User Profile

[Professor Phobos]

The other thing that'd be nice is a set of consistent keywords for anti-magical effects. So for example, the Arisen are immune to Time Magic, and they are Timeless, so we could assign "Immunity to a Particular Arcana=Xless" keyword. Deathless, Spiritless, Mindless, etc.

Then you could do Resistant which is just extra Withstand, something for "anti-Yantras" which make magic more difficult under certain conditions - hard to scry someone on the ocean for example. Maybe "Draining" for stuff that bleeds or charges Mana, "Polluted" for stuff that...

[Professor Phobos]

I dunno, I could see a variety of "mundane" counter-measures tossing a -2 penalty to spells, or boosting Withstand by 1 or 2. Protective amulets, that kind of stuff. The Mystery system often levies restrictions or penalties on magic but there aren't consistent guidelines for how to generate them; as a storyteller, if I want to establish the Weird Forest Outside of Town doesn't permit scrying within it, I'm totally within the bounds of the game to set that up, but I have no real assistance in doing so and theoretically it's a disadvantage to the players expectations of how their magic...

[Professor Phobos]

The ocean stuff does make me wish they'd established a set of rules for "ambient magical environment modifiers" or somesuch to cover the kinds of situational challenges that might affect magic. Harder to find people on the ocean. Certain magics work better at night or during the day. A man walking widdershins shakes off a tracking spell. Stuff like that....

[Professor Phobos]

Really liked the history chapter; one of the major complaints back when Mage 1e came out was how kind of empty the backstory was in terms of "contingent narrative" and a connection to history. They solved this over time and I feel like they really nailed it with this section.

The "world overview" chapter seems to assume by default waaaay more Mages than my own mental demographics; it could just be the consequence of trying to describe a society with complex internal dynamics in general terms, which always seems to imply larger numbers than the setting require...