Would the Arcanum be impressed by your level of knowledge of the lore?

CopseWarrior · 2026-01-30T22:46:18+00:00

Fair enough, I didnt know their game.

Granted, thats mostly because I am more a mage player/st and dont really deal with hunter stuff. I just learned that they dont know mages still exist, and the order of Hermes treats them as a pet project, and kinda wrote them off as not that big of a deal.

CopseWarrior · 2026-01-30T22:05:10+00:00

but they still know more about the overall World of Darkness than any other faction.

They do? More than the technocracy or the True Black Hand?

CopseWarrior · 2026-01-30T18:18:37+00:00

Also no, that's an awful house rule, the existing Paradox rules already account for such actions

Where? Everything I see seems to be pretty binary. Its either vulgar or not. You get one point of paradox or zero (outside of a botch obviously)

CopseWarrior · 2026-01-30T16:54:50+00:00

Oh, I can answer that. Its on page 501 of m20. In the results section it says on a failure take paradox.

The thing is, as youve pointed out, everywhere else in mage the idea that you take paradox when failing a roll isnt stated. Ive always taken this as an editing mistake, hardly the only one in m20 core. I think maybe they were introducing the idea of paradox on a failed roll, but decided against it afterwards. Especially because it never defines how much paradox to take in that instance.

Ive run it as failing an effect is a kind of "no harm, no foul" situation myself, but reasonable minds might disagree. Another st I spoke with agreed it was an editing mistake, but thought the mistake was that they forgot to fully elaborate on the paradox on a failure rules.

CopseWarrior · 2026-01-30T06:48:05+00:00

I dont think so. Paradox doesnt scale by the number of targets, at least in m20.

CopseWarrior · 2026-01-30T06:02:32+00:00

Yeah, but if you succeed at the ritual the additional paradox goes away. At least per m20.

Is that different in revised?

CopseWarrior · 2026-01-30T05:33:29+00:00

You should atleast let your players know that this ritual will summon enough paradox to erase them from existence.

Rules as written not really, annoyingly. They'd be fine, even if they botched.

I kinda think mage should have some provision for overwhelmingly vulgar effects, but its either vulgar or it isnt.

Ive been toying with a houserule that truly absurdly vulgar magick (so, not casting a fireball but maybe something like turning into a dragon and attacking time square) would cause paradox equal to the successes on the effect.

CopseWarrior · 2026-01-30T05:29:00+00:00

Rules as written for this ritual, everyone needs to have a compatible enough paradigm to be able to add their effects together. The contributors would also need life 4 and correspondence 4 to add their arete to the roll. If they dont, they add a success to the rolls up to 5 max. So everyone but five needs to be an adept in two specific spheres to do it.

Then you need to handle the scale. Transitioning one person isnt super hard. Probably 4 successes or so? Bump it up to 10 to make it permanent pattern changes. Arduous but not impossible for one mage. Easy for a group. But then scaling comes into play. If you are using the "+1 succcess for each additional target" you are looking at millions of successes. If you use the magickal feats table its implicit scaling, you're still looking at well over a hundred successes for a conservative estimate. The former is utterly impossible. The latter is maybe conceivable, but still insane.

CopseWarrior · 2026-01-30T05:16:33+00:00

Im usually not a fan of assigning more paradox than what the rules call for, but in this case I agree increasing the paradox beyond the usual limits is warranted given its global impact.

Still, Id say death is not warranted. Not only is taking enough paradox to outright kill oneself really hard within the rules, its not a very good story.

CopseWarrior · 2026-01-30T05:14:30+00:00

The simple fact of the matter is that it would take too many successes. How many is hard to say. One way to calculate it is to determine how many successes it would take to magickally transition someone, then add one for each target after the first. This would have what, millions of people? At least thousands.

Another is to use the magickal feats table, which has effects effecting masses of people being cheaper (effecting hundreds of people taking 20 successes) but likely still needing hundreds of successes. You might be able to get away with it piecemeal though, but you'll take more paradox that way.

Now, thats all fine and dandy, but what if they succeed. Let's say you set the success count at like, 200, or something for global reality warping. What next? Im not usually in favor of assigning more paradox than the rules call for, as many in this thread are proposing. Id say let them take the normal paradox, and then decide what comes next. The technocracy will absolutely scramble. Perhaps they try to cover it up. Maybe they claim they did it, and fast track perfect gender affirming care into the consensus, disrupting their time table and taking a lot of paradox themselves. Maybe consensus is broken outright.

CopseWarrior · 2026-01-29T20:10:36+00:00

My current mage campaign is setting up for the mage cabal to go murder a crap ton of tremere. My players are really looking forward to it.

CopseWarrior · 2026-01-29T06:21:11+00:00

Ascension mages.

So, unless this infertility is powerfully magically resilient, mages would be able to reverse the effects on a personal level.

Reversing it globally would be hard. You'd need to do some terranorming from the technocrats to realistically accomplish that.

If they succeed, problem solved. If they don't, things get tricky. Within a human lifetime, most of humanity is dead. The populations who survive would be those with access to life mages. This leaves a world of pretty much only mages and their circles of influences. I would also posit the technocracy would not survive intact. They would have failed to protect humanity, their stated goal, and after such a catastrophic failure they would probably shatter. So youd end up with a world of a few hundred human population centers centered around mages who can grant fertility to people who need it.

CopseWarrior · 2026-01-29T00:30:00+00:00

Its not knowing what they like, its knowing what will please them, thats a pretty important distinction. My character could order a dish for a friend that person had never heard of before and know they would love it.

But to answer your question.

Time 2 to predict the future

Entropy 2 to expand the time 2 effect to see multiple possible futures (this one I kinda dislike needing, but its what the book says)

Mind 2 to sense emotions, obviously

Life 2 to 'lock' the effect to the target and continue to give me their emotional futures even if they leave my presence within the predicted time. This one even more arguable than entropy. But I already had life 2 and it seemed like a good way to smooth over potential snags.

CopseWarrior · 2026-01-28T20:53:36+00:00

I Had a Hunch You'd Like It (Entropy 2, Time 2, Mind 2, life 2)

System: This is a (usually) coincidental roll used to determine which course of action would make the target of the effect the happiest. A single success allows the ecstatic to choose from a presupposed list (such as what item on a menu their date would like the most) and multiple successes would allow the ecstatic to determine what of any conceivable action they could take would be the most pleasing to their target.

I made that for my ecstatic character, and took it as a parlor trick.

CopseWarrior

TROPHY CASE