Mage Crawlies

Magic

While surfacers have to engage in arduous study, prayers and arcane rituals to infuse themselves with enough magic power to throw fireballs and heal others, most monsters have the capacity for some form of natural magic. Unlike surface mages who often tend to channel the ambient aether, monsters instead use their innate pool of magic, known as Magic Points, or MP. Once it's drained, since they can't use any more from their surroundings, they can instead expend their own lifeforce at a 1:1 ratio(first Shock, then Killing, only from the Torso location) to power it.

Using magic generally relies on the caster's inherent attributes and skills(for instance, throwing a Fireball might require Knowledge and Sight).

Abyssal Magic(Demonic Only)

Active Ability: Abyssomancers can freeze water at a touch.
Passive Effect: Ability to breathe underwater, appear to be weirdly moist at all times.

Abyssomancers often get asked if they're not just doing the same thing as Infernalists, to which their response is often to banish the asker to the deepest pits of the nethermost hells. This doesn't actually answer the question, but it does stop people asking. The main difference is that they work with icy devils, while Infernalists deal with fiery demons.

Abyss Gate

Cost: 7 Magic Points
Roll: Command+Haggle
Effect: For Height rounds, demonic tentacles lash at enemies with Width dice pool and doing Width Killing damage on hit.
Lore: Even Abyssomancers don't quite know what the natives of the frozen oceans of Kokytos look like, and judging by the barbed tentacles lashing forth from the Abyss Gate, they prefer it that way.

Drowning Death

Cost: 7 Magic Points
Roll: Knowledge+Healing, resisted by Body+Vigor
Effect: For Height rounds, an affected target's lungs are filled with water. If they fail their save, they're incapacitated by coughing it up for the duration. If they succeed at their save, they "merely" suffer a two-dice penalty on all actions for the duration.

Freezing Mist

Cost: 4 Magic Points
Roll: Body+Vigor
Effect: All combatants who fail a Body+Vigor roll suffer 2 points of armor-ignoring killing damage to all limb locations.
Lore: Originally made to replace concert fog machines, the amount of resulting frostbite among concernt audiences meant it never caught on. Instead it's now used as a weapon of indiscriminate destruction by cold-resistant mages and their friends.

Frozen Artifice

Cost: 2 Magic Points
Roll: Body+Vigor
Effect: The Abyssomancer creates an ice construct up to Width meters in diameter, which maintains integrity for Height minutes before it begins to rapidly melt. No water needs to be present to do this.

Ice Physics

Cost: 3 Magic Points
Roll: Sense+Sight, resisted by Body+Athletics
Effect: A combatant who fails to resist a cast of Ice Physics finds themselves prone on the ground until their next action, with all the penalties that implies.
Lore: It also works pretty well if you just want someone to slip and fall in a funny way without getting stabbed while they're helpless.

Shards of Kokytos

Cost: 2 Magic Points
Roll: Coordination+Sight
Effect: The target suffers Width+2 Killing damage.
Lore: If there's anything the icy devils of Kokytos have a surplus of, it's ice. This spell hurls a freezing shotgun blast of abyssal ice at the target, and is traditionally accompanied by some form of ice pun.

Bureaucratomancy

Active Effect: None
Passive Effect: None

The dark arts of the HR office, responsible for "morale boosting" events, internal dungeon memos and a serious talk with your boss if you've been making inappropriate comments to the succubi.

Affirmative Action

Cost: 8 Magic Points
Roll: Knowledge+Counterspell
Effect: For Height rounds, all Surfacers present suffer a Width/2 penalty to their actions.
Lore: Everyone knows that Surfacers are cruel and wily creatures, who clothe themselves in layers of enchantments they call "buffs" prior to any engagement. This creates an absolutely unfair playing field in their favour, which this spell attempts to deal with. Occasionally someone tries to tell underworld HR departments this isn't what Affirmative Action is actually about, but no one listens to them.

Busywork

Cost: 3 Magic Points
Roll: Charm+Graces
Effect: For Height minutes, Width targets are given a purposeless task that they absolutely believe they have to do, but which accomplishes nothing except sapping their will to live and, perhaps, in some arcane way, making number go up. They will still defend themselves if threatened.

