Instruments

Although you can’t usually carry a laboratory around with you (although certain portable labs can be stuck inside a vehicle, trailer, or suitcase), such places of labor provide essential instruments for technological, alchemical, and elaborate ritual practices. Generally, a mage employs his laboratory to refine other tools and spells for his practice, then uses the results of that lab work as his portable instruments. Still, without that lab, he’d be more or less worthless. You can’t grow clones, install cybernetics, or refine base materials into perfection without a good lab.

By extension, lab equipment – beakers, crucibles, centrifuges, generators, analyzers, and other sundry (though expensive) tech that procures results – constitutes an essential array of tools for the practicing scientist or technician. Even old-school mystics use labs occasionally, though they might refer to them as dungeons, workrooms, sanctuaries, and so forth. Within such space, a mage can work through difficult puzzles, experiment with methods, and enjoy a fairly secure space where Consensus interference is a bad memory.

(An established laboratory space makes an obvious Sanctum, as in the Background Trait of that name. See Chapter Six for details.)