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The story teller and I had a disagreement on how or if a mage could survive a nuclear explosion at ground zero. They can see a countdown and know when the detonation will occur. They have 10 minutes. They want the destruction from the bomb to occur and must witness it first hand. So, no negating or preventing the explosion. They cannot or are not willing to remote view it from either a different point in time or space. Standing in the blast radius and surviving the full fury and destruction of a nuclear explosion is the goal.

I'm interested in possibilities across editions of Mage.

Assume the mage is a marauder or otherwise not concerned with paradox.

I should note I'm not even sure how to properly explain a nuclear explosion (i.e. do they affect the spirit realm?), though this is not my focus.

What different spheres or sphere combinations (and sphere levels) would allow a mage to survive being at ground zero for a nuclear explosion? How difficult would success with each sphere or sphere combination?

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    \$\begingroup\$ You need to be a lot clearer in your question itself about where the mage is allowed to be. Most of the means that could be used to survive this situation would be various forms of "don't be there when the blast hits" - using time or spirit or correspondence or doing time in a different way or... there are lots of ways to run that, and some of them get weirdly persnickety. You're going to need to be a lot more precise. \$\endgroup\$
    – Ben Barden
    Commented Mar 15, 2023 at 19:13
  • \$\begingroup\$ Ben, I tried to make it more specific. I removed the idea of "don't be there when the blast hits" in order to focus on surviving being in the blast radius. \$\endgroup\$
    – zenijos10
    Commented Mar 16, 2023 at 1:13

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I'll be speaking from M20, because that's the one that I have the most recent experience with. I also acknowledge that I might be getting some of this a bit wrong, but I'm pretty sure that it's at least close.

There's... not a lot.

Mages aren't amazing at force-against-force, and "point blank of a nuclear explosion" is about as close to an irresistable force as you get. They're good at cheating. There's a bunch of ways to decide that you don't want to be here after all, or that you want to stop existing briefly and come back, but the constraints you've put in place even go so far as to prevent even things like Time-triggered self-resurrection rotes.

Your only real remaining options are going to be toughening yourself to the point that the blast can't kill you, making yourself temporarily into something that doesn't interact with explosions, and using Forces to tell the blast to pass you by. Let's start with the last.

If you want to try to redirect the bit of the blast that's coming for you personally, you're going to need 4 Forces bare minimum, just to be able to play. You'll probably want 5. Correspondence 5 would help, for the bit where you're warping the shape of reality. Matter 5 (and possibly prime 2) would be really handy if you're willing to create/modify a wall to hide behind... in order to allow that wall to be made of some sort of mystical material that can actually block some of the blast without being annihilated. So... Forces 4 if you want to try to part the blast with raw will, and thus use the rote as a contested action, multiple times in quick succession, against a much higher dice pool, while your storyteller laughs. Forces 5, Correspondence 5, Matter 5, Prime 2 if you want to arrange for a physical shield of some magical material that might give you an actual decent chance of survival if you hunker behind it.

If you want to turn yourself into something that can survive the blast, that's Matter 5 (for Alter Properties) and Life 5 (for Perfect Metamorphosis). In essence, you come up with a magical material that can ignore nuclear blasts, and then turn yourself into a living statue composed of such material. This one is actually pretty straightforward, as the hard part isn't a contested roll against the bomb's absurd-tier dice pool, but it's super-paradoxical. If you want this effect to persist, that paradox is going to be permanent paradox, and you're also going to want to have Time 5, so that you can stretch those 10 minutes out into enough time to perform a major ritual. You could also do crazier versions of this one, like temporarily transforming yourself into a spirit of nuclear fire (using Spirit and Forces, rather than Matter) but you're going to need Life 5 anyway, and the other component probably isn't going to be easier than Matter 5.

It all starts making a lot more sense mechanically when you start thinking of a nuclear bomb as a Technocracy Forces/Prime/??? effect that involved multiple powerful mages with a lot of infrastructure behind them doing dangerous ritual work for an extended period of time at a notable cost in resources.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Teh damage code of a nuclear bomb is "REALLY?" aka "UNLIMITED Aggravated" \$\endgroup\$
    – Trish
    Commented Mar 16, 2023 at 17:52
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    \$\begingroup\$ Ben, I think this is really helpful, any thoughts on how entropy might help? \$\endgroup\$
    – zenijos10
    Commented Mar 16, 2023 at 19:01
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    \$\begingroup\$ zenijos10 - It wouldn't. Entropy is all about utterly destroying things, or about subtle and fine manipulations. You won't let the bomb be destroyed, and when the explosion happens, the time for subtlety is passed. The way an Entropy mage avoids dying in a nuclear explosion is by making their chance of being near to such an explosion highly unlikely. Now, if you want to luck out and have something to go subtly wrong in the bomb's trigger mechanism so that it doesn't explode after all? That's when you want Entropy. \$\endgroup\$
    – Ben Barden
    Commented Mar 16, 2023 at 19:20

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