<TBODY> Major Arcana and Minor Indiscretions

Newsletter           May 12^th, 2007</TBODY>

<TBODY>Wade Lahoda	Head Storyteller   storyteller@saskatoonbynight.com or 477-0145
Narrators:    Allan Schnell & James Nobel

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

Next Game Saturday, June 9^th, downtime submissions due Saturday, June 23^rd

Increasing Order Status requirements for learning Rotes…

Currently, a single dot in Status(Order) will enable you to learn any standard Rote from your Order – whether it be an one dot cantrip or a mighty five dot spell for Masters of an Arcanum.  As time goes on, however, your Orders will look to the characters to provide more support to each other and rely less and less on outside help.  As that happen, the Rotes that Orders are able and willing to expend the effort to teach will decrease…  Right now, Orders are willing to teach any Rote of a magnitude equal to your Order Status + 4 – effectively, with one Order Status you can learn any Rote.  Eventually, Orders will be willing to teach Order Status + 3 Rotes – with one Order Status you’d only be able to learn up to 4 dot rotes…  That number will gradually decrease until eventually Orders will only teach you Rotes that are equal to or less than your Order Status.

Of course, as the support the Orders outside of the city is willing to give shrinks, the Orders will likely be increasing in strength inside the Consilium.  Characters will hopefully be performing deeds that will allow them to raise their Order Status(raising Order Status, unlike mundane Status Merits, isn’t a matter of downtime actions, but a matter of increasing your overall standing in the Order – speak to the Storyteller to see if you qualify to purchase the next dot of Order Status).  More to the point, characters in the Consilium will know more Rotes that they can then teach each other – remember that learning from a specific character is almost always faster than learning from the Order at large.  Plus, teaching members of your Order Rotes and Arcana is one of the main duties you’ll be expected to perform in order to increase your Order Status.  And if you’re teaching Rotes to characters not in your Order, you’d do well to keep track of such favours and expect payment in return, whether immediately or in the future.  The Mentor Merit will not be affected by your Order Status(nor do you necessarily even have to have Order Status to have a Mentor), but of course there are limits to what each Mentor knows.  Finally, if you are searching out a Rote that no one in the Consilium knows and that your Order is no longer willing to teach, there will be opportunities to seek out such knowledge in the world, whether from musty tomes or NPCs, but such chances at arcane knowledge will neither be automatic nor necessarily painless…

Paradox Mitigation, Backlash and other ways to avoid the bad stuff

Paradox is a bad thing.  You already know this, but what you might be interested in knowing about are ways you can avoid Paradox, especially since Paradox is one of the subsystems I’ve dabbled with the most.  When you cast a Vulgar or Improbable spell, you have a Paradox Pool.  Generally, this goes up the higher your Gnosis is, the more Sleeper witnesses there are, and with successive Vulgar castings in the same scene.  There might also be environmental or situational things that will increase Paradox.  I’ll ask you to roll a “Paradox Die” when you cast – this isn’t a success test as normal, it actually goes off a little chart that mirrors tabletop or downtime probabilities, but the standard of “The higher your Paradox Pool, the more Paradox Successes(a bad thing)” applies.  You can always ask what the Paradox Pool would be before actually casting, although there might be rare hidden factors.  Don’t like your odds?  Here are some things that can help you out:

• You can spend extra Mana when you cast the spell(limited by your Gnosis, as always) – each point of Mana reduces the Paradox Pool by one.
• Casting a spell as a Rote reduces the Paradox Pool by one.
• Using one or more Dedicated Magical Tools reduces the Paradox Pool by one.
• If you’ve already cast the spell, and Paradox is about to occur(but it hasn’t been revealed what form it will take yet) you can abandon/cancel the spell and absorb the energy into yourself as a Backlash.  You can take points of Bashing damage, and every point of Bashing damage you take subtracts one Paradox Success.  If you absorb all the Paradox Successes, no Paradox occurs, otherwise a lesser Paradox effect occurs.  In any event, the spell is cancelled and has no effect.

New Rule Simplification: Initiative

This change was mentioned in the last newsletter, but is reprinted tonight because it is now official at least on a probationary basis:

Rolling for Initiative at the start of every action scene tends to really slow things down.  Now, for most standard scenes, initiative is not rolled; characters simply act in order of their Initiative scores.  The one time Initiative is rolled is if two characters are taking dramatically important competing actions – for instance, if one character is diving to cover the magical McGuffin with his body, and the other is trying to shoot the McGuffin, they might roll Initiative for that one set of actions to see which goes off first (and then the rest of the scene is run just off static initiative scores).  In short, Initiative is only randomized when something dramatic is at stake – most of the time people just go by their base scores.

