Magic in Play

Your Pattern Is Your Whole Hero

In the lore section, your pattern is what makes you a magically distinct individual — your history, your abilities, everything about how magic touches you. In game terms, that whole pattern is represented by your four Theme cards taken together, not any one of them alone. Each Theme's Title tag is a facet of your Name; its power tags are things your pattern lets you do; its weakness tag is a price your pattern exacts; its Quest is a piece of the story your pattern is still writing.

What Earthdawn's magic adds on top of ordinary Legend in the Mist play is two things nothing else in the system gives you: the ability to weave a thread outward from your pattern to something else's, and the fact that doing so can permanently grow your own Themes in return. That's the entire content of "thread magic" at the table — a mechanic for strengthening what your Hero can do by binding part of your pattern to something outside yourself.

What Is a Thread, Mechanically?

A Thread is not a resource you track, a roll you make, or a new kind of action. It's the narrative label for a specific kind of progress: the moment your Hero permanently gains something from a bond with another pattern — an item, a spirit, a place, another person.

Concretely, weaving a thread plays out in three beats:

1. Learn it (a Prep action). Before you can weave to anything, you need Key Knowledge — its Name, its history. This is always a Prep action: research, an interrogation, a conversation with someone who knew it. You cannot weave to a stranger.
2. Attempt the bond. With that knowledge in hand, actually forming the thread is usually a Detailed action, built toward a Limit the way any extended magical effort is — resisted by the item's or spirit's own nature, not by a fixed difficulty number.
3. Gain a tag. A successful weaving nets you a new power tag — most often the target's own Relic Theme growing a tag you can now invoke, or, for a lesser bond, simply gaining access to a tag it already had.

So yes — mechanically, a Thread is a way of creating a stronger Story Tag, or growing an existing Theme, through the fiction of a relationship rather than through ordinary downtime or a Milestone. What sets it apart from a normal tag grab is that it's meant to be permanent, cumulative, and personal: losing a woven thread later (a severed bond) costs you a real, named piece of your Hero, not just a tag that quietly recovers at the next scene.

Astral Sight

Astral Sight isn't a power tag any Discipline has to spend one of its card's chosen slots on — it's baseline magician infrastructure, the same way Thread Weaving is. Per the card-building methodology, this kind of shared capability gets written up once, here, rather than appearing as a pickable tag on every individual Spellcasting Theme: any Hero with a Spellcasting Theme simply has it, the moment they have the Theme at all.

• Used to support a magic action directly, it works through whatever tag you'd already be invoking for that action — your Title tag, or a relevant power tag your Discipline card actually lists — the normal way any tag helps a roll. Astral Sight itself isn't the thing being invoked; it's the baseline capability that makes invoking it for this purpose make sense.
• Used as a Prep action, it lets you surface hidden Story Tags on the current scene or Challenge before you commit to anything — this is your mechanical "I read the room's pattern first," available to any caster without spending a card slot on it.

Stepping fully into astral space as a place — walking a spirit road, opening a shadow-crossing — isn't new movement math. The Narrator builds it as its own Challenge or scene, with its own tags ("timeless," "no solid ground," "hungry things watch").

Reckless or extended astral sensing inflicts Astral-Strain (see the status table below). That's the mechanical teeth behind "looking too long at the weave has a cost."

Thread Weaving to Items

Weaving a thread to a Thread Item follows a clean sequence:

1. Key Knowledge is a Prep action gate. You cannot attempt to gain a new power tag from a Thread Item until you've completed a Prep action establishing that you actually know its name and history.
2. Thread Rank is the item's Might tier. A newly-woven bond sits at Origin. A well-tested one reaches Adventure. A legendary bond, the kind built across a whole campaign, reaches Greatness — same ladder your Themes already climb.
3. Losing a thread is what happens when a weakness tag is invoked against the bond, or a Horror severs it as a Consequence. It can scratch or remove a power tag, or in the worst case, sever the whole Relic Theme.
4. Failed attunement or backlash while weaving inflicts Disrupted-Pattern on the item — not on you. The item goes dark until repaired with a downtime Prep action.

