There are ways to supernatural might outside of the dedicant's bargain, if you can deal with being a living crime against god and mortal.

The Snake Cult is a multi-initiatory-stage mystery cult that venerates reptiles as the predecessors of mammalian life, and therefore inheritors to Ancient Mystic Wisdom. Initiates are encouraged to keep, handle, and be bitten by snakes with hallucinogenic venom.

Throw down one or more sticks and each animates into a serpent. (Any pieces of wood largely devoid of branching will work, producing snakes of proportionate size.)

All snakes in the vicinity begin to talk: continuous, human speech. Roll INT:

• Success — they reveal arcane lore.
• Twist — they tell mundane secrets.

Choose a stat; your inner power is awakened, and you roll an extra die for each of your next three uses of it. (After that, mark it due to a state of spiritual exhaustion.)

You transform into a giant snake until you fall asleep or choose to change back. While in serpent form, things in your inventory become innate features of this uncanny ophidian.

Shamans, psychopomps, medicine men, witches: throughout time, there has been a place for those of power, half enmeshed in the lives of those around them, half outside the normal world entirely. The Work is service — not indentured, as to the gods, but to an iron sense of duty to the greater good.

When a significant life event occurs in your community, found family, or other context of duty to the Work, you make the necessary occult notifications and gain 1 XP.

You project your mind as a passenger within the body of a nearby creature, witnessing its senses. Your body, while left empty, will slowly die.

Ritually brew a draught which will make the drinker (choose one):

• Remember.
• Forget.
• No longer care.

Journey on the far side of the veil to find a supernatural, dead, or mythic figure. Ask them up to three questions, or for one favour, in exchange for completing their tasks.

Hermetic practitioners believe it's all done with mirrors — and long enough levers, and arcane calculi. So all that anyone needs to do, to have the power of the gods themselves, is simply reverse-engineer the universe itself from observation.

Transform a fist-sized quantity of one substance into (choose one):

• a coin-sized lump of valuable metal.
• a drop of Alkahest, the total solvent.
• a thimbleful of pure liquid light.

Draw up a horoscope charting all of the astrological correspondences affecting a future event.

Ask the GM for a one-word omen.

Undergo a symbolic ritual death and funeral. For all purposes, both people and magic treat you as having died; only people present at the ritual recognise you as the same person.

Enter conversation with an eldritch voice from beyond the world. Ask the GM a question about events happening in the world at the time of the conversation; the being answers “Yes”, “No” or “Unknown”.

The Elementals were the first things to exist in the world, the first oppressed by the gods, the first enslaved. There is no greater symbolic defiance, no more feared and seductive path to secret power, than to tap into their primordial secrets and boundless, timeless rage.

Choose one:

• something flammable ignites.
• something burning extinguishes.
• a fire crawls away like a creature.
• a fire explodes, dealing Catastrophic damage.

Choose one:

• a crafted wooden object reanimates and grows into a sapling.
• new seedlings sprout — pushing through floors etc. — into a thicket.

Choose one:

• a pitch-dark thunderstorm gathers.
• a tornado lifts you into the sky — destroying roof etc. — to place you anywhere outdoors within 10 miles

Choose one:

• you (or one target) sink into earth as if it were water.
• entire cubic metres of stone shape like handfuls of wet clay at your touch