The Slaying Stone (D&D 4e): Review + Alterations

I realize this module has gotten a lot of attention online as D&D 4e has been having a bit of a (much deserved) renaissance. I don't necessarily think I have anything revelatory to say about it, but I will be running my own adaptation of it at a local game store starting in about 2 weeks, and I see no reason not to put my thoughts in writing.

Adventure Summary 

This is an adventure that came out in the middle-to-late days of 4e's run (which was roughly '08-'13; not as short relative to most prior editions as the haters would have you believe, despite their best efforts at the time.) It's designed for level 1 characters, although by my math a 5-player party would hit level 2 about 2/3 of the way through. The increasing levels of the last few encounters would support this.

The setup is that the PCs are hired to retrieve the eponymous MacGuffin from a fallen human city that has been overrun by goblins. The Slaying Stone is supposed to be some big-time scary magic weapon that can't be allowed to fall into the wrong hands, or whatever. I have some thoughts on this conceit and its execution that I'll get to later.

This is a faction-driven adventure. The biggest and most frequently encountered faction are the goblins. There's also a smaller group of kobolds that have beef with the goblins and an orc mercenary group that are also looking for the Stone.

I have seen this described as a sandbox, which I don't think is accurate, although I also object to false dichotomies and I don't think any two D&D players will ever agree what "sandbox" and "railroad" mean. The encounter structure is linear at the beginning and the end. You're supposed to run encounters 1-3 first, no matter what, and then wrap up with encounters 10-13. The middle chunk is flexible.

 

Check it out, I made a whole diagram and everything!

What I Like

Faction Play Done Right: Not that it's rocket science to pull off, in my opinion, but I think the factions are well-executed in this adventure.

The three factions are designed to be easy to play off each other. They're fairly distinct in motivation and the resources available to them, although I have ideas about how they could have gone further with this, specifically with the kobolds. Narratively, the goblins are the bread-and-butter enemies, the kobolds are underdogs who can be swayed to the PCs' side, and the orcs are the Big Bads and don't directly show up until near the end. 

I anticipate this element working well with minimal changes, and it's a core part of the adventure, so I'm happy about that.

 

Creative Use of Skill Challenges: Skill challenges are a divisive element of 4e, even amongst its own designers. This shows through in how much the chapters on them evolve between the DMG1 and DMG2. 

In my opinion, the first two skill challenges in this adventure (Encounter 2 and Encounter 3) are excellent. They showcase the strength of skill challenges as a piece of design: mechanizing non-combat parts of the game that still need to have stakes, in a way that integrates well with the combat mechanics that make up 95% of the game system. 

Encounter 2 provides the players three options on how to sneak into the city. The options' pros and cons are immediately obvious and mechanized in ways that make sense with the narrative details. Straightforward, but not to its detriment!

Encounter 3 is the one that really has me itching to design weird storygame inspired skill challenges, though. It progresses between fights throughout the entire rest of the adventure. A sidebar suggests it may be better not to even announce it as a skill challenge to the players, which kind of reminds me of the whole debate in the OSR about how much of hexcrawl mechanics should be made visible to players. 

I could see this encounter forcing a GM to improvise if the players fuck up a lot near the start of the adventure, but I will withhold judgment on that until I run it myself. 

The one other skill challenge, Encounter 10, is kind of boring; a bog-standard negotiation with a dragon too powerful just to fight head-on. It feels likely to chafe at players if you keep it firmly within the skill challenge framework, but whatever. There's nothing stopping me from replacing it or sprucing it up so that players have more meaningful choices to make.

  

Narrative Flexibility: This is pretty minor, but I like that the adventure explicitly advises the GM to alter the overarching questgiver framework according to what will be fun and interesting. For example, if the players start to suspect their employer and that of the orcs are in cahoots, it says that you should feel free to make that true. 

I don't think the questgivers and their motives are likely to cross the players' minds during the adventure, because it's very much a narrative bookend thing, and as written they are highly unlikely to compare notes with the orcs, rather than just fighting to the death. But I appreciate the sentiment.

 

What I Don't Like 

Linearity: As stated above, I don't care about debating "railroads vs. sandboxes." But I do care about giving my players meaningful choices, even in games as prep-heavy as modern D&D, where respecting those choices can mean throwing out a whole session-long fight I spent time designing, bought minis for, etc etc. 

There is a balance to be struck, and I realize prewritten adventures are going to skew toward forcing their setpiece encounters, but I wish some of that advice to be flexible applied here as well. 

The most egregious case of this is that the final battle with the orcs is set up such that they ambush the PCs after they acquire the Slaying Stone, and there is nothing players can do to prevent this from happening.

I have a few ideas on how to fix this. One is to have two versions of the final fight: a harder one where the players fail to prevent the ambush, and an easier one where they come prepared. Or, I could have the orcs discover the stone at the same time as they do, and either have a three-way fight with the dragon as its own side, or ditch the dragon altogether. Or combine the two: maybe the default is they fight at the location of the Stone, but clever planning could mean they beat the orcs there. There's a lot of options I prefer to the prewritten version. 

Not Enough Magitech!: One of the things I really fuck with in this module is the whole "lost magical weaponry" aspect... Except there's almost nothing to it. One fight with the cool-ass robot dogs from the cover, and the Slaying Stone itself, which... See the next section for why that's not enough for me.

I plan to run this in a way that really emphasizes the Roadside Picnic Zone-iness of the city. It's dangerous, it's full of hostile factions, but there's also uniquely cool magitech weirdness to harvest, even if some of it will try to kill you for your trouble. One change will be to have more construct fights. 

The MagGuffin is Boring: So yeah, all the Slaying Stone does is kill one creature within the city, AFTER it gets a full turn of combat. And there's just one stone and it can only be used once. Even if, as GM, you BS some implications it could be turned into something more powerful, that's lame. And the adventure explicitly tells you to hype this thing up whenever possible.

My fix? It's basically a one-use Death Note. It can kill any one person as long as you have a decent Arcana bonus and know their true name. That's strong enough they're unlikely to waste it on this encounter. It also makes the Stone, and by extension the party, focal to future adventures rather than just getting destroyed by the questgiver upon retrieval. What will the PCs do with it? Surely they don't trust some old wizard guy who paid them 100 gold with this kind of power, right? These are more interesting questions to me. And I'm never afraid to upset the status quo of a campaign this way. Many of my favorite moments in RPGs result from giving the PCs this kind of dilemma, and power.

The Kobolds Don't Actually Use Traps: This is pretty minor, but one of the things the module says makes the kobolds distinct from other factions is that their territory is full of traps. But there are no encounters where this get used (nor any trap stats for during exploration.) They do have a secret passage in one fight, at least. 

Anyway, this is dead easy to fix. I'll poach some of the low-level traps from the DMG and slot them into one or two of the kobold fights.

