u/ChronoRebel

Rules as written, wearing Heavy Armour requires a Body Attribute of at least 4, and Two-handed weapons can't normally be wielded with a Shield unless with specific Talents like Gargant's Grip or Additional Arms. However, across the rulebooks and supplements, I see several official Archetypes that seem to break these rules, such as starting with Heavy Armour despite only have a Body Attribute of 3, or with both a Two-handed weapon AND a Shield, without any explicit mention of specific Talents, other effects, or special exemption rules that would allow them to. What's the deal with that?

Another related question is what Weapon Traits to use to represent a glaive. The Soulbound core rulebook's doesn't give glaives their own unique Trait list, but going by the creatures in the Bestiary section depicted as wielding glaives, it seems to consistently treat them as 2+S weapons whith the Slashing and Two-handed Traits, like a Greataxe (which makes sense to me, since IRL glaives are primarily slashing weapons). But Era of the Beast lists the Heartshard Glaive as a starting weapon option for the Melusai Archetype, and explictly labels it as a Halberd, which in the core rulebook are listed as 1+S weapons with the Piercing, Rend, and Two-handed Traits (despite the fact that the artwork for the Melusai Archetype in Era of the Beast visually depicts the Heartshard Glaive as being much more blade-like than spear-like...).

The two questions are related in that I'm currently writing up a homebrew Sylvaneth Archetype based on the Arch-Revenant, which in official artwork and in its tabletop wargame miniature, is consistently depicted as wielding both a glaive and a shield at the same time, and the official lore and flavor texts consistently describes the Arch-Revenant's Glaive as being a slashing weapon. Should I treat glaives as Greataxes or Halberds in Soulbound rules? And is there really a way within Soulbound rules as written to allow the wielding of a Two-handed weapon AND a shield at the same time at char creation without specific Talents, or are the officials rules just straight up contradicting themselves?

I was thinking of making a homebrew Archetype for the Raven Priests of Lethis, and for that I also need to come up with homebrew Miracles of Morrda. Is there any already-existing homebrew of those? Any ideas to recommend for the Miracles?

Of the way death and afterlife work in the Mortal Realms, we know the following:

• that countless afterlives exist physically in the Realm of Shyish, each one directly shaped by and from the faith and imagination of a mortal culture that believes in it somewhere across all eight Realms, and that when a mortal dies, their soul typically goes to the afterlife corresponding to the cultural belief system they suscribe to;
• that the vast majority of these afterlives are "colonized" by one of the four Grand Alliances, most prominently Chaos and Death;
• from the Champions of Death supplement for the Soulbound TTRPG, that Nagash has laid hexes on the border between life and death that automatically ensnare freshly-deceased souls that have commited various general categories of transgression in his eyes during life (anything from being a violent bloodthirsty murderer, to being a necromancer who failed to pay Nagash proper respect, to simply being a healer who's saved others from the brink of death because Nagash is a petty a-hole like that, and so on) and turn them into Nighthaunts;
• that there does exist methods of final disposition that can make both the deceased's corpses and souls immune to being raised and controlled by necromancy, as proven by the Raven Priests of Morrda in the Sigmarite city of Lethis in Shyish.

This has all gotten me to think about how knowledge of all these factors might influence and inform the cultural practices and philosophies regarding death of non-Chaos/Death-aligned peoples across the Realms. First of all, it's easy to imagine certain cultures going out of their way to develop complex and elaborate systems of funeral rites and procedures and death-related taboos and superstitions, all specifically designed with the intent to not only shield the deceased against necromancy, but also increase as much as possible the chances of the soul being sent to a Chaos-free and Nagash-free afterlife and sneaking past Nagash’s Nighthaunt hexes on the way there.

And, thanks to Shyish being a place that the living can actually literally physically travel to and visit via Realmgates, the concept could be pushed even further. There could be organizations and polities investing efforts and ressources into scholarly research and exploration expeditions into Shyish in order to map out and catalogue afterlifes that are neither Chaos-controlled nor Nagash-controlled, and then preach belief in these afterlives to the living.

