Ask a simple question, Awakened edition

[21C Hermit]

Although I think there's an implicit or explicit premise that granting somebody access to Imperial spells with the Auctoritas does not automatically convey understanding of the Quintessence required to cast them.

That being said, there are Artifacts that can cast Imperial spells, and I've never seen any suggestion that those would require Quintessence. If the pirate Nameless of Nassau could use an Artifact that shut down all Yantras based on authority within a certain area, I'd say somebody could acquire an Artifact with a power that spreads out.

…. Oops. Yeah, Quintessence might be an issue. An Artifact does sound easier, though likely perceived as more random in-universe.

[KaiserAfini]

…. Oops. Yeah, Quintessence might be an issue. An Artifact does sound easier, though likely perceived as more random in-universe.

I remember the main villain of The Soul Cage found a loophole by asking about the Quintessence to an archmaster. So if you can get the information somehow, it could work, maybe. It would be incredibly Hubristic and, being an Imperial practice and it would probably require a ton of work to setup: negotiating with the Aeon, talking to or seeking out the information from the Invisible Masters, finding or producing the right Quintecense, selecting the optimal ritual site and doing it all in such a subtle way that no one stops it. It could be an entire chronicle's worth of work, but its theoretically possible.

[TempleBuilder]

Accidentally tapped post before I was ready

You can visit one of the Aeons of the Arcana in the Anima Mundi to petition for Auctoritas (Signs of Sorcery). One possible form of Auctoritas is a +1 dot in the Aeon's Arcanum for one single spell. The +1 dot trumps Gnosis and Path limits... I assume this means a Master (5-dot) can cast a Dynamics (6-dot) spell once.

No. Not for this. The Aeons are in my mind, a very last resort. I’d love to visit them sometime, and speak to their servants, and learn from them. But their bargains will cost more, much more than a Dynamics spell.

You could go straight to the Vidanti within the Arrows. I don't remember much of their 1E form, but for 2E they were mentioned off-hand out-of-book as a Nameless Order inside the Arrow, reserved for people who can't follow their tenets any more. It's more like a retirement program, though, so I suspect the Arrow would still put you in a magical boot camp at the least. (Or whatever their initiation is; I really need to reread the 1E orderbooks...)

… can you tell me of them? I don’t have the Arrow book, and they don’t seem in 2e yet.

[KaiserAfini]

Accidentally tapped post before I was ready
No. Not for this. The Aeons are in my mind, a very last resort. I’d love to visit them sometime, and speak to their servants, and learn from them. But their bargains will cost more, much more than a Dynamics spell.

… can you tell me of them? I don’t have the Arrow book, and they don’t seem in 2e yet.

The Vidantus (meaning "those who are to be shunned") are Arrows that have forsworn all conflict and embraced pacifism. Becoming one involves a ritual of renunciation, but some Caucuses levy the status as punishment for cowardice. Henceforth, they are no longer members of the Arrow, will not join any other Order and will not work against the Pentacle in any way. They are not allowed, under any circumstances, to council other Arrows or persuade them to join the Vidantus. While its expected for Arrows to shun them, its not an absolute and receiving magical (or mundane) tutelage from them could be accepted. In short, they are generally Arrows who experienced such traumas that they developed a fundamental, irreconcilable philosophical break with the core doctrine of the Arrow.

[TempleBuilder]

This was going to be part of my previous post, but accidents happened.

Although I find myself wondering if the Mysteries about such travel in that book are supposed to persist into the modern day; if mages did not find some way to resolve them at some point.

Even if they resolved it on Earth, doesn’t mean it’s resolved in Space. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was mentioned that these problems still persist in remote environments.

Yeah, I think they're more like a kind of tradition within the Order's systems then a separate embedded Order.

...Although calling them a Nameless Order within sounds vaguely like the kind of thing DaveB would say... I'll look back into it.

For the time being though, I'd say that with the Order as written, the Adamantine Arrow would simply not accept avowed pacifists into their ranks. I think the corebook line about being willing to look upon peace as a greater challenge to achieve means that they can make some allowances for people who are highly reserved about the use of violence or dedicate themselves to resolution of conflicts without it, and the Order book itself talks about many aspects of what they do that are not strictly to do with fighting (one that I find interesting is the Arrow as element in a Consilium deadlocked by an excess of intrigue that gets people back on task), but they reject people who specifically not only reject all use of violence but view it as a moral wrong.

