Just feeling bored, and I remembered someone asking for this on another thread sometime back, so here it goes...


Channelling Tradition

Concept:
A very rare tradition, channellers make use of psionic channelling to open their minds to the vast power of angels, demons, and other entities with the power to cross the Divide. It typically involves entering into a deep meditive trance-like state that allows their 'source' to momentarily enter their body, granting the recipient vast amounts of power.

While opening yourself to the secrets of the universe has several powerful advantages for the magician who often feel they can control it, the nature of that control is deceptive and will ultimately consume their mind and soul. Chanellers are largely shunned by the magical society who see them as little more than rank, arrogant, amateurs dabbling with cosmic forces beyond anyone's understanding.

Required Qualities:
A channeller must take the Magician or Adept Magician quality, as well as the Shamanic Mask quality.

Spirits:
Combat: Air
Detection: Beasts
Health: Fire
Illusion: Earth
Manipulation: Water

Drain:
Magic + Intuition

Chanellers do not suffer Drain in the same way that Mages and Shamans do. Drain is calculated in the same way, and the Chaneller uses Magic + Intuition to resist. Any resulting drain, rather than causing physical or stun damage, adds to the magician's Hysteria.

When a magician suffers Hysteria, his Hysteria state may change. After a magician suffers drain, count up his Hysteria, and convert any 3 full points of Hysteria to Madness, decreasing Hysteria and increasing Madness. As a result of this conversion, Hysteria will always be between 0-2 points and Madness will continue to increase as the chaneller suffers more drain.

Hysteria state:
0 - The magician is perfectly normal.
1 - The magician enters into a mild state of depression or paranoia.
2 - The magician will become bouncy, energetic, cheerful, and optimistic.

For each point of Madness, add +1 to the threshold of all Logic and Charisma -related tests conducted by the Magician. When a magician's Madness score rises higher than his Essence score, he has become completely insane and his brain is fried (often literally) by the higher powers he has invoked. In other cases, chanellers have tapped into some source of great power in the outer metaplanes and completely faded away with a lingering echo of cackling laughter. In any case, the magician is no longer a playable character.

In order to relieve a point of Madness, a magician must take a Complex Action to perform an Insanity Action. This Insanity Action is taken in addition to any other activity a Complex Action (or 2 Simple Actions) would allow such as firing weapons, conducting odd negotiations, starting a fire, etc.

The Insanity Action must be something wildly detrimental and suitably weird. The exact definition of what kind of activities constitute "Insanity Actions" will vary from group to group, depending on how comfortable that group will be with the theme of insanity in general. Some players may not like having a magician around who will spend a complex action screaming at the top of his lungs while on a stealth mission, but that's exactly the sort of thing a chaneller might do as his madness continues to rise to life-threatening levels.

very nice... Of course then there'll be the players who want to play madmen...

There always are.



"I don't care what time it is, unlock his cell, unstrap him, and get him to the phone." -Giles

Lovecraftian magic isn't all that compatable with cannon SR magic. It's all about the indistinguishability of high magic and tech, and bending the rules of space and time.

In stories, one sees both summoning and possession. Ideally, a character would be able to use both, but lack that the former would probably make more sense. Lovecraftian 'posession' is more of just mind control. There are a few special exceptions (such as when a wizard transfers his consciousness to a descendant to avoid death).

Anyway, it looks like you've got a fun 'madness magic' system. Maybe a little bit unbalanced, but I suppose that's the whole point