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Laundreu said:
I've got a bit of a question - where would I go to learn how to run Mage: the Ascension revised? Is the Storyteller's guide any good for teaching someone how to ST the mechanical bits or is there some useful website or another that goes over the ins and outs of the game?
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@Quantumboost might be able to help you there also in regards for starting out as a Mage GM.
In regards to choices that differ mage ST from other games , for one players tend to have a tremendous amount of information avaible to them unless everyone goes full force and they then still can hack a computer at range with a bit of corr. And also deliver rockets/fireballs from out of nowwhere.
Mages are very good at informations, changing the circumstances so that there own powers apply and in certain senses feel more like for example shadowrunners as while preperation is king for them most of them can also don a pink mohawk. Do note that depending on the paradigm on the other hand, some mages are basically unable to cast at combat time unless they went for the pure brute force will effort.
As MJ 12 noted it all depends on what you want from the campaign to give better advices. Mechanically the stuff in the core book is sufficent for your needs as strewn out as it is . Then it depends what you want to play, Wacky astral sidequests require a different book then forging wonders or talismans. On that note if someone has a wonder or a talisman you will require forged by dragons fire for revised as that at least helps a bit with that even if it still has problems.
On the gripping hand one think that I would stress is sit down with the players, at first, talk about what they want to build to prevent decker syndrom and then also take the time to set asside a session after they finished building about what they can do with there spheres and effects now as far to many new players stumble over that roadblock and only tend to think in pure mystical terms or go for the direct application all the time and forgot that for example everyone with force 2-3 can become invisble.Look at this link for example to see some of that.
Tabletop - White Wolf's World of Darkness | Page 49
On the last tentacle based on the link also decide if your game is HOP/HAP/HIP which showcase when something is vulgar, when something is concidental and if it is result or process based
Definitions of Magic and Coincidence is a basic example of the problems with that and showcases why you need to deal with that beforehand.
 
Bel said:
I'm fairly sure that's a 'alternative setting' for Vampire the Requirem. I'm not sure what book its in (might be the chroniclers guide, Danse Macabre or Damnation city. Though I think its more there's one city and the vampire population is ruthlessly kept stable because there is simply not enough mortals left.
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It was in Mirrors.
But I was fairly certain that it had been published in an CWOD supplement before that.
 
Laundreu said:
I've got a bit of a question - where would I go to learn how to run Mage: the Ascension revised? Is the Storyteller's guide any good for teaching someone how to ST the mechanical bits or is there some useful website or another that goes over the ins and outs of the game?
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Scia said:
@Quantumboost might be able to help you there also in regards for starting out as a Mage GM.
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Most of what I have to offer are pitfalls I've fallen into, since I'm still often flailing around hoping things happen to work out. >_>

First, don't even consider using M20 to introduce new players to the game, if you intend to use it at all. It's a long, blathering diatribe of nonsense; there's good bits, but they're interspersed with... well... a long, blathering diatribe of nonsense.

If a player is new to the setting, provide one of the corebooks and the appropriate Convention or Tradition book if you have them. Be sure to inform them that the associated book has in-character bias, and the opinions expressed about other factions say more about the one describing than they do about those being described.

Also, if they don't have character ideas already, suggest they picture characters - specific characters - from media they're familiar with who have a similar role. Make absolutely certain that they have at least a passing familiarity with some of the source genres involved in their preferred splat. The Progenitor player in our game had literally no experience with cyberpunk-style bioware as even a concept, which we only figured out in the past month; that has caused no end of frustration. I'd recommend Eclipse Phase as a convenient source for ideas about Science Convention/VA apparatuses, or if you have Shadowrun books to let them look at those can be very useful as well.
 
