Vindictus
XENO
- Location
- Texas
I will smirch what I wish to smirch; and if this man be smirched, so be it.
White Wolf's World of Darkness
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'd find some way to make sympathetic casting via Connection a less devastating advantage, I'd remove Entropy all together since I believe that "luck magic" is the domain of one's paradigm, Forces gets to stay as it is, so does Life and Matter, Mind gets to actually make beings with souls when you use Mind 5, though only in paradigms that don't believe in souls, Prime has it's "you require this Sphere if you want to actually create anything with the other Spheres" taken away and it'll also get the "Truth" aspects of NWoD's Prime, Sprit wouldn't be modified, but spirits would, so that the ability to create Spirits ex nihilo becomes less of a "i don't need other Spheres" button.
Primal Utility is great and so is Dimensional Science, though the former should be expanded to cover more than just economists. Data is something more than simply another sympathy chart and instead something like a mixture of Forces, Mind and Correspondence.
Sorcerers as written get thrown the fuck out, and we instead replace their Paths with something that's basically Styles as written by @EarthScorpion and @Aleph, with each consecutive dot from one to three granting access to one kind of Sphere effect from a number of Spheres as long as they fit into theme. Mages can also learn these, and often do, though they merely supplement their already existing Spheres rather than give them new stuff. Sorcerers also suffer paradox like Mages, though it tends to be more subdued.
An example of such a Style might be:
Path of Hellfire Style
Thought by many to be tainted by darkness, if not outright of evil origins, the Path of Hellfire taps into the deepest, most primal, and destructive of forces. Legends ascribe the beginnings of this power to the infernal realms, pacts with malevolent spirits, and bargains with beings better left alone. The master of the Path of Hellfire can demand, and receive respect; he will also receive suspicion and fear, whether he demands them or not.
A student of the Path of Hellfire learns to summon and control powerful and destructive attacks, drawn to destruction as these sorcerers are, this is often a boon as it allows them to create the destruction that they often seek. This Path is often practiced with Foci such as satanic invocations, hermetic pentacles, forbidden martial arts and infernal science. It's paradox backlashes tend to take the form of the sorcerer's powers turning against her and wreaking great destruction upon her physical form.
1: With the first level of the Path of Hellfire, the sorcerer can rip mystical power from her own body as a Life 1 Heart's Blood effect.
2: With the second level of the Path of Hellfire, the sorcerer can sense destruction wherever it may be found as a Correspondence 1/Entropy 1 effect.
3: With the final level of the Path of Hellfire, the sorcerer can work great and hellish spells of magical destruction, drawing upon dark powers to perform this as a Forces 3 effect.
This means that a Mage who knows the Path of Hellfire gets moar dice when performing these effects in line with the themes provided by the Path.
You can still cast, via pure Arete. But someone who doesn't understand the world should absolutely be at a disadvantage at casting, and people who don't have organized courses of study which allow them to learn things which they can apply to understanding how reality functions-and therefore how to manipulate it-should in fact get shafted. The Technocracy and Hermetics are the big 2 of politically powerful mage organizations because they have a common understanding and paradigm of the world that they change on the edges.
Awakened magic doesn't require you to have formal training-but it is very important. The game is pretty clear about that.
I did a Sorcerer rework in this very thread. Basically, Sorcerers learn spells. Mages learn spheres. A sorcerer learns a single, specific thing that works because they might not be Awakened but are educated enough in it and believe in it hard enough that this thing works for them. It makes sorcerers a lot more potent but also a lot more limited-spells are expensive, after all.
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- He/They
Hmm... on a conceptual level I really, really like this idea, especially for Technocrats who really shouldn't have a divide between their Academics (Physicist) skill and their Forces sphere, for instance. On the other hand, though, I can't imagine how this could be implemented--it'd have to involve creating effects charts for, like, hundreds of different skills, which sounds nigh-on impossible. Alternatively I guess you could make a very general guideline just based around Arete and apply it to everything.
If you're the kind of person who thinks that some people can be especially lucky, it's entirely possible just to make luck a skill of its own.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
You did actually inspire me partially, though mostly subconsciously.
