Restricted, ask the GM. It can create artificial forms of luck or unluck, bestow or lift curses or geasa. Shamans have access to Blessing, but it operates very differently, since there is no conscious deity to watch over the target; instead, they can mark a person for friendship or enmity with the forces of nature. Most Blessing effects are Manipulation+Occult and have a difficulty of the target's Essence.
Luck. Difficulty based on how important this activity is to your deity. (1 for direct service on a quest of utmost importance, 2 for actions aligned with the deity's cause, 3 for neutral activity.) Every extra success translates to a special die that can be rolled after a result has already been determined, when it looks like it will make an important difference. The gamemaster determines this, though players may say, "That blessing would sure come in handy now!" as a suggestion (being explicit helps, your GM is hosed). Unluck creates a Fortune die that works against them when they're doing well... or a failure would be really disastrous. The blessing lasts for one particular activity (a battle, a journey). If the character is doing well, it may go unused (they don't need help!).
A magician may also give a +1 to the combat values of a number of allies equal to his Essence by staying in one place and praying continuously. They may perform no other activity than reflexives, and this effect counts as a charm activation each turn.
Calm. Roll at a difficulty of the median Willpower of the crowd and affect a number of unnamed targets equal to the square of your successes. If you surpass the Willpower of a Named target, it cannot take offensive or exciting actions for one round per extra success you have.
Incite. This can start riots, berserking... similar to Calm but makes people attack.
Guidance. Spend an willpower point and roll at a difficulty of the target's Essence. This can create temporary effects.
| Extra Successes | Blessing | Curse |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Help a lost child find their way home. | Send someone to the bad part of town. |
| 1 | Make a field or animal especially fertile for a year. | Cause a calf to be born with three legs. |
| 2 | Aid a woman in having a safe birth, or help someone recover from a fever. | Cause a person to have a dangerous accident or contract an unpleasant disease. |
| 3 | Guide a person safely through a dangerous place. | Place a person in a life-threatening situation. |
| 4 | Bring a family health and luck in all that they do for the next year. | Visit plague upon a family. |
| 5 | Cause someone at death's door to recover from an injury or illness. | Cause a person's death in a mysterious accident. |
Fate. Spend a permanent Willpower point and roll against the target's Essence (if unwilling). This can create permanent blessings and curses.
Witness. Spend an willpower point and roll; this is a Blessing that supports an oath witnessed, a curse that will befall the oathbreaker, or both. See the Eclipse caste power for details.
Takes all the chi-related effects from the standard Fertility schtick and adds in Garry Handelman's Countermagic effects. It can use the Blast schtick of Karma in the same way as the Weather sphere can use Lightning. The difficulty is usually the target's Essence. Most Karma effects use Intelligence+Occult.
De-Attunement. Severs links to feng shui sites. Difficulty is the target's Essence, or number of attuned sites ×3.
Harvest Karma. Spend a willpower point and add a number of dice equal to your successes on an Int+Occult roll to any task check. The willpower point must come from a ritual or your own personal Magic stat; power point storage items do not channel the energy properly for using it to manipulate probability. Difficulty is the number of dice you'd otherwise be rolling.
Observe Karma. Take 30 seconds to precisely peg a person's Essence rating, observe the nature of active magicks, etc. Difficulty 1.
Steal Karma. Spend a willpower point and subtract a number of dice equal to your Int+Occult from another person's task check. Like Harvest Karma, it cannot be used with a power point storage item. The difficulty is the number of dice they're rolling before you do this.
Restore Karma. Remove disruption by Sorcery or Creature Powers.
Disrupt Magic. Using this ability counts as a defensive action when defending yourself or someone standing within arm's reach (i.e. you can abort to it), but is a normal action otherwise. Do it when a bad guy is casting a spell, not necessarily at you. If you can beat his total successes with your own, his spell is canceled. Difficulty 1. (or look at it as difficulty equal to his, and you need to beat his net successes).
Disrupt Beings. As per the Karma effect of Blast, but only effects Supernatural Creatures, and ignores creature armor and damage immunities. You may use your Occult when defending against arcanowave or creature power attacks even if you do not have Blast. This looks like you parrying with little paper wards, thrown rice, obscure gestures, etc.