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Laundreu said:
I've got a bit of a question - where would I go to learn how to run Mage: the Ascension revised? Is the Storyteller's guide any good for teaching someone how to ST the mechanical bits or is there some useful website or another that goes over the ins and outs of the game?
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Quantumboost said:
Most of what I have to offer are pitfalls I've fallen into, since I'm still often flailing around hoping things happen to work out. >_>

First, don't even consider using M20 to introduce new players to the game, if you intend to use it at all. It's a long, blathering diatribe of nonsense; there's good bits, but they're interspersed with... well... a long, blathering diatribe of nonsense.

If a player is new to the setting, provide one of the corebooks and the appropriate Convention or Tradition book if you have them. Be sure to inform them that the associated book has in-character bias, and the opinions expressed about other factions say more about the one describing than they do about those being described.

Also, if they don't have character ideas already, suggest they picture characters - specific characters - from media they're familiar with who have a similar role. Make absolutely certain that they have at least a passing familiarity with some of the source genres involved in their preferred splat. The Progenitor player in our game had literally no experience with cyberpunk-style bioware as even a concept, which we only figured out in the past month; that has caused no end of frustration. I'd recommend Eclipse Phase as a convenient source for ideas about Science Convention/VA apparatuses, or if you have Shadowrun books to let them look at those can be very useful as well.
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^This, and like Scya said I'd really heavily recommend sitting down with people at character gen and discuss what they want to do with their character and what is needed in order to preform it. Like, I made my character with the idea in mind that she'd be able to be making a lot of cool weapons and things like that.

And then I found out a few sessions in that in order to make the actually impressive and worthwhile things I needed her to have prime, which she has no ranks in because I just didn't know it was needed. But then conversely she has ranks in skills she's never even used because I didn't realize that other things she had made them redundant.

Also, if you give them something make sure that they understand what you are giving them. I was sitting on a pile of enhancement points for a months because I didn't realize that my character got them refunded when she had to give up a device that had been implanted in her.
 
One of the biggest things about oMage is that you need to understand what genre the Traditions and Conventions operate in, and how this makes sense for them, because that lets you get them much more easily. So let me try to summarize both.

The Traditions are fantasy, fundamentally. They range from urban fantasy to regular fantasy to full-up science fantasy, but they should always have this fantastical, magical idea. They're mystics, magi, will-workers. They're eccentric, out of place in modern society, and work on the edges. They should be a little weird when they're not deliberately trying to pass. They're Great Men, heroic individuals. They're independent heroes with a lot of leeway, and a game about them should emphasize that leeway. The Traditions are disorganized and independent, and although multi-tradition cabals are common that disorganization and tension should be emphasized.

The Technocracy are science fiction meets technothrillers. The specific type of SF/technothriller might change-the NWO are more Bourne Identity to Iteration X's Ghost in the Shell or Deus Ex or Polity novels-but they're fundamentally part of a society. As heroes, they exist in a system, a system which they defend. The system might sometimes be their opposition, but it's always a passive, inherent opposition. They are The Man, and a Technocracy game should fundamentally be about being in the system. You might oppose elements of it, you might be disgusted by it, but your reactions should be informed by being in that system, a system which you subscribe to and know will punish you if you step out of line.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
One of the biggest things about oMage is that you need to understand what genre the Traditions and Conventions operate in, and how this makes sense for them, because that lets you get them much more easily. So let me try to summarize both.

The Traditions are fantasy, fundamentally. They range from urban fantasy to regular fantasy to full-up science fantasy, but they should always have this fantastical, magical idea. They're mystics, magi, will-workers. They're eccentric, out of place in modern society, and work on the edges. They should be a little weird when they're not deliberately trying to pass. They're Great Men, heroic individuals. They're independent heroes with a lot of leeway, and a game about them should emphasize that leeway. The Traditions are disorganized and independent, and although multi-tradition cabals are common that disorganization and tension should be emphasized.

