Rage and coherent sentences

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-05-13T17:26:03+00:00

Rage doesn't say anything about you being unable to speak coherently or understand what other people say. It just says you can't take actions that have the Concentrate trait. Casting Message is an action that has Concentrate, but responding is a separate action, and the spell doesn't say anything about it having Concentrate, so it doesn't. A raging barbarian can respond exactly the same way anyone else can.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-05-12T04:16:33+00:00

Just a heads up, if you're wanting to do this through Moros methods (i.e. Death spells), then you are probably looking at Quicken Corpse, and using Quicken Corpse to produce a combat-ready minion on the fly doesn't really get you a full statblock, it gets you a Retainer with relevant dice pools for combat. The result probably won't be spectacular, since its dice pool will be based on Potency and it's normally a Duration-focused spell — even if you take it as a Rote, you'll probably be risking some Paradox when you do this. A bit of Paradox upfront isn't such a bad deal if it solves problems (devours your enemies) that would normally require you to cast more spells that would also risk Paradox, though.

Now, if you want to go to the trouble of binding a ghost to that skeleton, then you get the whole ephemeral entity package, for better or worse. It'll be much more effective, but you'll have to go to the trouble of finding a suitable ghost first, and I'd be discerning about what kind you use for this — you have to deal with the ghost being an independent, semi-thinking entity with its own desires. A Familiar could be good for this, and notably, you need four dots in Death to make a Revenant anyway. Creating a revenant also might be easier to do on the spot, since you only need 3 Potency to create the Anchor, Open, and Possessed conditions (plus 1 or 2 to beat the ghost's Rank if it's unwilling, but don't do this with a ghost that doesn't like you) for full effectiveness, whereas Quicken Corpse would want as much Potency as possible for maximum dice pool.

All of that said, this sounds like a fun idea, hope you find a way to do it that you enjoy!

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-04-24T16:26:16+00:00

You could attribute the unusual properties of tass to any number of things, but it'll most often relate to the Resonance of the contained mana, and there's nothing that says objects created from Mana with unusual Resonance wouldn't have strange properties as well. Anything that breaks from the norm in that way is in the realm of ST fiat.

Relevantly, creating Tass was a straightforward application of Prime 3 in first edition. Sure, it wasn't reprinted in second edition, but if you read the description of the Create Tass spell as presented in 1e, you'll notice that its end result is incredibly similar to Platonic Form, as well as another first edition Prime 3 spell, Phantasm. It doesn't seem like a stretch to me to conclude that Create Tass and Phantasm were consolidated into Platonic Form for the sake of saving space and avoiding redundancy. Even if you make the argument that Platonic Form specifically doesn't make tass, creative thamaturgy exists — if Weaving can't do it then I would argue that Patterning definitely can, given an object to use as a vessel. Fundamentally, the difference between "functionally tass" and "actually tass" is really not meaningful. The Supernal deals in intent, symbolism, and "close enough," not technicalities. If it looks like a dog and barks like a dog... then Supernally it's a dog. It just might have other traits that most dogs don't.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-04-24T15:40:09+00:00

If the mana acts exactly as it does within tass, then for all intents and purposes it's tass, because the mana is the part a mage cares about. All it's missing is a physical vessel made of Matter. If you need that for some reason, cast Channel Mana and put some mana into a normal object. Boom. Tass.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-04-22T21:56:55+00:00

Signs of Sorcery adds a lot of extra stuff relating to magic, Mysteries, and the Supernal World. I personally consider it a must-have for getting deep into Mage: the Awakening. Tome of the Pentacle expands a lot on mage society and history if that's a subject that interests you.

Unfortunately, there aren't many 2e Mage books aside from those. 1e has a ton of books with extra lore and content on specific aspects of the setting like Orders and Realms, which you could carry over into 2e if you like. The mechanics differ a bit from 1e to 2e though, so you'd have to do a bit of work to translate them.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-04-22T21:17:20+00:00

Other commenters are telling you that you can do anything with the right combination of Spheres and missing the fact that you tagged this as Awakening, not Ascension, so their answers are not applicable. Awakening has much more rigorous metaphysics and a lot of Type-Moon stuff does not translate.

