking the Sponsamancer if their crush would like the seat wouldn't be enough, they would have to ask Kimiko the Body Pillow herself how she feels, the Sponsamancer can 'translate' however, giving their assent to get their charge. The lengths that they'll go to aren't particularly important, if they give up their seat and then ask for it back thirty seconds later after the shame sets in, that's fine - they already admitted that the object was real, if only for a few moments. The person who is doing the accommodating has to be there in the flesh as well, no teleconferencing in charges. You can only gain a charge from a single person or collective group a single time per week.

Generate a Significant Charge: Make a group of at least four other people acknowledge or accommodate your crush for at least a half-hour. It's similar to the minor charge behavior, but the scale is different; convince a group to celebrate the Crush's birthday, have them attend a commitment ceremony for you and your Crush, bring your Crush to the office Christmas party and have them take a couple drinks with your co-workers. This suffers all the same restrictions as the minor charge version, and it has to be at least four, if it's three you get nothing more than three minor charges, with the same applying if say two of them peeled off early because they were freaked out. Each group of people can only give you a charge once per week

Generate a Major Charge: Arrange for your beloved to be officially recognized by either a large group (say, 100 or so) or by an actual government - this is big stuff like getting an official birth certificate, having imageboards or conventions dedicated to them or even starting a minor religion based around the object of your love. The edge between a true believer and a casual one is a bit murky, so to a certain extent it is up to the adjudication of the ST and the players, but a good rule of thumb would be that anyone willing to defend their notions of an inanimate object’s reality would count as a believer. The recognition only has to be kept going for a couple of weeks, but if it unravels at the first sermon or court injunction against an illegal marriage, no charge. The charge is only given the one time per Crush, once Kimiko the Body Pillow becomes the centerpiece of a cuddly faith, she can't then go on to become a real girl in the form of being granted a marriage license, the symbolic nature of the Crush's relationship to humanity has already been fundamentally altered too much.

Taboo: The gods are jealous, possessive creatures, and they will accept no other position than that of the centerpiece of the Pygmalion's life. The only Favorite relationship that an Objectifier is ever allowed to have is their Crush, they don't have to take it at character creation, but most do anyway. Having a relationship with another person, whether intimate or otherwise is fine, but they need to know that Kimiko will always come first. In game terms the relationship is functionally nil beyond being it being able to used to threaten or cajole you. After all, if you're not willing to die for your Crush then it's not really true love. The other half to their taboo extends to relationships in general, not only can the Sponsamancer never have a Favorite outside of their Crush, they're not allowed to raise any of their relationships that concern a particular person without being in violation of their mystic vows - that doesn't include organizations, that sort of generalized love for a group isn't nearly as straining on the Sponsamancer's Crush.

...About Your Crush: The types of objects that can be a legal 'Crush' for the Sponsamancer have to be anthropomorphic in nature; body casts with a picture taped on the front, statues of the beloved sculpted out of discarded gum and gym socks, fursuits (as long as no one is in them!) are cool, but just straight sex-robots without any pretension towards the human form are not, as would be lamps or coat racks, no matter how fetching they may be. It must also be a real object and roughly correspond to the actual height of the crush in question, so a body pillow, wall scroll, stuffed corpse or mannequin would work, but a picture on a phone or monitor would be right out. There is no limit to how many Crushes that a Sponsamancer may have, though they generally only have a few, given the nature of their love. A crush can be someone who is, or was alive, but only the actual object that is their physical facsimile is the Crush, a puppeteer would gain no power from someone acknowledging the sentience of a real, breathing person.

Random Magick Domain: The power of sponsamancy is in affecting possessions which are important in an emotional sense, as well as the relationships that those feelings towards an inanimate object are generated from; grandpa's old pipe is important even if you don't smoke and even the cheapest of wedding rings can tug at the heartstrings of their owners. A pygmalion could make you love your mailbox openly and without shame, or ratchet your anxiety level while driving your brand new sports car up to the point where you simply give it away. This also applies to the opposite, objects which have no value can be made to be seen as important or vital in the same way that a treasured keepsake would be. Nearly all sponsamancy effects need some sort of object to perform, the more (or less in some cases) emotionally charged the better.



