Another piece of my alt-history Altered States Shadowrun campaign, this covers the first observable manifestations of the Awakening. Long before the guerrilla war against the NAN, the Emergence of Metahumanity, and the appearance of Ryumyo, small magics began to have an influence.

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Small Magics of the Awakened World
Prof. Joshua Shaw, Ph.D., D.Th. MIT&T

Magic is formed by belief and powered by belief. Beliefs in ceremonies, magical creatures, supernatural beings. When the Awakening began in 2010, the return of magic meant these beliefs became true.

Beliefs in spirits, totems, and magical creatures. Belief in the efficacy of magical rituals or ceremonies. Belief in supernatural beings.

Trolls are giants in Norway, and cyclops in Greece. The beliefs—the culture and mythology—of those areas shaped what Emerged there. (And if modern beliefs differed from those held thousands of years ago, it was the modern beliefs that became real.)

The Awakening meant magicians had once more become real. It also meant that small magics had again become real.

Nearly all people have at least a small connection to the astral plane: they are alive, and so produce mana and can (in minuscule ways) shape and form mana. Such tiny wisps of mana can do little on their own, but thousands of tiny wisps of magic working together can achieve impressive, if subtle results.

It can keep food from spoiling, that long ago should have gone bad. It can convince men to turn aside from violence, or offer aid. It can even cause weakness, illness, or speed death.

(That so many survived the Collapse can, in part, be ascribed to the effects of small magics. Indeed, VITAS and the Collapse drove a resurgence in religious belief and practice across the globe, with significant consequences for many countries.)

Tales of the Awakening focus on the dramatic: the appearance of dragons, Howling Coyote’s Night of Ghosts and Terror, the Emergence of Metahumanity. But in the earliest days of the Awakening, the only magic that worked was the small, subtle workings of minuscule amounts of mana.

Prayers that rain would come, or turn aside. Superstitious gestures, symbols, or rituals. Vows of hatred and revenge, repeated many times by many people. In small ways, these can affect the world.

In 2029, the Awakening is 19 years old. And small magics are still a part of the Awakened world.

• An old woman with Alzheimer’s loses her cat. Forgetting it has died, she expects it to be there when she sets out food. So it is. A cat that she can see, hear, and hold, that is invisible to others.

• A single rural county in Virginia hosts a colony of brownies. Unseen house-spirits, brownies help in animal husbandry and household chores for the price of a small bowl of milk and a piece of bread. Their first manifestation can be traced to an elderly, superstitious gentleman of Scotts ancestry, who had been feeding brownies since his boyhood in the 1960’s. His neighbors took up the practice in the late Teens, and have had the aid of brownies ever since.

• A town in Mexico (now Aztlan) had the lowest murder rate in North America. Its church, The Church of Christ’s Peace, had a shrine to St. Zachary. Each week the congregation prayed for peace, and many burnt candles at the shrine, hoping for peace. Even during the Aztlan coup, no one in the town was killed, nor was a single shot fired. (The town was later destroyed by the Aztlan governing council for offering aid to rebels.)

When dealing with small magics, cold, detached, scientific analysis will always fail. These small magics are subtle in effect, affect a small area, are hard to predict and impossible to duplicate, in part because of the nature of magic.

Magic is formed by belief and powered by belief. And those who don’t believe, find that small magics don’t exist for them.
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> Shaw's editorial, first published in the Hermetic "Journal of the Processes of Rational Magic" in 2029, wrecked his academic career. A prominent Hermetic, taking up the cause of folk-beliefs and superstition, and proclaiming both to be accurate (to some extent), while simultaneously declaring that Hermetic magic couldn't confirm their existence, much less understand them... it was tantamount to the Pope recanting his Catholicism.

The ensuing imbroglio was fun to watch, though.
- Rational Supernaturalist

> Arguments for and against are still rocketing back and forth across the globe, in conferences, symposia, and peer-reviewed journals. Shamans trumpet the existence of Small Magics, Hermetics deny it, and theurges sit to the side smiling and looking mysterious. Careers have, and are, being made and broken over what is, at its core, a simple editorial recognizing how vast and mysterious the Awakened world really is.

Had I know what would happen, I might have kept my mouth shut.
- Atlantean in Exile

> Maybe you should have. The return of magic doesn't invalidate science. Observation, information, and experimentation are just as valid and necessary as ever. Otherwise the credulous and irresponsible will declare anything and everything mystical to be true, whether it exists or not.

Just because magic is real, doesn't mean every single superstitious belief is true. Carefully sorting out the gold from the dross takes care and hard work. There is no golden road to knowledge, we must all walk through the muck.
- Scion of Hermes

I wonder, who's in charge of that at the moment. Do you have names? I haven't been following this road for a while, but I know there's an organization looking into these things just like the vatican used to send out priests to find proof for alleged miracles.
- Gael

> Any Hermetic Order. Pick one. Hermetics are the only spellworkers anal enough to require a double blind study published in a peer reviewed journal before they can accept the truth their minds and bodies tell them. They are heirs to marvels, and have made of them a prison.

- Daydream Disbeliever