In Against the Dark I tried to have House Tremere researching ways to overcome the Parma Magica using massed fire. This doesn’t work, because hte Parma is not ablative and cannot be made so by research. In the process, I discovered there’s a a new Greater Limit of magic, one that’s clear not just to players as a rule, but to player characters.
You can only cast one spell in every six seconds.
You can work the edges of this rule. Multicasting and using Wizard’s Fork hedge it a little. Setting off a battery of magic items with a single triggering gesture. At its core, though, you get one spell per round.
There’s one way to wobble the six second rule. Effectively there are two tracks: the fast cast and formulaic tracks. Its possible to shave seconds off the six by fast casting, but then you still get one fast cast per six seconds unless you drop back to the fomulaic track and lose the second you caught before. Effectively there’s a bright line just before the capacity to fast-casting resets. You can’t research your way past this – there’s no Breakthrough there.
This is different from combat. A round, in combat, is just an aggregation of attacks and defences. It’s plausible to deal damage multiple times in a round, because the round in just an out-of-world convention, in an in-setting one. As an example, the creature I was going to write up, which led to this post, is a Great Beast from House Bjonaer, that is a Swift of Virtue. This in turn was inspired by the first verse of a song called “The Ballad of Barry Allen”.
I’ve got time to think about the beauty of a thousand variations
Of the beating of a wing
Of a hummingbird suspended in the aspic of the world
Moving slower than molasses
As I’m off to catch the girl
Who is falling off the bridge
A magus who has this problem (which I didn’t know the Flash has, but it’s explicitly why Quicksilver over at Marvel is a jerk to people – he finds them exhausting).can attack dozens of times in a round, but can’t cast more than one spell. Hummingbirds are an American bird, hence I used a swift instead. They never land, so they have no feet, mythically.
If you could muck with this, the other realms would. Even the Infernal seems caught in this six second cycle – there are no demons who use both tracks simultaneously, and if they could, they would.
The one exception to this is magic power use in regiones. To an observer within the regio the powers work normally, but if you were scrying into a regio the click rate is alarmingly high. For example in my personal games, there’s a regio where the Tremere have an R&D lab where time dilates. One day spent outside is experienced as a week inside. If you were scrying in, a magical strobe light set to ignite each round would blink faster than once a second. Within the frame, though, the rule holds – you can’t break your experienced rhythm.
Is there a physical embodiment of this limit? We know that, mechanically, the magic of Mythic Europe is powered by a metaphorical sea of energy. Within this fluid there are waves. Traditionally we have acted as if these are caused by a mixture of magical geography, astral influences, and the residual echoes of cataclysms. Might we add to these a steady, metronomic heartbeat from deep in the Earth. In regiones, the flow is faster or slower, but the pulse still exists.
This has some mechanical effects. It means magi have a sense of time that verges on innate, as they can use InVi level 1 spells to feel the click track. It allows precise clocks, which solves the longitude problem from the age of European expansion.
Games From Folktales 