If that's your honest opinion then you need to actually read the books and not get your information off of 4chan.

I don't know whether I should feel insulted or amused by your idea that I get my information off 4chan.

In any case, you are only partially correct:

Changelings can use methods that do not involve fucking people up when it comes to gaining Glamour, but ravaging people is by far the most effect-

Why the fuck am I debating Changeling over the internet?

Why am I debating Changeling at all?

I would say that "are sustained by" is a much better way to phrase that than "feeds on".

Meh.

They are interchangeable in this case.
 
Changelings can use methods that do not involve fucking people up when it comes to gaining Glamour, but ravaging people is by far the most effect-
:eyeroll:
Like how eating humans is the most effective way for NWerewolves to regain essence?
I don't know whether I should feel insulted or amused by your idea that I get my information off 4chan.
It sounds like the kind of thing they say about Changeling, that and calling it "Avatar: The Game".
 
Last edited:
:eyeroll:
Like how eating humans is the most effective way for NWerewolves to regain essence?

I never, ever said that the focus of the game was feeding on creativity Sydonai.

But, sure do put words in my mouth.

It sounds like the kind of thing they say about Changeling, that and calling it "Avatar: The Game".
I must honestly admit that I kind of don't care what 4chan says when I'm on SV.

4chan is irrelevant when I'm browsing here, this is irrelevant when I am browsing Onyx Path.

In any case, I am not the least interested in taking part of a ten pages long discussion about the merits and flaws of oChangeling, so can we end it here?
 
Here's the next part of my Traditions write-up. I will note that I've removed the purple paradigm from the traditions. It currently exists as a minor sub-paradigm with practitioners in all Traditions, as the high ranking members that fully understood it are all gone now.

The Order of Hermes

The Order of Hermes was formed in the middle ages in order to prevent independent magi from killing each other wantonly. By easing the rampant paranoia of those days, they soon became one of the most powerful magical organizations in the world. They were instrumental to the formation of the Council of Nine Mystic Traditions, and are currently the most powerful Tradition on the New Council, in part because they were the ones to write the rules. They are numerous due to being able to teach large numbers of sorcerers, some of whom inevitably become Mages, and by being good at recruiting the newly Awakened.

The Order of Hermes believes in the law of sympathy; that by changing something that's connected to something else, you can impact the second part. They also believe that through this they can summon spirits that they can convince to aid them. These two rules are the basis of their magic. They are divided into nine Major Houses and a number of lesser houses, though this is fairly fluid

They fight the Technocracy as it is both a threat to their material power, and because they believe that it, through a massive magical working performed by its hidden masters, has altered reality to resist magic.

House Flambeu

House Flambeu are first and formost the militant arm of the Order. Each full member is an accomplished war-mage, and are often accompanied by apprentices and warrior-sorcerers. They primarily practice magic through Theurgy, taking on the mantle of a deity or angel in order to call their power into the world. They hold the seat of Forces.

House Bonisagus

House Bonisagus are the theoreticians of the Order, and on a purely technical level are the best spell-weavers. Their technique is so good that they are often capable of creating items imbued with spells, creating magical golems, or even binding spells into living beings. They practice magic magic through using various methods to focus their Awakened will, such as mnemonic chants or carefully drawing patterns as a form of meditation. They hold the seat of Prime.

House Tytalus

House Tytalus are rich and powerful, and use magic to remain that way. They run a number of mystery cults that include politicians and businessmen, and use them as a front to work their magic on them. This magic is usually purely beneficial, allowing the subject to succeed in whatever endeavor House Tytalus chooses. High ranking, trusted members of these cults often become Sorcerers in service of House Tytalus. They typically perform magic through rituals calling on ancient gods, though skilled members can shorten the time they take. They hold the seat of Mind.

House Verditus

House Verditus are potion-makers and naturalists (don't call them biologists). They seek magical creatures, from two headed snakes to dragons, in order to use them as parts of their potions. Interestingly, Progenitor Constructs are a fine source of ingredients, a fact that results in cooperation and conflict in nearly equal measure. They often create strange homunculi to serve as soldiers and servants, and some can give their servants strange abilities. They primarily use potions to work magic, and hold the seat of Life.

House Shaea

House Shaea are the spies of the Order, aided by their mastery of True Name magic. By speaking the true name of an individual, they are capable of controlling it, learning about it, and more. They spend most of their time learning the names of friends and enemies of their House, and maintain vast libraries with the information.

