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.