Mage: The Sterile Version

Mage: The Ascension is on my mind again. I’m planning to run a game at Anime North where the characters’ objective is to assassinate the Second Coming of Christ. I decided to continue fooling with the Dirty Version. I read a bunch of RPGNet threads about updating Ascension which were . . . well, we’ll get to that.

I love Ascension. Love it. It’s a capstone for the whole corpus of roleplaying, a love letter to taking on a strange, alternate persona, and a meditation on the problems gamers run into. Its politics were never particularly focused and often based on wacky interpretations of the source material, but were provocative enough to piss  off people years later.

The Magic(k) Test

That doesn’t mean it was an entirely successful game. There was always an inverse correlation between Ascension play and discussion. It got to the point where I developed a basic test to determine whether someone played the game to any significant extent, since you sure as hell couldn’t tell from post volume. It’s pretty simple, and I’ll share it with you now. Just ask yourself:

Has this person alluded to the fact that Mage: The Ascension‘s magic rules make no goddamn sense?

If you play Ascension 2nd or Revised for any length of time you’ll immediately notice that the magic rules are — and I usually hold this term in low esteem — “broken.” The power of a magical Effects are determined by the number of successes. These average less for higher-Ranked Effects (with a capital “E” — guess I still remember the style guide) because those use a higher difficulty on the die (in old World of Darkness games the number you had to roll on each die to succeed varied, instead of always being 8). It also made coincidental Effects less powerful than vulgar ones, which contradicted the role of vulgar magic. Instead of being the moment where you bust out and damn the consequences, it was just a bad decision.

This isn’t immediately obvious if you don’t play the game regularly. It looks like ascending difficulties should make sense, and the odd combination of type and intensity governed by Sphere ranks might disguise it for a couple of sessions, but the problem sticks out like a sore thumb in ongoing games. It’s also something that you’re kind of stuck with as a legacy issue, so I don’t really blame anyone for it sticking around through most of the line’s existence.

When the discussion doesn’t address the fact that Ascension‘s mechanical bones are rotten, it often means the participants may be into it for the conversation over play. When staunch defenders of 2nd Edition (a compelling game!) don’t seem to know that it introduced almost everything they think Revised “broke” it makes me think lots of them stopped supporting the line once they gave up on playing the thing, and it started to stumble.

(That’s right. Chris Shy once told me that he’d been encouraged to do what he liked because he was told 2nd was “a failing line.”)

It looks like Phil Brucato (who this isn’t written to diss — I very much enjoy his work) carefully preserved funky space shit while he let everything blow up in the background of development as a “nuclear option.” Well, something happened that probably involved talkative fans not buying the funky space shit they would later claim to love, so somebody pushed the button that made explosions n’ things which had floated in some canon-indeterminate novelspace waveform collapse on top of everybody’s Free Pegasus Rides.

From here we get into some kind of conspiracy theory involving making Mage like Vampire. This is kind of an assholish claim because you can’t do it without implicitly accusing a bunch of folks of lying. We said this wasn’t the case repeatedly.

Still, Mage Revised had problems out the gate with editing, content and a chunk of opening fiction that could have been better (and in the intro story that appeared on White Wolf’s old website, actually was better). I heard that massive overwriting was part of the reason why the book took the shape it did, but nothing about developer headbutts or anything.

The Matrix proved that Ascension‘s time had come, but but it didn’t suggest a version of the game that existed or could be easily salvaged from the wreckage of 2nd Edition’s metaplot. Jess Heinig set things up to rebuild the game as gritty urban fantasy with a focus on  the moral choices of freshly created characters. He planned to build a full ladder of setting options to replace the ones destroyed in the previous edition. This not only involved retooling the Umbra but making PC Technocrat characters viable without ruining the Union as an antagonist. (This arc was fulfilled through Bill Bridges’ run, so the idea that Ascension was fundamentally rebooted in mid-stride is wrong too.)

Science Ninja Team Motherfucker

Now people really fuck up the Technocracy because they want to be seen as rational folks defending  Truth from the religious Right, but that conflict is just a stupid dog and pony show pushed by participants who don’t want to deal with shared, urgent problems with their worldviews. Baptists and Brights don’t oppose the omnisciently selfish homo economicus even though it should be morally offensive to the former and empirically absurd to the latter. When it comes to actually wielding force they still align based on crass political interests, and both sides have been historically willing to prostitute their supposedly deep convictions to do it.  That’s why you have prosperity theology and BP’s funny estimates of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The problem with the Technocracy isn’t that it fails to be your League of Feeling Superior to Creationists. It’s that it doesn’t have sucker Creationists willing to send mercenaries to Iraq for Jesus on tap.

The Technocracy represents the Western tradition’s ductility in the face of realpolitik, as well as its habit of saving face by redefining its own historical narrative to portray itself as consistently progressive. This is hard to talk about because people have bought into it completely, especially as America has shifted to the Right over the past decade. For example, over on RPGNet I read the usual silly things about constantly accelerating progress, even though actual history shows back and forth fluctuations in height and life expectancy until the early 20th Century — including declines directly related to urbanization and industrialization. For example, the First Nations who met European colonists on the Atlantic Coast were probably 4-5 inches taller than the diseased gnomes who’d give them trouble later.

Even this ignores the fact that averages don’t take into account the large populations who were exterminated in the course of colonization, and imperialist wars, and the lasting, more subtle damage done to subject cultures’ overall utility. Mage Revised runs on the premise that these events are not merely impersonal historical forces. They grow out of moral choices. Calling the consequences the necessary outgrowth of a metaphysical position is moral cowardice. We suffer from strong inducements to be cowards, but that doesn’t remove the fact that we choose to stigmatize other ways of knowing to justify the bad things done in the name of our own positions.