I remembered your hack and was like "oh right, Mj12 did this before me, damnit"
OctarineShrike
Avatar of Mandos
Does the Celestial Chorister book mention anything about a neoplatonic Philosopher named Plotinus? I've been hearing about him, and well... his concept of the One is probably where Celestial Choristers got the concept from, apparently medieval Christian thinkers and Muslim thinkers both borrowed from him when it came to analyzing their theology. Combine that with some of his opinions on the nature of matter and well... he was probably an interesting character, in Mage the Ascension or Mage the Awakening.
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- He/They
Hmm... I think the idea of ability-based magic actually synchronizes really well with @EarthScorpion's ideas of Training and Talents.
You can cast minor (1-2 dot) effect equivalents in anything you have a Talent in--representing general bases of knowledge. For instance a Technocrat with Biology can bullshit all manner of small effects with anything vaguely related to living things--not just Life but also some Mind, Time, etc.
To perform major (3-5 dots) effect equivalents, you need an actual Training, so for instance to create a antimatter bomb your Void Engineer is very specifically going to need Exotic Matter Physicist or something like that.
Gaining more dots in your Talents or Trainings should give you access to a wider variety of effects or somehow greater magical ability otherwise, but I'm not quite sure how that would work yet.
However, Arete alone should have no effect on what sort of effects you can perform, just on how powerful your magical ability is in general. All mages are all capable of reality-warping to equal extents. A low-Arete mage is not likely to be successful at pulling of an effect that needs a fuckton of dice, but he should be able to if he takes, like, a year to ritual cast.
I've also been toying with a related concept called "Paradigm Incoherency" which serves as a pseudo-morality stat for Mages, which models the way that broadening one's paradigm hurts one's confidence in the way the world works. I'm not sure how exactly I would implement this yet, but it'd probably have something to do with making certain Talents/Training incompatible with other ones (Or forcing you to list what paradigm your training exists in). As you gain more "inconsistencies" in your paradigm, Paradox hits you harder and it becomes more difficult to cast (this might be tied with Willpower--if your Paradigm Incoherency score is above your Willpower score, you start subtracting dice from your magic dicepool)...but this is also the only way you can gain Arete past a certain level. That way gaining Arete becomes associated with some actual ingame risk, and fanaticism can actually be a mechanical benefit at times which explains (and encourages) why Mages so often fall into it.
Just for reference, your average person probably has a Paradigm Incoherency score of, like, 4--his worldview is generally coherent, but might fray at the edges in conflicts between his religion, superstition, science, intuition, etc. Someone extremely devoted to one mode of thought--say, a religious fundamentalist--would have a Paradigm Incoherency score around 2, while a particularly open-minded (or, less charitably, less resolute) person would have one in the 5-6 range.
You can cast minor (1-2 dot) effect equivalents in anything you have a Talent in--representing general bases of knowledge. For instance a Technocrat with Biology can bullshit all manner of small effects with anything vaguely related to living things--not just Life but also some Mind, Time, etc.
To perform major (3-5 dots) effect equivalents, you need an actual Training, so for instance to create a antimatter bomb your Void Engineer is very specifically going to need Exotic Matter Physicist or something like that.
Gaining more dots in your Talents or Trainings should give you access to a wider variety of effects or somehow greater magical ability otherwise, but I'm not quite sure how that would work yet.
However, Arete alone should have no effect on what sort of effects you can perform, just on how powerful your magical ability is in general. All mages are all capable of reality-warping to equal extents. A low-Arete mage is not likely to be successful at pulling of an effect that needs a fuckton of dice, but he should be able to if he takes, like, a year to ritual cast.
I've also been toying with a related concept called "Paradigm Incoherency" which serves as a pseudo-morality stat for Mages, which models the way that broadening one's paradigm hurts one's confidence in the way the world works. I'm not sure how exactly I would implement this yet, but it'd probably have something to do with making certain Talents/Training incompatible with other ones (Or forcing you to list what paradigm your training exists in). As you gain more "inconsistencies" in your paradigm, Paradox hits you harder and it becomes more difficult to cast (this might be tied with Willpower--if your Paradigm Incoherency score is above your Willpower score, you start subtracting dice from your magic dicepool)...but this is also the only way you can gain Arete past a certain level. That way gaining Arete becomes associated with some actual ingame risk, and fanaticism can actually be a mechanical benefit at times which explains (and encourages) why Mages so often fall into it.
