“That fight was hell on us,” groans your companion Jonas. He’s a little ways away and through your cracked eyelids you can see Tamari, the Animist of your group, attempting to heal him. “I’ll be fine Tamari. You should focus on Malsor. He’ll die without your help, and I know you’re low on energy, too.”

You know Jonas is right. Tamari managed to seal the major wound you took but it cost her most of her remaining strength to do it. You’re on your own. You close your eyes and try tunning out your companions, but the conversation still butts into your serenity.

“I’ll take first watch. You focus on him, Tamari.” Jonas adds after the shifting silence. Your other two companions are out of this shack it seems since Jonas and Tamari are the only ones making noise. Your focus shifts to the tension in Tamari’s next words.

“Jonas, you’re in no condition either. I’ll make sure you both survive the night. The others and I will take turns.” You hear Jonas sigh and can envision the eye roll that comes with the sound before silence fills the little shack you’re in. The absence of noise makes focusing past the burning across your middle.

The blade of the opponent cut too deep through your shirt. Your group was unprepared for the ferocity of those attacking you. Another focused breath brings you deeper into yourself. Deeper into the well of pain that you allow to become your world. Acceptance of this pain allows your mind to cope and your body to understand. This injury is not meant to be. It can be healed. It will be healed.

You have just enough strength left to invoke the last skill your master taught you. With another shallow, pained, but focused breath you force your body to begin healing at a level beyond what Tamari’s spirits can accomplish. It will take the better part of the night and into a good portion of the morning and so long as things remain grim and silent around you, you’ll have little difficulty accomplishing the healing.

Your focus shifts after countless hours as sounds of movement come to you under your meditation. Exhaustion beats at you but the burning is gone from your middle. Things in you are whole once again. There is a soft undercurrent of discussion happening between Jonas and Tamari once again.

“I’ll be fine.” Jonas snaps. “Check Malsor, Tamari.” Instead of allowing Tamari to do more than stand you sit up with a soft sound of pain. Your body is still sore and you need to sleep but you’re alive and healed.

“How?!” Tamari asks stopping dead in her tracks at the sight of you before scurrying closer and dropping to her knees.

“I achieved the rank of High Mystic in my cult and was taught by my master how to heal myself through meditation. I’m still in rough shape, but the deadly part is over with,” you explain in an undertone. Tamari presses back onto her knees, astounded.

The Mystic arts work through focusing one’s energies and magical abilities to temporarily improve one’s natural capabilities. Mysticism is one of the more hands-on styles of magic. It relates to Folk Magic in its simplicity but is costly to work with. When I say costly, I mean Magic Point (MP) heavy. The effects that you can create from using the magic discipline, Mysticism, can easily make you seem godlike to a standard non-player character (NPC) or even your fellow companions as Player characters (PC).

Heyo, I’m Kat! I’ve been a game master (GM) for a little over a decade and I’m here to help you learn the ins and outs of Mysticism from Mythras Core Rules and what it compares to in Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). Mysticism is the magical path to manipulate your mind over the matter of your body. Your powers and abilities aren’t transferable to your companions, so it relates a lot more to martial training and meditation than other magic disciplines like Animism, Sorcery, or Theism.

That doesn’t belittle the things you can accomplish through using Mysticism as a player. Let’s begin with what skills are involved in this magic discipline.

Meditation and Mysticism

One of the first things you should think about when crafting a magic user is to make sure you’re looking into what characteristics influence the magical discipline. For all of them, Power (POW) is involved, but some also include Intelligence (INT) or Constitution (CON), much like Mysticism does. Meditation is one of the main skills of the Mystic Arts, as is Mysticism itself. Both of these have the contributing characteristic CON but vary beyond that.

The Meditation skill (INT+CON) is used to determine your potential. Meditation also allows you to split your concentration between multiple abilities or talents that are able to access. Mysticism is one of two Magical Disciplines that have the ability to concentrate on more than one spell at a time. This moldable aspect makes each individual Mystic unique since multiple talents can be invoked at a time. To figure out your potential, you take 1/10th of your meditation skill rounded up.

Here’s a quick example: Malsor has a meditation skill of 78%. The maximum intensity he has the potential to make his talents is at most 8. That’s the Intensity he can accomplish. I’ll explain Intensity in the next section.