Racist Fantasy Game is Racist: This is by no means unique to this module, but damn, it's always jarring to see everyone that's not a "civilized" (playable) race get described as if they're barely smart enough to speak. And of course they're ontologically evil and thus OK to kill. I dunno. It's just weird and boring and gross. 

One change I plan to make around this, besides roleplaying people as people with survival instinct, real motivations, not monocultures, etc. is to replace the orcs with a mercenary faction that aren't all one race, and that have more sophisticated methods than "torture goblins until we ambush the PCs as scripted." I'm thinking probably having a tiefling spellcaster in charge, since they're supposed to have been the ones to create the Slaying Stone (and presumably the Iron Defenders and other, undescribed magitech weirdness).

Some of the Fights are Kind of Boring: I do feel like I should spend more time on this, because it's really the important part, and the main reason to buy a module rather than run your own story off-the-cuff. But here's the gist of my thoughts.

Overall I think most of the fights are fine. I really like Encounter 6, which is not only the one with the iron defenders, but also a kobold that summons an ankheg halfway through the fight. The only ones that really strike me as underwhelming are Encounters 11 and 12. This is kind of a shame, since Encounter 12 is the boss fight with the leader of the goblins. His only gimmick is that he has a mount and he can deflect damage to it. 

I'll probably redesign that one, and just scrap Encounter 11 altogether. That one has a lycanthropic noble NPC who gets ambushed by a bunch of goblins. I find his whole subplot half-baked and uninspiring, so I will be cutting him altogether. I'm not really big on the whole "reclaim the city for humans" thing they set up in general, between the fantasy racism as mentioned above, and the fact it detracts from the Stalker-y "overrun magitech city" vibes that I think are a lot of fun.

I also feel like there are slightly too many fights with all or mostly Skirmisher enemies. I get that they're kind of the "default" monster role, but variety is the spice of life.

 

Okay, that was a lot of words! I'm curious to see how many of them I take back and/or eat after actually running this. Stay tuned on that, and also maybe on some posts about the DIY mini substitute I'm thinking of trying since I gave away all my miniatures a couple years ago. 

Statospheric Saturdays: The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 5 - "Evil, Vile" Levi Oster, Anagram Gematriast Heretic

Here is the last entry in this subseries. Levi was originally going to be my PC in an All-Mart campaign that never got past the dreaded scheduling phase.

As mentioned a couple weeks ago, I will be shelving weekly StatSat entries for the time being. I have a 4e D&D campaign starting soon and want to focus my RPG writing time on prepping for that. There will probably be more posts relating to that soon. And even if I'm not writing it down weekly, the UA brainworms will never leave me in peace, you can rest assured.

 
 

The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 5

Levi Oster, known in occult circles by his own tongue-in-cheek title, “Evil, Vile Levi,” has a relationship to his heritage that lies between “complicated” and “tortured.”

He was born into a Brooklyn Ashkenazi Jewish community, assigned female, and raised to become a loyal housewife and faithful mother. He always chafed at the strictures of his orthodox upbringing, wanting to be given the respect shown to his brothers and male cousins: a modicum of freedom, a listening ear to his ideas, a future that he might make his own. His father was a respected gematriast – not of the anagram variety, mind you, but of the ancient Jewish tradition. Premodern mysticism, the kabbalah and the like, held a dignified place in his community. Levi always hovered as close to the edges of those mysteries as a “girl” could get.

By his early teens, Levi knew he was actually a boy. He also had the wherewithal to keep that fact to himself if he wanted to continue to have a roof over his head. Sometimes, in the wee hours, he would stay up to complain with the neighborhood girls about the unfairness of their lot in comparison to the boys. But he always had to hold back what he really wanted to say. In the end, he had to repress it as a survival instinct.

A stranger attended his Bat Mitzvah. He was an old man with a long, white beard, the very image of a sagacious elder, and the sort of man Levi had been raised to listen to carefully, and with great respect. The stranger kept his distance, not just from Levi, but apparently everyone else there, to some degree. And nobody seemed to know him either.

As things wound down, with the other kids and the women released to play, study, or clean, and the men talking in clusters, Levi approached him. The man’s name, he said, was Moshe, and he knew Levi’s name. This seemed pretty in keeping with expectation until he said that name. He called him Levi, not his deadname. For that one instant, everything fell away around them, as Levi accessed mystic truth unfettered for the first time.

Until he turned eighteen, Levi and Moshe – whose surname was never revealed – met regularly under the guise that the latter was a rabbi from Israel whose son he might wish to marry off to Levi (which delighted his parents). Moshe was every bit as erudite, pious, and wealthy as he needed to be to support this claim. When Levi left home, Moshe told him that he had convinced his parents it was to plan the wedding. Levi continues to feel conflicted about his disappearance from their lives, but has never considered going back.

Moshe had known Levi’s name through means he never explained, and because of that, had known Levi was male, even when he had all but forgotten that fact himself. But as he started to build himself a new life, he questioned everything. And in the end, he turned his back on Moshe, too. Partly, it was out of spite at his restrictive upbringing - at having his identity denied, and at the fate of all the girls and women he’d known. Partly, he saw the contradictions within Jewish traditions, and between Judaism and other religions. He had a lot of questions and unresolved frustration, and Moshe expected him to be a Nice Jewish Boy. Years later, he’d mature to the point that he wanted to try and make up with the old man, but by then Moshe had faded away, whether succumbing to age or illness, or something more primordial, Levi never found out.

What was left to Levi of their bond was, in truth, not particularly Jewish. But it was magick: the magick of names. True names are something that the trans community Levi has found as an adult tends to balk at, and understandably so. Who decides what is “true” about them? Why does one person only get the one name? Levi doesn’t know. He doesn’t make the rules. But he can do magick with them.

In essence, he practices anagram gematria (Break Today, p. 91), but only with people’s names. He believes it only works with a person’s true name, and that those are granted from some ineffable force on high. It’s quite likely he’s mistaken there, and that if he had his horizons broadened he could do the full gamut of anagram gematria, with any word or phrase.

Generally, when Levi meets someone, he tries to come up with spells for their name. For example, his boss at the All-Mart where he works is named Oliver Anderson, and he has found success casting “I Order Venal Son” on him to manipulate him with bribery, even in ways that don’t make sense, like giving him a raise. For about one in ten people, Levis’ magick doesn’t work, in which case he assumes their true name is not their legal name, or the name they go by. Usually, this means he just can’t affect them, but once in a while he digs up a childhood nickname or occult underground moniker, and then he can ensorcell them just fine.

Try as he might to move on, he keeps being drawn back to Orthodox Judaism. He always studies the Torah and kabbalah in his free time, and he’s gone as far as to try and join a couple synagogues in recent years, now he can reliably pass. There’s inevitable friction when he does, and he ends up burnt out on his faith and resentful for months at a time, but he can never quite shake the belief that was instilled in him so young. Worst of all, the misogyny he internalized as a child has only festered in him as he’s purged himself of femininity. Sometimes, it comes out in ugly ways.

