Downtime

‘Downtime’ is the time between the meetings of Mages, when your characters are presumably off doing their own thing.

Downtime Actions: Our games are two weeks apart, so there’s time to do some study and activity. Mages have very busy lives, studying magic, listening to lectures, working, teaching, doing grunt work, etc. However, there’s still plenty of time between games for you to do your own thing.

Try not to do anything during Downtime that you could instead do at the game. For example, if you want to have an argument with someone, save it for the game – then you’ll have something interesting to do!

During Downtime, you may submit one passive and one active downtime action.

Passive actions include studying for Spheres, training up your Abilities, working on an Artistry project, or such. Stuff you’ll mostly do at home.

Active actions include stalking other characters, going out and investigating a crime scene, checking in with Contacts, and such. Stuff that requires you to get out of the house.

Rotes: You may sacrifice either kind of action to cast any Rote you know during downtime.

Other than that, you’re pretty much free to do whatever you want (within the limitations of your character’s abilities). You may even attack other players during Downtime, although killing a player between games can be bad form. (Use your judgment.) All the rules work the same.

The best thing to do is to do some investigation, get some interesting new information, and use your Backgrounds. But don’t feel that you have to. It’s perfectly fine to let the time between games pass without doing anything drastic or significant.

Learning Spheres: You never need to spend time learning your Tradition’s Specialty Sphere. It is assumed to be so indoctrinated in their Paradigm that you have more than enough resources to learn it. That’s why it’s Specialty.

For the other eight Spheres, you may either learn from a Teacher (another character who has the Sphere Level you want), or learn on your own. If you learn from a Teacher, it takes no time – you just spend the XP, and describe how you learn during Downtime.

If you’re learning on your own, you must first have the Library Background equal to or higher than the Sphere Level you want. (Such as Library 3 for a Disciple-level Sphere.) This takes one game session per Sphere Level, and you must spend a number of Passive downtime actions equal to the Sphere Level being bought.

Learning on your own is intentionally slow. Teachers would be justified in asking for significant favors or gifts in exchange for their instruction.

The number one rule of teaching is: Never, ever teach anything that will give someone an advantage over you.