I suddenly realised that a lot of you may not have access to that particular bit of the ToC rules, so here they are:Taavi wrote:Hi all,
After a bit of thought I've decided that I would be happy to have idiosyncratic magic use in the game, as described in the rulebook - that is, peculiar little rituals with a price, that can give you an edge in certain situations, not fireball-throwing. I imagine this might be something Harwood or Laura would be interested in adding to their characters.
Idiosyncratic Magic
Book-hounds, their customers, their contacts, and all those who haunt the Mythos black market are superstitious, obsessed, and widely read in the occult. This is the kind of combination that leads people to try magic, and in keeping with the weird, uncanny setting, some of it might work. As an entirely optional rule, the Keeper can allow an Investigator (or NPC) to make a 3-point Stability test to exchange 2 Stability pool points for 1 pool point from another Ability. The exchange can happen after the die roll. The player must say what weird ritual action her Investigator is (possibly retroactively) performing, give some notion of the oddball theory by which it works, and tell where she learned it if this is the first time she has made this particular exchange. The primary restrictions are: no player (including the Keeper) should consider it grotesquely abusive, it must be strange and eerie, and it should have a necessary condition. The Keeper is allowed to enforce these conditions for similar trades from here on.
For example: “Rose really needed to make that Sense Trouble test – I’m trading 4 Stability for 2 Sense Trouble, so she gets a ‘5’ on the die roll instead. Rose is smoking cigarettes soaked in rats’ blood and saffron oil, since we think the plague demon we’re hunting is from Russia where saffron grows, and she’s watching the smoke pool around its invisible hidey-hole. She learned this trick from that crazy White Russian who used to trade books for vodka money down in Spitalfields last winter.”
Creative Keepers and players will be able to justify all sorts of weird, eccentric magics to boost Athletics (“I twist the strand of human hair around my neck and pull myself over the fence”), Disguise (“I’ve got his mummified thumb in my ruddy mouth, of course I look like him”), Fleeing (“I cut my finger, let it soak my glove in blood, toss it onto the boot of that speeding car, and run the other way”), Shadowing (“I’m only looking in shop windows with her first initial in them”), and so forth. Keepers may rule that any idiosyncratic magic must have a Mythos source (forcing Investigators to read their wares), that it must involve the caster’s blood (either a token amount, or 1 Health point), or any other restriction she feels suitable. At the Keeper’s discretion, some parts of London may be more conducive to certain magics (the Isle of Dogs for hunting magic, say), lowering the Difficulty of the Stability test from 4 to 3.
The ToC Supplement "Rough Magicks" has more examples for Idiosyncratic magic, which I can share with those interested. Or do people think that this overdoes the supernatural?
