Everything

A savant of bureaucracy, you slash your way through official obstructionism. When red tape unspools across your path, you know who to talk to, which forms to fill out, and where the loopholes are. A few calls to the right people, and official obstacles disappear as if by magic(k). After all, it’s not what you ask for but who you ask, and how.

When faced with the near-inevitable morass of bureaucra­ cy, subtract -2 from all difficulties that involve dealing with the system. To use this Merit, you need to decide what you want to accomplish and how you want to go about doing that. Your character makes the requisite calls to the requisite people, and the dice determine the rest. Backgrounds like Alternate Identity,

Backup, Certification, Contacts, Influence, Rank, Requisitions,

Retainers, Secret Weapons, and Spies often involve bureaucra­ cies, and Allies, Chantry, Resources, and other Backgrounds might feature red tape if the Background in question comes from a larger organization. Although it’s most helpful for members of the Technocratic Union, any modern mage can find this Merit useful. Hermetic Chantries are infamous for byzantine bureau­ cracy, and the courts of classical China pretty much invented such things, making this an appropriate Merit for Wu Lung and certain monastic Akashayana.