House Thig

House Thig are the youngest of the Great Houses, and are the most willing to mix technology and magic. They compile computer programs to calculate models of magic, play mystical chants through audio files, and more. They often enchant their computers to work better than normal, allowing a laptop to outperform a supercomputer. They often 'liberate' technocratic equipment and modify it with spellwork, which annoys the Technocracy to no end if they ever recover the equipment. They hold the seat of Matter.

House Fortunae

House Fortunae are numerologists. By finding patterns within numbers they can determine the whims of fate, and by altering those numbers they can alter fate itself. They are heavily involved in Wall Street, both as a way to make money and a way to perform their magic; changing stock prices to change the fate of others. They are often accused of stealing the secrets of Syndicate magic, and the Syndicate hates them for messing with their portfolios. They hold the Seat of Fate

House Tharsis

House Tharis are astrologists. They believe the heavenly bodies determine the fate of men, though their art has progressed far beyond the horoscopes of the newspapers. They are primarily concerned with the heavens, and spend much of their time on other worlds. They hold the seat of Time.

House Criamon

House Criamon are diabolists, though they claim that they're not evil and have everything under control. They make pacts with dark spirits (and occasionally light or neutral spirits) for power, wealth, and knowledge. Though they claim that they have everything under control, they have a distressing number of mages go missing each year, and have been censured by the Order repeatedly for their practices. They hold the seat of Spirit.

Minor Houses

There are a large number of houses that don't hold seats, including Houses Xaos and Skopos, studying Chaos and Quantum theory respectively, houses that study different types of magical creatures, House Quaestori, which is responsible for judging disputes, and more. Around the turn of the millenium, House Jannisary was purged, and it now exists as a shell of its former self.
 
So, who'd be interested in a Camarilla Quest? Vampire focused, o'course, but there'd be werewolves, changelings and (heavily nerfed) mages involved.

The pitch is Bloodlines meets Black Lagoon: you're a group of troubleshooters brought into a Cam city to do dirty deeds at reasonable prices. Kingdom building will potentially be a part of the game.

For the lore heads in the audience: Week of Nightmares happened, so the suckheads are more open to cross-splat recruiting and Ravnos aren't a thing. Relations are 1e style: Nossies and Gangrel are cool with the cool werewolves (Walkers and Gnawers), Malks are chill with faeries, mages are tsundere for Tremere. Time of Judgement didn't happen, although I kind of like The Revolution Will Be Televised's True Blood-y Masquerade breach and Lilith/[Lasombra] playing political footsies under the table. Cams adopted a less violent version of the Sabbat Viniculum (sp?) because.

For the mechanics heads, I'd be using a quest streamlined RPG system I've had cooking, with all the V:tM trappings slotted into the system. You'd start as decently powerful Kin. Blood Bondage works in reverse (because that always bugged me), feeding works like in Bloodlines (so the Masquerade isn't strained ever more to the breaking) and Generation works like Co'D Blood Potency (because that makes more sense).
 
Last edited:
Reading @notanautomaton's stuff I was thinking about basically a more drastic nuAscension.

I don't think a single canon explanation is necessary for a nAscension, or even desirable. Instead, it should be a toolkit, like Grim War, which provided options and plot hooks for every single faction in the setting being heroes, questionable shades of grey, or villains. The setting itself is basically "the modern day, but with wizards and paradigm responsible for stuff." This leads you to have a very good level of room as to who is actually responsible for what. The second thing is I kind of dislike the bipolar nature of mage-there are two superpowers, the Technos and the Trads, they fight (sometimes like NATO and the USSR, sometimes like WW2).

What I'd prefer is that the Ascension War is a multipolar conflict, like The Great Game on steroids or a multiplayer RTS clusterfuck. You have large, powerful factions which keep making temporary alliances as goals tie together, drifting apart, and this political game shapes consensus. It's no longer Wizard Democrats versus Republican Witches or whatever, but instead a dynamic alliance system makes it more plausible that these powerful forces both aren't shaping most of society and leaves room to explain why the dominant strains of thought change fairly regularly.

So the Technocracy gets split into two groups. The first would be ItX/VEs/Progenitors, the objectivists (yeah my name is bad, sue me). Their basic tenet is that there is an objective set of laws to the universe, and 'consensus,' as it were, is the unconscious psychic power of humans or something changing the laws of reality. As you might have noticed, this is a change from canon. They now explicitly sort of (but not fully) know they're fucking with consensus and changing human belief. Are they right? Are they wrong? That's up to the ST.