Company Uniform

Cost: 3 Magic Points
Roll: Command+Intimidate
Effect: For Height minutes, Width targets believe that they've wearing inappropriate clothing/outfits for their current jobs/work and will discard the "wrong" things they're wearing in favour of what they're presented with, assuming it isn't obviously suicidal to do so(i.e. discarding a diving outfit underwater, putting on a suit made out of explosives).

Detect Boss

Cost: 1 Magic Point
Roll: Sense+Eerie
Effect: For Height minutes, you have a perfect sense of the location of the nearest boss. This may either be your literal superior, someone else's superior or simply some sort of powerful boss creature or enemy. Potentially useful for hiding from dangerous people or people looking to make you do work, which are really quite similar.

DSHA Authority

Cost: 3 Magic Points
Roll: Command+Intimidate
Effect: For Height minutes, you lay down a barrier that enemies can only pass if they manage a Senses+Scrutinize roll with greater Width, as they otherwise believe it to be marking off a hazardous area. Nothing stops them firing or casting spells across the line, though.

Escalated Complaint

Cost: 4 Magic Points
Roll: Charm+Lie
Effect: For Height minutes, Width targets believe that they lack the authority to respond to your request and that they have to summon their leader(or let you see their leader) so they can resolve the problem.

Fine Print

Cost: 6 Magic Points
Roll: Charm+Haggle
Effect: Forges a magic contract containing up to Width/2 things that the signatory must or must not do, for up to Height hours. Violating the contract causes the signatory to suffer a Width/2 penalty to all rolls for the rest of the week. Ostensibly it also promises the signatory things, but the fine print prevents any of this from actually mattering unless the caster fails their roll, in which case the contract is still binding… but on them instead of the target(effects as if Width 2).

For Exposure

Cost: 8 Magic Points
Roll: Charm+Lie
Effect: Summons Width interns for Height hours. The interns are poorly trained at all skills and expect you to teach them valuable lessons, and also to get paid. If any of them are still alive and capable of following you at the end of their contract, each surviving intern deals 1 Killing damage to your torso as per the contract, before leaving. You may also be able to just pay them. Interns won't kill themselves or stop following you on command, however, so you'll have to get creative.

Pink Slip

Cost: 4 Magic Points
Roll: Charm+Lie
Effect: For Height minutes, Width targets believe they've been fired from their current job when presented with the dreadful Pink Slip. This may trigger anything from pleading, to rage, to utter despondency and, in some cases, elevated joy.

Remote Office

Cost: 8 Magic Points
Roll: Charm+Stealth, resisted by Sense+Scrutinize
Effect: For Height hours, the room you're in appears, from the outside, to be something uninteresting and disused. An old archive room, janitor's closet or boiler room, perhaps. Certainly nowhere that any employee would have any reason to be.

Explosion Magic

Active Effect: Explodomancers can ignite small objects with a touch.
Passive Effect: +1 wound box to all locations.

Explosion Magic is a rare and specialized school of arcane violence, its followers tend to live short and pyrotechnic lives that attract a lot of attention and they are, to a man, absolute weirdos. The ones you see up and around are the ones who haven't cast Big Explosion yet or the ones who are hardy enough to survive.

Air Burst

Cost: 1 Magic Point
Roll: Coordination+Sight
Effect: Conjures a "detonation" of warm air that shoves objects up to the size and weight of a small child around.
Lore: Explosion wizards generally use this whenever someone tells them that all Explosion magic can do is indiscriminately destroy things. This is especially the case if the person telling them so is standing next to a precarious cliff edge.

Big Explosion!

Cost: 10 Magic Points
Roll: None
Effect: Results in 10 Area Killing Damage against the caster and everyone in the general area.
Lore: Big Explosion is what happens when an Explosion Mage does not give a fuck, channeling the arcane pool of an entire lesser mage into one huge, uncontrollable conflagaration. Most Explodomancers cast it sooner or later, much to everyone's regret.

Copyright Violation

Cost: 5 Magic Points
Roll: Body+Run
Effect: Everyone in the area suffers 5 Area Killing damage, reduced by the Width of a Body+Run check. Creatures who haven't been warned of the casting suffer a -2d penalty to their roll.
Lore: Explodomancers have teamed up with Dimensionmancers in the past to learn the arcane incantations of the mightiest destructive spells of other realms. However, any time they've attempted to use them, a chunk of space and matter surrounding them has been almost-instantly torn out of existence. The exact mechanics are unknown, but it's a good trick for the besieged Explodomancer who's done his cardio and whose friends they've either forewarned or do not care about.

