Merits & Flaws

Your metaphysical practice demands specialized instru­ ments. It’s not simply that you need fuel for your hypermodded Porsche 911 Turbo S – you need your own specially prepared blend of fuels, or the car won’t go. A simple rowan wand will not suffice – your spells demand a hand-carved branch cut from an unscarred rowan tree at high midnight on Samhain Eve. In game terms, at least one of the instruments in your magickal focus must be specifically created, harvested or modified to work with your magicks. No lesser tool will suffice.

How hard is it to procure or employ this specialized com­ ponent? That depends on the value of the Flaw:

• (2 points) Easy to procure and /or employ (sunlight, yoga postures, motor oil, strong emotions, a book commonly found in the New Age section at your local bookstore, etc.).

• (3 points) Challenging to procure, employ, or replace (open flames, the Kurmasana posture, professional racing oil, genuine sorrow, an out-of-print occult text, and so on).

• (4 points) Pretty damned hard to obtain, employ, and replace (liquid fire, the Vrschikasana pose, alchemically formulated oil, deep-core grief, a genuine Roman text of De Daemonum Socrates by Apuleius, and other rare and precious instruments).

• (5 points) Unique, obscure, forbidden, cumbersome, or some combination of those four (a bottle of alchemically distilled sunfire, an impossibly complex yoga posture invented by the practitioner, personally formulated and distilled hypertech lubricating oil, the heartfelt scream of a grieving mother, a woodcut-illustrated Renaissance Grimoire of Honorius inscribed on flayed human skin, and similarly rarified instruments).

When used, the chosen instrument functions as a Personalized Instrument (Mage 20, pp. 503 and 587) – possibly a Unique Personalized one in the case of a five-point component. In your case, however, you cannot employ the magick that’s connected to that instrument at all unless you’re also able to employ that particular instrument. If Lee Ann Milner depends upon a unique vengeful centipede yoga posture in order to employ certain Forces Effects through her yoga practice, then Lee Ann is SOL unless she can assume that posture in time to deploy the necessary Effects.

In the original version of this Flaw, the material was bound to a specific Sphere Effect. This revised version ties the Crucial Component to a tool you employ. This change makes it easier to keep track of the component and its uses, employing the new focus rules presented in Mage 20, Chapter Ten, so that the Flaw becomes an integral part of the way your mage performs magickal Effects. For details about Assigning Practices and Instruments to Effects, see the section of that name in Chapter Three, p. 169.