In the Western tradition these choices are framed within a distinct urge to systematize societies — to make them Utopian (or at least egoistic) projects. Another stupid thing people say about Ascension is how if some Tradition were in charge we’d be eating our own babies. Fact is, the Traditions were almost never in charge. (This also means they weren’t really responsible for various bad things, though they were irresponsible about them.) There’s a reason every Tradition is heterodox or heretical compared to the baseline beliefs of its related cultures. The Celestial Chorus isn’t the embodiment of monotheism. It’s a global monist conspiracy with a decided bias against the doctrinaire positions of its component religions.

The desire to progressively engineer cultures is not universal. The Technocracy is that urge, and it’s not an inherently good urge. You cannot ignore the fact that even though science is a force for good, this is the urge that pays its bills, and it is this urge that especially lends Western civilization to centralized control by elites. (Other civilizations may be be controlled by a central group of oligarchs, but alternatives like Tianming aren’t progressive, and represent popular cultural standards to which they can be held accountable.)

When you combine the urge to engineer a better society with political ductility, you get the problem the Technocracy represents, including its adoption of the most effective  instruments for change — tools based on scientific methods (and no small amount of pretense — lots of Technocracy “science” looks like bullshit for the same reason that lots of management and QA techniques look like bullshit — they use hoodoo with fancy lingo). The Technocracy are supposed to be the guys behind screwed up hegemonic systems that blur the division between science and ideology. It’s supposed to be a bitter pill to swallow because you already read that system’s propaganda and have to contend with its slant in every political matter.

The Goodish Guys

Mage: The Ascension never quite finished the job of taking that Technocracy and sifting out a group of idealistic science advocates. The bad-guy Technocracy is more relevant than ever. (BP is using the Coast Guard to suppress media around the oil hole right now after its scientists lowballed the effects. That situation covers every branch of Technocracy operations in the game.) Still, there ought to be high tech guys who aren’t into VR, orgone and pyramid power.

But none of the factions should be untainted good guys. If we say that there’s a nice “pure” science faction it breaks the tone of the setting (where no faction is pure) and ignores an important theme: that people necessarily conflate ideology with the way they interact with the world. This is true in Mage, and true in the real world, too. For example, it’s a safe best that no Pioneer Fund research project is ever going to end in results that defy white supremacist thinking. And when our society switched to “scientific” management, it did so to satisfy entrenched interests and their Fuck You Buddy ethos.

Hell, just watch The Trap.

Redeemed “magical” scientists need a virtuous ethos to influence their work, and Mage doesn’t do that for any faction. The Traditions are good guys because they do not oppress humanity in any organized fashion and say that you get to choose whatever belief system makes you happy. This doesn’t recommend any of their paradigms or internal workings as models for society, but the game’s stance is that people ought to decide these for themselves, based on whatever lets them navigate the world while adhering to a basically compassionate stance.

The Traditions don’t necessarily do compassionate. They’re a collective insurgency with a hierarchy that was once designed to pass on traditional knowledge, but is now the ranking system of the strangest army in the universe. The Sons of Ether are ignorant of colonialism. The Akashics can use abstraction to excuse themselves of anything. The Euthanatos . . . well, you know. The Traditions’ collective goal — give Sleepers the freedom to decide what they want and not come to a universal consensus, even — is a good thing, but the Traditions are self-absorbed and amoral until the PCs do something epic to turn them around. Good Guy Science should be in a similar place, with some underlying ethos that is compelling and a bit dangerous. That’s what I designed the Transhuman Adepts to do. in the Dirty Version.

Paradigms don’t make good or bad people. They serve as props that allow people to commit wonder or horrific acts because they act as conceptual frameworks for moral decisions. They don’t determine what those decisions are going to be. That’s why the game never got into “paradigm wars,” and why thinking along those lines isn’t that relevant to game play. It’s a very attrractive field, but the game’s about getting past it. There’s no denying you could do something cool with it, but it would probably be less cool than designing specific situations and stories to play in.

NoMo PoMo

It’s too bad that talking about them and about Ascension in general is always going to be marred by the game’s fairweather postmodernism (which it isn’t all about — I think I’m the guy who worked on the line who used that point of view the most, and there’s at least as much pop philosophy, New Age and 90s occultism in there) and the fact that lots of fans don’t actually know what postmodernism is.It’s not a free for all, not a way to create your own reality (though that’s in Ascension — see how I said it’s not all PoMo?) but an acknowledgement that we act in a context provided by the facts of our histories and the stories told about them. The context features biases, hidden implications and lots of other wacky stuff. Some of these things will piss you off, since they will imply unkind things about you. This is a feature, not a bug.

As far as getting postmodern, the mage is a Pharamakos: an ambiguous figure who may be an influencer and leader, but is himself a product of a narrative outside of himself (his paradigm). These narratives shouldn’t just be a matter of “voting,” since mages and Sleepers alike are subject to these big stories that tell them who they are and assimilate new information in ways that avoid contradiction (or Paradox). Working subtly from one’s own subject position nudges the feedback loop between self and culture, but doing the vulgar magical jack move is what really establishes Pharmakos status: that of the sorcerer-scapegoat who is at once confined to the subaltern, but necessary to keep society dynamic, and away from the trap of total systemization in the service of elites, rather than the polis/culture/world as a whole. I have my way of tweaking the game to support that better.

I think the sorcerer-scapegoat angle is important. I think Ascension is a great game, an almost accidentally important game, and I’m going to enjoy running it for the first time in six years.

Tags: Mage: The Ascension, world of darkness, worldbuilding