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Kai Tave posted:So the grounding lover is basically the universe's way of ensuring that enterprising adepts remain weirdo loners who shun human companionship. That certainly is one side effect. More, though, they're the universe's way of keeping magick circulating rather than building up like tumors inside miserly adepts. They only show up if you go more than three months with three or more significant charges stored up. So, y'know, most adepts will never see one in their lives.
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Apr 1, 2016 00:08
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GimpInBlack posted:Book 3 has some things to say about that:
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Apr 1, 2016 00:09
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GimpInBlack posted:That certainly is one side effect. More, though, they're the universe's way of keeping magick circulating rather than building up like tumors inside miserly adepts. They only show up if you go more than three months with three or more significant charges stored up. So, y'know, most adepts will never see one in their lives. Sure, but unless the exact details of how these things work is common knowledge than all anyone in the occult underground is likely to know is "if an attractive person wants to sleep with you, you could lose your magic!" The circulation of magic isn't something I recall being touched on in the previous edition of UA, do they go into any more detail about why this is something the universe cares about or is it just one of those ineffable things?
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Apr 1, 2016 00:11
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Kai Tave posted:Sure, but unless the exact details of how these things work is common knowledge than all anyone in the occult underground is likely to know is "if an attractive person wants to sleep with you, you could lose your magic!" If they're encountered frequently enough to be identifiable as a particular phenomenon, sure, but that's my point. The number of adepts who go three or more months with three unspent charges is vanishingly small, and the ones who do it routinely enough that they might attract more than one of these things to notice a pattern is even smaller. Given their comparative rarity, it's probably equally likely that the story of an encounter with one leads to the moral "don't store up your magic too long or you might blow up your boyfriend like that joke in The Nutty Professor. No, not the Jerry Lewis one, the Eddie Murphy one, Christ, did you really think Jerry Lewis would make a joke about sexual explosivity?" The only way you can tell they're not human is by medical testing or deep investigation of their supposed background. To any kind of magical testing, they're perfectly, ordinarily human. Oh, and if you spend those stored up charges before you bump uglies, they don't do anything dramatic, they just straight-up ghost you and you never hear from them again. quote:The circulation of magic isn't something I recall being touched on in the previous edition of UA, do they go into any more detail about why this is something the universe cares about or is it just one of those ineffable things? Pretty much ineffable--actually, "circulation of magick" is just my interpretation, all the book says is that they exist to drain magic from magic-hoarding humans."
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Apr 1, 2016 00:24
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I'm so disappointed no one's quoted this bit from the Cinemancer section:quote:If a cinemancer preys on people’s knowledge of clichés, can they generate charges or cast spells based on television tropes? Nice idea, but nope. e: Also, given the rise of superhero movies, I feel like a good spell would be something to force a revelation related to a dangling plot thread after the main dramatic arc is concluded---a stinger scene after the credits, you see.
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Apr 1, 2016 00:57
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Finally, ASMR is given the attention it deserves in UA3
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Apr 1, 2016 01:00
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I feel ashamed for how much cash I want to drop at this game I will never play anyway.
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Apr 1, 2016 10:04
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Lichtenstein posted:I feel ashamed for how much cash I want to drop at this game I will never play anyway.
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Apr 1, 2016 15:27
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Evil Mastermind posted:I'm going through book 3, and man there's some...interesting events that happened between 2e and here. You did it!
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Apr 1, 2016 16:09
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Kai Tave posted:The circulation of magic isn't something I recall being touched on in the previous edition of UA, do they go into any more detail about why this is something the universe cares about or is it just one of those ineffable things?
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Apr 1, 2016 16:21
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I've backed it but I haven't read much yet, and I'm kind of thinking about waiting until (next year some time when) I get print copies to really dig in. Does it mention the old schools at all? Does it seem like they'd be compatible with the new rules changes as written, barring really specific stuff like Videomancers?
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Apr 1, 2016 17:34
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Gilok posted:I've backed it but I haven't read much yet, and I'm kind of thinking about waiting until (next year some time when) I get print copies to really dig in. All the old schools (and Avatars, I'm pretty sure) get at least a glossary entry level description in book 3, so they're definitely still around--though as you say, Videomancers are specifically mentioned as having been pretty much killed off by DVRs and VOD. The new rules are mostly different in form, not function (that is, everything's still percentile based, adepts still use charges to power spells, Avatars still have channels, etc.), so barring any balance problems that were already present in the previous editions, porting stuff over should be easy.
