[Mage:Ascension] I need help getting creative with Spirits and Werewolves!

[Andreaz]

Hello, everyone!
This month I'll join a game composed of 5 werewolves and 1 mage. My mage.
I need a bit of help with spellcasting, namely the Spirit sphere.

Right now my character has a dot of entropy, 3 of spirit and 2 of life. I'm well used to Life magic, and entropy as well. But Spirit, along with Forces, are two spheres I almost never used in my whole life.


So...little help? What kind of craziness and handy effects can I weave with Spirit?

[Asmodai]

Yeeech. Ok, this is a bit of a problematic territory as Werewolves may take quite a bit of beef with the fact that you're a Mage and may be mistreating Spirits that deserve respect or dealing with Spirits that are anathema.

But to actually help you out you need to tell us about your paradigm first. That's the only way we can specify what you can actually do with Spirit.

[JeenLeen]

In the mage game I played, the GM said he read somewhere that you can treat your Spirit rank as your rank for Life and Matter while dealing with ephemera (what the umbra realms and umbrood, aka spirits, are made of.)

With Spirit 3, you can heal or harm spirits like Life 3. You can also shape matter in the spirit realms. Spirit 4 would be needed to create heterogeneous substances, but Spirit 2 lets you make homogeneous (acid, gold, whatever.) Well, 'transmute', not 'make'; making would take Prime 2 as well.

Just being able to heal spirits could help you bargain with them. You could be a worthwhile tool to your garou allies and their spirit allies. (And Spirit 2 lets you call your own spirit allies.)
If your GM plays it that garou in the penumbra/umbras are made of spirit while there, I guess you could use Spirit as Life on them, too... which is even more powerful. You'd be a threat, but also an asset as a healer.


But, yes, please describe your mage.
(Also, if you get just Forces 2, you can probably match garou on damage output by going vulgar. Forces 2 lets you manipulate forces, such as increasing the kinetic force on your sword slash or gunshot. Also stuff like warping light to make you invisible, sound to give an aura of silence, etc.)

[Andreaz]

The actual pack is good with the mage. She's a kinfolk that was a gateway for garou to the police and underworld as a private investigator. Her awakening was a huge ruckus, but enough weredudes stood by her that she has some autonomy and permission to take a little of her home caern's power (a small Node) as long as she doesn't abuse it. Few are openly against her very existence, most just give her her space and trust that she'll remain faithful to their way (and she is).

Personality wise, it takes from Bernard Cornwell's Merlin. Crafty, relentless and full of crazy ideas no one else gets early but don't regret trusting if the goals align.

[Asmodai]

We're asking about the paradigm. Tradition, Craft, Orphan? If Orphaned you could pattern yourself after Garou Gifts and Rituals, even getting some consensuality breaks there.

The Paradigm is the general description of what and how your character percieves and performs Magic. Anything you can and cannot do with Magic is directly tied to what your character actually thinks is Magic.

[Andreaz]

Ah, sorry, I thought that since these things don't actually change much, mechanics wise, I could overlook it and head straight to the spheres.

She's an orphan(none of the traditions really caught me) Magic comes from life. Living, to be more specific. It's the desire to live, the little good things in life that carry one forward and make miracles happen. It's all rooted in wanting more, wanting to live and wanting to make sure others live.

Get it while the getting's good. Spread the word. Everyone should taste that at least once.

[Asmodai]

In Mage Mechanics are less important then the fluff. Most of all because you can be a Mage with a ****load of arete and spheres and you still cannot do something beyond your paradigm.

As your description goes, Spirit would most likely take an animistic form where you commune with spirits of life and channel them into the real world to make things "better". This will most likely include nature spirits of the same kind the Garou interact with (you know what they say about familiarity ;))

Spirit one would allow you to communicate and perceive spirits, fetishes and spiritual creatures. You would most likely see them as infusions of life energies, for instance Garou would positivley glow with this energy. With effort and rituals of communion of the bounties of nature you could even share these benefits with others.

Spirit two would cover summoning and getting spirits to do things for you. It would allow them to perform favours, and some of them could even emulate Garou Gifts. When infusing yourself with life energies you could touch the other side.

Spirit Three allows you to enter the Umbra and tinker with the gauntlet. The latter would most likely involve some kind of a nature/life themed ritual through which you merge with the Realms Beyond.

As an Orphan your style will be highly influenced by what your characters life experiences were. As a kinfolk, you would have seen a lot of stuff the Garou and Kinfolk do together... Pillage, plunder and go crazy with cribbing from them. Heck, it should help with the PR, and would justify the bit where they allowed you to take some Gno... Quintessence from the Caern.

[Andreaz]

Thanks for the insights. It gave me ideas for foci, extended rituals, motivations and approach, but that doesn't actually tell me what I can do with the spirit sphere. The book doesn't go a long way with that.

[Asmodai]

I just told you what you can do... Spirit is about interacting with Spirit and the Umbral Worlds. The rest is down to your inspiration, the types of Spirits you interact with, the manner you deal with them and the philosophy your ST has on the Spirits.

