26 July 2025

Statospheric Saturdays: Happy Medium

This is a more personal than usual entry in this series. I've talked about the fact I'm a therapist before on this blog, and have deliberately brought my love of RPGs into that work. I'm also a lifelong psychiatric survivor, which I consider more useful to my job than any formal training I've undergone.

I had the idea for Happy Medium a while ago, when I had nearly as many bad patient experiences under my belt as now, but very little experience on the other side of the Freudian couch. That is no longer as true, and seeing the specifics of how organizations fuck over patients on a structural, systemic level has not only been eye opening, but also quite helpful in fleshing out this GMC cabal.

I still have more to write about the role of psychotherapy in Unknown Armies because it is a game explicitly about trauma (among other things) and explicitly mechanizes the therapeutic process in ways I find naive, and too trusting of psychiatry as a system built within and supportive of capitalism. Another day, for sure.

Unlike other StatSat posts, I'm going to have an afterword as well as this little introduction. Please read it, too.

 

Happy Medium


Most people agree that the "occult mainstream" is more socially accepted in the wider world than ever before. As we approach half a century since the height of the Satanic Panic, astrology, tarot, crystals, new age medicine, even Paganism, wicca, and Santeria are everywhere. Long, long gone are the days of burning people at the stake because of a fear of the unknown power they had, or were believed to have had. Into this cultural climate steps Happy Medium, with arms wide open.

While many occult practices have, by and large, ceased to inspire primarily fear and disgust among the masses, it can still be hard for many magick practitioners to integrate fully into society. Happy Medium's viewpoint is that the fragmentary, insular, and eccentric communities that comprise the so-called "occult underground" exist in fearful opposition to normality.

Some adepts wear their heterodoxy as a badge of honor, scoffing at those who desire to integrate with society. Happy Medium feels for these wayward souls, but believes that attitude can only hold them back. Magick is a wonderful gift that can change lives, but to use it doesn't make you a god or a messiah. No man is an island, says Happy Medium; what good is the power to change humanity if you insist on setting yourself apart from it?


Beliefs & Objectives

In a phrase, Happy Medium believes in respectability politics for the occult. They want to be sure that in any hypothetical conflict with the occult underground, they're seen as "the good ones", and are left alone, while the "real bad actors" get what's coming to them. They reject the Sleepers' framing of the Sleeping Tiger in a world now so saturated with weirdness; it doesn't have to be all-out chaos when magick and mundanity meet. At the same time, they're no Mak Attax. They are happy to keep the occult underground separate but equal, as it were.

Their focus is on the rehabilitation of occultists' image and wrongdoings. Where the Sleepers want to cover things up at all costs, Happy Medium seeks to smooth things over and reach a mutual understanding. To that end, they operate not as disconnected vigilantes, but under an organized hierarchy, which is just as rife with petty internal politics as you might imagine.


Operations

Happy Medium was founded by philanthropist, retired psychiatrist, and cliomancer (in that order), Patricia Walton. She identifies as self-made, despite being the beneficiary of both occult and socioeconomic nepotism in a dozen subtle and several obvious ways. Her vision remains the guiding star by which the organization operates.

Happy Medium is unique in the occult underground as the only legally qualified, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that regularly interfaces with charges and major cabals. Naturally, this earns them no shortage of revulsion, which is not easy for them to understand, since they perceive their mission as so noble.

Nonetheless, many adepts, and even avatars, who get in too deep lean on the resources they provide: namely, financial and legal support, housing assistance, and therapy. All these services come with strings attached; their goal is not simply charity, but to reform their clients into respectable members of society. They operate shelters in several major cities across the northeast U.S. and have a number of additional offices where those willing to jump through the requisite bureaucratic hoops can be connected to aid, both by Happy Medium and a number of wholly mundane partner agencies.

Mum is not just the word, but a way of life when interfacing with these latter allies. Happy Medium uses coy language, typically framing their clients' real magick as delusion and psychosis (not that there's never overlap), and insisting they play along if they want to keep getting handouts. Legally binding documents and their implicit financial threats are weaponized to further ensure compliance here, although they aren't always enough to contain rebellious and/or unstable mages who have had enough being bossed around and made out to be kooks.


