Mages explore the Astral Realms by turning inward, following their Gnosis to the worlds within human souls, and even beyond, to alien and primal ideas. The Astral Realms are states of mind as much as worlds.
The Self is infinite, expanding outward to other selves and though-forms until they intermingle. Travelers meditate, sending a dream self in to search for knowledge.
Everyone enters the shoals of the Astral by dreaming, but most never go deeper. All mages travelled the Astral through their Watchtowers when they Awakened, though they might not have been aware of it in the face of Mystery Plays and other enigmas. They’ve even gone beyond, to the Supernal — but they can’t duplicate the journey now. Yet the experience allows them to follow the path partway, and even blaze new trails beyond individual dreams, and to the following realms.
Dreams
The shallows of the Astral are experienced by almost every human being as their own dreams. Mages can enter the dreams of subjects with Mind spells, or practice lucid dreaming to explore their own. Some Goetia and other, strange supernatural beings stalk through human dreams and nightmares, and a mage meditating on a problem may find inspiration in a dreaming state.
The Oneiros, The Personal Soul
The lowest layer of the Astral proper contains individual thoughts, beliefs, and passions in dozens of cells, side by side. They hold memories, beliefs, Vices, Virtues, and personal fancies. Each cell is an individual realm and on the inside, is large enough to contain any setting.
A traveller’s Oneiros creates the people, places, and things she needs to act out the scene at hand. Most of these are weak Goetia, but a mage’s daimon, or embodied “higher self,” is stronger and more insightful. Sorcerers raise personal Goetia here, or examine the Imagos of their Rotes.
Mages enter their own Oneiroi by default, but can journey to others through Mind spells, or by crossing a tenuous bridge made of shared thoughts. These aren’t high archetypes, but specific people, places, and things.
Thus, a sorcerer might use the fact that she is currently thinking about the same person as someone else as a bridge into another person’s soul. (Famous people and things don’t qualify unless they’re of great personal significance, because Fame vaults the subject’s Astral double into the Temenos.) She follows the common element from her soul, to the other. Note however that the other party must be actively dreaming or meditating for this method to work.
In many Astral journeys, the Oneiros is just a starting point. If a mage looks outward, she generates a vision-narrative about widening her perspective. She moves through the vision, deals with its petty challenges, and meditates upon it to vault herself past into the Temenos.
The Temenos, Soul of Humanity
Mages think of the Temenos as the next layer up from the Oneiros. This is where individual souls coalesce into the massed soul of Humanity, private thoughts becoming shared myths, archetypes, and concepts. They cluster by theme. Realms of Fascism, Collectivism, and Democracy belong to the greater realms of Government, and share territory with Human Nature.
You can meet every god here, every fiction, and even people so famous they fill the mythic roles of old deities. Temenos conceptual realms include every magical tradition ever practiced by more than one person. Various regions belong to Paths, Orders, Legacies, and other cults. The groups so represented take particular interest in these realms, often protecting them with spells and magical guardians.
Traveling from one region to another is a game of association, similar to travel between Oneiroi, but doesn’t require the same degree of specificity. It still takes the form of a dream story, however. To travel from Democracy to Fascism, you might enter the realm of a failing government: Germany in 1933, or a fictional realm of mashed-together states and archetypal tyrants. If you wish to journey “upward” to the Anima Mundi, travel through a story where archetypes give way to primal concepts and emotions, and consider the thoughts of beasts, stars, and stones.
Mages travel the Temenos in search of occult insights and a better understanding of human nature. In fact, it’s possible to alter collective thought realms by changing their stories. These changes manifest in the material realm. If you want to get a television show cancelled, kill the protagonists in the Temenos; on some level, viewers will believe the show’s dead and watch something else.
Fortunately, the more pervasive and important a concept, the harder it is to adjust. Belief in free will, true love, and the rest probably can’t be expunged or radically altered in this top-down fashion. Stronger concepts also possess guardians. These Goetia don’t depend on an ideal being popular, though this helps. Goetia also play the parts of gods, celebrities, and other personified ideas.
As a mage rises through the Temenos, cultural skin flakes off collective ideas until she reaches the border of the Anima Mundi, the Omphalos or Boundary Stone: the liminal realm of High Speech that represents the highest form of human language. From here, mages can either travel through tunnels in the stone into the Anima Mundi, or skirt its edge to walk into the Primordial realms containing humanity’s essential emotions and fears. These realms, representing the animal instincts of the human race, are poorly understood. Their inhabitants are typically monstrous and highly protective of their territory.
