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

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, cooperative project into a territorial fistfight.

The innate problems of being a White Wolf game aside (namely, the design team's obvious sympathy with the 90's-counterculture vs. the "square" factions), M:tA is generally regarded as one of the best settings in the original World of Darkness's repertoire, at least by Second Edition. Unfortunately... well, keep reading.

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

To make a long story very short, Mage has not been regarded as a very good system mechanically. The rules are often criticized for being simultaneously OP as shit in crossover games (once he or she gets to about Arete 3, an individual mage of equivalent "level" will, one-on-one, reliably curb stomp any other supernatural in the oWoD gameline if they can get the first shot off, and can, depending on the opponent, give whole teams of other types of PC a run for their money), frustrating to manage (virtually anything can be too "cool" to avoid Paradox in public, and the rules aren't great at examining different levels of "acceptance"), and possessed of intensely, artificially complex mechanics (For those of you not up on your game design, complexity and depth are two different things).

Thus, any player who wants to play Mage: the Ascension has to beat a completely different game first: namely, the game of finding another set of magic rules to use in place of the ones provided in any of the three editions of M:tA. The GURPS version of M:tA was a common pick back in the day, as it has roughly the same fluff. (And if your players are running to the "Generally Unplayable Role-Play System" to get away from the rules, that's how you can tell you've got a special level of rough on your hands.) Nowadays, the most common choice is to back-port the nWoD Mage: The Awakening rules via the Mage Translation Guide. 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, but hey, they're fa/tg/uys and like to argue about anything and everything. 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, and most factions are particularly good with at least one of them.

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, warp 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, considering that you are in fact, telling reality to divide by zero AND IT DOES SO. Two words: black holes.

Entropy

The EDGY sphere (so naturally the sphere that White Wolf likes the most). 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. Also, enjoy your Jhor.

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 a 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 in solidified 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 inappropriately 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! Also good for turning vampires into lawn chairs, since they're inanimate matter.

Prime

The meta sphere. Allows you to do stuff with other spells, to perceive and modify Quintessence (essentially Mana). Broken at high levels. Mostly used with other spheres, but apparently, you can remove people out of existence. With mana swords.

Mind

Mind magic. What you see is what you get: telepathy at low levels, then you can start to influence people (and find an interesting way to mess up with the Storyteller's story), also you can boost your intelligence or will to superhuman levels. Alternatively, you can make vegetables out of people with Mind curses/debuffs, or restore madness. At high levels, you can create minds (total combo with high-level Life for that Dr. Moreau feel). Alternatively, cast it on a broom and get sentient broom familiars), or project yourself astrally (since you aren't going through the Umbra it isn't Spirit). Very, very good for shenanigans. However, it only controls humans and animals, not spirits (Werewolves, fae, etc).

Spirit

Everything to do with the Umbra, which is essentially the spirit world. It lets the user tear open the Gauntlet, the protective Saran-wrapping around reality created by the Technocracy's consensus, and slip outside of the universe. Masters of this sphere can conjure, bind, and control powerful spirits and other entities, create "bases" for themselves out in the Umbra, and travel around inside of it. If, rather than fight a useless war you already lost to restore a bunch of incompetent fucks who did a shitty job of running the world the last time they took a crack at it, you just want to relax in a palatial extradimensional mansion while your harem of adoring monstergirl wives feeds you fresh meatbread mouth-to-mouth, this is the sphere for you... unless you're playing Revised, which essentially nuked the entire Umbra to prevent that sort of thing, consequently making your entire sphere nearly useless. The Technocratic version practiced by the Void Engineers is essentially identical, but they call it Dimensional Science instead.

Time

Well, it's temporal magic. Actually, manages to be not completely broken because time travel is HARD. Like if you travel into the past, you lose yourself in history or something equally trippy. At low levels you can perceive time accurately (yay!), then you can do more interesting stuff like sensing the past and trying to sense the right future between all the possible futures (prescience is hard, go read Dune again), controlling the flow of time on targets (actually slowing down your relative time means you get super speed and probably get extra turns. Broken ? Yup) , and then you can go time-travelling at high levels... and interestingly, past-traveling is harder because the future is yet to be written and you go against the tide of history and memory. Also to avoid munchkins doing ridiculous stuff with time travel.

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 controlling the current global paradigm and also being fairly ruthless sons of bitches. The Technocracy grew out of the late Medieval and Renaissance-era Order of Reason, who to kick some ass, take some names, and implement their own view of 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. Unfortunately, power corrupts, and by the nineteen hundreds, the Order of Reason is no more. Instead, they rebranded themselves as the Technocratic union, deciding on trying to control the world by any means necessary. This 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 to determine.

