The Pattern Arts
Rote · Mage
Combined with Life, the elemental Spheres of Forces and Matter make up what’s often called the Pattern Arts (see Mage 20, p. 67 and 511): principles that allow a mage to construct, transform, animate, energize, enchant, or destroy physical objects and forces. For while Correspondence deals with spatial dimensions, Entropy with probabilities, Mind with consciousness, Prime with raw energy, and Time with temporal phenomena, the Pattern Arts allow mages to literally get their hands around their magicks. Spirit could also be considered a quasi-Pattern Art, dealing with the forms and principles of extra-physical realities. The “formal” Pattern Arts, however, grant
influence over Earthly bodies – things you can easily touch, measure, and otherwise sense even if you’re not a mage. And so, the Pattern Arts form the “building blocks” of magickal understanding within the physical world, the Spheres that let a person construct, alter, or annihilate his world at will.
Generally speaking, elemental magick takes five different yet related forms:
• Manipulating an element that’s already present – spread-ing a fire, warping metal, directing a wind, shaping water into a wall, dropping the temperature in a room, and so forth.
• Shifting a collection of simple elements into a complex combination of them – turning dirt into bread, morphing stone into a computer, making a carriage out of a pumpkin, and the like.
• Mutating one element into another – changing water into stone, igniting ice into fire, shifting flesh into metal, and other related tricks.
• Conjuring an element that was not already present – throwing a lightning bolt, creating a wall, summoning a flood, creating fire in the palm of your hands, and similar phenomena.
• Creating an elemental substance that did not exist before – water-diamonds, glassine wood, unique alloys or plastics, and other unique substances.
A mage may combine these applications too. Given time and materials, Chopper could electrify a bowl of water until it burns (manipulation and mutation, possibly with conjuration involved as well).
As detailed in Mage 20, Chapter Ten, extensive alterations and/ or complex transformation may require higher Sphere Ranks than small and simple ones. Manipulating a breeze would demand Forces 2, while manipulating a hurricane would demand Forces 5. Tuning rocks into steel is easy (Matter 2), but
turning them into cars is not (Matter 4, plus Forces 3/ Prime 2 if you want that car to run). See the individual Sphere entries for the details pertaining to each Sphere and its capabilities.
All elemental magicks employ the appropriate Spheres for the elements in question, and at the appropriate Ranks for the size of that Effect.
• To perceive the flow of elemental energies, use Forces 1. To perceive details about elemental substances, use Matter 1. For further details, see Enhanced Perceptions,