Player Created Foci

The common Mage Paradigms, Practices and Instruments start on page 568 of the M20 core and onward. However, you don't have to stick to just them! Here, we have on offer additional paradigms, practices, and instruments. If you want to make up your own, you can keep it to your own notes, or add it here for the next person!

Practices

Ecstasis

Ecstasis is a magickal practice wherein the Mage manipulates reality by pursuing an elevated consciousness that alters their perceptions and unlocks the potential of the Awakened will. There are multiple ways to reach this goal, such as ordeal through pain, extreme physical pleasure, mind-altering drugs, or extreme physical exertion. The achievement of the state of Ecstasis allows for remarkable feats, such as ignoring pain and performing increedible physical feats, enhancing and extending one's senses, and opening oneself up to the spirit world. The quintessential practitioners of Ecstasis among the Awakened are the Sahajiya, for whom it is such an integral practice it was once part of their name, but it's also a key practice for the Darwushim of the Ahl-i-Batin, the Bata'a, House Merinita of the Order of Hermes, many Hollow Ones, and countless other factions of Mages.

Recommended Instruments: Bodywork, Brews & Concoctions, Dance/Movement, Drugs & Poisons, Group Rites, Meditation, Ordeals & Exertions, Sex & Sensuality

Necromancy

Commonly consigned to the macabre practices of evil wizards in role-playing games, Necromancy is actually one of mankind's oldest magickal practices, with its roots in the Shamanism of antiquity. This broad practice centers on manipulating the representations of physical death and the mephitic energies of death itself to gain power and insight. While a sometimes wet and grisly practice replete with haruspicy, wailing spectres and shambling zombies, Necromancy can also involve talismans carved from bone, magic circles to conjure ghosts, Spiritualism and other esoteric practices. Modern mages tend to default to Necromancy as being the blackest of magic, but many classical necromancers also studied physical healing, protective magic, communing with ancestors for benevolent wisdom and curse-breaking. Among Tradition mages, this practice is most common among the Euthanatos but is also practiced by some Verbena and even Hermetics (though Hermetics frown on trafficking with the un-dead, which is understandable given the Order's history...) In the Alliance, Bata'a dance with Baron Samedi, Hollow Ones pursue this most Goth of practices, and some Wu Lung blend it into their work. Technocrats shun such superstition, though viral re-animation of dead tissue continues to tempt some Progenitors... not that that could ever go wrong