Phobomancy

Fear-based Magick Summary: There are very few motivating forces that are as potent and insidious as fear, and Phobomancy, in oneform or another, has been around for a long, long time. The Phobomancers, or boogeymen, understand that fear is essentially a strong survival instinct and that as such, it underpins many of our emotional and rational responses to the world around us. If you can make people afraid of you, then it stands to reason that you can make them do just about anything else you want. For reasons that will pretty much become apparent as we go, Phobomancers tend to be domineering, manipulative and generally very unpleasant. Their magick relies upon being able to terrorise others into submission, and it’s generally agreed that if most of them got wiped out during WW2, it’s no less than they deserved.

In fact, the Phobomancers who hooked up with the Nazis in Germany probably were all exterminated. However, it wasn’t too long before an ex-Gestapo officer and one-time Thule Society occultist, who had done fairly well for himself by passing on Nazi counterintelligence techniques to the Americans during the Cold War, decided to have a try at resurrecting the school, based upon what he understood of its principles. He was successful, unfortunately, but the school is at least small, relatively weak, and unlikely to ever be able to wreak the same sort of damage as its equally unwholesome predecessors.

Blast Style: Damage from a Phobomancy blast is different from victim to victim, and generally takes the form of whatever is going to freak out the target most. Minor blasts take the form of unusual and inexplicable aches and pains that could, quite frankly, be caused by anything – after all, a sudden burst of excruciating agony in your nether regions is all the more scary if you don’t know what’s causing it.

Stats

Generate a minor charge: Intimidate someone into performing some relatively minor service for you, e.g. ‘loaning you’ $100 or committing a petty crime on your behalf. You get the charge as soon as the task is undertaken, either successfully or unsuccessfully.

Generate a significant charge: Intimidate a very big favour out of someone, such as getting permission to treat his house as your own for as long as you like, or committing a serious crime on your behalf and risking a hefty prison sentence. One again, you get the charge as soon as the task’s attempted. For the purposes of getting a significant charge, anything short of murder counts as a serious crime.

Generate a major charge: Terrorise a person to the extent that he’ll kill someone, betray someone he loves or do something else that similarly goes against his deepest-held convictions. To do this, you have to uncover and then play upon his deepest, darkest fear, and you only get a significant charge if the person caves in too easily – this needs to be the sort of betrayal that will irrevocably violate the core of his identity and trigger, in game terms, a rank-10 Self challenge.

Taboos: A Phobomancer loses all of his charges if he ever shows fear or is perceived to be acting on his Fear Stimulus.

Random Magick Domain: Fear, as they say, is all in the mind. So is Phobomancy. It is subtle and powerful, and by altering or controlling the perceptions of others, Phobomancers can make their decisions for them, cause them to act in ways contrary to their personalities, or just re-write their personalities altogether.

Starting Charges: A Phobomancer starts with 4 minor charges.

Minor Formula Spells

'''Give You the Creeps Cost:''' 1 minor charge.  Effect: This spell afflicts the victim with a strong sense of insecurity, paranoia and general anxiety that lasts until the next time he sleeps. It also causes him to make madness checks with a –10% shift and gives anyone who’s trying to intimidate or coerce him a +10% shift on related rolls.

'''Look Before You Leap Cost: 1 minor charge.  Effect:''' This spell convinces the target that one course of action, determined by the Phobomancer when he casts the spell, would be so insanely foolish and dangerous that he must make a relevant stress check if he wants to try it. Just about anything can become a taboo, no matter how innocuous, but the target gets a chance to resist the spell if the caster specifies something that would be ridiculous or wildly out of character for him to have reservations about. He can shrug off the effects with a successful Soul check, but if the victim is an adept or anyone else who knows about magick, he’ll have to face a rank-4 Unnatural challenge as he realises that someone’s been trying to play with his head.

'''I’m Your Nemesis  Cost:''' 2 minor charges.  Effect:The Phobomancer takes on the appearance of the person that the victim is most afraid of. Caveat emptor: this spell only works while the caster is in sight of the target, it doesn’t reveal to the Phobomancer who he’s masquerading as, and it only affects one person at a time. Everyone else will see the Phobomancer’s real appearance, and so will he if he looks in a mirror.

