<TBODY> Major Arcana and Minor Indiscretions

Newsletter           March 10th, 2007</TBODY>

<TBODY>Wade Lahoda

Head Storyteller   storyteller@saskatoonbynight.com or 477-0145

The official Saskatoon by Night webpage can be found at www.saskatoonbynight.com

Next Game Saturday, April 14^th, downtime submissions due Saturday, March 17^th

I have been using the newsletter to highlight some aspects of Awakened society or magic works, to slowly introduce folks to different aspects of the setting.  Let me know if anyone has any suggestions on other facets of Mage I should cover next month…

Game fee is now $5…

As previously discussed, the game fee is now $5.  As usual, if you can’t afford to pay, don’t worry, no one is going to harass you over it.  On the flip side, if you’ve got extra cash (maybe you were one of the folks pushing for a $10 game fee), we’ll always accept extra donations – every little bit counts, and moves us closer to having another game in a nice pay venue.

Complications

As previously explained, you can take Complications for your character (like Flaws in other systems) to garner you extra experience points.  Every month one of your Complications is activated and causes you serious hindrance or harm, you get an extra experience point.  If you want to know more, check out the post on the forums.

Firstly – could I get everyone who has taken Complications to e-mail me with a short write-up of what they are.  Some folks already included these in their backgrounds, etc, but some people just marked down something like “Hunted” without telling me what they were hunted by or why, for instance.  If in doubt, e-mail me.  If you’ve already sent them to me, you might be well off with e-mailing me and asking “Do you have ‘em?”

Secondly – I can’t award for what I don’t know.  For some things, I’ll know if you deserve the point because I’m the one activating the Complication – if I throw a Witch Hunter at you because of your Hunted Complication, I’ll probably know and give you the point.  But if you got yourself beat up by another PC because of your “Loud Mouthed Bigot” Complication, I may not know that.  So if you think one of your Complications have been triggered and you deserve the point, let me know when you send in your XP spending, downtime actions, plot leadership nominations and the like the Saturday after the game.  I enjoy giving out XP – give me more excuses to do so.

What is Resonance?

“It’s possible to imagine the whole of Creation as a great Tapestry made up of countless threads of Mana woven in complex Patterns.  Like the strings of a musical instrument, these primal threads resonate with a particular tone, the background hum of Creation, like the music of the spheres.  This vibration gives each and every thing in Creation what mages call a unique resonance, a kind of mystic frequency or ‘tone.’  It is most often called an object’s aura, since many mages perceive resonance visually in terms of auras of colored light surrounding things.”

Everything has Resonance.  Some things have a more vibrant or easily discernable Resonance than others, however…  Physical objects are the “densest”, and resonate the least.  When you look at the Resonance of a brick, for instance, mostly you just see the physical brick.  Maybe its predominate tone is simply “brick”.  If it had been the subject of very powerful emotions, happenings, or magics some of those may have washed off on it…a brick used to kill someone might have a resonance of “hate”, “murder” or “pain”.  But generally, you’ll just see a brick.  Artifacts, which are physical objects imbued with Mana, tend to be a lot easier to read.

Living beings are a bit easier to pull Resonance off – Mages with Prime or Mind can actually see more detailed auras and read things like a creature’s supernatural aspects(Prime) or their emotional states(Mind).  But every living being’s aura is unique, even if you can’t read what type of creature it is or its emotions.  The auras of the Awakened are brighter still, and fairly easy to detect.

Ephemeral things like spirits, spirit material, and spells tend to be the easiest to get Resonance off of, because there is no physical material to get in the way.  Sometimes, all there is to be perceived is a Resonance.

All Mages have access to Mage Sight spells – simple spells at the first dot of each Arcanum.  All these spells do is allow a Mage to read Resonance, although some Arcana are better at reading certain phenomena.  They don’t generally allow you to perceive things you couldn’t normally, but they do allow you to read the Resonance of those things you can perceive.  Reading Resonance isn’t a passive action – you have to actively be paying attention to what you want to read, and since everything has a Resonance simply “scanning a room” for a Resonance generally won’t help you unless that Resonance is especially bright.  As an other note, when you scrutinize the Resonance of other Mages, those Mages can potentially notice you paying such scrutiny to them with a Wits + Composure roll.

