Merits & Flaws

You get along especially well with a certain type of spirit entity. Depending upon your practice, you might relate well with nature spirits, High Umbral Courtiers, Digital Web en­ tities, the Restless Dead, the Loa, angelic or demonic beings, and so forth.

When you’re dealing with entities within a single selected category, you reduce the difficulty of your summoning and negotiation rolls by -2. (See the section that deals with Sum­

moning, Binding, Bargaining, and Warding in How Do You

DO That?, pp. 90-95.) This bonus does not apply to attempts to bind or ward against such beings, as it’s based upon goodwill, not force. It does, however, apply to the Arete rolls when casting the summoning Effect (within the normal modifier limits, as usual), because the entities in question are more inclined to show up when you call upon them.

For three additional points per category, you may add another category of spirits, assuming that your practice favors an affinity for such spirits. (A BCD Void Engineer “ghost-buster,” for example, could not purchase an Affinity for ghosts, though a necromancer could certainly do so.) If you abuse this goodwill, as one might imagine, this bonus, and the Merit, both go away – and might wind up being replaced by a Flaw like Immortal Enemy (p. 93) if your mage behaves in an especially foolish manner.