Sophia’s Choice [Mage: The Awakening]

Mage: The Awakening, Open Development

Wizards

We’ve explored a lot of the setting and the character creation options of the game, so now it’s time to make a U-Turn and dig into the Mage Template itself. First up on this tour is Wisdom.

Pride’s counter and Gnosis’ counterpart, Wisdom is both an in-world concept (older factions in the Orders call it Sophia), and a central game trait. A wise mage knows when and where to use her powers and when to show restraint. She casts spells without injuring the souls of others, and suffers fewer and lighter paradoxes. Although most mages outwardly laud the very wise, it’s much like Sleepers agreeing that very moral people are upstanding – saintly mages exist, but most are content with being only as wise as they personally are, justify their excesses as pragmatism and point to those further down the slide as the real problem. The Orders definitely don’t agree on what behaviours constitute “wise,” each having blind spots and behaviors they promote that can be counterproductive for a mage trying to practice restraint.

Integrity, not Morality

Magic is a transformative act that leaves its mark on the soul of the practitioner. If you act without regard for consequences often enough, your grip on your spells becomes looser. conversely, only enacting very precise imagos without side effects and keeping within the limits of your Arcana helps to build that control.

Second edition Awakening is distancing the Wisdom trait from morality as an automatic association – many actions that risk Wisdom are also by nature rather immoral (mind controlling someone to get your way and not repairing the damage you’ve done, for example) but mages no longer always risk losing Wisdom for committing mundane crimes – which does not, I should point out, mean that you only risk it for casting spells.

The Wisdom trait represents how much control a character has over her magic, and (as magic is channeled through the soul) the relative integrity and health of her soul. More than that, though, it represents how much the character cares about the impact of her magic on others. High-Wisdom mages cast magic subtly and carefully, minimizing the effects of witnessing the supernatural on Sleeper’s Integrity. They act with care for consequences, rather than abusing their gnosis to impose their own selfish ends. Low-Wisdom mages are direct and at times brutal with their spells, using too much power or creating indiscriminate spell effects because it’s easier and faster.

Wisdom is put at risk through acts of hubris, ignoring the consequences of one’s actions to achieve goals. Effects that damage the soul (some Death spells, or the attacks of a few supernatural monsters) can “injure” Wisdom temporarily, until their duration wears off.

Wisdom does *not* determine how “good” a character is – only how *careful* he is. You can have a high-Wisdom Seer of the Throne who practices extreme caution in using the Exarchs’ gift or a low-Wisdom firebrand with good intentions who casts before he looks. Mundane acts of hubris are less severe if they’re carefully preplanned; Mage is one of the few World of Darkness systems where premeditated murder is better than panicked killing in self defense!

Effects of Wisdom

While Gnosis determines how overtly supernatural a mage’s nimbus is, Wisdom determines how far it spreads – the lower the further.

At permanent Wisdom 0 (not through “injury”, but hubris), a character becomes one of “the Mad”, a mage with a broken soul who has lost conscious control of her magic and “leaks” Supernal energy. Being Mad is incurable except perhaps through archmastery of Death.

Mage characters attempting to contain a Paradox within their own pattern contest the Paradox roll by rolling Wisdom.

High and Low Wisdom provides dice modifiers to interacting with Goetia and Supernal Entities, but not Spirits and Ghosts.

Tiers and Acts of Hubris

Mechanically, Wisdom resembles Humanity from Requiem Second Edition more than Integrity, Cover, Harmony, or their equivalents. The full range of possible Wisdom scores is divided into Tiers, with associated suggested acts of hubris. When a player creates their character or moves to a new tier, they also define at least one custom act of hubris that would risk Wisdom for their character.

How many Tiers? Well, that’s still in flux, design-wise. The mage’s long-term nimbus spreads across their sympathetic connections according to how many tiers they’ve dropped, so the number of grouped dots will match the number of discrete levels on the sympathetic connection table, which is *itself* in flux. (Although, and this is a spoiler for when we eventually look at sympathy, it’s got fewer steps in it than in first edition.) So, at least three (high, medium, low) and maybe as many as five (with 2 dots in each tier).

Each tier has a number of dice associated with it. When your character commits an act of hubris, you roll that many dice. If your act was in service to your Virtue, add a die. If it was in the pursuit of an Obsession lose a die. Failure loses a dot and imposes a condition (persistent for dramatic failure) from a different list for mages than those used in Integrity.

Whenever you make a degeneration check for an act of hubris, take an Arcane Beat.

So what’s going on the list? Stealing souls, creating a soul stone, using magic to achieve something you could have done without it, having an innocent bystander get caught up in one of your spells, increasing your Paradox Risk by allowing a Sleeper to witness obvious magic, not attempting to contain a severe Paradox, binding beings (whether ephemeral entities or humans) forcibly to your will, allowing a Supernal being to be consumed by the Fallen World, dealing with the Abyss.

Using mundane means to commit an act of hubris makes the roll easier – it’s still prideful to force your own desires on the world, but using spells to do it is worse. Using a Legacy Attainment is never an act of hubris – the character’s gnosis and soul are altered to accept that act, so it doesn’t risk the soul’s stability.

Inuring

If a mage suffers Wisdom loss through use of a spell, she can choose to wipe that spell from future acts of hubris; any future uses will not incur Wisdom loss. If she chooses to do this, to inure herself to the spell’s hubris, it forever becomes a Paradox risk. From that point forward, every use of the inured spell forces a base two die Paradox risk. Your character may inure herself to the effects of one spell per dot of Gnosis.

Next Week:

We’ll continue our second trip around the core mechanics with Attainments or Nimbus.