I know why it happened for the Chronicler’s Guide (I submitted a proposal without knowing it was already on the schedule) and I suppose some good prior work with Chuck helped with Mirrors. But even with two of the best folks to work with around, I still think these “odds and ends” books need to overcome an inherent suck factor lest they end up about as useful as all those lame-ass “Setting Riff: Thing I’m never gonna fucking play” productions that waste Internet.

I think my doubts helped me produce good stuff. I wanted to beat those flaws. I wanted my stuff to engage instead of look all shifty and indecisive. There’s a reason the best restaurants have the smallest menus. They know what’s good.

So I had to build whole restaurants.

Gamers already excel at modular modifications, so I concentrated on wholesale rebuilds: integrated systems that aren’t so easy for a smart audience to get through catch-as-catch can “hacking.” That’s  why my Chronicler’s Guide stuff features heavily modified systems. “White Wolf Comics Presents: The Cabal” and “Action Horror” featured a number of systems that not only stand on their own, but “talk to each other” in ways I’ve either mentioned in the text (Action Pool + Extras + Critical Hits) or left to be discovered in play.

Beyond integration, I wanted to also deal with the weak tone that I think plagues optional systems, and make them something other than pie in the sky outlines (“Setting Riff: Who Gives a Shit?”). Woundgate is very much a product of that. Chuck gave me Fantasy. As he said over at Terribleminds, he let me indulge myself as long as it hit the section objective and didn’t suck.

This led to the following process:

1. “What the fuck does fantasy mean? It’s only a genre when it sucks.”
2. “I’m not writing elf rules.”
3. “Reproducing old weapons and straight up magic systems sure would be a ripoff for the average WoDer.”
4. “If it’s not recognizably WoD then it’s a stupid waste of time.”
5. “Fuck, I’m reading Aeternal Legends again.”

That last part may be handy self-promotion but it’s also true. Stew brought Big Modern Fantasy to town with postmodern fey gateways — open ended weirdness (and taxes!) from anywhere to anything. I didn’t want elves or Big Time Spirituality (well, I wanted to leave that unstated, but my Woundgate has it) but I wanted strange little kingdoms. Thanks to that structure I could present one setting  without having to choose a particular type of fantasy. They made perfect “genre zones” so that Conan can tool around the Great Lakes while magitech unions picket along the Mississippi.

(And yes, I created fantasy folk. Not elves. Not “races.” No, they aren’t templates, so you can have a Wargaz mage if you like. Anybody notice the Wargaz are the smartest of the fantasy peoples? Intentional, and very much inspired by the introduction of Guns, Germs and Steel, where Diamond talks about the smartest guy he knows. People can treat it like a callback to Conan’s intelligence in the Howard stories, I guess.)

Best of all, I could fill this stew with chunks of the World of Darkness, providing cool hooks for anyone who knew the games well enough to use them. Like I said, I didn’t want to just make a fantasy port of the system. Any smart gamer could give a dude pointy ears, a sword and infravision. The challenge is to provide something that isn’t so easy. I want too give fans value, and something concrete they can play and share immediately, with a minimum of fuss over ground rules.

Matt McFarland’s development style features friendly cautions when he thinks something is crossing the line. He still gave me a great deal of freedom, to the point where I think I underutilized the potential there. The Cabal (comic-booky) chronicle is already a bit of an unusual sell to an RPG audience though, so maybe that’s for the best. It’s supers, but not big on point builds and highly specific powers. You don’t even make your own characters! Again, I wanted to get a sense of mythology and cohesiveness out of it that short treatments have trouble with, and I wanted it to be all Mage, even as it paid serious homage to comic classics.

Are we going to get any more of this stuff? I know Mirrors’ science fiction section was finished, fun to read and good to go. What about the postscripts in each book? What’s happening? Good question. I’d love to write something big about Woundgate, for instance, or work on that Mage archmastery book people have wanted for ages, but even though I know the World of Darkness isn’t shutting down and more electronic products are on the way, I don’t know what they’ll be, or how they fit into the larger plans CCP has for the brand. I write, and don’t plan on stopping.

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.

I felt like my blood twisted in its veins when I first mouthed that prayer. Tonight I feared a terrible error for the last time: that the old false image — horns, cloven hooves and all — would come and cut me open with its sharp, garish pentacle.

But they were only words. True words recalling true deeds, worn into insane legendry by propaganda and the warp of ages. It wasn’t easy to serve God. The masters of the world made it so.

Ave Baphomet.

“Oh, it’s all true.” I remember my sergeant grinning as he said it, right before he locked me away for the vigil. “Or true at the roots. If you lived in an era when one man loving another inspired vicious hatred, wouldn’t you gladly shed some secrecy when you found us, living for a higher Law, beyond that prejudice?

“When our Law intruded on a life enslaved to empty rituals, the Masters administered a ritual to set the soul right — trampling the Cross, or spitting upon the Host to assert one’s power over restrictive symbols.  And when the Law revealed that God was truly One there was no need to hate the Saracen, or anyone else a prince or bishop might order us against on bloody adventures. To save them and ourselves, we struck alliances.

“We are perpetually baptized by the flames of martyrdom not because we were falsely accused, but that we were virtuous in a sin-blinded world. Remember that.”

Ave Baphomet.

I didn’t care about dogma per se. My two years at the seminary had been a disaster because I could talk myself out of doctrine, not into it. Oh, I always believed in God, and feared him because I found theology so unconvincing. No man could know what that inscrutable Creator wanted of us.  He, She, It was the rogue-ruler of the universe.

Yet I believed in evil and feared it, too. There were too many dark possibilities, from Satans to hellish rebirths. And as far as most mundane faiths were concerned, the Templars wore evil proudly, calling it as unblemished as the white of their ritual cloaks. What if those religions were right?