I don’t know what they would think about me. I think violence is wrong, or at least a poor solution to problems. It tends to create even more problems and violence, which is not a bad thing to Arrow, since they believe in growing through struggle, but is not acceptable for me. I think that sometimes there aren’t any other solutions, though. I guess I think of it like this, even if you do good by your actions, you still have all the wrongs you committed to get there. There isn’t a balance, good doesn’t make up for evil. You aren’t absolved of your deeds, just because the good out weighed the bad. Everyone has a chance to become someone different, even if it isn’t likely. Killing them tends to remove their ability to change. If someone tries to hurt or kill someone else, try resolve the situation or take away their ability to do harm, or shield the other. If you can’t do anything else, if the only option truly is kill or let someone else be killed, well… do whatever you can live with. But no life is truly worth more than another. Not even mine. None of this will ever make it right. I don’t know. I can’t tell others how to live. Just thinking of the scenarios where I might be forced to kill has made me rather sad and slightly sick. I’m not sure I’d live through killing another. Nor letting someone die because I didn’t act when I could have.
I hope something of what I said makes sense, at least enough to place me in or out of the Arrow.

Steal it from space debris, man-made or natural. Forget about Earth or the redirection of your own speed vector, this is too much work for too little pay-off.

Oh, definitely should steal from space junk, that’s going to be a problem for people later and it should just fall to Earth. Helping, kinda, with pollution and serving my own purposes, win-win. Even stealing from space rocks is fine, it’s not like I need all of it, and even if I do the sun won’t care.

Instead, just use fuel and then steal momentum from space rocks. You're trying to come up with the most complex answer by doing it with magic alone.

Ha! Yes, I do that often. Thank you for stating the simple solution.

Rockets use tonnes of fuel because they need to accelerate tonnes of fuel. You can magic the energy out of the fuel and not carry the weight. Asteroids are relatively common and high speed, and the big ones will be so many times your weight, vessel included, and you can guilty-free steal all their momentum. Plan your trip to pass through a few select targets and that's it, 1.000 Km/h stolen from a rock 100 times your mass will give you 100.000 Km/h because we're magicking physics out of the equation.

Stripping energy/mass equivalence and other bits out of the equation simplifies your predicament immensely, and you can simply throw your excess momentum somewhere else when you arrive at your destination. There's no reason to think the trip will take more than a year with magic at your disposal.

I will do more calculations, but you are correct. Frankly, at this point, I am satisfied. Momentum and High Energy fuel would work wonders. Actually, I believe there is a way to store my excess if I every need it. It would require Space or Time though.

But Satchel is right that you need to think through how this whole idea plays a role on the story. Unless it is a solo game or a novel/fiction you're writing, in which case you can enter suspended animation and don't care about the time.

This is mostly a thought experiment, but I will use this if I ever make it into a Mage game.

[Isator Levi]

The Adamantine Arrow's perspective in violence is complicated (even apart from the book emphasizing variation in perspective). It could basically be summed up as them thinking it's not a thing to be yearned for, nor should it be shunned and demonised. It's not a grim necessity, or a thing you should be totally at peace with. It's an aspect of the universe and flowing along with it deepens your understanding of the universe and empowers you to remove things that ought to be removed, so you should embrace it but know the weight of it and be deliberate in where you point it.

That goes particularly with killing, where a common attitude is that it can at times be necessary but never exactly what you'd call justified. Don't be crushed with guilt over it, but don't be at ease with it or treat it as a first resort, excepting cases where you judge no other resort will suffice.

And at all times know there will be other Arrows to observe your use of violent and make their opinions of it known through their own martial skill.

[Satchel]

Alright let’s see, off the top of my head: is void a symbol -> is void a material like shadow is for death -> does the interstellar medium count as void (there is technically stuff in it)-> can there be perfected void -> do patches of it exist in the interstellar medium or galactic voids like perfected metals do sometimes in ore -> what occult properties does perfected void have

There are void spirits, covered in Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon, but I feel it's a reach to assume that turning a sensory phenomenon like shadows solid extends logically to turning the literal absence of any material at all into a substance through typical Awakened magic; attributing that kind of power to Death would let you move e.g. literal monetary debt around without the metaphor-handling equipment provided by the magic of changelings, demons, and other specialized systems.