Conjunctional Spells

Some spells need more than one Arcanum to cast, even though they only do one thing - these spells are called Conjunctional Spells.  Usually these spells are Conjunctional because they affect things that fall under the purview of multiple Arcana - for instance, if you are transmuting an animal(Life) into a stone statue(Matter) you would need both Life and Matter.  Sometime Arcana also have special "extras" that allow you to enhance a spell if you have the requisite extra Arcana(casting a spell Sympathetically with Space 2, for instance) - many of these will also cost a Mana to cast with the extra effect.  Some spell text can be misleading and leave out the requirement for appropriate Conjunctional Arcana – if in doubt, ask the Storyteller.  Here are some common Conjunctional uses:

• Death: You need Death if you want to affect ghosts, especially if they are in Twilight.  Death 1 allows you to perceive them, Death 2 allows you to directly affect them.  If a ghost is physically manifested or you are also in Twilight you only need Death if you want to affect its Pattern directly (cause harm without an intermediary force, read or alter its mind, etc).  Some other types of non-living or semi-living creatures might have the same Death requirements as ghosts.
• Fate: You need at least Fate 2 to cast spells with a Conditional Duration ("You will be a frog until a princess kisses you") or a spell with Target Exemptions ("Everyone except my enemies" or "Redheaded children born under a full moon"). You need Fate 2 and Time 2 to cast a spell with a Conditional Trigger (a Prepared Spell that goes off when an event occurs - "This spell activates if the statue is removed from the pedestal").
• Forces: You need Forces if your spell directly affects a forces pattern.
• Life: You need Life if your spell directly affects the physical part of a living pattern.
• Matter: You need Matter if your spell directly affects the pattern of a non-living object.  Corpses might require Death instead, but bones, wood and the like are the province of Matter even though they were once-living.
• Mind: You need Mind if your spell directly affects the mental part of a living pattern(if it is affecting the mental part of a forces, dead, or inanimate pattern it may or may not also require Forces, Death or Matter depending on specifics).
• Prime: You need Prime 2 and Space 2 to use the Sense the Threads ability with a spell (allowing you to set it up at casting so that you can sense if the spell is tampered with).  You need Prime to affect Mana or Hallows.  You need to spend a Mana and have Prime 2 to cloak a spell's resonance and have it not trigger Unseen Senses as it is cast.  You need Prime 3 to Imbue spells or effects into items.
• Space: You need Space 2 to perform Sympathetic Castings.  Any spell that affects something (and getting information about something is affecting it) you can not directly perceive or that isn't in your immediate area needs to be a Sympathetic Casting. If a spell affects multiple targets (for instance, it creates a bond between two targets (or between you and a target), uses information about a target to influence a second one) the target that is most remote or uses the weakest Sympathetic Connection is the one that needs to be considered.  (Example:  If you are casting a spell to create a compass that will track a specific target, even if you hold the compass in your hand, you'll still need to cast the spell Sympathetically if the target isn't in Sensory range for the duration of the spell).  Sympathetic spells also always cost an additional point of Mana.
• Spirit: You need Spirit if you want to affect spirits, especially if they are not in the physical world.  Spirit 1 allows you to perceive spirits in Twilight, Spirit 2 allows you to affect them.  Spirit 2 allows you to perceive spirits in Shadow, and Spirit 3 allows you to affect them.  If the spirit is physically manifested or you are in the same state of existence as it (in Twilight or Shadow depending), you only need Spirit if you want to affect its Pattern directly (cause harm without an intermediary force, read or alter its mind, etc).  Some other types of creatures might have the same Spirit requirements as Spirits while not technically being spirits.
• Time: You need Time, in varying degrees, to affect or perceive anything that isn't happening now, and doing so requires Temporal Sympathy which works similarly to Space-magic Sympathy(and would also likely include a Mana cost in the rare cases you are casting a spell into the past or future).  You need Time 2 to cast a Prepared Spell (a spell that is cast now but triggered later).  You need Time 2 and Fate 2 to cast a spell with a Conditional Trigger.

In Character Venue – MUMPS Lounge

This Gathering is being held at the MUMPS Lounge on the U of S Campus.  Seems one of the Cabal with No Name has university connections..  What you see is what you get, assume everything is IC.