Sponsamancy Minor Formula Spells

Always Presentable
Cost: 1 Minor Charge
Effect: Many doll-humpers aren't fastidious about their countenance, exultation and exhortation of the gods takes a lot most of their time and effort; the gods demand the best of their followers, even in such a pedestrian manner as their appearance. Casting this spell makes you look adequate, not great or stupendous, just alright and it lasts for 24 hours. The biggest benefit is that you look adequate in any situation, you could show up to your court date in a shirt plastered with anime girls in various states of ahegao, a pair of lime green shorts and flip-flops and the Judge wouldn't raise an eyebrow at your appearance. You never gain a negative shift for your appearance itself, but this only extends to your clothes and level of grooming, if you were covered in blood the police officer would still likely have a few pointed questions for you to answer.

Say A Few Words, Charlie
Cost: 1 Minor Charge
Effect: This unsettling spell allows an objectifier to control objects in their vicinity in a specific way, making them speak a few words in either their voice, or a different one if they have an Identity associated with mimicking or otherwise modifying their own speech patterns. The thing that the pygmalion wants to make chat has to be within their line of sight, and the volume cannot exceed what the caster could make with their own vocal chords. Each use of the spell allows the Sponsamancer a half-dozen words from a single object, though the number doubles if it is used on their Crush or an object that is associated already with speaking; a telephone, ventriloquist dummy or a talking doll. Witnessing this happen without framing it as a natural event (such as having a phone receiver or radio speak) is an Unnatural-3 check.

There Are Many Like It
Cost: 2 Minor Charges
Effect: The ubiquity of objects is a funny thing in the modern world. It used to be that if you owned a rake, or a shovel, or a knife, it may have been in your family's possession for a Century or, more if they're particularly well-taken care of. They were treasures, mostly because they couldn't be replaced almost off-handedly like they can be now. Unable to deal with the shoddy workmanship that mass-production often entails, an enterprising pygmalion from Kansas City Missouri came up with a way to make any off-the-rack object feel as if it were worthy of being in the family legacy. Cast this spell when you pick up a mass-produced object, it cannot be anything that has an emotional resonance to anyone beyond, "Hey, don't steal that." While you are wielding the object for its intended purpose you gain a +10% shift, which lasts until you drop it or stop actively using it. Once an object has been used as a target for this spell, it cannot be used again as it has been stripped of the banality necessary to be a target of the spell.

Home Is Where The Heart Is
Cost: 4 Minor Charges
Effect: A person's home is their castle, it's a place that has been suffused down to the walls with their essence, one that they know almost every corner of by heart. The house protects it's owners possessions, and with this spell it provides even more security. The adept casts the spell by dribbling some sort of bodily fluid of theirs onto the floor of their abode and spending the charges. If successful, the spell lasts 24 hours and it provides the following benefits:

The caster always knows when someone enters the structure, and from which entrance. This functions whether or not they are currently there.

If present, the doll-humper can with a successful roll on their adept identity mystically bar any point of egress from the home. Trying to open the door, window, etc without some sort of violence requires them to beat the adept's roll to magickally lock the place down.

Your Waifu Is Trash
Cost: 3 Minor Charges
Effect: We surround ourselves with those we love or who love us, drawing strength from those close to us, and we can do amazing things when in service to others. This spell allows the objectifier to seal off the ability for others to draw upon that connection in a small way, rendering them unable to draw upon that particular relationship for any sort of action, whether it be Coercion, Substitution or otherwise. You need to have some sort of object that the target of your curse owns, it can be literally anything, something as small as a staple or a paperclip would work, but it must definitively belong to the person who's relationship you want to wreck in relation to the target. The object is discarded during the course of the spell, generally into the garbage or a source of flame. The curse target still knows the victim, and may even still think of them fondly if that's the normal context of their relationship, it's just that they cannot help them in any meaningful way - their car blows a flat on the way over, their advice on how to fix the garbage disposal gets lost or garbled over the phone, they can't come over and help them with their science fair project because they have to work, etc.

