The player spends a point of Willpower to activate Scrutiny. While Scrutinizing, the penalty for rolls unrelated to magic increases to –3.
The influx of information she receives renders her unable to interact with the Fallen World in any meaningful way. If the mage employs Scrutiny on a subject protected by some kind of magical concealment, the Storyteller should use the same metric as Active Mage Sight for determining whether a Clash of Wills is appropriate. If a Clash of Wills is appropriate, the mage’s player receives the rote quality on the roll.
Scrutiny of a subject allows a mage to determine its Mysteries. The number and nature of Mysteries in a subject is up to the Storyteller.
Scrutiny is an Extended Action, but with a few variations. The time per roll is one turn, meaning that the player can’t use an exceptional success to reduce the time per roll. Also, the player doesn’t have a target number of successes. Instead, every time she reaches a number of successes equal to the Mystery’s Opacity, the Opacity rating falls by one.
For instance, if a mage begins Scrutinizing a lingering spell with Opacity 4, after the player accumulates four successes, the Opacity rating drops to three. If the mage continues (and the player accumulates three more successes), the Opacity rating drops to two.
In addition, while most Extended Actions are limited by the number of dice in the player’s unmodified dice pool, Scrutiny does not suffer this limitation. Maintaining Scrutiny does, however, become more dangerous to the mage. After a number of rolls for Scrutinizing a given Mystery equal to the mage’s unmodified Gnosis + Arcanum, the character’s own magic starts to leak into the Mystery.
In game terms, every time the player fails a Scrutiny roll after reaching this limit, add half the mage’s Gnosis (round up) to the Mystery’s Opacity. Unfortunately, this doesn’t apply only to the mage in question; anyone who attempts to Scrutinize this Mystery later has to separate out the clumsy mage’s influence on it.
The player can spend Mana during Scrutiny, releasing it and watching the shapes it makes as it sublimates into Fallen reality to gain clues about the Mystery at hand. Each point of Mana spent adds one success to that turn’s roll, but only if the roll succeeds. If the roll fails, the Mana spent that turn is lost. The mage cannot spend more Mana per turn than her Gnosis allows.
Dice Pool: Gnosis + Arcanum
Action: Extended Action
Roll Results
Dramatic Failure
The player accrues no successes, and adds two to the Mystery’s Opacity. If the player has already made a number of rolls equal to the unmodified dice pool, a Supernal Entity of the mage’s Path takes note of the mage and may affect him with its powers as long as he maintains his Mage Sight.
Failure
The player accrues no successes, but can continue to Scrutinize. If the player has already made a number of rolls equal to the unmodified dice pool, then a failed roll adds half the mage’s Gnosis (round up) to the Mystery’s Opacity.
Success
The player accrues successes, and can choose to spend Mana in order to add more, up to the normal per-turn limits of the character’s Gnosis. If the player accumulates enough successes to lower the Mystery’s Opacity, all successes are reset and the mage can continue (that is, it is not possible to lower a Mystery’s Opacity by more than one level in a single turn).
If the mage chooses to break off the Scrutiny, she can reinstate it later, with the Opacity rating at whatever level it was when the mage broke off the attempt
Exceptional Success
The player accrues successes and reveals mysteries as described above. In addition, since the exceptional success mechanics for normal Extended Actions do not apply, the player may choose one of the following options: She can apply all successes gained in this roll, even if doing so lowers the Opacity more than once; she can spend a point of Mana to blot out the Mysteries she is seeing so that other mages have a more difficult time scrutinizing them (add the character’s Gnosis to the Mystery’s Opacity); or she can spend a point of Mana to cover her tracks, obscuring any trace of her Nimbus from the area (anyone magically searching for her Scrutiny suffers a penalty equal to her Gnosis).
Permutations: Arcana
A mage can Scrutinize using multiple Arcana, as long as they are in her Active Mage Sight, but doing so carries risks. Because she is putting her senses through multiple magic filters, she has a more difficult time sorting all of the sensory input. In game terms, for every Arcanum beyond the first that mage adds into Scrutiny, subtract one roll from the maximum number of rolls allowed before a failed roll affects the Opacity rating. The base number of rolls is (Gnosis + highest Arcanum used).