Just for reference, your average person probably has a Paradigm Incoherency score of, like, 4--his worldview is generally coherent, but might fray at the edges in conflicts between his religion, superstition, science, intuition, etc. Someone extremely devoted to one mode of thought--say, a religious fundamentalist--would have a Paradigm Incoherency score around 2, while a particularly open-minded (or, less charitably, less resolute) person would have one in the 5-6 range.
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NonSequtur
a body
The point would be that skills would be a lot more narrow. So a luck skill isn't necessarily problematic, except that it's potentially too broadly applicable relative to other skills.
The issue is the flexibility and variability of Mages does horrendous things to that sort of system, though if you've got any ideas they might be something interesting to toss around.
Ascension's got the issue of trying to be all things to all paradigms.
Quantumboost
Now with 50% more dots in Dimensional Science
- Location
- Ensemble Space
As a note, with this particular implementation, a Mage who gets Willpower 10 would be able to have a paradigm that's completely incoherent and still be able to cast at full power. I'm unsure if you'd think that's a bug or a feature, though. Likewise you'd need an additional mechanic to represent fanaticism being
I take it the 'degeneration roll' equivalent would trigger when you're exposed to or convinced of something outside your paradigm, and not gaining Paradigmatic Inconsistency is because you've rationalized it within or adjusted your existing framework?
Also somewhat curious if you have an idea for how someone would reduce that. Because someone 'finding religion' and ending up intensely convinced of their new worldview seems like something that would sometimes happen to Mages.
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- He/They
That's the basic idea--willpower isn't involved because of fanaticism but rather because of existentialism. Basically it represents your ability to power through things like existential self-doubt that comes from occasionally almost realizing how everything you believe is ultimately meaningless. Degeneration rolls... hmm, I did consider that, but to be honest I haven't really pinned down how Paradigm Coherency would actually work mechanically so I'm not sure if that will be part of it or not.
Things like Arete crashes would increase Paradigm Coherency because it means you're doubling down on some more consistent aspect of what you believe--this can happen organically or through things like Reconditioning. However, narrowing your worldview like that is pretty much the only way you can reduce it--high-Arete mages are supposed to have very high Paradigm Incoherency to represent how their worldviews are incredibly alien to normal people, which also causes them to accrue Paradox at much faster rates and thus gives a reason why they're almost always only ever found in the Umbra.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
How quickly and by what methods are new Mages found in nMage? Like, I know there are means, but not sure what they are.
Aaron Peori Homebrew: Magic rewrite
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
Steal FATE style Aspects wholesale.
Note that this is only for Magick (with the special K) not for any other part of the system. Maybe run NWoD 1e mechanics as the basic underlying format of the game with Aspects on top of that.
Players would define their own Aspects as representations of their Paradigm. Probably rename them Paradigms, in fact, to avoid copyright fu1 as well. The Paradigms can be as broad or as narrow as the player prefers but should be defined with three hooks; two positive hooks and one negative hooks. We'll call these Coincidental Workings, Vulgar Workings and Paradox. The broader the Paradigm, the more Coincidental and Vulgar Workings you can use it for, but the more broad (and thus, restricting and punishing) your Paradox would be as a result.
Coincidental Workings would be things you could do that would not violate consensus reality with your Paradigm. By default all Coincidental Workings should have three of the following traits: they are slow, they are weak effects hard to notice, they require pre-existing circumstances, they make something likely but not guaranteed or they require special preparation. Stuff like using your magic to get a lucky lottery ticket would be a Coincidental Working: it requires a circumstance (ie a lottery must exist), it requires special preparations (you must buy a ticket) and its slow (you must actually cash the ticket, which gives a chance for people to notice you pulled shenanigans).
Vulgar Workings would be anything that obviously violates consensus reality with your Paradigm or that fails to fulfill at least three of the conditions above. Having a bank error deposit a million dollars into your account is Vulgar (it requires a bank account but not mmuch else). You automatically gain one point of Paradox from a Vulgar Working if performing the Working in such a way that a Sleeper notices you just violated consensus.
In the Umbra (including the Digital Web) and Sanctums compatible with your Paradigm all Workings are Coincidental or Vulgar as you please unless they effect things in the consensual world or a Sanctum hostile to your Paradigm, in which case they become Coincidental or Vulgar based on the above criteria.