Resources & Organization

Money is king, of course. It is in and of itself self-evidently useful even to people who can bend reality to their will through less conventional means. Connected is Happy Medium's plentiful social capital. Through expert politicking, choice "financial incentives", discretion uncommon among adepts, and, yes, the occasional sneaky spell or two, the organization is in surprisingly good standing considering its volatile clientele.

Many checkers, a solid handful of avatars, and even a few adepts besides the founder are on the payroll. All have had enough exposure to the unnatural to at least keep it together in the face of open displays, and the therapists on staff tend to be especially prepped. They are required to be in therapy themselves, although they tend to need to metaphorize their stranger experiences to their own shrinks.

Although Happy Medium employs occultists, much like in TNI they are rarely promoted very far, and for similar reasons. The organizational culture is forcibly unified to the extent of feeling uncomfortably culty, which is an unpleasantly familiar vibe for many of its clients. Patricia has done everything possible to distance herself from the cliomantic circles of her youth, but out of the kindness of her heart they still find their way to her organization more than most other adepts. Their brand of magick is easier than most to make palatable and useful for her agency's needs, after all.

In any moderate-to-large city in the northeastern U.S., Happy Medium maintains at the very least an office where you can get started on their substantial battery of intake questionnaires and assessments, and then be directed to the nearest relevant providers, which are almost always within a day's drive. They also offer remote therapy and social work services - by Zoom, not astral projection or anything like that, of course.

Second only to the behavioral health staff in number and prominence are the lawyers, all of whose loyalty is thoroughly paid for. Their work on clients' behalf is often dicey, and they are also frequently deployed to protect the organization's good name. However, they tend to be spared the most unpredictable interactions with clients while taking home the best pay and benefits by a mile, a fact they are regularly reminded to appreciate.

Management has the privilege of all the best perks and status without having to regularly expose themselves to the target demographic of the organization. They are the elite, and they and everyone beneath them know it. More often than dissent, this results in employees trampling each others' careers to make it into the club themselves. While this doesn't usually serve the clients, it's tacitly encouraged, in part because the infighting protects the managers' seats at the top.


Drawbacks

For the rank and file, burnout is at least as big a problem as in any other human services work. They're overworked, underpaid, and once in a while they hear a horror story about a colleague being hit with a blast spell.

Additionally, it's not too uncommon for some cabal to get the idea of infiltrating the organization, trying to broaden the availability of its resources without the associated judgment, or even just for purely selfish purposes. Over time, this has prompted a pretty strong paranoid streak amongst the upper eschelon of management.


Uses for Happy Medium in Your Campaign

  • If a PC seeks therapy, especially for some hard-to-explain Unnatural notches, Happy Medium is a solution that offers lots of ways to turn healing into blowback.

  • Similarly, Happy Medium can offer a lifeline after the law gets involved, which is frankly a pretty likely consequence for the pursuit of many objectives, even at the local level.

  • As described under "Operations", maybe the PCs have ideas about how Happy Medium could be run better, or its resources redirected. Do they want to try and fix it from the inside? Or perhaps a more radical approach?

  • Maybe someday Patricia loses her shit (again) and the end result is a bunch of highly unstable patients back out on the street to start charging up again, all at once.    


GMC: Patricia Walton

There is a perverse secret behind Happy Medium's seemingly banal structure: Patricia Walton was not always Patricia Walton. Before that, her name was Dawn Miller, agent of renunciation, and before that, Leticia Tobin, down-and-out wife of a poor, sleazy gambler. In seeking better for herself from the latter, she wound up the steward of the Room of Heart's Burden Lifted (see Statosphere from 1e), transformed from a young Black woman troubled by her oppression and its interplay with her undiagnosed autism, to a shrewd white matron with a savior complex.

The thing is, that didn't really solve her problems. Eventually, after years as a magickal social worker, it hit her that nothing had actually changed. She had gone from living in service of a husband who didn't care for her, to fixing the problems of whoever the Room sent her way, and at no point was she getting anything out of the arrangement.