By the same token, it seems a stretch to assume you can perfect an absence when the vast majority of ordinary materials can't be perfected either, much less that perfected instances would occur in nature. (What would it even do?)

Is there resonance in the void between stars -> is it plentiful because there is a lot of void, or is it thin because it’s void resonance -> is it possible that ley lines run between stars -> are these lines tainted by void resonance or perhaps defined by it. -> can Hallows or Nodes form from intersections of these ley lines and ( if so what kind)

There's the aforementioned void spirits, but given how little there is to sustain them in their native environment, the magath-adjacent nature of many of them, and the desolate quality of the void, evidence suggests it's far from a feast of resonance out in the vacuum; most void-spirits are vacuum-spirits, with more stable specimens being light-spirits from distant stars and background radiation, and rarer beings born from psychic phenomena a mage might connect to the Anima Mundi.

Ley lines are a landscape feature that connect to each other through Nodes and transmit resonance along and between them; it would be very weird for ley lines to connect on Earth and in space but not together, barring some sort of plot-driving hidden connection point (like a beach-at-the-end-of-the-world where the Earth is actually flat), which would almost definitely be more about that magical phenomenon than space or ley lines themselves.

Given the length of space between stars, it's pretty unlikely that there's any ley lines running several times the circumference of the Earth, and if there are, the resonance they'd be feeding into would almost certainly produce Nodes related to Time or Space, which… won't do anybody much good without a dramatic change in the landscape and population density of outer space.

Is the interstellar medium a potent yantra -> is there a difference between the yantra some of the Star Dust by itself produces and that of both the void and the dust
what prevents the teleportation by telescope.-> Do the threads of Sympathy get eroded by the void->

Some of this seems founded in the assumption that Space Is Magic, which… available evidence suggests there's some nasty stuff Out There, but the universe Chronicles takes place in is not the dream of the Golden Age of Space Exploration. Reality is thin outside of the one we know, and often hungry, spiteful, and inhuman when we encounter it at all.

Space dust is dust. If it has symbolic significance at all (rather than being effectively a mass of destroyed forms), it's going to have a normal amount of symbolic association with the place it came from.

Sympathy is eroded by the things that erode sympathy, which is mostly time and the loss of memory or the waning of passions. Its connections aren't totally abstract — emotional phenomena are foundational in most magical matters to some degree, and Fate's got a spell that shows you sympathetic connections for a reason.

Eh, I was thinking about how populations are easier to control if they all are in relatively the same space. I don’t doubt that the Exarchs probably didn’t cause the void between stars to be so big, but I’m betting they benefited or are benefiting from it. There is probably “a stay at home” ministry. Probably extremely minor, though.

Mage is a game where if you want to affect an area larger than a small neighborhood with a single spell or change the minds of more than ten million people from the inside you need to approach the Godhead.

The world mages occupy is one where:
• An entire border-realm between Flesh and Spirit was destroyed and replaced by a barrier made of a non-place where werewolves' failed prototype forebears were imprisoned and fragments of totemic gods occasionally wreck shop, and now the world of spirits is overcrowded from lack of culling.
• The ocean where ghosts go to dissolve has built up a case of cosmic plaque so extreme that cave systems and sham utopias pad out the space between the entryways and the shoreline, to say nothing of how most ghosts get sucked into the walls or are drinking the not-water.
• The place where culture lives in the human soul is full of a thousand thousand conflicting idea-forms, engaged in literalized war with each other while on the other side of a metaphorical stone tunnel the world-soul dances to a tune of hunger and pain that can only sort of be blamed on the crashing waves of unreality at its farthest edge.

People are welcome to customize the setting of their games however they like, but none of this really says to me "Earth used to be part of a grander interstellar system" besides raw speculation about the reach of Atlantis or the nature of the God-Machine. It looks more like the Fallen World is being kept creaking on past the point many of its systems were designed for by beings whose power and placement allows them to be comfortable while the world dies by inches.

