What happens when an archmaster removes the conditions that allows a previously Ascended being to exist?

This depends on the rationale for Ascension. Most Ascensions are pretty durable because an Ascended being exists in a state more fundamental than the Phenomenal, but if they depend on a recurring relationship with the Phenomenal World, it might be possible to dethrone them. This is the sort of thing that brought the Abyss into being, however.

What’s the deal with the Aswadim? They don’t seem so bad.

The Aswadim want to enjoy a spiritual state that allows them to embrace fundamental contradictions. They want to be Hypocrite Buddhas. This is different from knowing a fundamental ground of being prior to categories of existence that may seem contradictory, but can be resolved when you’re enlightened. This isn’t really the same as giving everyone their private universe. It’s more like giving yourself an insane private universe and telling everyone else it’ll be totally cool, unless they’re weaklings.

Is there a way to protect your Imperium Rites from outside interference?

There’s no direct method. You need to adjust the Force you’re pushing into the rite to avoid Aponoia.

What happens when you fail to seal an Omen?

You can’t use it until you seal it. You may design new challenges at a +1 difficulty increase, as per p. 78.

What happens when you fail to Exalt an Omen?

The changes it represents fail to occur, and you don’t Ascend. You may keep trying, but Aponoia may add additional Omens to seal and Exalt to get your plan back on track. Eventually, it may become impractical to continue, as Arcane Experience, Willpower dot and eternal wound costs repeat themselves.

Incidentally, you can’t heal eternal wounds, as far as I’m concerned. Dave may be more liberal about this. Archmages who’ve repeatedly failed probably sacrifice their Physical and Social Attributes first, followed by Wisdom, then finally Gnosis. I can’t think of a more pissed off entity than a sorcerer who’s insane, crippled, and whittled down to Mastery after reaching too far, too often.

Can you change your Omens?

Yes. See p. 77. One common usage is to shake off Profane Omens, since you can’t progress toward Ascension until to finish with them.

So, what can other supernaturals do about all this reality editing?

I assume they can do something, but I don’t know what it is. I personally think the ways in which other supernaturals interact with Imperium is unique to each type, rather than there being corresponding arch-vampires and arch-werewolves. Remember that Imperial Mysteries includes the option that archmages aren’t really altering reality for anyone else — just themselves.

In terms of the wider World of Darkness, the book assumes a kind of Anthropic Principle where the universe necessarily includes the conditions under which other supernatural beings exist. I don’t know why it might be that way and frankly, it’s none of my business. It’s your prerogative.

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.

In AD&D1e, social systems exist to determine whether an NPC is going to attack or shake hands, hang tough or flee, or be loyal or treacherous. They don’t take the form of a character resource (like 3e’s Diplomacy) marshalled against NPC resources. The situation instead creates modifiers to a 50/50 default, and break points (enemy reduced to half hit points, henchman given cheddar) arise where you check for a change in the social weather.

Function

Where does Vampire come into this? On one hand, the game could benefit from strong social systems — including systems that affect PCs — but you can’t overshadow supernatural powers and compulsions — the Beast, or Presence. One of the best ways to do this is to get out of the socialize-as-combat model and explore other constructive things and ask: What do Vampire PCs do socially? Answers:

• Wheedle information and favours
• Embarrass enemies and give friends status
• Change what people think of them
• Meet people and create social networks

Form

I thought of breaking these down into three domains based on Attribute, but that’s not how Storyteller works; attributes measure things we can talk about in concrete terms instead of metagame conveniences. If we go for the method favoured by Storytelling and newer games we lose the ability to reflexively determine dice pools, because we end up with attributes that don’t mean things we can grasp without mastering the system.