Paradoxes are the explicit and implicit downsides of your paradigm. The Paradox must be at least as broad as the Coincidental and Vulgar Workings your Paradigm allows. Paradox comes in the forms of Bans and Costs. A Ban is a thing your Paradigm can not do. A Cost is a thing your Paradigm causes that is negative for you and your goals. Anytime you perform a magical act that fails to fulfill your Bans and Costs you gain Paradox points.
You may combine Paradigms you have to allow you to produce broader effects on a per use basis, but doing so also combines the Paradox of those Paradigms.
You may have a number of Paradigms equal to 10-Arete. You generally want multiple Paradigms because that allows you to have a variety of plausible ways to do things so you can pick and choose which Paradox is easiest to avoid in the specific situation. As your Arete grows you have to start marking off Paradigms in excess of your maximum. You may do so by combing two existing Paradigms if you wish, but recall that this means you combine their Paradox as well. This will make that Paradigm more versatile but harder to actually use without accruing Paradox points.
Instead of sphere ratings the level of your effect is determined by your successes on the casting roll. Each success grants one 'dot' of Sphere effects you can use. So using an effect that would require Matter 3 means you need 3 successes. Yes, you can ritual cast to accrue more successes over time. Success above and beyond the Sphere level can be spent on various factors such as duration, range, area of effect, damage and so on.
Your dicepool for Coincidental Workings is Arete + (a relevant Skill as chosen when you defined the Paradigm). Ritual Casting a Coincidental Working takes one hour for the first roll and double that for each additional roll, you also suffer a -1 penalty for each roll after the first.
Your dicepool for Vulgar Workings is Arete. You may Ritual Cast once per turn but may take no other actions (not even defending yourself unless you have an ongoing defensive magic effect). You suffer a -1 penalty to your roll for each turn past the first.
You may spend Quintessence on your casting roll, provided the Quint you have access to and the method to use it is compatible with your Paradigm, to add dice on a one per one basis. You may spend a maximum of your Avatar rating, or if you raise the difficulty by 2 (to simulate Prime 2) you may spend as much as you wish. Note that this is per working not per roll. If you ritual cast you can either spend a maximum of (Avatar) over the course of all your rolls or you should raise the difficulty by 2 to let you spend whatever you have access to.
On a botched casting roll you gain one point of Paradox and an immediate Paradox backlash whose severity is determined by your total Paradox points. You also suffer a Backlash if your Paradox exceeds (10-Arete). Yes, as your Arete grows you become less able to operate in consensual reality. No, that is not a bug. You can not trigger a Paradox Backlash in the Umbra (including the Digital Web) or in a Sanctum compatible with all your Paradigms, but you retain all Paradox points and may trigger an immediate backlash once you reenter a consensual reality zone or a Sanctum hostile to your Paradigms if you have too much Paradox. Why yes, most Archmasters do spend all their time in special sanctums in the deep umbra, why do you ask?
You may bleed off Paradox points by submitting to the Paradox conditions of your Paradigm without gaining any benefit from them. Essentially anti-casting. This can be relatively trivial if you have a very simple Paradigm with a proportionally weak Paradox but if you have a single incredibly broad Paradigm this can be and should be excruciatingly painful and hard. (For example if your Paradigm is "I am the son of God and can do anything I want because I am omnipotent" than "I die crucified on a cross" should be enough to remove one Paradox point).
EXAMPLES!
The Law of Sympathy "Like Effects Like"
Skill: Occult
A typical Hermetic Paradigm, this Paradigm allows you to cause certain events to occur to the actual target by causing a similar event to occur to a thing over which you have more control. So for example by destroying an effigy you may harm a person or by ritualistic binding a mathematical model of a place you may cause effects to occur in that place. Often combined with other Hermetic Paradigms to allow long distance Working.
Coincidental Working example: Cause an existing chronic condition of your target to temporarily worsen by symbolically harming a sample of their flesh (weak, takes preparation, requires circumstances)
Vulgar Working example: 'Predict' a target will die tomorrow by examining their astrological charts.
Paradox example: The subject becomes aware of your Working through omens and signs as well as the fact you did it or the effect rebounds on you and effects you as well.
Cavorite "To The Skies!"
Skill: Science or Engineering
You can manufacture or refine a rare metal called Cavorite which acts exactly the opposite against normal gravity. This allows you to make things fly.