Which is to say: I don't think millennia of mountain-climbers, seafarers, forest-foragers, cave-delvers, and travelers to far-off lands are outweighed by the fact that humans haven't gone very far into space in the century in which we've seen what space is like for human bodies, had rigorous standards of safety and certainty in place even for unmanned exploration, and witnessed a number of highly visible examples of what happens when just the launch process goes wrong — most people are not mages, which means most people are not predisposed to throw caution to the winds when treating with a region hostile to human life at a scale many trillion times the size of the pale blue dot it comes from.

I think the Exarchs aren't particularly threatened by the prospect of people going to space, especially when access to space travel is still tied up in matters of power and privilege as it is and those matters will have new avenues for oppression by the time it isn't.

hmm, the Arrow? Honestly, didn’t really think of myself that way. I do like self refinement, but I’m a pacifist, and dislike physical confrontation.

I'd mostly just been saying you wouldn't have much trouble finding volunteers from the Order that says Service is Mastery and prides itself on honing its members' nonmagical capabilities. Finding an Arrow or two who'd relish the physical and spiritual hardships of space travel as a crucible and the aid and protection of a researcher in a distant corner of the universe as a challenging oath to uphold surely wouldn't be impossibly hard.

[TempleBuilder]

There are void spirits, covered in Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon, but I feel it's a reach to assume that turning a sensory phenomenon like shadows solid extends logically to turning the literal absence of any material at all into a substance through typical Awakened magic; attributing that kind of power to Death would let you move e.g. literal monetary debt around without the metaphor-handling equipment provided by the magic of changelings, demons, and other specialized systems.

What about cold then? It’s an absence of heat. That’s a physical absence Death covers. Also fire is a material, by the games logic, even though it’s not in real life. I don’t know, it seems like less of a reach because it’s something lacking a gross arcanum. (Which seems to be something all the Death materials have in common, could be something I’ve forgotten though) (On a side note, how would someone transfer debt through Supernal Magic, because that seems like a thing one should be able to do.)

By the same token, it seems a stretch to assume you can perfect an absence when the vast majority of ordinary materials can't be perfected either, much less that perfected instances would occur in nature. (What would it even do?)

…I’m not seeing a line saying that it’s impossible to perfect other materials, just that Mages don’t know much about them, and they are harder to make. It even gives the go ahead for the Storyteller to come up with their own stuff. As for properties, if I had to come up with something, I guess it would be like alkahest and dissolve everything into its smallest components and spread it it out. Maybe even destroy it, or destroy somethings magical properties. Or maybe it would be something like this?

There's the aforementioned void spirits, but given how little there is to sustain them in their native environment, the magath-adjacent nature of many of them, and the desolate quality of the void, evidence suggests it's far from a feast of resonance out in the vacuum; most void-spirits are vacuum-spirits, with more stable specimens being light-spirits from distant stars and background radiation, and rarer beings born from psychic phenomena a mage might connect to the Anima Mundi.

Oooo… direct connection to the Anima Mundi? From the Fallen World. That’s interesting. Very interesting indeed.

Ley lines are a landscape feature that connect to each other through Nodes and transmit resonance along and between them; it would be very weird for ley lines to connect on Earth and in space but not together, barring some sort of plot-driving hidden connection point (like a beach-at-the-end-of-the-world where the Earth is actually flat), which would almost definitely be more about that magical phenomenon than space or ley lines themselves.

hmm, it might be interesting if it played into the celestial alignments trope, though that’s more a Mummy thing.

Given the length of space between stars, it's pretty unlikely that there's any ley lines running several times the circumference of the Earth, and if there are, the resonance they'd be feeding into would almost certainly produce Nodes related to Time or Space, which… won't do anybody much good without a dramatic change in the landscape and population density of outer space.

Hmm, noted. The utility of Nodes isn’t particularly high anyways.

Some of this seems founded in the assumption that Space Is Magic, which… available evidence suggests there's some nasty stuff Out There, but the universe Chronicles takes place in is not the dream of the Golden Age of Space Exploration. Reality is thin outside of the one we know, and often hungry, spiteful, and inhuman when we encounter it at all.

it’s founded on the assumption that Yantras scale in strength based on how difficult it is to acquire them. Like I vaguely remember it saying somewhere. *shrugs* That being said, I think “Space being Magical” is a great description for my style of doing things.
I’m fine for cosmic horror, it’s part of what Mage is here for. Really, I’d be surprised if I didn’t meet some horrific thing from beyond the stars, that then tried to eat me or break my soul and mind.