Someday, he wants to use anagram gematria to commune with Yahweh. He’s sunk a lot of hours and taken many risks to try and figure out the name he would need to use, having tried Hebrew, English, Spanish, and a half-dozen other languages he’s barely familiar with. To be sure, he’s arrogant to even try, and it will probably burn him eventually, even though his choice of higher power to believe in is misguided in the World of Our Desires.

In the meantime, he works nights stocking at All-Mart, occasionally smuggling out a piece of exostock, always carrying on his person a notebook or two of true names and associated spells.

“Evil, Vile” Levi Oster, Anagram Gematriast Heretic

Obsession: True names. They are the essence of a person, and they hold great power.

Rage passion: The adulteration of faith by the institutions of orthodox religion.

Fear passion: (Helplessness) Being reduced back to womanhood.

Noble passion: I’m going to learn the true name of God someday, and finally get some answers.

Helplessness: Hardened: 5 / Failed: 2

Isolation: Hardened: 4 / Failed: 0

Self: Hardened: 4 / Failed: 0

Unnatural: Hardened: 3 / Failed: 1

Violence: Hardened: 1 / Failed:

Anagram Gematriast 60%:* Casts Rituals, Casts Gutter Magick

Night Shift Stock Boy 20%: Substitutes for Fitness, Protects Isolation, Evaluates Helplessness

Conflicted Agnostic 40%: Substitutes for Secrecy, Evaluates Unnatural, Evaluates Self

 

As a bonus, here are some of Levi's spells using his own "true name":

LEVI OSTER = RESOLVE IT: All-purpose minor boost to actions taken to proactively resolve a problem.

LEVI OSTER = EVER TOILS: +20% to Fitness checks that take place over at least a half hour.

LEVI OSTER = IS REVOLT: +10% to Struggle against authority figures and systemic power.

LEVI OSTER = ISLE TROVE: +20% to Status when referencing his "off-shore accounts" and/or playing into "Jew Gold" stereotypes. 

Statospheric Saturdays: The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 4 - Steven Smith, Soulless Thanatomancer

Here is the penultimate entry in this little subseries. Getting a bit spooky with this one; UA is a horror game, after all. 

The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 4

Many serial killers have been called soulless, sociopathic, heartless. Often there’s an element of metaphor, or at least exaggeration to these accusations. But for Steven Smith, it’s literal.

Smith had no upbringing. He wasn’t born. A glitch in the universe shat him out, fully formed, fourteen years ago. Well, fully formed, sans any kind of blood, bone, internal organs, or soul. If you haven’t already inferred, he is a nonentity (see UA2 Core Book, p. 304). Of the roughly decade and a half he’s existed, he has spent very little doing anything of note, which is typical of his kind, and necessary for his survival. He wore sweater vests and khakis, walked into a cubicle at a struggling temp firm and stared at its wall eight hours a day. After clocking out, he found a secluded alley, 24-hour diner booth, or the like to spend the night doing nothing.

This changed one night, nearly a year ago now, in the darkened Hot Topic of an isolated shopping mall. Smith sat motionless in the changing room he’d selected to spend the night, the college-age employee either having forgotten he’d gone inside or failing to give a shit when they locked up. The floor-to-ceiling grate outside the store rattled up, and a thanatomancer (see Postmodern Magick, p. 111) by the name of Florence Simon walked inside, pushing her sacrifice ahead of her.

As she explained, in brutal detail, her plans for the poor homeless woman she had chosen to harvest a sig from, the aura of terror wafted to Smith like a macabre apple pie on a windowsill. Silently, he unlatched the door to the changing room and watched the proceedings from the shadows.

Over the next three hours, the butcher did her work and cleaned up afterwards. She never even noticed Smith staring. Her victim did, but by that point she had been overwhelmed with agony, her screams long grown indistinct, her tongue cut out. Simon left dragging two heavy black trash bags and a fleshy fetish in a pouch hanging from around her neck. Enthralled, Smith followed.

Simon was on the warpath with an enemy cabal. She had just started charging up nightly for the span of a week in anticipation of some supremely grisly workings. However, on the third night, she caught Smith, because he had become overwhelmed with bloodlust and wanted to join in. Startled and angry to have a carefully planned charging rite ruined, the death mage reflexively unleashed a significant blast on Smith. She expected him to fall to literal pieces, but he just kept kneeling over her gagged and flailing sacrifice, digging fistfuls of meat from his chest cavity.

Simon went from upset to frantic. She struck out with her flensing knife, severing three fingers from the philosophical zombie. Though they were coated in the sacrifice’s blood, the stumps did not bleed themselves. From this point, her rage and terror escalated to twisted reverence.

Nonentities are immune to magick, but, though it’s vanishingly rare, they can still practice it. Smith’s obsession with suffering and pain dovetailed beautifully with thanatomancy. He also had the benefit of a devoted tutor. Unaware of what Smith was, Simon had interpreted his immunity to, and fixation on torture as a sign he was some kind of cenobite-esque entity, perhaps one she had attracted after her storied career as a ritualistic killer.

Unfortunately for both, but mercifully for the local unhoused population, their morbid attraction had allowed Simon to forget her feud until it was too late. The cabal got the drop on her, and although Smith harvested four significant charges in the aftermath, she received a nasty stab wound. It wouldn’t have been fatal, though she was in and out of consciousness for most of a day. But once Smith had finished with her attackers, he took one last boon from his mentor.

Short-lived as his training was, Smith learned enough of Simon’s ideology to know how to cover his tracks. It had been important to Simon to conduct her sacrifices in public places, but to leave no trace behind. So became Smith’s practice. He disappeared from his job, causing a minor kerfuffle, but before anyone could decide if they wanted to check if he had any emergency contacts, his firm went under. No one who knew him before ever thought of him again.

Now, Smith spends his days stalking and planning his sacrifices, and carries them out at night. His body count is in the hundreds. He has evaded erasure by the universe only because no one has ever associated him with his actions. He takes teeth or knucklebones as fetishes, which now weigh down his pockets, but do not slow his pursuit. He is stealthy, steady, and perfectly forgettable. And no one who he chooses to cross paths with lives to tell the tale.

There is one other oddity about him: he never casts a spell. He never fully learned how from Simon, and moreover, he’s obsessed with the process of the sacrifice and its resultant emotions. He couldn’t care less about exercising mystic power. He is a hollow man suffused with the equivalent mojo of several dozen major charges. It’s unlikely mundane authorities will catch him, but unnatural phenomena have been dogging him for months now. Surely, when he’s discovered by the occult underground of one of the cities his trail of blood passes through, he will go out with a terrible bang.

Steven Smith, Soulless Thanatomancer

Obsession: Ritualistic murder and the resultant froth of pain, fear, and misery in the victim.

