This system's metaphysic assumes a believer-created reality; however, an appearance of a stable reality is given by the sum of all perceptors' beliefs.

Will

Will represents the PC's ability to influence their own personal reality, and to resist changes in perception imposed by other individuals, the general environment, and Circuits (on which, more below). It also represents the more mundane sense of willpower. Will subtracts from magical attacks in much the way Constitution soaks physical attacks.

Will is a beginning attribute.

Gnosis

Gnosis indicates a character's general level of "enlightenment". A high Gnosis shows a strong attunement with the entire universe. Note that Gnosis is non-denominational--truly enlightened Christian saints may have a high Gnosis, but the majority are avatars of the YHVH Circuit. As Gnosis increases, the universe is more susceptible to the character's whim--or perhaps, the character simply follows infinitely subtle cues given by the flow of being. Cause and effect tends to disappear with increased Gnosis, as do all other dualities (and non-dualities!). Characters with a Gnosis of Superb +1 and higher can do nearly anything, but are difficult to roleplay.

In general, a GM should require very strenuous effort by the PC to increase Gnosis. Also, highly enlightened PC's must act like it--random violence, general ill-temper, lust for power, and other fairly typical PC traits are not characteristic of those with a high level of Gnosis.

In game terms, Gnosis determines how outrageous a magical act a character may perform ("Break Level"). Characters without Gnosis may not perform magic.

Gnosis costs 2 Gifts, starts at Fair, and costs 2 gifts for each level of increase. Players may not begin with a Gnosis greater than Fair.

Circuits

Circuits are differentiable collections of intense beliefs held either by especially powerful people, or by many. Circuits are called such by magicians because they can be "plugged into" to perform magical feats, more easily than they might be carried out using only an individual magician's Will.

Circuits should represent a temptation for players interested in power. They give comparatively easy gains in power for little expense. The flip-side is that as a character uses a given Circuit more and more, they endanger their very individuality. Careless use of Circuits damages Sanity. If a character becomes Incapacitated by use of a Circuit, they are almost beyond reach. They will folllow the rules of the Circuit to the letter, and all their actions are focussed on creating a world dominated by the Circuit.

As you can see, though they are the product of human consciousness, Circuits have an agenda of their own. In areas where a Circuit has dominated enough minds, it may have an Influence. This Influence is used to modify rolls in that area: magic that benefits the Circuit will get a bonus on its Effect roll equal to the Circuit's Influence. Magic that opposes the Circuit suffers an equal penalty to the Effect roll.

Each Circuit starts at Fair, and costs 1 Gift to increase. Beginning characters may not have any Circuits at greater than Superb.

Using Magic

Each magical feat is a skill. The difficulty of the skills depends on the power of the feat, the broadness of the talent, and the amount of preparation needed. For example: Being able to read Tarot cards requires preparation and usually gives general answers. It would be a Most skill. Prescience requires less preparation and can give more definite answers, and it would be a Very Hard skill.

A character whose power derives from a Circuit is limited to abilities consistent with that Circuit. A Christian avatar would not be able to gain power from a human sacrifice.

There are two parts to a magical feat. The first is the break level, which determines how much the feat defies the dominant reality. In most places, the break level would follow a scale as follows:

Break Level	Effect
Fair	Nothing that can't be explained by normal means. Easily explicable coincidences. No damage greater than Scratch.
Good	Minor effects that might be dismissed as tricks. Some damage possible. Somewhat hairy coincidences, say 1 in a 1000.
Great	More vulgar effects possible. Effects percieved as real by most observers. 'Hollywood level'. Coincidences that could make the local papers.
Superb	Major summonings, altered weather patters over wide areas. Explicable as acts of God or hypertechnology. Events, not obviously occult, that strain credibility in a major way.
Legendary	Biblical-level miracles. The dead can be brought to life. Plague can be called down to destroy countries. Amtrak can run on time.
Legendary +1	Godlike feats. Make universes in seven days. PCs who can achieve this break level routinely need to find something else to do.

The maximum Break Level that a character may use is either the level of a Circuit they wish to use, or their Gnosis.

The second part of performing a magical feat is the Effect. Basically, this is how dramatically the character actually succeeds in accomplishing a feat within a given Break Level. For example, Ed the Necromancer worships Beelzebub, Lord of Flies, a death god. In PFM, a god is simply a powerful Circuit. Ed has Beelzebub at a Legendary level. If Ed wishes, he may choose a Break Level of Legendary, allowing really stupendous effects. However, Ed's Raise Dead skill is only Fair. If Ed rolls Fair, he may not actually raise a corpse to life. Perhaps it would only speak to him a little before returning to its eternal rest.

On the other hand, Melissa the Coincidentalist has a Gnosis of Fair and no Circuits. Her Murphy skill, a Very Hard skill that allows one to simply make things go wrong, is Superb. Facing an enraged gunman that she just cheated out of a significant sum of money, Melissa decides on an emergency use of Murphy. The GM assesses a hefty -2 penalty for using magic in the heat of battle. Melissa rolls a +3--Superb, but with the -2 penalty she achieves only a Good result. The GM rules that the gunman's weapon jams, but only momentarily--he'll be back in action the next combat round. If Melissa had had more time to prepare, perhaps the gunman's car would have broken down, and he never would have been able to threaten her--at least, that day.