'''It’s Not a Tumour  Cost: 2 minor charges.

Effect: This is the Phobomancy minor blast. It affects the target with one of a variety of excruciating pains and freaks the hell out of him at the same time as he tries to figure out what horrible, life-threatening condition he’s got. For an extra minor charge, it can temporarily simulate the effects of something truly scary, such as blindness, deafness or paralysis. This effect lasts for a number of rounds equal to the sum of the dice on the caster’s roll.

'''Indomitable Will Cost: '''3 minor charges.   Effect: Phobomancers know that if they can control fear, they can conquer it as well. That’s what this spell does – it frees the target from inhibitions of every sort and renders him immune to most stress challenges for a number of hours equal to the sum of the dice on the caster’s magick roll. The target can simply ignore stress challenges of a rank equal to or less than the number on the tens die from the same roll. E.g. Schreck, a Phobomancer, casts Indomitable Will on Klaus, an enforcer, and gets a successful roll of 52. Klaus can ignore all stress challenges of rank-6 or below for the next seven hours. This may sound great, but when it also stops people from being afraid of the consequences of their actions it can have a very dehumanising effect.

Significant Formula Spells

'''Just a Bad Dream Cost: 2 significant charges.  Effect: '''This spell reaches into the victim’s psyche, pulls out his Fear Stimulus and forces him to confront it in a hallucination that’s indistinguishable from reality. In other words he must make an immediate stress check as his worst nightmare plays itself out inside his head, in horrifying Technicolor. However, if the victim can make a successful Mind check that also beats the Phobomancer’s magick roll, he’ll realise that he’s hallucinating. There needs to be some sort of external stimulus for this to happen, such as a physical attack on the victim, or the efforts of a friend to jolt him back into reality.

'''The Smell of Fear Cost: 2 significant charges.  Effect:''' For twenty four hours everyone who sees, hears or speaks to the target will perceive him to be a nervous, insecure wreck, even if he’s actually as brave as a lion. This impression wears off pretty quickly in the case of targets who obviously don’t have yellow streaks a mile wide, but it’s a serious hassle for anyone with good reason to be afraid, such as something to hide. It’s a nasty spell to cast on someone as they’re coming through customs checks at an airport.

'''Big Brother Is Watching You Cost: '''3 significant charges.  Effect: This spell has two effects. It allows the caster to watch the target as if he were following him with a video camera, as long as he concentrates on the spell and has a medium to work through, as well as a photograph of the target. What happens is that the Phobomancer casts the spell, switches on the nearest TV and concentrates while he watches, and he’ll get a crystal clear image of the victim and whatever he’s doing at the time. It also gives the victim an unpleasant feeling of being watched, or being maliciously whispered about behind his back. This can be dismissed as simple paranoia, of course, but Phobomancers have found that it’s ideal for keeping their enemies on edge and jittery.

'''Nerves of Steel  Cost:''' 3 significant charges.   Effect: The target’s capacity for fear and self-doubt are reduced drastically, as this spell allows him to flip-flop or re-roll failed stress checks for a number of days equal to the ones die on the caster’s magick roll. This can be very useful, but it also makes the target callous and unpleasant to be around as he generally ceases to care what other people might think about what he says and does.

'''Terror Fatalis  Cost: '''3 significant charges.  Effect: This is the Phobomancy significant blast. It immediately causes whatever form of horrific injury the victim is most afraid of, although it doesn’t inflict any permanent damage unless the Phobomancer’s magick roll is 50 or higher. Even so, the damage will often look permanent unless the victim gets serious hospital treatment, and even after that it might look agonisingly touch-and-go for a while.

'''This is Your Nightmare Cost:''' 4 significant charges.   Effect: This spell gives the victim a new Fear Stimulus of the caster’s choosing. This effect, while powerful, isn’t permanent and it doesn’t over-write the victim’s original Fear Stimulus, which starts to re-manifest after d10 days. The re-adjustment process is generally traumatic and unpleasant, especially if the victim’s magickally induced Fear Stimulus was frequently triggered and resulted in lots of Failed Madness Meter notches.

Phobomancy Major Effects:  Make someone’s worst nightmare come true. Permanently re-write someone’s Fear Stimulus, or make him completely and permanently immune to fear. Cause someone to die of fright.