Editing Mage: The Awakening (section)

==Magic==
===Arcana===
There are ten Arcana, which are the different domains that magic has control over. Similar to the [[Mage: The Ascension]] Spheres, except with easier crunch. Forces, Time, Space, Life, and Matter are the Gross (as in obvious, not as in disgusting) Arcana, while Fate, Mind, Death, Spirit, and Prime are the Subtle Arcana. 

*'''Death''': Deals with death, darkness, decay, ghosts, souls and other such spooky stuff. Is more or less a "new" Arcana not directly taken from the original Mage game, but it's got some elements of Entropy.
*'''Fate''': Mostly stuff like luck, fate, fortune, destiny, and oaths, but at the highest level you can go Old Testament on people's asses and summon rains of frogs, swarms of locusts and otherwise turn probability into your bitch. Derived from Ascension's Entropy.
*'''Forces''': Fire, wind and electricity, heat and cold, light, sound, gravity and even radiation: Forces is a potent Arcana indeed. At lower levels you're a bit limited, but at higher levels you can shit lightning like there's no tomorrow and cockslap physics in the face by creating or destroying energy. And then you can give someone cancer by radiating them. Much like Matter, Forces can become stupidly powerful in the hands of someone who knows a lot about real-life physics and can resist the urge to just throw fireballs everywhere. To give you an idea, here is an example taken from a blog: "I ran a mage game once. A young Warlock used space and forces to great affect with a Tungsten brick (Named "Fluffy"). He opened a portal through which the brick could reach the gravity well at the center of the Milky way galaxy. As it reached the event horizon of the Black hole, he open a second portal (with the use of advanced IRL math, his college major) to redirect the brick to earth. The campaign, and Earth, was literally destroyed before anyone knew it."  How he got a sympathetic link to a black hole, god only knows.
*'''Life''': The Arcana of healing and sickness, of rebuilding life and disassembling it, but also working with animals or shapeshifting: Life is a very useful support Arcana. At higher levels you can regrow lost limbs, rip the life straight out of people, or even create brand new species of life.
*'''Matter''': The Arcana of solids, liquids and gasses, of form, shaping and changing: Matter is a real hands-on Arcana. This works with both base materials and machines, allowing a mage to mess with electronic devices, reshape matter, fuse machines together so you have a shotgun that shoots nails, create golems or create matter ''ex nihilo''. More lethal than it seems- it's amazing how effective transmuting the air into acid can be against most enemies. Becomes stupidly powerful in the hands of a player with both in-character and out-of-character knowledge of chemistry.
*'''Mind''': Jedi Mind Trick, the Arcana. With some extra abilities involving the Goetia and mindfucking people to death. Also allows for telepathic networking and creating friends, sometimes literally so when it comes to Goetia.
*'''Prime''': The Arcana of Metamagic. This allows a Mage to mess with the Aether, Tass, Nodes, Mage Sight, Nimbuses, and allows Sleepers to become Sleepwalkers. Has less to do with making objects permanent like in the original Mage, but it still allows for messing with the trappings of magic like back in the day.
*'''Space''': Correspondence, but with the connections between things played down slightly. This Arcana allows the mage to mess with three-dimensional space to move faster or keep people away from certain locations, lock them in rooms that air can't get into (the book even has a sidebar to help give you an idea of how big the room should be to ensure they end up asphyxiating themselves), warp someone's flesh, fold space or even create pocket dimensions. Space can still mess with connections between things or people, but this is not Fate or Mind magic: it is merely the connection itself which can be returned to its original state.
*'''Spirit''': The Arcana to deal with the spirit world. Allows the Mage to commune with spirits, survive in the spirit world, create fetishes and familiars and at the highest levels alter or even create new spirits, Loci or a permanent residence in the spirit world. Remember that it is unwise to annoy the spirits, and even more so if the [[Werewolf: The Forsaken|Uratha]] have to get involved. 
*'''Time''': Precognition and postcognition, prophecy and change and even compressed or reversed time: while difficult to use Time is a very potent Arcana. At lower levels a Mage can alter minor events or see a bit into the future, at higher levels they can see far into the future, rewrite history, age someone to death on the spot or have time around them slow to a crawl while the Mage has hours to spend.