But no; this doubt is a last induglence, a memory of what was sincere. It’s nostalgia. I no longer fear the name.

Ave Baphomet.

I really wish tabletop gamers had as much fund drawing connections as Westphall boosters do, and were as accepting of contradictions and strange relationships.

I’ve always wanted to Westphall my way to a huge meta-setting. I’ve always thought that the original World of Darkness and Over the Edge both take place in nearly the same universe thanks to mutual Ars Magica references. Let’s expand on this a bit.

We start with Ars Magica: Mythic Europe, magical covenants and the rest . . .

. . . begat the World of Darkness, via the Order of Hermes and Tremere.

. . . . . . which begat Exalted via a mysterious prehistory.

. . . . . . which explicitly links to the cthulhu mythos and Call of Cthulhu via The Red Sign.

. . . . . . . . . which links to Delta Green.

. . . . . . . . . and to Cthulhutech.

. . . . . . . . . and any number of other Mythos games.

. . . . . . . . . and the Hyborian Age and the Conan Roleplaying Game via Howard and Lovecraft corresponding and sharing ideas.

. . . begat Over the Edge via Sir Arthur Compton and his links to a now extinguished secret society of wizards, strongly implied to be the Order of Hermes.

Part of me wants to find an excuse to chuck Unknown Armies in there, but I can’t think of a reason offhand.

Doesn’t that build a cool arc? In a previous cycle the Exalted rampaged through creation until the Primordials (Mythos beings) overcame them again. After an eon of darkness and the fall of Atlantis (or is in Enoch, the First City?) the Hyborean Age witnessed adventures that would eventually be lost to wind, sand and ash (though not certain eyes from the plain of Leng!) until humanity grew to truly master orthodox sorcery, leading to a High Mythic Age and the now lost estate of wizards in society. This triumph was a secret manipulation by the Eight Evil Sages and their Pharaoh slaves, who allowed mutant humans to leave their river valley enclaves and spread throughout the world, displacing the original, peace loving humans, or glug.

Eventually, the false humans’ science would prevail over its sorcery, but in losing mythic wonders the new culture of reason learned to understand the danger in its midst anew, using empirical evidence to discover and interpret ancient, alien science and the mad beings it was designed to supplicate or contain. Governments would experiment and conceal evidence, capture scouts and scour the world of evil cults. By 2085, the rising threat explodes into the Aeon War.

Can you think of other connections? How would you tie them into this big arc? What would you have to change? Remember: including is more fun than excluding.

Example: Fall of the Hegemonic Ministry

In Mage: The Awakening’s Seers of the Throne sourcebook I foreshadowed the fall of the Hegemonic Ministry, one of the big Seer factions. It’s rotting from the inside, relies too heavily on state control of the economy and is ripe for replacement. If Mage had a metaplot you might actually get to see the Hegemonic collapse in a source book. How should we do it while sticking to the principles in my last article? I’ll to try to stick to as few steps as possible but don’t look at this as some strict methodical road map.

(Don’t look at this as an actual development document, either. In the real thing, I’d be more specific about content and wouldn’t have to describe a lot of the process, and I’d divide content by chapter and section, not steps in a creative process.)

1) Come up with a cool name.

Really! This lets us do more right-brain work on the topic by exploring it through lose tricks and wordplay — and it helps with marketing, too. How about Shattercrown?

2) Brainstorm the plot.

All I know right now is that I’m kicking the Hegemonics to the curb in a story called Shattercrown. The name makes me think of aristocrats. Seers of the Throne tells me that the money-focused Ministry of Mammon is the Hegemonic’s heir apparent. Aristocrats and money make me think of Monaco. James Bond. Movie Stars. High Fashion. Yeah, this is going to be about occult shenanigans, spy-fi and Terrible Old Men with Money.

I think the Hegemonics are running out of money and Mammon is to blame. Seers get off on wealth, so losing it is a terrible blow. The Unity’s servants look shabby compared to their rivals now. Seers are ambitious bastards — Hegemonics must be running to better paying factions. The top levels start to get desperate and sloppy. There’s a Master with a gambling problem. When he loses big thanks to some surreptitious Mammon countermagic it sets off a flashpoint. Spells fly, mages die and the rogue Master escapes. Oh, it’s on. Each side gets ready to duke it out.

Pentacle communities notice the Seer civil war. It’s their big chance to hit the Throne hard. The Silver Ladder will call an emergency Convocation, perhaps the first Grand Convocation in over a hundred years. The other orders modify any plan to suit their own agendas. That renegade Seer Master is wiling to help them and has sent underlings to let Pentacle representatives know, but it’s hard to track him down. Both sides in the civil war want a word, you see.

Okay, cool.

3) Provide procedural advice to get players into the story.

A metaplot isn’t useful unless we can get play groups involved. A typical White Wolf book would do this implicitly (“Faction X buys more pancakes!”) and we’ll still use that method, but it’s time to give the Storyteller (GM, whatever) direct advice on how to add this to a running chronicle/campaign. Back in the last book for Mage: The Ascension (called, er, Ascension) I wrote a sidebar about setting up trigger events in your game to start a metaplot’s engine. I want to do that here, too. I’ll  suggest several ways character actions can set up a chain of events that lead directly to the event in Monaco. I’ll also address Reign of the Exarchs, since with the right framing it can act as a prequel to the Shattercrown event.

4) Design global events.

So, stuff happens that moves the story forward. It’s time to set it down (along with the question of who buys pancakes or in this case, sides with or against the Hegemonic Ministry). I see this creating a fluid time in Awakened politics, where Seers try to entice Pentacle mages into temporary alliances, promising special consideration if their side wins. It’s a time for traitors and double agents. The Silver Ladder and Free Council won’t stand for this sort of thing, of course — they won’t compromising with the Throne for favours. The Mysterium would sure like to get its hands on the Seers’ stuff, however. This is half of the event book style stuff (like Requiem for a God).

