Rotes & Procedures

Rules-wise, a mage needs Life 3/ Prime 2 in order to create very simple organisms – plants, crabs, ants, etc. The “social life” of such organisms is largely based upon chemical reactions, and so the mage doesn’t really have to worry about duplicating a specific ant within a colony, so long as he gets the basic chemistry right.

Higher organisms are much trickier: Life 5 for the body, Mind 5 for the consciousness, and Prime 2 for the energy, at the very least. Adding a soul involves Spirit 5 as well. A spirit could be bound into a mindless flesh-bag with a simpler Life 5/ Spirit 4/ Prime 2 Effect, but the resulting creature would essentially be a puppet for the entity inside… which, in many cases, presents its own set of problems.

Growing an organism from samples of another organism is possible through modern Sleeper technology if you’re willing to invest the time and money to do so; bio-labs cook up “basic” clones of simple animals all the time. Rapid cloning, however, still demands the usual Life 5/ Mind 5/ Prime 2 process (often with Time 3 added to “speed the clock”), plus the time it takes to teach and train the resulting critter if you want it to do

anything more than stand around drooling. The complexity of this process explains why the Tellurian isn’t overflowing with Black Suit clones and cyber-tooth tigers. Even with established labs, processes and personnel, creating effective clones demands time, effort and materials.

(A mage with the proper Life, Mind, and Prime Spheres could quickly conjure up simple beasts to fight his battles for him; such instant genesis, however, is vulgar as hell, and the resulting creations won’t be good for much other than simple labor or combat.)

Once the living creature exists, a mage could use Mind 4 or 5 to “imprint” a speed-teaching process on that creature; that process, though, would require plenty of successes if the mage wants his creation to be even remotely intelligent. The vast range of skills and understanding mastered by even a household pet, much less a functional human being, is staggering. The Storyteller may rule that a creature who has not been given an extensive training and adjustment period suffers significant penalties with social, mental, and probably physical feats (possibly a +3 difficulty to all but the simplest activities) because it hasn’t had enough time and experience to learn how to function beyond the bare minimum of its capabilities. Again, a Time 3 Effect can speed that process up considerably; that’s vulgar too, though. Even if the mage uses an additional Mind 5 Effect to transfer or duplicate an existing creature’s

consciousness onto a “blank slate” clone, that clone will need some time to adjust its muscle-memory to accommodate the imprinted data.

(All this explains why Doctors Frankenstein and West had such rotten luck with their creations; it’s one thing to energize a complex biomass, but quite another to produce a functional member of society.)