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Mage: The Ascension is an outdated "Gothic-Punk" roleplaying game published by White Wolf.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, a group of organizations responsible for updating consensual reality with cool technology, but decided on their own that that everyone must join them in a glorious technological utopia run by mad scientists. This paradigm has pissed off enough people that two member organizations eventually left the Technocracy and of the five remaining, the only one that can be described as "not evil" is considering it's options. If that wasn't enough, the Technocracy is also strongly hinted to be working under the Weaver, and differentiating between WeaverTech and Technomagick devices is difficult.

The Nine Traditions

• Akashic Brotherhood

• Celestial Chorus

• Cult of Ecstasy

• Dreamspeakers

• Euthanatos

• Order of Hermes

• Sons of Ether

• Verbena

• Virtual Adepts

The Technocratic Conventions

• Iteration X

• New World Order

• Progenitors

• The Syndicate

• Void Engineers

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.

• Nephandi

Infernal mages who regularly deal with demons.

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