The day this realization hit her, she waited for her secretary/bodyguard to leave for the day and repeated her renunciation, starting another new life. Maybe she should have waited to calm down and think through her options, though, because the Room was just as fickle the second time it spat her out as the first.

The product she became was still white, still an expert of bougie social mores, and she retained her rediscovered drive to put herself first for a change. Unfortunately, she came out even less like her original self, and her altruistic motivations were utterly subsumed by the desire to finally get hers.

She really doesn't care a bit about whose neck she has to step on to satisfy herself. She's done her time on the bottom rungs. Now she wants to reap the rewards, with the aid to others at best a thin veneer, and at worst a disguise for her desire to manipulate others embroiled in the occult and make them suffer as she has. She no longer gives any thought to the life she left behind in the Room, just as she stopped thinking about her daughter long ago. If she had gotten the chance to find her own courage in her own time, who knows what good she could have done. But the Room of Heart's Burden Lifted has twice molded her, leaving only this bitter discard in its wake.

Obsession: putting herself first. Patricia has had two lifetimes of serving others; been there, done that. It's me time now.

Rage stimulus: people who make their problems, her problem. She has a nonprofit to run; she doesn't have time for your whining!

Fear stimulus: confronting the several paved-over layers of her abandoned lives, and figuring out what's still left of her underneath it all. (Self)

Noble stimulus: giving others what they need. At this point, it's so obvious to Patricia how to fix someone's problems. Why wait around, explaining it over and over to them, when you can just bring them in line? They'll thank her later.

Boss Bitch 90%: Subs for Status, Coerces Helplessness, Protects Helplessness

Psychotherapist 30%: Subs for Connect, Evaluates Self, Therapeutic

Third Time's the Charm 60%: Subs for Secrecy, Subs for Lie, Protects Self

Possessions: the definitional girlboss wardrobe, pricey and gaudy jewelry with a couple of cars and a house in the suburbs to match, plus a timeshare in a delightfully quaint Martha's Vineyard cottage.

 

Afterword

Besides the stress healing mechanics, the other place where therapy shows up prominently in the official Unknown Armies books is the Room of Heart's Burden Lifted in 1e's Statosphere, which is *all kinds* of icky, and not just in relation to my profession. 

The agent of this room of renunciation is a Black woman implied to be neurodivergent who got turned into a white woman therapist, which. Wow. Also, it's one of fairly few canon ways to trans your gender, which in connection with other details is pretty wild.

Patronizing and microaggression-riddled writing by Rick Neal aside, it's pretty unclear as to whether this was supposed to be a good, bad, or lateral thing for her. By extension, it's unclear what the reader is supposed to make of her role as a magick therapist. A lot of times, the House of Renunciation is supposed to just be about changes without qualifying them as positive or negative, but when they get this political and intersectional I personally find that quite unsatisfying and centrist-y. 

The emphasis on individual autonomy is super at odds with the fact that Dawn's current existence as outlined feels like it would be a personal hell for her original self. I also really, really hate the preachy bullshit about how if she just had a spine, she (and every other abused wife) should have left her husband and fixed her whole life, easy peasy. I read her becoming the room's agent instead as almost some kind of karmic punishment for not doing that. This reading casts the whole entry in a really ugly light, and my writing Patricia as the result of Dawn rejecting that is an attempt to call that out as the patriarchal slime it is, while maintaining the idea that the room will always fuck you over monkey's paw style (and there's a case to be made that I should have challenged that part, as well).

Happy Medium and Patricia are a response to the Room of Heart's Burden Lifted, but also a response to my experience working against my institutional role as a therapist at a nonprofit for the sake of my clients. Maybe doing both those things in one piece of writing isn't a great idea, I dunno. 

I'll end by stating that I am a white trans woman who grew up in a petit bourgeousie ("upper middle class") family. I'm not trying to claim any authority to speak for all others who share those identities, but I think it's useful information as to why this came out the way it did. 

I'm more invested in the explanation here than I usually am on this blog because, again, this is an unusually personal piece of writing, and because I took some big ideological swings at some shit I'm still navigating and will probably have to navigate the rest of my life. I reserve the right to look back at this in six months and put up a big disclaimer of how hard I'm cringing at some or all of it, but hopefully I have the courage to leave it up, as an artifact of who I am at this point in my life if nothing else.

