Past Life

The Avatar tends to collect experiences from the incarnations with which it associates. In mages, these sometimes appear as flashes of memory or sudden insight. While reincarnation of human souls remains a hotly-debated topic, most mages who study Avatars agree that Avatars tend to spring from some source in the distant past (the legendary primordial “One”) and that experiences from lives with which they were once attached can sometimes provide valuable insight, or even memories of things never known to the mage.

Such Past Life experiences can be unsettling, but in time a mage can learn to harness these memories and insights through meditation and internal exploration, in a process similar to a Seeking. In some ways this is similar to the Dream Background, but the mage pulls out moments of former personal lives instead of cosmic subconscious knowledge.

Exploring a Past Life may take some time and concentration (a turn or more of meditation), or it may happen in a spontaneous flash of insight - at the Storyteller's discretion. The player rolls dice equal to the dots of Past Life at a difficulty of 8; each success grants one die to a subsequent roll, on one Ability. Unlike Dream, these dice do add if the character already has the Ability in question- but there's no guarantee that the player will score any successes. Success generally indicates that the mage found some snippet of wisdom to guide and assist in the current endeavor.

You may use your Past Life once per game session. Botching tends to put the mage in a Mindscape relating to a Past Life trauma. Once you use Past Life, you should record the names and events of the ancestor, so that you can use them in your mage's character history and development.

You don't need the Avatar Background to have Past Life. Even a very weak and slumbering Avatar might have snippets of memory.

● Faint Past Life: Every once in a while you feel a sense of deja vu
●● Weak Past Life: You have an inkling that you've done this before …
●●● Moderate Past Life: You definitely recall other times and places, and vague flashes of former habits and beliefs.
●●●● Strong Past Life: You possess clear memories of other existences, which you can summon up almost at will.
●●●●● Overwhelming Past Life: Sometimes you're not sure which life you're living.