Difference between revisions of "Kinetropic School"

Latest revision as of 17:46, 28 October 2015

“Motes move through Jade at three hundred theonanomons per second, Exaltations respire them at a base rate of four per hour, and they are utterly indivisible. What does it matter where Essence comes from, I’ve got work to do.”

Kinetropic Sorcery

The Kinetropic School of Sorcery is one of the major schools of sorcery extant in the present Age, taught by two major schools and studied by numerous Scavenger Lords. It is also a young school, borne out of the Devonian School of Sorcery during the dark days of the Dragonblooded Shogunate, as sorcerous knowledge was lost and focus shifted from exploring the underlying truth of Creation to testing and implementing a broad set of laws, which could be consistently replicated and rigorously tested to prove that consistency. The Devonian School had already investigated Creation in this way, and the Kinetropic School built upon that foundation, while stripping away both the drive to pin down the nature of Essence as an expression of the laws of Creation, and to uncover the universal Law beneath all others. The resulting school has a number of theories, based on experimentation and evidence, and while its practitioners feel these laws apply universally, they do not feel that the laws must necessarily share a common root.

Though many proponents of other Sorcerous Schools were horrified by its lack of philosophical depth, the Kinetropic school proved prolific: it could train its sorcerers more quickly than rival schools, its lack of deep philosophy meant it was less riven with sorcerous civil wars over metaphysical concepts, and its individual theories were optimal for dealing with the magitechnology that the Shogunate daimyo were so desperate to maintain. The Sidereal Exalted believe they encouraged this process, creating a simple school fit for the minds of the Terrestrial Exalted… if this is true, or mere hubris, is difficult to say.

To a Kinetropic sorcerer (more accurately sorcerer-engineer, as the number of sorcerers holding this school who are not artificers is few indeed), Essence is a form of energy (in fact several forms) that exists in Creation. How it came to be or why it behaves as it does is irrelevant, because it is testably and provably present. A large number of laws have been formulated concerning how Essence behaves (particularly how its behavior differs for different substances and configurations). Each spell, and each artifact, is constructed using these laws of Essence so that energy is challenged in the amounts, rates, and types required to achieve a particular end result. Kinetropic spells and artifacts are both set down not as rituals or oral traditions but as blueprints showing how each theory and component interlocks together to form the whole of the end unit. Development of any spell or device layers test upon test: laws applied together until the correct combination is determined, and then the next law combined with the result until that combination is determined, on and on, and for any new spell or device, even those similar to existing projects, the whole process is repeated again to ensure everything interacts properly. This is a great deal of (somewhat dry) lab work, and for this reason Kinetropic sorcerers (both during learning and developing afterwards), tend towards group work and joint projects.

Kinetropic spells tend to be physical in nature, motes pushed in and physical effects pushed out (spells such as Death of Obsidian Butterflies or Raising the Earth's Bones).

Notable Kinetropic academies include the Kinetropic Curriculum of the Heptagram and the Valkhawsen of Lookshy.

Kinetropic Spells

Death of Obsidian Butterflies

Raising the Earth's Bones

Kinetropic Absorption

Source: Derived from the White Treatise pp.22

School Minimums: One Craft (Ability) 3.

A Kinetropic sorcerer must believe in the real power of sorcery, and that this power can be produced through repeatable procedures and rote patterns. They tend to practice such patterns and procedures as part of their Sorcerous Initiation (which also tends towards the ‘scripted’).

A sorcerer with the Kinetropic Absorption gains access to the following powers:

- Efficient Attunement: Manse and artifact attunements are repeatable experiments. With a successful (Intelligence + Lore) roll, difficulty ([Manse or Artifact rating] x 2), a Kinetropic sorcerer can attune to such a thing in 20 ticks instead of the usual twenty minutes. If she ever succeeds on the roll for a given object, thereafter he may always attune to that object in 20 ticks, without need to roll again.

- Industrial Assembly: A Kinetropic sorcerer adds +10% to the successes gained from working with Complete Plans, Partial Plans, Reverse Engineering, and Repeat Creation in Artifact Creation. Storytellers may wish to levy additional penalties or difficulties to crafting according to First Principles.

- Fundamental Introduction: The change from one Sorcerous Absorption to another is a deep and arduous process, requiring the sorcerer to re-learn even the most basic lessons before they can once more practice sorcery. For the Kinetropic sorcerer, however, their training grants an advantage in transitioning to the school considered by many to be their ‘parent’: when a Kinetropic Sorcerer seeks to transition to the Devonian School, they do not immediately lose access to sorcery or spells, instead simply losing their Kinetropic Absorption then purchasing the Devonian Absorption Charm and paying two additional XP, as well as undergoing roleplaying in-character to demonstrate pushing through the boundaries of one school and following questions to new, far deeper answers, the Storyteller determining when this is sufficient to merit purchasing the new Absorption. If Storytellers feel this is too easy for such a fundamental shift, they may also require the character to make additional rolls to analyze each spell they know, keeping them only if they can succeed and thus understand the underlying principles they ignored as Kinetropic sorcerers.