 



19 July 2025

Statospheric Saturdays: Exostock, as seen in "Escape from All-Mart"

As my more longtime and/or obsessive readers already know, Escape from All-Mart was a (sadly) short-lived campaign I ran building off the fan-favorite campaign starter kit Raiders of the Lost Mart and a related prompt from GOAD. I realized I never actually posted my fully detailed, GM-only notes on the exostock I wrote for the campaign, not all of which was discovered by the players, and even less of which they fully understood how to use. So here's exactly that! 

If you saw these when I posted them on the UA discord, they writing has been edited and in a couple cases I've tweaked or added details.

 

"Liquid Dick" Personal Lubricant
MSRP $18.99 

An animate slime that can be mentally controlled, with packaging explaining how to use it as a self-lubing dildo via some very strange pictograms. By default, Secrecy is used to move and mold it into different shapes, but any supernatural identity can be used instead, including adept schools or archetypes. It dries out after about half an hour, and it's only a 4-ounce "travel size" tube, so you'll probably need to use the whole thing to do anything useful, or its advertised function.

 

The Gaiawave 
MSRP $59.95

An "eco-friendly" microwave oven designed by an previous-reality James Lovelock. Any intact, dead life form comes back to life if cooked inside for exactly 3 minutes and 33 seconds. However, you can only set it in 1-minute increments. 

Note that, depending on cause of death, what you heat up may not last long. If the life form is mostly intact, perhaps having died by being uprooted whole or from a heart attack, it can be expected to live the rest of its normal lifespan after being put through the Gaiawave. However, if it died more thoroughly, such as by complete saturation with pesticide or dismemberment, it will only live on for 3d10+3 additional hours, and those will likely be agonizing.

 

AYSE Bullets 
MSRP $59.99

9mm bullets that come in a 100-count box. If you shoot someone with one, visions about their future manifest in your dreams for the next 1-5 nights, each time providing a hunch for your next roll that affects that person in some way. If the wound was fatal, these dreams instead traumatize you with ideal futures they might have had if you hadn’t shot them, forcing a rank-9 self check each time they occur. These bullets can be used on yourself; shooting yourself on purpose deals unarmed damage, unless you fumble the roll, in which case it's normal damage.

 

VAYU-VA-2 Handheld Fan
MSRP $2.99

A handheld, battery-powered fan with foam blades and decorated with cheaply inked, stylized Zoroastrian designs. allows you to control the temperature out to a range of two dhanusham (a little under four meters), for as long as you hold the power button continuously down. You can set the temperature between 0 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit using a plastic dial that is liable to get stuck if not turned carefully. The batteries provide three hours of functionality and contain chemicals that do not otherwise exist in this reality.

 

"Overcoming Disembowelment & Other Setbacks" VHS Tape 
MSRP $86.00

An instructional video oozing a gaudy eighties aesthetic, sold inside a cheap cardboard slipcase that looks equally dated. If played to an empty room, an audience of multiple people, or recorded by any means and played back, the only footage is static and occasional, subliminal frames of gore or eerie, empty spaces. 

If you watch it alone, however, a speaker called "Rodney Nimrod" (a famous avatar of the Masterless Man from a prior reality) educates the viewer, in mystic terms, on how to survive 3 hyper-specific lethal injuries, illnesses, or scenarios, one of which is always disembowelment (the other two are different for each viewer). Mechanically, this manifests as a Specific Protection identity with a rating of 1d10+80%.

This version of the tape has disturbingly realistic imagery that force a rank-10 Violence check upon viewing. Once it ends, the tape bursts into flame. 


Industrial nail clippers (brand name unknown)
MSRP 🜚4.95

These extremely sturdy, oversized nail clippers' brand name is inscribed in an unrecognizable script originating in an earlier reality in which humanity evolved to be carnivorous hunters. Fingernails, toenails, and even teeth can be clipped with them to subsequently grow back exceptionally sturdy and razor sharp. The regrowth happens at a normal speed despite the unnatural changes.

