Power and Fatigue - Rules for Sorcery and Conjuration

Power Sources

Personal Power

Desperate mages can power their magic using their own life force. The emphasis here is 'desperate'. You are feeding off your own Endurance, which tends to quickly become dire. Spells powered by personal power can be cast anywhere, even if the shadow doesn't normally support magic.

Petty
• Human Endurance: One makes you tired. Two make you exhausted. Three makes you fall down.
• Chaos Endurance: You can manage two spells without significant penalty. Each two after that moves you from tired to exhausted to unconscious.
• Amber Endurance or Higher: At Amber, as chaos rank, but by threes. At higher ranks, you can increasingly use petty magics at will without tiring significantly.

Minor:
• Human Endurance: A single minor spell makes you exhausted. After two you pass out.
• Chaos Endurance: You can manage one spell without significant penalty. Each one after that moves you from tired to exhausted to unconscious.
• Amber Endurance or Higher: You can manage two fairly easily. After three, you are tired, after five you are exhausted, and after seven, you pass out. At higher ranks, you can increasingly use minor magics without tiring significantly.

Average:
• Human Endurance: A single average spell leaves you on the verge of collapse. A second one without getting proper rest will kill you.
• Chaos Endurance: Each one cast moves you from tired to exhausted to unconscious.
• Amber Endurance or Higher: You can manage one fairly easily. After two, you are tired, after four you are exhausted, and after six, you pass out. At higher ranks, you can increasingly use large numbers of average magics before you collapse.

Difficult:
• Human Endurance: A single difficult spell puts you on the verge of death. You will need medical help.
• Chaos Endurance: The first spell leaves you exhausted. The second one would drive you to the verge of death.
• Amber Endurance or Higher: A single difficult spell leaves you tired. A second one leaves you on the verge of collapse. A third one would kill you. At higher ranks, you can handle more of these, but you'll still drain quickly.

Challenging:
• Human Endurance: You drop dead.
• Chaos Endurance: You pass out and can't even try to cast a second one.
• Amber Endurance or Higher: You totter about on the verge of collapse after just one. A second one would kill you. At higher ranks, you can handle more Challenging magics before passing out or dying, but it's still not wise.

Hard:
• Human Endurance: You don't just die, your entire body is consumed and crumbles to dust. And the spell fails anyway.
• Chaos Endurance: You sink into a coma, and sleep for weeks to months. When you awaken, your endurance sinks to human.
• Amber Endurance or Higher: You pass out and sleep for days. At higher ranks of Endurance, you don't sleep as long, and at really ludicrous levels (80+), you only reach the verge of collapse.

Incredibly hard:
• Human Endurance: You completely evaporate as if you had never been, but the spell fails regardless.
• Chaos Endurance: You drop dead.
• Amber Endurance or Higher: You sink into a coma and drop to Chaos endurance after about six months nap time. If you have 10 or more points in Endurance, you simply lose ten of them.

God-like:
• Human Endurance: You explode within a second of trying to cast it. Out of control energies explode around you in some much weaker form of the effect.
• Chaos Endurance: You burst into flames and burn away to ash. Spell fails.
• Amber Endurance or Higher: If you have 0-4 points in Endurance, you drop dead and nothing happens. If you have 5-20 points in Endurance, you spend two years in a coma and wake up with Chaos Endurance. If you have 21-30 points in Endurance, you wake up in a year at Amber Endurance. If you have over 30 points, you lose 30, and wake up after six months of coma.

Stored Power

Smart mages carry a magical 'battery' of some kind with them wherever they go, so that if they're desperate, they can draw on it to perform spells if necessary. These batteries have the major flaw that other mages can easily detect them, which can make stealth past a mage tricky. Also, broken batteries explode, which is never fun.

External Power Sources

The safest, but least reliable source of power is external power sources. Every shadow where magic works has sources of magical energy. Sometimes it collects in foci points, and in other shadows, it is evenly spread throughout the shadow. Depending on the nature of local magic, this power is tapped in different ways, and learning these ways is the most time consuming aspect of adapting to different shadows. Many shadows are non-magical and have no such sources of magic at all.

It takes about a week for a Chaos psyche sorcerer to learn how to adapt his spells to use local power sources. With Amber psyche, a day will suffice. Every ten points above that halves the time (10--12 hours, 20--6 hours, 30--3 hours, 40--90 minutes, etc). This enables the sorcerer to fill in the needed 'magic of shadow' lynchpin during casting. This is only possible if the sorcerer is a Broken Pattern, Pattern, or Logrus user (or has some other way to study the nature of Shadow). This is usually only necessary when one moves a substantial distance across shadow, or if the shadow in question has been moulded to change its laws. For example, all of the shadows which make up the Golden Circle share the same laws of magic as Amber, and thus there is no need to tinker with one's spells within that area. Chaos is the same way, although a fair number of Houses of Chaos tinker with local magic rules to give them an advantage on their home ground.

Logrus Conduit

Sorcerers who have bought 'Logrus Sorcery' can use the Logrus as a conduit to draw power from other shadows to perform magic even in non-magical shadows. They are vulnerable to having their logrus conduit tendril cut, however.