Alright, I've gotten my hands on the Book of Secrets, and I'll be liveposting my reading of it.
Never underestimate a cute little hippie-chick with a grudge, boys. You never know what she can do when she sets her heart on doing it.
Much afraid, very wow. So tough.
So, it opens with a story where a 'hippy' tortures a... Technocrat maybe. It's very unclear. I really have very little idea what's going on, so I'm just going to go straight through.
Welcome to the annex – the storehouse of secrets that escaped the mammoth confines of Mage 20th Anniversary Edition and found their way between these covers. Even with projects of that scope and size, there's never room for everything,
Maybe if you had an editor worthy of the name you'd have had enough room for some of this stuff. And we're already seeing the stupid conversational style that takes up so much of the wordcount.
Chapter one:
Archetypes:
For the Archetype section, it strikes me that each Archetype has a 'how do you get ascension.' However, like in earlier editions, there's no system for finding ascension, so this seems to be wasted wordcount. I'll admit, I skimmed through this section a bit, so I don't have much to say.
Secondary Abilities:
Before reading this, I'll say that I don't expect to like this, seeing as how Ability bloat was one of the bad things about World of Darkness. I mean, do we really need an Ability specifically for terrorism? Do we? Who knows, maybe this will surprise me?
As described in Mage 20, Talents represent Abilities for which your character has an innate gift. Practice hones that gift, of course, but the basis for a Talent Trait comes from a knack that certain folks have and other folks do not.
Well let's see what things Brucato considers to be innate gifts!
>Cooking
Welp. That's the worst of these though, though I consider all of them teachable. The real problem is that all of them seem to be adequately covered by existing things. So why spend wordcount in an actual book on this instead of posting it on the forums or something?
Also, some of them are redundant inside the same chapter! Do we really need Diplomacy, Negotiation,
and Newspeak? Do we need Newspeak at all? Do we need Intuition
and Scan?
Also:
[Blind Fighting] does not, of course, give you a bonus for fighting in the dark
Of course. Why would I ever assume that? I guess if you're blind, you still get impaired by darkness, because why the fuck not?
Finally, Terrorism makes a return, as the more politically correct Unconventional Warfare. Aside from that, I find myself liking the writeup, as it focuses on the policital and propaganda aspects of terrorism instead of just blowing shit up. The question remains as to how it combines with other Abilities, and why you can't just use those other Abilities. Like, do you need both, or can you just use the non-terrorism ability, or can you use the terrorism ability to do all the things, or what?
Merits and Flaws
Although we have not reprinted the Traits given in that book, we have included entries below that refer you to those Mage 20 entries; this way, all of the appropriate Merits and Flaws are presented together for clarity's sake, and you don't need to go paging through different books in order to find what you need.
Still spending wordcount like it's going out of style, I see.
All I really have to say about this section is that it hasn't done anything to alleviate 'autistic blind dwarf savant' syndrome, or 'lightweight child with nightmares' synrdrome. The first is where you end up with a ridiculously disadvantaged character which is minimaxed out the wazoo, and the second is where you pick a bunch of relatively irrelevant flaws in order to minimax. The worst is when you pick a bunch of flaws that are bad for the whole party, rather than just you, like Enemy (or whatever they decided to call it nowadays). They did make it a lot less offensive, changing names and stuff to that effect. But really, did we really not learn anything from the past decade+ of game design? No? Just asking.
Twisted Apprenticeship (1 pt. Flaw)
Someone taught you all the wrong things. For whatever reason, the mentor who introduced you to the Awakened realm did a terrible job, and now you reap the benefits. They may have told you lies about other groups, filled your head with nonsense about the nature of magick (though in all honesty, pretty much everyone does that), or simply behaved like a raging shmuck and left you with the payoff. Now folks blame you for things you did not do (or you did out of ignorance), and the mentor's bad rep and worse teachings hang about you like a god-slaying stink. You'll probably recover eventually, but your Awakened career got off to a wretched start
Damn Akashics!
Next up is Chapter Two.
