So You Wanna Learn Blood Magic

[ST: Lo]

pecial rules and system apply to the study and developement of blood magic and it's associated rituals. Aside from the experience cost of developing or increasing magical traits there is the matter of research time as well as the potential that said research can go wrong and be spoiled because of this. This section will outline the house rules for learning and excelling in the study of blood magic.

1) Learning & Increasing Path Traits

hile a blood mages primary in clan path can be built upon quickly requiring only a bit of practice and the expenditure of experience points between nights, secondary paths and out of clan paths require time and diligent study to learn and expand upon.

To learn a new secondary path of blood magic for an in clan school of practice such as thaumaturgy in the case of Tremere the blood mage must either have a learned tutor (possessing at least three dots in the path in question) or make an extended occult roll using appropriate instructions for the path such as grimoires in order to buy the new path with experience. In the case of out of clan paths both a learned tutor and an extended occult roll are required.

When performing the required occult roll to aquire new path traits the difficulty is always ten minus the mages occult rating (+2 in the case of out of clan paths) and requires the accumulation of no less than ten successes. Appropriate modifiers such as occult library or ability apptitude may apply. Rolls are made once per night and necessitate the blood mage spend no less than three hours studying the path they wish to learn free of distraction. Should the mage botch any of these rolls before the requisite successes are accumulated all successes are lost and the mage must start over again from scratch no sooner than the following night. A botch may also indicate a disasterous and unintended activation of the magic being studied, this is never good for anyone involved.

earned paths are simpler to build on than they were to aquire in the first place. The mages primary in clan path may be increased freely without the need for study time only requiring that they practice the magic in question a bit before enhancing the path trait.

Secondary in clan paths require a bit of time spent in study and experimentation before they can be enhanced. Specifically this requires the mage to devote a number of three hour study sessions to the path in question equal to the paths current rating (or double that in the case of out of clan paths) with only one study session being allowed per night. Additionally the mage may not study more than one magical discipline per night, there are only so many hours after all and there is no game if all your character is doing is burying her face in a book for the entire night.

2) Aquiring Additional Rituals

hile a blood mage learns a ritual for each level in their primary paths of magic within that paths school of study how do they aquire more? Well, similarly to how they aquire and enhance paths really, time and experience. Buying the third dot in the thaumaturgy discipline grants a tremere a free level three ritual and in order to aquire another ritual of similar value they must spend three xp and three nights studying some sort of thaumaturgy. This can be done during the study of a secondary path of thaumaturgy but necromancy rituals may not be learned while studying thaumaturgy, only thaumaturgy rituals. The xp cost for out of clan rituals as well as the time needed to aquire them is always doubled but certain utilitarian rituals are universal throughout all schools of blood magic. Rituals such as communication with kindred sire are a good example of this being featured by both thaumaturgy and koldunism alike. Practicioners of less diverse schools of blood magic such as koldunism may ( at storytellers discretion) be granted the ability to learn certain utilitarian rituals as though they were in clan.

3) Storyteller Has Final Say

rom time to time there may be certain paths or rituals that for one reason or another the storyteller simply does not wish to hand out to the players. This simply goes with the territory of playing a blood mage. You can have a maxed out occult library and ability apptitude stacked with discipline prodigy and still be unable to aquire certain powers from time to time. This will usually be because either A the power in question clashes with a certain plot point or B your character is simply overpowered as it is. Whatever the case is, if the ST says no let that be the end of it.