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Apr 1, 2016 18:05
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The mechanics are pretty much a mash-up of old school UA and A Dirty World. Which is pretty hot.
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Apr 1, 2016 18:57
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Evil Mastermind posted:Any. The link is in the first update, which is backers-only. HOLY poo poo I am looking forward to getting that far in my Gammas. Only through 1 so far. The whole running fiction with the hosed-up dukes who got MUCH better, normal lives when the counter rolled over on 3/3/03 but go right back down into the poo poo is real grade-A UA poo poo. And I'm not just saying that because it has one of my favorite UA GMPCs in an epilogue cameo.
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Apr 1, 2016 21:20
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Jenx posted:If it's a Major Charge we're talking about, I suspect the GM's idea of "scratch" is not going to be particularly forgiving. Better start learning about mining and smelting ores! Yeah, that's explicit.
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Apr 1, 2016 21:21
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Does anyone have some really good and maybe concise UA stories onhand that I could share with my "not RPG playing, but curious" friends?
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Apr 3, 2016 05:49
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Capntastic posted:Does anyone have some really good and maybe concise UA stories onhand that I could share with my "not RPG playing, but curious" friends? Roll Your Bones. The characters involved are recurring background characters throughout various bits of fiction interspersed throughout the various UA2E line but you don't really need to have read any of them beforehand to get a handle on things.
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Apr 3, 2016 06:22
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I'm just imagining an Epidomancer or Sociomancer or basicly any adept storing up charges for three months deliberately in an attempt to get laid without consequence.
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Apr 3, 2016 06:43
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Magnusth posted:I'm just imagining an Epidomancer or Sociomancer or basicly any adept storing up charges for three months deliberately in an attempt to get laid without consequence. It works even better as some kind of wacky romcom plot where an adept needs to convince their parents that they have a significant other at the upcoming family reunion and so they embark on a scheme to build up enough charges to get a grounding lover to zero in on them, only then they have to resist its advances long enough to make it through the reunion without their boy/girlfriend exploding in a shower of confetti.
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Apr 3, 2016 06:47
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Kai Tave posted:Roll Your Bones. The characters involved are recurring background characters throughout various bits of fiction interspersed throughout the various UA2E line but you don't really need to have read any of them beforehand to get a handle on things. Thanks!! I'll specify further that I'm looking for more "here's what insane antisocial mischief my party got up to" rather than in-setting lore, specifically. Trying to get my friends to understand what they're missing out on.
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Apr 3, 2016 08:48
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My favorite little thing from Book 3 is that several creepypasta rituals and creatures have wound up in UA. Some may cry foul that there's a UA version of the Rake or the Slenderman, but given UA basically invented creepypasta (I know a rumor I wrote for the website wound up being circulated in a modified form), I think it's only fair. That and there's little things done to the Rake and Skinny Slim--the Rake is Claws, a kind of beastie that emerges when random supernatural phenomena turns malignant. It's a pain in the rear end, and it may be trying to force its victims to kill themselves, but being able to defeat the thing gets you ten shivs that are invisible to everyone but you... And the Slenderman is The Gentleman, an observer that feeds on being perceived and conforms to its viewers' beliefs to keep them interested, and the monster itself around. Also, it's radioactive, so the more you keep it interested, the likelier you are to get some bad cancer, which may or may not be a pisstake. TombsGrave fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Apr 3, 2016 |
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Apr 3, 2016 15:46
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That might just be a reference to how a lot of the Slenderman series have people getting literally sick due to his presence. Marble Hornets, Everyman Hybrid, and I think Tribe Twelve all had that. (I think Everyman Hybrid even literally went the radiation route if I remember right.)
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Apr 3, 2016 18:11
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UA also now includes, almost verbatim, that modern Japanese urban legend of the scissor lady.
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Apr 3, 2016 19:24
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Idran posted:That might just be a reference to how a lot of the Slenderman series have people getting literally sick due to his presence. Marble Hornets, Everyman Hybrid, and I think Tribe Twelve all had that. (I think Everyman Hybrid even literally went the radiation route if I remember right.)