The Technocracy are science fiction meets technothrillers. The specific type of SF/technothriller might change-the NWO are more Bourne Identity to Iteration X's Ghost in the Shell or Deus Ex or Polity novels-but they're fundamentally part of a society. As heroes, they exist in a system, a system which they defend. The system might sometimes be their opposition, but it's always a passive, inherent opposition. They are The Man, and a Technocracy game should fundamentally be about being in the system. You might oppose elements of it, you might be disgusted by it, but your reactions should be informed by being in that system, a system which you subscribe to and know will punish you if you step out of line.
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And if anyone ever wants to run a Mage game here I've got characters in mind for both types of game and would be so enthusiastic you have no idea.

Which is kind of surprising considering the incoherent mess that the M20 rules (my only exposure to the mechanical side of things) are. Mage strikes me as one of those games people try to play despite the system rather than because of it. Or they play it for the Spheres and the free-form Magic and try their best to ignore everything else.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
One of the biggest things about oMage is that you need to understand what genre the Traditions and Conventions operate in, and how this makes sense for them, because that lets you get them much more easily. So let me try to summarize both.

The Traditions are fantasy, fundamentally. They range from urban fantasy to regular fantasy to full-up science fantasy, but they should always have this fantastical, magical idea. They're mystics, magi, will-workers. They're eccentric, out of place in modern society, and work on the edges. They should be a little weird when they're not deliberately trying to pass. They're Great Men, heroic individuals. They're independent heroes with a lot of leeway, and a game about them should emphasize that leeway. The Traditions are disorganized and independent, and although multi-tradition cabals are common that disorganization and tension should be emphasized.

The Technocracy are science fiction meets technothrillers. The specific type of SF/technothriller might change-the NWO are more Bourne Identity to Iteration X's Ghost in the Shell or Deus Ex or Polity novels-but they're fundamentally part of a society. As heroes, they exist in a system, a system which they defend. The system might sometimes be their opposition, but it's always a passive, inherent opposition. They are The Man, and a Technocracy game should fundamentally be about being in the system. You might oppose elements of it, you might be disgusted by it, but your reactions should be informed by being in that system, a system which you subscribe to and know will punish you if you step out of line.
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What genre would you say a game with both groups working together classify as? I'm just curious as that's what I believe my own game is going to be once we get done with character building on Thursday and move on to actually playing.
 
notanautomaton said:
Pretty much superheroes.
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I disagree. Superheroes are Traditions game stuff-secret identities, the tension between the face you present to everyone and the real you, the tension between individual characters with their own personality conflicts, the distrust of authority... that's good Traditions stuff. A joint game generally is going to be defined by the enemy rather than the group. Maybe it's a horror story where you have these guys stuck in Nephandi Country. Maybe it's cosmic horror or the story of different people coming together. Maybe it's a story about peacekeeping where the enemy is the hardliners of both factions. Maybe it's doomed romance. Whatever.
 
I do get the impression that Nephandi are going to be one of the big issues in this game considering the GM has described the setting as "It's 2020, both the Technocracy and the Traditions have taken major beatings in the wake of the Avatar Storm and the terribleness that happened after. They've been slowly clawing themselves back to their former strength, and in the meantime very nasty forces have come out to play."

So I imagine I should expect horrible things. And Pentex, but I repeat myself.
 
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I can see it now.

It's a small town in the middle of the American heartland. Population: 436 very polite men, women, and children. Salt of the Earth types. They buy their clothes from the K-Mart at the center of the town's only shopping center. There's one waffle house, and one 7-11. No one ever stops. Few people even pass through anymore.


Someone leaks to the Traditions that the Technocracy is doing something major there. So a team goes to disrupt Technocracy's work.
Someone leaks to the Technocracy that the Traditions are doing something major there, so they send in a team to disrupt the Reality Deviants' work.

They the two teams meet and they try to fight, unsuccessfully. It doesn't matter who takes the first shot, because the first shot fails. Equipment explodes, spells fizzle. The most basic and coincidental of rotes is suddenly as difficult and as vulgar as eating the sun. Even mundane tools and weapons don't work right. Guns refuse to fire. Knives are reluctant to cut. Punches barely tickle and cars rebel against drivers who try to use them as rams.