This doesn’t dictate how many active talents he can have, however. This is just the number that he can’t go over if he splits his concentration between multiple talents. The next skill the mystic has is their mysticism skill.

The Mysticism skill (POW+CON) gives you the ability to manipulate yourself and the skills granted to you by the Mystic Path that you chose. This gives you the understanding of what the intensity cap is per talent and what you can do with them. There are three ways to accomplish these manipulations.

1. Shift the difficult grade one step easier.
2. Enhance physical skills, much like the healing ability.
3. Activating a trait like Adhere or Arrowcut. (Stick yourself to something or grabbing arrows out of the air.)

The significant difference between the Meditation and Mysticism skills is how they’re calculated and what they affect. Where the Mediation skill has 1/10th of the skill rounded up as its limit, the Mysticism skill is 1/20th.

Here’s a quick example: Malsor has followed the Path of Abjuration to its completion. I’ll explain what’s in that Path a little later. His Mysticism skill is 54%, which means his max intensity is 3 per talent.

I know that’s a lot of technical information to wrap your head around, so let’s look at it a little differently. Malsor can focus up to 3 points into his talents with his Mysticism skill and can focus a sum of 8 points between 1 or more talents with his Meditation skill. That is so long as he doesn’t go over the 3-point cap from his Mysticism skill. How many skills can he focus on? That all depends on his POW and MP. Let’s look at Intensity, Magnitude, and Implementing talents next.

Magnitude and Intensity

While using any Magical Discipline beyond Folk Magic, you’ll quickly realize that there are a few things you need to keep track of. Beyond Magic Points, they are a spell’s Magnitude and Intensity. You can think of Intensity as the power or level of your spell. Magnitude is more how you’re your spell costs to cast at the level you choose.

When we talk about mystics and their ability to Augment themselves and their talents, you need to know how much things cost. Augmenting a skill or shifting the difficulty level a degree easier takes 1 MP per 1 Intensity. This is the easiest thing for the mystic to accomplish.

Invoking a trait or one of your Talents takes 2 MP per 1 Intensity, and each Talent takes at least 1 Intensity. Finally, Enhancing Attributes like Malsor did his Healing Rate take 3 MP per 1 Intensity. You can see how this is a MP intensive balancing act.

Let’s give an example of how this cost works in a scenario by explaining Malsor’s situation.

Healing Rate increase is a unique ability that allows the standard healing rate to be increased by one time step. The Major wound that Malsor suffered would have taken for a normal character 1 month to accomplish with help, but he healed in 1 day.

To accomplish this, he needed to enhance his Healing Rate by at least 2 Intensity. On a successful Meditation roll, he spends 6 MP and plenty of time in meditation to heal. Thus, his Major Wound was healed in a day.

Now that we’ve covered Magnitude and Intensity, let’s talk about Paths and Implementing abilities.

Example Paths and Using Talents (Traits)

We’ve talked about all the nitty gritty costs and monitoring you have to use when playing a Mystic character. Let’s talk about the fun stuff of what paths are and how to use your magic as a character. Mystic characters are very much like the monks of D&D. You have plenty of different combinations within the traits section in the Mythras Core Rules, but we’ve given you two good example paths there, too.

The Path of Abjuration, found in the Cults chapter of the Mythras Core Rules, is a path that follows a more traditional Shaolin monk style character. This is the path that Malsor uses. The example gives characters access to Augment Endurance, Augment Survival, Invoke Denial Food, Invoke Denial Water, Invoke Denial Sleep, Enhance Fatigue, and Enhance Hit Points. For Malsor, I adjusted the Enhance Hit Points for Enhance Healing Rate. Again, these are just the possibilities of things you could learn for this path.

The second example option is Path of Shadows, also found in the Cults chapter. This is more like your ninja style character or in D&D terms, rogues, and their subclasses. This path gives characters access to Augment Perception, Augment Stealth, Augment Ranged Combat Style, Invoke Adhesion, Invoke Astral Projection, Invoke Dark Sight, and Enhance Fatigue.

Seems like a lot of traits, right? Here’s where one limitation of Mysticism comes into play. Mystics are limited to the number of Talents they may have active or known. So while Malsor’s Path of Abjuration includes all these talents, he cannot necessarily use all of them.

