OMEGAMANCY -- for use with the GammaFinder Setting by Owen K.C. Stephens, inspired & informed by Defiling, a History and a Look Ahead & Running Dark Sun: Defilers
... Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The twisted lords of City Omega, it is said, were once served in combat & intrigue alike by vile magicians: depraved & corrupted enchanters who wielded unstoppable sorceries, fell magics that drank deeply from the last flickers of life clinging to our cursed earth.
Where their obscene will was worked, abject destruction savaged the waste.
Although the hideous masters of the Omega Invasion and their deviant catamite-mages have long-since fallen to dust & madness, their blasphemous occult legacy lives on ... echoing, growing in the shadowed wilderness like a iridescent, pulsating constellation of tumors.
This essay brought to you absolutely free to enjoy, to read & to share – as always – by the fine folks of my Patreon
original image by Jacob Blackmon, available from AAW Games here
DEPRAVED & INFECTIOUS KNOWLEDGE
No character may use Omegamancy until she has personally, directly witnessed another creature use Omegamancy.
Once a character has beheld the raw power of Omegamancy, she is forever-after marked, and she may use the abilities below at-will.
Use of Omegamancy is a strongly evil act.
THE MAJESTIC PERVERSION OF OMEGAMANCY
Whenever a Mystic or Witchwarper casts a spell, she may choose to evoke Omegamancy: scouring the earth around her clean of all natural life.
When she does so, she afflicts an area with a radius of 10 feet per level of the spell cast (5 ft. radius for cantrips): reducing plants & soil-bound microbes to strewn white ash, weakening and killing minor wildlife (creatures too small or insignificant to themselves have statistics), and reducing the rate of live birth among all surviving creatures in the area. If she uses this ability in an area that overlaps a previous use of this power, the radius is drawn from the edge of the previous area.
Omegamancy does not work in utterly barren landscapes, in the void of space, or in other places without enough life-force to steal.
Omegamancy does not kill truly unnatural life. Entities from beyond our understanding of biology are, in many instances, bolstered by the sudden disappearance of their competition: in those scarred places where Omegamancy has been used, forests of alien cartilage & twitching mollusk-flesh often grow, dripping protoplasm evolved under no known stars.
In other places, only dust remains.
An area afflicted by Omegamancy might recover, in time, but if so it has never been observed or recorded.
If she chooses to evoke Omegamancy in this way, she gains one of the following benefits as the spell is cast:
She gains a single temporary point of Resolve. Unspent temporary Resolve Points gained in this way disappear at the end of one minute.
The range of her spell is doubled.
The range of her spell increases from Touch to 30 ft.
She may re-roll any number of damage dice dealt by the spell. 1s on this single re-roll are treated as 2s.
The spell’s duration is doubled. The spell must have a duration longer than instantaneous.
Casting the spell does not provoke attacks of opportunity.
She gains the benefits of the Penetrating Spell feat until the end of her round.
She generates an effect identical to a Wonder Grenade within the area of the spell’s effect. She rolls twice and chooses one of the two effects.
Choosing to evoke Omegamancy in this way is a free action.
It is not possible to evoke Omegamancy in a subtle way: any creature within the afflicted area is instantly aware of this monstrous power’s evocation, and feels a sharp, agonizing tug at their life-force in the direction of the caster.
Those who survive an encounter with Omegamancy often suffer from Deformities.
DARK MAGIC IN A RUINED WORLD
Everyone hates Omegamancers.
No. Scratch that, actually. Everyone hates witches, and one of the reasons is that backwoods hillbillies who’ve never actually seen Omegamancy at work are just clever enough to err on the side of caution: willing to real-quick beat, string-up & behead anyone who might have the capability to unleash such legendary power at some point in the indeterminate future.
Everyone, after all, knows that Omegamancy is “a thing”.
And even at the best of times, normal people don’t handle magic well.
Uninitiated folks react to seeing sharp-edged proof of [2+2=5] the same way they’d react to a rotting clown-baby bursting into their darkened bedroom screaming, thrashing and vomiting spiders. Witnessing raw sorcery unravel & rewrite reality in-the-flesh activates the fight-or-flight response of a normal person the same way that a loaded pistol pointed directly at your own skull does ... while simultaneously pinging the uncanny valley just as hard as the primitive lizard hind-brain can register a sense of wrongness.
Something old – lurking just beneath the tense, stressed-out surface of every hardened apocalypse survivor scraping-together a life in the harsh dust – still believes in magic and monsters; that wide-eyed, blood-caked monkey knows that the best way to deal with wolves, demons & tigers in the dead of night is to wake the tribe with screams, light the big fires and start throwing heavy stones.
They’ll come at you with bare fists & teeth, friend.
You don’t even want to know what they do to people who unleash the true, eldritch power of madness.
If a Mystic or Witchwarper evokes Omegamancy while holding an item of power constructed of Omega-Core Substance, she gains two of the benefits from the list above rather than one. In addition, all living creatures in the afflicted area -- except you, the caster -- suffer one hit-point of damage per level of the spell cast (no save). This ability must deal at least one point of damage or the spell fails.
Omega-Core Substance is rare in the extreme, illegal in all settlements, highly radioactive, poisonous, causes unexpected & inexplicable energy-shifts in its surroundings, attracts alien predators and -- worst of all -- is highly valued by remnants of the Omega Invasion, who possess some unknown means of tracking the material.
