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 "epic storytelling game of reality on the brink" created by White Wolf and set in the Old World of Darkness. Unlike most of White Wolf's World of Darkness gamelines, Mage centered not on stereotypical horror movie monsters (mostly), but on the force of "magic" and the various people who practice it, from mad scientists to angry druids to stereotypical old men in beards and pointy hats, all of whom can do cool stuff by punching reality in the balls. They are loosely united in their attempts to get humankind to "awaken" and become wizards like themselves, but keep running into problems from reality punching back, the Man, crazy and/or evil corrupted mages, and their own petty grudges with one another and incredible ability to turn any progressive project into a territorial fistfight.

Paradox, or why being a mage sucks

One of the biggest problems with the game is that, while magic is cool, it only works well when no one can see you do it. 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, and since doing most magic involves at least swimming against the currents of reality a little, doing it in front of people generates something called "Paradox," which can manifest in all sorts of ways.

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.

The Magic System, or why playing Mage sucks

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 has the same fluff, though GURPS is kind of a pain-in-the-ass, and the back-port of nWoD Mage: The Awakening rules via the Mage Translation Guide is another. Both keep the basic idea of not using magic in public and stuff, but aren't quite as blunt and over-complicated about it.

There's a reason why Mage is the game that you love to read all the awesome fluff of but never quite get a group together to play.

The Nine Spheres of Magic

Mage divided all magic into different spheres, like D&D schools but more clear, since they encompass the building bricks of existence. People like to argue over what sphere is the best, and like to argue even more about if you can do X with X sphere and if the X and Y spheres overlap.

Mages have rankings in each sphere, from one (sensing some aspects of the sphere without changing anything) to five (doing mostly anything with it). All of them are awesome in their own ways.

Correspondence: Controls space and distance. You can detect stuff at distance, teleport yourself and others (extra bonus points if you manage to teleport a vampire into the Sun), punch people (or simply pull levers) at a distance, teleport bullets around, stack people on themselves, make several copies of yourself, and even create planes. Becomes both crazy, drug-worthy and awesome at high levels.

Entropy: The edgy sphere. Entropy controls luck, fate, odds, and well, entropy. You can sense luck, sense "weakness" in items, do predictions, cheat at cards, alter probability, curse people or alternatively make them lucky fuckers, make people/machines destroy themselves with age and wear. At the highest levels you can even affect thought and ideas with entropy. Yes, you can make ideas grow outdated. Or the opposite. Awesome sphere is awesome.

Forces: FIREBALLS FIREBALLS FIREBALLS- Oh, shut up, there's more than blasting to this sphere. Forces is about controlling energy, that is : fire, cold, lightning, kinetic energy, gravity, radiation, and light. Even the nuclear forces at high levels. Forces is hilarious and varied, and while being the prime offensive Sphere it has also lots of varied effects. At first you can only control small amount of forces, but then you can transform energies into each other. One of the best uses of that is setting fast people on fire with friction (changing kinetic energy into heat), get infrared/ultraviolet/sonar vision, shut down electrical appliances, change gravity so the Technocrat here is going to faceplant into the ceiling at a few meters per second, pick up a phone line and intercept messages by reading electric impulses (You'll need to know how it is encrypted though), or for the more classic uses summon storms, fly, call lightning, use telekinesis, and the aforementioned fireball.

Life: Control over living beings. The quintessential druid sphere. Includes healing, but ALSO ripping people in half, physical transformations (you can transform into your inner super-special animal if you want), and physical augmentations. Very varied, you can give yourself winged flight, gills, super-strength, poison bite, regeneration, immortality or whatever. Also you can turn others into cancerous masses of still-living flesh if you really want... or even yourself. At high levels you can create life (feel free to cackle maniacally and make as many references to Frankenstein as you can), and permanently transform into stuff. Ever wanted to be a dragon ? Now you can! Only bad thing with this sphere is that at low levels of control, if you transform into animals, you can start to change mentally into an animal. How many furries were in the White Wolf team at that point ? Well, apart from the inherent potential for yiff, this sphere is really pretty cool and you can do manly stuff with it.

Matter: Control over all inanimate matter. Very, very varied. You can transform matter into other matter, change the properties of matter (yup, trapping enemies into solid air), or simply create matter from nothing. Or just change air into rocks and let them fall. You can also use telekinesis with this sphere, which means all kinds of lulz when someone has a gun and it is innapropriately pointed and you pull the trigger with Matter. You can make items rust and/or become worthless, or alternatively build shit out of your wildest dreams, for the architects in you. Summon fighter planes out of thin air ? Go on, man, if you have the skill to create a fighter plane, this sphere is crazy. And then you can remote control it with the same sphere !

