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Old 10-05-2017, 02:08 PM   #11
baakyocalder
 
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Default Re: rotes in M:tA

I'd suggest more mastery of Mind is appropriate since major portions of the mind are being shut down and I'd throw Dimensional Science into the mix if the goal is to prevent Awakening. Prime is needed as well if it's a Prime effect.

Life 4 would be fine for just ability score increases and if you added Mind 2 or 3, the Mind could be focused to not think about abstract thoughts. Enlightenment doesn't come from merely counting, so if you go with the Mr. Gradagrind from Dickens' Hard Times who wants only facts, a person trained and manipulated to think that isn't going to Awaken.
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Old 10-05-2017, 02:10 PM   #12
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Default Re: rotes in M:tA

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Originally Posted by baakyocalder View Post
I'd suggest more mastery of Mind is appropriate since major portions of the mind are being shut down and I'd throw Dimensional Science into the mix if the goal is to prevent Awakening. Prime is needed as well if it's a Prime effect.
Is it a Prime effect?
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Old 10-05-2017, 02:50 PM   #13
whswhs
 
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Default Re: rotes in M:tA

Okay, about Avatars. Does every human being have one, or do you only have one if you're Awakened? or is it a kind of predestination, where if you have a link to an Avatar you can awaken, but if not you'll never be capable of magic? Or does becoming capable of magic create an Avatar?

(If Avatars are only inherited from Primordial times, they must be getting thinly spread. Back at the start of the Mythic Age, there were only around a hundred million human beings; now there are close to ten billion. If one person in twenty had an Avatar then it would be one in two thousand now.)

Can you use magic to detect that a human being has an Avatar trait? To see that they have the potential to acquire it? To perceive the qualities of their Avatar? What Sphere do you use? (It seems as if an Avatar is a Spirit, since you can destroy one with gilgul, which is at the fifth level of Spirit. But Technocrats don't have Spirit; they have Dimension.)
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Old 10-07-2017, 07:27 PM   #14
baakyocalder
 
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Default Re: rotes in M:tA

All humans have Avatars, but mages have Avatars with enough power to do magick.

Avatars reincarnate, as you would expect from the Past Lives background. So, you don't have the issue of needing billions of fragments of avatars until you have billions of people.

Mage is silent on predestination, but the same Avatar doesn't start as Awakened in every body. So, in each new human, the Avatar starts as a slumberer, a Sleeper, but can wake up.

Prime 1 and Spirit 1 can be used to see the Avatar. Prime will show a lot more than the 10ish Quintessence in a human body--basically anything charged with enough Prime can be noticed with Prime 1 as being more there. The Spirit sphere at the first rank actually lets one see the spirit of the Avatar, which can find mages. Combine that with Entropy or Mind or other spheres and you can get an idea if it's another supernatural being.

An Avatar is a spiritual part of each living thing, which is why you need Spirit 5 to gilgul--it's part and parcel of being alive.

Oh, and while the Technocracy uses different terms, their Dimensional Science sphere shows Avatars as well.
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Old 10-07-2017, 08:10 PM   #15
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Default Re: rotes in M:tA

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Originally Posted by baakyocalder View Post
All humans have Avatars, but mages have Avatars with enough power to do magick.

Avatars reincarnate, as you would expect from the Past Lives background. So, you don't have the issue of needing billions of fragments of avatars until you have billions of people.

Mage is silent on predestination, but the same Avatar doesn't start as Awakened in every body. So, in each new human, the Avatar starts as a slumberer, a Sleeper, but can wake up.

Prime 1 and Spirit 1 can be used to see the Avatar. Prime will show a lot more than the 10ish Quintessence in a human body--basically anything charged with enough Prime can be noticed with Prime 1 as being more there. The Spirit sphere at the first rank actually lets one see the spirit of the Avatar, which can find mages. Combine that with Entropy or Mind or other spheres and you can get an idea if it's another supernatural being.

An Avatar is a spiritual part of each living thing, which is why you need Spirit 5 to gilgul--it's part and parcel of being alive.

Oh, and while the Technocracy uses different terms, their Dimensional Science sphere shows Avatars as well.
Can you provide page references for these points? I have Mage 2nd, the 20th anniversary version, How Do You Do That? and Sorcerer's Crusade; any of those would be helpful.

Every living thing? So a tree has an Avatar? Or an E. coli bacterium? Can such a living organism Awaken? And that makes gilgul perplexing: If being alive and having a spirit are the same thing, then it seems that gilgul ought to kill the being it was done to instantly. I thought that the Avatar was like a second spirit, one separate from the personal spirit. Are you saying that if I do a character sheet for an unawakened Man In The Street, I should give it an Avatar score that doesn't actually confer any benefits?

