The Gutter View

(• Any Sphere)                                                                    The Orphans Survival Guide  123
As Edge points out in Chapter 1, a street-dweller relies on his senses in ways few suburbanites can grasp.  If nothing else, a man who can see in the dark has little to fear from midnight alleyways.  Knowing this, urban orphans hone their senses and mystick expertise with this simple trick:  Closing his eyes and concentrating, a Darkling shifts his awareness from normal sight to a deeper, more comprehensive perception.  When he opens his eyes, he can see his surroundings on a different level.  Depending on his expertise, he might sense things in his general vicinity (Correspondence); see in the dark or hear a bloodhound (Forces); notice weak points (Entropy or Matter) and hidden structures (Matter); sense other living things nearby (Life); empathize with other peoples' emotions (Mind) or read auras (Mind or Spirit); spot areas of mystickal significance (Prime); see ghosts or other entities (Spirit); or maintain a dead-accurate sense of timing (Time).

As useful as these perceptions are, it's dangerous to be too attuned to your surroundings; Darkling who's seeing things on three of four different levels at once will have three of four times as much trouble keeping track of the sensory input...or dealing with the overload that comes with clubbing, fighting, gunplay and other events.  The city is loud, wild and unpredictable, and oversensitivity can be as deadly as no sensitivity at all.

[Sensory magick is coincidental, and rarely requires an Arete roll (although the Storyteller may require a Perception + Alertness or Awareness roll to notice certain things).  Mystick senses must be "turned on" -- they do not function 24-7.

[Overload, either from sudden harsh stimuli or an overdose of magickal perceptions, can be distracting or even hazardous;  For every Rank One sense "turned on," the character suffers +1 to all difficulties on his Perception based rolls.  (Two would be +2, three would be +3, etc.)  Also, powerful stimuli -- loud music, bright lights, gunshots, etc. -- have twice their normal effect, and may overwhelm the character unless he makes a Willpower roll (difficulty 6) to keep his wits intact.

[Prolonged sensations -- clubs, torture, etc. -- can become excruciating ordeals to a mage hopped up on extrasensory perception...  which is occasionally the idea.  A variant of this spell shares the sensations with someone else (see "Extending Perception" in Mage, p. 172), which can be great during sex, but horrible under torture.]