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Apr 3, 2016 19:27
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Strange Matter posted:Did Everyman Hybrid ever get a proper ending? The last thing I remember clearly was an episode that was sort of a montage of shots of them driving and water flooding a forest and someone mentioning that they can't remember how long it's been night for, and it's probably the most unsettling thing that ever came out of Slenderman. It reminded me of a Harmony Korine film. It's still...theoretically...ongoing. But its slowed down enough that there's between 5-6 months between videos. It's clearly more or less dead. And not really any closer to being explained. While it was running strong it was really neat and interesting though.
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Apr 3, 2016 19:36
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Idran posted:That might just be a reference to how a lot of the Slenderman series have people getting literally sick due to his presence. Marble Hornets, Everyman Hybrid, and I think Tribe Twelve all had that. (I think Everyman Hybrid even literally went the radiation route if I remember right.) Iirc, intense radioactive sources usually cause white noise on cameras due to ionising the film, which I think is part of the reason they went for it?
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Apr 3, 2016 20:45
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Kai Tave posted:Roll Your Bones. The characters involved are recurring background characters throughout various bits of fiction interspersed throughout the various UA2E line but you don't really need to have read any of them beforehand to get a handle on things. I like this story because I like UA being a setting where the secret master of an occult conspiracy can get distracted from a prophecy while overthinking his weird anxieties about interracial dating, and magicians explicitly don't have health insurance. e: I haven't read the setting update yet, but surely Dermott Arkane is the new Messenger by now, right? We're pretty much living in the bad future where he wins. Kellsterik fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Apr 3, 2016 |
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Apr 3, 2016 20:59
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Kellsterik posted:e: I haven't read the setting update yet, but surely Dermott Arkane is the new Messenger by now, right? We're pretty much living in the bad future where he wins. It's mentioned that a lot of folks assume he did, but also that there are still some old school Mesengers around who say it ain't so. IIRC the Messenger channels in the book are still the classic flavor as well. Hypothesis: In a hilarious twist, Arkane actually replaced the Demagogue as the Appeal to Authority.
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Apr 4, 2016 04:03
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oriongates posted:It's still...theoretically...ongoing. But its slowed down enough that there's between 5-6 months between videos. It's clearly more or less dead. And not really any closer to being explained. The whole Trials of HABIT audience interaction event utterly killed its momentum and it never really recovered.
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Apr 4, 2016 04:10
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Haven't run it so I'm not sure about the new base-abilities system, but I am so loving in love with the new fluff. "This explains Florida"; all the old factions went to war with each other and they all got completely hosed; The Freak and the Comte doing a Renunciation pas de deux, all of it. Given the timelines of various things and the running fiction in the first book, my read is we hit 332 on or just before 3/3/03 and The Freak caught the Comte on the way up somehow -- the following chat and Renunciation somehow resulted in The Freak never being The Freak (per the stuff in Book 3 about its backstory, I guess rather than murdering Pre-Freak's SO, Dirk gets clean, so no Freak, Sleeper Dirk, etc.?), which reset the previous dozen or so years, leaving us with a world that seems a bit more hopeful maybe (except of course for the many many many dead Dukes in the Whisper War, which probably results from this)? That make sense?
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Apr 4, 2016 19:56
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I decided to take a crack at test-driving the adept school creation rules and got to thinking about pennies, probably because of that big chunk of writing on penny superstitions in the new book. So, here's a first draft of Centomancy, the magic of how actual-money dollars turn inevitably into useless disks of copper that do nothing but float around gumming up the works. Check it out and let me know what you think. GimpInBlack fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Apr 5, 2016 |
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Apr 4, 2016 22:11
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GimpInBlack posted:I decided to take a crack at test-driving the adept school creation rules and got to thinking about pennies, probably because of that big chunk of writing on penny superstitions in the new book. I don't know why, but the Left-Digit Effect spell's actual effect stands out to me as having room for improvement; maybe drop it down to 1 charge too, and only lets you lower (instead of choose +/- ) the next stress check by 1 or 2? Drives home the idea that centomancers' paradox also starts to bleed onto them: where Loafer makes them seem less important to the world, Left-Digit Effect dulls the impact of the world back on them. As either a multiple-minor or a significant-charge spell, being able to count all your money at once / know which ones have been dedicated or 'counted' (if it's minor?) or gauge the cash-value of all of someone's liquid assets at a glance (significant, you could use it on yourself in a mirror) might also be handy, and keep their obsession to "keep all my pennies" rather than "keep a ledger of all my pennies + those I've ever used with a spell and are now valueless dross." No major effects yet, but I'm struggling to think of things that fit the school while also being worth the charge. Maybe "Make one person or object permanently ignored by anyone it did/does not cause direct harm" or "Cause everyone to regard an object as being worth 1 cent" or "Devalue a nation's currency enough to cause a market crash." A thing to keep in mind is there are only 11 kinds of pennies in the world worth a grand or more so getting these effects is probably harder than "have a thousand bucks on hand" might make it seem. ALSO at some point you should include something about the plight (or great fortune?) of centomancers in Canada, where they're phasing out the penny from circulation and stores will round up/down to the next 5 cents.