Scrutinizing Resonance is generally an Intelligence + Occult roll – your Mage Sight allows you to see the Resonance, but you need to use your head to decode it.  Scrutinizing objects or places generally isn’t very useful unless they are magical or you’re just looking for the general “feel” of an area.  Scrutinizing people is a bit more useful – firstly, every Resonance is like a thumbprint, uniquely identifying that person.  Secondly, if you spend long enough you can determine if the person is human or inhuman, spirit or flesh, Sleeper or Awakened, although you’ll generally need other spells to narrow it down further than that.

Scrutinizing Awakened Magic(i.e.: spells) is the most useful thing you can do with your Mage Sight generally.  You can often learn the potency of the spell, the Arcana it is composed of(although not what it actually does – you learn that through observation), the unique magical signature of the caster, and other nifty details like that.  Analyzing especially complex spells or trying to more information than normally allowed out of the Resonance might take a downtime action at the Storyteller’s discretion.

As a side note, even without Mage Sight all Mages can sense when they are in the presence of active supernatural powers, including spells.  This doesn’t give you specifics, just a “Yes/No”.  You can assume that at all gatherings the answer is “Yes” – at least a few of your fellow Magi will have spells in effect, and I won’t go around announcing it every time a spell is cast.  That being said, you can definitely use this Unseen Sense as an excuse to bring your Mage Sight up and actively check someone for Resonance…

Limitations on Retrying Actions, Successive Actions, and Extended Actions (including Rituals)

When you fail an action, can you try again?  Most of the time, you can, presuming that the circumstances allow; you can’t stop yourself from falling off a cliff multiple times since after the first time you fail, you’re probably in free fall, and tests to see if your character knows a piece of knowledge generally are pass/fail(he either knows it or he doesn’t).  However, every additional attempt you make is at a cumulative -1.  So after trying many times, you might reduce yourself to a chance die(your pool is 0 or less), and risk Dramatic Failure.

Mental and Social actions against other characters are a special case.  If you try one of these and fail, you generally can’t try it again until at least an hour has passed.  This also applies to supernatural powers, including spells cast to influence others mentally or socially.

Extended actions are a little bit different…  An extended action is when you roll an action multiple times over a period an accumulate successes towards a task.  In general, you can only roll on an extended action a number of times equal to your pool.  An example: Jimmy the Squid is trying to pick a lock – his Dexterity + Larceny total is 6.  The Storyteller rules that picking a lock is an extended action.  Jimmy can make 6 rolls at his +6 bonus, adding all the successes together.  If he can’t get enough successes in six rolls though, the lock is beyond his capabilities, at least for now.  Also, if you get a dramatic failure(roll a 1 on the die when your pool was reduced to 0 due to penalties), it erases all successes in the extended action thus far, but it doesn’t reset your total number of rolls allowed.  Importantly, this also applies to Extended(Ritual) Castings…if you are doing an Improvised Extended Casting, and your Gnosis + Arcanum is only, say, 4, you can only add together 4 rolls, no matter how successful the rest of the downtime action is.  Sounds like a good reason to learn Rotes to increase your pool for spells you intend to cast as Extended Castings.

And of course, for all actions…if your character’s approach is something along the lines of “I’ll just keep trying until I succeed”, you’ll probably end up being instructed to use a downtime action for it, as that is the type of thing downtime actions are meant for.  Even if normally in a scene you could attempt a roll once every three seconds, if it looks like you’re going to be doing a whole bunch of rolls right there, a downtime action would be appropriate.  That’s dramatic pacing – paging through a musty tome to find a critical banishing ritual might only take thirty seconds if it is happening during the middle of a firefight(but those will be a long thirty seconds!), or it might take days of “Music Montage Research Time” if it takes place away from the action.

In Character Venue – Persephone Wellness Clinic

This Gathering is being held at the Persephone Wellness Clinic.  Presume that all the private areas of the clinic, offices and examination rooms, are locked up tight.  Even though ICly it is likely a very different style of building, you should still assume that layout is roughly the same – my general guideline for “How far is it to the nearest exit?”, is usually to say “Well, how far is it OOC?” and if people want to hold scenes outside or whatever, that people go outside to hold them.