Rotes & Procedures

Returning to Escher’s non-Euclidian drawing-board, a mage might elect to mangle localized physics in order to sculpt his surroundings into something that would make Giger’s corpse sit up and applaud. Although such feats are vulgar as a mile-high space-god, their effects (and Effects) get confined to a small area rather than stretched out from horizon to horizon. And so, within Sanctums and Realms that fit the caster’s sense of reality, these bizarre physics are… well, not exactly “coincidental,” but more or less normal for that location.

The game-systems for such redecoration projects are simple, even if the feats themselves are not:

• Correspondence 5, combined with Matter 4 (complex and radical transformations), allows the mage to craft her surroundings into temporary or – with no less than 10 additional successes – permanent landscapes that defy conventional dimensional physics. Permanent changes also require investments of Quintessence – one or two points for small alterations, five points or more for abstract artwork that manages to remain intact.

• Correspondence 5/ Forces 4/ Matter 4/ Prime 2 allows the mage to set up locations where the elements and energies work in normally impossible ways: sculptures of fire, steps of light, water that flows upwards, pockets of lessened gravity or perpetual shadow, and so forth. Again, such creativity demands Quintessence if its artistry is built to last.

• Adding Life 5 to the previous feat allows the mage to go Giger on that landscape, adding trees of flesh, talking hills, or other bizarre accents to the surroundings. This Effect also adjusts the physical properties of local lifeforms so that they adapt to the crazy-ass laws of custom-built reality.

In all cases, the Storyteller should use the Magickal Feats chart to determine the number of successes involved with such undertakings. Hint: This sort of architecture demands many successes!

Once complete, the physics-warping landscape will function more or less normally with regards to the people inside it, allowing people to walk upside-down on Escherian stairways without falling off or disappearing at the border-point. Life 5 will still be essential for living things that want to swim in oceans of fire or breathe concentrated sunlight; the strange dimensional properties, however, won’t affect the functional stability of those mathematically disjointed areas, or keep living things from using them as they might otherwise if those structures weren’t so damned improbable.