Template:Character Creation Step Four
Step Four: Select Advantages
Backgrounds
Assign your seven free Background Traits to any combination of Backgrounds that reflect your character’s history, relationships, and resources. Backgrounds are a great way to mechanically represent your mage’s past experiences—such as long-standing ties to their Chantry, mystical tools passed down through generations, favors owed by other Awakened, or spiritual patrons who guide them. Allies, Mentors, Nodes, and Arcane are just a few examples of how your character’s legacy and connections can shape their journey.
Arete
Arete represents your mage’s enlightenment—their ability to perceive and shape reality through magic. It governs the strength and success of your character’s magick, as well as the depth of their understanding of the Spheres. All mages begin with one Trait in Arete unless Free Traits are spent to raise it (up to a maximum of 2 for new players in Inheritance of Ashes).
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The mage’s enlightenment, mystical insight and awareness of magic combine to form his Arete. A young Initiate most often has only a single Arete Trait. With time, experience and Seekings, the mage can improve their rating in this Trait.
Your mage’s Arete determines the success or failure of most of their magick. It also is the limit of how much of the Spheres the character can comprehend. A mage cannot learn a Sphere level above the character’s total Arete Traits.
Record starting Spheres
There are nine Spheres, each of which represent a certain element of reality. In game terms they represent a mage’s ability to manipulate that aspect of reality. Each Tradition has a heritage of study that covers one Sphere in great depth. It is this heritage that determines your character’s Specialty Sphere.
After marking down your free level of your Specialty Sphere, you will then assign an additional five free levels to any Spheres of your choosing. Note that your maximum level of a Sphere is capped by your character’s Arete; in other words, if your Arete is 2, you can only have two levels in any given Sphere.
In total, at Character Creation, your character will get six levels of Spheres to spread among the nine Spheres of magickal understanding.
The affinity Spheres for the various Traditions are:
- Akashic Brotherhood: Mind
- Celestial Chorus: Prime
- Cult of Ecstasy: Time
- Dreamspeakers: Spirit
- Euthanatos: Entropy
- Order of Hermes: Forces
- Society of Ether: Matter
- Verbana: Life
- Virtual Adepts: Correspondence
After marking down your free level of your Specialty Sphere, you will then assign an additional five free levels to any Spheres of your choosing. Note that your maximum level of a Sphere is capped by your character’s Arete; in other words, if your Arete is 2, you can only have two levels in any given sphere.
In total, at CC, your character will get six levels of Spheres to spread among the nine Spheres of magickal understanding.