Thread Sight — the lesser sense that lets you attempt to gain a Thread Item's power tag without reading its full Relic Theme — is a weaker version of the same baseline capability described under Astral Sight above.

Raw Casting, Astral-Strain, and Why You Prepare Spells

Here's the part that confuses everyone the first time, so let's slow down — and let's use the Core Book's own version of this ingredient, which turns out to be cleaner than "scratch your whole Theme."

Your known spells are a repertoire, not tags on your Theme card. Per Magic Is Collected, your Discipline card's Spellcasting section lists your known spells (or, per the card-building methodology, functional categories of spells) separately from your Spellcasting Theme — a reference list of what you're capable of, not what's live right now. A Nethermancer's repertoire might read: unravel a curse's grip, calls kin from beyond, a mount of fire and fog, lifesight, suppress curse, astral interference. None of that is usable yet.

Preparation is a Prep action, taken at camp, that turns entries from that list into real backpack story tags. This is the Advance Preparation variant by the book: you can only use abilities you've prepared beforehand, and only for the stretch of play until your next camp. You prepare 3 spells by default, +1 for every Improvement your Spellcasting Theme has earned — the Limited Repertoire variant caps what you're drawing from to your known list, never anything outside it. A Wizard's list is narratively bounded to what's actually recorded in their spellbook; a Nethermancer, Elementalist, or Illusionist can prepare from their whole known repertoire each time.

Once prepared, a spell is just an ordinary story tag: invoke it for +1 Power like anything else, or burn it for +3 Power if you want more out of it — the normal Drawing More Power choice, no different from burning any other tag. When it's gone (burned, or scratched by a Consequence), it's gone until your next camp reshuffles the whole set.

Example: Sera the Nethermancer has earned one Improvement, so she prepares 4 spells at camp: unravel a curse's grip, calls kin from beyond, a mount of fire and fog, and lifesight become real backpack tags for the day. Suppress curse and astral interference stay on her known list, unprepared, unusable. All session, invoking calls kin from beyond works like any story tag — +1 Power, still there afterward, unless she chooses to burn it for +3.

Raw casting is what happens if Sera wants suppress curse — a spell she knows but didn't prepare. Under a strict reading of Magic Requires Preparation, she simply couldn't; this Way of Magic adds a deliberate exception, in the spirit of the book's own Costly If Not Met variant: she can reach for it anyway, but doing so means forcing the spell directly off the raw, unfiltered weave instead of drawing it safely through a prepared matrix, and it immediately inflicts Astral-Strain in place of the usual reduced Power. If her Astral-Strain reaches its top tier, the Narrator may treat that as the moment a Horror finally notices her: worst case, a Horror Interception, described below.

A severe complication during any casting (a critical failure, a violent backlash) inflicts Fractured-Matrix on you instead of, or alongside, Astral-Strain — your own casting infrastructure breaks, not just your exposure. The related spell can't be prepared again until you repair it with a downtime Prep action.

Dragons don't play by this rule. Every dragon Challenge is built with a Special Feature: Immune to Astral-Strain. Every spell a dragon casts is raw, and none of it costs them a thing.

Blood Magic

Available to any Hero, magician or not — this lives in the shared Way of Magic, not locked to a caster Discipline.

This is not the same thing as the ordinary "burn a tag for Power" option every Hero already has — anyone can always do that, for free, no blood required. Blood Magic is what you reach for when burning a tag isn't enough: when there's no relevant tag to burn, when you want to bypass a hard prerequisite you simply don't meet, or when you want to push an Effect further than your rolled Power would normally buy. The price is never Power you didn't earn — it's a status or a permanent tag that makes your Hero measurably worse off until it's paid down, and the book gives us an actual formula for how much:

• Minor Blood Magic uses the Equal Price And Benefit variant directly: immediately before or during an action, take **Blood- Marked** at a tier equal to the Power or Effect you're buying with it — ignoring a Rote's stated prerequisite, or one extra tier of Effect beyond what your spent Power would normally cover. Want more? It costs more. The exchange rate is fixed, not negotiated case by case.
• Major or Ritual Blood Magic (sacrifice magic, curses, Horror-Call-tier workings) reaches for **Pay With What Is Dearest To You** instead: rather than a status, the Consequence is marking Abandon on the relevant Theme (or a related one, Narrator's call) — a real step toward that Theme being replaced, not a scene- scoped cost. Where the campaign wants something short of that, a permanent weakness tag or a Limit that never fully closes serves as the softer version of the same variant.
• Blood Wounds are a harm status that resists ordinary recovery entirely. They convert to normal, healable harm only through the same kind of special Aftermath that clears Blood-Marked.

