Did you forget to sacrifice a chicken over the monitor?

Magus. From Magos, wise man. Wizard from similar roots. Sorcerer comes from “poisoner”. Etymologically speaking a magician is one thing, it’s somebody who knows something that you don’t. In times past that “something” was how to keep the bad spirits at bay, or how to read the stars and the entrails. In the old days magicians worked with rules and lines and circles. They knew how things worked and that made them powerful.

These days things have changed. Magic is about make-it-up-as-you-go syncretic symbolic freewheeling. The world does what you tell it because *you* have power and *it* does not and sacred formulae be damned. These days any moron with the chutzpah to leap in front of a lorry for the charge can be a magician and in the Statosphere the Archetypal magus watches and, insofar as such a thing can, winces.

But even in these latter days there are still Deeper Mysteries, still matters which most men fear even to speak of, but in which a select few are initiated into the proper arts, and can make sense of a world of strange rules and arcane ritual, and can by means understood only to them, get your bloody email to download like it’s supposed to. Clued in dukes figure an ascension/renunciation could be coming up any day now.

Attributes: The Magus has an understanding of mysteries most mortal men do not, and will have the capacity (if not the inclination) to exploit that understanding to tangible effect.

Taboo: Admitting ignorance or inability. The Magus is about confidence in your own ability and your own knowledge. More importantly, it’s about convincing everybody else that you have confidence in your own ability and your own knowledge. When was the last time you met a geek who would admit that they *couldn’t* fix your laptop for you? Additionally it is a breach of Taboo to follow an Adept School.

Symbols: If you follow the *old* version of this archetype, then Wands, Swords, Lines and Circles. If you follow the new version then Tech, Tech and more Tech. Both faces of the Magus do well out of overblown incomprehensible jargon.

Suspected Avatars: Insert list of famous occultists here, although some of them may have been Scholars or Tricksters

Channels:
1% – 50%: The Avatar can flip-flop any roll to cast ritual magic or deal with “tech” (where we define “tech” as “complex electronics, computers and… y’know… geek stuff”). He must still have an appropriate skill to roll on, of course.

51% – 75%: With a successful Avatar: the Magus/the Hacker roll, the Avatar can diagnose the root cause of any problem which has its basis in either the occult or the technological. The amount of detail you get is based on your mundane knowledge about the arena. If you find somebody dead in a mysterious car crash, for example, and you know nothing about Urbanomancy, then a roll on this channel will tell you it was “some kind of magickal curse”, if you *did* know about Urbanomancy you’d get “probably an Urbanomancer Significant Blast” (only in more IC sounding terminology)

75% – 90%: You can “jury-rig” solutions to magical or technological problems. These are short term affairs (ultimately a GM call on how long they last, but generally it’s the Avatar skill check in Rounds, Minuites, Hours or Days, depending on what you’re fixing) and you do actually need to *do* something, however minor to get the effect. You may only use this channel once per problem, then you need to find a real fix.

91%+: Those things Bound by the Laws are bound to your will. From the point of view of the Magus, this means that you can command unnatural beings with an Avatar: the Magus/the Hacker check for a variable length of time depending on the power of the creature, and how well you roll. From the point of view of the Hacker, this channel allows you to do truly Hollywood style tricks. A computer will do whatever you tell it to (provided it is within its power) You can look at anything, alter anything and delete anything on the machine, as long as you can make it “hear” you (in general this means actively typing commands into it, or into a computer connected to it)