In the Forbidden and Forgotten Orders supplement for M20, the Knights Templar are stated to be able to produce their own variant of Primium called Orichalcum, which the book says has the same exact properties as Primium mechanics-wise, but lore-wise it’s also, quote: “capable of doing aggravated damage to shapechangers and the undead as well as serving host to other enchantments”, end quote.

Orichalcum doing aggravated damage to shapechangers is expected because Primium does that too, but "serving host to other enchantements"? Isn’t the other main feature of Primium the fact that it’s an anti-magical material? Am I misreading something?

In the Forbidden and Forgotten Orders supplement for M20, the Knights Templar are stated to be able to produce their own variant of Primium called Orichalcum, which the book says has the same exact properties as Primium mechanics-wise, but lore-wise it’s also, quote: “capable of doing aggravated damage to shapechangers and the undead as well as serving host to other enchantments”, end quote.

Orichalcum doing aggravated damage to shapechangers is expected because Primium does that too, but "serving host to other enchantements"? Isn’t the other main feature of Primium the fact that it’s an anti-magical material? Am I misreading something?

A little under a week ago, I made a post on r/magetheascension sharing the description of the Avatar I had come up with for my Society of Ether concept character build for M20, and asking under what Essence that Avatar should be classified. But after reading the feedback and some time, I started to have second thoughts about what I had come up with, and I realized that my real problem was that official MTAs books are too ambiguous on what should even be even the role of the choice of Essence in defining Mage PCs. Then, I found out about the Storyteller’s Vault book Prism of Focus, I bought it, and while it doesn’t touch upon the subject of Avatars outside of proposing ideas for Practices-themed Seekings, reading the book has allowed me to finally come up with a satisfying personal interpretation of what Essence should say about a Mage, both narratively in roleplay and meta-narratively out of roleplay.

Basically, an Avatar’s Essence should represent what the Mage believes what should be the primary purpose of Magick on a philosophical and cosmic level and the kind of lasting meaningful impact they subconsciously want to have in the grand scheme of things, informed by and made actively manifest as the kind of lesson that the Avatar wants to impart upon its Mage.

Dynamic: Magick as a source of revitalizing change; introducing freedom and randomness into an otherwise constraining and stagnant status quo, and/or reshaping base materials into new creations.

Static: Magick as a mechanism of stabilizing preservation; sustaining the continuation of necessary and valuable structures and systems (natural or otherwise), and/or enforcing a greater unseen cosmic order upon a universe preyed upon by chaos and degeneration.

Primordial: Magick as a force of restorative destruction; removing and deconstructing that which is overgrown, obsolete or corrupt, and/or returning things back to a purer, relatively "simpler" state.

Questing: Magick as a tool of qualitative discovery; revealing hidden truths, and/or driving forward progress.

Any opinions?

A little under a week ago, I made a post on r/magetheascension sharing the description of the Avatar I had come up with for my Society of Ether concept character build for M20, and asking under what Essence that Avatar should be classified. But after reading the feedback and some time, I started to have second thoughts about what I had come up with, and I realized that my real problem was that official MTAs books are too ambiguous on what should even be even the role of the choice of Essence in defining Mage PCs. Then, I found out about the Storyteller’s Vault book Prism of Focus, I bought it, and while it doesn’t touch upon the subject of Avatars outside of proposing ideas for Practices-themed Seekings, reading the book has allowed me to finally come up with a satisfying personal interpretation of what Essence should say about a Mage, both narratively in roleplay and meta-narratively out of roleplay.

Basically, an Avatar’s Essence should represent what the Mage believes what should be the primary purpose of Magick on a philosophical and cosmic level and the kind of lasting meaningful impact they subconsciously want to have in the grand scheme of things, informed by and made actively manifest as the kind of lesson that the Avatar wants to impart upon its Mage.