Isn't It Just The Best?
Cost: 4 Minor Charges
Effect: Sometimes you just have to make someone fall in love with a toaster. The true reborner must find an object that has some bit of emotional value to the target, it doesn't have to be some family heirloom, so something their cell phone, just one of their favorite coffee mugs. The Sponsamancer has to touch the item and charge it, nothing more. For the next number of hours equal to the 10s place on their die roll for the spell, the owner feels a compulsion to touch, protect and yes, even lavish the object with adoration both physical and emotional. The unfortunate new lover feels the need to defend their charge, and will respond with naked hostility if someone tries to remove the object from their presence. Seeing the object destroyed is a Rank-4 Violence check and it will certainly provoke a violent response from the victim.

What Do You Love?
Cost: 2 Minor Charges
Effect: To many people, what they own is what defines them. If you own a sporty car and a big house, you're a Big Shot - even if you may be a big behind on the car payments, and have two mortgages. You can see those connections with this spell, so if someone spends a lot of time rebuilding a car, you may get a flash of that, if they obsessively clean & maintain their guns, you'll see that. The information comes to you in a swell of emotion, similar to what the owner of the object feels when they handle or take care of it themselves.

Sponsamancy Significant Formula Spells

The Mannequin Method
Cost: 1 Significant Charge
Effect: Most doll-humpers want their Crushes to be real, or at least more animated than they naturally are. This spell goes in the complete opposite direction and brings the caster closer to their idols in nature. Casting the spell makes the caster appear to all outside observers to be a statue, mannequin, wax sculpture, any sort of immobile object which would make the most sense in the circumstance. This isn't foolproof, if you're in the middle of a crowded movie theater, a statue of any sort will look weird, but you'd be surprised the amount of time that people can completely overlook statues or other such decorations in places that would seem odd. The spell lasts as long as the adept stays still, moving in any way breaks the spell.

See, They Are Real!
Cost: 1 Significant Charge
Effect: In many ways this spell is a refinement of 'Say A Few Words Charlie', but the effects are far more broad. The objectifier can only use this spell on one of their Crushes, and they cast it by spending the charge and then showing it some sort of outward sign of affection, such as hugging, kissing or groping their fetish object. For the next hour any one (with the exception of the caster) within a close vicinity of the Crush (about 30 feet or so) sees them in the image that the sponsamancer wishes so desperately that they could be. They can converse with them, feel them and even smell them just as if they were a real, breathing person, the only major limitation being that it is still in reality an object and thus cannot move under its own power, though the case could be made for an animatronic or other such self-ambulatory device. The illusion is remarkably resilient and victims of it will resist any attempts to persuade them otherwise, even after clear evidence is presented after the fact that what they were speaking to was an object. This spell cannot ever be used to gain a sponsamancer charges.

Fuck Your Couch
Cost: 1 Significant Charge
Effect: People care about the things they own, they represent time and effort poured into them, sometimes weeks, months or even years of effort for big purchases. Cursing their enemy to see the things they most love destroyed, the puppeteer makes it true with an investment of mystical power. Basically this spell makes the objects which are the most important (not necessarily the most valuable, though they certainly can be) in the target's life simply take damage from an outside, seemingly sourceless force. Cars are covered in dents and gash marks, a wedding ring warps and falls apart, a beloved house loses shingles, has it's windows broken and develops a dozen creaking floorboards. This damage is represented by simply rolling 2d10 and reading the damage similar to a firearm attack, with the cap being the caster's Sponsamancy identity. It would take several uses of this spell to destroy something as large as a vehicle or a dwelling, but something small like a treasured set of china would be gone after the first attempt.

