Universal Family

Universal Magic
Universal magic is the rarest, the strangest, and the most poorly-understood of the three families. It covers abstract concepts like divination, time, space, and chance.

More than any other family, universal mages of different types don’t have much in common with each other. A fire mage and a water mage and an ice mage might use different elements, but in a lot of ways they’re very similar – they can all shield, they can all gate, and they can all hit things with their magic until it breaks. On the other hand a time mage, a space mage, and a diviner have wildly different abilities. Some types of universal magic such as space can actually affect the physical world even better than elemental magic can (at least in specific areas) whereas other types like divination can’t affect the physical world at all.

If there’s one thing universal mages have in common it’s that they can do things no-one else can. A fire mage can put out a fire, but so can a water mage, or an air mage, or a guy with a fire extinguisher. But no-one except a diviner can look into the future, and no-one except a time mage can speed up or slow down the flow of time. Unfortunately this comes with a drawback:  universal magic is the weirdest and most alien of the three families, and integrating it with a human mind isn’t easy. One of the reasons universal mages are rare is that a lot of universal novices never make it out of apprenticeship, whether for voluntary reasons (they give up their talents out of sheer exhaustion and go off to live a normal life) or for involuntary ones.


 * Chance Magic
 * Divination Magic
 * Illusion Magic
 * Sound Magic
 * Space Magic
 * Time Magic
 * Light Magic

Chance Sample Spells
Hex  Action: Instant  Duration: Instantaneous  Effect  The chance mage afflicts his victim with a foul curse, this curse inflicts the victim with minor accidents and inhibiting bad luck. A victim might step in paint, or run afoul of a skunk or something equally disturbing. It deals not actual damage, but might inhibit the target in certain social situations, or turn the scale in combat.

Accident  Action: Instant  Duration: Instantaneous  Effect  The chance mage is capable of overloading a target with such massive amounts of miss fortune, that it suffers some kind of severe accident. This is an attack that deals one point of lethal damage per success. However this damage does happen immediately, rather it can happen over the course of a day, and might not happen all at once. Should a mage curse a target with Accident and roll three successes, the victim might suffer 2 health levels of damage as he falls down the stairs, only later to take one point of damage as he cuts himself with a knife. At the cost of one point of willpower, the damage will come immediately as the Chance mage invests the target with such misfortune that something extraordinary unlikely come to pass simply to punish the victim.

Divination Sample Spells
Premonition  Action: Free  Duration: Instantaneous  Effect Diviners are often capable of predicting the choices of another being, or situation, to such a degree that they know what not to do. Vision is a simple spell that allows the Diviner to ask a single question of the GM, this question cannot affect a future more than 1 minutes into the future, per success rolled on the activation roll. This question could be “What would happen if I pulled this lever?” or “What would she answer if I asked her name?” – The questions can only be regarding one simple subject, and the answer is always in simple details.

Path walking  Action: Extended  Duration: Special  Effect Path walking is one of the harder divination techniques available to a diviner, it allows him to enter a meditative state and focus on taking specific actions as he scans the future for certain outcomes. Path walking is extremely hard to pull off, and requires the diviner and those around him to be completely still and not even consider moving. As such, the Diviner receives a penalty of -1 per person nearby unless they too enter into a meditative state. To activate Path walking a Diviner must spend one point of will power, each success on his activation roll allows him to take one rounds worth of action and learn from the outcome. Every time he runs out of actions or his ‘mental projection’ is killed in the future they can spend one more will power to keep the path walking up. In case of being killed, you start from where you’re physically sitting.

Life on the Line  Action: Reflexive  Duration: Instantaneous  Effect  Master diviners seem to avoid most unhealthy situations, this allows a diviner to change his fate by seeing an entire turn into the future and then decide upon a new course of action. In terms of mechanics, this allows a diviner to redo a complete combat turn and change his action, this in turn allows anyone else to change theirs as well but only insofar that the diviners actions affect the other characters actions. The diviner can only do this once per encounter.

Illusion Sample Spells
Phantasmal Assault  Action: Instant  Duration: Instantaneous  Effect  The Illusionist can trick a subjects mind to believe the body is actually being attacked, causing the body to react. This attack deals bashing damage, it can never result in lethal damage. Armor or defense has no effect on this attack. If a target is knocked unconscious by Phantasmal assault  they wake three rounds later. Other than the last dot of health which heals after three rounds, other health boxes heal at a rate of one per three minutes.

Fata Morgana  Action: Instant  Duration: Concentration  Effect  The Illusion mage is capable of producing one image, the size of an average human or 2 cubic meters of mass, per success. This illusory image moves, sounds and smells as directed by the illusion mage but is otherwise completely intangible to the touch. Once someone interacts physically with the fata morgana, they automatically realize it being an illusion. This ability has a range of 30 meters.

Sound Sample Spells
Sound burst  Action: Instant  Duration: Instantaneous  Effect  The mage produces and explosion of sound, causing the intended target a great amount of pain. If the effect deals more damage than a targets stamina, the target is deafened. This attack deals Bashing damage and is kinetic.

Enhanced Hearing  Action: Instant  Duration: Constant  Effect  Sound mages have extraordinary good hearing, with this spell they’re capable of finding people without direct sight as well as identify their gender, weight, height with hearing. Even through a closed door. They also gain a bonus dice on hearing based perception checks, equal to half your Potency.

Space Sample Spells
Blink  Action: Free  Duration: Instant  Effect  This spell allows the caster to teleport short distances in the blink of an eye, each success allows him to move 1 meter. This movement cannot be obstructed by anything save for wards specifically designed to interrupt space magic.

Dimensional storage  Action: Free  Duration: Instant  Effect  Space mages often master the craft of creating their own pocket realms, often these are used to store things of value that they’d need on hand quickly. A Space mage is capable of storing any object within this space, that’s no larger than what he could hold in his arms, and it can be retrieved with equal ease. It is a free action for a mage to retrieve an item stored, but it takes a full round action to store anything within the space. The mage can store three objects per potency.

Time Sample Spells
Haste  Action: Instant  Duration: Maintenance  Effect  The caster is capable of speeding up time to an extreme degree however only around himself, this enables him to move at blindingly fast speeds. Each success on his dice rolls increases his speed by +5, and grants him +1 to melee attacks due to his incredibly fast attacks.

Timesight  Action: Instant  Duration: Maintenance  Effect  Time mages are known as some of the world’s most competent investigators, only being passed by Diviners. Timesight is the primary reason for this. This ability allows a mage to scan the past for information, to do this a time mage must be in the area from which they want to pull information. For each success they can view one hour into the past, it takes about a minute to scan an hour to see if it contains the information you need. Should a given hour contain the information you need, it takes at least ten minutes up to an hour to dissect the information.

Light Sample Spells
Blinding Light  Action: Instant  Duration: Instantaneous  Effect  The Light mage is capable of producing a burst of harsh light from his hand, causing everyone in a 30ft cone to roll a Dexterity as a reflexive action. Failure means the targets take the blinded tilt for a number of rounds equal to successes rolled.

Bending Light  Action: Instant  Duration: Concentration  Effect  While invisibility is usually considered under the purview of the illusion school, light magic users are capable of producing a similar effect by bending light around themselves or restricting light's ability to reflect on their body effectively making them invisible. While invisible they are undetectable to the naked eye, though it can be countered by a certain elementalist-sight spells.