When it comes to whys and hows, we’re going to follow the Mekton Empire model for some items. I’ll provide complete information for the main thread of the story, but I’ll also ask a bunch of questions about hidden facts and motives without answering them — but I won’t leave lame adventure hooks as a consolation prize. I’ll set down a list of 3 to 5 possible options so that harried Storytellers can make simple multiple choice selections, along with a reminder that pure DIY is encouraged.

Incidentally, part of making a metaplot work involves reaching back as well as moving forward. I’ll invent new bits of history here and in the adventure.

5) Make cool toys.

It’s not a metaplot unless there are some neat systems and more entrenched setting elements to support the main set of stories that might take place. I’ll design a system for espionage, trust and faction loyalty and a bunch of new spells mages might use whipping down the Autobahn after rogue aristocrat sorcerers. Setting-wise, I’ll design a few new factions to support the most obvious player and antagonist stances, along with one or two that don’t fit in one box or the other so easily. This is the other spot where event book techniques work well.

(Keep in mind that in a full treatment I’d probably have  more metaphysical, secretive story happening in tandem with obvious stuff. It might all be fallout from an Imperial spell, for example. Odder factions and systems can easily take root here. I’ not going to go into detail because that’d be too much work for a blog piece.)

6) Create lots of characters to fill PC and NPC roles

I’m taking some influence from Scion here, as it gives you ready to play characters at each tier of power. These guys are really handy because even if you don’t play the Son of Thor you can always bring him in as an antagonist, ally or Fifth Business dude in some godly meeting. Lots of the characters are useful; I want maybe 150% of the number I need to just get the plot on its feet. I’ll describe their intended uses in a straightforward fashion: as a supplement to more atmospheric descriptions, not a replacement. And yeah, I might add a few really powerful guys because they’re useful, but I’ll follow up with advice on how to use them.

I’ll design one or two relationship maps so that we can find out how the most important characters get along at a glance. Vampire: The Masquerade’s Chicago by Night is a great example of this technique in action.

7) Design an important adventure

The attached adventure shouldn’t just be a side story, but something the travels through the heart of the metaplot and has a chance to alter its outcome (though not necessarily completely — part of a rich setting comes from there being things players can’t change, but as this causes the money wailing of a thousand nerds you should never say so in the book). The adventure is the machine that shoved the metaplot to its ultimate resolution, even if it doesn’t do so in a way that necessarily meets player or character objectives.

8 ) See if breaking any metaplot rules would make it better. Mix things up. Smooth the bumps out. Question structure.

I lied — I totally want to deprotagonize you beneath my cool Mary Sue NPCs! Well, not really, but if we get to far into a method we’re likely to end up with some boring-ass thing that feels like the gaming equivalent of painting by numbers. People say they want structure and ways to make reconfigure chunks of stuff within set rules, but the finished product usually ends up seeming a bit soulless. At some point we need to smooth things over, build seamless links between the chunks and make it feel like an organic whole with its own mood, motifs and message. It needs some soul or else nobody’s going to care.

Although it’s loaded with inaccurate connotations, the Consensus is still a useful shorthand term to describe the elements of existence that are most vital to the Ascension War. It isn’t as simple as majority rule, though the instincts of millions exert undeniable power over the nature of things. To survive, you must combine of intellectual rigor, ideological commitment and a tolerance for enigmas. Knowledge is the foundation, and this work begins by exploring the roots of ecumenical occult philosophy to strengthen it.

The Tellurian and Necessity

The Traditions and Hegemony both call the sum total of existence the Tellurian. Theoretically, the Tellurian contains all possible universes, though what constitutes a “possible universe” is subject to debate. As the ground of all being, the Tellurian contains those elements of reality that must exist for sentient beings to construct narratives, and for the most part, these are the only “raw” components of reality that sentients can perceive. These include the exoteric manifestations of physical laws. Gravity has always existed as a force that causes things to fall, for example, though its rationale and less common manifestations may arise out of narrative threads. Technocrats call this necessary base the Anthropic Principle – it only works this way because we could not exist in a universe that didn’t – while mystics refer to manifestations of the mind, ideal Forms, or the influence of deities.

The primacy of consciousness and individual agency should be noted here, as it must exist as an aspect of the raw Tellurian. Sentient minds (that is, those of beings perceiving the world, not just interpreting it through sapient thought) are not directly subject to the Consensus and prefigure the Tapestry, though they can be manipulated through social pressures and direct magical working. This has been experimentally verified through the ages, particularly when Kyriarchs have attempted to turn specific peoples into “subhumans.” The Tapestry can’t satisfy their wishes, and the intended victims remain as intelligent, strong and self-willed as ever.

The Tapestry and Consensus

Acting within such cosmological preconditions, sentient beings shape the Tellurian’s manifold possibilities into the Tapestry: the defined or semi-defined content of the universe. Every thread in the Tapestry is a narrative created to explain the teller-seer’s life and everything he, she or it encounters. Nonsapient animals weave threads based on their immediate perceptions and instincts. Sapient beings such as humans are capable of consciously telling stories about themselves and the world around them, giving them the potential to impose changes beyond the routines of biological and ecological niches. Together, they add specificity, complexity and restrictions to existence.

The Tapestry’s threads aren’t completely defined; elements that are less meaningful aren’t as fixed in the narrative continuum. This is why a sorcerer can weave a coincidence out of a conveniently placed object. The object was nowhere in particular until it had to be in a particular place. The less narrative importance a facet of reality possesses, the less defined it is. A map sets the territory in place – prior to being defined, it only has a tendency toward a location or specific nature. Technocrats say that reality in this type of flux has an eigenstate, and this term is widely use beyond their labs.