The throughline, straight from the ingredient's own logic: Blood Magic never simply hands you free Power. What it costs is always sized to what it bought.

Enchanting

Heroes can craft items of small or great magical power — given enough time, the right ingredients, and if they possess the right secrets. This isn't a talent every adept can pick up on a whim; making something meant to outlive the moment it was forged demands a kind of patience most Disciplines never teach, and knowledge most adepts never bother to seek out. When a Hero does have that access, it's worth treating as a genuine centerpiece of a session, not a shopping-list errand — which is exactly what the Ritual As A Journey variant is built for.

Mechanically, enchanting is played as a Journey: a sequence of Simple or Quick steps, each a distinct piece of the working, with the final casting only as strong as the steps that led up to it.

1. Gather and choose. Obtain or craft the item, and choose how it will be imbued — a True-element infusion, a Naming, a permanent spell laid in, or a spirit trapped and bound inside it. (Simple or Quick step.)
2. Work it. Shape the material, inscribe the working, hold the ritual space — however many distinct steps the Narrator and player agree the method demands. (Each a Simple or Quick step.)
3. Set the pattern. When the ritual is complete, the Hero gains 1 Power for every step successfully traversed along the way — per the Ritual As A Journey rule — and spends that accumulated Power on Effects the normal way (most often Add a tag, 2 Power, to set each of the item's new power tags).

A rushed enchantment, with few steps taken care over, yields a weak item with barely a tag to its name. A patient one, built across a full session or a downtime arc with every step honored, can walk away with a proper Relic Theme.

Access to this whole process is a matter of Discipline flavor, not a stat. Elementalists and Weaponsmiths get it as a natural power tag. Wizards dabble. Nethermancers and Illusionists can attempt it, but the method itself carries a cost — a Nethermancer enchanting through bound spirits or blood magic takes Blood-Marked even for a minor item, reflecting the stigma the lore describes.

Spirit Summoning

Summoning plays as a Detailed action against a Challenge — the spirit is the Challenge, complete with its own Might, tags, and a Vulnerability a clever summoner can exploit. The Core Book's own Magic Requires Preparation entry describes exactly this split: summoning a being is the prep action; commanding it afterward is a separate magic action.

• Negotiation is a social Challenge, using ordinary Threats & Consequences, but running on nonhuman logic: a spirit's price is memory, an oath, an act, or an "impossible" object — never simply gold.
• A failed negotiation triggers a Complication: either Astral-Strain or Disrupted-Pattern lands on the summoner, or the spirits themselves flip from passive to an **active hostile Scene Threat**.
• A fetish is a story tag you want on hand for a clean summons — the Costly If Not Met shape of Magic Requires Tools, Items, or Ingredients. Without one, the working still functions, but the Narrator is free to introduce a harsher Threat.
• Horror Call is the same structure at its worst: the Challenge being summoned sits far above your ordinary Might, the prep-action cost is steep (a true Name, a ritual circle), and even a successful binding leaves a hostile Challenge that can act the instant the binding falters.

How Many Services Do You Get?

A successful negotiation doesn't buy vague, undefined "aid" — it buys a countable resource, exactly the way Magic Is In Short Supply handles any limited magical capacity. When you succeed on the negotiation, spend Power on Give a status (1 Power per tier) to grant yourself an ally-spirit status, tiered to how much you put into it.

That tier is your number of services — your [resource] status, in the ingredient's own language. Each time you actually call on the spirit to act for you, its status drops one tier, the same as Reduce a status, just paid for in favors called in rather than Power. This is the Laborious Replenishment variant: the resource does not refill on its own. When the status reaches zero, the bargain is honored and the spirit returns to astral space; nothing more is owed on either side. Want it to stick around longer, or come back for a second calling? That's a fresh negotiation, and usually a fresh price.

