There is one Flux, and one Resonance. Every spellcaster in the world draws from the same well and casts with the same skills — no tradition grants you a spell someone else can't learn, and none locks you out of one. What a tradition is, is a dialect: a culture's complete way of thinking about the Resonance, so embedded that it shapes what mana will hold still for. It changes the material culture of your casting — which reagents answer you, what your sanctum looks like, how your work reads on the astral, what name your mentor spirit goes by — and it says as much about you as your chrome does.
The Four That Own the Supply Chains
Four traditions dominate the Metroplex, mostly because they own the markets:
| Tradition | The Resonance is... | Answers to | Cold to | Meets a mentor spirit as |
|---|
| Hermeticism | measurable energy | minerals, pure elements, old trinkets, virgin ores, refined alloys | fresh organic matter — feathers, fur, greens | a tutor or specialist consultant |
| Shamanism | living kinship | plant and animal parts, naturally polished rocks, small handcrafted items | industrial alloys, sealed synthetics | a mentor, plainly |
| Devotional traditions | covenant with what came before | consecrated items, relics, pieces with lineage | unclaimed mass-produced goods | an ancestor, saint, or hearth-god |
| Wuxing practice | flow to be balanced | calligraphy, incense, jade, coins, the five phases | objects with no arrangement or intention | an honored lineage figure |
What this means at the table is mostly about reagents. Reagents are typed by the tradition whose ground they grew in, and mana checks receipts. A dram from your own tradition works at full strength: one dram, −1 DC. Stock from a foreign tradition works at half strength — every two drams spent count as one, toward DC and caps alike. A few materials are so bound to their tradition that they won't answer outsiders at all. And orichalcum — the orange-gold reference standard at ¥5,000 a dram — is the one reagent that works at full strength for everyone, which is exactly what the price buys. If you refine raw stock yourself, it keeps the tradition it grew in: feathers stay shamanic no matter whose bench they cross. Practical version: shop where your tradition shops, and expect to pay extra for the other side of town's stock.
Your Tradition Is Whatever Raised You
Those four own the supply chains, not the truth. An Igbo mage might find magic in ofo wood. An aspected magician might seek natural items harvested under a certain moon. Chaos mathematicians fold probability into origami; ghoul lodges keep their own counsel. Any culture that meets the Flux long enough grows a tradition of its own — and yours is whatever raised you, named or not.
If nothing on the shelf fits, invent it. It takes four sentences:
- Name it, and say who keeps it — a people, a neighborhood, a lodge, a lab, a family line.
- A reagent affinity — what answers it, and what it is cold to. One row of the table above, in your own words.
- A sanctum style — what a working space looks like when your practice is the one that built it. Chalk containment, a living lodge, a shrine niche, a compass layout — or something none of them thought of.
- A voice for its mentor spirits — what actually shows up when one does, and what you call it. Tutor, ancestor, adviser, hound, ghost of the wire.
Bring those four sentences to your GM and the tradition is real. The rules read the rest straight off your answers: your reagents are typed by your affinity, your sanctum furnishings follow your style, and your mentor spirit speaks in the voice you gave it — see Magical Traditions, Reagents, Resonance Sanctums, and Mentor Spirits for how each of those works at the table. Nothing else about your character changes: your skills, your spells, and your spirits are the same ones every caster uses.
Choose the tradition that raised you — or the one that raised you wrong, which is usually the better story.