I do like three categories, though, so let’s go with:

Relationship Building: Two or more characters try to build a social advantage between themselves. Examples:

• Romance (they develop mutual rapport)
• Covert communication (they build a “secret language” of innuendo or other factors)
• Institutions and ideologies

Storyteller already has rules for acting in concert and combining successes. We’ll use these for relationship building. Passing on a message through innuendo might require a Manipulation + Expression from the sender, and a Wits + Expression from the receiver, with a target of 3-5 successes. Creating a cult that mostly runs itself might require a dozen of more Charisma + Occult successes. These are measures of how impressive the feat is, not how hard each step is to take — that’s a function of difficulty rating.

Impressions: The character tries to modify his status in the community — this is a matter of type, not just degree. Examples:

• Escape notice (or be extra notable)
• Be popular (or unpopular)
• Be a certain kind of popular (known to be badass, smart, etc.)
• Saving face

To make this system work you need to measure how strong an effect the character needs to achieve (successes), and how hard it is to get done in the relevant scene (difficulty). I’d use trait-based signals to establish thresholds here. 3 or 4 + the Status Background of the person or group you’re trying to impress might be suitable to make an impression at a party.

Sway/Power-Over: Lastly, we’ve got the “social combat” stuff folks go for — sometimes it’s the right way to go. Like standard combat, the core engine is a series of opposed rolls, but there isn’t  Health analogue and an inescapable consequence — and thanks to the role of Disciplines, there can’t be. If controlling your mind is a power, straightforward social sway makes that power kind of suck.

You might get around this through a “damage or dare” system. The player can choose between performing an action or applying a penalty linked directly to the system: Willpower loss, a dice roll penalty, etc. The game or Storyteller could apply a price list based on service, or five degrees of general severity, and room for haggling.

Combine Them

Develop interactions between each subsystem. Examples:

• When you build a relationship, its value in combined successes becomes the number of successes you need to fracture it through sway-type social attacks.
• Build a powerful institution with a strong impression. A successful stunt to get attention creates a “seed” of successes that can be increased by allies’ efforts.
• Use social “combat” on the ability to steal the successes used by your enemy to make an impression. He builds himself up — you tear him down.

I can think of more specific systems for create social durations, resistances and so on, but they all spring from using these three “channels” in concert. And even if these specific methods don’t hit you, stepping outside of “social fight” thinking has plenty of potential.

The Storyteller System

You’ll need to be gentle about the system because changing the base too much multiplies the effort by the number of child items. Still:

Do Something About Four Roll Combat: Attack, Parry/Dodge, Damage and Soak. Christ. Adopt Aeonverse Storyteller’s option for soak (and use the “heroic” mode for ½ lethal; aggravated damage needs more differentiation). Leave in a defense roll – otherwise, you end up with all kinds of wacky revisions. Damage is the other item you can get rid of a roll for, but purists will hate that, so leave it as an option, with a list of suggested base damage ratings that you add successes to in order to get a final total. I ran Mage like this for years and it was buttery smooth.

Multiple Action Rules Are Terrible: Easily the worst permutation in the system – worse than pre-Revised 1s wonkiness, even. The split action rules require you to pre-plan something the narrative treats as spontaneous, and makes players calculate a variable penalty – and doing even simple math to screw yourself sucks. I ran it where I just asked players to determine if they were taking full, split or total defensive actions. If it was a split the first action was -3, the second, -5, with a cumulative -2. I’d limit the total number of actions you can get this way to your Wits. Total defense is a cumulative -1 to parry/block/dodge starting from the first attack. A full action has no penalty.

Bottom at 3, Top at 9, Please: Get rid of difficulty 10 or 1-2 rolls. They don’t work. Mage Revised modified total dice if a difficulty went higher or lower. Use that rule. It’s better.

Make Health Easier to Track: Right now it’s a pain in all iterations of Storyteller/ing. Have I taken slashy, X-y or starry damage? I suggest you break it into separate bashing/lethal/agg tracks, where less severe damage rolls over to more, and the most severe damage type automatically fills boxes in less severe types. I can diagram this if anyone wants to know more.