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Apr 4, 2016 23:55
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Ugh, dammit, somehow uploading and subsequently editing the doc split it into two versions and the one I linked was out of date. Fixed the link in my previous post.Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:You could probably afford (heh) to drop at least one of the Minor spells to 1-charge; I'm inclined to say Loafer because of all the spells, it's the one that seems most intertwined with the theme of the school, so it makes sense to be the thing that in a pinch every centomancer should be able to fade into anonymity. Indian Scout is one charge in the corrected version, but I take your point. Loafer's pretty drat good, though; I could see dropping it to 2 maybe, but 1 minor charge (for a school that's stupidly easy to gain a charge) for basically social invisibility feels a little too good to me. For now, I dropped Heads or Tails to 1 as well. Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:I don't know why, but the Left-Digit Effect spell's actual effect stands out to me as having room for improvement; maybe drop it down to 1 charge too, and only lets you lower (instead of choose +/- ) the next stress check by 1 or 2? Drives home the idea that centomancers' paradox also starts to bleed onto them: where Loafer makes them seem less important to the world, Left-Digit Effect dulls the impact of the world back on them. I like that a lot better. Consider it changed! Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:As either a multiple-minor or a significant-charge spell, being able to count all your money at once / know which ones have been dedicated or 'counted' (if it's minor?) or gauge the cash-value of all of someone's liquid assets at a glance (significant, you could use it on yourself in a mirror) might also be handy, and keep their obsession to "keep all my pennies" rather than "keep a ledger of all my pennies + those I've ever used with a spell and are now valueless dross." Ehh... feels a little too ordered for a school about entropy and useless currency to me. This feels more like a Plutomancy spell. I'll add a caveat that you automatically know whether a penny's good for a charge or not to the charging section, though, because yeah, the goal here is "be the weird penny hoarder," not "keep a precisely indexed ledger of every penny I've ever possessed." Well, I should say that's not the goal for players, but it's perfectly valid as an IC obsession. Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:No major effects yet, but I'm struggling to think of things that fit the school while also being worth the charge. Maybe "Make one person or object permanently ignored by anyone it did/does not cause direct harm" or "Cause everyone to regard an object as being worth 1 cent" or "Devalue a nation's currency enough to cause a market crash." A thing to keep in mind is there are only 11 kinds of pennies in the world worth a grand or more so getting these effects is probably harder than "have a thousand bucks on hand" might make it seem. Major effects! I knew I forgot something. These are all great and I'm stealing them all. And yeah, I did my research on pennies when I wrote this--the price point of a major charge was intentional.  Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:ALSO at some point you should include something about the plight (or great fortune?) of centomancers in Canada, where they're phasing out the penny from circulation and stores will round up/down to the next 5 cents. I live in Canada, and the penny's been gone for years here. But yeah, that certainly sparked a mass exodus of Canadian centomancers to the US, and you could spin an entire campaign out of the "get rid of the penny" movement in the US.
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Apr 5, 2016 00:20
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GimpInBlack posted:Ehh... feels a little too ordered for a school about entropy and useless currency to me. This feels more like a Plutomancy spell. I'll add a caveat that you automatically know whether a penny's good for a charge or not to the charging section, though, because yeah, the goal here is "be the weird penny hoarder," not "keep a precisely indexed ledger of every penny I've ever possessed." Well, I should say that's not the goal for players, but it's perfectly valid as an IC obsession. quote:Major effects! I knew I forgot something. These are all great and I'm stealing them all. And yeah, I did my research on pennies when I wrote this--the price point of a major charge was intentional. quote:I live in Canada, and the penny's been gone for years here.