As a nonentity, Smith has no passions and does not face stress checks. He has a base rating of 15% in all abilities.

Thanatomancer 75%: Casts Rituals, Casts Gutter Magick

Soulless Killer 75%: Substitutes for Pursuit, Substitutes for Struggle, Coerces Violence

Statospheric Saturdays: The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 3 - Gwen Paylik, Bibliomancer of Action

I still have the thanatomancer planned for this subseries, and I will be adding an anagram gematriast as well. After that, I think I might take a break from StatSat for a while so I have time to develop my non-UA posts a bit more. But that's a couple weeks out. We shall see.

Oh, and a disclaimer: I have not actually read any airport thrillers. I am willing to do research for these posts, but not a whole book I expect I will not enjoy. So take this post as the GMC in question's view of the genre (?) rather than my own. 

The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 3

Gwen Paylik hates “airport thrillers” – “ghostwritten, paint-by-numbers dreck with the literary merit and attitude toward women of a Republican politician’s drunken Twitter screed,” as she once described them. Unfortunately, she is under the (mistaken) impression that they have unique mystical potency, and she owns a minimum of two copies of every single one of them: a hardcover and a paperback.

Typically, bibliomancy revolves around the knowledge one derives from the written word. Not exactly so for Gwen, who can, and often does, earnestly attest she has learned nothing of value from any book in her collection. In her mind, the books are all completely interchangeable, except for the signed copies, which are the only ones valuable enough to be usable for a traveling library (which is essential in her line of work).

Something about the stream of capital revolving around these books, combined with her abject loathing of them, has drawn her along a path in which she embodies their stereotypical heroes, defying logic and expectation in perilous work just as they do. By day she’s a stay-at-home mom of two, by night a private investigator, burglar, and occasional assassin.

Gwen had no magickal mentor, just an ex-husband obsessed with these books and an inability to ever shut up. She rid herself of him eventually, but the brainworms had taken root. Though she has since crossed paths with other chargers and checkers a number of times, she still has an incomplete understanding of adept magick, hence her… Specialization.

She had the benefit of a sizeable starting collection, having finagled her ex’s hoard in the divorce. He thought it was purely out of spite, but in fairness he had rarely bothered to ask her what she wanted, let alone why she wanted it. And she wasn’t about to explain to him that she could become a real-life action-thriller badass from the books so polarizing in their relationship that they wound up being the final straw that got her to contact a lawyer. Plus, she gets decent alimony payments.

As of right now, her library contains about 5,000 total books across two adjacent storage units. This would make her something of a powerhouse if she understood she could derive significant and major charges from higher quantities. That said, she would also need to know more spells, or understand how to use random magick to its fullest.

She casts “Book Learning” (see UA2 core book, p. 119) about a dozen times for every other use of a minor charge. Those are usually random magick castings that have more to do with her hatred of her library’s contents than the specifics of the books. For example, she can amplify the misogynistic attitudes of men she encounters, getting them to mansplain for literal hours while she cases a joint or roots around for evidence. Another favorite is to prevent witnesses from remembering anything more distinct about her than her hair color or breast size to report to authorities.

The other bibliomancers in her area are (so far) intimidated by her ruthlessness, and to be honest, her physical fitness, to the point of refraining from stealing from her, even though she’s pretty careless with her library’s security. But they have arranged a conspiracy of silence to keep her in the dark about the full truth of their school.

Jaded Gwen might be, but not stupid. She is aware that other wizards exist, even being peripheral to the occult underground, and she correctly assumes there is more power she could learn to access. She’s encountered a few avatars, who she tends to view through the lens of stereotypical fiction character types, but sooner or later she’ll run across an avatar of the Naked Goddess, the Mother, or some other archetype that is impossible to square with a view that all magick is tied to her least favorite genre of fiction.

For the half-decade since her divorce and descent into bibliomantic wetwork, she has chosen to protect her tweenage boys by staying at arm’s length rather than diving into magick. She has some inkling of getting more involved once they’re both in college.

Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise that engaging with bibliomancy is such an unpleasant experience for her. Nonetheless, she is obsessed like any other adept, and it’s probably only a matter of time before her curiosity wins out, or worse: a past target gets set on revenge, or decides she knows too much. It’s not really in keeping with convention for the woman to have her sons “fridged” as opposed to the other way around, but the contradiction of her femme fatale alter ego and her magick’s source (or at the very least, her view of it) is probably one of the mystical tensions that made her an adept in the first place.

Gwen Paylik, Bibliomancer of Action

Obsession: Airport thrillers are so popular, but so bad, (and remind her of her ex-husband so much) that they are uniquely deserving of her obsessive hatred.

Rage passion: The success and popularity of some of the worst writing ever penned by human hand.

Fear passion: (Isolation) Her sons preferring their washed-up bore of a father to her, and/or cutting her off after they leave for college.

Noble passion: Doing it all as a strong, independent woman – raising kids, hoarding objects of magick power, and stalking the streets with a paperback in one hand and a silenced pistol in the other.

Helplessness: Hardened: 2 / Failed: 0

Isolation: Hardened: 5 / Failed: 2

Self: Hardened: 3 / Failed: 2

Unnatural: Hardened: 2 / Failed: 0

Violence: Hardened: 3 / Failed: 0

Bibliomancer 40%:* Casts Rituals, Casts Gutter Magick

Single Mom 55%: Substitutes for Connect, Protects Self, Protects Isolation

Secret Badass 35%: Substitutes for Secrecy, Substitutes for Dodge, Protects Violence

 

Statospheric Saturdays: The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 2 - Bucket List Bill, Daredevil Sociomancer

Last week, I started this subseries on especially weird adepts. The specialest of special snowflakes. The following GMC is very, very loosely based on an uncle of mine, as perhaps all the best UA characters are. 

    Stay tuned for a bookworm and a death mage in the coming weeks.

 

The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 2

Now, sociomancy is a very broad school of magick. You can engage with it by membership in literally any subculture. So what makes Bucket List Bill uniquely strange? Well, to understand that, you have to understand his origins.

If you ask him what got him involved in extreme sports, Bill will tell you about his diagnosis: cancer, and not the kind you have any hope of getting rid of. The thing is, he doesn’t have cancer. That’s just the lie he’s learned requires the least elaboration. The truth is a lot more mundane and, in some ways, a lot sadder.

Bill learned sociomancy from the love of his life – sort of. Bill never had much luck with women. At the time he and Roselle Varano met, he was already 43, and they were both huge country music fans. He kept seeing her at concerts, and she looked about the same age. Eventually, he worked up the nerve to start a conversation. She was really interested to learn he was an amateur singer-songwriter himself.

They were married within the year. But what Bill didn’t know is that Roselle was only in it for the major charge. Worse, his musical career never took off as they’d both hoped (for very different reasons). She moved on to obsessing over college-level Esports and divorced him as fast as it had all started.