The Anima Mundi, Soul of the Cosmos
The final layer of the Astral accessible to mages, the Anima Mundi or Dreamtime is the shared soul of the whole Fallen World, where the subtle thoughts of animals and even stars array themselves.
After a mage follows the runes of High Speech through the Omphalos, she might travel to the Swath, where the polluted aspects of post-industrial civilization manifest, or the Spire Perilous, a remnant of the Axis Mundi that is said to have been damaged by the end of the Time Before.
These places (typically visualized as upward journeys) connect in turn to the Dreaming Earth, where nature and the raw elements manifest, and beyond to the Sidereal Wastes, where mages behold the dreams of planets and stars.
None of these are human-generated dreams and ideas. Sidereal Mars isn’t a planetary romance with green, sword-bearing natives (you can find that in the Temenos), but sterile red sands — that is, assuming Mars didn’t once bear life. The Sidereal Wastes cause Time to mutate so that time is divided into actions, not units you can measure with a clock — and it holds true even when the action might take years to accomplish.
In the Anima Mundi, travellers must resist the Ecstatic Wind, where human thought dissolves into the cosmic oversoul. Raising the Astral Amnion (see below) protects against it.
Beyond the Sidereal Wastes, explorers find a desolate beach on the shore of a light-absorbing sea: the Ocean Ouroboros, Astral reflection of The Abyss. Along the beach, travellers find the citadels of the Aeons, mighty beings who represent the Arcana. All but one of them manifest in pairs matching the Path Arcana. The final Aeon, the Old Man of The Abyss, lives alone by a ramshackle hut.
Mages can go no further than the shores of Ouroboros. Even touching it is tantamount to entering The Abyss, and destroys the fool who does it. Mages sometimes cast things they don’t want into Ouroboros. This includes memories, souls they wish to damn, and even material items they’ve converted into ephemera for the journey. One need merely imagine the act of throwing something in your (Astral) possession away and it vanishes forever.
System
All a mage needs to enter her own dreams is a Resolve + Composure roll to meditate while going to sleep; Mind spells bypass the need for meditation or are used to enter the dreams of others. Spells within dreams are cast normally, except that Sleepers do not treat spells affecting the dream or its narrative as obvious magic.
The Astral Realms proper are made of thoughts, emotions, and other ephemeral creations of the soul, but the Arcana affect their creations using the same rules as they do on the material realm. In a place of symbols, each Arcanum’s dominion has equally symbolic importance. Matter affects visions of stone, for instance. That said, a place of thoughts and emotions made manifest eases the use of the Mind Arcanum. Mind spells benefit from a –2 penalty to Paradox rolls in the Astral.
To create an Astral Path and begin her journey, the mage meditates at a place of power. This can be a Hallow, a Demesne, or a Synese.
Each of these starting points demands its own requirement for access.
After satisfying the access condition, the sorcerer meditates. Roll Resolve + Composure. Success projects the sorcerer into the Oneiros over the course of a scene or hour. Exceptional success pulls it off in a single turn. The mage enters her own Oneiros unless she makes telepathic contact with someone else, in which case mutual assent or the strongest telepath (using Clash of Wills where necessary) determines which Oneiros she visits.
A sorcerer in his own Oneiros is formidable; his spells never risk Paradox as long as the magic doesn’t leave the confines of his own soul. This doesn’t apply to shared or foreign Oneiroi. Sleepers’ Oneiroi reflect their curse to a greater extent than the material realm. All magic cast in a Sleeper’s Oneiros is a Paradox risk. Finally, a mage “killed” in the Oneiros by its contents and native Goetia (but not intruders or their actions) doesn’t suffer Soul Shock (see below) — she just wakes up in the material realm, disoriented but able to return with full Dream Health after meditating again.
The mage manifests in dream form while in the Astral or her own dreams. The dream form may look nothing like the sorcerer, because this is her self-image as influenced by contact from the Supernal, and divorced from the limitations of flesh. Characters with the Shadow Name Merit often appear radically different in age, race, sex, or fitness, as their dream forms conform to their magical selves. The traveller uses this form to interact with anything in the Astral Realms while her body remains in the material realm, alive but unconscious.