Over the course of the games run, the Technocracy went lighter and lighter. From an Orwellian Nightmare faction, to ruthless dictators over reality, to well intentioned but ultimately deeply flawed people. Some even like to run them as wholly unironic Defenders of Humanity, ignoring their more unsavory aspects.

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 since they're basically Jedi anyway and need to do the mind-trick to make it complete.

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. Their sphere is Prime.

Cult of Ecstasy

The classic image is mages focused on sex, drugs, and rock n roll. But mainly the tradition is sensationalists. They want to experience life to the fullest. Not just the happy times either. Any Cult of E played true to form will know to challenge their own fears. They are mage focused on sensation, altering their own perspective by altering their own emotional state.

The gist of the Tradition is a large amount of personal freedom, coupled with an equally large amount of personal responsibility. The tradition demands very little of its own members (respect for their teachers is one of the big ones), but they are also unlikely to bail you out if you are in trouble. (Fortunately, Cultists are usually sociable people with a decent amount of friends to help them).

Have mastery of the sphere of Time, due to the tradition being based on an older tradition, The Seers of Chronus aka badass seers of time.

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! 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. To play devil's advocate for a moment, an alternate view is the ethnic mages were too few and scattered to have any real power unless they worked together. No one is going to pay attention to the two remaining shamans of a tradition most people can't even pronounce. A hundred of them from a variety of sources bound into a coherent group with unfamiliar powers and an ax to grind; on the other hand, is a different story. Their mastery is 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 of magical medieval Europe but was kicked in the nads over and over by the Order of Reason until in modern Times they've had to evacuate their secret wizard castle to friggin Mars of all places just to have it not be ruined. Their upper guard is 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 stiffly rigid and systemized "houses" with harshly defined specialties, now more prone to infighting than combating the rise of other Traditions and the Technocracy. They use hermetic magic, which involves old Medieval stuff like Decanic Trappings, Sepiroth, and the Seal of Solomon. They master the sphere of Forces. Tend to be pretty fun as crazy ass knowledge dedicated wizards with a tons of axes to grind should be. 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

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 once the Technocratic Union approved the Michelson-Morley experiment. (This disproved the Luminiferous Ether, removing it as a concept from reality. Don't worry, they got their revenge by slipping the wacky fun-house world of quantum mechanics into the Consensus on their way out.) Nowadays they've gone from Technocratic organization to being VICTORIAN STEAMPUNK MADMEN (also gentlemen). Really likes to engage in scientific debate on whose pet theory is the best and most accurate. This usually includes intellectual sniping in underground scholarly journals, and sometimes through actual sniping via lightning guns and disintegration beams. They have the Matter sphere. The possibilities are endless... so long as, in a bit of Technocratic heritage, it remains internally consistent with their technobabble. In the 20th Anniversary edition, the Sons got officially renamed to the more P.C. "Society of Ether," though lady Etherites had been lobbying for it in the background of several previous editions.

One of the coolest aspects of the Sons of Ether is their space fleet. They literally fight technocratic spaceships in large airship like vessels, using cannons and rayguns and similar. Because, to the Technocrats, the ether might have been disproven a century ago, but to the Etherites it's right outside we can bloody well see it and touch it, thank you very much.

Verbena

Think a D&D druid and you'll be in the ballpark since their progenitors were the original article. Full of Wiccans and tree huggers, 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 they do have their fair share of crazy murder people. They have the sphere of Life, naturally, and can use it for massive healing boosts, shapeshifting, and even creating life.

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. 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.

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 held to an idealistic dream of an utopic future.

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, a greedy, money-grubbing business, and a brutal dictatorship.

They've even lost two of their old Conventions to the Traditions, the Sons of Ether and the Virtual Adepts, and are finding it harder and harder to get the ordinary people excited enough about their new inventions to actually stop them Paradox-ing.

Their original draft made them out to be horrifyingly dark. However, just as Vampires main antagonist faction, the Sabbath was given some nuance and reasons for their actions, the Technocratic union was also provided some depth to it as times went on, making them less and less evil.

Now you can pick what flavor of Technocrats you want.

1. Original style Technocrats. Will murder your soul because it is inconvenient to them and also please remember to love big brother. 
2. Most common depiction of Technocrats in the source. Ruthless, callous, rife with paranoia. Seeks to control all of reality from the shadows. Will murder you and replace you with a clone, unless you are a mage, in which case it is more cost effective to drag you to a nice room and brain wash you into serving the greater good. But in fairness they also will kill off actual threats to humanity on occasion and most of their rank and file is as oppressed by them as everyone else is. 
3. Probably the most common way to play Technocrats. Kind of like Flavor number 2, but much much nicer to their own people, and innocent bystanders. Most atrocities committed are either in the past, directed towards their enemies, or is the responsibility of the (still fairly corrupt) leadership, with the rank and file being filled with idealistic people truly believing in their cause. The most recent depiction of them is basically this flavor. 
4. The technocrats just as wholly good. Never actually used by any books, but some people like to play them as such anyway, either because they can't fathom the technocrats as evil, or because they want to run a Men In Black campaign where they shoot monsters in the face with plasma guns and don't need a morality play. 

