INITIATE ROTES

​

Prerequisites: Occult ◉ Arete  ◉ Relevant sphere rank ◉

​SUCCESSES REQUIRED ◉ (however you may need other successes to allocate where appropriate)

​

​

​

​

​

Correspondence

Sense Connection
Correspondence ◉
Powerful uses of Correspondence pull places together or wrap space around like taffy. The proper rituals allow the mage to sense such distortions. This Effect is handy in determining if there's a gate nearby, whether someone is scrying or whether an object is being manipulated remotely. The mage can also determine if a Pattern has a specific connection to another Pattern. Obviously, this knowledge is extremely useful in sympathetic magic, or in determining what would be a good item to use or place to work a specific Effect. Note that a mage can't necessarily tell what something is connected to. The Effect merely indicates the presence or absence of an unusual Correspondence.

​

Landscape of the Mind
Correspondence ◉
One of the most basic Correspondence exercises, this Effect opens the mage's awareness to her surroundings without recourse to normal senses. With concentration and ritual, the mage can "feel" or perceive a great area of space, although extreme areas are both difficult to encompass magically (requiring many successes) and difficult to process mentally (generally requiring the aid of Mind magic for anything beyond a city block in area).

Whereami?
Correspondence ◉
Absolute sense of space gives the mage a perfect determination of her relative location. Combined with Spirit, the mage can even intuit location within spirit worlds, and thus find her place almost anywhere in the Tellurian. Mind magic lets the mage determine the validity of her senses and establish whether she's hallucinating or dreaming. Naturally, wards can alter or block such perceptions, and Paradox or Quiet might confuse the issue. In most cases, this Effect simply lets the mage get a rough idea of where she is relative to some axis other normal, familiar world, so that she can get home or find her way. This Effect gets its name from the Virtual Adepts, who tend to use computer-aided maps and positioning to determine location.

​

Entropy

Locate Disorder and Weakness
Entropy ◉
By using Entropy senses, the mage can locate areas of chaos, disorder and decay. A simple sensory Effect determines roughly where an object may break, where an occurrence may happen randomly or how a sequence of events may fall out. With more successes, the mage gets more detailed and accurate information. By concentrating on an organizational structure, the mage can find the most disorganized and chaotic point. Doing so can be useful in determining areas that may be difficult to understand, or places where a few more little changes may go unnoticed. Focusing on a Pattern, the mage can sense the weakest areas and make a devastating attack in those places. Applying the magical senses lets the mage use his Entropy magic to augment his damage roll

Ring of Truth
Entropy ◉
For those who believe in such things, destiny has a way of coming to the fore. Prophets speak the words of destiny, and events come to pass; people make simple statements that turn out to hold profound truths. Attention to destiny (or just to the patterns that indicate when someone is most likely to lie or to be right about something) can tell a mage whether someone's words hold accuracy.
The Ring of Truth relies on some tie to destiny to determine veracity. Although this powerful Effect can help a mage determine if someone is lying or if the individual's words are somehow important, it has limits. The mage can only analyze something that has meaning to her — a question that has no relevance to the mage or the subject cannot be analyzed. That is, the mage cannot simply query a random person on the street, or even a cabal-mate, about sundry details of the Technocracy and expect an objective assessment of truth if the questions are without connection or context to the subject. Furthermore, the Effect is not infallible, and it often leaves the mage with cryptic hunches or incomplete answers. Fate is fickle. "Reply hazy. Try again later".

​

​

Forces

Darksight
Forces ◉
In the absence of visible light, the mage can shift his perceptions up or down the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. This allows him to view infrared or ultraviolet light, radio waves, X-rays, etc. He won't be able to discern colors, but he may read other interesting perceptions from the various spectra — X-rays would allow him to see an object's underlying structure, and he could see in the dark using infrared.
Virtual Adepts and Sons of Ether tend to use special visual lenses, filter programs or goggles for this Effect, and they look through scientific spectra. Mystical magicians use this power to see by heat or sound, often mimicking natural creatures that can do the same.

Quantify Energy
Forces ◉
By invoking this Effect, a mage can sense the type and amount of energy at work around her. She can easily translate her perceptions into accurate measurement units such as volts, amps and teslas. Note that this quantification includes kinetic energy, which allows a mage to determine an object's speed in relation to her if she knows the object's mass. Just because a mage can sense and quantify energy doesn't necessarily let her make sense of it. A mage could note the presence of radio waves, but he might not be able to translate and hear them immediately.

​

Life

Life Scan
Life ◉
A simple attachment to a computer can search for the bio-fields of nearby living creatures, allowing a Virtual Adept to determine the locations and conditions of such targets. Although such scans require additional work (and Correspondence) to reach over a great distance, they can be helpful in targeting friends or enemies, since the Virtual Adept can recognize individual Patterns that have been detected and logged previously. Most Virtual Adepts also include special filter programs to cut out undesired life-forms from the scan, like microscopic organisms or simple vermin (aside from Technocrats).
Many other Traditions can perform a similar Effect with an appropriate scrying tool. A Verbena might use a mirror that shows images of nearby creatures, while a Euthanatos sniffs for the distinctive scents of various creatures.