Henceforth, the affected body parts can only be trimmed with these clippers; they are for all intents and purposes otherwise indestructible. Realizing you've done this to yourself provokes a Helplessness (3-4) check; if someone else used the clippers on you without your consent, it's Helplessness (5-6) instead. 

Every time the clippers are reused by a given person, there is a cumulative 5% chance they yield to the affected body part and break apart irreparably.

 

Topps YOURts Cards

MSRP $3.49

Packaged like sports cards but with only a mirror-like reflective face on the front, each pack contains 16 collectible cards, each bearing twelve-digit serial numbers and a photo of a person with their name on one side and several trivia facts and demographic statistics about them on the other. 

Each card's details regard someone the person who opened the pack knows personally, anywhere from acquaintances to loved ones. The photos depict them in an action pose that defies expectations, and are frequently disturbing; you might open a pack to see your infant daughter standing atop a pile of corpses, or the doorman of your apartment building ripping pages from a bible.

The information on the cards is a mix of generally known information about a person (eg. height, occupation, etc.) as well as a couple of details about them that only they would otherwise know, be they shameful secrets or deeply private past experiences. 

The cards don't offer any inherent game-mechanical benefit. 

 

Surprise in a Can! 
MSRP $0.99 

This exuberantly decorated can, equivalent in size to contain a [unit] of soup, contains the literal element of surprise. Pulling its tab gives you a Provides Initiative identity at 99% for a split second.

 

Air Friar
MSRP $159.99

An air fryer emblazoned with a crucifix and adorned with a plastic ring that resembles a tonsure. Sauces heated in it can be considered holy water for the purposes of any kind of Christian-oriented magick, including reality bruising cast by or against a Christian. 

Also, poultry products come out with cryptic portents carved into their centers in Latin, which can be viewed by cutting the meat open lengthwise. These messages are only sensible to Christians who are active and genuine in their faith. Reading and understanding one of them provides a hunch roll. 

Each of the Air Friar's mystic effects only works ten times, after which it can still be used to fry food.

 

Cloaca-Cola
MSRP $0.99

A 12-ounce soda can with suspiciously familiar branding. Its sodium content is inordinate; it tastes somewhere in between seawater and sweat, with a hint of Gatorade-y fake sugar. Anyone who chugs a whole can in one go, and keeps it down with a successful Fitness check, transforms into a random species of monotreme for 3d10 hours. They retain their full cognitive faculties, but face an Unnatural (9) check upon transformation. Any witnesses of the process must make an Unnatural (5-6) check. 

The consumer's clothes morph into their body for the duration of the transformation, but any jewelry or other adornments or worn/held/carried items go flying in a random direction at the initial transformation, not quite hard enough to do damage. 

Anyone who drinks the cola over the span of more than a single chug, or who doesn't finish it but keeps down what they did drink does not transform, but instead experiences a lucid dream in which they are a monotreme the next time they sleep. 

12 July 2025

Statospheric Saturdays: Menaphamancy

"Could a perfect map only be developed for a perfect world? Or would the perfect map make the world within it perfect?" - The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd


This school originated from me reading the book cited above a year or two ago, and has slow-cooked into its final form since then. Other influences were the thematically-adjacent adept schools of cliomancy and odomancy, as well as research I've done on the colonization of the Americas, in which mapmaking played a significant role spanning the Atlantic.

 

Menaphamancy

AKA pin-droppers, Columbuses


Maps are a key development in humankind's use of tools. They are man-made depictions of our real environment for practical use, repositories of subjective knowledge applied for the purpose of dominating each other and the world we occupy.

Throughout history, they have taken many forms: bead-and-string maps of favorable hunting currents, fantastical illustrations of colonial prospects, guides to subterranean networks of public transit.

These are attempts to convey physical reality through symbols, and as such are ripe with magickal potential. Where cliomancers harness the power of places, menaphamancers step back a layer of abstraction. Theirs is the power behind representing land, sea, networks, polities, and ideas in visual form.