In trying to understand what had happened, Bill met Roselle’s sociomantic mentor. Barry Patrick was a sad man who used his magickal tutelage as a lure for attractive young women into whatever his current subculture was. He’d met Roselle through swing dancing. They’d had a relationship that ended in a mess, perhaps setting Roselle on the heartless path through which she met and abandoned Bill.

To his credit, Bill thought Barry was a swine. Barry was getting on in years by the time they met, and although he’d slowed down his charging, he still remembered Roselle with a mixture of reverie and bitterness. This predisposed him to passing on what he could to Bill. Their arrangement was awkward, made worse by the fact that they joined a men’s gospel choir together and received no small amount of judgment for their perceived “excessive closeness.” Once Bill felt he’d learned enough, he disappeared in the night and moved to another continent, hoping to never see Barry again. So far, he’s gotten his wish.

Bill had another motive for moving to England, though; he’d heard Roselle was there, serving on the staff of a Tory MP. He managed to track her down while worming his way into the Labour party scene; he confronted her in the height of election season, blowing both their shots at some heavy charging. He wanted her to take him back; she refused.

A sociomancer who’s lost the will to live is a sad sight to behold. Bill spent the next few years throwing himself completely into increasingly sad subcultures. While working toward a major charge with a model railroad club, he found himself laying on the tracks in front of a very real train, wanting to end it all.

You might be hoping for some kind of happy turnabout in the story here, but you’d be disappointed. Bill learned the hard way that suicide advocacy as a subculture was great for charging, but only until you got a hefty prison sentence. He jumped ship to the Dangerous Sports Club at Oxford. He’s been careful to separate each one out for the purpose of maximizing his time (and charging) with each. He’s gotten what he could out of extreme skiing, paintball, and hang gliding. Right now he’s focused on the Egregore of free climbing. Beneath his immersion into occult power-seeking, he always hopes that he’ll screw up fatally at some point.

Just recently, on an outing in the Andes, somebody saw through Bill’s “cancer bucket list” story for the first time. It was scary to him how quickly the man could see through to his core, the way his crippled self-worth and magickal obsession intertwined. This man was in much the same boat. This man was an entropomancer. And hours after he explained what that meant to Bill, he plummeted to his death.

Since that fateful encounter, Bill’s obsession has begun to warp. Who knows what might have happened, what he might have become, if he'd learned all this a few decades earlier. As it is, perhaps he’s about to make the shift and become a bodybag. Perhaps his dark impulses will morph into some unholy hybrid or a new school altogether. Or perhaps, one day when he sees his aging face in the mirror, the lines around his eyes that remind him uncomfortably of Barry Patrick, he’ll stop taking chances, commit to something for once in his life, and blow his own brains out.

    He's been stockpiling major charges for a rainy day since he joined up with the Club. Now he's got a half dozen of them. Whatever fate he suffers in the end, something dark is bound to come of that.

Bucket List Bill, Daredevil Sociomancer

Obsession: Throwing himself into a subculture to escape his inner mire of regrets.

Rage passion: Happy couples, especially those closer to his own age.

Fear passion: (Violence) The epideromancer who botched his major charge was not the first person Bill saw meet a graphic end over the course of his time in extreme sports subcultures. But what’s worse is when they survive their accidents. He doesn’t want to end up a living vegetable.

Noble passion: Turning himself off in service to an adrenaline rush, and to his current Egregore.

Helplessness: Hardened: 3 / Failed: 1

Isolation: Hardened: 7 / Failed: 4

Self: Hardened: 6 / Failed: 4

Unnatural: Hardened: 4 / Failed: 1

Violence: Hardened: 3 / Failed: 3

Sociomancer 70%*: Casts rituals, casts gutter magick

Extreme Athlete 55%: Substitutes for Fitness, Subtitutes for Pursuit, Substitutes for Dodge

Cool Old Dude 40%: Substitutes for Status, Substitutes for Connect, Protects Helplessness

Death Wish 30%: Substitutes for Secrecy, Substitutes for Lie, Evaluates Isolation

Statospheric Saturdays: The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 1 - Ed Christ, Epideromantic Savior

This is the first in what is currently looking like a 4-part... Sub-series, I guess? The idea is GMC adepts who take their magickal practice in an especially weird or unexpected direction. As a teaser, the concepts for the other three are "Daredevil Sociomancer", "Bibliomancer of Action", and "Minor Thanatomancer". Not sure which one will be next but I'll probably do them all in a row, possibly followed by ways to use them in a campaign.

The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 1 

This unlikely cure to all the world’s ills is known to some as “the small-fry the Jesus Christ Advisory Board turned away” (see Book 3: Reveal). To his fretful parents, he’s still Edward Moss; they don’t know he had his name legally changed a decade ago. To the local Christian community he’s a sad and unsavory character, to the local Sleepers a moderate priority to put down, and to his disciples, the second coming of Christ.

Ed’s story began in his childhood, specifically his trigger event, which he underwent at the tender age of sixteen. The youngest child of upper-middle-class suburban Catholics, he was well into his rebellious streak by this time. He more or less didn’t bother to attend high school anymore, lied to his parents about anything and everything that occurred to him, and had recently moved from pot to stronger stuff – he thought he was buying heroin, but his dealer read him as the rube he was, and what he got was cut with all kinds of nasty stuff. He paid for it by stealing from his parents; they knew he was doing it, but hadn’t yet figured out how to confront their “troubled” son.

With his being primed by an especially noxious hit (containing trace amounts of mercury, of all things), it’s no surprise it was a religious experience when he crossed paths with the then-godwalker of The Masterless Man. Ed never learned his name. His memories of the whole encounter are fuzzy and more than a little colored by his later commitment to his stoned interpretation.

This is what Ed remembers: A homeless man who shared his opioid habit had pulled a knife on him, and like an idiot, he’d tried to parry the first stab, receiving a hole in his hand in exchange. Just then, an angel rode up on a motorcycle. The addict rounded on him, and the angel’s wings unfurled as if in challenge. He took off his sunglasses to reveal eyes made of blistering light. The addict stabbed him in the chest, but the angel just smiled, then grabbed the addict by the hair, remounted his bike, and peeled away, dragging him, along the pavement as he went, heralded by an angelic choir.

He never learned that the addict who’d attacked him was actually a charger who had longstanding beef with that godwalker (thus ruling out any altruistic motive on the part of the “angel”. Nonetheless, the charger’s allies started coming after Ed, trying to find answers. They believed the Masterless Man godwalker had died after they’d seen him pushed off a skyscraper, reinforcing the divine haze through which Ed saw him.

This was not helped by the fact that, as the godwalker hunted down his remaining enemies in the area one by one, he saved Ed’s life a second time. In this case, Ed had been sober, but suffering a bad concussion and a faceful of blood from a gash in his forehead.