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Apr 5, 2016 01:18
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:You could also make an entire campaign out of the dwindling powers and numbers of Canadian centomancers who play fast-and-loose with their currency itself because it's safe to assume it won't spend most places, but also know that every charge built up might be the last they ever get their hands on. The logical conclusion of centomancy's core paradox is that they'll eventually be confronted with their own commonplace-object-magic failing because the only people who value pennies anymore are centomancers themselves. That's one way the Centomancy story could go. The other is that they adapt as inflation drives more denominations to the same fate as the penny (it's a short trip--when the US stopped making half-cents due to low purchasing power, they were still worth more than today's quarters). Over time they become more and more radical, embracing the school's central paradox until they become Inflaromancers, seeing economic inflation as the road to the heat death of the universe.
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Apr 5, 2016 02:55
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So what happens to adepts whose school just dies in the face of changing reality, like videomancers? Given that adepthood requires you to know that magickal effects must happen, I can't imagine they just "adapt."
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Apr 5, 2016 03:16
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Halloween Jack posted:So what happens to adepts whose school just dies in the face of changing reality, like videomancers? Given that adepthood requires you to know that magickal effects must happen, I can't imagine they just "adapt." At a guess? A series of cascading Self tests every time they have to violate their taboo because the zeitgeist no longer supports their idiom. (I don't think it's an official rule, but I've always felt like repeated taboo violations, even when you're out of charges, should have some teeth in the form of Self checks.)
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Apr 5, 2016 03:22
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Adepts headbutt reality into getting what they want from their personal obsessions. They don't care about the zeitgeist at all. You can be the only person in the world who cares about pogs and still have one hell of a Slammer whammy.
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Apr 5, 2016 03:26
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Halloween Jack posted:So what happens to adepts whose school just dies in the face of changing reality, like videomancers? Given that adepthood requires you to know that magickal effects must happen, I can't imagine they just "adapt." Cryptomancers are one of the oldest Adept schools and at the time of UA's original release their school is dying as the distinction between truth and untruth becomes fuzzier in the modern world. This is represented mechanically by a -10% penalty to their Adept skill for purposes of casting spells. Presumably as schools get more and more disconnected the penalty becomes higher. However, I imagine that the main loss is pretty much natural selection. Once you hit a significant penalty to your spell rolls adepts are going to start dying off as they simply get killed by the stupid poo poo they do to gain charges and lose the ability to use magic to help stave off the consequences of their actions. A lot of Adepts of dying schools probably get killed in desperate bids to get major charges in hopes of getting enough juice to keep themselves going. Of course, with videomancers the death of the school is largely just a matter of the mechanics of their school screwing them over. It was pointed out in Fatal and Friends that in modern broadcast TV you easily get screwed on the whole "miss no reruns" part of their Taboo. There's just too many shows being broadcast on too many channels for many of them to keep up, getting them trapped by their own obsession and then helpless due to constantly breaking taboo.
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Apr 5, 2016 03:28
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Capntastic posted:Adepts headbutt reality into getting what they want from their personal obsessions. They don't care about the zeitgeist at all. You can be the only person in the world who cares about pogs and still have one hell of a Slammer whammy. Yeah, but if your personal obsession is no longer applicable to the way you see the world, you can be in trouble. Like, Videomancers are all about the paradox of being alone but also with all the other people watching Friends at 9 pm on Thursday. If people stop consuming media that way, and yet the world keeps turning, a Videomancer's whole worldview breaks down. Granted we're not there yet for Videomancy, but that and the aforementioned "350 channels of syndication" problem can't be good for the current crop's mental health. If a school is just unpopular, it'll stay small but effective (see Mechanomancy). We're talking about schools that are totally overtaken by the culture. An adept school built in the 1940s on some paradox involving the massive size of computers would be similarly hosed because computers aren't the size of houses any more. GimpInBlack fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Apr 5, 2016 |
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Apr 5, 2016 03:35
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