What creates an eigenstate out of unbiased potential, or makes it difficult for most people to impose any narrative they desire? Nonsapient sentients create powerful eigenstate biases based on their own experiences, forming ecologies with spiritual as well as physical significance. Human mages must contend with the resultant natural principles. That’s why theories of spontaneous generation have never been true – at least in this Cycle of existence. Nature knows the truth. Before a human begins to tell his or her own tale, she must take into account the reality of the natural world.

(Then again, some believe that everything permitted within an eigenstate does in fact happen, and that there are many worlds based on every way in which a narrative thread might “collapse” one into itself. Due to the subjective problems involved in exploring these possibilities, it’s difficult to determine whether evidence showing this is true is discovered or manufactured, or whether the two possibilities are even contrasts.)

Sleepers face another limitation. They instinctively weave narrative threads that only minimally conflict with others, particularly those that are a part of their direct historical situation. Sleeper threads are intersubjective, based on interpreting what has come before and what surrounds them in light of their own experiences. In a way, the human sense of history an culture is a trap, tangling people in its tendencies – a property The Hegemony exploits. Common trends throughout these related threads create the Consensus mages shape and defy, but this is not to say that Sleepers always agree with it. They resist in private worlds of the imagination and might see “impossible” events, but they lack some vital combination of will, instinct and intellectual patterning to disrupt the efforts of their ancestors and contemporaries.

Awakening and Spiritual Reality

Enthusiastic mages characterize Awakening as a state that liberates them from the instinct to weave intersubjective stories into the world, but the truth is that they’re never wholly free and barring Ascension, can’t be. To truly believe the world is arbitrary would drive them insane – and when it occurs, that’s exactly what happens.

Mages draw on alternative explanations of the world, minority histories and sincere fictions that not only make sense of Creation as it is, but encode the possibility of radical change within them. This new paradigm establishes primacy over his or her ordinary intersubjective state. Many draw upon an established mythic Tradition, but a strong minority construct their own paradigms out of various elements, devising an syncretic base upon which to explore their inspirations within consistent praxes. No sorcerer is wholly orthodox, however; like Sleepers, they establish unique relationships with the narrative threads they value. Simply interpreting a paradigm as a static model restricts the sorcerer to rotes and conservative routines. To progress, a mage must reach beyond his or her established mythology.

Obviously, Awakening depends on consciousness, because a Sleeper on the threshold must choose to plunge his or her life into an alternative thread. Don’t assume, however, that only sapient beings can weave meaning into the Tapestry beyond the boundaries of ordinary experience. Ecological patterns are far older, stronger and more pervasive than human desires. They generate spiritual beings and realms of existence. These belong to a substrate of meaning running through the Tapestry and while often studied, remain one of the least understood manifestations of reality.

Paradoxes and Blurred Boundaries

The more a mage reaches beyond historical narratives and their most plausible extensions, the more he or she comes into conflict with the established Tapestry. When a magical narrative resists assimilation the Tapestry is said to “fray,” causing a Paradox. Reality responds in unpredictable ways until the Tapestry reweaves itself to swallow the contradiction by fiat, turning miracles into accidents post hoc, even to the point of altering Sleeper perceptions. The likelihood and power of a Paradox depends on the nature of convergent narrative threads and their relative strength, along with the eigenstate’s bias in the situation to be affected by a magical working.

A region long associated with the mage’s paradigm inhabited by Sleepers who belong to a compatible cult might blunt a Paradox or render it a non-issue. In a populated area long beholden to Hegemonic interests, (that is to say, most of the world) magically interfering with a notable object can provoke a severe fray. In this scenario, the mage generates a conflict with current “running” threads (the active self-stories of witnesses) and the entrenched history of the object and region.

In a more hostile scenario such as a busy city street, a sorcerer might still avoid a Paradox if he or she manipulates the eigenstate in a plausible fashion – it’s easy to define the location of an unexceptional tree in the forest, for instance. Unfortunately, the mage can’t employ self-deception or misinformation to manipulate the presence of undefined elements. For example a mage can’t “coincidentally” conjure something he or she knows isn’t there by reaching into a pocket, even if it’s a common object, and can’t get around it by asking an accomplice to randomly stuff his or her pockets – they both know what’s inside them. The precise limits of this are not always consistent, however. An important object might devolve to a less defined state after a narrative thread stops focusing on it, for example (but this isn’t guaranteed, as important events leave a more lasting influence). Ultimately, these are matters of meaning and sentiment, not immutable laws.

Can magic manipulate the raw Tellurian? Mages doubt it, and most scholarship states that the unmovable nature of the Tellurian is a tautological property, necessary to define the “unmoved” as something distinct from the Tapestry of narrative and myth. On the other hand, there is no strict division between the two and myths credit mages for making permanent, large scale changes to the nature of things. Generally speaking, the more fundamental a change and the more it violates broadly held principles, the more likely it is to impose a Paradox.

What What?

These reactions are nigh-incoherent yet feel genuine, mirroring the good and bad in metaplots. The bad things about metaplots — that they make the setting less accessible and harder to work with — might be unavoidable in some respects but I think they also stem from some bad design habits in RPGs:

1. The idea that RPGs can be improved like a technology.
2. The notion that one tool, insight or design movement can take care of #1.

Developers use (or used) metaplots to drive fan loyalty, reboot game systems, tweak settings and justify adventures. I don’t think any development tool can do it all. Metaplot’s no exception. The more you expand a tool to do more, the less you focus on its best qualities. If it does everything, it doesn’t mean anything. When metaplots lose sight of a core mission in favour of lots of discrete, ad hoc tasks it gets difficult to provide practical advice about how to use them. If one book adds a development to introduce a new bad guy and another justifies a shift in the magic system, what can I say to gamers to help them own the whole thing from start to finish? It just looks like a bunch of crappy patches — and sometimes, that’s all it is.