The intersection of statospheric glory surrounding these events, Ed’s muddled mind, and his latent Catholic guilt changed him. After his second encounter with the angel, he began the arduous process of getting clean, attending his first NA meeting the next day. The more those around him doubted his story of angelic intervention, the more he clung to that belief.

His NA sponsor turned out to be a checker whose misapprehension of the Invisible Clergy was framed through a Christian lens. This man noted Ed’s stigmata: he had a hole through one hand and a jagged forehead scar, both with infections that had so far resisted antibiotics. The sponsor, a guy called Craig O’Dell, was Ed’s epideromantic mentor, and his first disciple.

Like Craig, Ed sees epideromancy as a kind of penance for sin. As Ed believes he’s Christ, he focuses on harboring the suffering of others through his stigmata. He stopped taking antibiotics and charges primarily through reopening the wounds (including holes he’s added to his feet and other hand) and letting the infection run its course.

Despite one true believer and the development of actual magickal powers, it’s been slow going for Ed to build his following. He lacks any kind of charisma, and although he’s been sober for over a year now, he’s often delirious from infection (which, incidentally, coincides with all his conversations with God), and he never learned any kind of useful life skills. His parents have covered his rent and living expenses since this all started, but their patience has worn thin as Ed has reached thirty without his delusion waning.

Ed doesn’t actually charge that often, either, and has not found a lot of uses for the spells Craig has taught him that align with his persona. He’s also obsessed with figuring out how to channel the Martyr, but this hasn’t gone well since he has no cause to speak of.

He has two disciples besides Craig now, both also recruited through NA, and both also fleshworkers who took to the school much better than him. Their names are Nadia Warrick and Luther Martens. Nadia really only sticks around because Ed’s forsworn Craig from teaching her any significant formula spells until she shows the “proper piety” and atones for sins she doesn’t regret in the slightest. Luther is the kind of godfreak who didn’t take a lot of convincing to believe some weirdo he just met is the second coming. He still uses all the time, not just heroin but psychotropics, despite Ed’s chiding.

Sooner or later, it’ll all fall apart. Luther will OD and Ed will blame himself, or Nadia will turn Craig and they’ll disappear in the night, or Ed will simply die from his years-old, gangrenous wounds. The saddest part is how likely nothing meaningful is to come of it all.

Ed Christ, Epideromantic Savior

Obsession: Saving humanity by suffering for its sins, just as he did in a previous life.

Rage passion: Nonbelievers (in him specifically, moreso than Christianity in general).

Fear passion: (Helplessness) Maybe his parents, siblings, childhood friends, childhood pastor, and parole officer are right: maybe he is just crazy.

Noble passion: Say what you will about Ed, but he does want to make the world a better place.

Helplessness: Hardened: 6 / Failed: 3

Isolation: Hardened: 7 / Failed: 2

Self: Hardened: 6 / Failed: 1

Unnatural: Hardened: 5 / Failed: 3

Violence: Hardened: 4 / Failed: 1

Epideromancer 40%:* Casts Rituals, Casts Gutter Magick

Self-Styled Savior 25%: Substitutes for Status, Coerces Self. Protects Self

Wash-Up 25%: Substitutes for Dodge, Substitutes for Lie, Substitutes for Secrecy

In Recovery 45%: Substitutes for Connect, Evaluates Self, Evaluates Helplessness

D&D 4e is Full of Lies

Believe it or not, I do still have interest in games other than Unknown Armies. Radically different games, even. I’ve been entertaining the idea of getting back to my RPG origins and running D&D 4e. As much as I hate the clunkiness I associate with a turn order and a physical board and minis, I have been wanting to engage the board game design-y, tactical combat-y parts of my brain for a while and this is certainly a much better outlet for that than 5e.

Before the nuts and bolts of encounter design, though, I want to make the setting my own. If you didn’t know, 4e makes the bold (for D&D) and wise choice to acknowledge that it has assumptions about the kind of world you run it in. Even more interestingly, the “points of light” style it has verges on post-apocalyptic; major settlements are rare, the wilderness in between is dangerous, and nations don’t really exist. There’s also a unique cosmology that deviates in some neat ways from the D&D formula, while retaining all the racist, colonialist nonsense. Whoops.

In this post I’m going to riff on this post on Prismatic Wasteland, an OSR staple that I recommend reading first, if you haven't already. It even references 4e! From there I will be getting gnostic and subversive with 4e’s cosmology and setting assumptions in ways that will likely not surprise readers familiar with my politics.

 

The following are statements in the core books (PHB1, PHB2, MM1, DMG1; I haven’t looked at the rest yet):

• All of the PHB1 gods (except Melora and, to a lesser degree, Sehanine) have a shared imperialist goal.

• All of the gods in the PHB1 and DMG1 except for Gruumsh, Lolth, and Tharizdun are opposed to demons and the abyss, and they are all opposed to the primordials.

• The gods’ supposed values directly contradict each other (eg. Bahamut is a god interested in freeing the oppressed while also being the god of oppressive institutions like nobility) or contradict their purported mutual animosity (eg. Kord and Bane have nearly identical portfolios.

• The material plane (and the Shadowfell and Feywild) were created by the gods. Their creation was opposed by the primordials, who also removed the latter two from the former out of spite.

• Primal spirits represent a balance between the gods and the primordials, and were only created after their struggle.

• Empires never last for very long, and the world in the present exists without any kind of unified civilization.

• “Civilization” (that is, unified empire) is the product of collaboration between the PHB1+2 races; the “monstrous” races do not have any kind of counterpart in scale or level of unity.

• Following the creation of the material plane, the primordials’ agency is greatly deemphasized compared to the gods, and there are none with specific names or characterization as individuals (aside from those that became demon princes; Demogorgon, Baphomet, and Orcus).

• Tharizdun is portrayed in the core books as creating the abyss and subverting several primordials to his side as demon princes, with the goal of supreme cosmic power as an individual. This drove him insane and led to his imprisonment in the abyss and erasure from the culture of mortals (hence there being no mention of him in the PHB1 or PHB2).

• The abyss is not portrayed as able to mount a meaningful opposition to the gods; demon princes and Tharizdun only have disparate cults with their own apocalyptic projects, Lolth is either insane or scheming indefinitely, and Gruumsh is dedicated to a fruitless, eternal war with Bane.

• The elemental chaos and the primordials predate the gods, and the primordials are said to oppose the stability and longevity of the material plane.

• Player characters are just more special than everyone around them. They’re heroes, they play by different rules, they have unique agency and the capacity to reach an epic level of power, on par with the demon princes, who are just below the gods in terms of power.

• The divine power source comes from the gods, and the primal power source comes from primal spirits. Martial and arcane power seem to be the results of exceptional personal skill.

• Sigil, the main settlement in the Astral Sea (and thus center of the gods’ “civilization” in their own realm), is ruled by The Lady of Pain, who is not a god (as she’s not mentioned in the gods section of either DMG1 or PHB1).