Space dust is dust. If it has symbolic significance at all (rather than being effectively a mass of destroyed forms), it's going to have a normal amount of symbolic association with the place it came from.

A mass of destroyed forms seems intriguing in its own right, I mean, is there a pattern to the chaos? Secondly, depending on where the dust came from, it might have come from the creation of a solar system, nearly untouched since, despite the ages. That seems Magically potent to me. It would be grabbing a ember from a Forge, except the forge was cosmic in scale.

Sympathy is eroded by the things that erode sympathy, which is mostly time and the loss of memory or the waning of passions. Its connections aren't totally abstract — emotional phenomena are foundational in most magical matters to some degree, and Fate's got a spell that shows you sympathetic connections for a reason.

Yes, I was suggesting the vast isolation of the void might wear those bonds, or maybe something like a mystery like those in the dark eras, but more directly pressing. I don’t know, maybe that’s not a good idea?

People are welcome to customize the setting of their games however they like, but none of this really says to me "Earth used to be part of a grander interstellar system" besides raw speculation about the reach of Atlantis or the nature of the God-Machine. It looks more like the Fallen World is being kept creaking on past the point many of its systems were designed for by beings whose power and placement allows them to be comfortable while the world dies by inches.

I’m not really assuming there is some vast interstellar system, only positing that the Exarchs do nothing but benefit if we don’t attempt to find out. There might, there might not be, but we could know if checked.

Also that’s a great description of the world.

Which is to say: I don't think millennia of mountain-climbers, seafarers, forest-foragers, cave-delvers, and travelers to far-off lands are outweighed by the fact that humans haven't gone very far into space in the century in which we've seen what space is like for human bodies, had rigorous standards of safety and certainty in place even for unmanned exploration, and witnessed a number of highly visible examples of what happens when just the launch process goes wrong — most people are not mages, which means most people are not predisposed to throw caution to the winds when treating with a region hostile to human life at a scale many trillion times the size of the pale blue dot it comes from.

I think the Exarchs aren't particularly threatened by the prospect of people going to space, especially when access to space travel is still tied up in matters of power and privilege as it is and those matters will have new avenues for oppression by the time it isn't.

Look, if there is a ministry for “routine is the opiate of the masses” I don’t see one that says “don’t explore anything new, stay at home where it is safe” as being that far fetched. I’m not saying it would be a big ministry, it might even fit in as a side branch of Horologion itself, but it seems like something the Seers would do. Have the Exarchs ever waited for something to actually be a threat, before they try to counter it? If something even infinitesimally increases the odds someone might possibly be in a position to one day oppose them, I pretty sure they would try to counter it. Especially if it improved their grip on reality. Keeping people from exploring means keeping people from finding something conflicting with their mental version of reality, and possibly awakening as a result.

I'd mostly just been saying you wouldn't have much trouble finding volunteers from the Order that says Service is Mastery and prides itself on honing its members' nonmagical capabilities. Finding an Arrow or two who'd relish the physical and spiritual hardships of space travel as a crucible and the aid and protection of a researcher in a distant corner of the universe as a challenging oath to uphold surely wouldn't be impossibly hard.

Oh. Alright. Well, sure, crew could help lots! I will keep in mind the Arrow if I get do actually do this.
We got a interesting discussion out of that misunderstanding, so I’m glad it happened.

I like to take a moment to say: Thank You Satchel. You always write such detailed responses. I wish I had more say in order to respond in kind.
Thank You everyone for helping me with this thought problem.

[Satchel]

What about cold then? It’s an absence of heat. That’s a physical absence Death covers. Also fire is a material, by the games logic, even though it’s not in real life. I don’t know, it seems like less of a reach because it’s something lacking a gross arcanum. (Which seems to be something all the Death materials have in common, could be something I’ve forgotten though)

Cold is a sensory phenomenon (to the point where the human body has different nerves for detecting cold than for heat), and fire is a thing. The Elemental Masteries are Legacies corresponding to the modern elemental associations of the Paths, and the Tamers of the Void focus on Death with Attainments that use a particular form of ectoplasm.

