Loom of Vishnu
This potent tantra enables a magician to usurp the god Vishnu's power of cosmic illusion. The magician burns an oblation of milk, ghee, soma and her own vitae within a special mandala, then burns a picture of a scene she wants to create. That scene then appears in solid form - real to every test that mortal senses can devise.
System: The zone of maya lasts until dawn. At the sun's rising it vanishes like a dream.
This power of illusion has three limits:
- The illusion has a maximum diameter of 60 feet (although it may seem much larger from inside). If a person steps outside the illusion's actual boundary, he returns to normal reality.
- The illusion cannot cause real harm to anyone who enters it. The magician can set whatever rules he wants for this pocket of altered reality: People can fly, they become rotting animate corpses, anything, but the maya itself cannot inflict real damage. If a person does something stupid and hurts himself, however that's not the illusion's doing.
- The zone of maya must include the magician's sacrificial fire. The magician can place it in some context that hides its significance, such as placing it in a fireplace or disguising it as a campfire. Extinguishing the fire instantly breaks the illusion.
Auspex hints at the falsi8ty of the scene. To Heightened Senses, everything in the scene looks a little too regular, without the fine detail of real things. Illusory creatures lack auras; the Spirit's Touch detects no psychic impressions on objects. The Storyteller should not come out and tell players that their characters have entered an illusion; let them figure it out for themselves.