A Note on Fetishes — Two Different Things Wearing the Same Name

You may already know "fetish" as the physical totem some Disciplines — Shamans, specifically — use in place of a spell matrix: their entire spellcasting infrastructure runs through carved charms and bound totems rather than a pattern held purely in mind. That fetish can be broken, lost, or stolen, which is exactly the vulnerability a Shaman's magic carries that a Wizard's or Nethermancer's doesn't. See the Shaman's Discipline card for that version.

The fetish that shows up in Summoning, above, is related but distinct: it isn't your whole casting infrastructure, just a single story tag worth having on hand for any summoning working, regardless of Discipline — a carved token, a name-scroll, a scrap of the summoned thing's own nature, anything that makes the calling cleaner. Any summoner benefits from bringing one; only a Shaman is structurally dependent on fetishes for every casting they do. A Shaman who shows up to a summoning without a relevant token is missing both kinds at once — which is exactly the sort of complication worth calling out at the table.

Horror-Taint and Horror Marks

• Horror-Taint is the slow, ambient ladder — a status that accumulates from corrupted astral space, tainted items, or prolonged proximity to a Horror. Low tiers are pure flavor (unsettling dreams, animals shying away). The top tier turns mechanical.
• Horror-Marked is the acute, specific version: a permanent weakness tag imposed on your Hero, tied to one particular Horror's Name and pattern — either dropped directly during a Horror Interception, or reached when Horror-Taint maxes out. Unlike an ordinary weakness tag you chose at creation or a Milestone, this one the Narrator can invoke whenever that specific Horror or its taint is present, even outside your own actions.
• Full Horror-Thralldom — Horror-Taint's absolute ceiling — isn't a status at all. It's the same Pay With What Is Dearest To You outcome Blood Magic can reach at its worst: the corrupted Theme marks Abandon and is retired and rebuilt, or the Hero exits play as a Horror-construct NPC, the same way Legend in the Mist already handles a Theme lost to Abandon.

Quick Reference: Magic's Shared Statuses

Status	Who it hits	What triggers it	What it does	How it clears
Astral-Strain	A Hero sensing or casting	Reckless/extended astral sensing, raw casting, a failed spirit negotiation	Growing personal exposure; at high tiers becomes a standing Threat	Fades with ordinary rest, or the Narrator may let it linger as an active Threat
Disrupted-Pattern	An item, Thread bond, or Group True Pattern	Failed negotiation or raw-casting backlash	Disables that pattern's power-tag benefits until fixed	Downtime Prep action re-attuning the pattern
Fractured-Matrix	A caster's own spell-related tags/Rotes	Severe magic complication	Blocks the related Rote(s) until repaired	Downtime Prep action re-forging the matrix
Ruined-Fetish	A summoner's or enchanter's focus item	Same as above, for focus-dependent magic	Blocks the Rotes/tags depending on that fetish	Downtime Prep action repairing/replacing the fetish
Horror-Taint	Any Hero, NPC, or item exposed to Horror influence	Ambient exposure — corrupted astral space, tainted items, prolonged proximity to a Horror	Flavor-only at low tiers; mechanical at the top	Never clears on ordinary downtime — requires a rare, deliberate Aftermath
Horror-Marked	A Hero, as a permanent weakness tag	Horror Interception, or Horror-Taint maxing out	The Narrator may invoke it whenever that Horror or its taint is present	Not normally removable — at most a campaign-level Aftermath
Blood-Marked	Any Hero using Blood Magic	Voluntary sacrifice to bypass a cost or prerequisite	Lets you burn a tag for Power, or meet a Rote's requirement, unearned	Doesn't clear on ordinary downtime — needs a special Aftermath
Corrupted-[X]	A location or scene	Horror Interception dropping pollutants into the fiction	Hinders Heroes acting there; may spread	Cleared only by a dedicated Adventure/Aftermath

These are ordinary Legend in the Mist statuses — tiered by magnitude like any other. Nothing here needs a new subsystem or a number to track outside the normal rules; the table just tells you what each one means when it shows up on your sheet.