Paradox: Maps are precise, fixed representations of a fluid, inconsistent world; a clean line dividing Russia from Ukraine on the page is much more complex for the people living in the region depicted. At the same time, maps attempt in vain to display perceptible reality like mountain ranges and coastlines with nothing more than ink on a page or pixels on a screen. People often reference a map before their own five senses. Some (including menaphamancers) make maps of places they have never been, or even secondary worlds that will never exist.


Generate a minor charge: Map a very small area in complete and painstaking detail (for example, a two-story house, including heating and ventilation systems, windows, and accurate measurements), or a somewhat bigger area, somewhat less thoroughly (such as each part of the brain, labeled by size, shape, and function). As a general rule, minor charges can be generated in half a day's work as long as appropriate tools are used.

The following applies to significant charges as well: menaphamancers need not create maps for previously uncharted areas. Nor do they need to map physical spaces; for example, a relationship map of a large polycule qualifies, as long as it's detailed enough. However, there needs to be something unique about the map in question; maybe a Columbus uses an unconventional medium like blood in copying over a 16th-century map of the Americas, or adds a piece of obscure culinary trivia to every town on their map of Sicily.


Generate a significant charge: Map a moderately large area in absolute detail, or something as complex as a continent in decent detail. Either of these generally takes at least a week of work.


Generate a major charge: Be the first to accurately map a culturally significant area. "Accuracy" is in the eye of the beholder, which is also cultural. If you can convince expert astronomers that your map of the northern hemisphere of Venus is correct, it counts.

Alternately, affect meaningful cultural change with a map you made. Even if your map of Venus is bogus according to all authorities, if you can convince a tech billionaire to send a manned expedition to check it out, it still counts.


Taboo: Your first taboo is that you cannot have firsthand knowledge of anything you map. If you've set foot in a place, you can't charge from it. Remotely viewing a place, such as through Google maps or a crystal ball, does not count as a violation. Once a map has been finished, you can go there and see how you did,

Secondly, somewhat like bibliomancers and cameraturges, you must maintain a store of all your maps. However, they can be entirely digital (if you want to take that risk), and because maps are meant to be used, there is no requirement they be kept secret. It's common practice to make copies of maps you lend out, or else publish a scan online while keeping the original somewhere safe.

Complicating this is the fact that menaphamantic spells that require the alteration of a map work better if they use the original copy; a -10% shift is applied if the map used is not the original, plus another -10% for significant spells unless every single copy is altered the same way.his effect lasts a number of hours equal to the casting roll's tens place.


Random magick domain: territory and dominion, navigation, boundaries and connections between places and ideas


Ω: +1


Menaphamancy Minor Formula Spells


Armchair Trailblazer

Cost: 1 minor charge

Effect: By consulting a map they've made, the Columbus can use this spell to spout off information about its subject, even things they couldn't possibly know without having actually been there; this lets them use their "Menaphamancer" identity to substitute for a single Knowledge roll.


Blurred Borders

Cost: 2 minor charges

Effect: The menaphamancer alters the boundaries between two places on one of their maps, and accordingly alters a related mundane identity of someone who looks at the map as or after it's changed. For example, they could turn "Mexican" into "Texan", or "Invader" into "Native". This will change the identity's "Of Course I Can"s, and often the features as well. This spell can target the caster, but given the taboos of the school, it's not likely.

This effect lasts a number of hours equal to the casting roll's tens place.


Earth in the Palm of Your Hand

Cost: 1 minor charge

Effect: If a pin-dropper personally provides a map of their own creation to someone else, who uses it as a primary guide in traversing the depicted subject, they can either give that person a hunch or +20% to their next roll that navigating by the map might affect (the adept chooses which).

Either way, this effect can only be used as long as the target defers to the map when making decisions and can only be used within 3 days of bestowal.


Here Be Dragons

Cost: 2 minor charges

Effect: By adding some kind of threatening or ominous illustration to the appropriate section of one of their maps, the Columbus can instill a single continuous outdoor region up to 3 miles across, like a small forest or lake, with a compulsive foreboding. People who tread there feel this dread, and if they don't flee within a minute or two of arrival, they face a rank 4 Unnatural check.

This effect lasts a number of hours equal to the casting roll's tens place.


