While you're thinking of what Ms. Clock has access to and what Rose/Donald/Sera have been doing, let me give you some more entertainment. That's right, grimoires! Now there's only the Verbena and Virtual Adepts left. Thanks to
@Quantumboost for help with Dreamspeaker grimoires.
Dreamspeaker Grimoires
Shamanistic Lineages: Many Dreamspeakers grimoires are etched into bloodlines, such that their magical knowledge is passed down through the ages. This grimoire passes from a teacher to a student once they master the legends and teachings of their particular lineage, and may only reside in one student at once. Although inefficient at mass-Awakening, these grimoires are often Primers and are reliable at awakening single people in their specific bloodline. Typically, these grimoires are Primers which teach Arete 1 and Spirit 1 initially and can grant Arete 2 and Spirit 2 with further tutelage (at which point the grimoire passes on from the teacher to their new apprentice). These grimoires are far rarer than they were in the 18th and 19th centuries due to the imperialistic policies encouraged by the Technocracy leading to the mass death of such shamanistic bloodlines.
The Nameless Ancestor: Not all the spirits created by the Avatar Storm have been hostile to mankind. One of the formerly-mortal spirits well-accounted for after the Avatar Storm, the Nameless Ancestor was a skilled Dreamspeaker of the Pattern Essence who wrote the secrets of entreating the Spirit Worlds on his soul so that even after they died, they could continue mentoring initiates. Nothing else is known about them, though the spirit is known to appear as a giant and colorful spider. To learn from this Ancestor, he or she must be summoned by Spirit 2, using a specific dance that its people once favored in the spirit's life. A performance that moves the spirit sufficiently to gain advantage of its tutelage requires Charisma + Performance 7d, and with a successful attempt the summoner may learn Spirit 3 and gain another dot of Performance, as well as a "Spirit Courts" specialty in Etiquette.
Order of Hermes Grimoires
Madame Penelope's Primer on Potions and Proper Alchemy, 98th Edition: The Order of Hermes teaches most of its students through formal instruction and uses unified systems for its magical tutelage. The 98th edition of Penelope Greenwald's primer on alchemical techniques was published in 1999, only days before the Avatar Storm, and few copies exist. With the destruction of Doisstep in the Avatar Storm and the second-rate Nebelkamm University of Mysticism and Magic having been destroyed by infighting in 1943 and demolished by the Soviet Union's Technocrats in 1944, many of these books have become hard to find, especially since now the third-rate Edward Kelley Tertiary School of the Magickal Arts is the sole remaining large Hermetic university. The Order of Hermes has paid adventurers, scholars, and even has been rumored to have paid Technocrats to retrieve textbooks from Hermetic chantries, Umbral realms, and other places where they might be found. The Primer on Potions and Proper Alchemy teaches a reader Matter 2 and Life 2, allowing them to brew a fairly basic set of potions and do minor beginning alchemy. It is generally used by Hermetics exclusively, although Verbena
could learn from it with an open mind.
A Treatise on Ars Essentiae (Porthos Fitz-Empress): One of the rarest and most prized Hermetic grimoires, the
Treatise on Ars Essentiae was the archmage Porthos Fitz-Empress's magnum opus before his mind slowly started degrading into senility due to paradox and age. Made out of nearly indestructible materials, this Treatise is long and nigh-incomprehensible to all but the most gifted, requiring Intelligence + Occult 10d to comprehend, and each attempt to ferret out more mystic knowledge requires +1d to that total to even attempt (so someone reading it for the 5th time requires 14d Int + Occult). However, someone who can comprehend the Treatise will soon realize that it explains the
entirety of the Forces sphere to a person who is steeped in the Hermetic paradigm, teaching all Forces ratings from 1 to 5. Learning Forces 4 and 5 from this treatise sets one's Forces specialty to (Purifying Flame). There was only ever one copy of this treatise, stored at Doisstep. The Hermetics have made multiple desperate attempts to recover it, but all these attempts have failed with massive casualties.
The Book of the Law (Alistair Crowley): This infamous mystic text was an embarrassment to its writer, Alistair Crowley, even if it was a source of wisdom in its time. A few copies were originally made with full mystic might, but later Crowley recanted and sought to destroy it. It would have taught a reader Mind 3 and Spirit 3, but after its publishing it has lost its mystic power due to how much of it was invested in its secrecy, and now nothing of its original mystic nature remains. It might be possible to find a copy which survived this symbolic act of destruction, but doing so would require an Umbral journey to realms where its mass publishing was never done. Before the Avatar Storm, there were plenty of texts that did much the same thing, and after the Storm, the Umbra has become incredibly risky. Amusingly, if a NWO psychic operative gained access to a working copy, they could benefit from its cryptic text, interpreting it as the power of Crowley's unconscious mind rather than as something external to him.
Immortal: House Thig has been the most irreverent and technologically savvy faction of the Order of Hermes, and it is just like them to encode a grimoire into a video game. In
Immortal, you play as Patrick O'Leary, an occult investigator and two-fisted mystic hero who is slowly drawn into a saga of magic, betrayal, and a surprise twist involving killer robots seeking to remove the mystical abilities of mankind. Although the game ended up mysteriously cancelled before release, its source code and assets are available on the internet on various sources. Recompiling the game requires Int + Computers 6d and Int + Occult 5d to do, but a mage who does so may learn Forces 2 and Correspondence 2 from the effort, and also may learn Spirit 2 from the (accurate) Hermetic rituals to see and interact with spirits if they play the game, read the manual, and read the EU materials. The EU materials also grant some information on HITMarks should a mage already know of them, and some surprisingly accurate detail on spirits and the Umbra (Technocracy Lore and Cosmology 1). Virtual Adepts can take advantage of the search and recompile parts of this grimoire, but cannot learn Spirit from it.