Prayer of Healing Revelation
Life ◉
The Celestial Chorus studies Life magic to detect illness and injury. These Disciples learn to identify flaws that indicate various diseases, injuries, poisons and parasitic infestations in a life form's Pattern. The mystic must usually make a Perception roll when scanning the Pattern. The more successes scored on the Effect, the more specific the information she receives. One success might reveal poison, two might reveal that the poison is affecting the respiratory process, and three successes might determine the poison to be arsenic.

​

​

Matter

Analyze Substance
Matter ◉
Any number of simple enchantments can be used to determine material properties. The mage could pick out gold from iron pyrite and tell exactly what a chair's made of and how much weight it can hold. Mages do so in many and varied ways. Sons of Ether and Virtual Adepts use their favorite tricorder-style sensing devices, Hermetics often compare to known samples and look for disparities, Ecstatics just "go with the flow" and pick whatever feels right.

Fragments of Dream
Matter ◉
Dreamspeakers view all manner of fragments of the Earth Mother's dreams. By tapping such dreams, they can expand their perception of Matter. The mage extends her senses beyond physical reality into Pattern. She no longer sees matter in the same way: instead of a brick wall, for instance, she sees its Pattern in her mind's eye.
This Effect allows the mage to perceive tilings that would be unseen in physical reality. She could sense the contents of a room beyond a wall, or detect objects or structures that might otherwise be hidden, such as a false bottom of a suitcase. Really dense or complex Patterns may be more difficult to penetrate.

​

​

Mind

Mind Empowerment
Mind ◉
The mage's mental discipline, even at this rudimentary level, lets her accomplish prodigious feats easily. She can focus on multiple tasks at once, improve her thinking capabilities and focus her concentration. The mage can reach out to feel others' emotions, defend herself (rudimentarily) from such intrusion or enhance her mental capabilities.
The mind-shielding of an Initiate is crude but effective: The mage's successes on the Effect counter direct Mind assaults. Very subtle or skilled assailants may be able to bypass this protection, and the mage's mental defenses at this level of skill are obvious to anyone who cares to probe the magician's psyche. This Effect can at least keep out some unwanted guests though.
Empowering mental processes allows the mage to function like a calculator or computer. He can work through information rapidly and with little or no error, and he can collate facts and logical data. The successes scored either cut down the time necessary to process information accurately, or allow the mage to multi-task and concentrate on multiple avenues of thought at once. Although the mage still moves, responds and acts at his normal rate, he can engage in battle while simultaneously thinking about several problems and deciding what sort of tie to wear for formal dinner later that evening. The mage can even improve her Mental Attributes temporarily and artificially, although surpassing human limitations or supercharging her mind for too long can risk Pattern bleeding With emotional sensitivity, the mage can "see" auras as multicolored halos that reflect the emotions of a person or object, or even feel some level of the subject's emotion. Strong emotions practically scream out at the mage, and they may even be traumatic if the mage does not defend herself with mental shielding. A knowledgeable mage can also detect some types of supernatural activity or creatures by watching an aura. She can even tell as a subject goes through mood shifts. Watching reactions to others lets the mage tell friend from foe, and the mage can also determine when a subject is lying, with careful study and a handful of successes on the die roll. The mage can also determine when an area has strong emotions associated with it, or sense the presence of Resonance in a given form of Tass or at a Node.

No-Mind
Mind ◉
A simple examination for nearby mental Patterns allows the mage to detect other thinking beings in the area, and to determine their positions, individual genders and types. The mage senses the closest minds first in a pattern that radiates outward, but he can screen out known types deliberately. The Akashic Brotherhood performs this Effect through the "No-Mind" technique, emptying their own thoughts to clear away their minds and make them more sensitive to others, but the other Traditions have similar mind-sensing Effects as well.

​

​

Prime

Consecration
Prime ◉
A mage may allow the ether to suffuse his aura, so that his unique pattern of psychic Resonance bleeds over and into an object and forges an etheric bond between the two. This phenomenon occurs naturally, and Sleepers even make it happen subconsciously, but the magic of Prime can perform quickly what is usually an extended process. Such consecrated objects are useful in that, as they are considered part of a person's Pattern, they will thus transform, translate or otherwise change along with the subject to whom they belong. There is also some risk to this Effect, for such intimately connected items can be a great danger if they fall into the hands of an enemy. Likewise, a person or a place may be aurally marked in this manner, the subject linked to the place or person, and the person or place linked to them in turn.
Naturally, such sympathetic magic causes an object to carry some of the mage's Resonance Traits, and it may seem to have a "personality" of its own, reflecting the owner. An object so suffused typically counts more closely as a connection to the mage on the Correspondence Ranges chart.
With Prime 2, it's possible to form such a bond with a living creature. Although this bond doesn't help the mage to sense the creature's thoughts or moods without Mind magic, it is used in the formation of familiar bonds (for familiars with living forms) and sometimes as a sort of "lifeline" to valued friends or loved ones. The mage can always use his Prime senses to track back the link, as long as it exists.

