This supplements the Scrutiny rules found in Mage Core, page 92.
When Scruntinizing certain Mysteries, merely time and patience is not enough - sometimes it takes diving deep into the mystery to wrestle the truth away from the Mystery.
Revelation
Roll Arcanum + Gnosis - Opacity. Each Success provides you with one piece of Surface Information.
- Type of Arcanum (and if it is awakened magic)
- Resonance or Nimbus (if it wasn’t cast as a Rote)
- Age of the Mystery
- What kind of Practice it is most similar to
- You start the Scrutiny-Chase with Edge.
Roll Results
Dramatic Failure: The player overloads her own perceptions and the subject of her study with Mana, akin to spilling a bottle of ink on a page she was deciphering. No Scrutiny or Revelation of that subject is possible — by any mage — for the next 24 hours. The Prime spell “Cleanse Pattern” can dissolve the Mana before then, allowing further Scrutiny.
Failure: The mage is unable to Reveal anything about the subject. She can still attempt to Scrutinize it, however.
Success: The mage discovers one piece of the surface information of the Mystery per success.
Exceptional Success: In addition to discovering all of the Surface Information, the mage can also either lower the Mystery’s Opacity rating by 1, or, at the Storyteller’s discretion, uncover one piece of deep information.
Scrutiny
Scrutiny is a Chase. You try to understand the Mystery before an Entity (Supernal or otherwise) becomes aware of you to the point of influencing you with their powers.
When a mage gazes into the Supernal World, scenes play out in a vision-quest not unlike the process of Awakening itself. Imagine it like Constantine visiting hell, being chased by demons, until he finally understands the meaning behind Isabel, her twin sister and the hospital wristlet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AL8Kl-8H9k8
This “Enlightenment-Trip” is heavily coloured by the mage’s personal experience of Focused Magesight, his Path symbols, appropriate Supernal Entities and the underlying symbols of the Mystery.
Cost: 1 WP
Determine Opacity, as normal.
Target Successes: 2 + Opacity (plus one if all of the Surface Information has not been determined)
The Entity has the Edge, unless the Mage chose the Edge - option at the Revelation stage.
Pool: Arcanum + Skill vs. Opacity + half of Opacity (rounded up) if the entity has the Edge.
You roll a Skill, depending on your approach to solving the Mystery. You are not allowed to roll the same skill twice. Take cues from the symbolic description of the Mystery when determining which skill to roll. A Moros investigating a potent Death Spell might see crumbling pillars with mysterious epitaphs and use Occult, Investigation or Academics to wrest meaning from them before they are reduced to rubble by the ever-present entropic pull of Stygia, while rolling stealth to hide from the bodiless shadow that lurks on the fringes of the graveyard, just out of sight. A Thyrsus could reason with or threaten a mythic Beast that protects the secrets of a Werewolf’s shapeshifting abilities, employing social skills - or fall back on raw dominance and fight the Beast physically.
You are allowed to pay Mana to reduce the Dicepool of the entity for its next roll on a one for one basis, according to your maximum per turn.
Instead of rolling, you may cancel the process of Scrutiny. If you do so, raise the Opacity of the mystery by one as your Nimbus leaks into its pattern.
If you (or the Entity) don’t have the Edge, you are allowed to bet on how many successes you get. If you guess correctly, you get the Edge. You are not allowed to guess 0.
Exceptional Success: In addition to a massive accumulation of successes, your character manages to set back their opponent(s). You can subject them to the effects of a failed roll, regardless of his roll’s outcome.
Success: Calculate successes and add them to your running total.
Failure: You lose one combined success from your total, or suffer a specific narrative effect such as a Tilt, two bashing, or one lethal damage.
Dramatic Failure: You gain the “Gaze from Beyond” Condition and your Nimbus contaminates the Mystery, adding one Opacity. The Scrutiny ends.
Overall Success of the Chase allows you to understand all surface information of the Mystery, and some or all of the deep information, depending on the nature of the Mystery.
Even when failing the Scrutiny, you may learn one piece of deep information if you accumulated at least half the target number of successes.
