[UA] Big Fat Index/Thaumaturgy/101

[Unknown VariableX]

I see two solutions.

1. No matter how obssessed an adept is about his magic, any vestige of 
sanity would require he admitted that there was more than one approach to 
magick. If you're an Entropomancer and you're fighting a Dipsomancer, and 
you see some broken bottles and tin cans from the dumpster flying at your 
face, you HAVE to admit that he has some sort of power. The alternative is 
to act like it's not happening and get a concussion and lacerations from the 
trash. Of course, if you're an Entropomancer, you might do that anyway, but 
because you know that it's real, it's dangerous, and you're gonna take a 
chance.

In this case, the adept rationalizes things by thinking that while there are 
thousands of methods, the one s/he chose is the BEST. All the other stuff is 
weak-ass, dead-end crap.

2. The obssessed view of the adept filters their ability to conceptualize 
other approaches to magick. This means that an Entropomancer thinks of 
Dipsomancy as risking liver disease and alcohol poisoning, Personomancy as 
risking humilation and ridicule, Epideromancy as risking infection and 
shock, et cetera. To the Epideromancer, The Entropomancer is gaining some 
sort of power from the testing of reflexes and (more likely) the injuries 
from such crazy risks. The Dipsomancer is getting power from destroying his 
body with booze. It's like a hologram... or those charts people make when 
trying to prove that Kevin Bacon is the center of the movie universe. 
(Speaking of which, I wonder if there's any occult nuts who try to use THAT 
as the key to unlocking mystic power.)

In places, the reasoning and logic can get very thin, but adepts are used to 
that. Given enough time and inspiration, any adept can relate any other 
school as a very limited and underpowered version of his/her own school.

The second one is probably more common, but both seem plausible. Altogether, 
though, most adepts probably never think about it for longer than a few 
minutes or so. Too busy looking for rare books on eBay, cooking up some 
mystic meth, or getting hammered.

-Variable (tries to explain everything in terms of rubber chickens)

----Original Message Follows----
From: Thuvasa3 <thuvasa3 at yahoo.com>
Reply-To: The Unknown Armies RPG Mailing List <ua at lists.unknown-armies.com>
To: The Unknown Armies RPG Mailing List <ua at lists.unknown-armies.com>
Subject: [UA] Big Fat Index/Thaumaturgy/101
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 08:16:04 -0800 (PST)

By chance is there a big fat index out there that
spans *all* of the published UA material?  I was
toying with the idea of making one, but then I
remembered that I am lazy and that I never finish
anything.

Authentic Thaumaturgy--I'm having some trouble
wrapping my mind around this one.  The thaumaturge can
do minor rituals just by rolling the AT skill, right?
*Regardless of how many minor charges the ritual would
normally cost?*

Also, it says again and again that using thaumaturgy
rituals breaks taboo for adepts.  Is that just the
charging rituals, or all of them?  In other words, if
the adept is using charges from his school to power
the rituals, it would seem to me that that would not
damage his world-view; i.e. his way *is* the only way,
because the stupid rituals wouldn't work if he didn't
have [school of magick here] to power it.  eh?  Am I
just getting that all turned around?  Finally, does
anyone have any charging rituals they would like to
share?

Finally, the 101 (the binary ravers) people--I read
that, it reminded me SOOOOOO much of John Tynes's
article on altered spaces I just had to grin.  Dunno
if that's still on the site somewhere, but I thought
that was a good article, and was happy to see it
getting some play.

Be gentle.

Jonathan

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