Coincidental Working example: By alloying your Cavorite with mundane materials you make them lighter and easier to carry (requires preparation, weak, slow because you have to build the object) until the cavorite loses potency.
Vulgar Working example: I have an airship!
Paradox example: Cavorite is incredibly costly and difficult to manufacture (requiring significant Resources expenditure each time it is used) or you lose control over it and end up launched into the sky where you can fall from great heights and maybe even into outer space itself...
1: Copyright Fu "Never Piss off Disney"
Skill: Bureaucracy
Ideas are property, citizen, or so the New World Order and Syndicate tells all their agents. You can manipulate intellectual property to hinder your enemies and aid your allies. Patent troll those Etherites and Virtual Adepts. Get a Dreamspeaker sued for violating the trademarks of a major league baseball team. The credulity of the judges are the limit.
Coincidental Working example: Real nice website you have there, shame if something were to happen to it like it being shut down for copyright violations (requires preparation, requires circumstances, not guaranteed to work)
Vulgar Working example: You can't summon snow golems to fight me without paying Disney a kickback!
Paradox example: You can not violate copyright and sometimes you'll end up on the wrong side of a lawsuit.
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On a similar note, I think there should actually be an incentive to just fuck off and go vulgar. A temptation, as it were. I'd make vulgar casting's bad effects bad but delayed. As a mage, you always have that temptation to just cut loose. As such, I think paradox backlashes should always happen only at the end of scenes-no more paying willpower to suppress them. And no penalties to casting vulgar magic.
Make it tempting and easy to just do vulgar shit. And make characters pay for it later. Huuuuubris.
With the idea of Paradigms as a thing, I like @Aaron Peori's idea but I think that it needs a delineation between Minor Magic, Major Magic, and Ritual Magic.
Minor magic is stuff like making 20 bucks appear in your wallet. Major magic is big but still personal-scale stuff. Ritual magic is what you need to do to do huge shit like blow up a city or make new life or something. So you'd have a paradigm, which you express by skills, and your aptitude in that paradigm (Minor/Major/Ritual) tells you how far you can push your stuff. I guess you could rename them because the fundamental split is Small Stuff/Big Stuff/Huge Strategic Stuff
Make it tempting and easy to just do vulgar shit. And make characters pay for it later. Huuuuubris.
With the idea of Paradigms as a thing, I like @Aaron Peori's idea but I think that it needs a delineation between Minor Magic, Major Magic, and Ritual Magic.
Minor magic is stuff like making 20 bucks appear in your wallet. Major magic is big but still personal-scale stuff. Ritual magic is what you need to do to do huge shit like blow up a city or make new life or something. So you'd have a paradigm, which you express by skills, and your aptitude in that paradigm (Minor/Major/Ritual) tells you how far you can push your stuff. I guess you could rename them because the fundamental split is Small Stuff/Big Stuff/Huge Strategic Stuff
Legend of Ruina
Growing eyes on the inside
Off top of my head Acanthus can just go looking and find one, while Moros can use soul sight to look for other supernatural beings, mages included. Obrimos you can probably easily convince your storyteller that a "detect Mage" spell works for Prime. Mastigos and Thyrsus have a bit of a harder time finding Mages, though can improvise something anyway with normal Magesight looking around for evidence of someone casting spells nearby.
That's before you get into Unseen Sense (active powers) that all Mages have, a fresh Mage is quite likely to be using and experimenting with their powers a good deal. It's not really that hard for a Mage to find a supernatural being, their issue is more what do they do with that knowledge and how do they pin down what precisely it is. Preferably with the unknown not catching on to being observed.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
The main way is by looking for Awakenings. Most awakenings involve going temporarily insane, so they keep an eye on mental hospitals, homeless populations, and missing persons. The ones that don't involve insanity are often foreseen by the Orders, in their Labyrinths and similar structures. The rest can go months before bumping into another Mage on the prowl.
- Location
- Mausheim, USA
A question for those of you who've played CTL, what Tokens have you, your players, or your fellow Motleymates made/acquired that were really cool or memorable?
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Take some more Sorcery Styles:
Path of Martial Mastery Style
Martial Mastery is the way of enhancing the body, it's practitioners are Akashic monks and Iterator exojocks, it teaches that the body must be trained and conditioned to better accept punishment. Those who master the Path of Martial Mastery are often ignorant of pain and hunger alltogether, since they are no longer able to experience them.