Soul Mask. Anytime anyone attempts to use supernatural methods, of any sort including Charms, to detect you or gather information about you, add your Essence to the difficulty, even if the base difficulty is your Essence. You can spend a willpower point to extend this benefit to any person you touch for one day.
Enchantment. Potions, scrolls, one-shot items, charging wands.
The next level of Karma provides some of the more impressive powers.
Astral Flare. Creates a flare of energy that can blind spirits, screw up certain categories of detection spell, and serve as a beacon to spiritual entities a great distance away. See the "Light" blast effect, but it only works on beings currently looking into the Astral.
Karma Blast. As the Blast schtick.
Disenchant. Spend a Willpower Point and select an artifact or person. Strip them of all magical effects presently on them. Difficulty is the artifact level or Essence of an individual, or the Essence of the individual(s) responsible for the enchantment(s) or other magical effect(s). This does no harm to supernatural creatures, nor does it damage arcanowave devices or their users, but can free them from the effects of said.
Mana Dissolution. Roll a Int+Occult check with a difficulty of 3. For a number of days equal to your successes, the mana level drops in a sphere 5x(net successes) around you. This also reduces the Essence regeneration of anyone in that range by 1 per net success.
Enchantment. Go use the artifact
creation rules, but this shtick lets you build mundane artifacts
— healing potions, light crystals — more easily. It
should probably still be a Craft charm. or a Craft charm.
Sustaining. (T3.) When you use a magical effect of duration other than instant, you may spend a Willpower point to extend the duration to a whole session. You must opt to do this before you roll any dice. There is a +1 difficulty penalty to such spells. This can be mighty useful, but the Gamemaster may not allow it for all effects. You must give the spell a unique Name.
The next level of Karma provides some of the more impressive powers.
Permanent effects. Metamagic.
Anti-Magic Shell. (T3.) Spend a willpower point and roll: you become the center of a sphere (diameter equal to your Magic rating in yards) in which all magical effects suffer an increased difficulty equal to your net successes. This lasts a number of rounds equal to your Magic rating; spending additional willpower points scale it up to minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months. You can keep it centered on yourself as a continuous action, but as soon as you drop concentration it will remain stationary.
Permanency. You can make any magical effect permanent through the expenditure of willpower points supplemented with XP, usually 20. Unlike enchanted items, permanent spells are dispellable, though it usually takes some work. In some cases permanent spells cannot be dispelled through raw power, but there is an associated geas or riddle associated with the spell that must be solved in order to take it down. Divination can usually discover said geas or riddle, sometimes without even beating the difficulty of the spell.
Intangible Tunnel. (Ars Magica.) Opens a magical tunnel to a place with which you have a symbolic or material link, allowing spells to pass either direction. Each use costs five willpower points and lasts until the end of the next round.
Channel. You may create a magical conduit between yourself and another character or even a place. You and your target must have a magical link of some kind, and you must either see your target, or you must both work simultaneously to create the effect, which requires communication or a previous agreement. Only you need know this level of Karma.
Once this link is created, you can cast spells through the magical conduit, and the effect will originate from your linked character or object. Each such spell costs you a single willpower point, and both of you a casting action. You are allowed to use the better Occult skill. The character actually in place does the targeting and the spellcaster decides which spells to cast, as the power gives very basic communication and no vision.
Remote. You symbolically link yourself to something, and you can then cast spells through that object. You must touch the object and spend a willpower point to activate it for a session. Favorite objects are ritual dolls, holograms, illusions, statues or objects significant to your tradition, such as great trees for a druid. It cannot be small enough to count as a personal object, it must be cumbersome enough that somebody who wishes to protect it counts as defending somebody else.
Whenever you focus your attention upon this object, it starts to glow, hum or otherwise draw attention to itself, being about as noticeable as you would be if you were there and casting spells. Sublte magic might be a good idea. It counts as an unnamed character with your Occult as its Dodge value, and you can cast spells through it using your attributes. If "killed", it is rendered permanently harmless. You can actively defend for the object.
Enchantment. Quest items.
Invariant items. (Invariant items are enchanted items that can only
be permanently destroyed in a particular way. They aren't
otherwise indestructible; they just will pop up elsewhere, possibly
entire islands away...)