Teamfight and Scrutiny
You are allowed to scrutinize a Mystery as a team, if you have an Arcanum important to the Mystery. Everybody has to pay for their Magesights as normal. One player takes the lead and rolls for the Revelation and takes the first action.
Everybody is allowed to pay Mana to mitigate the Supernal Entities Dicepool. If someone paid Mana, they are allowed to do the next action. They still have to use a skill not used before and are only allowed to roll with Arcana that are important to the Mystery.
The reason why this works is that everybody uses their Nimbus to influence and touch the Mystery - visible to everybody else in their own Magesight. Important symbols get marked by the mages and understood by the other Mages involved. (also these chases take some time - so you really don’t want to play them 5 times for the whole cabal…)
Example:
Orion, a Shaman and Anubis, a Necromancer are trying to understand what a Life and Death related Artifact is doing. It's an Opacity 4 Mystery. Both the Entity and the mages will need 6 successes. Orion rolls one success on the Revelation and choses to start the Chase with the Edge. While his sight shifts into Scrutiny, the world turns into a living organism. Before him lays a bone-axe with a strong and strange smell. He starts to stalk the area around it and is searching for signs of the animal, it originated from. He rolls Spirit+Survival. He gets 2 successes. Anubis, his necromantic friend, pays one Mana, and the Entity rolls one die less. Therefore it rolls 3 dice and bets on getting 1 success. It also gets 2 successes. Both of them will need 4 more successes. He witnesses a beast, hungry for the tasty bone in front of Orion, sniffing in the air… sniffing something tastier than just a mere bone.
Meanwhile Anubis sees a withering warhammer in her sight, at the sandy grave of an unnamed, mummified soldier. A sandstorm surrounds it and unveils some pieces of the battle (Orion, searching for signs), but the Sandstorm attracts an undead Skorpion which burrows out of the sand. Anubis goes down on her knees and uses the short time she has, before the Skorpion attacks her, to get a good view on the hieroglyphs written on the warhammer. She rolls Death+Academics and gets 3 Successes. They need 1 more success. The hieroglyphs, written in high speech, tell of an exchange of life.
Orion pays a Mana. The Entity rolls 3 dies, bets on one success and gets it. Damn! Now it has the Edge and will roll 2 more dice, before the two Mages have a chance to get their last success. It's 1 vs 3 right now. Both Orion and Anbubis pay 1 more Mana to mitigate the chance of the Entity to wipe them. It rolls 4+2-2 dice and gets two successes.
In Orions sight, he sees Anubis reflection as the beast is rushing at her. He is chasing between them, roaring at the Beast and wrestling it down to protect his friend. He rolls Brawl + Life. They only need 1 more success so it would be clever to guess that he gets 0 successes. But that is against the rules of the Scrutiny-Chase. So he just rolls and gets the success. The blood of the beast will show the meaning of the mystery before them. As it flows over the weapon, both Orion and Anubis feel… revitalized.
Orion and Anubis, outside of their deep magesight, both look on the artifact with their ordinary eyes. They didn’t move a single metre but some muscles might have twitched as Orion wrestled with the Supernal Entity. However, the symbolism before them is clear. This Artifact is a vampiric weapon that transforms the damage it deals into life for the wielder.
Condition: Gaze from Beyond
An Entity’s (typically Supernal) curiosity has been drawn by you gazing into the Supernal World too vigorously. It watches you, always, and should you open your eyes, that is, engage in active or focused Mage Sight, it may target you with its abilities (if Supernal; other entities may act at other appropriate times).
While most Entities are not outright hostile, their morality and capacity for understanding any human suffering they might cause is limited to the higher truth they represent. Their abilities might cause some discomfort or even distress - especially if the entity in question is loyal to the Throne. What exactly they try to accomplish is up to the storyteller, however, the entities spells might relate to the Mystery that was studied. The aforementioned Thyrsus investigating Werewolves could possibly find himself wracked with spells that compel strong instinctive urges or even slightly shift his appearance or bring him to the attention of resentful spirits.
Resolution: The entity casts a number of spells on you while you engage your Mage Sight equal to its Rank (half the Opacity of the pertaining Mystery, rounding down).
Beat: The entity’s spells cause a major inconvenience that cannot be easily averted.