[UA] Writing new schools

[Chris Cooper]

I want to stress that this is MY view on the topic. I
get a daily digest so have no other clue to what has
been posted here - before and after.

So Mattias...

You want to tell people what they can and cannot write
up as magic schools or archetypes. Well you can’t
because I said so.

Your point of view assumes the would-be adept is
studying the school because he wants to get magic.
This is wrong because you’re describing old-school
sorcery.

Firstly,
 
…Adept-styled magic is not actually about the magic at
all. Adepts are unhealthily obsessive about their
focus obsession that eventually reality becomes
schizophrenically loose enough to bend to the adepts
wishes. The more the adept self-referentially enforces
his way of looking and dealing with the universe as
the only correct way, the more the universe does what
its told, proving the adepts way is right. 

And that’s all magic is, you tell the universe to do
something your way and it does it.

Magic is a by-product of the adept’s obsession. A way
of saying you are so screwy, reality has eventually
gone screwy with you. To decide what an obsession is,
is something your adept would get a sexual buzz about.
Any sort of sexual congress with the obsession
involved will give the adept a satisfying orgasm.

Saying the phobomancers are extinct because of pop
culture acting as some sort innoculation against fear
doesn't compute. People have been using fear as a
source of entertainment for millenia not to suddenly
start now.

All the phobomancers are alive and well in Brazil. As
well as the few remaining, dying SS magicians can be
called alive and well.

The magic taboo is actually an obsession taboo. If
your prototype adept would violate his obsession –
violate the very thing that keeps him getting up in
the morning to stay unemployed – then he violates the
privilege to do magic. An adept on Prozac could
neither get more charges, nor spend any. And if he
violates his taboo, his taboo is violated – he loses
all charges.

In Postmodern Magic (pg.35), two new forms of magic
where given. One of which is the mageekian, the lone
nut that discovers a new personal school or a twisted
variant of an existing one. These feature paradoxes
because the magic is an externalised, actualised
fantasy. A weirded-out spider magician that is an
arachnophobe is a paradox to use. 

I would insist the cantomancer’s taboo would be to
create any original music. He may play original music
as a session musician, remix someone’s song or as a
member of a boy band. But as soon as the  cantomancer
discovers the normal method of creating music or by
redoing a cover that becomes more popular than the
original’s release (being obscure doesn’t help), he
loses all charges. The cantomancer is a whore to
music, a wannabe musician without any talent to do it
on his own.

A minor charge would be listening to music solidly for
one hour – any music.

A significant charge would be performing solidly for
an hour – live or in studio.

A major charge would be just playing a dead platinum
musician’s unrecorded song. The musician would have
some way of never playing music again for this to work
and his name would have to be known by at least half
the world’s population.

Secondly,

… I can make any Avatar as goddamned post-modern as I
want. If I build my Messenger-channelling creep and
make him a Thanatomancer to boot and call the whole
caboodle Marty the Assassin, the Messenger of Death –
I have a post-modern Avatar! Wheeeeee! Much like
Dermott Arkane doing the whole Heisenberg’s Messenger
is redressing the Messenger in a post-modern way.

All post-modernism is (in art, my area) dressing up
old or traditional forms, updating them with
pop-cultural references. Another big thing with
post-modernism is its lack of descriptors. There is no
single set of rules that determines 

I created Guede as an Avatar replacement of the Shaman
merely because the character I wrote up about was a
little more hard core and sneaky than the previous
incumbent. As just because as a GM I feel the Guede –
otherwise known as the necromancer or witch doctor (in
Africa) – has become the modern replacement of the
shaman, he ascends.

Thirdly
Anything can be anything else – in the same way the
Pornomancers are adepts not channellers, and both
Messengers and Infomancers exist. There’s no Unknown
Armies Watchdog Committee of the Purity of Gaming
Magic Rules that will drag you off at three in the
morning if you don’t run to specifics.

So at the end of my argument I raise your beating me
with a belt and buckle with my prising your kneecaps
off with a hammer and chisel.

Cheers,

Chris.
 


=====
You cannot make someone love you but if your stalk them, they might just give in.

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