Magical Charts for Mage in Dusk[]
Here are a number of lists and charts that will help you streamline using Magic in the room.
Casting Magic[]
What do you want to do, and how?[]
- What Effect are you attempting to do and how?
- What is your character doing, within his or her paradigm, to make it happen?
- How does your Effect appear?
- How long does it take?
Do you know how to do it?[]
- Does your mage have the appropriate Sphere knowledge?
- Does your mage need any mudane Abilities to help?
- Does your mage's paradigm (magical beleifs) support the form of the effect?
Did you succeed?[]
- Roll your character's Arete versus the appropriate difficulty
- Coincidental: Highest Sphere used +3
- Vulgar without Witnesses: Highest Sphere +4
- Vulgar with Witnesses: Highest Sphere +5
- Add or subtract any modifiers up to +/- 3 total
- Spend Quintessence and/ or Willpower, if desired
- Check the number of your successes
- Check thresholds and remove successes
- Repeat for extended effects
What happened?[]
- How much effect did your magic have?
- Did the target resist your Effect? Remove their successes, and check remaining sucesses
- Did you succeed? Assign the Effect, and take any appropriate Paradox (one per highest Sphere level for Vulgar effects, plus one with witnesses).
- Did you fail? If you did but didn't botch, take any appropriate Paradox, and watch the Effect fizzle.
- Did you botch?
- Coincidental Botch: Gain one point of Paradox per dot in the highest Sphere used.
- Vulgar Botch without Witnesses: Gain one point of Paradox for botching + one per dot in the highest Sphere.
- Vulgar Botch with Witnesses: Gain two points of Paradox + two points per dot in the highest Sphere.
- Apply Paradox.
- To apply a backlash in raw damage, roll dice equal to the number of points of Paradox accumulated at difficulty 6. You can soak this damage with Stamina. Apply the unsoaked amount of bashing damage to your mage.
- The bigger the Effect, the nastier the potential Backlash. Each roll after the first adds one more Paradox point to a Backlash's total, on top of anything gained for the botch. This Paradox does not apply if the ritual succeeds or fails without botching.
- Did you get more than five points of Paradox? The Paradox spirits in Denver tend to be particularaly annoying. Suffering odd effects are as likely, or even more likely, than experiencing damage when more than three dots are accumulated.
- If the roll botches, you may spend a turn (or whatever unit of time the ritual rolls take) and a Willpower point to avoid screwing up the whole affair. By spending the Willpower, you make your mage keep the magic going — barely — but you lose one previously rolled success in the
process as well as the Willpower point. From there, you must increase the difficulty by one, as if you had failed the roll. A second botch destroys the Effect utterly and brings Paradox crashing down on the caster. - If the ritual is disrupted by an outside force — like an attack or a distraction — you must make a Willpower roll (difficulty 8) or botch the whole Effect.
Magical Reference Charts[]
Notes[]
- The Magical Difficulties chart offers the pluses and minuses of some possible circumstances, but it doesn't cover every possibility. Adjucate (or have a ST) additional modifiers with this chart as a guide, but remember that no more than three points of modification can effect a roll either direction (+/-).
- Use the Magical Feats chart to determine the rough required successes for most magical Effects. Compare with the Degree of Sucess chart to determine how well the Effect does what was desired. For large Effects, it's best to use an extended roll to score enough successes.
- Check the Damage and Duration chart to see how much damage or benefit an Effect had or how long it will last. The Aggravated Damage list explains which types of attacks inflict aggravated wounds automatically; other types do lethal or bashing damage unless the ST rules that the attack is sufficiently severe.
- Remember that these charts are guidelines. Keep the spirit of magic in mind, and not the rules. Magic is a tough art, but its also rewarding. Be fair, and promote the story. When in doubt ask a ST, who always has final say.
Magical Difficulties[]
Maximum modifier: +/-3. Minimum difficulty of 3, maximum of 10. Extra modifiers add to threshold, requiring additional successes.
Forf a detailed explanation of these modifiers, see the Modifier Table page provided on this wiki.
| Activity | Difficulty Modifier |
| Researches lore on subject before using magic | -1 to -3 |
| Has item resonating with target's essence (sympathetic magic) | -1 to -3 |
| Near a Node | -1 to -3 |
| Uses a specialty focus | -1 |
| Uses a unique focus | -1 |
| Uses a focus when its not required | -1 |
| Extra time spent on each step of magic (Spend mutiple posts for one roll) | -1 |
| Spending Quintessence | -1 per point to a max of -3 |
| Appropriate Resonance (personal or from Tass) | -1 |
| Opposed Resonance (personal or from Tass) | +1 |
| Distant or hidden object | +1 |
| Fast-Casting (without a known rote on the sheet) | +1 |
| Mage destracted | +1 to +3 |
| Mage in conflict with Avatar | +1 to +3 |
| Domino effect | +1 to +3 |
| Outlandish or greater feat | +1 to +3 |
| Surpassing a necessary focus | +3 |
.