These ideas lead me to the conclusion that:

• The voice of the core books is an unreliable narrator (much the same as that of Keep on the Borderlands, several decades earlier) who is aligned with the gods and against the primordials.

• There is probably less dissent and disagreement amongst the gods, including the “good” and “evil” ones, than the core books indicate. They are all proponents of cosmic order in the Moorcockian sense, as well as sharing imperialist and colonialist goals. Thus, the gods are kind of analogous to the capitalist class or feudal monarchs; they have supreme (astral) power while the other occupants of the universe have to settle for subservience and obedience.

• Melora is likely a figurehead for the primordials’ agenda (chaos/untamed wilderness) among the gods, with minimal influence, if she even really exists. I could also see her being a turncoat/”reformed” primordial; there’s a precedent for primordials changing sides in the demon princes.

• There must still be some kind of powerful cosmic opposition to the gods’ goals, because of the difficulty their imperial projects routinely face. It seems like monsters are the primary vehicle for this opposition, perhaps more than “monstrous humaoids” that still tend to worship the gods.

• There is more to the story of the abyss. It may not really be part of the elemental chaos, or perhaps represents a failed project of the primordials, because multiple of the gods are aligned with the demons, its residents. Regardless, it is not likely to be the basis of cosmic chaos.

• The primordials are likely more anarchistic than “chaotic,” opposing the gods’ cosmic colonization and the way much of the universe they created was stolen and made the vehicle for the oppression of all the mortal races of the material plane, Shadowfell, and Feywild. Perhaps this even persists in a metaphysical sense; is death really an inevitable truth, or is The Raven Queen’s domain just part of the imperial engine of the gods?

The following are the questions I think thus need answering to fully flesh out the campaign setting provided:

• Why are PCs empowered with greater potential than all other mortals?

• Are the primordials really proponents of cosmic chaos antithetical to the existence of mortals? If not, what is their actual agenda? What have they been doing since they lost their war with the gods and the material plane got made?

• Do primal spirits really represent the balance, when they occupy and are a product of the material world, which is the result of the gods’ victory over the primordials? Relatedly, what is Melora’s deal?

• What’s stopping god-backed empire from permanently taking root? Or, put another way, what makes monsters so numerous, and why do they seem to inherently oppose law?

• Who (or what) is the Lady of Pain? Is she the head god?

• What’s the deal with Tharizdun and the abyss? Did Tharizdun really get driven insane by choosing to utilize “evil”? Is he really a god, and was he always? Is the abyss really part of the elemental chaos, and if so, does that mean it’s in alignment with the primordials?

My answers to these have yet to take form, although I have a vague vision for a campaign setup, framed by the recent and mysterious magical obliteration of the capital city of the “civilized races’” most recent doomed empire. I plan to have more 4e stuff on here eventually, in between the ongoing Statospheric Saturdays posts, which will continue as long as I continue to have the free time and motivation to write them.

Statospheric Saturdays: Phosphomancy

I've thought a radiation-themed adept school would be appropriate for Unknown Armies for a while, but it really started to take shape for me after I watched the excellent 1979 Japanese movie, The Man Who Stole The Sun. The symbolic power of the A-Bomb and the protagonist's aimless but consuming obsession feel very on brand for UA, even though nothing supernatural happens in it. There are a handful of references to it littered throughout the school. It's kind of like the offspring of Taxi Driver and Breaking Bad, but a lot more whimsical than either.

 

Just a boy and his plutonium.

Anyway, here's the school.

 

Phosphomancy

AKA Curies, atom splitters, half-lives

(Not to be confused with Photomancy.)

"They say radiation’s harmful

It’s a fact of life

Without it, we would die"

Nuclear Babies – Oingo Boingo (unreleased)

The cold war may be over, but humanity will forever live in the shadow of The Bomb. The effects of atomic annihilation are as ingrained as the imprints of its victims in the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There’s something very Promethean about a manmade force of such unspeakable creative and destructive power. We have devices whose energy output exceeds that of the sun many times over, and yet we put them to such prosaic ends: threatening other countries, powering industry, and so on.

Nuclear power demands respect – and yet we don’t respect it. Systems of its regulation are laughable in comparison to the worst case scenario should they ever fall through, and despite a colorful history of disasters and hand-wringing scientific papers. We can never put the genie back in the bottle, and today most people don’t think twice about it as they go about their lives.

The central tension of phosphomancy is encapsulated in inverting this mentality: atom splitters pray at the altar of the A-bomb. Their god was born in the Trinity test. To invest their bodies with radiation is to harbor a divine spark; to build a nuclear bomb is to hold the power of the sun in their hand. As mere mortals, they are unworthy to turn this divine wrath against others, but they live to be subsumed by its blinding light.

STATS

Generate a minor charge: This is not possible for phosphomancers. They can split up sigs if they need to for rituals or the like, but there are no minor spells and no minor random magick in this school, just as there are no half-measures in nuclear war.

Generate a significant charge: There are two methods: either sustain a dose of ionizing radiation sufficient to permanently alter their health, or acquire sufficient fissile material to power an atomic bomb.

For the former, a few hours in a tanning bed won’t cut it; a few minutes standing right next to the elephant’s foot will. See below for radiation mechanics.

For the latter, “acquire” means it’s your personal property, not just in a lead-lined truck you’ve been hired to drive between facilities. Equivalent or greater explosive yield to Little Boy or 13 kilotons of TNT qualifies as “sufficient”.

You may notice that doing this enables the other charging method. Many Curies have, too. It’s common to see them worship with fetishes made from radioactive plutonium or uranium isotopes, usually involving ritual actions that expose them to sufficient radiation to charge.

Generate a major charge: Two methods again. You can sustain a fatal dose of radiation, or singlehandedly build a functional atomic bomb or nuclear generator. “Singlehandedly” means that you personally own all the materials that go into the bomb and all the equipment with which you make it. This does put rich half-lives at a big advantage, but that was true anyway, because they can afford a lawyer if they get caught pinching plutonium.

Taboo: You must insist on respect for the object of your worship. Any time you bear witness to someone making dismissive or blasé comments about nuclear power or nuclear war, failing to take proper precaution around radioactive materials, or disregarding the chain of command for their usage, you have to correct them in no uncertain terms. This can make charging by acquiring and compiling bomb components tricky, of course. You don’t have to force them to act differently, but at the least you should issue a dire warning and remind them what they’re dealing with.

Simply addressing heresy is not enough, though. You need to proselytize as well. If you ever pass a week without making some kind of public statement, such as counterprotesting at a rally for disarmament, publishing an opinion piece in the news, or teaching your middle school science class how to build a nuke of their own, you break taboo. This can be avoided only if you’ve made meaningful progress on building a bomb or generator of your own during that time.

On top of all that, you cannot seek medical care for radiation you sustain for the purpose of charging, or any adverse health conditions that result from it.

