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Mage: The Ascension is an outdated "Gothic-Punk" roleplaying game published by White Wolf.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

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

The obligatory Bad Guy Faction. Infamous amongst OWoD players and other /tg/ fans for being one of the worst handled villains in all of the Old World of Darkness. See, the reason these guys are villains? Is because they created the current Reality Paradigm, are responsible for enforcing it, and want to strengthen it to the point of stamping out the other Mage Traditions. The only problem with this, is that A: it means they're responsible for pretty much all of the good things that science & technology have brought us (like reliable medicine, television, the internet, cars, fast food, etc), and B: most (if not all) of the Traditions would bring about a new Reality Paradigm that would really, really fucking well suck for mortals.

Seriously: one Tradition wants to turn reality into a Magocracy, and another wants to send humanity back to the fucking Stone Age. To say nothing of just how much more dangerous the world would be with demons, dragons, giants, and other monsters allowed to run around freely once again.

So, yeah, to many players, the Conventions being the Bad Guys is an even worse hamhandled aesop than the ones plaguing Werewolf: The Apocalypse.

• 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 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