It’s Okay, Everything Sucks

What can I do to fix it? One answer is “Nothing!” Then you throw your hands up and make a great show of contrition that you ever sought to oppress gamers or something.

I don’t think that’s the best answer. It’s a big mistake to give up on metaplot. It’s not a tool for everything but it is an effective tool. It remains one of the best ways to create a convincingly detailed setting, build a community and develop enduring parts of your IP. Metaplot even seems to be better at inspiring details about the back story of the “Year Zero” setting than the alternatives. When you reach back and add something to justify a new development the game’s history expands organically. Vampire: The Masquerade looks like it got all kinds of nifty things (and a few duds) out of the process.

One alternative is to make a toolkit out of your setting. These are often great resources, but might damage the community’s ability to develop common interests in the game, or the developer’s ability to build expand the setting in interesting ways.

I’m skeptical of toolkits. Like metaplots, they’ve bloated what they’re good at — but if you disagree with me fear not, because most people do! I remember when we got down to Seers of the Throne and I told Ethan and the other freelancers that I thought the toolkit, make your own bad guy approach was a bad idea. I used Vampire: The Requiem‘s VII book as an example. VII is a great book, full of compelling, well-executed ideas. You get to pick from multiple versions of VII. That can only be a good thing, right?

Think again. Any VII you want means:

• No future material about VII without breaking the implied promise of the VII book.
• No basis of unity for fans to develop VII on their own, because there’s an immediate division based on the version you want to use. It seems counterintuitive for more choice to hinder gamer creativity, but think of it this way: If you have 10 people split among three versions of VII (3/3/4) the chance of each sub-project dying from lack of interest goes up, since so many of these things have over 50% attrition, leaving 1/1/2 people who think nobody cares.

It may sound like I’m harshing on the book. I’m not! I own it and used parts of it in my Vampire/Mage game. This book didn’t fail but its tools have a price. Metaplot adds its own difficulties, but it’s not alone.

(At this point, people who love structure may accuse me of conflating metaplot and setting — and that’s true. Fact is, the boundary between the two is pretty vague in practice.)

Whatever we do, there’s a trade off — RPG Design Culture Tendency #1 blinds us to it, but it’s there. If metaplot is a particular pain in the ass it’s probably because it did more than should have (Cultural Problem #2) and we were so busy applying it that it was hard to get to the intellectual space where we can look at it from afar, appreciate it as a general thing and see how we can give it a proper place.

Metaplot 2.0

Let’s get it right.

First, we’ll ban ourselves from using metaplot as a game design multitool. That means:

1. We won’t use metaplot to justify rules changes. We won’t kill every assassin in the Forgotten Realms to support an edition change. We might add and change systems to support an event, but it’s for the sake of the event (and it had better be a good one).
2. We won’t use metaplot to invalidate any fundamental character or setting structure (choice of character types, factions, etc.) unless we’re going to a new edition or some equally momentous release. We won’t kick your splat out of the Splat Social Club in a supplement.
3. We’ll never make book B require book A unless book A is a core book to limit declining accessibility. This is the tough one.

These are the rules. We’ll only break them in a dire emergency or to support a eucatastrophically awesome idea.

Next, we’ll set some objectives:

1. We want to build a community around the setting, where gamers can talk about basically the same people, places and things.
2. Related to #1, we want to build loyalty to the game setting. We want good fans, and we want to reward them for being fans — without alienating newcomers.
3. We want to open up lots of new possibilities for stories.
4. We want a sense of verisimilitude and living history.

Frankenplot Lives!

You can find bits of Metaplot 2.0 strewn across dozens of game books. If I wanted to elevator pitch it I’d go with, Scion + Requiem for a God + Mekton Empire. You might come up with different examples, but let me explain myself here:

• Scion features playable signature characters and a default campaign structure that has a powerful effect on the setting.
• Requiem for a God is a complex resource for a single event that doesn’t lay out a firm source of events beyond Odin kicking the bucket (or whatever).
• Mekton Empire features one of the best implementations of setting secrets, bar none, where there are multiple choice answers and space for GMs to add their own (a toolkit idea! I’m a hypocrite! But let me explain . . .)

Damn, this article’s running long, so it’ll be a two parter. See you!

(I should double-emphasize that it’s not as if RPGs don’t have a ways to go with that last one. For instance, I’m still a bit stung that the transgendered cop I created for “Bloody Mary” in Urban Legends got that part of his background cut at the developer’s insistence.)

Right after the D20 licence came out but before the Book of Erotic Fantasy I floated a thought experiment with some other writers about attacking the license with three books:

• The Killing of the King: The occult flow of causality requires you to assassinate JFK using every possible permutation allowed by the (loosely conceived) constraints of evidence to prevent the early rise of “Third Way” liberalism, because it sucks. Just look at how many times Tony Blair had to lie.
• D20 Eco Ops: This’d be a modern resource with rules for eco-activist sabotage. The game systems would be integrated into comprehensive descriptions of the organizational and tactical methods used by real groups, with the explicit position that the book was an ideological training ground.
• The third one is still a project I’m pursuing so I won’t go into too much detail, but it involves methodical real-world drug use by characters to stimulate their creative autonomy.

In retrospect a rewrite of the D20STL would have just resulted sooner, but the real point wasn’t to attack the license as much as use it as a conceptual benchmark in pursuit of challenging ideas. It’s all pretty contrived, but I’m afraid that I don’t think RPGs are doing better right now. They’re about Meta-issues for gamers, either situated in the game or the community. There are a whack of games stabbing at depth, but they just don’t succeed. It’s stuff like Man, organized religion sure is screwed up! or It’s hard when people die! or Poor people sure have it rough! or Aren’t you offended when I’m gross!