Again, this is not the realm of pure abstraction; Awakened magic below archmastery works with the tools provided by the Supernal being the place where the abstract and the concrete mix, but just as you're not going to be able to use Veiling spells to hide from Time Itself, you're not going to be able to Perfect the form of something that doesn't have a form. There's symbols for empty space and the sensory impact of vacuum, and you can move an empty space around in a way that shifts the stuff around it, but you Perfect the absence of anything by removing things from a space rather than by adding qualities to nothing; this is where using Unmaking spells to truck with the Lower Depths generally comes into play.

(On a side note, how would someone transfer debt through Supernal Magic, because that seems like a thing one should be able to do.)

Shared Fate with the +1 Reach effect to shift it as it happens, Matter, Forces and/or Mind with the necessary placement or sympathies to change the indicators after the fact. Awakened magic runs on building-block logic instead of the rules provided by more established frames of reference, which is part of what Legacies push into to bend the rules like other monsters do.

…I’m not seeing a line saying that it’s impossible to perfect other materials, just that Mages don’t know much about them, and they are harder to make. It even gives the go ahead for the Storyteller to come up with their own stuff.

It also talks about compounds, alloys, and living materials rather than absences thereof or even magically-produced materials like solidified shadows or ephemera.

Oooo… direct connection to the Anima Mundi? From the Fallen World. That’s interesting. Very interesting indeed.

Not really; that connection is me extrapolating for "psychic phenomena from seemingly nothing" from the fact that there's a long-established Legacy (the Dreamspeakers) that communicates with Dreamtime beings through their material correspondences — it's not inconceivable that a patch of outer space might match up with an invisible dreaming thing from the Whorl (Abode of Stars and Aeons), but that's an Astral being exerting rare worldly influence on its material counterpart in a way that happens to be in outer space.

You'd get more material to go off of in a shorter time by starting from the Astral and building your findings from there, which is why that's the more common advice than leaping past aeronautics to comb the cosmic currents.

it’s founded on the assumption that Yantras scale in strength based on how difficult it is to acquire them. Like I vaguely remember it saying somewhere.

You get an extra die if you went through significant difficulty to get the right thing for the spell, bumping up to two extra dice if it's from outside the material realm, and this applies to sacraments, Yantras that you use by destroying or consuming them during casting.

A mass of destroyed forms seems intriguing in its own right, I mean, is there a pattern to the chaos?

I was being poetic about the fact that a thing that has ceased to be something is not that thing anymore; Mummy characterizes part of the role of Ammut the Devourer in the cosmology as releasing Sekhem (the stuff of manifest existence) from forms when it's destroyed.

A clay figurine of a dog ceases to be a figurine of a dog when it's destroyed. Bread stops being bread when it's chewed and swallowed to make mast. Boiling seawater removes an amount of "seawater" from the world to make steam and salt. Space dust has stopped being the rocks it came from and started being one of the most reduced forms of matter in the visible universe.

Have the Exarchs ever waited for something to actually be a threat, before they try to counter it?

Every time the Threshold Seeking happens. You don't usually get ochemata dispatched to assassinate you for researching archmastery until you're actually approaching the breakthrough that lets you establish a beachhead in Heaven.

If something even infinitesimally increases the odds someone might possibly be in a position to one day oppose them, I pretty sure they would try to counter it. Especially if it improved their grip on reality. Keeping people from exploring means keeping people from finding something conflicting with their mental version of reality, and possibly awakening as a result.

The Ministries are charged to divide humanity and keep them trapped in spiritual infancy; they mostly accomplish that by fanning the flames of particular forms of fear or by propagating ways for Sleepers to be too preoccupied to investigate the Lie that keeps them ignorant of magic. Horologion's MO is dramatically more powerful in a fast-paced world where everything is scheduled down to the minute, Hegemony doesn't exist without The State, and the Nemesis's old Archigenitorship is built on the combination of privilege and deniability that cash and masks and such provide.

There's almost certainly a "stay at home" Ministry or three — probably under the patronage of the Nemesis or a related Exarch — but that activity looks like more than just saying "space is dangerous" in a world where the Space Race happened; it's more likely to have its power base in Earthly concerns like insular ethnic neighborhoods or promoting anti-immigration sentiments (or both at once, ideally). Perhaps a different one covers pushing people to cling to stable urban living or engineering highly publicized accidents away from where most people live. Both are likely to run into conflict with a Ministry pushing people to be more afraid of losing their job than getting sick or injured, because the Exarchs play a deeply un-unified game with the Iron Pyramid and power takes many contradictory forms.

