#Mage time sphere generator

Like playing Vampire without the Humanity rules.Īnyway, tl dr - Forces, Matter, Life, Prime all at 2. A thinly veiled game of supers with a well-developed philosophical backdrop. And without that aspect it tends to become a geek show. Learning that all the rules are equally arbitrary should come later, as part of the character's enlightenment.īut that's the part that's left out of most Mage games. Because that's not a part of his paradigm. If he's a Akashic Brother, for example, and has learned some arcane exercises and breathing techniques that allow him to increase the kinetic energy of his punches (Forces), then that's great.īut then he shouldn’t be able to shoot fireballs. An early Mage (Arete 1- 5 or so) thinks that he has come across a set of rules that are different from the rules of reality everyone else uses, but his rules are just as restrictive and just as complicated.Īnd that paradigm is supposed to control and define everything he does. They shouldn't really be aware that they're altering reality by will alone. What makes magic, in your character's opinion? What causes it? A beginning character shouldn't think of themselves as a Mage. Do you need 1 Prime to use magic at all? How privileged an observer is 'reality' in terms of adjudicating 'Vulgar Magic without Witnesses'? Paradox Backlashes and so many other things are (intentionally or unintentionally) vague in the core books that the ST is effectively making up his or her own game every time.īut, at heart, Mage is supposed to be all about the Paradigm. There are the mechanical considerations, first of all. There's almost no way to help you make a Mage without some idea of what's happening on the other end of things. More than any other oWoD game, Mage depends on what the ST wants and what the ST does and how the ST thinks things work. Forces 3, Prime 1, Correspondence 2, 3 if my concept didn't require an enormous amount of backgrounds or skills and I could burn all my freebies on magical goodies. If you're set on OoH, I'd probably do something like, Iunno. Matter and Forces or Correspondence and Forces work to make a pretty damn nasty Mage at the expense of not having so many chances to work subtly (at least not that I found.) Mind and Entropy gives you the capability to be super subtle but generally can't match the pure ridiculous power of Forces, especially when you're fighting Technocratic beasties with resistance to magical Effects but not to fireballs being thrown at them. In case you don't know, that's the effect were making 20 coincidental magical effects in 2 rounds becomes so unlikely that coincidences become vulgar again - once every gas main in a 20 block radius spontaneously explodes, having a jet crash on your vampire foe ceases to be a likely occurrence.)Īnyway, it depends on how you wanna play. I used to love OoH but I'm bad at making Forces believable - on the other hand, forces is ridiculously powerful in a lot of ways, too.Įntropy was always fun - controlling chance may not give you exactly what you need in every situation, but it does HELP in every situation, and it's pretty easy to make Coincidental (although beware of the Domino effect, which again depends on your ST. Subtlety in the normal course of things, though, is KEY, so whatever you're best at 'finding' (making up) ways of being believable at, take some of that.

#Mage time sphere generator

Plus, though, when it's time to pull out the stops, the capabilities of Prime to do aggravated damage is nice with the unfortunate offset of being a generator of Paradox, in the same way Star Trek matter/anti-matter reactors are a generator of electricity. I like having Prime - lets ya do stuff with the very fundamental block of magic, which is helpful for getting, you know, anywhere near the amount of Quintessence necessary to do the fun stuff. Yes, that takes a lot of your freebies for Arete.