It can range from dice bonuses to talking the spirit of the wheel not to turn on the car chasing you.

[Andreaz]

I'm definitely not the smartest person around to ask this kind of question. I'm looking more for specific ideas. Your final statement has one such idea.
I can...
Ask for a spirit, even a dormant one, to help me with any given task (a difficulty or dice bonus / penalty), summon a spirit to bargain, find out which nearby objects have active spirits, banish/pushback a spirit.

Maybe my question should be "what kinds of stuff have you pulled off with Spirit?"

[The Glyphstone]

Thanks for the insights. It gave me ideas for foci, extended rituals, motivations and approach, but that doesn't actually tell me what I can do with the spirit sphere. The book doesn't go a long way with that.

What you can do with the Spirit Sphere = whatever you can convince/cajole/bamboozle/blackmail/threaten your Storyteller into letting it do.

That's pretty much how every Sphere in M:tA works actually, Spirit is just more blatant about it (I summon an 'X' spirit to do stuff for me).

[Asmodai]

Let me put it like this... Werewolf (and to an extent Mage) go with the whole Animist spiel - concepts, items and creatures have spirits. Most normal objects in our world don't have a spirit of its own, unless they are very well loved, taken care of, nurtured and/or awakened through an act of spirit Magic.

Now, you need to choose what kind of Spirit you want to talk to - each spirit would have a different purview what it would have power over, you could ask a bear spirit for healing or for strength, while you could ask an atomic bomb spirit to kill things and create mutations. Spirit is all about getting creative, summoning something nutty that you thought up, and then persuading that thing to help you. In some ways it's the single most powerful sphere for a clever player that is ready to deal with Spirits in the right way.

So what can Spirits actually do?
A) Control things within their purview. When you consider things that would be their purview feel free to go beyond to obvious
B) Do errands
C) Fight for you
D) Offer insight, guidance and power boosts
E) Insert your own thing that you managed to talk a spirit into.

One thing that's different from most other Spheres, while Spirit will allow you to force a spirit to do something, usually it's better to play it clever and talk it into helping you instead. That way it won't come back later to feed you your guts when you least expect it. Come prepared, pack a silver tongue and some bribes (Quintessence, offers of service and/or physical items they would care for). Worst of all, there are quite some spirits that are stupidly powerful and who can pretty much kill you on sight if you really piss them off.

If you're good at it, you can even get spirit friends who will gladly serve on your behalf and help you out when you need it, and who do you think will dare mess with a Mage whose cousins are Werewolves and whose Poker regulars include a Bear spirit, Wendigo whirlwind monstrosity, a well beloved cartoon character and Morpheus the King of Dreams?

[Toldolth]

A good place for inspiration is to look up Rotes. Some of them are really goofy and the official ones aren't necessarily better than homebrew. It gives specific uses of spirit magicks often in conjunction with other spheres. Here is a short list of things that spirit magicks have done in a campaign I've been running plus some other things I know you can do with it.

1) A Verbena awoke the spirit of a Juniper bush in the local Node. He made a good impression and the bush and him have pleasant conversations from time to time. The spirit has agreed to watch for intruders in exchange for the Juniper bush receiving excellent supplies of plant food, rainwater, etc. He also consulted it concerning some rotten fruit that had a taint of corruption on them. The bush was appalled by them and revealed that they had been tainted by a Banes spirit. (A useful lead, you know?)

2) A Dreamspeaker went into the Penumbra and caught a small Pattern Spider about the size of a cat. She pulled it back into the real world. She also used an effect that tied its "senses" to the rest of the cabal and sent it to spy for them in the Penumbra. (She didn't talk to it as Pattern Spiders are barely sentient but another member of the cabal used mind magic to implant the impulse to walk toward a certain building.

3) You can lower the Gauntlet rating in your area which will make it easier for your Garou allies to "Step Sideways." That can also be used to help spirits manifest easier and can also help the use of certain Garou gifts.

4) You can break the Horizon and allow travel to more distant spirit realms.

5) Coupled with 1 dot in Entropy, you can use a coincidental Spirit 1 effect to detect Wyrm tainted places, spirits, or people. It is similar to the Garou Gift that Detects Wyrm taint.

6) You could use Spirit and Prime to recharge a spirits power.

7) You could probably impede a Garou's ability to shapeshift with a conjunctional life effect. (Useful against Black Spiral Dancers for example)

8) I'm just freestyling now. You could bind a spirit to a place and cajole it into guarding it. You can shred the gauntlet and allow spirits to come and go as they will and mortals to cross over without effort. You could tear a spirit limb from limb or create one ex nihlio. You could place a mark on a spirit that would allow you to track it anywhere in the Tellurian (maybe with some help from Correspondence). You could do the same to an Avatar. You could Awaken the spirits of your shoes and if you treat the twins well, they will trip anyone who tries to wear them other than you.

Anything that has to do with a sphere that you can imagine is possible as long as you have a high enough rating and it fits your paradigm.

Hope this helps.