Dynamic: Magick as a source of revitalizing change; introducing freedom and randomness into an otherwise constraining and stagnant status quo, and/or reshaping base materials into new creations.

Static: Magick as a mechanism of stabilizing preservation; sustaining the continuation of necessary and valuable structures and systems (natural or otherwise), and/or enforcing a greater unseen cosmic order upon a universe preyed upon by chaos and degeneration.

Primordial: Magick as a force of restorative destruction; removing and deconstructing that which is overgrown, obsolete or corrupt, and/or returning things back to a purer, relatively "simpler" state.

Questing: Magick as a tool of qualitative discovery; revealing hidden truths, and/or driving forward progress.

Any opinions?

I'm making a Society of Ether character concept build for M20. For context, his Paradigm is “In A Mechanistic Cosmos emerging from Holographic Reality, Tech Holds All Answers and Ancient Wisdom is the Key”; He’s a mechanical engineer by trade, but his preferred field of Awakened Weird Science research is ancient civilizations (particularly Atlantis), the Hollow Earth, and ancient advanced technology.

I’ve already come up with the Avatar description: A surreal idealized version of his deceased Etherite grandfather as a larger-than-life hero-Scientist with an “old-timey radio/TV announcer” voice affect, bombastic mannerisms and exuberant confidence, always pushing to see the world with eyes full of wonder, to never accept that what things currently are is all that can be, and to pursue ever-greater height of glorious SCIENCE!!!

But I dunno which Essence this Avatar would fit. Thoughts? Feel free to ask for any additional information.

EDIT: More info on my character: His Nature and Demeanor Archetypes (out of the M20 list) are Idealist and Innovator respectively, and he conceives of Ascension as the realization of a single grand “Theory of Everything” whose formulation would naturally and elegantly encompass and account for all of the unseen physical and metaphysical mechanisms of the Tellurian hidden beyond the walls of Consensus, and all of the infinite possibilities that exist in potentia in the fundamental Ether underlying it all. My character also believes that the continuous pursuit of this “Theory of Everything” inherently elevates human civilization closer to a state of true Utopia; Atlantis and other such precursor peoples reached further along that process than anyone else since, and thus by reverse-engineering their fantastical technologies from the clues and vestiges they left behind, and combining them with the newer insights of the present, humanity might be able to retrace their steps and map its way back to matching these Ancients' lost heights of prosperity, and eventually even surpass them.

NEW PRACTICE: GEOMANCY

While often conflated in modern pop-culture with “geokinesis”, as in the ability to control the earth element (see the practice Elementalism in The Book of Secrets, pp. 200-201, and the subsection Elemental Kinetics in How Do You DO That? pp. 28-29), the term “geomancy”, from the Late Greek *geōmanteía, literally “earth divination”, originally only referred to just that: fortune-telling via perceived signs in geographic features and/or in sets of sticks, dice or other such tokens cast in random patterns on the ground, all typically interpreted using complex systems of numerological symbology, sacred geometry and astrological correspondences. Beyond this strict classic definition, geomancy also more generally encompasses a host of disciplines, systems and beliefs that endeavor to identify the subtle energies and forces immanent in one’s surroundings, natural or otherwise, in order to gain insight into they influence the world and – in the hands of a sufficiently proficient Awakened practitioner – find ways to bend and redirect this influence.‘’

