- Psionics is anything that involves affecting a character's mind, reading a character's mind, hypnotism, telepathy, scrying for information or omens (only if the PC has the appropriate special), or moving inanimate objects around with one's mind. Hostile psionics against another character must be targeted, and will take the target's resistance into account.
- Imagination encompasses the creation of illusions so believable that they become real. Spectacular dream-like or cartoon-like effects, such as flying/long-jumping, surviving falls from great height, making all your furniture into lime jello, turning day to night, or making things out of nothing. If it's something you've done in a lucid dream, there's a good chance that it can be an Imagination effect.
- Faith covers healing or the creation of life. Mending bones, making forests grow, dispelling poison, creating water, or otherwise encouraging nature are examples of Faith effects. So are channeling and unleashing pure holy power against the undead. Faith is a power of creation only. A level three faith may create a flower but a level three faith cannot kill one. Faith can ONLY be used to destroy by draining the life of one living object in order to transfer it to another. You can't kill a flower with faith, but you can take in the power or life from it, causing it to wither.
- Magic involves controlling the environment around you, manipulating the mist and your surroundings. Think of it as being based in traditional 'four elements' magic. You can't create water, but you can pull the water from the air into a sudden storm. You can summon your body heat into a massive fireball, or freeze the surface of a lake with a touch. You can transform one material to another, or enchant a common object with new properties.
When mist handling, level refers to the magnitude of the effect which you are attempting to produce. You must choose an appropriate level for each of your effects. The level is, then, a quantification of the difficulty of your task. Level determines both how hard it is to succeed and how unfortunate the mist's backlash will be if you fail miserably. Examples of each level, in each school of mist handling, can be found in Appendix D: Mist Levels.
Levels for individuals run from 1 (the weakest effects) to 10 (the most magnificent effects). By pooling their willpower together, groups can accomplish even greater feats. Levels for groups run from 11 (requiring two people and being slightly more spectacular than anything an individual can do) to 20 (requiring upwards of fifty thousand people and being quite as spectacular as the feats of the gods themselves.) If a group joins their will together, they must attempt their feat within an hour of the first two individuals joining or will lose any collected power they've assembled (including mist points!).
If you do particularly well on a mist handling attempt, you will score a critical success. This means that your effect is enhanced in some manner, though not enough to increase its level. If you do particularly poorly on a mist handling attempt, the mist will backlash against you with unfortunate results. Some examples of critical successes and backlashes can also be found by consulting this poston our forums.
Mist points (type inv or expend to see how many you have) are a measure of a person's collected mist power. The likelihood of an effect succeeding is based both on the mist handler's statistics and on the number of mist points that they choose to expend. Since almost no person is exactly the same as any other, there is no hard or fast rule to determine how many points should be expended at a given level. You can type mag #excheck [level] = [points] to see your probability of success.
To perform a feat of mist handling, first determine which category the effect is rooted in. Then consult Appendix D: Mist Levels (or info mist/levels on the MUCK) to determine the appropriate level for your effect. Type join if you are going to be performing a group effect. Finally, type mag #help to learn how to execute your effect. Good luck!