Copyright
2004 Alexander Lampros.
Lamproswc@yahoo.com
The Karmamancer
Aka Sadists, Vigilantes
Nothings going to change the world, but
someone’s going to rule it. We live in a World of Sorrows and
Suffering. No matter how great our
technology, the condition of our life is always ruled by fate and always ends
in sorrows. You are the operator on the
great machine of life, causing joy in
There are those who struggle
vainly to achieve material happiness.
But we are all in the hands of fate.
Our technology and wealth are great, but still billions of people suffer
from disease, hunger, and oppression.
Some people live in luxury.
Why? Who chooses?
People make mistakes. They chase after illusions. They marry people they’ll later loath, they
kill for no reason. They fail to take opportunities
sitting in front of their face.
Suffering never stays in one
place. Once inflicted, it echoes a
thousand times. The woman who was abused
as a child marries an abuser as an adult.
A starving man robs a struggling storekeeper. A man with a broken arm can’t do his
job. How to stop it?
The first step was understanding.
You saw through the illusion, saw that
everything exists on a continuum from black to white, with grays in the
middle. The rest of the colors are
illusions. Everything is pain or
pleasure, good or bad; and the rest is nonsense.
The next step was to break the
cycle once. Help someone. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked. The normal next step would be for you to
receive some reward for your do-gooding.
Maybe you got paid for our services, or maybe you earned a ticket to
heaven, or maybe you let yourself feel content for a job well done. But you weren’t going to allow that. You needed that energy.
Buddhists believe in the wheel
of life – what goes around, comes around.
Karmamancers have, if you will, a supernatural pencil. They draw lines from one point to another and
watch the suffering flow. The first
point on the line is a mundane act of charity.
The second point is the magick.
The Paradox of Karmamancy is
that you help in order to hurt. To build
charges, you have to be a saint, doing good but accepting no reward. When you do your Magick, you’re a devil,
inflicting pure pain on the world.
Karmamanacy Blast
Style: Inflicts some of the pain you
prevented onto someone else. In the case
of the Significant blast, the kind of damage that
manifests is directly related to the kind of damage you prevented. Minor blasts just manifest as generic
pain. (because
who remembers where they got all their minor charges?)
Stats
Generate a Minor
Charge: Stop minor pain. Heal the
wounded, feed the hungry, clothe the naked - the whole Jesus schtick.. This has to be
done personally - buying a poor family $100 bucks worth of food is great, but isn't worth a charge
unless you deliver it personally.
Generate a
significant charge: Stop an event that
would be hugely painful from occurring.
This has to be something that could effect someone for their
entire life. Prevent a murder, rescue a
writer’s prized manuscript, or get an alcoholic on the wagon for good.
Generate a major
charge: Stop an event that would
have brought pain to an entire city, nation, or other large group. You have to play a large role in whatever
helpful action occurred. This is practically
impossible to do, but the good news is that you can use minor and significant charges to help you earn a major
one.
Taboo: Personally benefit
from ritually helping someone. You need
to decide ahead of time exactly what constitutes “ritually” helping someone,
and your reasoning has to make sense, if only on a minimal level.
Karmamancy
Random Magick Domain: Karmamancers have domain over the worse half of their
“black to white” spectrum, and can do anything that fits their. They also deal in redirection of negative
energies, whatever the hell that means.
Charging Tips:
Making a small difference in someone's life is surprisingly easy, 10 hours of charity work could easily get you 20+
charges. Making a serious difference in
someone's life is very, very difficult.
A particularly dedicated social worker would consider themselves
lucky to pick up one charge per month.
Negative Energy
Cost: 1 Minor Charge
Effect: Victim gets a -10% shift on their next roll. Unlike the Entropomancer spell “Taste of
Chaos”, this can’t be stacked. If the
victim doesn’t make any rolls in the next hour, the spell evaporates
harmlessly.
Shatter
Cost: 1 Minor Charge
Effect: Breaks stuff. This
will break or rip apart any small object that can be broken in one motion by a
particularly strong set of hands. A window or a t shirt are
fine. A gun is not fine.
I’ll take that
Cost: 1 Minor Charge
Effect: Transfers whatever damage someone has taken on to you. You have to take all the damage or nothing at
all. The damage might manifest
differently on you, especially if you have much higher or lower health than
whoever you’re taking from. This only
works one way. You can hurt other people
all you like, but you can’t heal yourself in the process.
Pain
Cost: 2 Minor Charges
Effect: Simple – whoever you throw this at feels some nasty
pain. It comes through at the strength
of an electric shock or strong hit to the face – strong, but not supernaturally
strong. Most people will stop what
they’re doing and back off if they feel pain.
(If that pain has no rational cause, they’re likely to freak out too.)
This doubles as the minor
blast. You can choose to do damage, or
just inflict pain. Your
call.
Its all the Same
Cost: 2 Minor Charges
Effect: Moves a hardened or failed notch from one meter to
another. This can’t change a hardened
notch for a failed notch or change the number of total notches. If you move a notch to a gage where you have
more notches, it comes through at the fist unfilled spot. This is generally cast on yourself as a
reaction, although you can cast it on someone else in anticipation of a check
they’ll make anytime in the next month. (you have to
name the two meters to be affected, but not the type of check.) You should role-play the effects of this spell,
ie. “And when I saw the knife, it made me realize how helpless we all are in
the face of our inevitable doom.”