Dreadful Incantation

Cost: 3 Magic Point
Roll: Command+Intimidate
Effect: A Width+5 morale attack against mob enemies.
Lore: Almost everyone knows what an Explosion Mage's incantantion looks like, including, unsurprisingly, explodomancers. Dreadful Incantation combines an almost-real incantation with a bit of magical fireworks to make extras think they're about to get vaporized and run for the hills instead.

Explosion!

Cost: 5 Magic Points
Roll: Knowledge+Counterspell
Effect: Results in a Width Area Killing effect on all targets in the general area and within sight.
Lore: Explosion magic is a poorly understood realm of spellcasting. Its adherents generally insist that they're channeling pure detonations from the Elemental Plane of Volatility, and the mechanics of the basic Explosion spell do lend some credence to this, as casting it seems to be less about properly channelling destructive force and more about restricting said destructive force from ripping the world in half.

Unstable Crystal

Cost: 4 Magic Points
Roll: Knowledge+Counterspell
Effect: Creates Height crystals which, when thrown or otherwise violently bumped, deal Width Area Shock damage. If not used, they explode on their own within a few minutes.

Holy magic

Active Effect: Holy magic users can summon soothing light and pleasant church hymns at will
Passive Effect: Surfacers will always attack Holy magic users last unless attacked by them first.

Holy magic is a blight upon the world invented by the brand of surfacers who call themselves "Clerics" and "Healers" that make their warriors near-impossible to kill. Surface healers are said to be a demure and insecure lot, wishing nothing but to aid their casters. The few underworlders who've found a way to use this dark discipline, however, have taken it in a different direction. Demonic creatures always take double damage from Holy sources after armor.

Beam of Judgment

Cost: 10 Magic Points
Roll: Coordination+Sight, resisted by Coordination+Dodge
Effect: Deals Width armor-ignoring Killing damage to the affected location. Characters and creatures who are truly free from sin are immune to this power.
Lore: This spell is occasionally used by enterprising Dark Lords as part of their courtroom proceedings if a minion declares themselves innocent of a crime or offense. This practice has lead to considerably greater numbers of guilty pleas in these jurisdictions.

Divine Radar

Cost: 1 Magic Point
Roll: Sense+Scrutinize
Effect: Instantly makes the caster aware of any Healers or other Holy Magic users in a group, both their number and who they are.

Life Bond

Cost: 1 Magic Point
Roll: Command+Inspire
Effect: For Width rounds, all damage taken by the targeted creature is transferred to the caster as armor-ignoring damage. The caster can end this effect at any time.

Pain to Power

Cost: 2 Magic Points
Roll: Command+Inspire
Effect: For Width rounds, the caster gains MP equal to the amount of damage taken by the target, up to a maximum of Height MP.

Screaming Stone

Cost: 2 Magic Points
Roll: Command+Intimidate
Effect: For Width minutes, an inanimate object starts screaming loudly and extremely distractingly
Lore: The only thing angels hate more than being summoned by surfacers is being summoned by monsters, angels in these conditions tend to get extremely upset and violent. Resultingly, Holy Mages among monsters tend to immediately bind summoned angels to an inanimate object. This doesn't make them any less upset, but does prevent them from chopping Steve's head off with a flaming sword. Also it's funny because it leaves then in agonized pain for several minutes before they're forcibly ejected back to the astral sphere, the feathery pricks. The screaming occasionally works to distract someone when you need it most.

Retribution

Cost: 4 Magic Points
Roll: Command+Inspire
Effect: For Width rounds, anyone hitting a targeted creature suffers half the damage they deal(rounded up) as armor-ignoring damage applied to themselves, up to a maximum of Height damage per attack.

Fungus Magic

Active Effect: Fungomancers can choose to talk to plants, the plants may not always have something worthwhile to say, though.
Passive Effect: Mushromancers suffer only half damage from toxins of any kind

Mushromancers are often shunned as weirdos who're only one step removed from druids, i.e. intolerable protagonists who use ecofascism as their excuse for murdering innocent monsters. Also they tend to either eat or talk to moldy bread, which is just insufferably weird. Usually competent wizards, though.