Challenging art requires to to fight a position that’s commonly believed in a way that gets to the point. Gamers are overfond of Star Trek-style superloose allegories (It’s really about black people/queer folks/etc, not aliens!), possibly because these were invented to avoid complaints from people just like them. The fact that these people lived in the 1960s indicates we haven’t come very far, have we? We like to use these to dodge blame for the bad stuff (like orcs as stand ins for colonized peoples) and take credit for the good stuff. We need to build challenges that are harder to dodge.

Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Mage: The Ascension (and others; just going with what comes to mind first) both tried out these sorts of challenges, though neither succeeded completely. Werewolf started out by saying Human nature and corporate capitalism in particular are immoral, destructive forces. Mage said Modernity isn’t necessarily desirable, probably isn’t rational and is a servant of political interests, anyway. Boy, did that make people mad, and not mad in a kind of throwaway fashion. Gamers still get pissed off about it. They get pissed off when hints of it come up, like when Awakening added a nod to John Zerzan-like primitivism in Tome of the Watchtowers, or whatever Phil Brucato wrote in Changing Breeds, and they’re probably not going to like something in an upcoming book where the easy colonized-peoples metaphor are the smart guys.

This kind of thing doesn’t happen too often though. It’s hard to present a commercial proposition that’s based on telling the audience their beliefs are screwed up unless it’s about religion. If it’s about religion it’s pretty easy because people who can’t irreverently manipulate signs suck at RPGs anyway. So besides things like like Satan was a good guy! Angels were stone killers! writers and designers get scared of saying this stuff because they don’t want to alienate their audience, especially now that segments of the audience can broadcast all kinds of crap in response on a public forum.

You would think that smaller publishers would pick up the slack here but by and large, they don’t. They’re pretty addicted to Trek-level allegories to inoffensively pick up the slack, with a side order of the ‘ol grossout (like that Old School thing where the guy details the evil things you do to summon demons and crap). I’m not saying it’s never been done there (Steal Away Jordan, for instance) but the small press sure has some ways to go.

It also doesn’t help that the culture of gaming is chock full of creative machismo. Everybody wants assurances that their creative impulse isn’t being oppressed by the GM or designer or group of something — everybody’s an enemy of the big swinging cock of self-expression. Challenging that . . . Well, it pretty much feels like pointing below the belt and laughing to these types, and making a statement about how you ought to think or feel can’t help but do that. It’s a pity, because it other media people take more responsibility for their responses.

I’ll put it this way. You know those crazy far right movie reviews that talk about how every flick will turn you into a gay(er) (more) heathen (card carrying) communist? Keep that style of analysis but remove the slant (mostly; there’s something inherently totalizing and fascist about that mode anyway) and you have how pretty much every internet-vocal gamer reacts to new RPG stuff they have a problem with. If someone did that for every movie they saw without a hint of satire or comic effect you’d probably think they were assholes, wouldn’t you?

Finally, you can’t do your best job without revealing something of yourself. It’s possible to do a good job writing against your beliefs, but it can be seriously disconcerting. I despise the world views of the Euthanatos and Silver Ladder, but people frequently cite that stuff as some of my better work. RPGs represent a special danger because the audience generates its own deep narratives and might really piss you off with them. I really sympathize with Vincent Baker dealing with Dogs in the Vineyard being used to play SS members, resulting in oneupmanship where everybody tried to sympathize with the SS. The answer to these challenges is that doing something like this means you’re an asshole, but nobody really wants to be put in a position where they have to call somebody an asshole. And win or lose that fight, you’re dealing with someone who created an involved narrative to an immoral end.

That’s the danger; that’s the challenge. Once you flirt with the heavy stuff you’re not dealing with remote intellectual questions any more. You’re laying it out, and you may end up confronting what you don’t just think is a creative conflict, but a basic moral error while you’re fighting for a position you believe leads to something finer in the world.

Who’s up to the challenge? Am I up to it? I don’t know. I think we need it. I hope we get it in 2010. Like I said at the beginning, it’s not the purpose of art, but without it, an art form has no purpose.

Part of the Hegemony is truly ancient. This Kyriarchy claims descent from ancient priest-kings and culture heroes: the first lords of fire, agriculture and medicine. They learned that true power lay not in discovering wonders, but capturing them within a structure of control. The enlightened deserved undiluted access to the source of power – everyone else lived to serve. Over centuries, lord and sacral officiant drifted into two distinct roles and the Kyriarchs diversified into numerous factions. By the Middle Ages their secret orders (In Europe, the Cabal of Pure Thought and the Sangreal) dominated the world in secret, acting through kings and bishops, soldiers and scholars. Serfs toiled, nations went to war and it was good.

As long as inventions and spiritual studies reinforced the Great Chain of Being, the Kyriarchy had no quarrel with them. If they challenged the order of things they deserved death or exile. Most renegade Awakened chose the latter, and why not? The world was vast, mostly unexplored and filled with spaces where sorcerers could study in academic covenants. Where magi and philosopher scientists could not physically relocate they hid among the people, fearful of exercising too much influence lest Kyriarcy warriors respond.

As the late Middle Ages bloomed into the Renaissance Europe brimmed with wild ideas and rebellions, challenges to sacral authority and rule by oath. The opportunity wasn’t lost on the exile wonder-worker, who plotted to expand long-constrained dominions. Behind a crusade against heresy, the Cabal of Pure Thought raised armies at Languedoc against Mistridge and Carcassone – an error, for the resident Hermetics and Artificers gave no thought to an alliance until a common enemy battered at both their doors.

The seed bloomed, attracting other covenants until a truly dangerous idea took hold: that a world without aristocrats and serfs could exist. At the Alliance of the Ivory Tower, dreams coalesced into worldwide ambitions.

This wasn’t the first time the Kyriarchy had faced this kind of challenge, so it used a practiced response: It bought half of the rebellion. In truth, it had long since seduced some of the newer mysteries – those of the merchants and explorers – to its side. It was easy enough to bring the majority of Artificers across with the promise of wealth, influence and the freedom to pursue their most ambitious projects. The life-scholar Cosians were already strongly associated with the Church, and were offered indulgences against all sins in perpetuity, and freedom against the earthly punishments they would normally demand.