You can cast this on a mark someone
acquired in the past, but its likely to mess with
their head. You’ll find yourself with
reactions that don’t make sense based on your memories. Moving marks you already have around is a
fast route to self checks.
Play the Fool
Cost: 3 Minor Charges
Effect: Works like the Fool’s second level channel: as a reaction
to taking damage, you cast this spell and the damage gets dumped on someone
else. You skip your next action, and the
GM gets to choose who takes the damage.
Unlike the Fool’s channel, you can use this spell on someone else
(although you can only cast it once per round.)
This spell also tends to be less subtle than the Fool’s channel. It might make the bullet hit the guy next to
you, but its just as likely to make it bounce back and
hit your attacker. (which
is great until people start blowing stress checks.)
Significant Formula Spells
Hatred
Cost:1 Significant Charge
Effect: The significant blast.
The target suffers
whatever harm you had earlier prevented. If its not
applicable or you can’t remember, then the target looks like they were the
victim of some nasty violence. Some of
their skin is flayed off, they get the shit hit by a
hundred invisible hands, whatever.
Dark Gate
Cost: 1 Significant Charge
Effect: Allows the caster to move to the Astral
plane, where he may wander around at his leisure. This works like the
Dipsomancy spell “Astral
Stumble”, described on page 129. The
difference is that the Karmamancer blast does
work on Astral creatures, although you can’t gain
charges by helping unnatural creatures.
This spell has a significant
catch. You can only enter or leave the astral
plane at a “place of pain.” This could
be a prison, a hospital ward, or just a site where criminals are breaking
legs. (a fight
doesn’t count unless someone is getting seriously hurt.). Once you leave the astral plane, it doesn’t
take another casting to go back.
I’ve Got Something For You
Cost: 2 Significant Charges
Effect: The best torture spell Charity work can buy, this spell inflicts supernatural pain on whomever you
put it on. The target feels years worth of pain, in the form of both physical pain as
well as images and emotions, compressed into a few seconds. During the Victim’s next action, they do
nothing but experience pain. After that,
they have to Unnatural, Violence, and Helplessness 7 stress checks. (If they fail one, they don’t have to make
the rest.) If they fail any of those,
they fell down during the pain, dropped whatever they were holding, voided
their bowels, and now have to deal with a failed stress check. If they passed all three of them, they’re
real bad asses and can proceed with their actions.
Dispel Magick
Cost: 2 Significant Charges
Effect: This works exactly like the ritual “Spellbreaker”, except
that it can be cast on other people, specific places, et cetera. In other words, it removes the lingering
effects of magick.
This spell doesn’t actually
destroy the Magick, it just pushes it away.
It could simply move somewhere else, but usually it shatters and reforms
as unnatural effects in the area. (or sometimes, it doesn’t do a damn thing.) For an extra 2 charges, you can try to
control where it goes. Otherwise, its up to the GM
Dark Matter
Cost: 3 Significant Charges
Effect: Focuses the energy of pain into a physical form, creating
a large, semireal object. As mentioned,
the object can be pretty large, but shouldn’t have any moving parts. Ie, a staircase, a bridge
over a small river, a wall, a big sword, whatever. Generally speaking, the objects are
invisible, but they appear on some suitably symbolic occasion (
Puppet Strings
Cost: 4 Significant Charges
Effect: Remember those
cartoons where the bad guy would scream “dance!” then shoot at the ground, and
the hero would have to dance up and down to keep the bullets from hitting their
feet? Puppet Strings works kind of like
that, except that instead of bullets and feet, its got
the victim’s entire nervous system to play with. This spell lets the victim know exactly what
the adept wants them to do. They can
either spend the round doing it or spend the round screaming in pain, experiencing
horrific hallucinations, et cetera
After the first time this
happens, the victim has to make a rank-10 Violence check (for submitting
themselves to torture) every time they try to resist the adept’s actions. If they fail, they do whatever the adept
wanted them to. If they succeed, they
suffer the pain. Either way, they get a
mark of the appropriate type. If the
adept forces the victim to do something wholly against their nature (like kill
their children), then they resist whether they make their Stress check or not,
although they still get the appropriate mark.
The victim does have to keep making checks after they’ve already failed
one, meaning one casting of this spell can wreck someone’s mind. (The GM should feel free to limit this if its
going to mess up his campaign.)
Needless to say, casting this
spell isn’t very nice. Its probably worth Rank 6 Violence and Stress checks.
Major Charge Effects
Create a nuclear
explosion. Condemn someone to spend
eternity in their own personal hell.
Curse the economy or culture of an entire country or region. Create a new disease.
What you Hear:
Karmamancy
Harry Truman
was a Karmamancer. The explosions on
There's a
reverse version of Karmamancy that charges up by hurting people and uses Magick
to heal. Saddam Hussein is secretly an adept,
is torture of the Iraqi people was all for a higher cause. No that he’s gone, the world will fall into
chaos, which is the goal of
the Zionist conspiracy controlling the US Government.