Cycle of Decay

Cost: 2 Magic Points
Roll: Body+Vigor
Effect: The Mushromancer dissolves an organic corpse and heals himself or a target he's touching(which isn't a Construct) for Width wound boxes.
Lore: Those assisted by a Mushromancer with this spell report that they feel gross for weeks no matter how many showers they take. Nasty.

Grasping Mycelium

Cost: 4 Magic Points
Roll: Body+Vigor, resisted by Coordination+Dodge
Effect: For Height rounds, all enemies in the area who fail their resist roll cannot use Dodge actions at all.

Indiscernible Anatomy

Cost: 3 Magic Points
Roll: Body+Vigor
Effect: For Width rounds, all target locations up to Height only suffer Shock damage(though a Shock-filled location will still start rolling over into Killing)
Lore: An advanced Mushromancer discipline that attempts to make them one with the fungus. It only lasts for a brief while, but the lack of any discernible internal anatomy to bruise and sever makes the Mushromancer immensely difficult to actually kill.

The Miracle of Nature

Cost: 1 Point
Roll: Body+Vigor
Effect: For Width rounds, the Mushromancer produces a smell much like a large pile of raw meat that's festering in a pile somewhere. This will make almost anything with a functional sense of smell try to stay away, though it may attract janitors or large mutant flies.

Rooting Mycelium

Cost: 2 Magic Points
Roll: Body+Vigor
Effect: For Width rounds, the Mushromancer is immune to any sort of effect that would knock him down or toss him around and can even root himself on vertical surfaces.
Lore: Mushromancers just do gross, weird fungus things. If one of them visits, ask him to wear shoes or you'll be cleaning mycelium out of the floorboards.

Spore Storm

Cost: 6 Magic Points
Roll: Body+Vigor, resisted by Body+Vigor
Effect: For Height rounds, anyone in the area who needs to breathe and fails to resist, suffers 1 point of Killing damage to their torso as fungal spores aggressively colonize their lungs.

Toadstool Structure

Cost: 2 Magic Points
Roll: Coordination+Perform
Effect: A number of mushroom structures rapidly grow at the Mushromancer's command, lasting for Height minutes before they begin to rapidly decay and covering up to Width cubic meters. They can be soft and spongy or hard like shelf fungus as needed.

Infernal Magic(Demonic Only)

Active Effect: Infernalists can summon ominous leitmotifs at will.
Passive Effect: +1 Armor against fire effects, cannot wear armor that gets in the way of their high-collared black robes

Infernalists often get asked if they're not just doing the same thing as Abyssomancers, to which their response is often to banish the asker to the deepest pits of the nethermost hells. This doesn't actually answer the question, but it does stop people asking. The main difference is that they work with fiery demons, while Abyssomancers deal with icy devils.

Banish

Cost: 6 Magic Points
Roll: Knowledge+Lie, resisted by Coordination+Dodge
Effect: If the target fails to resist, they're banished to the dark realms of Inferno for Height rounds. Every round spent in Inferno scorches them with a point of killing damage in all boxes.
Lore: Records show that Banish was the first spell discovered by the mages who would later become Infernalists, originally as a method of getting rid of garbage. Shortly after it began to see widespread use, the surviving handful of Infernalists suddenly made great strides in learning how to control and dispel demons.

Bind Demon

Cost: 4 Magic Points
Roll: Charm+Graces, resisted by Knowledge+Counterspell
Effect: If successful, a demonic target will hear the caster's plea for long enough that the Infernalist will be able to finish fashioning a binding spell. Bound demons must obey the caster in all things for Height rounds, but will likely be extremely pissed about it afterwards.
Lore: Ostensibly you need a demon's true name to bind it to service, but clever Infernalists discovered that if you cough over the name part of the binding incantantion, it still works for just long enough to make the demon finish taking out your trash and then jump off a cliff.

Brimstone Gate

Cost: 5 Magic Points
Roll: Command+Perform
Effect: With the appropriate words and gestures, the caster tears open a gate to Inferno for Width minutes(or rounds, in combat), which allows two-way travel. If no one enters the gate, it's possible that an un-bound Inferno resident may pop through to see what's happening. And possibly to eat anyone it meets.

