Qlippothic Spheres, Resonance and Other Things

[Saint Michael]

thanks! ^^

[Dataweaver]

They are similar. Both are “Awakened” individuals who have turned their supernatural powers against the supernatural. So yes, it might be possible to borrow material from the Banishers to flesh out the Negation Men.

[Saint Michael]

I do too. Would Banishers work for Negation Men? They sound similar.

[Jihelu]

There are already Marauders based on Morbidity in the book, but they don't seem to have any bonuses. I do wonder what they would get.

[Dataweaver]

The Negation Men are in the Book of Secrets, pages 248–249. Personally, I tone it down a bit from what BoS describes by restricting the auto-Countermagick to Effects that the Negation Man would consider to be Vulgar; but the underlying concept — a Marauder variant who has weaponized Denial instead of Madness — is definitely something I can get behind.

As I said before, the notion could also theoretically be extended to allowing for a Marauder variant that weaponizes Morbidity; but I'm unsure of how that would manifest: perma-Madness shunts Paradox onto others; perma-Denial hits nearby magick with countermagick; what would perma-Morbidity do? One possibility would be that it serves as a difficulty reduction on the types of Effects that the Qlippothic Spheres supposedly specialize in. But I'm not terribly happy with that execution; it feels clunky to me.

[Dataweaver]

I've considered a hybrid of DAI and HtR, combining DAI's morality system (Conviction, Piety, Natures with Impulses, Virtues and Superior Virtues) with HtR's Creeds and Edges (when assigning Creeds, read Faith as Mercy, Wisdom as Vision, and Zeal as Zeal).

The Negative Men are in the Book of Secrets; I'll get you a page reference later.

[Saint Michael]

I like Inquisitor for some reason. I don't know if they'd work in modern day. Book of Madness 1st edition and the rough, super-early idea of Marauders in Book of Mirrors helped me understand Marauders better. What book are the Negative Men in? I don't remember reading about them.

[Dataweaver]

I've had bad experiences with Hunter the Reckoning. I don't like being assaulted for existing.

Fair enough. If you don't like HtR, far be it from me to force you to use it. For what it's worth, the motivation for the idea I floated was Dark Ages: Inquisitor, which was basically the Dark Ages counterpart to Hunter: the Reckoning. Which is not to say that it was “the Imbued in the Dark Ages”; it wasn't. But to paraphrase George Lucas, “It rhymed”. Like HtR, it featured otherwise-human protagonists who were empowered by Conviction and three Superior Virtues that weren't all that different from HtR's Virtues: Faith, Wisdom and Zeal (as opposed to Mercy, Vision, and Zeal), and which granted access to powers useful in coping with monsters. In fact, DAI went so far as to state that the True Faith rules found in Dark Ages Vampire were in fact a rough approximation of DAI's supernatural powers system. So my thought was to similarly adapt HtR's crunch (but not its fluff) to serve as a modern “more detailed alternative” to the True Faith mechanics.

What happens when a Nephandus goes Marauder? I imagine most carve a path of destruction before being taken out by their former brethren. That was the other thing that occurred to me.

Earlier editions of Mage had a tendency to view the Technocracy as pawns of the Weaver, Marauders as manifestations of the Wyld, and Nephandi as agents of the Wyrm. But the further you get in Mage's development, the less pronounced these affiliations become. In M20, pains are taken to distance the Technocracy from its origin in the game as the advocate of Stasis; Nephandi haven't served just the Wyrm in a long time, and M20's “true” Nephandi don't call anything “master” besides their own dark impulses; and with the introduction of the Negative Men, the Marauders are no longer restricted to being Madness Incarnate: now there are some that are Denial Incarnate instead.

And if there are Marauders whose perma-Quiet is centered around Denial instead of Madness, who's to say that there can't be Marauders centered around Morbidity instead? I suspect that those Marauders would have no problem working alongside Nephandi.

[Saint Michael]

I've had bad experiences with Hunter the Reckoning. I don't like being assaulted for existing. What happens when a Nephandus goes Marauder? I imagine most carve a path of destruction before being taken out by their former brethren. That was the other thing that occurred to me.

[Dataweaver]

M20 includes support for a Focus that inverts the “my will be done” attitude that's normally considered to be inherent to Mage and instead views Magick as coming from your god. As presented, such a Focus is presented primarily in a negative light, in that it makes it possible for you to pick up the Faithless Flaw (Book of Secrets, p.93); but it strikes me as very much in keeping with said Focus for it to likewise serves as an enabler of True Faith — either by disallowing True Faith entirely unless you have this sort of Focus or by imposing a cap on True Faith if you don't have this sort of Focus.

True Faith is a Numina, like Hedge Magic and Psychic Phenomena; but it's unusually broad in its benefits for a Numina. Personally, I like to treat it as a sort of “tenth Sphere” that deliberately cuts across the boundaries of what the Nine Spheres can do and isn't capped by Arete (heck, it's available to Sleepers who by definition don't have Arete), but it's balanced against them in game terms by your need to uphold a strict moral code or else lose it. In this view, Faith 6+ is very much the same sort of thing as Archmastery; and depending on whether you prefer to cap all Archmastery at 6 dots or to let it go all the way up to 9 or 10 dots, True Faith works in a similar way. The aforementioned Inquisition provides guidelines for allowing Faith to go all the way up to 10, with guidelines as to what each dot rating allows; but you can collapse all of that into a single “sixth dot” if you prefer.