Some talents may take years to learn and master, so starting Mystics may have only two or three available talents, while a true master might have half a dozen The limit is ½ the Mystic’s POW. Malsor has a 16 POW so he can have 8 active abilities, so long as he has the focus (1/10th meditation %) to do so.

One of the other limitations is that even though you know that these traits and abilities exist within the path you chose doesn’t mean you have trained in them to be able to know them. Much like a mage from D&D having all the spells at his fingertips but not being able to use them since they aren’t his active spells.

Let’s look at one of Malsor’s potential Talents. For ease, we can use Denial Sleep. To invoke Denial Sleep, Malsor would roll against his Mysticism skill to see if he succeeds. Here’s where you start counting MP:

• When you critically succeed – you only use HALF the MP cost of your trait.
• When you succeed – you use the required amount.
• When you fail – you use HALF the required amount and your Talent fails.
• When you fumble – you expend ALL the required amount, and you fail to use your talent.

On top of succeeding or failing, you also need to have at least 1 turn per Intensity of prep to accomplish any of your traits. Take Malsor’s Denial Sleep. It’s an Intensity 1, so he needs 1 round to prep before he can roll to succeed or fail to deny the need for sleep.

Now that you know how to activate it, let’s touch on Duration. The Duration of Mystic abilities act very much like Folk Magic. It only lasts as long as the situation demands it. Denial Sleep would then last only the night Malsor would be awake.

Since we’ve gone over the example Paths how about we create one based on a D&D Monk, so you have some reference.

Mysticism and D&D Monks

Many of you who’ve dabbled in D&D likely look at monks and write them off as just some martial artist dream character. Much like the Mystics of Mythras, there is a lot of potent potential that can be had both in and out of combat. These two character styles are underrated and written off because of one flaw. You need to make sure you are keeping track of your points.

The path that I’m going to explain is the Path of the Kensei. This is the one I’m most familiar with since more than one of my players have used it and dominated my campaigns unintentionally with it. In a brief description, the Path of the Kensei Monk uses their bonus actions and Ki-points to varying degrees of self-manipulation, be it increasing speed to perform multiple attacks, dodging blows, or catching and hurling arrows back at those attacking them.

It lines up well with Mysticism’s traits. Here is an example for bringing a level 5 Path of the Kensei into Mythras:

• Combat Style (Ranged or Melee or Martial Arts) – This covers Kensei Weapon, Martial Arts. Each option increases your proficiency with your chosen weapon.
• Augment Evade – This would act as the monk’s Evasion which doesn’t come into effect until 7th level but is worth mentioning..
• Augment Movement Rate – Monks in D&D get an additional 10ft of movement starting at level 3.
• Invoke Arrowcut – This is almost identical to Deflect Missiles, which is an ability the monk gets to snatch arrows, darts, or any kind of projectile weapon and throw it back at the one who sent it your way in the first place.
• Invoke Formidable Natural Weapons – This gives you the improved Unarmed Strikes capabilities.
• Invoke Featherlight (optional) – Monks in 5e gain the ability to Slow Fall, making them take less damage when they fall.
• Enhance Action Points – This gives the Monks more capabilities in combat. Like using Ki points to activate their Patient Defense or Step of the Wind abilities.
• Enhance Healing Rate (Optional) – Quickened Healing is an optional ability that Monks can gain. This enables the monk to regain hit points by spending two ki points.
• Special Effect Flurry – There is a Special Effect called Flurry. This covers the Path of the Kensei’s Flurry of Blows/Ki points. Flurry is available to people using unarmed automatically.

This isn’t a perfect exchange. I don’t think any class between D&D and Mythras can ever be ‘perfectly’ replicated, but we can get close with some research and creative play. That’s the perks of Mythras. As long as you keep within realistic perspectives, you can get creative. Mysticism is no exception to this rule.

Conclusion

To be able to use Mysticism effectively, you have a lot of things to keep track of, but it can be highly rewarding if you do it right. While this is a Magic Point heavy magic discipline, it can also become one of the most efficient ones when you line up the abilities. The one warning I’ll give you GMs out there, like the Monk of D&D if you’re not paying attention or write off a Mystic, you’ll watch them dominate the field of battle. That’s not me saying don’t allow mystics or restrict them. Let them have fun but know that the mystic is just as challenging for you as it will be for the person playing it.

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