Perhaps the two teams retreat separately. Perhaps they talk and decided to work together. Perhaps they try to escape. If they do they'll find that all roads lead back the the center of town. Perhaps they try to create some sort of fortifications. That would be wise, if perhaps futile. Perhaps they investigate more closely, though the townspeople don't notice anything strange, everything is perfectly normal and perfectly peaceful, too normal, too peaceful. Perhaps they do nothing but wait.

Either way, night eventually falls, and that's when the things come out of the dark.
 
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Mm. Could be interesting, but also sounds like a recipe for a major bad end, because, uh, you've basically just playing a Mortals: the Dysenterying game that way.

Maybe if you let the Technocracy bring in the VEs, and then with the help with enough Spirit/Corr Hermetics they can force through a paradigm overwrite to make a common construct? To keep the theme of "if you want to live through this you're going to have to come to a compromise."
 
That could make for a damn interesting game, Technocrats and Mages stuck in a strange Nephandic hellhole that during the day seems nice and at night monsters come out. They have to work together to escape the strange warped space of the town, and each session could be what they do during the relatively peaceful times of the day in preparation for the warzone the town becomes at night.

It would start to grate on them, especially if everything reverted during the day. All the damage would be gone, the blood cleaned up. People would be living the same boring lives even if they were slaughtered the night before... An expression on how everything is meaningless, perhaps?

Yeah, there'd be tensions up the wazoo. The Technocrats wouldn't trust the Mages and vice versa, but they'd distrust the town even more as whatever is causing this insanity plays with them. And throughout it all there might be offers, sometimes given subtly and at other times not, that there's a way to escape this wretched labyrinth. All you have to do is accept a hand reaching out to show you the truth, and let it lead you to the caul.

So it'd be a race to escape this awful town before they either die, go mad or break down enough to accept the offer. This whole idea has a lot of good horror potential, and could probably make for a decent short campaign. Thank you for sharing this premise, @hyzmarca. I'll certainly keep it in mind if I ever consider running Mage in the future.
 
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Maugan Ra said:
And if anyone ever wants to run a Mage game here I've got characters in mind for both types of game and would be so enthusiastic you have no idea.

Which is kind of surprising considering the incoherent mess that the M20 rules (my only exposure to the mechanical side of things) are. Mage strikes me as one of those games people try to play despite the system rather than because of it. Or they play it for the Spheres and the free-form Magic and try their best to ignore everything else.
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So I've had two different idea's for mage games for a while. I've decided to go ahead with one of them, you all can have a say.

OOC - Two mage/sorcerer ideas
 
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hyzmarca said:
I can see it now.

It's a small town in the middle of the American heartland. Population: 436 very polite men, women, and children. Salt of the Earth types. They buy their clothes from the K-Mart at the center of the town's only shopping center. There's one waffle house, and one 7-11. No one ever stops. Few people even pass through anymore.


Someone leaks to the Traditions that the Technocracy is doing something major there. So a team goes to disrupt Technocracy's work.
Someone leaks to the Technocracy that the Traditions are doing something major there, so they send in a team to disrupt the Reality Deviants' work.

They the two teams meet and they try to fight, unsuccessfully. It doesn't matter who takes the first shot, because the first shot fails. Equipment explodes, spells fizzle. The most basic and coincidental of rotes is suddenly as difficult and as vulgar as eating the sun. Even mundane tools and weapons don't work right. Guns refuse to fire. Knives are reluctant to cut. Punches barely tickle and cars rebel against drivers who try to use them as rams.

Perhaps the two teams retreat separately. Perhaps they talk and decided to work together. Perhaps they try to escape. If they do they'll find that all roads lead back the the center of town. Perhaps they try to create some sort of fortifications. That would be wise, if perhaps futile. Perhaps they investigate more closely, though the townspeople don't notice anything strange, everything is perfectly normal and perfectly peaceful, too normal, too peaceful. Perhaps they do nothing but wait.