A student of the Path of Martial Mastery learns to protect and repair her body, using different regenerative procedures. This Path is often practiced with Foci such as cybernetic enhancement, physical conditioning and martial arts. It's paradox backlashes tend to take the form of the sorcerer's powers failing or breaking down, such as a healing spell inflicting poison on her instead.
1: With the first level of the Path of Martial Mastery, the sorcerer can establish a knowledge base on her immediate area as a Correspondence 1 Landscape of The Mind effect.
2: With the second level of the Path of Martial Mastery, the sorcerer can repair her natural features as a Life 2 Heal Self effect.
3: With the final level of the Path of Martial Mastery, the sorcerer can increase her body's natural prowess as a Life 3 Better Body effect.
Note: If one happens to be someone who would require another Sphere than Life to have their body manipulated, substitute Life for that Sphere so that the Technocracy's full conversion cyborgs would use Matter effects instead, while a Virtual Adept that has learned it for use in the Web uses Forces.
Path of Energy Style
Nearly every sorcerer recognizes the flow of some sort of power: mana, sekhem, chi, vis or some other representation of magical potential. Most magicians learn to feel or describe the energies that course through them during the casting of a spell. Some however, learn to direct these power sources in order to reshape the fundamental mystic energy about them.
The Path of Energy is an esoteric Path, and few sorcerers would describe it in such abstract terms - rather, most see it as an exercise described by their specific magical style. A magician used to feng shui and chi kung, for instance, will channel chi energies with special mirrors or moxa burning while an energy manager will use generators and other scientific trappings. This Path is often practiced with Foci such as hypereconomics, geng shui, hermetic arts and experimental science. It's paradox backlashes tend to take the form of the sorcerer wasting or corrupting the energy such as turning it harmful to living beings, or perhaps even addictive.
1: With the first level of the Path of Energy, the sorcerer can perceive and bear witness to energy as a Prime 1 Watch The Weaving effect..
2: With the second level of the Path of Energy, the sorcerer can invest energy in items as a Prime 2 Enchant Weapon effect.
3: With the final level of the Path of Energy, the sorcerer can generate energy from sacrifice as a Prime 3 Lambs to the Slaughter effect.
I kinda like doing these.
Path of Martial Mastery Style
Martial Mastery is the way of enhancing the body, it's practitioners are Akashic monks and Iterator exojocks, it teaches that the body must be trained and conditioned to better accept punishment. Those who master the Path of Martial Mastery are often ignorant of pain and hunger alltogether, since they are no longer able to experience them.
A student of the Path of Martial Mastery learns to protect and repair her body, using different regenerative procedures. This Path is often practiced with Foci such as cybernetic enhancement, physical conditioning and martial arts. It's paradox backlashes tend to take the form of the sorcerer's powers failing or breaking down, such as a healing spell inflicting poison on her instead.
1: With the first level of the Path of Martial Mastery, the sorcerer can establish a knowledge base on her immediate area as a Correspondence 1 Landscape of The Mind effect.
2: With the second level of the Path of Martial Mastery, the sorcerer can repair her natural features as a Life 2 Heal Self effect.
3: With the final level of the Path of Martial Mastery, the sorcerer can increase her body's natural prowess as a Life 3 Better Body effect.
Note: If one happens to be someone who would require another Sphere than Life to have their body manipulated, substitute Life for that Sphere so that the Technocracy's full conversion cyborgs would use Matter effects instead, while a Virtual Adept that has learned it for use in the Web uses Forces.
Path of Energy Style
Nearly every sorcerer recognizes the flow of some sort of power: mana, sekhem, chi, vis or some other representation of magical potential. Most magicians learn to feel or describe the energies that course through them during the casting of a spell. Some however, learn to direct these power sources in order to reshape the fundamental mystic energy about them.
The Path of Energy is an esoteric Path, and few sorcerers would describe it in such abstract terms - rather, most see it as an exercise described by their specific magical style. A magician used to feng shui and chi kung, for instance, will channel chi energies with special mirrors or moxa burning while an energy manager will use generators and other scientific trappings. This Path is often practiced with Foci such as hypereconomics, geng shui, hermetic arts and experimental science. It's paradox backlashes tend to take the form of the sorcerer wasting or corrupting the energy such as turning it harmful to living beings, or perhaps even addictive.
