Oh, I'm sorry! Seems I omitted the “Notes” portion when putting the app sections together to submit.
Every variety of adept does things to generate 'charges,' which are best described as packets of magical energy. Charges are categorized as minor, significant, or major, with significant and major charges both being markedly more difficult/dangerous to create than minors and significant, respectively. (For example, a chaos mage will risk serious injury or several months' wages for a significant charge, but a major charge requires risking one's life as well as the life of a loved one.) 'Minor adepts' are adepts who cannot ordinarily access significant or major charges because their charge-generating activity cannot be sufficiently scaled up, and has no scale-able approximations. Sam is a minor adept, and gains one minor charge with every tattoo she acquires. (These tattoos must be a minimum of two square inches; you can't cheat magic adding one freckle at a time.)
One charge powers one spell, though improvised spells may cost more, and additional effects (such as booby-trapping something with a blast spell*) will certainly cost more.
It's also worth noting that every variety of adept has a taboo, an action which violates the paradigm their variety of magic hinges on. For a chaos mage, this would be asking someone else to take a risk they are unwilling to take theirself; for Sam, it's having a non-decorative needle puncture her skin**, or having a tattoo removed/defaced (say with a particularly bad scrape or gash across the design).
*The rulebook suggests booby-traps, but also specifies that the traps must be symbolically appropriate/resonate with an adept's focus, so it's a limited ability. Sam could set a trap-blast which would be triggered by the next person to draw blood on Person B, for example, but she couldn't set a trap-blast which would hit the next person who tried to pick a certain lock.
Re: Clarification
Every variety of adept does things to generate 'charges,' which are best described as packets of magical energy. Charges are categorized as minor, significant, or major, with significant and major charges both being markedly more difficult/dangerous to create than minors and significant, respectively. (For example, a chaos mage will risk serious injury or several months' wages for a significant charge, but a major charge requires risking one's life as well as the life of a loved one.) 'Minor adepts' are adepts who cannot ordinarily access significant or major charges because their charge-generating activity cannot be sufficiently scaled up, and has no scale-able approximations. Sam is a minor adept, and gains one minor charge with every tattoo she acquires. (These tattoos must be a minimum of two square inches; you can't cheat magic adding one freckle at a time.)
One charge powers one spell, though improvised spells may cost more, and additional effects (such as booby-trapping something with a blast spell*) will certainly cost more.
It's also worth noting that every variety of adept has a taboo, an action which violates the paradigm their variety of magic hinges on. For a chaos mage, this would be asking someone else to take a risk they are unwilling to take theirself; for Sam, it's having a non-decorative needle puncture her skin**, or having a tattoo removed/defaced (say with a particularly bad scrape or gash across the design).
*The rulebook suggests booby-traps, but also specifies that the traps must be symbolically appropriate/resonate with an adept's focus, so it's a limited ability. Sam could set a trap-blast which would be triggered by the next person to draw blood on Person B, for example, but she couldn't set a trap-blast which would hit the next person who tried to pick a certain lock.
**It's a weird system.