[UA] Oh, Those Wacky Cliomancers

[Stuart Anderson]

Nick Wedig wrote:

> So, would a cliomancer charging at the wrong place (which everyone thought was the right one) still gain a charge?

Some folks run magick as being all about intent. If he tried to charge and couldn't, he'd know he was at the wrong spot. Maybe he's close enough to leech some juice off the real site if he tries real hard. I de-emphasize intent somewhat. I'd be likely to have that spot be worthy of being famous for something else, so it has some magickal potential. Juice that could be felt. But if he wanted the Shakespeare charge, he'd be
going about it all wrong. So there would be juice there he couldn't get, giving him deep primal doubts about the efficacy of something he'd come to rely on. I did a thing where a guy scoured Mississippi looking for the crossroads where Robert Johnson met the devil, but kept getting thrown off by juice left from things that should've been history, but weren't. But I'd log that as a pretty deliberate distortion of the school
to suit my own nefarious agenda.

> Anyway, what if the whole deal was an attempt by some cobweb farmer to hog all the charges from that site, and have all the other clios getting nothing.

Then I'd say he's fixing to get his ass handed to him.

> All it'd take is some usage of those spells to make people think the wrong house was the right one. (though this would backfire if the school's more based on public perception than actual history, which would mean the new site would get the charges and not the real one)

Official history that folks have studied for years can be wrong. So--if the charge comes from the investment of the students, then even if the history's wrong, that's where the charge is. The 'reality' of the situation is meaningless. Unless you want to have two slightly different arcanodynamics running simultaneously. (I'd probably go that route) But this could provide some additional motive for folks that want to alter,
invent, or forget history. Maybe Gibbon or Toynbee were up to something. Maybe the post-modern revisionists are up to something. Maybe there's a soundstage in Hutchinson, Kansas where the 'real' charges for the lunar landing reside. A Cliomancer would have to go to the moon to be sure. But we've been over that before.
--Stu



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