Either way, night eventually falls, and that's when the things come out of the dark.
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This is a premise that requires both sides to be incredibly dumb and not have a single dot of Awareness between any of them. You can't make shit randomly vulgar like that without having a reality bubble, and the moment you have a reality bubble easily exposed to realspace on Earth is the moment the Void Engineers go around nuking the place from orbit. And it'd also result in the problem that you've just made all your shit vulgar as well.

Like, the Technocracy can make traditions magic vulgar in their constructs by forcing it to conform to their paradigm very tightly, and the Traditions can do the same-but Virtual Adept technomagic, which works by Technocratic rules, is totally coincidental in a Technocratic construct and VAs would avoid a mystical chantry which says 'no tech allowed' like the plague. This stuff is paradigm, not IFF-and unless you have a nephandic chantry which has a super-specific and super-edgy paradigm, you can't do something like that.

At the very least, modern technology would still have to work (and thus NWO-like paradigms would be fine) if you wanted to have that facade. No making everything vulgar except magic powered by baby-eating or something.
 
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If I ever ran the premise in a game I'd not make the player's magic all randomly vulgar, but I suppose a town you can't leave would have enough warping space that the Void Engineers would have found and nuked it anyway... Well, I guess that kills this particular campaign idea. It seems I've still got a lot to learn about the setting. Here's hoping having a game or two under my belt will help flesh out what I've read from the books.
 
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MJ12 Commando said:
You can't make shit randomly vulgar like that without having a reality bubble, and the moment you have a reality bubble easily exposed to realspace on Earth
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It doesn't have to be in Earth.

That campaign could easily start with a VE shipwrecking next to the town. (That is, actually, some Realm somewhere in the void, even if they like to pretend is not).

And there are paradigms that fit the parameters. Sure, modern tech works. Spells work. But everything has, a, how to say, malice. Shots have a mysterious tendency to hit your comrades, even when they should not. Medical treatments backfire. Etc, etc.

Hmmm. I am reminding this:

EarthScorpion said:
There were places like that.

They were in space/the Umbra. Hothoused flowers grown in safe places, away from the paradigmatic warfare and harshness of mass Sleeper consciousness. Places where the paradigm was so finely engineered that the only thing out of consensus was "actions taken to serve the Technocratic Union". Places where a MJOLNIR fired by a Virtual Adept would work perfectly, but the exact same gun fired by a Technocrat would explode. Places the NWO couldn't infiltrate because pretending to be a Traditionalist was impossible [1]. Compared to them, North Korea is a brutal, resilient outdoor plant hardened to resist the freezing and unpredictable climate of the mainstream Consensus.
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So yeah, you definetively could make a Realm with a pure horror paradigm.
 
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Broken25 said:
So yeah, you definetively could make a Realm with a pure horror paradigm.
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Yes, but by the point you're doing that, you're essentially just dragging the characters off to Silent Hill. And while various emotionally damaged persons in the Silent Hill franchise can just go "Huh, why is everything all foggy and why are there monsters everywhere? I dunno, I guess I'll just keep running around the town", unfortunately people with sphere magic will start throwing out investigation spells and sensory effects, will try to leave, etc etc

Now, yes, if you had a weak spot in the Gauntlet you could probably do something like borrow the concept of the Other City from Shadows of the UK, a hellish Glasgow which in the oWoD is probably some kind of twisted hell-realm right up against Glasgow born of the misery of parts of the city. But that's still something which has to face the fact that mages have tools - and the cross-faction thing just makes it more complicated. It's probably actually easier to have a young group of Traditionalists poking their noses in or an underfunded and underprepared group of Technocrats investigating a minor anomaly which turns out to be much bigger than anyone knew than have both show up.

(In the case of the Technocrats, the win condition is basically "HOLY SHIT CALL THE VEs AND SURVIVE UNTIL PICKUP!".)
 