Master of All His Domain

Cost: 1 minor charge

Effect: The menaphamancer consults a map they've made and thinks of a person that either could be occupying the physical space depicted, or who is themself depicted on the map. In the former case, they know if that person is indeed on the map, as well as which quadrant of the map they currently reside in. In the latter, they get a glimpse of the target's current location through their eyes for a number of seconds equal to the sum of the casting roll.


Out of Site, Out of Mind

Cost: 2 minor charges

Effect: The pin-dropper removes or covers up a detail on one of their maps no larger 333 square feet, and in so doing obscures it in reality. This illusion prevents visual detection of an erased place, but those relying primarily on other senses can still access it.

Alternately, if the detail is conceptual, it must be fairly small - you might efface knowledge of the relationship between a specific financier and politician, but not the relationship between billionaires and the Democratic party.

Either way, this effect lasts a number of minutes equal to the casting roll, or until the erasure on the map is reversed (assuming it was done in a reversible way).


X Marks the Spot

Cost: 2 minor charges

Effect: The Columbus plants a useful object (if it's a map of a physical space) or idea wherever you draw a big red "X" on a map you've made. You can go and dig it up, literally or metaphorically (depending on the kind of map), but of course someone else might stumble upon it before you if you drag your feet.

You don't control what the "buried treasure" is, but it will be applicable to your current objective while still being as plausible as possible for where you put it. If you're trying to bring down a politician and you put an "X" further up his family tree, maybe you've just created a genetic predisposition to cancer, or maybe his dad was a closet case that doesn't fit his own political persona. If you're planting something under the sand of a desert island where a buddy is stranded, it probably won't be a fueled-up helicopter, but a previous castaway may have left some useful navigational or survival equipment.

Because of menaphamantic taboos, Columbuses often choose to hire someone to do the dirty work of retrieval for them, or sell their services to those in need.


Ya Can't Miss It!
Cost: 1 minor charge

Effect: With this spell, the pin-dropper targets someone currently using a map they've made for information or navigation. That person abruptly feels absolutely lost and confused; if it's a geographical map, their sense of direction abandons them for a moment. This provokes a Helplessness (2) check; if they pass or ignore the check, the target regains their bearings almost immediately, and likely feels a bit silly.


Menaphamancy Significant Formula Spells


The Hrön Effect

Cost: 3 significant charges

Effect: Similarly to X Marks the Spot, the menaphamancer creates something dormant and useful, ready to be unearthed. However, in this case it's not of this earth. As such, it does not have to make sense for where they put it, nor is it guaranteed to be useful to their current objective. Examples include a demon in a bottle, a minor artifact tangentially linked to the adept or the place they put it, a handful of minor charges, or a fragment of statospheric insight in the form of a gutter magick whammy or boon - but the menaphamancer has no control over the specifics of what, only where (or who).


Line in the Sand

Cost: 1 significant charge

Effect: The pin-dropper alters one of their maps to sever a connection or point of access between themself or their property and a depicted place, concept, person, or thing; then, reality follows suit.

For example, they can change the floorplan of a bank vault such that there is no access to it, and just like that, stairs go right from the first to the third, basement floor and the elevator skips a stop. Or, a nasty charger on their conspiracy board of major occult underground players a few cities over just can't seem to track down a ride or get ahold of their phone to retrieve the artifact they're "borrowing".

In either case, persistence can eventually overcome this meddling. The third unique attempt made to broach this new barrier will succeed, breaking the spell's effect.


Plant a Flag

Cost: 2 significant charges

Effect: The Columbus contributes to an objective that involves contested ownership of something depicted in a map they've made. The creation of the map must predate their (or their targets') commitment to it, and each map can only be used once for this spell.

The objective increases by 2d10+10 if local, or 1d10+5 if global.


Terra Incognita

Cost: 2 significant charges

Effect: To cast this spell, the menaphamancer conceals all copies of a map they've made from themself and all others for at least 10 hours. In doing so, all knowledge that could be gleaned about a specific area of the map (chosen when the spell is cast) is suppressed in the minds of anyone who knows it. However, if the information exists in other maps or written sources, it can be actively learned from them, even while the spell is in effect.

This effect lasts a number of hours equal to the casting roll's tens place.