Agony Poppet
Cost: 2 Significant Charges
Effect: It's unclear whether this technique was simply incorporated into the school via pop-cultural osmosis, or if the doll-humpers themselves inspired the occult practice - what is clear is how deadly the fetish that the spell creates can be if used and crafted correctly. Build a small representation of your enemy, it could be made of stitched fabric and stuffing like an actual doll, or it could be something like a human sized figure carved out of wood or potato. It doesn't  have to be a work of art, a head, torso, two arms and two legs would do, just enough that someone could recognize it as a person. Then you need to have something to correspond to your target, such as a lock of hair, a piece of stationary or a discarded hunk of gum - if you want to do minor blast damage. If you want to do significant blast damage you need to have something that corresponds to them, that's also near and dear to their heart; a locket from their mother or the tassel from their college graduation cap. The Poppet, once invested with the significant charges can be used at any time by inflicting damage to it, and it only works once. The damage done to the target reflects the types that was inflicted upon the poppet, so if it was thrown in a bonfire they would suddenly break out in burns & blisters, if it were smashed repeatedly against the ground then the unfortunate victim would find themselves covered in bruises and contusions seemingly instantly.

Ring-Giving
Cost: 3 Significant Charges, or 3 Significant Charges and a Taboo Break
Effect: Named after a kenning, which is a sort of word mashup metaphor that anglo-saxons used to describe their deeds, this technique is used to enhance relationships that are otherwise so heavily damaged or stymied by the normal day-to-day, isolating activity of engaging in being a sponsamancer. The puppeteer must sacrifice an item of theirs in a short ritual in which they destroy it in front of a photo or other representation of the target of the spell, burning is the most popular, but a lot of objects simply can't be destroyed in such a way. The object in question determines the effects and whether or not the spell is considered a taboo break. The minor version of the spell simply requires a personal object that the puppeteer chooses, it can literally be something as simple as a fork or a book purchased from a thrift store, the adept rolls a 10-sided die and simply adds the result to the relationship that they wish to bolster, please note that increasing it in this way does not count against the adept as a taboo break. The significant version of this spell calls for the pygmalion to destroy one of their Crushes, it is an extremely traumatic undertaking which always causes a Rank-7 Violence check and causes the adept to be in violation of their vows, but on the other hand they are allowed to roll two 10-sided dice and add the sum of the roll to a relationship of their choosing, even an entirely new or dead one.

Mea Tulpa
Cost: 4 Significant Charges
Effect: Have you ever looked around and just invented random backstories for people on the street? That haggard looking woman used to be a talented grifter until she fell in with the Russian Mob, that man in the raincoat used to farm on his estate in Spain until the financial crisis of 2008 made him sell it off, this bloke in the fishing hat raises chickens in his basement so that he has a source of income outside of his...The possibilities are endless, and we can create whole casts of imaginary friends in this manner, but with this spell you can make them real. The Tulpa of a person is built around a 'seed' from which is grown the rest of their personality and identity, if you were to use a plastic police badge as your seed you could create a being focused around investigation, protection or intimidation, if you were to use a toy truck, you could use it to craft a being that was a truck driver or a child with an interest in construction equipment. The minds of these thoughtforms are extremely simplistic in nature, but are able to superficially pass as a person and are able to make rolls directly relating to the identity that they were crafted around. Appearance wise they tend towards a sort of banal average, no matter what race or gender the adept chooses to make them, unless the seed object was from a specific person which the caster intends for it to ape, then they function as perfect replicas. The Tulpas are also relatively fragile, only having a number of wounds equal to the sum of the die roll used to create them, and if they are forced to make more than a single stress check of any sort in a scene (success or failure) they shatter into random bits of trash and refuse, with their seed object in the center of the wreckage. Seeing this unfold without being prepared is a Rank-7 Unnatural check, and even when informed that it may happen the shock still causes a Rank-3 check. A sponsamancer can use a Crush of theirs as a seed object, but they can no longer use that object as their source of charges and the results are often an extreme letdown, given the limited nature of Tulpa personalities.

Sponsamancy Major Effects

Transform one of your crushes into an actual, sentient person or turn a living person into a statue/sculpture/figurine of themselves. Cause someone to irrevocably fall in love with an object of your choosing, treating it similar to a Sponsamancer's Crush but with no mystical benefit to them. Completely strip a Pop Idol of all of their fame and cause them to fall from the public's eye, or cause a relatively unknown star to become an absolute sensation overnight.