Places

Throughout our world in this 21st century, the Technocratic vision of reality holds the coincidental edge, not simply because of the Union’s indoctrination (although that does have something to do with it) but because science-based technology is rooted in following the laws of Earthly physics. Unlike faith and magic, it’s based upon repeatable, verifiable, consistent results, not mere Enlightened Will, so it tends to work more reliably than mystic magick does.

Note that mystics can, and do, use technological tools in their practices. A wizard can use a cell phone, and a shaman can mow his lawn. Although hardcore primitivists reject all but the simplest technologies, most 21st-century mystics accept Technocratic Reality by default. (Whether that’s a result of brainwashing or practicality is a subject for lively debate…)

The Industrialized World: Science-based technology has made the world into a better place for most human beings. Central heating, advanced medicine, info tech, toilet paper… the Masses really are better off now than they were during the High Mythic Age. And so, as a result, people have faith in the blessings of technology – not just in the devices and Procedures of the Technocracy, but in everyday miracles like cars, soap, and running water.

Thanks to those factors – as well as the large-scale paradigm enforcement on the part of the Order of Reason and its various descendants – the majority of the industrialized world accepts miraculous technology as coincidence. A jetpack will get your mage further than a broomstick will, and guns can do what wands cannot. Mystic Effects, then, have distinct disadvantages when it comes to getting away with magick.

Scientific and Technological Installations: In places dedicated to technology, that technology reigns supreme. Even the weird science of the Etherites and Adepts dominates coincidence in the labs and workshops devoted to those pursuits. Mystic magick is almost always vulgar in such places, and even the more extreme forms of technomagick could be considered vulgar if they contradicted the purposes of a specific laboratory. A HIT Mark at MIT would attract the wrong sort of attention from the thousands of students and faculty members who realize just how impossible such technologies are in their reality. So when you’re trying to figure out the edge between coincidence and vulgarity near a science lab, ask yourself whose version of science dominates the localized belief. After all, the paradigm difference between Arkham University and UCLA is pretty damned big.