1: With the first level of the Path of Energy, the sorcerer can perceive and bear witness to energy as a Prime 1 Watch The Weaving effect..
2: With the second level of the Path of Energy, the sorcerer can invest energy in items as a Prime 2 Enchant Weapon effect.
3: With the final level of the Path of Energy, the sorcerer can generate energy from sacrifice as a Prime 3 Lambs to the Slaughter effect.
I kinda like doing these.
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So. First issue. As it stands, the first of those Styles provides 9 dots of rotes, while the second one provides 6 dots. They presumably cost the same amount of XP. This is an issue.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Jesus fuck what was I doing holy fuck.
This is an issue. It's also way too versatile since "Better Body" covers literally every effect that enhances your body.
EDIT: No they don't, I would never write something like that without considerations to balance. And I did not just edit it away.
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- Location
- Quezon City, Philippines
Top of my head...
Ayakashi Sakura. A wooden knife fashioned from the thorns found in the Hedge, the thorns having been continually fed with bloody for a month and a day before crafting. When used to stab someone, if the knife is left, it grows roots inside the victims body, steadily dealing damage until removed with a Str+Stamina check. Upon removal, deals automatic 1L damage. If an attack misses, the wielder takes 1B damage automatically. Catch is that wielder takes 1A damage.
Harimau Eye. An amber jewel with a narrow black slit. Adds dice to Resolve checks, with an equal penalty to Composure checks. Catch is provoke a fight with someone who is stronger than you.
Viper's Tooth. A broken tooth extracted from a poisonous hedgebeast. Implanting it in the mouth gives the wielder the ability to spit corrosive poison. Cankerous pus filled sores form in the mouth, causing extreme halitosis. Catch is to drink your own poison.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
On the more crunchy side:
First, I don't like the fact that buying Arete 3 is essentially mandatory. I'd rather prefer something like:
Spheres can start up to level 3, and I'm not yet sure whether to allow raising them to Arete+2 or just the higher of (Arete,3) in play.
I'd want to make the magic roll (Arete_Level+Sphere_Level), but adjust the required numbers of successes accordingly. Arete might be made slightly more expensive in terms of Freebies (not sure about that).
Damage from magic would need to be recalculated, in a way that would make higher sphere levels do more damage. It's bad that the current system incentivises everyone to take the lowest sphere level possible to do damage.
We need a way of calculating areas of true area effects, as opposed to 'more pinpointed targets'. Higher Sphere levels should make bigger areas easier, particularly for vulgar Forces things.
On the more fluffy side (or more like a fluff/crunch interaction):
The fact that Tradition-/Convention-specific paradigms are "lies that happen to be true", or training wheels, and that the path towards ascension makes one understand that they're all true, and this is one of the themes of the game line, should be supported by the crunch. As in, ability to reconcile with very different paradigms, to abandon foci (because foci are just another training wheel) etc. should visibly change over the course of a campaign. And so at least some significant changes in terms of foci and ability to reconcile very differing paradigms should be visible in the Arete 2-4 range; note that this comes together with Arete 3 no longer being a 'must-buy' thing.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'd make Arete increase as you gain experiencce in general, so the more you are exposed to the world and learn new things, the easier you have it increasing your Arete. I'd probably also introduce some "morality system", since I'm a bit of a fan of the Integrity system in CofD, it'd be something like that where failed breaking points increase your "effective XP to next Arete level" to emulate the fact that a lot of high-end mages probably are traumatized as hell. When you reach the necessary level of XP, you qualify for a Seeking, and if you fail that, the required XP is increased so you have to strive further on. Maybe take inspiration from Promethean's Milestones and Vitriol.
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vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
I like your Arete idea on one hand, but don't quite like that it would mean that the whole party will need to start with the same Arete level again.
As for the morality system, I fear that this would incentivise having a Mind Mage in the party even more than it currently is. It's only logical: people get wounded bodies, go to the Life mage for healing; people get wounded minds, they go to the Mind mage for healing. On the bright side, this subverts the 'There Are No [good] Therapists [for Mages]' cliché, so that's good.
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- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I have no issue with this.
I don't think I would let Mind fix the problems, only gloss them over or prevent them
But Mage therapists are totally a thing, NWO has Psych Ops and the Void Engineers have some as well.