Source Player Core pg. 196
"In a galaxy simmering with spell-circuits, quantum enigmas, and Rival Rift bleed, only the savvy thrive. Guild magisters wield custom scanners, frontier scavvers test relics on twitchy drones, and every spellcaster with ambition learns to parse a spell’s pulse before risking their own Yom on a ritual gone wrong. Mistaking a dormant artifact for a power cell can melt your neural jack—or worse, draw the Rift's gaze."
Who Uses Identify Magic?
Starship engineers surveying onboard spell-wards.
Technomancers and archivists deciphering planar anomalies.
Spellhunters are tasked with tracing spellsmog leaks in murder zones.
Nomadic exorcists expelling Rift-corrupted software.
Roleplaying Hooks and Implications:
Identifying rare magitech can provide crucial leverage in deals, broker alliances, or provoke corporate sabotage.
Failures may trigger arcane defense protocols, social complications, or unintended Faction entanglement.
Reinforces setting themes of cosmic peril, intrigue, and neon-lit ambition.
Identify Magic Trained
Using the skill related to the appropriate tradition, as explained in Magical Traditions and Skills, you can attempt to identify a magical item, location, or ongoing effect. In many cases, you can use a skill to attempt to Identify Magic of a tradition other than your own at a higher DC. The GM determines whether you can do this and what the DC is.
Once you discover that an item, location, or ongoing effect is magical, you can spend 10 minutes to try to identify the particulars of its magic. If your attempt is interrupted, you must start over. The GM sets the DC for your check. Cursed magic or esoteric subjects usually have higher DCs or might even be impossible to identify using this activity alone. Heightening a spell doesn't increase the DC to identify it.
Critical Success You learn all the attributes of the magic, including its name (for an effect), what it does, any means of activating it (for an item or location), and whether it's cursed.
Success For an item or location, you get a sense of what it does and learn any means of activating it. For an ongoing effect (such as a spell with a duration), you learn the effect's name and what it does. You can't try again in hopes of getting a critical success.
Failure You fail to identify the magic and can't try again for 1 day.
Critical Failure You misidentify the magic as something else of the GM's choice.
Adventure Hooks
Decrypt an alien spell-seal to access a derelict vault on a Rift-burnt moon.
Disarm an Ebon Syndicate trap disguised as 'innocent' tech in a trade hub's shadow market.
Identify a growing Rift bleed before it swallows a mining colony’s reactor core.
Prove a relic’s authenticity in a high-stakes, multi-faction auction.
Identify Magic is the art and science of keeping your soul, ship, and syndicate one step ahead of the cosmos’s unpredictable pulse. From treasure rooms to battlefield ruins, those who uncover secrets—and survive their learning curves—command the power of the story itself.
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