Growing Tension

This can be treated as the fourth major event. For a time — depending on how events unfold, and on the temperaments of the player magi — there is more than one battlefield. Soterists and Wächter both compete for support from the rest of the Tribunal's magi. The two sides also actively try to hinder the other side's activities in Willehad-im-Wald with increasing intensity; Soterists use Perdo Vim to sabotage the powerful and indiscreet rituals of the Wächter, who in turn start to sabotage the more discreet measures of the Soterists in order to increase the need for more powerful magic. If the player magi are heavily involved in investigation, sabotage, or assistance to either faction at this point, they are also involved in this escalation.

Naturally, the factions come to blows, starting with skirmishes with the other side's agents and eventually, a Wizard's War or two erupts. If nothing else, this serves to identify the individual active magi from both factions to those player magi who have been unwilling to get involved or unlucky with their investigations. Neither of the competing factions is sufficiently fanatic to risk Wizard's March by openly attacking another magus outside Wizard's War — yet! Since both parties feel that the undecided magi are more easily swayed if they know about the Wars, ample information is circulated by the Redcaps. Soterists up the ante by having armed warriors prowl the countryside, clearing more forest with fire and the iron axe. The Church tries to spread the Dominion with every sermon and ringing of bells. Dieter the priest goes to great lengths to invent and spread local stories about divine events, in order to justify building shrines at majestic or oddly colored trees, at roadsides, on hilltops, or on the shores of lakes. The Wächter recruit more and more animals and faeries to sabotage this, and thus goad the

village into a full-fledged crusade against the wild, against which they can strike back with just cause — at least according their own ethics. If it fits the conditions in the Tribunal, they might even start aggressively recruiting sympathetic hedge mages and funneling them into the Order and their own Houses.