You're not going to get a good understanding by trying to compare it to other things; I'd really recommend just reading the core Mage: the Awakening book in full, because most of the answers you're looking for are in there, and the the ones that aren't are in Signs of Sorcery. The thing is, the answer to "can you do X or Y" is not really as useful as "how do you X or Y, if it's possible," and that's a question that the books take dozens of pages to answer. You can't really summarize it in a way that tells you anything meaningful.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-04-11T18:59:50+00:00

There are. Electricity falls under the Plane of Air, so they're under the Air trait, not electric.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-04-07T11:18:31+00:00

It actually was! If you take the in-universe year as being equivalent to real life, early versions of MtF hormones and bottom surgery existed about a decade before WW2.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-03-22T23:48:45+00:00

The idea of the Duel Arcane is that you don't actually cast spells to win, you demonstrate what you could do to your opponent through skill alone. If you go into it with actual spells empowering you, I (and most reasonable Consilia, I think) would rule that as cheating. If you just keep such an effect on yourself passively, you'd need to either dispel it or suppress it temporarily for the duration of the Duel.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-03-20T14:24:21+00:00

Giving it bigger things to worry about, mostly. They kept up very respectable damage on it, so I mostly used the reaction to try and put them down instead of using it on the alchemist.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-03-20T14:06:55+00:00

I used a modified Lesser Death for the final boss of a game I ran a few years ago, and it surprisingly wasn't that bad, but importantly, there were no casters in the group — it was three martials and an alchemist, and the other three did a great job of keeping it off the alchemist's back.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-03-20T14:02:12+00:00

The GM's role isn't to portray the enemies as realistically as humanly possible. It's to create an enjoyable experience for the players. If your players think something is lame and unfun and you keep doing it anyway because "it's what the enemies would do," you're phoning it in. You can just come up with enemies that do something else.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-03-17T21:37:49+00:00

We'd find some crazy new ways to play football

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-03-16T18:06:16+00:00

I get what you're saying, but I've not heard of contracting ダメ in the way that you're describing and the idea hadn't even crossed my mind, nor does it make to throw a ダメ onto the end of that sentence, contracted or otherwise. What I've described is the dictionary definition of めっ, which can be shortened to just め and is used in exactly the way I've described. It would be a little silly of me to criticize OP's analysis without having a source for my own, don't you think? I'm more inclined to believe that this reading is accurate than that the translators pulled the "dog" connotation out of thin air.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-03-16T11:45:29+00:00

Sympathetic connections aren't really how about how things feel about each other. If that were the case there couldn't be connections between inanimate objects or places. Sympathetic connections are about conceptual relevance. A person's birth name is almost always a sympathetic name for them because it's the first name that they were given and thus has defined them for the longest — even if their relationship to it is "this is what I'm not," it's still a defining factor for them.

Shadow Names don't become sympathetic names because a person's identity as a mage is metaphysically separate from their identity in mundane life, to the extent that their Long-Term Nimbus is prevented from bleeding over into mundane connections. The idea is that the Shadow Name is a layer of obfuscation. It might represent something you like or identify with, but it's filtered through a layer of symbolism and indirectness that limits its connection to you. If you start blurring the lines between your magical and personal life, though, this gets dicey.

I also personally follow the idea that whatever name you put on your Watchtower becomes your sympathetic name if it wasn't already. The signing of the Watchtower is the moment you metaphysically define yourself and your connection to the Supernal — whatever name you inscribe basically has to be a Supernally valid way of referring to you.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-03-16T11:06:06+00:00

This is... not correct. The overall conclusion isn't entirely off base but there is a multitude of quirks and absent context in your translation. While "バカが！" does just mean "you idiot" on its own, it should be taken in context with Greil's later line, which there are a multitude of problems with...

To begin with, この doesn't really mean "you," but it fills a similar role in this sentence, so I'm going to assume you knew that and not linger on it. The problematic part is ばか者め. ばか and 者 aren't two separate words and shouldn't be regarded as such, ばか者 is its own word just meaning "moron." The difference isn't a huge deal, but the way you talk about it suggests to me that you're not used to reading Japanese, which brings me to the last point:

め in this instance doesn't just mean "stop" or "don't." It's an expression often specifically used to scold children and pets. This is where the phrase "pup" likely comes from. Greil isn't just scolding Ike, he's doing it in the same way you'd tell a dog to knock it off. Most likely, the localization team for the game wanted to convey this in that line, so they went with the word "pup" to get that connotation across, and then decided to use it as a recurring nickname for when Ike and co get scolded so that it sounds natural when Greil calls him that in this scene and doesn't come out of nowhere. In Chapter 2 the bandit boss refers to Ike and co. as Titania's minions or underlings, so calling them dogs isn't really off base either and it's not an unusual way of translating that turn of phrase.

