Secondary powers for awakened souls

In my story, one of the forms of magic comes from looking within one's soul and figuring out what "theme" their soul has an affinity for, and their powers are centered around that theme. Some figure it out with years of meditation, others from sudden moments of clarity. Now, I was looking to give these guys (commonly referred to as the Awakened) secondary powers based on how deeply they understand their soul.

Souls in my verse store memories of past lives (which are normally inaccessible when the person is alive, though bits and pieces might get through subject to individual circumstances) and to achieve this, they have large reserves of energy. Some of the secondary powers draw from this reserve, and the energy expended can only be replenished upon death. I came up with two powers and Clarste provided me with three more (which I've modified a little before presenting below), although I'm still not sure how to incorporate some of them properly with how my souls work. But for the time being, if you have any more ideas, I'd be happy to hear them. Right now, I have:

• Constantly drawing on the energy reserve to increase one's longevity. I can maybe extend it to being able to delay death in certain circumstances.
• Being able to sense souls up to a distance, and for extremely high skill users, being able to sense what form of magic they can use or what "theme" a potential Awakened might have.
• Using the energy to mark a person or place for tracking or leaving messages. The energy only exists for a limited time, and can only be sensed by other Awakened who have learned this skill.
• Constantly expending energy to use skills from past lives (if any memories of the same are available to them). The skills are locked in their state, which means it won't be possible to improve or change them in any way (the Awakened is free to acquire those skills in his current life by training without relying on the memory).
• Expending a chunk of energy to temporarily(?) overwrite someone's personality by transferring memories from a past life into someone. How successful it is depends on the individual circumstances of the transference and the people involved.

Aside from "expending energy to increase one's physical prowess" and "using themed powers from past lives" (which I cannot use because they would make it too similar to the other forms of magic), do you have any suggestions?

No, can't think of much.

What do you plan to do with all of this?

Take care to avoid Unfortunate Implications regarding life-patterns. If authority is dependent largely or solely on your lives' patterns of being a warlord/king/CEO, that has major potential for turning things into a spiritual caste-system. In real-life reincarnation beliefs, someone who has patterns of being authority figures usually has the personality traits inherent to being a leader: Charisma, a head for politics or war strategy, physical combat prowess, that sort of thing. But they could just as likely be an actor, an entrepreneur, or a gang leader with those qualities.

Or just an entitled/abusive prick who coasts on his past lives' status and refuses to get with the times. Especially if they weren't a GOOD leader.

edited 22nd Jun '15 3:07:05 PM by Sharysa

@Deus Denuo: You mean why I want to have secondary powers? There's a couple of reasons, but the main one is I want to have something I can take away from characters, that combine all three forms of magic, as a drawback (I already have drawbacks from the other two forms of magic). If I can get some good ideas out of this, then even better.

@Sharysa: I hadn't intended for something like that happening (since memories bleeding over from past lives is supposed to be pretty rare), but I'll keep that in mind.

No, I mean what will you be using this system of magic for? A "story"? Blog post? Novel? Tabletop game? Creating a new cult for when you move to the Pacific Northwest? Bedtime story for your young nieces and nephews? Thought experiment? Etc.

Each one of those requires a slightly different outlook to work effectively. (Don't believe me? Look up DMOfTheRings - translating a story and story elements from one medium to another and still portraying an experience effectively isn't easy.)

From there, it's a matter of what genre you plan to use the system in. Sci-fi horror with a bit of Mecha? Supernatural shounen martial-arts/tournament arc? Space opera, heavy on the snark and mil-tech? Seventies buddy cop extravaganza? Nineties culturally mismatched buddy cop comedy? I can think of ways to cram The Awakened into all of these, with a bit of tweaking - and in general, you should adapt the system to the story and not the other way around.