Phobomancy

Phobos. Fear. It is the spur driving us onward, and the club which beats us back. It is the red light that stops us from destroying ourselves and everything around us, and the ultimate enemy in our skulls. For a few adepts, it is the key to transcendence and power. The ones that call themselves PHOBOMANCERS (and others call FEAR-MONGERS or PSYCHOS) seek to master the enemy within and use it to vault themselves beyond the confines of ordinary humanity.

To those who practice this path of magick, it's purpose is similar to that of extreme confrontational therapy. It is fear, in all it's guises, that holds us back from achieving our true potential. When we overcome our fears, we overcome the barriers that stand in our way. The price to full overcoming (and thus transcendence) is steep and painful, but one that must be paid. Many of this path's root practices have a basis in old, "left-hand" Gnostic mystery cults.

To those outside the path, who know of Phobomancy and what it entails, announcing you're a Phobomancer is like announcing your NAMBLA membership: *not* the smartest thing in the world to do. Even the most hardened individuals in the Occult Underground tend to loathe and distrust known fear-mongers, and wiht good reason. After all, the ability to feel fear (and other emotions) is part of what makes us human. Phobomancers deliberately set out to burn that part of themselves away. Simple common sense dictates that you steer clear of people like that! Of course, some phobomancers justify it by choosing to act as vigilantes, using their abilities to inflict brutal justice on transgressors that others can't seem to touch. But remember that warning about gazing into abysses and slaying monsters....

Blast Style: Seizures, apoplexy, blackouts, stigmata, psychic wounds, the phobomancer blast does all of that and then some. It is similar in style to the Psychotrauma attack used by pornomancers, although the victim can dodge the attack by rolling over the fear-monger's Phobomancy skill but under his or her Mind score. If the victim succeeds, then no damage is taken, although s/he must spend the next turn making a rank-5 Unnatural check. If the attack succeeds, then damage is determined as normal, plus the victim must make a rank-6 Stress check, determined by the victim's Fear Stimulus. (The blast dredges up some *real* nastiness from the bottom of one's psyche!) If the victim's Mind score is below the Phobomancy score, oh well...

Stats:

Generate a significant charge: Cause someone familiar to you, or force yourself to undergo, something that would cause a rank 6+ Stress Challenge. Rules apply as for minor charges.

Generate a major charge: Cause someone you love and care for dearly to suffer a rank 8+ Stress challenge.

Taboo: If you stop yourself from doing something out of fear, guilt, shame, embarassment, etc. all of which you are supposed to transcend, you lose all of your charges. If you fail any Stress check, you lose all of your charges and cannot gain any back until the failed check is removed. Random Magick Domain: Nightmares, phantasms, tracking down victims, hiding in shadows, or any other common horror-movie effect. It is designed to invoke unease and fear, and accelerates entropy in a negative fashion, unlike the entropomancer who can guide it for either good or ill. However, it's also useful for banishing fear as well.

Starting charges: Four. No, the starting Failure in the Unnatural Stress column doesn't take these away, although that Failure must be taken care of shortly after the Phobomancer comes into play, or s/he won't be able to gain charges back.

Minor Effects:

Cold As A Thousand Tombstones

Cost: 1 minor
Effect: Boosts the Phobomancers attempts at intimidation/interrogation by 5% multiplied by the one's place of the roll (ie. if the roll was 23, the Phobomancer gets +15% added to his Social rolls to intimidate.) If a successful match is rolled (ie. the Phobomancer rolled a 33), then the bonus is 10% multiplied bu the one's place (in this case, +30%.)

I Know What Scares You

Cost: 1 minor
Effect: On a successful Phobomancy roll, the Phobomancer finds the general Mental Stress that underlies your Fear Stimulus. If a match or OWACOWA is rolled, the fearmonger uncovers the *specific* Fear Stimulus. Very handy info, but not without risks: If the Phobomancer rolls a matched failure or BOHICA, s/he also finds out the basic Fear Stimulus--by experiencing it. A Stress check on the related Mental Stress is in order.

Lulling the Lamb

Cost: 1 minor
Effect: Allows the Phobomancer to extinguish the natural reservations people have about someone they don't know. This, of course, allows for all sorts of error judgements on the part of the victim! In game terms, this allows the Phobomancer to add 10% to all Social rolls directed toward the victim, while the victim loses 10% to all rolls that would allow him or her to spot the character flaws in the Phobomancer.

Into The Shadows

Cost: 1 minor
Effect: Adds 10% to all stealth/hiding related rolls by the Psycho. Creates a mental "blind spot" in the pursuers'/victim's/guards' minds which makes them overlook what might be obvious to anyone else in that situation.

Panic Attack

Cost: 2 minor
Effect: This is the Phobomancer Minor Blast. It is similar in effect to Psychotrauma, in the fact that the damage is all mental. If it succeeds, the victim takes damage as per a Minor Blast and must spend the next turn making a rank-5 Stress Check on the general category of his/her Fear Stimulus. Note that, if the person is actually confronting his/her specific Fear Stimulus and a Successful Match is rolled, Significant damage will result, and the Fear- check goes to 8! It has no effect at all on those who's Fear Stimulus has been Hardened to 8 or higher.

Go Numb

Cost: 2 minor
Effect: This allows a Phobomancer or another person chosen to ride out the effects of a Failed Stress-check. It witholds the effects of a Failed Stress roll for up to an hour, by which time the source of the Failure should have passed. After that hour, the spell wears off gradually, allowing the the beneficiary to re-roll the Stress Check at two ranks lower. This spell cannot be used again if the beneficiary fails this new roll. Minimum Stress-rank can be reduced to is 1.

Know The Scent Of Fear

Cost: 3 minor
Effect: Allows the Phobomancer to track someone s/he has run afoul of in the past. S/he will know exactly where the person is living, or, if in pursuit, where the person is currently hiding.