Magical Feats[]
Do not use this chart for direct damage effects, use the damage/duration chart. Anything requiring 10 or more successes requires ST consultation.
|
Level of Feat; with examples |
Sucesses Required |
| Simple Feat: Lighting a candle by touch, enhancing your defenses, defending yourself from a mental attack with Mind. | 1 |
| Standard Feat:Creating a small fire at range, sensing someone else with Mind or Life magic, healing yourself. | 2 |
| Difficult Feat: Igniting a flammable object at range, reading or effecting someone's emotions with Mind magic, transforming yourself. | 3 |
| Impressive Feat: Blasting someone with fire, forcing someone to perform an action, altering someone else's shape in some minor way. | 4 |
| Mighty Feat: Blowing down a wall, altering someone's psyche, conjuring a fantastc living creature. | 5-10 |
| Outlandish Feat: Blowing apart a car, turning a small mob into drones, binding a potent spirit. | 10-20 |
| Godlike Feat: Blowing up a building, putting a whole city to sleep, rewriting your own pattern permenently. | 20+ |
In Dusk area and duration are generally independent of the actual feat's required successes. In some cases, the Damage and Duration chart can give an idea of the scale of an effect.
Damage and Duration[]
- Scoring Damage: Each success expended to score damage inflicts up to two levels of damage. For Mind attacks its bashing, for most other Spheres, its lethal. Charged with Quintessence. its aggravated. Forces attacks inflict one extra level of damage automatically.
- Scoring Duration: Each success expended on duration extends the duration beyond instant/one post as follows. Any effect you want to last longer than a week requires ST approval.
- 1 success expended = a scene
- 2 successes expended = a day
- 3 successes expended = a week
- 4 successes expended = a month
- 5 successes expended = six months
- 6+ ST's discretion
For Enchanting items, the timetable is:
- 1 success expended = a week
- 2 successes expended = a month
- 3 successes expended = a year
- 4 successes expended = permanent
- Scoring Area: Affecting a Pattern other tnan the mage himself requires a success. Each additional Pattern effected after the first requires an additional success. Affecting large areas requires additional successes at the ST's discretion. A giant ball of flame is much harder to make than a single, focused bolt of fire.
- Example of total scoring: A mage scores four successes on a vulgar fire blast. Two successes are used for damage, so it inflicts five levels of aggrivated damage (four for the successes, one from the forces effect, aggravated from being fire). One success is used because it's affecting a target other than the mage, and the last success is used to strike an additional target. Two targets are struck with the fire blast, each taking five levels of aggravated damage.
Degree of Success[]
- Botch: The mage fails to bend the tapestry correctly, and the entire effect comes crashing down. No effect occurs, and the mage gains paradox (and that may just have an effect of its own!)
- Total Failure: No successes, but no botch. Includes successes cancelled by ones rolled or by thresholds. The spell has no effect, yet. The mage may continue, but with cumulative difficulty penalty of one. He may also quit and start over. Paradox accumulates for vulgar Effects just as if the spell had succeeded.
- Beginning success: Some successes, but less than fifty percent. The magic has not formed completely, but it can still be finished properly. Continuing the Effect incurs a cumulative difficulty penalty of one, if desired (depending on cercumstance). If the mage stops now, the Effect only has some minor, trivial result, and Paradox accrues normally.
- Partial success: Fifty percent or more of the necessary successes. The mystic accomplishes what they set out to do, but not as well as they would have liked. The Effect is incomplete, missing some pieces or in some way flawed. The mage can continue to accumulate successes if desired, at an increased difficulty, or he may stop and take the paradox while leaving the effect in a semi-functional state.
- Success: 100% of the successes required. The mage does exactly what they wanted to do.
- Extraordinary success: Hundred and fifty percent or better! The mage not only succeeds, he succeeds brilliantly. The Effect has a much greater range and strength than he had hoped for originally, but not to much to go outside the bounds of the mages intent. Some all-or-nothing Effects might not have extraordinary results (you did, or you didn't, there is no try), at the ST's discretion.
Correspondence Ranges[]
| Successes | Range | Connection |
| One | Line of Sight | Body Sample |
| Two | Very Familiar | Close possession or companion |
| Three | Familiar | Possession or casual friend |
| Four | Visited once | Acquaintance or object used once |
| Five | Described location | Briefly touched or met object in person |
| Six | Anywhere on Earth | No connection |
Time Lines[]
Remember, these limits apply only to reaching or looking through Time, not to the actual duration of lasting effects. Sometimes areas may be blocked from sight, and other may be "fuzzy" due to probability.
| Successes | Effect Time-span |
| One | Within a year |
| Two | Five years |
| Three | 20 years |
| Four | 50 years |
| Five | 100 years |
| Six+ | 500 years |
| Ten+ | 1000 years or more |