Never numerous, the Solificati alchemists were offered nothing more than the opportunity to survive behind the promise that win or lose, the Kyriarchs would take pains to extinguish them utterly.  Philosopher scientists from all factions switched sides, but the Solificati pretended to stay with the alliance until they opened the Ivory Tower to invaders, on the day of the Great Betrayal.

The Kyriarchy made concessions. It incorporated the technologists as equals and aligned certain occult ideas to match the newcomers’ obsessions. It didn’t matter. From the dawn of their order the Kyriarchs knew that bringing fire to the people was nothing without the power to deny it, to ration the merest sparks as rewards for obedience.

The Hegemony changed greatly in the intervening centuries, but it still reflects the unity of two former enemies that uneasily manage the world. The modern Kyriarchy and Technocracy are more ideologies than factions now, and adherents of both systems inhabit every Convention.

Conventions

The 21st Century Hegemony consists of:

The Cartel: They’re masters of economics down to its purest form, where value is relative, finite, manipulable and beholden to desire, not moral principle. The Pragmatists employ formulae that reduce everything to a unified abstraction and manipulates it to serve their wills. Cartel prodigies use Platonic-mathematic rites, economic power blocs and the social structures of sanguine utility made manifest.

The Curia: Descended from the Cabal of Pure Thought, the Curia applies moral absolutes in the name of a remote God, creating taxonomies of sin drive obedient behavior. The Exarchs rarely believe every value they insinuate into the populace – one law applies to the common Sleeper but another rules the Elect. Their theurgy, though subtle, still disturbs atheist allies.

The Illuminati: The  Administrators overthrew the aristocratic Sangreal, replacing divine right with applied science and political theory. Still, many of their techniques are simply rituals and biases inherited from a world that believes in reason but doesn’t practice it, from cult-like managerial techniques to applied “evolutionary psychology.” Their Men in Black are some of the most feared operatives in the Hegemony.

The Ingenium: The Engineers concentrate apply physical science the problems of power. The Hegemony needs AI to monitor its possessions, machines to measure, move and work, and weapons to kill their enemies. Some “engineers” devote themselves to pure research, but the Convention’s primary focus is application in the service of the Hegemony’s agenda. The Ingenium possess some of the purest Technocrats: mean and women who believe that human destiny is best entrusted to scientific principles – and the fact that they create and interpret them is merely the advantage of superior knowledge.

The Progenitors: Despite reductionist efforts, living things continue to hinder the dream of a unified Enlightened Science, to the Progenitors maintain their place. They apply their particular expertise to drugs, genetic engineering and surgery to everything from human enhancement to agriculture, defining subjects by the most obvious potential in their genotypes. Deviation is disease. The Physicians will cure it.

We Are All Beautiful Information

Immortality is a dream as old as Gilgamesh. Scholars have hungered for transcendental knowledge from the most ancient days, and didn’t separate numinous enlightenment from their pragmatic studies. The Transhuman Adepts may be a new movement but they partake of that most ancient impulse – the same felt by Plato, Pythagoras and William of Ockham.

The Enhanced know their legacy but they don’t look back; archaic memes are for the archives. In the here and now, science and technology prune away the most egregious mistakes in human thought. The Tradition’s efforts rest on dozens of pragmatic technologies, but take their unifying principles from a smaller number of powerful ideas. First, there’s the idea of a computational cosmos. There’s no difference between a sufficiently accurate mathematical model and the object it represents.

Subordinate to this grand idea are others: universal evolution via mathematical replicators, the denial of a “mind essence” so that consciousness can be limitlessly expanded, and the body-as-information’s mutability via genetic engineering, practical nanotechnology and more. All of these tools focus on overcoming physical, mental and political barriers to human development. Abandoning the natural, evolved state is essential; the Enhanced believe the Ascension War is a battle between memes stuck in the Darwinian game, lashed to the human mind’s limits. Victory relies on becoming more than human, thereby developing a vision greater than the rest.

History

It’s easy to forget that Great Betrayal grew out of virtuous motives. With the Kyriarchy’s help, the Order of Reason turned away political collapse, total war and threats from Beyond. They prepared Sleepers for the coming Utopia – an age of peace and plenty that the Hegemonic Time Table delayed again and again. A few scientists of conscience became dissatisfied with the status quo’s glacial pace.

Many members of this faction belonged to groups that the Kyriarchy discriminated against. The Hegemony’s elders told female, homosexual, Jewish, and non-European members of the Order of Reason that policies repressing their Sleeping counterparts served the greater goal of cultural unity. It was supposedly no statement on their personal abilities, but it was more telling that scientists from these groups never rose to a position where they could change the policy.

The Æther Society’s defection did little to inspire the discontents. Ætherians were eccentrics who lacked a constructive vision for the world. Still, they demonstrated that there was room for Awakened Science outside of the Technocratic fold. The Utopians developed into a semi-formal faction that the Hegemony was forced to tolerate – it couldn’t stand another defection.

The Second World War was the Utopians’ watershed moment. Every state had its sins, but the Axis was a study in unalloyed evil – and the Hegemony supported it. Officially, it was a purely pragmatic decision that had nothing to do with the Axis’ foul ideologies. It would just be easier to guide a few totalitarian regimes than a shifting political mosaic. The Utopians not only believed that no rationale could justify the choice, but knew that true Fascist sympathizers populated the upper ranks. The Utopians abandoned the Technocracy, supported the Allies and at the war’s end, negotiated an alliance with the Traditions.