Significant Effects:

Bad Dreams

Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: This is the Significant Blast of the Fearmongers, and it waits until the victim is asleep to attack. The truly unnerving part is that the damage from Bad Dreams duplicates what was done to the victim in the nightmare, one that seemed to relentlessly dredge up the victim's worst fear and amplify it. This Blast has been responsible for numerous unsolved crimes--and numerous Sleeper reprisals. No effect on those who are Hardened to 10 on the stress meter responsiblefor their Fear stimulus.

Vertigo

Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: Causes the victim to be unable to move without disorientation. If the victim rolls over the Phobomancy score, but under his/her Mind, s/he can move, but at a -20% penalty for anything involving heights or fine motor skills. If s/he fails, forget it! Movement under his/her own power is out of the question. Lasts for about a half-hour.

Hex

Cost: 2 significant charges
Effect: If the Phobomancy roll is successful, the Psycho puts a repeating hex on the victim. For a number of times equal to the one's place on the roll, the Phobomancer gets to flip- flop the rolls of the victim, conjuring up critical moments of doubt and defeatism in the victim's mind. Thus, if the Phobomancer rolled 52, s/he could only flip-flop two rolls on the unlucky victim. Note that the Psycho must be able to see the victim, and that this spell can't be overlaid on top of a Hex that's already functioning.

Regain Control

Cost: 2 significant charges
Effect: Allows a Phobomancer to heal long-term psychic trauma. In game terms, the Phobomancer sacrifices a notch on a Hardened meter to cancel a Failure on the *same* Meter. Thus, if the Phobomancer was attempting to bring bach someone with 3 Hardened notches and 5 Failed on the Helplessness meter, he could bring the person to 4 Failed and 2 Hardened. Thus, the victim loses some "armor" but is now more able to cope. Matched successes allow the Phobomancer to cancel two Hardened/Failed notches in the same Madness Meter. Note that if there are *no* Hardened notches in that particular Stress, then the spell automatically fails. Also, no swapping from different Stresses! Hardened Unnatural cannot counteract Self-failure.

Clear the Air

Cost: 3 significant charges
Effect: This causes any demons, revenants, astral parasites, tenebrae, entropics, ghouls, etc. active in ten feet of the caster to flee the area of risk Significant damage. It does not work on enfleshed supernatural creatures, such as golems or unnatural servants.

Feeding the Nightmare

Cost: 4 significant charges
Effect: The Phobomancer summons and binds an Entropic, sending it to hunt down and attach itself to a person or group of persons, who the Fearmonger must know. For this Effect, the Phobomancer gives the Entropic some of his/her blood. This not only gives the Entropic the information to hunt the victim, but it also gives the Entropic a Mind score equal to the caster's Phobomancy score! That's right, now it has a brain and it's *really* dangerous. Further, if the Fearmonger does nothing else but concentrate, s/he can communicate telepathically with the Entropic to get details as to where the victim is and what's going on. Note that many in the Occult Underground won't be too quick to clue into what's happening; after all, it can't be an Entropic because they're nowhere near subtle, right?

Nothing Can Stop Me Now

Cost: 4 significant charges
Effect: The phobomancer chooses a specific victim to hunt down and kill. Using this spell, s/he rolls her Phobomancy. If the victim has at any time been sucessfully intimidated or has been magickally attacked by the fearmonger in question, add 5% to the Phobomancy roll for each successful time. Thus, if the victim had been bullied around twice by the Phobomancer and had two successful spells cast on her by the same psycho, then the Phobomancy roll gets a 20% bonus.
If successful, the roll turns the Phobomancer into a near-unstoppable killer, fueled by his victim's own fear. He gains Wound Points equal to the roll plus any bonuses. All damage is subtracted from these additional points first. If he matches, the roll-plus-bonus is also divided between his Body and Speed, which is boosted for the duration of the hunt. An OWACOWA does all of the above (total being the Phobomancy score plus bonuses.) Note that the Body/Speed scores have a maximum of 90, and Wound Points can't go beyond 250.
Also, the phobomancer must make an attempt to go for the straightest line possible between his victim and him. No pausing to order a hot dog, no robbing a bank and then taking a stroll in the park and *then* killing the target, none of that. However, it should be considered acceptable for the Phobomancer to gloat, or systematically take out any police/ bodyguards before taking down the victim. All bonuses disappear after the victim is killed.

Personal Hell

Cost: 5 significant charges
Effect: This spell lasts for 24 hours, or until the victim is completely insane. It causes the victim to fixate unreasonably on the subject of his/her Fear Stimulus, to the point where s/he starts seeing things out of the corner of his/her eye related to the fear. As the day goes on, the victim becomes more and more divorced from reality, which becomes more eerily surreal and seems to conspire against the victim, digging up long buried memories and forcing him/her to confront the fear in the most dramatic manner possible. These episodes only occur when the victim is alone, but the victim will (naturally) seem paranoid and jumpy, catching hallucinations out of the corner of his/her eye and mishearing conversation in the worst way.
Near the end, when the victim becomes completely divorced from reality and the victim is face-to-face with his/her fear, the victim must roll for his/her Fear Stimulus, no matter *how high* the victim's Hardened rank is. If the victim fails, s/he goes straight to insanity, with five Failed ranks in the Stress related to her fear. If the victim succeeds, s/he recovers (but still having to make a rank-6 Unnatural check), but may have a *lot* of explaining to do.
As mentioned above, this spell subtly works its way into the cracks of its subject's psyche. The descent will be sudden, but should seem gradual. Generally, this spell is only used when harassment by an intelligent Entropic or being hunted down by a superhuman slasher just doesn't seem to say enough to the victim in question.

Major Effects: