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This subject is explained in more detail in Tome of the Mysteries in the part of Chapter One called "Spell Aspect" (pp. 40-46) In particular, the crossover section explains the manner in which the powers of other supernatural types interact with Awakened magic. The reason given is that the power of the other templates — the Kindred, the Uratha, and the Lost ...

The supernatural creatures are essentially following physical laws that normal people aren't aware of, or manipulating loopholes in those physical laws that normal people aren't aware of; there are a set of laws governing the universe that vampires/faeries/etc aren't breaking, they're simply manipulating them in unusual (as far as normal people are ...

Remember that the Seers of the throne keep their true agenda secret from all but the upper-most echelons of their organization, and even then only parts of it are disseminated. Most operatives know only that the Pentacle opposes them and that they are mass murderers who awakened the wrong way (they weren't picked by the Exarchs) and are trying to usurp ...

Let Them Be. There are practical reasons why mages and players might choose to rely on rotes. Improvised spells not only have a smaller die pool (Gnosis + Arcanum vs Attribute + Skill + Arcanum), but they have a mandatory cost of 1 mana if not in your ruling arcana. If your troupe is more interested in collecting codified effects rather than doing ...

That rote is working as intended. If you can secure the room, maintain your focus, get the proper amount of "temporal sympathy" — the modifiers for sympathy are in effect, as detailed under the Space arcanum and made explicit in the rote — and penetrate any magical protections placed on the time of the event, then yes. They can search through time until they ...

What's a scroll? It's a piece of paper with words on it that, when read, cause a spell to be cast. Sounds like an imbued item with a contingent trigger to me. The Mage: The Awakening core book describes them on page 84, with a reference to the "Imbue Item" rote (Prime •••) on page 225.

When making a mage, one begins by using the World of Darkness core rulebook to make an ordinary person, and then apply the Awakened template atop it. Since ordinary people have day jobs to earn money to stay alive, it's fair to assume that many mages do, too. However, as the demands of mage life — the search for secret information and the fight against the ...

The best way to get your players to act the way you want is to teach them them via rewards and punishments for each situation. This training doesn't change their way of critical thinking, it just changes the tools they do actions with, and hopefully will open their magic use. Please consider the personality of your players before beginning a 'training' ...

In my understanding, every Order may have (in theory) its own rote for every spell listed in the rule books. The rotes explicitly described are just examples (in general indicating which Orders are most likely to use a rote version of a given spell.) If you learn a rote from a mentor belonging to a different Order than yours, you'll use the rote dice pool ...

The Death 1 rote Forensic Gaze. (Mage: The Awakening, p.134) Page 121 of Predators tells us that the process of usurpation by the Azlu inevitably kills the host. Forensic Gaze allows the mage who casts it to know "what killed the being in question and how much time has passed since it died." Since it explicitly works on vampires, it's no stretch to see how ...

I'm not familiar with the game setting specifically, but my gut says.. This goes back to Romeo and Juliet where the Montague and Capulet servants run into each other on the street and argue. Both sides tried to get the other to act out but neither side wanted to go first because of the consequences from the local government (prince). But once one side ...

Tome of the Mysteries addresses this issue in two ways. On page 116: Using magic to cause direct harm to someone is an act of hubris against Wisdom 4 (three dice). For a sin to count as an act of hubris of this magnitude, the harm caused to someone has to be the direct, intentional result of the magic. Bolts of lightning or electricity, ...

A typical build for a newbie mage is 3 in one arcanum, 2 in another, and 1 in a third. So this is probably a good baseline for "common mage with a little experience or a little talent, but nothing special." Let's say that's the 25th percentile. Looking at the NPCs in the M:tA book, their highest arcana are 3, 4, 3, 4, and 5, but most have several arcana ...

Like a lot of the details of the nWoD, I don't believe there are any hard and fast published stats on this. I've read most of the published material and don't recall ever coming across such information. It's likely to be highly varied based on local culture, rate of awakenings (again, no solid stats on this that I know of), attrition of the local ...

The ones I'd put forward are Intruders: Encounters With The Abyss and Secrets of the Ruined Temple, as they give more depth to the adversaries of the game and further flesh out possibilities for the game's two big unexplored areas: the dangerous parts of magic and the secret history of the world. (Plus, magical monsters and a detailed write-up of the Seers ...