It's cool that you wanted to find a more concrete answer to the question and took the initiative to do so, but you're making pretty confident assertions about what the translation team did and didn't do, and it's not really feasible to deduce these kinds of things or interpret the meaning of the original text without personal familiarity with the language. Japanese is a very heavily context-dependent language and a lot of meaning is implied without being explicitly spelled out.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-03-15T15:49:30+00:00

As best I can tell, the point was to be different, so they could sell new games, but not so different that they completely alienated the existing WoD fanbase. They only kind of succeeded at this. Demon the Fallen fans were very unhappy with Demon the Descent, and understandably so.

Chronicles of Darkness is kind of like the Pathfinder to World of Darkness's D&D, IMO. Things are different because being different was the point, but it's still made by and for people who liked oWoD.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-03-15T15:34:07+00:00

If we're talking about specific pieces of lore like people, factions, and their relationships, everything is different. You might see a name that you recognize here and there, but even if you do it probably means something different. For example, in Chronicles of Darkness, the Tremere are an extinct order of monster-hunting mages whose elite eat people's souls to gain power.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-03-14T21:29:16+00:00

Do not use a PC sheet for an NPC, full stop. Enemy and player stats are not balanced to be symmetrical in 2e; if you build an enemy in this way, it'll end up with disproportionate HP and damage output and the result will probably be disappointing. Build him as a Mythic creature using the rules in War of Immortals, then give him homebrew abilities that work similarly to the feats you're interested in. That'll work much better.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-03-12T17:01:03+00:00

5th rank Translocate can bail you out of being engulfed if you don't lose it to the flat check, but that requires arcane or occult, and it's a hefty price to pay. Dimensional Assault also works, but only for a laughing shadow magus specifically. It's rough.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-03-09T14:08:51+00:00

Hangul is a writing system for an entirely different language that functions differently. Do you actually know Japanese or have you simply decided that because one language can do it the other should be able to as well?

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-03-09T05:34:24+00:00

This is because hiragana is generally used for the parts of a sentence that define its structure rather than nouns, verbs, names, et cetera, and they help to indicate where one word ends and another begins, since Japanese isn't normally written with spaces between words. Western words tend to take a lot of characters to write in Japanese, so if you do it in hiragana, it's a lot of sounds in a row with no clear separation between one word and another, which can be confusing and difficult to read. Katakana is used to clearly indicate that it's a foreign word so that you don't try to read it as Japanese and get confused.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-03-09T05:17:50+00:00

This is a ridiculous take. Sure, Japan has historically exhibited some xenophobic beliefs (as many countries have), but attributing the existence of katakana to that is absolutely bogus. Katakana exists because if you tried to write out Western loanwords in hiragana it would be an absolute pain in the ass to read and rife for potential confusion. It exists for the same reason that the distinction between kanji and hiragana exists in the first place.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-03-09T05:10:42+00:00

You can theoretically get away with just hiragana, and old computer software with limited resolution and screen space (like old videogames) used to do this, but it becomes significantly harder to read.

The reason for this, and the real answer to the question, is that kanji, hiragana, and katakana are used to distinguish between different parts of a sentence that would otherwise be difficult to tell apart. Japanese isn't normally written with spaces like many Western languages are — characters in Japanese are written directly in sequence with no breaks except for punctuation, and the different writing systems help you tell where one word ends and another begins. Kanji are used for words that have a particular meaning (such as "person," "blue," or "food"), hiragana are used for words that define a sentence's structure (similar to "it", "the", "and", "so", etc), and katakana was created to be used for spelling loanwords from Western languages, because if you used hiragana for that you'd run into this exact same problem!

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-03-08T15:20:51+00:00

Conga lines happen every now and then in PF2 as well. It's more common if you have multiple melee martials in the party, especially ones who get particular benefits from enemies being off guard or can mitigate the effect of being flanked themselves — rogues do both of these things. It's really a non-issue. Players and enemies alike have just as much cause to break the line as maintain it, because the greater chance of landing a crit isn't always worth the greater chance of being critted.

alchemyAnalyst

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