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[Niknokk]

My favourite answer for the Principle is that it's literally a principle, a fundamental rule in creation; basically a loophole that says, in essence; "fuck entropy, sometimes you really can get a free lunch". So it's not really God but you can imagine that humans reacted to occasional free lunches as gifts and miracles, and how that could give rise to legends about Prometheus and Jesus (and Sutekh).

Pyros gathers in small quantities where living things plan, act on impulse, create, and destroy. That's why I think it works well as a counterpart to Sekhem: if Sekhem is generated...

[Niknokk]

I think there's an interesting relationship between Sekhem and Pyros.
Sekhem is the energy of life in response to suffering; when a living thing suffers and obeys the Law of Suffering by moving away from the negative stimulus, Sekhem is generated. Sekhem is also, IIRC, related to the Law of Will that Sutekh mandated; the idea that living things can do more than just avoid suffering, and is therefore not entirely predictable.

So I think Pyros, a creative/destructive expression of spontaneous transformation and change, could be Sekhem that's basically exploded or caught fire in...

[Niknokk]

Tome of the Pentacle briefly mentions a group of Abyssal mages who live in the 11 missing days left over from the switch to the Gregorian calendar. Is this expanded on anywhere else or is it just a fun riff on Faction Paradox?

[Niknokk]

117
A surprising number of the supernaturally-inclined enjoy illegal underground combat sports. Sometimes they get something out of it, like blood, glory, or Glamour. Sometimes they're looking to recruit. Sometimes they just like the vibe.
Whatever their motive, illegal pit fights draw a diverse supernatural crowd and they often develop their own strange culture unique to the scene, depending on who participates.
The most common rule is simply not to unduly hurt the regular folks who make up most of the competitors, and using supernatural powers against them is seen as poor...

[Niknokk]

One of the ways I describe the G-M is:
"Imagine Skynet from the Terminator, but instead of sending one robot back to the 80's it sent its whole self back to prehistory and embedded itself in the world, so that when humanity arrived they couldn't fight it, because they couldn't recognize it, because they'd never been in a world free of the Machine". I don't think that's the actual answer but I like the image.
I actually think it's more likely that the G-M is a naturally occurring form of occult "life", like chemical reactions eventually forming DNA precursors in...

[Niknokk]

I kind of assume that everyone knows something, or saw something, or heard about something from a friend, but no one knows very much.
In comparison to something like the Dresden Files, where most of the big movers-and-shakers know each other and even have a treaty, I like supernatural knowledge in the Chronicles setting to be incredibly fractured and siloed. Vampires trade rumors of changelings and spirits, hunters try to make any sense of demons, and so on. With that in mind there isn't room for an average citizen who isn't part of a cult and doesn't go looking for trouble to know much,...

[Niknokk]

Sympathetic connections reflect your closeness with others, so someone who knows your true name ought to be closer to you than someone who doesn't all else being equal. I'd have to look up how sympathetic connections work again to say for sure but I feel like it should be possible to swing it with just Space, assuming all you want is a nudge and maybe a direction when someone says your name. IIRC Fate has some other spells which deal in "recognizing when someone says something significant" so Fate/Space could work for when people say your name in a significant way, or Forces to flag...

[Niknokk]

With any chronicles game I almost always start with a traditional setup, if there is one. Not for use, just as a model to help me get my head around the game. If I think my model's too anodyne I'll start thinking of alternatives and sometimes one will grab me. I'm pretty fond of "something happened, almost every vampire/mage/whatever is dead and all the survivors are scrabbling to reassemble the local government, figure out what happened, and end better than they started".
I don't like thinking of Covenants as monoliths, so I prefer to break it down to individuals and coteries...

[Niknokk]

The video game Cultist Simulator has a whole system about gaining occult knowledge from dreams. The actual mechanics are simple and not that useful for Chronicles, but the fiction is basically that these specific dreams contain all sorts of improbable stuff, including spirits of the dead, visions of divinity, and knowledge from other timelines that reflect your timeline in important ways, and learning secrets from them can be used, with some effort, to find mysterious people, places, and things in the real world once you wake up. It's very focused within the limits of its gameplay but it's very...

[Niknokk]

I'd probably limit something like that to be a bit less powerful than the effects of the spell in question, but I could see someone with good enough sense of things getting a benefit from arranging things properly at a ley line nexus, sure.
I'm reading China Mieville's Kraken right now, and there's a character in there who can fold up complicated machinery and living people and fit them in boxes that they shouldn't be able to fit in, and that don't weigh as much as they should, and they still work properly and can be unfolded without hurting them. That's his whole thing, it's the culmination...

[Niknokk]

You don't necessarily have to compel ephemeral entities with other magic; if they're sentient and able to communicate you can bribe them, leverage their Ban or Bane, or maybe use the Chronicles of Darkness conversation system to strike a deal with them, or just roleplay it. If you take the core gameplay mechanic for getting your summons to do what you want to be talking to them, you can build some open rites or ceremonies or whatever to support that rather than building a ton of rituals to try to cover everything.
This would be dangerous, a lot of the time, at least without a lot of prep...

[Niknokk]

Mechanically, Abjuration is just an opposed roll that uses a character's Resolve + Composure, which every major splat has. Virtue and high Integrity can give bonuses to the roll, and vice versa Vice and low Integrity can give negatives. So, certain splat traits like Cover or Harmony or even Satiety that don't really map to Integrity that well are a bit awkward, thematically, but you could keep Abjurations available but just not hand out those bonuses. If you're including Abjuration in your game because you want more options to interact with ephemeral entities for your players I'd just handwave...