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, man. They are the administrators 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"(cajole, convince, painfully brainwash) 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 a bunch of horrible eugenics and transhuman types, among other things helped egg on the second world war because it gave them plenty of material(people) to experiment(stitch together into crazy animal/human/monster/hybrids) on. Anyway they're TOTES BETTER NOW, we PURGED MOST OF THE PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE yeah!

One of the most research oriented conventions, and funnily also one of the more violent ones (possible because it is so easy for them to coincidentally and untraceable poison their enemies from a safe distance). They are divided into three factions, the people who like to make crazy otherworldly creatures, the people who like to make crazy drugs and the people who like to make clones.

In their modern form they like to: research life saving medication, charge people exorbitant prices for lifesaving medication, research awesome medical science, poison people, use clones to give themselves eternal life, and replace people they don't like with clones.

The Syndicate

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, Darwinian 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. 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

As the Sons of Ether are to the Traditions, the Void Engineers are to the Technocracy. Why, you ask? Three words: Wizard Space Marines. 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 (they are especially friendly enemies with the Euthanatos), 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 as the "less corrupt" faction only because they don't have to get their hands dirty running the 'real world' like their brethren. On the other, other hand, they are the single most likely magegroup to get a multi-faction party together to get shit done and pull awesomely pragmatic feats 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 subplot 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.

Independant Crafts

Too small or specialized to join the Conventions and either disliking or outright opposing the Technocrats, the Independent Crafts decided to band together to form a power block of their own.

Ahl-i-Batin

The former Seat of Correspondence before the Virtual Adepts jumped ship. They were a group of Arabic mystics who had mastered spacetime; then they saw how things were 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.

Bata'a

A group consisting of former slaves in the Americas. They got voodoo, they got hoodoo, they got things I didn't even try! And they got friends on the other side. Are the servants of Les Mysteres, which translates into the Spirit Tradition.

Children of Knowledge

Alchemists turned drug users, using all sorts of crazy shit to power up their senses and use their magic. Party even harder than the Cult of Ecstasy.

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.

Knights Templar

Yes, the real deal. Once part of the Order of Reason they were betrayed and went into hiding. Are a very secretive group and communicate mostly through the Internet in messages that can only be deciphered by someone with extensive knowledge of scripture and the Templars themselves. Gather in lodges, some of whom are charity-minded nuns while others are monks/soldiers of Christ.

Kopa Loei

Polynesian mages using all sorts of stuff related to their culture to protect their lands from The Man.

Ngoma

Practitioners of traditional high ritual magic in Classical Africa. Their predecessors got their shit several kinds of wrecked and now seek to recover lost knowledge. Are frequently amongst the richer and more successful people in Africa.

Sisters of Hippolyta

Descended from the Amazons, and use a mix of martial art, Wicca and Greek ritual to practice their (frequently Life and Mind-oriented) magic. At best, they are some of the most caring and loving healers in the world. At worst, they are caricatures of Social Justice Warriors.

Taftâni

Arabic Zoroastrian-influenced mages who think the Consensus can go fuck itself, so they enslave djinni, make flying carpets, make brass palaces out of deserts, and other overwhelmingly vulgar magic straight out of the Arabian Nights. They don't give a shit about Paradox either, hell, they consider it is a badge of honor. They also have fought the Technocracy and won, and they make their lands acceptive of Paradox. Basically, they're wizards who not only kick reality in the balls but kick her in the balls a thousand times in a second and screaming really loudly "FUCK YOU, I'M A WIZARD" that reality got afraid of them and got the fuck out of their lands. Fuck yeah, Taftani.

Wu Lung

Arrogant Chinese mystics, they got blinded by their hubris and had their asses kicked during the War For Drugs (the Opium Wars) and the Cultural Revolution pretty much broke them. Now they seek to rebuild their power in the great tradition of "China takes over the world". Mages are urged to become powerful bankers and money brokers. The majority of their number are pure-blooded Chinese men, but they have begun to accept women and those of non-pure blood out of necessity.

Orphans

Wholly independent mages. The Caitiffs of the Mage setting. Typically never had a mentor. Stumbled into magic by themselves and never had another Craft or Tradition to guide them. Completely self-taught. Jacks of all trades, masters of none. They're a total blank slate for those who don't really like how the other Crafts/Traditions are themed.

Others

Two different flavors of batshit crazy. Nobody likes either of them, and some of the Marauders are even wiling to stop being asshats to put down a local Nephandi.

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 gray 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)

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
• Weaponmark: An Open Source Weapon Comparison Utility for Mage - all new 8/15/2017