Mage: The Ascension

Mage: The Ascension
Role-playing game published by White Wolf
Rule System	Storyteller System
Authors	Stuart Wieck, Chris Early, Stephan Wieck, Phil Brucato
First Publication	1993
Essential Books	Mage: The Ascension

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Mage: The Ascension is an outdated "Gothic-Punk" roleplaying game published by White Wolf. Unlike other *-Punk genre works, machines powered by Goths are not a common element in the setting.

Magic is an awesome thing you can do...

...when no one is watching. Like all awesome things, the moment you try to show off to impress your friends, it backfires on you. Since reality is "consensual" in MtA, that means everybody does their part, and everyone who can't do cool magic does boring magic. And just to rub your face in it, boring magic trumps awesome magic. So the moment an "awakened" Mage tries to throws a fireball in front of "sleeping" Mage, bad things happen. Backlash happens. Backlash allows your GM to work out their sadistic streak and protect their special NPC at the same time, turning a fireball of plot derailment into an exploding lighter that sets your character on fire. On a good day. On a bad day, all of your character's futuristic prosthetic organs fail when an NPC so much as glances at them. Then they explode and set your character on fire.

Another example of how magic sucks is in the rules that you have to deal with directly: namely finding another game's magic rules to use in place of the ones provided in any of the three editions of MtA. The GURPS version of MtA is a common pick as it's the same fluff and the back-port of nWoD Mage: The Awakening rules via the Mage Translation Guide is another.

Herding Cats: Organizations

The Traditions are a loose association of even looser organizations, led represented by the Council of Nine who are doing what they've always done: pursuing independent agendas. Their meetings take place every nine years and only three Masters even bothered to show up in 1988, it's unknown if any were there for 59th and last planned council of 1997.

The alternative is the Technocratic Union, who are currently winning due to being much better-organized than the Traditions and generally having something resembling a unified agenda. They are responsible for updating consensual reality with cool technology and lifting humankind out of the Dark Ages, but they've since decided on a much more-conservative course of trying to control the world before guiding it into utopia. This paradigm has pissed off enough people that two member organizations eventually left the Technocracy, and those remaining are starting to split between the ones who want to make a positive difference in the world, and the tubby old white farts who just want to keep their power and make everything the same forever. Unfortuantely, the Old World of Darkness wasn't always that great about inter-gameline continuity, and whether or not they're heavily-corrupted by the Weaver from Werewolf: The Apocalypse is difficult. At the very least, though they're still aligned against Pentex and its Captain Planet-villain shtick.

The Nine Traditions

• Akashic Brotherhood

Kung fu Buddhist wizards. They can flip over cars with flying kicks and their super-special martial art, which is called Do ("the way" in japanese. Original). They specialize in Mind, that is doing jedi shit with other's minds (and their own), turning into Einstein, or mind control. Excellent to troll other players by using Mind rotes on them.

• Celestial Chorus

Some boring, generic religious wizard (or "miracle worker") Jesus-clone class that no one ever plays. They have the most broken sphere in the game though : Prime can do so much stuff it's not even funny. They can even remove people from existence !

• Cult of Ecstasy

Drugs, rock and roll, and sex. That's all there is to know. They are permanently on crack and probably all are boring, character-less adrenaline junkies/stoners/mindless hedonists. They can time travel for some reason, but fuck if we know why.

• Dreamspeakers

Talk spirits, summon spirits, and all that shit. Boring generic "Magical Native American" stereotypes around. You can also go in other spirit planes with it. Seems boring until you realize you can summon anything for you, and it may do anything with it's own powers. Kinda like D&D's conjuration spells.

• Euthanatos

Crazy Hinduist assassin wizards. Obsessed with killing "bad" people so they can reincarnate or some shit. Pretty cool in theory, but the type to attract emo roleplayers and Vampire: the Masquerade players. They have a pretty cool sphere though : Entropy is all about influencing luck, fate, and decay. Also probably the most overpowered sphere at high levels.

• Order of Hermes

Apparently bog-standard SUPER-SEKRET order of wizards. They use hermetic magic, and yet to that name no one can understand it. Roleplaying one correctly is akin to blabbering about shit that nobody cares about, like Decanic Trappings, Sepiroth and the Seal of Solomon. They master the sphere of Forces, which is all about controlling energy. Fireballs, electricity, gravity, kinetic energy... You can do crazy shit with it like turning your Mage into a radio, trolling people by crippling them with radiation, and the ever-standard fireball. Tend to be pretty fun, but Hermetics tend to explode into giblets due to Paradox.

