From the Back Cover:
A Practical Guide
Mage: The Ascension's flexible and ambitious Sphere system has provided many questions and debates for over 20 years. Here, now, in this book, we answer the eternal question How Do You DO That? with hundreds of reality-altering feats - puppetry and possession, elemental command, martial arts prowess, illusions, and far, far more - all presented in simple, casual, and often quite profane English.
For Metaphysical Mastery
Unlike any previous Mage sourcebook, How Do You DO That? strips away the series' trademark ambiguities and deals straight-up with raw rule systems behind Mage's magick rules. Dividing a multitude of uncanny feats into 10 general categories, this book features rules for...
Conjuration & Transformation
Elemental Mastery
Energy Work
Enhanced Perceptions
Martial Arts
Mystic Travel
Necromancy
Summoning, Binding, Bargaining & Warding
Time Distortion & Travel
Uncanny Influence
Sphere magick will never be quote the same again...
From the Introduction:
"How do you DO that?!?!" The question echoes through four editions of Mage: The Ascension, often with good reason. Mage's greatest rules-based asset - its flexible, personalized magick system - can also, bluntly speaking, be a royal pain in the ass when you're trying to translate Sphere Ranks and Arete levels into "I turn him into a newt; how long until he gets better?"
We present this book in an effort to minimize the headaches when your mages warp the fabric of reality.
The Arts are theoretically infinite. Even so, certain classic bits turn up again and again in mystic legends and Mage chronicles. And although the Common Magickal Effects chart in Chapter Ten of Mage 20th Anniversary Edition reveals the basic Spheres involved in many classic acts of magick, the following entries can answer questions and suggest possibilities for certain elaborate feats of Awakened Will.
How Do You DO That? cannot, of course, reflect every possible act of magick you and your fellow players can imagine. Nor should it. Part of the fun of Mage: The Ascension involves clever acts of imagination. Each mage has her own way of doing things, and each Mage player employs an individual approach to magick. You'll come up with things we hadn't even dreamed of. Even so, this book features a wide array of magickal feats - transformation, influence, martial arts, and so on.
This is not a book of spells or a collection of rotes; instead, it's an assortment of feats and tricks that mages of all kinds might employ in one form or another. Rather than having a Hermetic summoning ritual entry, for example, this book has a section that deals with many aspects of Summoning, Binding, Bargaining, and Warding - the basic systems, the essential Traits, the game systems involved when making a pact with an Umbral entity, and the tactics smart mages use in order to avoid having their Awakened asses kicked into some Otherworldly hell by the entity in question. Although most of the basic feats can be found on the Common Magickal Effects section in Mage 20, Chapter Ten, this book offers more detailed guidelines for the rolls, Traits, long-term consequences, and so forth that tend to be involved with those various feats.
Unlike most Mage books, How Do You DO That? is strictly business. Aside from bits of flavor text that show appropriate glimpses into a mage's world, there's no setting or character information offered here. Instead, we deal simply with the game systems involved. Our tone may be playful or snarky in places, but we aim to be straightforward whenever possible here and save the poetry for other occasions.