Optionally, characters may take a lower Break Level than they would be capable of, in return for a possibly increased Effect. For each reduction in Break Level below the maximum possible for the given Circuit, or Gnosis, add 1dF to the Effect roll. So, Ed the Necromancer could use a Good break level and be fairly sure of succeeding with his Commune with Spirits skill, which is also Fair. (Apparently his intense devotion to his deity is not matched by magical scholarship.) Instead of the usual 4dF roll for resolving tasks, Ed could roll 6dF when Communing with Spirits.

Sample Effect roll modifiers

-1	Poor preparation for skills that require it; distracted; doing an Effect that is questionable for the Circuit involved; doing an Effect the character is reluctant to do.
-2	Performing magic in battle; character highly distracted in some other way; significantly inappropriate Effect for the Circuit involved.
-3 or worse	Magic in battle with no prep., for skills that require it; Effect that is highly inappropriate for its Circuit.

Consequences of using Magic

Playing games with reality is not without its problems. The human mind is primed for dealing with ordinary consciousness, and straining it too far can be disastrous.

All characters, magicians or not, have a Sanity scale, which looks just like the Damage scale. The adjectives are different, however:

If the character's attempt is worse than Mediocre, it's a serious failure. If the character's action was oppposed by a Circuit, roll that Circuit's Influence + 4dF as an attack on the character's Sanity. As with success, the character subtracts their Will from the result, as a kind of mental "armor".

A Touched character suffers no special ill effects, but is on the way to worse things.

Shaken characters suffer a -1 penalty to Will, including resisting further Sanity damage!

Disturbed characters suffer a -2 Will penalty, and might be diagnosable as needing serious psychiatric help, possibly institutionalization, but with a good chance of recovery.

Characters having a Psychotic Break suffer a -3 penalty to Will, and are basically out of touch with reality. The GM may place strong restrictions on what the character may do, depending on the cause of the loss of Sanity.

"Gone" characters are, well, gone. The character is now GM-controlled, perhaps permanently.

When tracking damage to Sanity, it's useful to note just where the damage came from. This is so that one can know in what way a character loses it, and also to assist in role-playing recovery, covered below.

There are basically four places where Sanity damage can come from: "ordinary" psychological stresses, such as witnessing terrible events or being tortured, called "Traumas" in this game; magical success using Gnosis; magical success using Circuits; and magical failure.

For the simpler horrors of life, to which all characters are subject, one should assess the usual kinds of neuroses, obsessions, and phobias. Phobias are an old standby of Sanity loss in role-playing games. Attacked by a giant spider? Arachnophobia. Suffered Horrors from the Deep while trapped in a submarine? Thalassophobia. (Fear of large bodies of water; what experience could make a character afraid of ordinary drinking water? Hmm . . . ) And so on. Trauma, the usual kind of "ordinary" Sanity loss for PC's, can also result in amnesia, obsessions, panic attacks, dissociative disorders, and a host of other nasty psychological ailments. The GM is encouraged to be creative in this regard, perhaps even reading up on psychology. The DSM IV, a taxonomy of madness for psychological professionals, is a useful reference for those GM's who don't mind wading through the technical language.

Trauma

"Traumas" are the damage that our minds suffer from exposure to shock, mind-bending realities, bad treatment from parents and peers, and so on. Obviously, most everyday irritations aren't worthy of Sanity damage, and PC's are typically made of sterner stuff, going through carnage that would send veteran warriors into the throes of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Depending on the level of cinema in your game, assess Traumas according to the intensity of the event. Shooting an enemy in self-defense isn't much for heroes in TV or movies, but if you want to run a more realistic game, be aware that killing another human being is a Sanity-threatening event for an ordinary person. In a typical game, some PC's could have a Fault such as Sensitive or perhaps Empathic that would make for more Sanity checks in violent situations.

Magicians who succeed to excess with Gnosis magic are gradually separating themselves from ordinary reality. Here is the crux of the old question, is my magic getting better and better, or am I losing my mind? In the present system, it's a little of both. In describing this kind of Sanity loss, the GM should emphasize the growing sense of unreality the PC feels. Objects seem brittle and strange. Other people seem to speak to the PC from a far away place. Everything is dull, unless the PC is exercising magic. People around the PC will notice a certain alien cast to the PC's features, a hyper-realness.

Eventually, a character Gone from performing Gnosis magic spins off into a pocket universe, and can only be retrieved by considerable effort. An adventure where the party must convince a god of its own world to return to theirs could fill a few evenings, indeed. PC's are likely to encounter copies of themselves in the new universe, as the Gone character will probably want to spend time with friends. However, they will be the Gone one's ideas, not the real thing, and to the copied PC's, they may seem like gross charicatures. Especially interesting characters that go this way can be made into new Circuits!

A character suffering from the depredations of their own Circuit is on the way to becoming an Avatar. At the Touched level, the effect isn't noticeable, though the GM might drop hints about how "right" the Circuit feels. As the damage advances, the character becomes more and more convinced that their Circuit is the One True Way. Nastier GM's may rule that Circuits will bribe characters into more ill-considered use of the Circuit by giving them extra powers. (Such powers should of course be taken away if the PC recovers the lost Sanity.)

Recovering Sanity

Insanity, as much of a slippery slope as it tends to be with the cumulative Will penalties, is not inevitable. Below are several suggested ways of hanling Sanity recovery.

Recovering Traumatic Sanity Loss

"Ordinary" Sanity loss is recovered via some fairly obvious methods.

A character naturally recovers one Touched level of Sanity per week, assuming they aren't subjected to other traumas. They have to be taking it easy, mentally, during this recovery time.

Overcoming a source of trauma, such as killing that scary giant spider that made you Disturbed, will allow a chance for recovery of the specific Sanity loss.

Recovering Magickal Sanity Loss