• Sons of Ether

The coolest tradition. They are mad scientist wizards, each according to a vision of Science ! who is probably 60 years too late at least. But it still works, because they will it so. They have the Matter sphere, which means doing cool stuff with all inanimate matter. Probably the greatest potential for trolling : you can rust swords, move stuff telekinetically around, turn the Technocrat's guns into fake toy guns, or just transform the air into rocks on top of enemies and take yourself for an angry GM... the possibilities are endless. Well, except that you're a technocrat, so you can't do anything that is physically impossible even to mad science. Sucks to be you.

• Verbena

A ripoff of the D&D druid. All wiccans and treehuggers, however they have some form of coolness in blood rituals and sacrifice. They have Life, which is about influencing living beings (not their minds, though). Insect swarms ? Animating trees so they attack your enemies ? Turning into animals ? Healing ? Yup, D&D druid alright. Well, to be honest, there's ALSO strengthening the body, super-speed, and punching enemies really strong, so you can go Muscle Wizard if you want.

• Virtual Adepts

Some sort of computer wizard. They are the tradition of choice of the nerdiest of us, because they cast spells with programs and the internets. Masters of the Correspondence sphere, that is doing crazy shit with space and distance. Bags of holding ? Sure. Teleportation ? Knock yourself out. Bringing stuff at distance ? Yup. They can even multiply and stack a dozen people on the same point. We're not even sure what they do, really.

The Technocratic Conventions

Back in the olden days, otherwise known as the Mage: the Dark Ages spin-off, the Daedalans of the Order of Reason formed out of the Awakened mages who weren't total asshats. Seeing that their fellow wizards were grinding the common people under heel, and, on behalf of God and the greater good, they began to create a new form of magic that anyone could use, otherwise known as SCIENCE! It was a roaring success, and it quickly became so popular that other mages' shit stopped working right via the "consensual reality" mechanics of the setting.

Unfortunately, that was the olden days, and they became the Technocracy, and they've gone from being the man to being the Man. There were a lot of factors involved, but in general the biggest one is that they started to shift away from trying to make life better for everyone with sick inventions to trying to control everyone for their own good. Nowadays, the Technocracy is basically a hybrid of a boring government agency and a greedy, money-grubbing business, less actively malicious than sullenly satisfied with the status quo and disinterested in the consequences of keeping the world the same. They've even lost two of their old Conventions to the Traditions, the Sons of Ether and the Virtual Adepts.

Their original draft made them out to be, in keeping with the heavy Romanticism of the original World of Darkness, villainous curs out to crush all wonder and joy out of the world to make room for more boring urban developments and soulless industrial complexes, but over time they gathered more and more fans who pointed out that anyone who invented public schools, democracy, and toilet paper couldn't be all bad. And, after all, with Traditions like the Verbena wanting to knock us back to the Stone Ages and the Order of Hermes trying to take over the world and rule over the muggles with an iron fist, they clearly aren't the worst game in town.

Eventually, White Wolf got out of their hippie granola-and-4/20-scented cave and, blinking in the sun, agreed, making them playable and implicitly retconning their earlier portrayal as Tradition propaganda. It was a smart move that improved the game immensely. Nowadays, they're pretty much a starting playable set of alternative factions, with their own "reforming a corrupt, stagnant monolith from within" game feel compared to yet another "scrappy rebels fighting against the modern world" plot you can get anywhere else in the World of Darkness. After all, even in their original portrayals, they were the front-line fighters to keep ordinary people safe from supernatural threats, and they still have their share of people who genuinely want to make the world a better place.

A long time ago, they tried to wipe out the Traditions by force in a program of attack called the Pogrom. It was largely successful, but for a number of reasons they dropped it a while ago, and only splinter elements want a return to it. Nowadays, the Technocracy is largely committed to "winning the argument," and only intervening when local mages are getting out of hand. The Traditions and the Technocracy hate each other, but since they ultimately both want humanity to "ascend," no matter how sharply they disagree on what that means, their hearts are both in the right-ish place, and they both regularly declare truces and cooperate to fight Nephandi, Marauders, and regular-old human evils like child pornographers.

• Iteration X

Talking about the It X'ers inevitably means talking about the biggest divide between them. On the one hand, you have the old guard of master craftsmen and inventors, the cool ones. On the other, you have the crazy transhumanists worshipping the "Xth Iteration" of the Master Computer they've built with their own hands. Naturally, there's a lot of friction there. As a whole, they are the Technocracy's R&D division, focusing on cybernetics and robotics, and they focus on the spheres of Forces and Matter.