MJ12 Commando said:
This is a premise that requires both sides to be incredibly dumb and not have a single dot of Awareness between any of them. You can't make shit randomly vulgar like that without having a reality bubble, and the moment you have a reality bubble easily exposed to realspace on Earth is the moment the Void Engineers go around nuking the place from orbit. And it'd also result in the problem that you've just made all your shit vulgar as well.

Like, the Technocracy can make traditions magic vulgar in their constructs by forcing it to conform to their paradigm very tightly, and the Traditions can do the same-but Virtual Adept technomagic, which works by Technocratic rules, is totally coincidental in a Technocratic construct and VAs would avoid a mystical chantry which says 'no tech allowed' like the plague. This stuff is paradigm, not IFF-and unless you have a nephandic chantry which has a super-specific and super-edgy paradigm, you can't do something like that.

At the very least, modern technology would still have to work (and thus NWO-like paradigms would be fine) if you wanted to have that facade. No making everything vulgar except magic powered by baby-eating or something.
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Yes, that's the point. The scenario should be impossible, and yet its happening.
 
TheLastOne said:
So I've had two different idea's for mage games for a while. I've decided to go ahead with one of them, you all can have a say.

OOC - Two mage/sorcerer ideas
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I would normally be interested, but I'm... well, looking to play Mage, using the default setting or reasonably close to it, since this would be my first actual game of it. Whereas you're recruiting for a game which features a significantly different setting and is played using the Mutants and Masterminds rules.
 
Laundreu said:
I've got a bit of a question - where would I go to learn how to run Mage: the Ascension revised? Is the Storyteller's guide any good for teaching someone how to ST the mechanical bits or is there some useful website or another that goes over the ins and outs of the game?
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Quantumboost said:
Most of what I have to offer are pitfalls I've fallen into, since I'm still often flailing around hoping things happen to work out. >_>
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I figured I shoud give my $ 0.02 since I'm also flailing my way through running a mage game myself right now.

  • First I want to echo how important Paradigms are. Each player needs to really know their paradigm. We have a player who chose Euthanatos and then didn't understand how the Euthanatos do magic, it took some work. Another good thing to remind people of in a Traditions game if they're not that familiar with the setting is that they can play an Orphan mage.

  • Second, and this is more of a problem in Tradition games, is to figure out how the characters know each other. If your rag tag team or Traditionalists are from a bunch of different Traditions, why do they work together/how do they know about each other. For my group, it was mostly close physical proximity when shit went down plus some players being employed to others.

  • Third know the setting really well yourself, because your players probably won't. This goes for the spheres as much as the setting. This also means having/obtaining the relevant rulebook for the important rules and factions involved.

  • Fourth, work with the players. The players often have a hard time adjusting to a new system so be there every step of the way to give advice and assistance, maybe even going as far as letting them adjust their character sheet because they didn't understand something. Be willing to repeat explanations for things over and over again until players learn them.

  • Fifth, mages and their magic are really versatile, though also weirdly limited and specialized dependent on their paradigm, be prepared to improvise if when something you didn't expect happens.

  • Sixth and finally, understand Avatars and Seekings. Since they are such an important and personal part of every character it's really important that you get them right. I wish someone had emphasized that before I started. Personally I find that the Storyteller's Handbook has a really good section on Avatars and Seekings. I'd recommend buying it for that reason alone, though it actually has some other pretty good sections.
Also don't be afraid to ask for feedback from the players[​1]​ or advice from people who know the system and/or the setting well.


[1] I actually, accidentally created a great way to get feedback from my group called the 'Fan-mail Inbox'. The players can post snarky, angry, annoyed, etc. comments about sessions, NPCs, and stuff and are often more willing to put in criticisms through this snarky, informal method than they are to actually come out and tell me that they had a problem with something.


Edit: I forgot to mention that this is a relatively good resource for helping players through character creation and helping players understand the spheres.
 
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