I had this problem in my Dresden Files RPG game not too long back where a wizard would only ever use rote spells. (Some of the terminology might be a bit different with Mage, as I'm only loosely familiar with the system, but I think the basic principle of the encounter still probably applies.) The solution turned out to be throwing a magic-eating ...

I saw that article, and this thought never occurred to me. Thanks for bringing it up. It's not totally clear that the Consensual Reality argument holds up so well in Awakening, but it is trivial enough to make the common reality a consensual one as you've done. The rest of this answer will discuss the metaphysics of consensuality, rather than rules. The ...

I do not think you need rules for this. The first thing to note is that for most of the supernatural, the change from mortal to being supernatural is generally a sudden discontinuity in their life. A sudden break with what came before. A vampire goes from being alive to being a vampire in the course of a few minutes. A werewolf is born a werewolf, and ...

Introduce cutscenes in which your players take on the roles of minor Mage NPCs (prepared by you in advance) for about an hour of game time (no more per session.) Have the players learn of crucially important background events / info through these (fast paced and ruthless) scenes... and do not give these NPCs rotes. They're freshly awakened, or otherwise ...

How about asking them why they did not use other magic? Was it a question of choice or ignorance? If it was by choice, then that is fine. Maybe the bad stuff of messing magic were too high a risk to the player, maybe it was because rote are more powerful than making it on the fly. If it was by ignorance, was it because of a lack of knowledge of the ...

While not official supplements, I'd read The Broken Diamond and The Soul Cage actual play threads. The GM is a WW free lancer and I learned a lot more about the potential of Mage as well as things like your question from them (especially the first) than I did from WW books.

The mana cost is partly due to the power of the spell, and partly because of the sympathetic magic inherent in the spell; casting it requires forging a sympathetic connection to the destination of the portal. To do it as you describe — using sympathetic magic to place the Portal near a distant subject — would require an additional point of mana, raising the ...

Mage: the Ascension. (aka oWod mage) Now hear me out. Seeing where ideas in the system and setting originated, and how they were modified, can be a great way to understand what really makes it tick. For example the old concept of "paradigm" now pretty much dropped could really help to understand what "sphere based magic" really is.

You may want to lead by example. Why not have them confronted by other mages that hand them their asses using smart examples of improvised magic. In a little while, they will start asking if and how that can be done. Hopefully, in a little more while, they will surprise you with the magic they come up with.

Using the example listed about the internet, we can always subscribe to the thought that just because it's on the internet doesn't make it true. We see all sorts of whacky things online and even the most realistic can be edited graphically especially with the technology out there (take that video of the eagle picking off the toddler for example). Seeing ...

Though I don't know of any official or unofficial Rules, I can see this be done for werewolf and changeling, but a Mage's Awakening is generally a radical and sudden change. A Mystery Play could probably be roleplayed over the course of a session, but I don't see it extending beyond that. While not rules per se, there are guidelines in each splatbook ...

I don't play Mage but I found someone who worked on this kind of problem in the past. Alternatively I could suggest two different way to proceed with this: Decide/invent what (in your opinion) the ratio of awakened-to-humans should be. In this case you should also take in account that this number should be further detailed by power level... e.g. 50% of ...

I think their density should be disproportionate to the number of other supernatural beings. If the game is solely mages then the number should go up quite a bit. With the added presence of Kindred/Garou/Changelings/What-Have-You's their numbers should decrease thanks to the food chain going all funhouse mirror. Nothing in WoD likes each other and for the ...

Let them be! There is no reason to do and carrot-and-stick learning nonsense here. You are seeing the result of the nWOD vs oWOD Mage rules. My oWOD group rarely bothered with rotes. What's two dice compared to limiting your cosmic power, after all? In the nWOD Mage game there are serious drawbacks to improvised magic. So long as your players understand ...

Look at the rotes the characters have and prepare poblems, which are not solvable with their rotes. For making it easier, you should not make the problems lethal and let them enough time to be creative. And maybe let them find a parchment or something describing how to solve it being creative. But you should not forget, that some players don't like to have ...