But relevant to the original poster's request, Inquisition specifies that 9 dots of True Faith lets you grant Transcendence to a Wraith, and 10 dots lets you cleanse a willing vampire of the Embrace (either reverting it to mortality or letting it achieve Golconda, as the Storyteller decrees); I'd put “undoing the Nephandic inversion of an Avatar” in the same category.

And this concept of True Faith as a sort of “Tenth Sphere” can be reversed, with the notion that anything that True Faith can achieve can also be achieved by the proper selection of Spheres. In fact, one of the options described in the Revised Chorister Book is to say that “True Faith”, the Numina, doesn't actually exist; instead, use Awakened Magick with a faith-based paradigm. A lot of the stuff that True Faith allows is stuff that I'd permit a Chorister with sufficient ranks of Prime to do; and undoing Nephandic inversion falls in this category — albeit at an Archmastery of Prime. And things like walking on water, turning water to wine, calling fire down from heaven, etc. are fairly simple applications of the Pattern Spheres.

The most exotic approach I've ever used for True Faith, though, has had little to do with Mage and everything to do with Hunter: the Reckoning. Specifically, I've experimented with the notion that the Messengers of Hunter game are in fact angels — rogue angels who give out Heaven's favor to mortals who haven't strictly met the criteria that Heaven normally demands on the theory that the impending end of the world calls for drastic measures. In this approach to True Faith, the various game systems available to the Imbued are also fully available to the Faithful, who also get Creeds and ratings in the Hunter Virtues and Edges, fueling them with their own form of Conviction. True Faith, in this model, is largely replaced by Hunter's game systems, with what remains of it taking the form of an enhanced version of the Religious Devotion Merit found in the Hunter Player's Guide: in addition to its normal benefits, every other level (1, 3, and 5) also increases your Starting Conviction by one. On the downside, failing to live up to the tenets of your faith blocks access to these benefits until you've properly atoned.

[Aleph]

Horizon Forces 6 it's just Forces 5 with a wider area...

In general canon Archspheres aren't very inspired. They do have a few good ideas here and there, but rarely something to justify them being whole Sphere Levels.

[Jihelu]

The level 6 spheres in Horizon aren't all that good, Entropy is just 'Regular Entropy but better(?)". I think one of the examples is 'Turning someone to dust instantly' but...it's a 6 level sphere, so the DC is already going to be really big and stupid.....and entropy 4 can do this with enough successes.

Entropy 6 should have become something like "Affect Metaphysical Pattern" to follow the trend of Object ---> Living thing ---> Idea ----> Metaphysical concept.

But the other ones seem ok.

[Rock113]

Which reminds me that there is a second Archsphere system that is less known than the one in Masters Of The Art; Check out 'Horizon: The Stronghold of Hope', page 117.
I kind of like the system that is presented in there. It only adds a 6th level of spheres, and even though it of course does not really offer anything that "Level 5 with enough successes" doesn't (especially in M20), the level 6 Spheres essentially become "Stuff you could do at level 5, but you need less gargantuan amounts of successes.", along with some refinements.

And this typo is that Malcolm Sheppard wrote.

[Rock113]

Which reminds me that there is a second Archsphere system that is less known than the one in Masters Of The Art; Check out 'Horizon: The Stronghold of Hope', page 117.
I kind of like the system that is presented in there. It only adds a 6th level of spheres, and even though it of course does not really offer anything that "Level 5 with enough successes" doesn't (especially in M20), the level 6 Spheres essentially become "Stuff you could do at level 5, but you need less gargantuan amounts of successes.", along with some refinements.

I remember this second system very well, I even translate it into my native-spoken language.

I agree with your opinions about archspheres, they should decrease successes you need and make things simpler. But they also might have much more roles than something just about dice-rolling and should be much more theorizing or "original".

For instance, achieving impossible or changing something basical like undoing curse of Caine, altering physics rules, performing real miracles and so on. That's also why I say Lv.7-10 is abundant in some way. If you need make impossible possible you just need use Lv.6 Sphere. And why they should exist, there is still something Lv.1-5 Spheres can't do.

I must say again, Archspheres in Masters of the Art are really bad. They don't have anything new. Almost all things can be done by Rotes combined with ordinary Magick.

[Ambrosia]

PS: And Archspehres themselves are really not "typo". Archspheres first appeared in 1st edition rulebook. An Umbrood Lord in Chapter Antagonist has Force 6, which implies other authors admit the presence of archspheres at first...

Which reminds me that there is a second Archsphere system that is less known than the one in Masters Of The Art; Check out 'Horizon: The Stronghold of Hope', page 117.
I kind of like the system that is presented in there. It only adds a 6th level of spheres, and even though it of course does not really offer anything that "Level 5 with enough successes" doesn't (especially in M20), the level 6 Spheres essentially become "Stuff you could do at level 5, but you need less gargantuan amounts of successes.", along with some refinements.