Soul For Sale

Cost: 8 Magic Points
Roll: Charm+Haggle
Effect: The caster summons up a demon lord whom they offer to sell their soul to. If the roll succeeds, they gain Width permanent XP in exchange for permanently losing 10-Height wound boxes. If the roll fails, they've badly misread the contract and end up getting nothing in return, but still suffer the penalty in full.

Summon Imp

Cost: 1 Magic Point
Roll: Command+Intimidate
Effect: Summons a servile imp for Height turns, the Imp will perform menial labour, but only as lazily as it can get away with. If forced to actually do work, it does so with Width/2 dice if rolls are needed.
Lore: Infernalists occasionally summon imps, no one's quite sure why, as they're inevitably the laziest and most cowardly of the demonic hierarchy.

Voluntary Possession

Cost: 5 Magic Points
Roll: Body+Vigor
Effect: For Height rounds, the caster gains Width dice to distribute among Body and Coordination. When the effect ends, the caster suffers Shock damage equal to half their max boxes in all areas.
Lore: Allowing a demon to possess you is incredibly painful and uncomfortable, but allows Infernalists to do terrifying and ill-advised things with tehir bodies.

Necromancy

Active Effect: The Necromancer can talk to the recently dead, they may not want to tell him anything, but they'll hear him
Passive Effect: If a Necromancer dies, they can choose to return to life as an undead creature with the Construct quirk.

Animate Dead

Cost: 1 Magic Point
Roll: Command+Tactics
Effect: For Height minutes, the Necromancer animates a reasonably intact corpse as a shambling abberation which has no brain but can be puppeteered to perform simple tasks.

Astral Projection

Cost: 2 Magic Points
Roll: Command+Intimidate
Effect: For Height minutes, the Necromancer departs his body as a ghost and can explore to his heart's content. He will be able to pass through wooden barriers, but not stone or metal. All senses function as normal. Some mages may be able to detect his presence, as weill other ghosts.

Bone Spear

Cost: 3 Magic Points
Roll: Coordination+Sight
Effect: Launches a ranged attack that causes Killing+3 damage

Mask of Death

Cost: 2 Magic Points
Roll: Charm+Lie
Effect: For Height minutes, Width number of creatures appear to be perfectly and completely dead. If they move about, they appear to be undead monstrosities.

Summon Ghost

Cost: 4 Magic Points
Roll: Charm+Graces
Effect: Summons a ghost to attempt to answer a question, no specific ghost can be chosen, however, and the ghost may not know the answer or be willing to part with it.

Your Own Skeleton

Cost: 5 Magic Points
Roll: Charm+Lie, resisted with Senses+Scrutinize
Effect: Summons and animates a skeleton. Targets who fail to resist spend Height turns riven by the existential terror inherent in believing that the summoned skeleton is theirs. They may doubt they still have bones, they may believe the skeleton to be from the future, they may believe themselves to be a ghost. They'll still defend themselves, though.

Poison Magic

Active Effect: Toxomancers can give someone a mild contact high, including themselves
Passive Effect: Toxomancers instinctively know the effects of toxic substances just by handling them, most Toxomancers eat very little fast food.

Toxomancers are strange and insular people, often distrusted by everyone else who suspects the Toxomancer of trying to assassinate them. What they don't know is that the Toxomancer is actually busy assassinating his own liver with designer drugs instead.

Acid Burst

Cost: 3 Magic Points
Roll: Coordination+Sight
Effect: The struck location of the target loses Width worth of armor for the remainder of the fight. Excess armor loss becomes Shock damage.
Lore: Most Toxomancers can easily whip up a nasty, failed batch of junk in a second and fling it into the fray.

Discolorant

Cost: 1 Magic Point
Roll: Senses+Sight
Effect: The Toxomancer creates a large amount of a paint-like substance that adheres to any surface, of whatever colours the Toxomancer intends. The substance is, undoubtedly, quite poisonous, but on a timescale that means it'll just lead to cancer at some point after the adventure has concluded.

Pain Resistance

Cost: 2 Magic Points
Roll: Charm+Lie
Effect: The target gains Width extra wound boxes for every location for Height rounds, and they are always filled last. When the effect ends, the extra wound boxes disappear fast, which may kill or incapacitate the target.