• New World Order

If the Technocracy is the Man, then the NWO (no relation to the professional wrestling stable of the same name) is the Man's Man. They are the leaders of the Technocracy, acting as advisers around the world to governments and industries, trying to steer humanity in what they think is the right direction. Their leaders are the Men in White, and their foot soldiers are the Men in Black, the iconic uniforms using the organization's mastery of the Mind sphere to tap into the Masses' brains to make them hard to spot. They also handle the basic indoctrination every Technocrat goes through, and they're the foremost Technocrats in terms of trying to "recruit" mages. Not initially as sinister as it sounds (they were the biggest advocates of dropping the Pogrom, and their leader is a former Ecstacist who swapped sides during the Second World War), since convincing mages to turn peacefully is preferable, but they'll break out the dystopian equipment if they have to.

• Progenitors

The biological sciences division, specializing in everything from medicine to genetic engineering under the umbrella of the Life sphere. Used to have bunch of horrible eugenics and transhuman types, but after discovering them collaborating with Nazis and Nephandi during the Second World War, they purged that division, and are today some of the chillest, most bro-tier Technocrats... mostly. They really, really, homicidally hate homeopathy, healing crystals, reiki, and all that other New Age pseudo-medicine. Like, they think of it as a honest-to-God war crime.

For those of you at home wondering how this is supposed to make them less likable and sympathetic, keep in mind that this was the late-90s early-00s, and roughly 80% of White Wolf's staff were some combination of back-to-nature hippies and neopagan/Wiccan types. Naturally, the rest of us subscribe to the "by definition, alternative medicine has not been proved to work or has been proved not to work" mantra, and the Progenitors have furiously pointed out that even if a mage is there making it work, it encourages people to entrust their lives and bodies to frauds and hucksters who can't.

• The Syndicate

Probably the Convention that hews closest to its stereotype, the Syndicate are the Technocracy's business and marketing division. Naturally, this means they're a bunch of cut-throat Gordon Gekko-types who love destructive, Darwininan competition, and so conservative that they think the biggest problem with the Technocracy today is that their fellow Conventions are rocking the boat too much and need to focus less on what could be. (Yes, this is the same organization we called a "corrupt, stagnant monolith" several paragraphs up.) The closest thing to something sympathetic about them is that they honestly believe in being the Masses' partners rather than their rulers, and that they just can't or won't see how flawed and cruel their philosophy really is. They focus on the spheres of Entrophy and Prime for their hyper-economics, but they have a lot of cross-training in other areas to look into marketing the other Conventions' stuff.

• Void Engineers

Regarded by mages as "the good ones" and their fellow Technocrats as the loose cannons, the Void Engineers are masters of exploration. In the olden days, they searched the bottom of the sea and the furthest reaches of the land, and in modern times they chart the Deep Umbra and run a thriving community of space stations throughout the solar system. They are masters of the spheres of Correspondence and Dimensional Science, a heavily-modified version of the Traditions' Spirit sphere. The Engineers are the most free-spirited of the Technocrats, and the most likely to collaborate with the Conventions, but they're still loyal technocrats. In fact, while they remain informal ties to the Etherites, they were the ones who pushed to remove the Luminiferous Ether from the Consensus to keep their brother Convention in line.

They had a whole sub-plot in Revised where they recruited Traditions to help fight Threat Null, but it's a long story and M20's probably going to make it obsolete when it finally comes out, so for now we'll skip it.

Others

• Hollow Ones

The Councilor faction has been trying to join the Traditions since the 1900s, despite not having a Tradition to join with.

• Marauders

Insane mages that can somehow avoid paradox by passing it off to other people. When John the Barbarian rides through New York on the back of his pet t-rex, holding his magic crystal sword in one hand and bellowing war-cries as he rides off to fight an imaginary menace, it's not his problem, it's society's problem.

• Nephandi

Infernal mages who regularly deal with demons. Part of becoming one involves inverting your avatar through a horrific process that persists through everyone else who inherits it. One of the threats that cause the Traditions and the Technocracy to team up, as in World War II.

Independant Crafts

• Ahl-i-Batin
• Knights Templar
• Lions of Zion
• Sisters of Hippolyta
• Taftâni
• Wu-Keng
• Wu Nung

See Also

• Mage: The Awakening (nWoD)
• World of Darkness

Links

• World of Darkness website
• World of Darkness wiki
• Unmoderated WoD Chat
• Mister Gone's Character Sheets