It’s easy to influence people who’re already inclined to follow you. And so, certain Background Traits allow the mage to use influence-based feats more easily on her followers than she could on strangers, peers or enemies.

In game terms, figure that a “character under the influence” can be easily swayed by minor feats – perhaps at a -3 to the usual difficulty, or maybe even with no roll at all. Major acts of influence (oaths, benign possession, conceptual entropy, etc.) would be at their normal difficulty, and traumatic ones (psychic assault, malicious possession, and so forth) actually add +3 to the difficulty, thanks to the sense of betrayal involved in the act.

Naturally, a smart leader will phrase her influence in ways that the followers are inclined to go along with her, not to op-pose her. And if they’re already inclined toward violence, hate, ignorance and fanaticism, those followers could be convinced to do some pretty horrific things…

The following Backgrounds reflect a certain amount of preexisting influence:

• A mage with the Backgrounds Cult, Retainers, and Spies could consider the characters who are covered by that Background to be under the mage’s influence to begin with.

• A player whose mage has Fame, Influence, Rank, or Resources could roll the Background as a dice pool, with each success reflecting a number of people who are under that character’s influence by default. The exact number will depend a lot upon who the mage is, what she’s doing, how she’s doing it, and to whom she’s exerting that influence. Certain leaders or celebrities command loyalty from thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people, while others are lucky to make a single Twitter post without being heckled off the Internet.

• The Allies, Backup, Familiar, Mentor, Patron, and Totem Backgrounds do not count as “characters under the influence,” as such characters tend to have their own ideas about their relationship to the mage in question.