Campaign idea: Hobo Wizards

Hobos as mystical defenders of the nation. An idea I've had swimming around in my brain since reading Tim Powers' Earthquake Weather and Charlie Elmer Fox's autobiography in the same week.  

Reefer Charlie clearly had his rose-coloured glasses on while dictating the memoir: in his mind hobos were knights of the road, upright and chaste. They always gave a day's work for a day's pay and supported each other in tough times. Sister of the Road (Boxcar Bertha's autobio) is much grimier with its free love, prostitution and Bertha's regrets about being too drunk to join an anarchist bombing campaign. What I take from Powers is the idea that America has a secret king and the health of the land is directly tied to the king's health. All three of these books are good reads and I recommend them.

For the campaign, the Dust Bowl was the Apocalypse and all of Earth has been dragged into Hell. With the exception of the US, which is defended by the hobomages' Great Work. Now they form a court of councillors and bodyguards that travel with the King of America as he treads the boundaries of his nation (by riding the rails) and keeps the magic wards strong.

The king doesn't know he's king. The mages got him good and drunk for the coronation, he doesn't remember a thing. He just knows that his luck tends to go bad if he stays anywhere too long, and there's always a well-paying seasonal job available in a city just a little further down the coast. The Great Work prevents him or any mundane citizen from realising what's happened outside the country's borders.

The hobomages are wise and powerful, but for the most part they work for food and lodging like any other hobo. They need to stay hidden. The devil can enter the US if he limits himself to human form and power, and he's always sniffing for the source of the protective magic. If he gets a hint of a mage's identity he sends for his Yeggs, human agents picked from among the most degraded hobos. They don't care who they're working for and violence is their trademark. 

 

If a hobomage wants to work magic, it has to be subtle, using sympathetic effects like the laws of similarity and contagion. The idea being that yeah: the players can reveal themselves as the titans of magic they truly are, but then they have to fight off an army. If the king gets killed the country could literally go to Hell before a replacement can be crowned. Hobomages themselves can't be permanently killed because they've hidden their lives away with the greater part of their magic, but when they revive, they revive wherever that is and not where they need to be.

I'm not sure what I'd use to run this. Probably a system that has some kind of stress mechanism for tracking the heat players bring down on themselves through ill-advised magic use.

Edit: It seems there's an existing RPG called Hobomancer, using the QAGS system. And it won an Ennies Silver, so I should have been aware of it sooner. I've read the quickstart and it's clear the writers and I are dipping into the same well. We both have the idea of riding the rails as a mystical symbolic journey. We even found the same (admittedly famous) public domain photo of hobos walking the rails. I don't think I'd run my game in Hobomancer, because it appears to be higher-powered than what I'm thinking of. Less serious, too. One of the classes is the 'stinkomancer' which cultivates body odour as a weapon. 😃