Voracious Study

Cost: 2 significant charges

Effect: By physically consuming a map they've made (thus breaking taboo), the pin-dropper gains a "Scryer" identity for that map's subject rated at the same value as the total of the dice roll for the spell. This identity can subsequently be rolled to glean "birds-eye view" level information about the subject - either a literally zoomed-all-the-way-out view that would show a forest fire but not individuals' location (if it was a map of a place), or (if the map was more conceptual), high-level developments of the subject (like the birth of a new royal heir, but not a change in the relationship between a king and prince).


Major Charge Effects

Redefine governmental boundaries in accordance with one of your maps up to the county level. Cause anyone who uses a map you've made to become hopelessly lost. Fabricate and insert a street or comparably large natural area into the world. Change the culturally accepted causal links between two mapped places, people, or ideas.


05 July 2025

Statospheric Saturdays: He Has His Father's Eyes

Dysfunctional relationships among members of the occult underground are more or less a given, and this inevitably causes problems when those people become parents - read Godwalker for a case study. The following is a ritual to leverage this fact for personal gain in a very sinister way.

He Has His Father's Eyes 
Cost: 6 significant charges 

Ritual action: This ritual requires that you're physically able to bear a child. While possessed by a demon, attempt to conceive a child with an avatar. The specific archetype they channel has no bearing on the ritual. 

If you succeed at getting pregnant and making the ritual casting roll, you must start drinking to intoxication and smoking a carton or more of cigarettes every day, and keep it up until the baby is born. It has to happen at a home birth without pain medication, and without anyone being present who has the "medical" identity feature or prior experience at delivering a child. Although the product of the ritual will be immune to the nine months of toxins you've been building up, there is still no guarantee it, or you, survives the process. Lastly, you must be separated from the creature without so much as a glimpse of it. 

Effect: You have just given birth to a newborn diametric (see Book 2: Run, p. 110) of the archetype channeled by the other parent. It will be an unnaturally precocious baby, but equally ill-tempered and contrarian. It only regards you with the loyalty and affection due a parent by their child. You are all that makes sense, the only person it can ever like or obey, and this attitude cannot be shaken off no matter how you treat it. 

Its Againsty identity starts at just 3%, and it also has 3% in an "Unnatural Birth" identity (substitutes for Secrecy, coerces Unnatural, protects Unnatural). It develops rapidly, aging the physical equivalent of one month per day until the equivalent of its eighteenth birthday, 216 days later. Each monthlike day, both its identities increase by 1% until they reach 66%.

 

For good measure, here are some bullet-point ideas for GMCs resulting from the use of this ritual:

  • The daughter of a Flying Woman avatar (presumably a transfeminine avatar fertilized the egg) could be the perfect pawn for a truly evil and misogynistic charger. Other archetypes that could fulfill this role without such a horrible, patriarchal flair include the Rebel, the Firebrand, and the Masterless Man.
  • An avatar of the Fool could be both easy to seduce for occult purposes, and useful in creating a naturally faithful unnatural entity. The offspring of this union could be a genius, or some kind of prophet who can see the influence of the statosphere in everyday life.
  • Want to use this ritual to bring about the antichrist? Try a Martyr, Healer, Necessary Servant, or Solid Citizen.

04 July 2025

Introducing Statospheric Saturdays

Because it's a game that I love and that touches on so many themes that appeal to me,  I've always got a whole bunch of ideas for Unknown Armies content, most of which aren't developed past a conceptual sentence or two. I've also been wanting to get a bit more active on this blog. My solution, inspired in part by the great blog-turned-supplement book Oddities & Endlings, is what I'm calling Statospheric Saturdays.

For as long as I've got ideas and the time to flesh them out (the latter certainly being the likelier to run out first), I will be posting some kind of UA something on here every Saturday: anything from artifacts, rituals, GMCs and factions, unnatural IDs and entities, otherspaces, archetypes, adept schools, and even scenarios and things harder to categorize so neatly, like musings about the game's themes and mechanics.

Tomorrow's inaugural article will be a ritual inspired by the movie Rosemary's Baby. Stay tuned and stay weird!