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. See, scientists, doctors, bankers, and bureaucrats tend to be better at the whole rational planning thing than fat wicca chicks, drug addicts, scattered patches of Indigenous peoples, steampunk losers, Bruce Lee wannabees, and Jesus Christ an actual tradition of wizard serial killers somebody stop them. The Technocracy grew out of the late Medieval and Renaissance-era Order of Reason, who decided that a world ruled by elite cliches of insane reality warpers, vampires, werewolves, and demons was pretty shitty if you weren't part of this 1%, so they decided to Occupy Consensus Reality. They are responsible for adapting Consensus Reality to a rational, logical, and consistent materialistic form, and uplifting humankind out of the Dark Ages with ideas and technology, 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 farts who just want to keep their power and make everything the same forever. Unfortunately, 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 Technocracy are one of the most highly praised aspects of the setting; while most villain factions in the old World of Darkness tended towards pure evil, monstrous indiference, or violent insanity (the Sabbat, the Wyrm-tainted, the Nephandi, ect.) the Technocracy are relatable. Most fans either see them as misguided, corruptors of a good purpose, or even morally superior (if still a dark grey) compared to the Traditions.

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, Japanese for "the Way," (both the suffix of every martial arts ever, and a reference to Taoism, the basis of their magic). They specialize in Mind, which can be used to either supercharge themselves to Einstein-levels of intellect, or to do various jedi mind tricks on others. There are many, many ways this sphere can be abused.

• Celestial Chorus

The religious, "miracle worker" class, mostly comprised of various Abrahamic religions and their followers. They focus more on the ecstatic, "spirit-filled" religious practices than on old-fashioned tradition, with the Kabbalists joining the Order of Hermes and the hyper-traditionalist Muslims sticking with their ethnic craft, the al-Taftani. Unfortunately, given the largely-paganist bent of White Wolf's design team, this also meant they didn't get a ton of focus or cool new stuff outside of their one write-up. Their sphere, Prime, focuses on the very essense of magic and meta-magic, making it one of the most powerful and versatile in the game; Prime-focused mages can do almost anything up-to-and-including removing people from existence altogether.

• Cult of Ecstasy

Sex, drugs, and rock and roll, man. But, like, not for their own sakes, man, but so that they can, like, free themselves from the concerns of the material, temporal world, and, like, achieve a higher state of pure... like... I dunno, pass me some more of that ganja goodness, man.

...Yeah, can you tell that the development team was full of hippies yet? It will be a running theme in this article. There are ways to do the Ecstacists right (the ones who hunt down child pornographers to make pleasure as a whole more clean were welcomed for being an extension of the concept that wasn't just more of the same), but a lot of people just played them in very boring, "more of the same" ways. Have mastery of the sphere of Time, either as a play on "living from the moment," or because all the various substances inside of them make them lose track of it all the time, and they needed some way to get it back.

• Dreamspeakers

The Dreamspeakers represent old-tyme tribal magic from indigenous peoples throughout the world. Which part of the world? All of it. Wait, so like, all the different Africans, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans get lumped together because they're all "primitive?" That's racist as shit! Yes. Yes it is. Welcome to early White Wolf, you poor sap. We've got support groups. Later version made this explicit, with the Dreamspeakers themselves aware and resentful of the fact that the other Eurasian-dominated factions clumped a bunch of minor ethnic crafts together to make a coherent tradition for condescending political purposes.

Their mastery is of the sphere of Spirit, which mostly focuses on summoning and binding magic. Every sphere has its powerful, broken-ass exploits, and for Dreamspeakers, this means making like a D&D mage and abusing the fuck out of your ability to conjure things with their own powers to do whatever you like whenever you like it.

• Euthanatos

Crazy Hindu/Buddhist assassin wizards, who serve the Wheel of rebirth by killing "bad" people so they can reincarnate into better people. They attracted their share of emo roleplayers and Vampire: The Masquerade immigrants, but there were always some good bits thrown in too. Their sphere, Entropy is all about influencing luck, fate, and decay, which is good because "luck" doesn't necessarily ding the oppressive system of Consensus quite as overtly as some of the others.

• Order of Hermes

The old-tyme wizards, with the beards, staffs, and so on. Used to be the top dogs and run the world, but they were such dickheads that they more-or-less forced the modern Technocracy into being to keep them in check. Their upper guard are extremely bitter about this, and while they're more-united than most Traditions their hidebound ways prevent them from actually getting anywhere. In fact, they are divided into stiffingly rigid and systemized "houses" with harshly defined specialties, now more prone to infighting than combating the rise of other Traditions and the Technocracy. Just as well: they didn't do a great job ruling the world the first time around.

They use hermetic magic, which involves old Medieval stuff 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 also tend to explode into giblets due to Paradox pretty easily if they stick to tradition, and the politics of the Order demands that they do.

They also have an embarrassing tendency to fuck-up everything in the back story and create terrible splinter groups. The most infamous and important of these are House Tremere, who became Clan Tremere over in "Vampire: the Masquerade."

• Sons of Ether

By general consensus of the player-base, the coolest tradition. They are mad scientist wizards, each following a vision of Science! that hasn't been current for at least half a decade. But it still works, because they will it so. Formerly aligned with the Technocracy, but they defected in a huff once their brother Technocrats approved letting the Michelson-Morley experiment go forward. (The joke is that it disproved the Luminiferous Ether.) Now they're not very united, and they constantly fight over which outdated bit of mad science is right, usually through intellectual sniping in underground scholarly journals, sometimes through actual sniping via lightning guns and disintegration beams.

