Game Terms

## ECC Game Terminology

The following are terms that players (but not necessarily characters) should know.

**Affinity Sphere:** The sphere that a character feels the deepest connection to and interest in. Choices are based on the character's sect.

**Avatar Storm:** An event featured in Mage Revised and the Week of Nightmares cWoD metaplot that made it perilous for mages to cross the Guantlet.

**Coincidental Magick**: Dynamic magick that, if seens by a mundane witness, could be accepted as a natural and normal event.

**The Consensus:** The collective power of human belief.

**The Digital Web:** The magickal side of the Internet which can be considered one of the zones in the Otherworlds.

**Doissetep:** The legendary Order of Hermes stronghold destroyed as part of the MtA Metaplot.

**Dynamic Magick:** The open-ended magick that mages can channel into Effects.

**The Horizon:** The boundary between the Otherworlds and the Void beyond.

**Hubris:** excessive (and sometimes fatal) pride or overconfidence.

**Enlightened Science:** The view that the Spheres are not mystic concepts but defineable through advanced science divided into fields of specialized knowledge.

**Ephemera:** The elemental spirit matter that composes everything in the Middle Umbra.

**Extraordinary Citizens:** People who's personal beliefs are open-minded and allow for supernatural phenomenon or "fringe" science.

**Focus:** The combination of a mage's beliefs about magick and the style of his/her practice as an extension of those beliefs.

**Future Fates:** references to places, characters, and events covered in the MtA metaplot which provide suggestions to Storytellers on how to handle them in their own chronicle.

**Jhor:** a kind of resonance that is associated with the Lower Umbra and death.

**Lexicons:** dictionaries included in MtA books that provide terminology common to the characters themselves.

**Magick:** The suggested way to spell magic in M20, based on an explanation provided on p. 41 of the core M20 book.

**Metaphysical:** an idea, doctrine, or posited reality outside of normal human sensory perception.

**Mythic Age:** The historical era in which the existence of magical phenomena was still ingrained into human belief.

**Mythic Threads:** Symbols used in magic(k) that have deep ties to the Collective Unconscious.

**The Otherworlds:** Planes of reality beyond the terrestrial, human world.

Paradox Effect:

**Resonance:** a minor manifesttion of the Paradox Effect that "ripples" reality around a mage without causing additional Paradox.

**Sorcerer:** An UnAwakened hedge mage who relies on static magic.

**Sphere Progression:** The advancing steps of Sphere expertise: Perception (rank 1), Manipulation (rank 2), Control (rank 3), Command (rank 4), Mastery (rank 5).

**Static Magic:** The non-paradox producing magic possessed by sorcerers and Night-Folk.

**Technomagic (or Technomagick):** Dynamic magic that usually involves technological instruments and procedures.

**Technomancer:** Any mage who relies on Technomagic; they are not necessarily a member of the Technocracy.

**The Three Worlds:** The High, Middle and Low Umbra that lay beyond the Penumbra.

**Transhumanism:** The ideology in which human consciousness transcends the limitations of the human body.

**Wild Talent:** A mage who's magick has not been trained or refined, causing them to have little or no control over what they do.

**Will:** The determination of your character to make things happen exactly as they desire.