Empowering is a full-turn action which allows a mage to consume gems at a lab in return for permanently increasing their abilitiy in a single magic path. To empower to level 1 (from zero) in any path costs 50 corresponding gems: to increase a path's level beyond that costs 15 times the new level.

When empowering in Blood, there is a chance of gaining 1 or 2 of horror marks. For commanders without blood magic, this is 25% to occur; for those with blood magic already it is 7.5% per level of blood they had prior to empowerment. This occurence is mentioned in the empowering message, mentioning that the commander "seems to have attracted the attention of something from the void".

In practice, this makes empowerment something of a last resort for gaining higher magic path access, due to its cost compared to alteratives. These cheaper alternatives are usually some combination of forging magic items which boost paths, and potentially using these boosted paths to summon higher level mages. An additional drawback of any empowered commander is their fragility: compared to items which can mostly be freely removed and transferred between mages, a single empowered mage cannot be separated from their investment. This makes their loss from combat, assassinations, disease, or other causes very undesirable.