Do Not Get Suckered into a Combat Framework for All Social Stuff: Only losers think picking up ladies and gents is like punching people in the face. Romance and many other tasks should be teamwork oriented, where characters combine successes to meet a threshold. Vampire bitchiness is combative, but it should be viewed as part of a different social framework.

Vampire Systems

Don’t You Touch Humanity: It’s a classic system. Do not apologize for it. Make it a bit more user friendly, maybe. I think the theft sin is poorly contextualized (“bread I steal lest jerk I become!”) but that’s it.

Differentiate Between “Extra,” “Important,” and “Supernatural” Humans: Some Disciplines automatically do things to humans, leading to arguments over para-human characters and other PC types versus the shmoes we know they’re supposed to affect. Serpentis should paralyze the average guy with no roll, but exceptional types need rules, too. This also gives you the ability to be more liberal with no-roll effects versus Extras.

The Celerity Issue: We all know Celerity is overpowered, and the Dark Ages solution of upping the blood cost doesn’t work. At the same time, I know people miss multiple actions. I suggest leaving the system as is with a sidebar with an alternate system that reduces multiple action penalties for physical actions and increases the maximum number of actions you can take. This engages the system through its “currency” of dice in the pool. For example, if Celerity 2 gave you 4 dice to put toward penalized actions you know where it stands compared to other systems.

Fortitude and What I Said Earlier about Goddamn Soak: Fortitude doesn’t work with static soak, so maybe you should just let it grant bonus Health Levels if you use a fixed soak rating, as you certainly should.

Watch Power Interaction: One of the great things about LARP by Laws of the Night (not Revised, which emulates tabletop too much) is the practical interaction between Disciplines and how they affect culture. You needed a Tremere to wake torpored vampires up. Auspex provided a disincentive for diablerie – until you got Soul Mask. This gave Obfuscate-bearing clans a certain reputation. Setites always pretended to be Toreador.

Vampire’s Setting and Other Stuff

World of Tripwires: Exalted does a great job mapping potential conflicts without letting them happen. I think this is a great model to go with. Provide access to all the major, smart metaplot conflicts as if they were current events and not “Year of,” remnants. Leave room for metaplot, however, since you may wish to execute it in various ways if this takes off – such as through an adventure path style chronicle.

Keep Uber-NPCs – and Make Them Useful: Yeah, fuck all those guys who feel the existence of powerful characters out there makes them unimportant. I’m pretty sure I don’t do public speaking like Barack Obama, but it doesn’t make me want to slit my wrists or anything. At the same time, Barry doesn’t fly up here and speechify my wife into leaving me. This is basically what bad storytellers use NPCs for in Vampire. NPCs need a “role” section that tells you what to do with them, and despite the current fashion, those things need not variations on “Give smooth handjobs to PCs to preserve their feelings.” STs should feel empowered to be fair or unfair in ways that help the group care about the story.

Create Signature PCs, Just like Scion: Scion’s ready to play signature PCs should be emulated in every game. I’d suggest an adventure series too, but you have limited space. Instead, you should revise the Transylvania Chronicles into a huge softback with significant rewrites.

Make Crossover Option-Heavy, Not Uselessly Vague: There’s no need for every line to fight for its interests/fans/pies, so instead of worrying that ghoul mages would be Far Too Powerful introduce multiple plot-hooky options for each collision. Nevertheless, you should identify the preferred option as far as Vampire is concerned for the sake of LARPers and other extended gamer communities.

Step into First Person: The game is 20 years old, so it’s time to introduce some straight talk about your experience with Vampire. Just keep it functional, so that we know what you were going for with such and such a thing, but don’t reveal everything. That would be no fun.

Timbrook is the Classic Vampire Artist: It’s true. The clanbook interiors are awesome. I guess Tim Bradstreet is famous, but Josh Timbrook is the artist I associate with Vampire: The Masquerade.

