Mage college faction abilities completely revised!

One of the things I was most disappointed with when looking through Theory a couple weeks ago was the mage colleges. They were basically all the same thing: three levels of membership that gave bonuses to mana and maybe an interesting ability or two. So, I took two weeks and revised each and every one of them. Lets take a look.

The Helioseminary

Everyone's favorite light college just got a lot more lethal with 9 unique abilities including the ability to blind enemies, and heal in new ways. Speaking of..

The Pyrari Academy

The fire college got 9 new abilities that should make the fire mage play like something of a Rage-Mage. What do I mean? well how about:

Couple spellrage with abilities that reward you for going all-in on the offensive, and a Pyrari mage becomes quite the aggro strategy.

The Catricarch 

The terra college got 18 new abilities. Many of these abilities are focused around increasing the effectiveness of chain lightning, using lightning charges, unarmed attacks, and being a mother-fucking viking. While this college didn't get any ultimate-style abilities like many of the others did, it has a wide variety of ability sets that work well with many different character archetypes. 

The Alternate Interim

The chrono college got 10 new abilities including 2 ultimates. Of all the revisions, this is the most likely one to get nerfed.

 

The High Artisans 

The arcane college  got 11 new abilities including the ability to dispel or overcharge magic, and some interesting new ways to counter and manipulate magic.

You can find all this new material in the Factions chapter of Character Creation starting on page 65. I would be interested to hear thoughts and comments on the new and existing ability sets.

Combat and Lore update!

In my ongoing attempt to clarify and expand Theory, I have updated the combat document and the Lore document. Nothing about the game changed mechanically, much of what was added was simply for clarification.
This time around, the player is introduced to the two types of combat maneuvers and how and when to use them. Then, we move on to explain how to use all different types of interrupts (with pictures!). If you are reading this blog post currently (of course you are) I would heavily recommend that you read the new combat document. It is likely that there was a previous misunderstanding, or that I may have jaded the content of the document in some way. In either case, I would like to know.

While perusing around some of the old Theory revisions, I found an interesting section that I decided to omit for some reason. "The Mechanics of Magic" now appears on page 7 of the lore document. This section describes how magic physically functions in the multiverse and where each type of magic is drawn from. While this doesn't give GMs or players anything to take and run with directly, I feel that it adds some flavor, and that tampering with mechanics like these can make for great high-level campaigns.