Arabic ‘ilm al-raml, Malagasy sikidy, Yoruba Ifá, Chinese feng shui and I Ching divination, meditation or rituals within and around religious structures and sacred natural sites… all various manners, among others, by which an Awakened mystic may attune to location-based power, often as a component of other Practices, most notably including (but not limited to) high ritual magick, elementalism, faith, witchcraft, shamanism, Voudoun, yoga and qì manipulation. The importance of mathematics, geometry, physical landscape, structure design and management of space in the more elaborate and systemized forms of geomancy means that there’s also room for it to be treated as an Enlightened technological discipline. Specifically, one revolving around obtaining useful information from your environment and giving yourself the means to leverage its properties according to your needs – the original Arabic term for geomancy, ‘ilm al-raml, literally means “science of the sand”, after all. Thus, the Hindu architect designing buildings according to the traditional principles of Vastu shastra (craftwork), the Etherite tapping into the Etheric energies of ley lines and pyramid power (weird science), the Virtual Adept, Syndicalist or NWO agent arranging a room in a way mathematically optimized for functional efficiency or for inducing certain states of mind in themselves and other people (Art of Desire, dominion or reality hacking), and the Progenitor or Void Engineer using fine-tuned measurement tools and techniques to collect data from geography or the Earth’s natural geomagnetic and geoelectric currents (hypertech) may all be considered practitioners of technomagickal geomancy. Whether you see it as Magick or Science, the basic premise remains the same: gaining insight from the world around you and leveraging its inherent power… a power which has an undeniably objective reality in The World of Darkness through the existence of Nodes, and if you want to get technical, all Awakened and Enlightened, regardless of Paradigms, Practices or Instruments, already perform an act of geomancy every time they refuel their personal Quintessence from a Node.

The big problem of geomancy, of course, is that it’s based more on reactive intel gathering and adaptation and subtle coincidental influence than direct action and overt vulgar Reality-warping, and unless combined with another Practice, the power by definition does not come from you and is highly contextually dependent on locational factors. Progress towards Ascension will eventually allow you to realize how to impose your Will upon the world’s flow, but in the meantime, you’ll have to make do with finding ways to navigate the flow and nudge it towards desired results. Geomancy as a Practice, at its most basic level, enables you to use fortune-telling to measure whether certain things, environmental factors or courses of action are auspicious or inauspicious for you and others, often involving the Entropy Sphere, along with other basic acts of supernatural perception and prediction. With a bit of expertise and the right Spheres, you may become able to more or less subtly influence good and bad luck, the weather, ambient flows of Quintessence and the vitality and mental states of living beings, along with placing or removing spiritual wards and seals upon locations – all things which, of course, may be applied to deliberately harmful results, especially in the case of Nephandi geomancers.

Associated Paradigms: A Mechanistic Cosmos, All Power Comes from God(s), Ancient Wisdom is the Key, Creation’s Divine and Alive, Divine Order and Earthly Chaos, Everything is Chaos, Everything is Data, Everything’s an Illusion, Existence is Unknowable, Irrational and Sublime, Forbidden Wisdom is the Truest Source of Power, Holographic Reality, It’s All Good – Have Faith!, Tech Holds All Answers, Turning the Keys of Reality, We are Meant to be Wild

Associated Abilities: Academics, Area Knowledge, Awareness, Belief Systems, Esoterica (Astrology, Feng Shui, Fortune-Telling, Ley Lines, Sacral Architecture, Sacred Geometry), High Ritual, Meditation, Science (Astronomy, Geography, Geology, Hypermathematics), Survival

Associated Instruments: Blessings and curses, cards and instruments of chance, celestial alignments (as geomancy often goes hand in hand with astrology), circles and designs, crossroads, devices and machines, elements, energy, formulae and math, gadgets and inventions, gems and stones, group rites (within places of power), herbs and plants, household tools and furniture, knots and ropes (wrapped around a location or natural feature of particular potency, such as in the example of shimenawa ropes in Shinto), meditation, numbers and numerology, qì tools (luópăn), sacred iconography (religiously-significant natural features and dedicated sacred structures)

In Tarkir, the defining plane for color wedges, the lroe and mechanics are written according to the principle where the two allied colors of each wedge are dominant, but use their shared enemy color to achieve their goals (ex: Jeskai is mostly White/Blue in most aspects, but with Red's drive and aggression focused through it). But what about a wedge-based plane where this dynamic is flipped upon its head ? One where the enemy color is dominant over the opposed allied pair (ex: Red dominant over White/Blue). What would be a good general theme for a plane like that? And (although this technically goes beyond the boundaries of r/colorpie) how could this be reflected in mechanics?