Random magick domain: radiation, mutation, disaster and indiscriminate destruction; more symbolically, weaponized science and the hubris that comes with it, collective ignorance of existential danger, and raw energy on a scale greater than humans can comprehend.

Ω: +0.

 

Mechanics for Radiation

In game mechanic terms, doses high enough to generate a significant charge (ballpark figures, between 100-1,000 roentgens) provoke a Fitness test. On a matched failure or better, you feel sick for 1d10 hours (and probably shit yourself) but recover fully. On a fumble, or if your Fitness score was in the negatives (see below) prior to rolling, you develop cancer in 1d10 days, probably leukemia. See Book 4’s writeup of ustrinaturgy for more details on how that works in game terms.

Your Fitness score also accrues a negative shift equal to the ones place of the test every time you are irradiated enough for a sig charge. It’s suggested the cumulative penalty be tracked in secret by the GM, as with wound points. Every month you spend without sustaining further radiation, the penalty drops by 1d10.

A major charge-worthy dose also provokes a Fitness test, and on anything less than a crit, you have a number of hours to spend that charge equal to the sum of the dice before you are too disabled by acute radiation sickness to do anything but die in agony. On a crit, you get to repeat this test once a day for a week, and if you pass them all, you survive, although your Fitness is penalized by an amount equal to the highest of those rolls, reduced over time as described above, and any children you have will be horribly mutated and unlikely to survive their infancy.

Phosphomancy Significant Formula Spells

Atomic Abjuration

Cost: 2 significant charges.

Effect: The atom splitter enchants a homeopathic crystal purported to ward off ill health such that it actually does. This spell only works if the crystal in question is radioactive, although it doesn’t have to be hazardous enough to provoke a Fitness check against radiation. Whenever the bearer of the crystal (which can be the atom splitter, but doesn’t have to) would enter into harm’s way, be it exposure to a deadly virus or the path of a drunk driver, synchronicity protects them from harm. The one exception is that the crystal has no effect on radiation. This effect occurs a number of times equal to the ones place of the casting roll, after which the crystal disintegrates into slightly radioactive ash.

Demon Core

Cost: 3 significant charges.

Effect: The curie targets a radioactive object and any number of demons within a yard of one another. As long as the object chosen is radioactive enough to qualify for generating a significant or major charge for direct exposure, the demon(s) are bound to the object, and cannot move more than one yard from it. Because of how radioactive decay works, the object’s radioactive emission will eventually drop low enough that it no longer qualifies for the spell, at which point the demons are free. Additionally, every time the half-life period of the object’s radiation passes, the range from it that the demon(s) can move doubles.

I Am Become Death

Cost: 1 significant charge.

Effect: This is the phosphomancy blast spell. The atom splitter inflicts horrific radiation burns on the target, subjecting them to a Violence (5) check as well as a Fitness check as if they just received a significant charge’s worth of radiation (see above).

I'm Number Nine

Cost: 1 significant charge.

Effect: The next time the half-life attempts coercion, the stress check provoked is a Violence (10) or Helplessness (10) check, as their target perceives them to be as dangerous as a head of state with their hand inches from the big red button labeled “launch”. What they’re being coerced into is irrelevant to the apocalyptic implications of refusing (although they still can). As soon as the coercion is resolved, they return to viewing the half-life as they did before.

Manhattan Projection

Cost: 1 significant charge.

Effect: The atom splitter touches an object up to the size of an armchair, and it becomes sufficiently radioactive to provoke a Fitness check at a significant charge level (see above). The caster immediately has to make that check for standing right next to it, but they don’t gain a charge from doing so. Without a geiger counter or Rad-O-Vision (see below), the object appears unchanged upon examination. After a number of minutes equal to the ones place of the casting roll, or after that many people are subjected to the Fitness check, it returns to normal.

Mutagenesis

Cost: 2 significant charges.

Effect: Playing on decades of cultural tropes around post-apocalyptic mutation (and almost nothing to do with actual science), the Curie mutates themself or a target they touch for a number of minutes equal to the total of the casting roll.

This manifests in game terms by letting them exchange all the features of one of the target’s mundane identities for different ones, chosen from the following (see Book 1: Play): provides wound threshold, provides initiative, coerces Unnatural, coerces Violence, medical (affects self only), and provides firearm attacks (which manifests in some kind of biological projectile weapon).

Undergoing such a mutation provokes an Unnatural (5-6) check, and anyone present to witness the transformation, including the Curie, faces an Unnatural (2-4) check.

Mutually Assured Destruction

Cost: 2 significant charges.

Effect: The half-life mystically binds two objectives together, one of which they must either be working toward, and the other of which must go against one of their passions or be diametrically oppose to their own objective. Once this binding is in place, should either objective be completed, the other is instantly completed as well. Every party working towards both objectives is notified of the binding, through a vivid dream, unnatural omen symbolically linked to the two objectives, or series of obvious, synchronous signs.

Rad-O-Vision

Cost: 2 significant charges.

Effect: The atom splitter gains a new Specific Information identity (see Book 1: Play) with a rating equal to the sum of the casting roll dice. This identity, which shares the name of the spell, makes them a human geiger counter. They now see radiation as a kind of bright haze, with intensity corresponding to the amount emitted. A person sunbathing on a nice Summer day will have a little extra ambient glow. A nuclear reactor will be bright enough to make the atom splitter wince without eye protection.

Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Cost: 1 significant charge.

Effect: A single target the phosphomancer can see at the time of casting is overwhelmed with existential dread to the extent of paralysis. They become certain nuclear annihilation is imminent and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. Taking any action that only makes sense if the victim expects to be alive the next day is only possible if they overcome a Helplessness (10) check. This effect lasts a number of minutes equal to the ones place of the casting roll.

The Cost of Lies

Cost: 2 significant charges.

Effect: The Curie warps synchronicity around some complex bureaucratic process in a way that tangibly and directly affects people’s lives. This spell cannot just gum up the voting process on a bill in the senate that relates to the allocation of resources to homeless shelters, for example. Such a bill certainly affects life and death tangibly for unhoused people, but not in a direct enough way for this spell.

What the spell can do (for example) is generate some procedural SNAFU that results in somebody getting fired from a job they can’t afford to lose, cause a workplace accident causing up to a total of 5d10 wounds, or allow a criminal to escape life in prison or death row through some abstruse technicality or disappearance of evidence.

As you’d expect, this spell cannot be used to aid a Curie in the acquisition of bomb or generator components for the purpose of charging.

Major Charge Effects

Neutralize every warhead in one world power’s nuclear arsenal, confer a permanent supernatural identity to someone in the form of a pop-culture-style genetic mutation, put a neighborhood through all the effects of a nuclear detonation except the radiation (EMP, disastrous shockwaves, everything catches fire), power electrical infrastructure or other machinery with the energy of a nuclear power plant for a month, create compelling, falsified intelligence indicating an impending nuclear strike by one nation against another.