As I understand Dimensional Science, it reveals the spirit world as a hyperdimensional realm, one inhabited by alien races. Are Avatars then aliens, in the view of the Technocracy? Does every human body carry around an alien parasite/symbiote that controls its actions?
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Old 10-10-2017, 10:22 PM   #16
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Default Re: rotes in M:tA

The short definition of Avatar from Mage 2nd edition is on page 8. An Avatar is a soul and part of the Pure Ones. An Awakened avatar allows one to use magic. Pages 31-35 discuss Avatars, including technomancer Avatars.

Pages 43-46 of Mage 20th discuss the Avatar, much like the 2nd edition material.

Since Mage is concerned with people with Awakened Avatars, one need not worry about those who just have a spirit. The Avatar could be a second spirit, or just a part of a mage's spirit that has a different consciousness than the rest. Avatars are for humans who can become mages. Vampires and werewolves and changelings and all the other creatures that go bump in the night don't have avatars per se, but do have some kind of spirit. Mage is not the type of game to give you a clear answer on big metaphysical things, so just worry about the effects you want and let the nature of the Avatar be what works for you.

If you're talking about suppressing a Sleeper's ability to Awaken, you have many methods. Mostly the Technocracy keeps people distracted and tired. You can't awaken if all you want to do is to go home after a long day of work and watch some reality TV.

Turning people into living talismans that can accept extra Prime probably requires at least Prime 3, which is the level needed to channel Prime. Though Soulflowers are a Prime 5 effect. . .

The Technocracy understands Avatars as Genius, but tries not to discuss it. Essentially, the Technocracy knows that those with will and focus can do things ordinary people cannot, but they try and view it in the form of science.
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Old 10-11-2017, 02:08 AM   #17
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Default Re: rotes in M:tA

Say, whswhs, would you consider looking for answers not just here, but also within communities that are more focused on WoD?

There's the WoD Discord that seemed to be reasonably lore-knowledgeable and willing to take closer looks at the metaphysics of MtA.
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Old 10-11-2017, 08:03 AM   #18
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Default Re: rotes in M:tA

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Say, whswhs, would you consider looking for answers not just here, but also within communities that are more focused on WoD?

There's the WoD Discord that seemed to be reasonably lore-knowledgeable and willing to take closer looks at the metaphysics of MtA.
Probably not. I don't know what a discord is, and I don't see a way to take a look without joining. I'm averse to joining online things (one more password to come up with) and I'm especially averse to ones that don't let me see what they offer if I don't join.
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Old 10-11-2017, 08:56 AM   #19
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Probably not. I don't know what a discord is, and I don't see a way to take a look without joining. I'm averse to joining online things (one more password to come up with) and I'm especially averse to ones that don't let me see what they offer if I don't join.
Well, this probably won't result in you changing your mind, but Discord is a system similar to IRC and other chat systems (while it supports voice, IME almost everybody uses text-only communication on all the servers I've been to, surely because it's more efficient in those contexts). The server maintains long-term persistent logs of the text chats, but it's still a somewhat different experience than a forum - potentially more time-efficient for quick back-and-forths, but unthreaded as a result in generally operating with a relatively stable number of channels per server (each dedicated to a given subtopic).
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Old 10-11-2017, 09:08 AM   #20
whswhs
 
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Default Re: rotes in M:tA

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The Technocracy understands Avatars as Genius, but tries not to discuss it. Essentially, the Technocracy knows that those with will and focus can do things ordinary people cannot, but they try and view it in the form of science.
Well, this is the thing that makes it interesting for me, and it may be that I'm doing things that are extracanonical.

My take on the Technocracy is that they are explicitly anti-supernatural, and have been at least since the Crystal Palace. But Prime (like Spirit) is clearly supernatural. So I take a hint from Ayn Rand's contrast of "mystics of spirit" and "mystics of muscle," saying that the Traditions take an idealist or dualist approach, but the Technocracy a materialist one:

* The superhuman entity that is the source both of moral values and of extraordinary powers is not God, but Society
* The crucial resource that enables technocrats to do Advanced Science is not Quintessence, but Capital (this was the central clash of the Electrodyne Engineers with the other technocrats)
* Bankers and financiers are in effect doing hedge magic with money and capital, tapping the creative powers of society without fully understanding what they're doing
* Enlightened social scientists use the sphere not of Prime, but of Society
* Tass is special not because it embodies a form of supernatural power but because Society gives it special significance

But that seems to imply a radically different construction of what "mages" are doing. And what I'm trying to do is work out this paradigm more fully. Without denying the validity of the Hermetic paradigm that the Traditions rely on! If reality is subjective, then it's entirely possible for both paradigms to be "true," for local values of truth. But a technocrat who wants to explain why certain people can set things on fire by staring at them would not think of it as a result of spirits, or magic; they would need to come up with some other explanation, which would then be true in technocratic areas of the world, if they persuaded the Masses to accept it. (And of course, radical new ideas would be vulgar as hell until the Masses did accept them!)
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