The Imperial Mysteries Post

So Imperial Mysteries came out. People seem to like it, except for the art.

Let’s get the art out of the way first. Unfortunately, this book was finished in the wake of serious layoffs at CCP that disproportionately hit Atlanta. I don’t blame everyone for having other things on their mind, but committing to a release close to the promised date, but it looks like it hit the art. Cover artist Ken Meyer Jr. is actually pretty good, but this looks like they went with a draft piece just to get the book to market. Some of Kaluta’s art isn’t well used, either, because some character pieces are already used for specific signature characters in the core. Bad! John Bridges’ original art (there is original art in the book) looks good, though. I’ve always been fond of his stuff, and wish he’d been able to do more.

Honestly, if I was worrying about my friends losing their jobs and having my duties kicked around, yeah – a Mage book might not be top of mind. That’s understandable.

(Maybe you guys can produce a cool alternate cover! Send it to me and I’ll post it, assuming it’s legal.)

OK, art’s done. We can get into the content.

This book was a long time coming. Back when we were doing Tome of the Mysteries Bill Bridges and I sketched out what post-Master magic looked like. I teased folks with this fact from time to time. When Seers of the Throne came around, Ethan Skemp proposed a radical reordering of the usual presentation, where we would look at the high level machinations of the Exarchs first – and I was lucky enough to write that stuff. This was my first collaboration with Dave Brookshaw.

Dave came to my attention because of meticulous play reports (among the few I really trust) and the fact that he seemed to get stuff I dropped in the form of hints and subtext. Collaborating with him on Seers was a smooth process that confirmed that he understood the game artistically, beyond bare play procedures, carrots and sticks.

I kind of knew what I wanted archmages to be like: scary, remote, operating at a high enough level to alienate lesser mages, but not incomprehensible, once you understood the context – whatever that was. I wasn’t sure about that part.

Dave approached me to pitch this book. We did an outline. We started to understand The Context.

The original outline was for a big 160 pager. When EWhite Wolf accepted the pitch we got . . . less. But with help from Matt McFarland we prioritized, cut, economized, and ended up with something publishable with fewer pages (we still went over; the book was important enough to us that we basically added material, gratis, toward the end of development).

Dave and I split the book based on our interests. I gave him the old outline for Imperial Practices and he turned it from shooting the breeze into real rules. I took more of the fluff – I like the fluff.

Now before all this, I did Equinox Road, and the Game of Immortals. At some point, I told Dave and Matt I’d make another one of those. I had no fucking idea what I would do, just that I thought I was so cool I could totally pull off a minigame like that again. It wasn’t even in the original fucking outline. A few weeks in, I had designed and abandoned a stupid system with Tarot cards (don’t ask, I don’t remember) and went to the bar with my buddy Kearsley. We chatted about karma point spendy systems and how they end up getting all fucked up (order of declaration becomes a big thing, and everybody spends everything or the minimum) and he suggested I think about Blackjack’s “this high but no higher” principle.

Ping!

In development, Matt added a very powerful idea: that we should mostly ignore fears we might offend partisans of other games and general fears that we might just blow up the whole World of Darkness. Instead, we came up with a scheme where we could play with ultimate power, obscure the big secrets Storytellers want to control, and provide an out for folks afraid that archmages will blow up the world. (It’s based on the Anthropic Principle; since the big changes are retroactive across time, vampires and mages must necessarily live in a world where they can both exist. This begs the question of what now-dead universes might have had crawling around in them, but they never existed!)

So we had a good team, long term preparation and a strong degree of control over the end result. I think that made it work. I would only change a few things (besides the art John Bridges didn’t do). I wrote a fantastic bit of fiction to end the book with, but it got cut. I would have loved to more tightly integrate Imperial Mysteries with other Mage and World of Darkness books, but that apparently broke a strict policy about making books dependent upon each other (which I already knew, but man, this is a capstone for the whole universe, baby! I thought I deserved some slack). I wanted a bit more prose, and less procedure.

But I’m basically happy with it. The length constraint was, in the end, a blessing, since it forced me (and Dave, I think – can’t speak for his process) to convey more information using implication and subtext. There’s a school of thought that says you can’t use those in RPGs because everything needs to be accessible and functional on day one. I don’t believe that – never did. I don’t want books you rifle through, use and put away, except for reference. I want books to pick up again and again.

I hope this is one of those.