<center>
<gallery>
File:Arcanum - Death.png|Death
File:Arcanum - Fate.png|Fate
File:Arcanum - Forces.png|Forces
File:Arcanum - Life.png|Life
File:Arcanum - Matter.png|Matter
File:Arcanum - Mind.png|Mind
File:Arcanum - Prime.png|Prime
File:Arcanum - Space.png|Space
File:Arcanum - Spirit.png|Spirit
File:Arcanum - Time.png|Time
</gallery>
</center>

{|align=right border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=1 style="margin: 1em; solid black;"
|- align=center
| [[File:Practice - Compelling.png|75px]] || [[File:Practice - Knowing.jpg|75px]] || [[File:Practice - Unveiling.jpg|75px]]
|- align=center
| [[File:Practice - Ruling.png|x75px]] || [[File:Practice - Shielding.png|75px]] || [[File:Practice - Veiling.png|75px]]
|- align=center
| [[File:Practice - Fraying.png|x75px]] || [[File:Practice - Perfecting.png|75px]] || [[File:Practice - Weaving.png|75px]]
|- align=center
| colspan=3 | [[File:Practice - Patterning.png|75px]] [[File:Practice - Unraveling.png|75px]]
|- align=center
| colspan=3 | [[File:Practice - Making.png|75px]] [[File:Practice - Unmaking.png|75px]]
|}

===Practices===
Practices are the codification of magic. They simply define the effects of spells rather than having mechanical benefits- to make a spell, you pick the Arcana and Practices it would use, figure out how they combine with each other (e.g. if you want to see into the infrared spectrum, you'd combine Forces and Unveiling, and turning a person into a frog would require Life and Patterning; more complex spells may require more complex combinations of Arcana and Practices), and set up relevant spell factors to define other effects such as potency and duration- more potent changes, such as making a spell's effects indefinite or allowing it to be cast from further away, require Mana, Reach (which may increase Paradox risk depending on your Gnosis), or both. You don't need any levels in these to use them (although it helps with actually pulling them off): having a high enough Gnosis and Arcanum rating lets you use them. 

There are thirteen of them for regular Mages, five for Archmages and an Ascended one. The base Practices are:

*'''• Compelling:''' Urge a phenomena to do something that is within its normal nature.
*'''• Knowing:''' Figure something out about a phenomena that falls within an Arcanum.
*'''• Unveiling:''' Discover information about a phenomena that the Mage cannot otherwise see.
*'''•• Ruling:''' Control a phenomenon and make it act in ways that it wouldn't be capable of normally, but not to the degree that it would alter the phenomenon on a fundamental level.
*'''•• Shielding:''' Protect an object or person from something under the Arcanum's purview. It doesn't work against general damage- that's what the Mage Armor attainment is for. 
*'''•• Veiling:''' Hide something under the Arcanum from detection, or make it undetectable to a concrete phenomenon covered by the Arcanum (e.g. Veiling with the Death Arcanum could hide someone from a ghost, but not death itself).
*'''••• Fraying:''' Damage a target with a phenomenon or damage the phenomenon itself.
*'''••• Perfecting:''' Refine and repair phenomena within an Arcanum.
*'''••• Weaving:''' Alter the properties of a phenomenon without transforming it into something totally different.
*'''•••• Patterning:''' Transform a phenomenon into just about anything as long as it falls within an Arcanum.
*'''•••• Unraveling:''' Negatively alter a phenomenon that falls within an Arcanum, or greatly damage something with a phenomenon.
*'''••••• Making:''' Create a phenomenon that falls within an Arcanum out of nothing.
*'''••••• Unmaking:''' Destroy a phenomenon within an Arcanum or destroy something using a phenomenon within the Arcanum.

The Imperial Practices are:

*'''••••• • Dynamics:''' Create phenomena that change and adapts to conditions they encounter without requiring the mage's input.
*'''••••• •• Entities:''' Permanently graft Arcanum to a target's pattern, usually to grant it supernatural abilities.
*'''••••• •• Excision:''' Permanently strip a target's pattern of Arcanum, usually to remove certain capacities from it.
*'''••••• ••• Dominions:''' Create Chantries and split the Archmage's soul into multiple entities.
*'''••••• •••• Transfiguration:''' Only has one spell: temporarily merge with the Arcanum so that any feat is possible.

And finally:

*'''••••• ••••• Assumption:''' Purely theoretical, speculated to allow a permanent merging with the Arcanum. The only thing the rules confirm about it is that it exists.