They have the Matter sphere, which means doing cool stuff with all inanimate matter. From telekinesis to summoning rocks in midair like an angry DM, the possibilities are endless... so long as, in a bit of Technocratic heritage, it remains internally consistent with your gobbledegook non-science technobabble.

Note than in the 20th Anniversary edition, the Sons got renamed to the more P.C. "Society of Ether."

• Verbena

Think a D&D druid and you'll be in the ballpark, since their progenitors were the original article. Full of Wiccans and treehuggers, but they also cling to the less-savory side of the druid game in blood-sacrifices and a general discomfort towards the modern world. They aren't all crazy eco-terrorists, but enough are that one hopes they don't end up on top. And because White Wolf is full of hippies, neo-pagans, and New Age-types, we are supposed to find them sympathetic anyway.

They have the sphere of Life, which is about influencing the physical parts of living beings. (Whether this lets you control the chemicals in a living thing's brain to usurp part of Mind's shtick is a question for your DM/Storyteller.) Traditionally, this means the standard druid suite of turning into animals, summoning insect swarms, animating wood elementals, all that jazz. But there's ALSO strengthening the body, super-speed, and punching enemies over the horizon. It also lets you instantly force a cyborg's implants to fail, because of course the Wiccans in a White Wolf game need an "I win!" button when fighting the Technocracy.

• Virtual Adepts

Very literal computer wizards, and the other Tradition that emigrated from the Technocracy. In their case, it was a one-two punch of finding out they'd had Alan Turing chemically castrated and murdered, and learning that the Internet was being released to the Masses. The philosophy on why this was a bad thing had its good points ("They aren't equipped to handle it yet! It'll turn them all into lazy basement-dwelling trolls obsessed with trivialities!" which was pretty fucking prescient for the time) and its bad points ("Waaaaah! Newbs on mah Internets! I'm not special anymore!").

Since they cast spells with programs and the Internet, they're great for nerds who want to play nerds and don't want to stretch. Masters of the Correspondence sphere, which lets them work with space and distance. From bags of holding, and other shit that's bigger on the inside, to quantum teleportation to multiplying and stacking a dozen copies of themselves in the same space, Correspondence has you covered. Their shit works because the Internet is just the upper layers of a great Web of information that connects all things, which is how they can hack your wallpaper and make it change color to send messages. And we don't mean your computer background.

If you're wondering who was holding onto Correspondence before the Internet Age, there was once a group of Arabic mystics called the Ahl-i-Batin who had mastered spacetime; then they saw how things where going and performed a mass NOPE! ritual off to the depths of space. Whether they were legitimate Sufi mystics or Arabian Nights parodies depended on the supplement's author.

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. Since then, they've become known as the Technocracy, and they've gone from being the man to being the Man. There were a lot of factors involved, but the biggest one is that they started to shift away from trying to make life better for everyone with clever 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 opposed to change for reasons of sheer inertia. 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 or the Order of Hermes trying to take over the world and rule over the muggles with an iron fist, they clearly weren'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 alternative playable set of 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. This tends to make them the most violently pre-diposed towards the Traditions; the others see them as either pathetic relics or a reliable enemy - to a Progenitor, the Traditions are FUCKING KILLING PEOPLE WITH NONSENSE.

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 Entropy 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

Two words - Wizard. Astronauts. Fuck yes. 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 also tend to be viewed by the other conventions are "less corrupt" only because they don't have to get their hands dirty running the 'real world.' On the other, other hand, they'll go and pull awesome shit like frying a sub-continent darkening vampire Antediluvian by using orbital mirrors to reflect and concentrate light from the other side of the world.

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 long story short, a contingent of Void Engineers wandered off into the Deep Umbra (the extra-extra-dimensional realms of pure possibility) and found something that freaked them right the fuck out and sent them running back home to militarize - a bunch of high-level Technocrats fucked off to the edge of reality and became the Borg.

Others

• Hollow Ones

The Councilor faction has been trying to join the Traditions since the 1900s, despite not having a Tradition to join with. Stereotypically goth/emo "no future" club kids/ravers. No one takes them seriously, save for the Cult of Extasy (gotta sell that dope to someone, right?)

• Marauders

Insane mages that can somehow avoid Paradox by passing it off to other people. When John the Barbarian gallops through New York on the back of his pet T. rex Gundar, blasting cars aside with his magic crystal sword and bellowing war-cries as he rides off to fight an imaginary menace, it's not his problem, it's society's problem. Very powerful due to their Paradox immunity, and while they're tragic figures, they're also dangerous enough that the mages and Technocrats will team up to keep them under control.

• Nephandi

Evil mages that worship either insane demons, or most of the things Lovecraft came up with, they seek to cause not Ascension but Descent, encouraging humanity to transform the world into a literal Hell so that their masters can take possession of it. Part of becoming one involves inverting your avatar through a horrific process that persists through everyone else who inherits it, but unless you inherited the job there's nothing sympathetic about these monsters, and in a world of grey and gray they are the blacker than black. Another threat that forces cooperation between the Traditions and the Technocracy, most famously in World War II. (Unsurprisingly, most of the Nephandi were Nazis)

Independant Crafts

• 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