Magick!

Shaping Effects: Adding Traits

Traits like Area, Insidious, or Inexorable make an effect bigger, sneakier, or harder to escape. A caster doesn't get that for free. Adding a Trait adds difficulty - and each kind of caster pays for it in the currency that fits what they are. The principle is shared; only the coin differs.

Spellweavers Pay in Control

A Spellweaver manipulates external formulae, so the danger is that a more complex working slips its leash. Adding a Trait makes a spell Difficult: each Trait that makes it more useful or dangerous raises the casting difficulty by one (limiting Traits subtract). The caster makes a free-action roll to hold the altered spell together; succeed and it casts normally, with the Traits in effect. Fail and the spell destabilizes and is lost until re-bound - which is never possible mid-fight. This is the existing Difficult-spell rule; it is the Spellweaver's whole relationship with Traits. The risk is front-loaded and binary, but it is paid back in flexibility of power.

Adepts Pay in Their Own Flesh

An Adept is the magic, so pushing it harder strains the vessel. Every Trait added lowers the Adept's Power Threshold - the safe ceiling of what they can channel. The effect still happens; but the further the result clears that lowered Threshold, the more Overchanneling Harm potentially arcs back through them, resisted by Endurance. An Adept can always choose to hold the result down to a safer level if they prefer, or just roll the Overchanneling and take the gamble. Because each Trait lowers the ceiling, the gambit is self-limiting: the more you shape the effect, the smaller the slice you can throw without risk of burning. The cost is paid as you go, in a currency that recovery might reduce at the end of the scene - or kill you, if you push a low-Level Adept too far.

Conjurors Pay in the Relationship

A Conjuror's power is neither internal nor formulaic - it lives in the spirit, the bargain, and the Accords, and the strength of their own will and soul. A Conjuror pays for Traits in the relationship, or in scars on his psyche rather than body or merely his time and opportunity. There are two cases, because Conjurors do two different kinds of work.

Direct Conflict

When the Conjuror builds Traits into a Working of their own - a Ward or Rebuke - then like the Spellweaver they must resist the difficulty they have accumulated; like the Adept they risk Harm, but from Soulburn as they pit their aura directly against the power of an otherworldly will. Unresisted exposure of this sort is taken as a Soulburn Hindrance which weakens the Conjuror's interactions with any spirit until resolved. At recovery time after the conflict, the Conjuror and the GM can negotiate converting the Soulburn into an Imposed Hook, which can then be dealt with like any Imposed Hook.

Note that useful Traits for Conjuror actions might not be what you expect, though they can usually be treated like their more typical physical counterparts. Area Wards force spirits to honor physical distance and locality if applied to spatial concepts, but the concepts are what matter - Guidable isn't applicable. Selective often does not apply, as a Ward which "only affects spirits" is the norm, but it also doesn't have to take a Trait for "affects insubstantial spirits," so that's a wash; narrow it to "only demons" for a difficulty reduction. Inexorable (the sealed salt-circle) and Persistent (a standing wall that needs no concentration, without a Wager) might be useful, but a spirit who chooses to breach an Inexorable Ward must simply accept that portion of the effect as Harm, since it cannot be resisted. Area Rebuke might affect several spirits (or Halflings!) and Inexorable could apply, but Guidable and Persistent do not; a Rebuke is pure will, not something that is constructed and then directed about.

Borrowed Power

When a spirit produces an effect on the Conjuror's behalf, its own nature governs how the effect is shaped. The Conjuror's cost for demanding more is always a negotiation. A bigger ask is a steeper bargain, paid in offerings, Karma, or Luck Tokens spent as bargaining chips. This can be negotiated in advance for appropriately increased cost, or on the fly at a much higher price. Pay it and the spirit obliges; refuse and it declines or immediately renegotiates, which is an action spent. If you try to compel the work, the steeper demand gives the spirit a stronger chance to pervert or slip the terms, scaling with the Traits you force on it. The failure here is unmistakably a Conjuror's own: not self-harm, not a lost spell, but a recalcitrant, angry, literal-minded, or loosed spirit.