Heart's Blood
Prime ◉
An initiate of Prime can easily sense the flow of Quintessence through his own body — his life energy. This energy flows from the Tellurian, through the Life Pattern and back out to rejoin the cosmos. Each point corresponds to a health level, the last three on beyond Incapacitated and their loss resulting in death. In desperate times, mages skilled in Prime — typically the Celestial Chorus and the Verbena — can push themselves beyond their limits and "give 'til it hurts," taking the additional health levels as points of Quintessence above and beyond what is stored in their Avatars. Such damage may only be healed by time and bed rest, not magic, so most mages will usually only risk the Bruised health level. Mages of the Chorus, however, have burned themselves out in acts of martyrdom to perform one last holy miracle, while Verbena with low Avatar ratings often use their Bruised health level as a power reservoir, considering the sacrifice of heart's blood more holy than the spiritual energy used by most mages.

Watch the Weaving
Prime ◉
This Effect is not so much a spell as an additional degree of sensitivity. When any magical Effect is attempted within the vicinity of a disciple of Prime, he may roll Perception + Occult  to detect the weaving of the etheric threads.

This rote once activated counts as an active effect and the mage gets to reflexively roll Perception + Occult Difficulty 12+ rank of sphere/ gift/discipline/Evocation/Spell ritual that is in play. This includes passives. 

It does not however tell the mage much else, other than that magic is being used. It does not identify the magic type or individual casting it. Multiple uses of magic or a plethora of magical items in one location can make it hard to lock down one particular effect.

Note: Mages without this effect active can only detect magic that directly affects them. 

​

​

Spirit

Detect Possession
Spirit ◉
A Chorister uses exorcism rites while a Verbena tests the subject's blood, but whatever the ritual, it's a simple way to determine whether another spirit rides within a material shell. The mage simply uses his spirit perceptions to sense the offending spirit's presence in a person (or object, in the case of a fetish). The mage may not be able to do anything about it, but it's useful to tell if someone's actions are her own. Of course, determining the exact nature of the spirit may require the use of occult Knowledge or Mind magic.

Spirit Sight
Spirit ◉
It's usually a simple matter to shift one's sight into the spirit world. The mage can see what exists on the other side of the Gauntlet, although he may not be able to affect it directly. Thus, a mage might notice that an area has a very nasty or vibrant spirit reflection, indicative of some sort of problem or boon. The landscape of the nearby spirit world usually reflects the physical world of that area, but often with significant changes based on powerful events and items in the place. The mage can also see spirits as they go about their business, and some might even take notice in return.
With enough successes, the mage can translate multiple senses into the spirit world, allowing him to hear or feel spirits as well as seeing them. Usually, the mage can only sense one area at a time (spirit or material), unless he splits his senses and concentration with additional Life and Mind magic.

Add + 1 difficulty to the roll per rank of the gauntlet/barrier in the area.

Note: The umbra consists of many different parts. Peering into the shadowlands is different to peering into the Spirit Wylds or Astral plane for example. Seeing one spirit realms does not allow you to see All spirit realms.

​

​

Time

Perfect Time
Time ◉
Although Mind magic can provide an accurate internal count and chronometer, only Time magic can sense and correct for distortions in subjective time. From Virtual Adept self-adjusting computer clocks to Akashic internalizations and Verbena biorhythms, the mage learns techniques to feel the flow of time with incredible accuracy and to automatically adjust for jumps and skips in the time stream. If the mage is flattened with unusual Time Effects from adversaries or strange Umbral spaces, she at least has a chance to adjust and adapt. Better still, the mage can keep absolute track of their own Effects and timing, easily judging subjective time as necessary to put a precise duration or spin on any action.

Time Sense
Time ◉
Powerful events recur in the supernatural world, unseen to normal mortals but visible to mages. Such events range from tiny slips of deja vu to the phenomenal shifting and phasing castles, caverns and complexes that seem to exist outside of time and appear on regular cycles — or with no Pattern at all. Keeping up a running sensitivity to such phenomena is trying, but a mage who suspects the presence of something unusual can feel the ripples caused by such disturbances. These disturbances include the sorts of wakes left by other Time magic, as from time travelers and distortions of the time continuum. Potent spirits sometimes hold courts and there are gates that open only on certain cycles... the mage can sense any and all such phenomena with a modicum of concentration. Indeed, the mage may well presage such events before they occur, or feel the rippling residue left by such happenings.

​

​

​

​