Mage Manifestation
The dream form has the following Traits instead of the mage’s standard set:
- Power: Equal to the higher of Intelligence or Presence for mages, or just Intelligence for others. Used for Intelligence, Strength, and Presence tasks.
- Finesse: Equal to the higher of Wits or Manipulation for mages, or just Wits for others. Used for Wits, Dexterity, and Manipulation tasks.
- Resistance: Equal to the higher of Resolve or Composure for mages, or just Resolve for others. Used for Resolve, Stamina, and Composure tasks.
- Dream Health: This Trait replaces regular Health. Add Resistance to the character’s Gnosis-based Attribute maximum. Losing Dream Health imposes wound penalties just as for standard Health. When a mage is “killed” due to Dream Health loss, she acquires the Soul Shocked Condition and returns to her body.
- Amnion: Only the Awakened possess this Trait. The Amnion is an intensified self-image that a sorcerer can invoke to protect herself. Amnions take many shapes, from antique diving suits to scaled hides and spiked bat’s wings. A sorcerer may invoke her Amnion as an Instant Action. When she does so, she gains general armour equal to the lower of her Gnosis or highest subtle Arcanum against attacks that appear physical, and against the Ecstatic Wind. However, as a refined form of egocentrism, it impairs the ability to interact with the outside world, imposing a –2 die penalty to Finesse-based tasks and a –1 penalty to Defence. The Amnion is treated as a form of equipment. It doesn’t stack with “physical” armour, but does stack with spells and Attainments.
- Path Tools: All mages can will Path tools into existence in dreams or the Astral as a Reflexive Action, since they’re symbols of the bond between soul and Watchtower. These can only be Tools she has used before, in the material realm.
Once in the Oneiros, the mage can choose to explore it or continue on to the Temenos. The sorcerer must journey through the course of a vision, surpassing any challenges it may raise, until reaching the threshold. At that point, she again meditates, using the same system as travel into the Oneiros. (She doesn’t need to satisfy the conditions demanded by her means of access from the material realm.)
The sorcerer can step off her Astral Path and explore, or continue onward. In the latter case, the Temenos presents a challenge drawn from humanity’s collective imagination, especially where it intersects with the mage’s personal experience. If the mage merely survives the challenges, she can continue to the Anima Mundi. If she not only survives but deciphers the challenge’s symbolism or mystery, she earns an Arcane Beat.
Magic isn’t greatly altered by the Temenos, and obeys the same rules as it does throughout the rest of the Astral Realms. Mages benefit from a wealth of symbolism however, as the entire realm is made of humanity’s archetypes. Thus, every point in the Temenos is a potential place Yantra offering +1 die to spellcasting rolls.
To breach the Anima Mundi, the mage again concentrates, making the same Resolve + Composure roll as she used to enter the Oneiros and Temenos. She arrives at the Omphalos and may journey through it to the Swath or Spire Perilous.
Now she must contend with the Ecstatic Wind: the inhuman, cosmic consciousness of the Anima Mundi which might smother the mage’s individual identity. The better handle a mage has on transcendental reality, the worse the Wind affects her, flaying identity away and inflicting damage as follows.
When a mage is killed by Ecstatic Wind, she returns with the Soul Shocked Condition and loses a Willpower dot due to depersonalization. Finally, since her soul momentarily escapes its usual confines of self to be smeared across raw celestial Being, it often brings back some sign of its deformity: a Paradox Condition.
This crosses metaphysical lines and can even affect the mage’s physical body and surroundings. The Condition resolves itself as usual.
The mage encounters a challenge every time she moves from one region of the Anima Mundi to the next. Again, unearthing a hidden truth within the challenge often earns an Arcane Beat. The Ecstatic Wind vanishes when a mage reaches the shores of Ouroboros and the homes of the Aeons.
Mages can return from their personal Oneiroi as a Reflexive Action. They just wake up. Coming back from anywhere else requires the same Resolve + Composure rolls for each Astral threshold, but doesn’t require the mage to pass through vision challenges.
She walks back along the now-resolved Astral Path. Alternately, she can deny herself full psychic reintegration with the material realm to wake up in a single turn, but leaving part of herself behind this way inflicts the Soul Shocked Condition.