The Exarchs occupy a place in the cosmology that's tied to humanity and doesn't especially care about distance, and the material universe is theoretically big enough that, were attempts to escape Earth's gravity to escape the Lie a credible threat to their power, those instances would be isolated enough that they can tackle them individually unless the individual is also seizing direct Supernal power a la Threshold Seekings or Imperium Rites. Distraction by mundane problems accomplishes much of the work of keeping people from going to space, which is part of why the go-to metaphor for the Awakened these days is to compare them to one-percenters.

I like to take a moment to say: Thank You Satchel. You always write such detailed responses. I wish I had more say in order to respond in kind.

I am a rambling curmudgeon and for that I apologize profusely.

[TempleBuilder]

Cold is a sensory phenomenon (to the point where the human body has different nerves for detecting cold than for heat), and fire is a thing. The Elemental Masteries are Legacies corresponding to the modern elemental associations of the Paths, and the Tamers of the Void focus on Death with Attainments that use a particular form of ectoplasm.

Again, this is not the realm of pure abstraction; Awakened magic below archmastery works with the tools provided by the Supernal being the place where the abstract and the concrete mix, but just as you're not going to be able to use Veiling spells to hide from Time Itself, you're not going to be able to Perfect the form of something that doesn't have a form. There's symbols for empty space and the sensory impact of vacuum, and you can move an empty space around in a way that shifts the stuff around it, but you Perfect the absence of anything by removing things from a space rather than by adding qualities to nothing; this is where using Unmaking spells to truck with the Lower Depths generally comes into play.

Going to have concede this one. If anyone would be able to manipulate nothingness, the Tames of the Void would be able to. Still feel like you should be able to do something with something that is Nothing, but I am unable to present a coherent argument as to why I feel that way. So, I’m going to let it rest.

Shared Fate with the +1 Reach effect to shift it as it happens, Matter, Forces and/or Mind with the necessary placement or sympathies to change the indicators after the fact. Awakened magic runs on building-block logic instead of the rules provided by more established frames of reference, which is part of what Legacies push into to bend the rules like other monsters do.

Ah, Fate was the missing piece. Thanks. Perfect spell for a Mammon Mage.

It also talks about compounds, alloys, and living materials rather than absences thereof or even magically-produced materials like solidified shadows or ephemera.

Yeah, but there is limited space in a book. They can’t put everything in there. That’s not strong argument that something cannot be a perfected material. I think. Frankly I would read a book on more random perfected Materials. I wonder if there is a material that is perfectly elastic.

Not really; that connection is me extrapolating for "psychic phenomena from seemingly nothing" from the fact that there's a long-established Legacy (the Dreamspeakers) that communicates with Dreamtime beings through their material correspondences — it's not inconceivable that a patch of outer space might match up with an invisible dreaming thing from the Whorl (Abode of Stars and Aeons), but that's an Astral being exerting rare worldly influence on its material counterpart in a way that happens to be in outer space.

Still worth investigating, I would think.

You'd get more material to go off of in a shorter time by starting from the Astral and building your findings from there, which is why that's the more common advice than leaping past aeronautics to comb the cosmic currents.

Yeah…that’s probably a better starting point for a chronicle anyways. Still, I think the trip is worth it.

You get an extra die if you went through significant difficulty to get the right thing for the spell, bumping up to two extra dice if it's from outside the material realm, and this applies to sacraments, Yantras that you use by destroying or consuming them during casting.

Oh. Whoops. This makes sense.

A clay figurine of a dog ceases to be a figurine of a dog when it's destroyed. Bread stops being bread when it's chewed and swallowed to make mast. Boiling seawater removes an amount of "seawater" from the world to make steam and salt. Space dust has stopped being the rocks it came from and started being one of the most reduced forms of matter in the visible universe.

… I don’t know, that still sounds like a pretty decent Yantra to me, but I suppose part of the point of Yantras is that they are subjective.

Every time the Threshold Seeking happens. You don't usually get ochemata dispatched to assassinate you for researching archmastery until you're actually approaching the breakthrough that lets you establish a beachhead in Heaven.