Pheromone Control

Cost: 3 Magic Points
Roll: Charm+Lie, resisted by Body+Vigor
Effect: Width targets who fail the roll fall into a stupor for Height minutes. Rapid movement, loud noises or pain will jerk them out of it.
Lore: It's not actualy pheromones, but it sounds cooler than the actual chemical concoction that does it.

The Juice

Cost: 4 Magic Points
Roll: Knowledge+Scrutinize
Effect: Creates Width sips of a powerful chemical concoction. Anyone who drinks it completely blacks out for Height hours during which they will act inscrutable and self-destructive.
Lore: No one knows the true origins of The Juice, but as it's a "recreational" chemical, most Toxomancers end up learning this spell.

Toxic Mist

Cost: 6 Magic Points
Roll: Knowledge+Sight, resisted by Body+Vigor
Effect: For Height rounds, the target suffers Width penalty to all actions due to the disorienting effects of the mist. Mobs suffer this effect as morale damage instead.

Sword Magic

Active Effect: Sword Mages can sharpen any edge simply by wielding it.
Passive Effect: Always has a sword(width+1 killing) to hand, suffers an extra box of damage from swords.

Some insist that Swordmancers(also colloquially known as Stabmancers) are just jugglers with large pockets, but they always end up having terrible accidents with sharp objects, and thus the honour of Swordomancy as a legitimate school of magic remains un-impugned. It does seem to be somewhat cursed, though, as Swordmancers are extra-vulnerable to being cut by swords. Perhaps there is something to the old legend that Swords will fucking cut you wide open…

Chant of the Cursed Dark Inferno Hellsword Apocalypse

Cost: 5 Magic Points
Roll: Command+Intimidate
Effect: Height surfacers are convinced that within Width rounds you will unleash your ultimate destructive attack, annihilating anyone who isn't behind cover. Sufficiently distressed adventurers may choose to take their chances with steep drops or murky ponds rather than be potentially party-wiped.
Lore: It's said that to surfacers, this causes eerie visions of something called an "AoE marker," which all adventurers are taught to fear.

Gordian Problemsolving

Cost: 1 Magic Point
Roll: Command+Performance
Effect: If successful, everyone present earnestly believes you intend to solve a given problem by cutting it in half and will react accordingly.
Lore: Though let's be honest, if you're a Swordomancer, that was probably on your mind anyway. Admit it.

Sharpest In The Drawer

Cost: 2 Magic Points
Roll: Charm+Student of Swords/Blacksmithing/Weaponsmithing
Effect: For Height turns, the target gains Width/2(round up) extra dice to any Knowledge rolls
Lore: After witnessing a foolish Swordomancer attempt to sharpen his own wit with Ultimate Edge, a less foolish Swordomancer developed a spell that would actually do what his sadly-departed colleague tried to accomplish. He later lost his life for being an insufferable know-it-all.

Swordball

Cost: 4 Magic Points
Roll: Knowledge+Student of Swords/Blacksmithing/Weaponsmithing
Effect: Does Width+Killing damage to all enemies caught in the blast radius.
Lore: After studying the spell known as "Fireball," the early Swordomancers decided they could do that, too, and thus developed Swordball. It hurls a densely packed, roughly spherical bundle of swords towards the enemy, where it violently explodes, sending swords flying in all directions. Insanely dangerous to use.

Sword Facts

Cost: 1 Magic Point
Roll: Charm+Jest, resisted by Knowledge+Counterspell
Effect: For Height turns, enemies who fail their resistance roll ignore all targets but the caster.
Lore: Did you know that sword puns are the worst kind of pun? Used only by the edgiest, most sharp-witted swordomancers who perform them to the hilt.

Ultimate Edge

Cost: 2 Magic Points
Roll: Sense+Student of Swords/Blacksmithing/Weaponsmithing
Effect: For Height rounds, a sharp weapon gains Width/2(round up) extra Killing damage.
Lore: What's the most important part of a sword? The blade. After long years studying the blade, while others were wasting their time on tomfoolery, the Swordmancer knows how to tune any edge to ultimate sharpness. Swordmancers who attempted to use this to sharpen their wit felt really clever for about five seconds and then their heads fell off.

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