The Biggie

Respect Vampire: The Masquerade’s Game Design and Setting Design Merits: The reason Vampire: The Masquerade endures isn’t because It Was the 90s, or any of the other common wisdom that clusters around the false notion of TRPG design as an objectively improvable technology. It’s because it’s a genuinely good game that exceeded its predecessors in setting, presentation and even game systems. It didn’t invent dice pools and tiered powers, but it made them intuitive to use. Vampire’s character creation system is still one of the best in terms of sheer user-friendliness considering the detail you get out of it. The clans added social roles to character classes in a way that no prior game had succeeded in doing. V20 should feel like a vital game we want to play now.

Oh Yeah

If You Do This for Mage . . . well, I’m the best at Mage.

Fast Darkness

This is a super-streamlined version of the World of Darkness rules.

Character Creation

Attributes: Start with 1 dot in each and divide 5 dots between:

• Power: Strength, Aggressiveness, Force
• Finesse: Discretion, Precision, Quickness
• Resistance: Toughness, Counterbalance, Determination

5 is the maximum but it does not cost 2 of these dots.

Skills: Divide 7 dots between these Skills:

• Mental: Education, Thinking, Reasoning
• Physical: Athletics, Fitness, Martial Arts
• Social: Interpersonal Talent, Diplomacy, Etiquette

Max 5 each-the 5th dot costs 2 dots.

Figured Traits:

• Speed: Finesse + Physical + 5
• Health: Resistance + 5
• Willpower: Resistance + Mental
• Morality: 7. Choose one Virtue and one Vice.

Merits: Choose 7 dots of Merits. each Merits tops out at 5 dots each, and the 5th dot costs 2 dots.

• Give each Merit a specific Attribute/Skill combination and a descriptor.
• When the Merit applies (by descriptor and Att/Skill field) to a die roll, you may re-roll one failed die per Merit dot.

Equipment: Choose 7 dots of Equipment. A 5 dot item is so awesome the 5th dot costs 2 dots, as usual.

• Describe the items.
• Equipment adds 1 die to your roll per dot on actions that make sense for them to boost, or add 1 to a Resistance value per two dots.

Supernatural Characters: Each of the following traits starts at 1 dot except for Talent — it starts at 0. Add 5 dots. You may not start with a 5th dot in any single trait.

• Rank (Primal Urge, Blood Potency, etc.): This gives you an Essence pool of 10, + 1 per additional Rank.

1. Subtract dice from incoming powers equal to the degree by which your Rank exceeds that of the supernatural dude zapping you.
2. Each Rank dot also gives you a free dot to add to one of your Attributes. You can boost Attributes beyond 5 this way. You must assign bonus dots to all three Attributes within each 5 Rank dots.

• Origin (Thyrsus, Ventrue, etc.): This adds to your Mental, Physical and Social Skills when you use the group’s special powers — stuff like clan Disciplines and Path Arcana.
• Society (Summer Court, Silver Ladder, etc.): These act like additional Merit dots, linked to the group’s specialties.
• Talent: This is a supernatural ability common among your kind but not part of your Society or Origin.

1. This can be slightly broader than a by-the-book power — “Supernatural Athleticism,” not “Celerity.”

Task Resolution

Roll dice at the standard difficulty, but there are no opposed or extended rolls. All dice rolls are:

• Attribute + Skill + Equipment – Resistance + Equipment
• Teamwork works like multiple attacks. The best participants go first. Each additional participant reduces the Resistance by 1.
• Spend an Essence to use a power. If the power is a buff, just add the dice/Resistance as indicated by character Origin. If the power is a extraordinary thing mundane humans can’t do, just roll your Origin + dice pool to do that thing.
• Subtract Rank from dice pools belonging to powers targeting Superior Rank Guy.

There isn’t much more — it’s just a sketch, after all. I may have to juggle relative powers again — I could go a couple of ways with this (and did, fooling around).

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.