Do Seers get dispatched in that situation though? Because ochemata are technically breaking the agreement that archmages and ascended are under, right?

The Ministries are charged to divide humanity and keep them trapped in spiritual infancy; they mostly accomplish that by fanning the flames of particular forms of fear or by propagating ways for Sleepers to be too preoccupied to investigate the Lie that keeps them ignorant of magic. Horologion's MO is dramatically more powerful in a fast-paced world where everything is scheduled down to the minute, Hegemony doesn't exist without The State, and the Nemesis's old Archigenitorship is built on the combination of privilege and deniability that cash and masks and such provide.

There's almost certainly a "stay at home" Ministry or three — probably under the patronage of the Nemesis or a related Exarch — but that activity looks like more than just saying "space is dangerous" in a world where the Space Race happened; it's more likely to have its power base in Earthly concerns like insular ethnic neighborhoods or promoting anti-immigration sentiments (or both at once, ideally). Perhaps a different one covers pushing people to cling to stable urban living or engineering highly publicized accidents away from where most people live. Both are likely to run into conflict with a Ministry pushing people to be more afraid of losing their job than getting sick or injured, because the Exarchs play a deeply un-unified game with the Iron Pyramid and power takes many contradictory forms.

Nemesis… makes sense. I forget sometimes how much infighting the Iron Pyramid suffers, because that is a perfect example how even without meaning to, two Ministries might come into conflict. Going to use this minor Ministry, and Horologion as my go to minor Ministries, because both really exemplify the mundane nature of some of the Seers goals. Heh, maybe throw in the Cult of the Doomsday Clock. That would be interesting.

I am a rambling curmudgeon and for that I apologize profusely.

It’s fine. Nobody is perfect. Anyways, your rambling is usually very helpful.

[Satchel]

Do Seers get dispatched in that situation though? Because ochemata are technically breaking the agreement that archmages and ascended are under, right?

The Pax Arcanum is an agreement between archmages and the Ascended, which is why the Threshold Seeking is generally the last chance to outright directly interfere with a prospective archmage; the Exarchs aren't the only ones who exploit this loophole, but they do get the most latitude by virtue of their position. Aspiring Tetrarchs don't necessarily get killed for their trouble, but their Ascended forebears in the Seers' vast hierarchy can put a stop to the Seeking if they don't meet their standards of loyalty.

[monteparnas]

Still feel like you should be able to do something with something that is Nothing

You do every time you do something with something that is something.

Or, to be precise for vacuum, with Matter (and Forces if you want to talk true vacuum).

When you create content you destroy void, when you destroy content you create void.

The key difference about Death here, though, is that we're not talking about deterioration or antithesis, but true absence. A corpse is opposed to Life because it is the deteriorating husk of the living. It is not mere absence, but a Symbol of degradation, destruction, end.

But what about an empty room? This, not a corpse or ghost, is the Absence of Life. No lingering force, no memory or decaying husk, just nothing alive is there to begin with.

Death is about the decaying and decayed, not about mere absence. It is about the ghost and the corpse, not about the empty room. That's why it isn't the Arcanum of void and vacuum, because those aren't the opposition of things, but just the absence of things.

And absence you define by what is absent. You already deal with it with the other Arcana. So the question isn't what you do with vacuum, but what the complete absence of phenomena related to an Arcanum means.

[Isator Levi]

As an answer to a stray question, the Exarchs didn't start sending influence to get mages to organise at a larger scale in their service until after the Diamond Orders were well on their way to being founded, and even then I get an impression it took a slow and subtle form rather than ochemata appearing to directly command them.

[Isator Levi]

Wards and Signs cast over an area will mean that everything within that are can Withstand having spells cast on it, right?

[KaiserAfini]

Wards and Signs cast over an area will mean that everything within that are can Withstand having spells cast on it, right?

In theory yes, which means that technically it allows for an antimagic approach. Cast it over an area, send in a riot team and the mages will have mage armor at most. However, damaging spells are excluded from this, since they are not Withstood.

On a related question, if one casts Possession over an area, does the mage act as the hive mind or genius loci ? By that I mean that, in theory, they should take control of every camera, every weapon, piece of furniture and individual that fails to Withstand, correct ?