The Utopians kept their name until 1979, when cultural and scientific changes prompted the Tradition to debate its purpose and reassemble on the basis of the rising belief that members could create a better world by attacking human limitations over any specific political goal, but a significant faction believes this was less of a constructive development than appeasement designed to snatch talent away from the Technocracy. The remaining Utopian Engineers continue to be the Tradition’s conscience.

Appearance

Some Transhuman Adepts are moderately fit and rail thin – calorie restriction is a proven life-extension method and they hope to survive long enough to attain Consensus-accepted immortality. Others don’t care about a future where they might live forever with Sleeper-friendly technology. Some neglect their bodies, caring more about life on the plane of abstract information. Another group uses drugs and genetic therapy to gain superhuman abilities, but the benefits are usually short-lived or exact a penalty in medical and psychological complications.

Homemade surgery is an initiation rite for some, who carry scars and other obvious signs of the results: strange ports and studs erupting through their skin, or wires visible just beneath the flesh. Smart Transhuman Adepts learn to hide any sign that can’t be explained away as radical body art, and many camouflage their efforts with ordinary body modification. Meat is a mutable decoration.

Style-wise, Transhuman Adepts are all over the map. Older members cling to the punk fashions that were in vogue during the 1980s, but the majority either care nothing for fashion or accent a mainstream look with oblique references to cutting edge technology.

Paradigm

The Tellurian is a computational medium: a cosmic bestiary of equations that range from galaxies to atoms. Conventional science sits on the verge of seeing reality’s basic unit of representation, but even then can’t view the computational states beneath – much less alter them without the crudest of tools. A Sleeper scientist or engineer is like a blind watchmaker adjusting his creation with blacksmith’s tongs. The goal of science is to behold the cosmos’ pure mathematical forms. The ethos of science is to apply the results to humanity, freeing it from the savage evolutionary games that prevent it from transcending its boundaries.

Sleepers lack a certain degree of . . . inspiration. They might want to improve the species or have the capacity to view their own consciousness as an objective target for study, but they don’t combine both desires with a signature spark of genius. Theoretically, anyone could study science and technology while cultivating an objective view of consciousness but in practice, few attain the refinement to become mages. Sleepers can become experts in a narrow, static field, but psychological barriers prevent them from truly Awakening.

Magic? There are only technologies: methods that manipulate the universe’s mathematical forms by affecting their external manifestations. There’s little need to exert one’s will on the pure Telluric substructure when enlightened applications of biology, chemistry and physics will do. There are a few numinous operations that break down the divide between individual consciousness and the rest of the cosmos, but these are so rare that some Transhuman Adepts doubt they truly exist.

Nevertheless, there are crude ways to hack reality through direct psychic command and proto-science. That’s what other mages do. They manipulate symbols that happen to be effective memes or accurate models of an object, and catalogue these correspondences in their own traditions. They’ll never attain the breadth and efficacy of true technologies, but they serve and occasionally even inspire.

The computational cosmos’ one flaw is that it can accept multiple models – and some models have more potential to improve the human condition than others. Limited paradigms leave much to the dumb operation of cosmic forces by appealing to a great mystery or incompleteness principle. Once confirmed by observation, these models gain standing in the meta-Darwinian competition between cosmological models. That’s why the Consensus exists, and why less desirable models still dog Enhanced efforts to go farther, unlock the fundamentals, and give all humanity the power to master them.

Foci

Computers, scientific instruments, synthetic drugs and other chemicals, surgery, laboratories

Spheres

Correspondence or Mind

Sects

The Enhanced’s factions are political, with each accepting scientists and engineers of any specialty, though each group attracts specialists in particular fields. Transhuman Adepts routinely drift from one faction to another as their opinions shift.

Posthuman Front: A direct action cadre of the physically enhanced, the Posthuman Front serves two vital roles. Members recognize the importance of the human body. They “upgrade” their own with a variety of technologies and apply the results to research that may help Sleepers overcome disease, aging and disability. They’re also the Tradition’s most effective soldiers, strong and fast enough to counter comparably augmented enemies. The Posthuman Front’s members are the most likely to carry serious Paradox backlashes, since they apply radical experiments to themselves.

Reality Hackers: Peerless computer scientists and programmers, the Reality Hackers are the most devoted to the Tradition’s metaphysics over its numerous applications. They wish nothing less than to make the universe programmable by everyone, breaking down the division between physicality and information. In practice, many show disdain for “meat” issues. Matter is just a particularly obstinate form of data, and it might be better to disdain it entirely by creating a new universe with more tractable “permissions.” They develop better ways for people to interact with computers, improving the number of “digital natives” able to transcend the physical world.

Utopian Engineers: Utopians carry the Tradition’s original torch, urging it to pursue its efforts in a socially responsible context. The global majority is more concerned with daily survival than novel technologies. Without political activism, the Enhanced will only benefit the already-privileged, making them nothing more than a Hegemonic tool with delusions of independence. Utopian memeticists, anthropologists and economists focus on how to make scientific development relevant to the needs and values of all cultures, instead of the elites most able to skip to the head of the line when it comes to reaping the rewards.

Concepts

Hacker, scientist, backstreet engineer, information broker, technology smuggler, doctor, designer drug merchant, social scientist, Web activist

Stereotypes

Æther Society: Science isn’t a set of personal preferences, but you have to admit that their obsessions bear the odd fascinating fruit.

Eumenides: I like my justice without porn. Reincarnation is strangely plausible – replicators are everywhere – but I doubt it goes that far.

Order of Hermes: It’s failed science, but they make up for it with pure attitude. Sometimes the math even works.

Templars: If we’re living in a simulation, there is a God. If it’s all about randomly spawned replicators, there isn’t one. In CERN We Trust.

Vajrapani: They stretch the potential of unimproved minds and bodies to their very limits, but they won’t take the obvious next step: Improve the potential!

Verbenae: There is no memeplex so silly that someone won’t sacrifice a goat over it. Just saying.

Hollow Underground: RTFM.