Then you have the sovereigns, who think being Awakened is justification to rule. They absorb a bit of the Hermetics and become the Illuminati/NWO/Barvarian conspiracy theories, combining the high-tech conspiracy stuff with the shady mystic symbolism that comes along for the ride with the NWO.

The Traditions generally get split even further. You'll have intersectional Traditionalists who are basically fighting for their own beliefs to be recognized and validated in consensus (i.e. saving their local consensus), the religious who believe that they're granted powers by their religion (the groups here probably don't get along), the postmodernist Traditions who believe in observation > facts (parts of the Etherites, VAs, and Akashics), the mystic religions who believe in an alternate mystical consensus with spirits but an axiomatic, almost scientific view of the world (Heeermetics), so on and so forth. All of these guys get to be more or less great powers in their own right.

The Nephandi and Euthanatos get combined into like, Reincarnationists who believe that the world must be broken to build a new one in the ashes, and Mar

The thing is, these groups are all independent rather than in the NATO/WarPact blocs of Mage canon. This makes the world, I think, more dynamic, and lets you have a lot more room to have fun. So right now, in 2016, the Sovereigns and the Christian magi (I really need better names) are working together, because the Sovereigns dumped the Objectivists a while ago in favor of strengthening religion to keep on top, and the religious took that chance-but now they're squabbling with each other. The Intersectionalists are getting in with minority rights

I think it gets the Ascension War's essence better-philosophical knife fights-and the temptation of power and hubris are both featured here, as well as the idea of having oddball parties and fighting colorful bad guys.

I definitely agree that Mage would be a lot more interesting if it had more factions. On the other hand, I'm personally kind of skeptical of having the objectivists play up the consensus angle--I would actually rather that no one knows the details of the Consensus except maybe some postmodern near-Marauder groups, since it plays up the paradigm warfare aspect more. As a matter of fact, most factions shouldn't really even have a a clear distinction between the awakened and non-awakened--Mages really are just "superhumans", doing things better than normal humans.

As for factions, I've actually given some thought to this in the past.

I don't think the Technocracy needs to be split up completely like you're suggesting--the Syndicate and especially NWO just need to have their thematic focuses shifted around a bit. They're still probably the largest conspiracy around (mostly because it's one of the few that's truly global and remained truly global after the end of colonialism), but it's much more of a first among equals thing than the dominance they have in Mage.
Iteration X, the Progenitors, and the Void Engineers: Largely the same of canon, but with some methodologies switched around. In particular, ItX should have a dedicated Materials Science/Chemistry research methodology, and the Void Engineers should get some more emphasis placed on their physics research.
The New World Order: NWO probably needs the most drastic change to excise most of the spiritualism/mysticism stuff like the Harbingers of Albion or their Templar origins that are associated with it in canon--it should be more reflective of the actual New World Order conspiracy, that is, that a modern global liberal elite is controlling our minds through surveillance and information. I think the best way to do this is to deemphasize the Operatives in favor of Ivory Tower and the Watchers (who should be split into a SIGINT/ELINT methodology and a news/media control and propaganda methodology). Borrow heavily from things like CFR/Rand Corporation and cultural Marxism conspiracy theories.
The Syndicate: Likewise, the pseudo-corporate structure of the Syndicate should be done away with--they're bankers and economists first and foremost, the International Bankers conspiracy controlling world financial institutions. The corporate world as a whole is still very much everyone's game.
The Difference Engineers: The Virtual Adepts should be retained as part of the Technocracy as their Formal Sciences division--they're mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists.

Next up we have Leviathan, the second child of the Order of Reason. They're pretty similar to the "sovereigns" you're suggesting, a 1/3 to 1/2 or so of the Order of Reason that split off when the Order/Technocracy decided to become secular and reject overt Christian mysticism (They're basically the Etheric Biologists ES described in that one TradWiki article for Panopticon). They're kind of like super-Etherites--they have a slightly anachronistic aesthetic, although in this case it's because they're technological resources are more limited since the Technocracy made off with the lion's share of the scientists, forcing them to use older OoR designs (they have high-tech gadgets of their own, but they're almost all narrowly espionage-focused devices because of their limited scientific establishment). The mysticism and hyper-conspiracy elements of the NWO can mostly be spun off here--their subgroups are the Priory of Sion, their political/religious division, the Craftmasons, their science/engineering division, the Knights Templar, their military/espionage division, and the Rosicurian Order of the Mysterium, dedicated to studying mysticism, procuring and hoarding occult artifacts, and the like. Leviathan is very paradigm open and tends to approach reality deviance by studying and incorporating it if it works--they're basically halfway Hermetics at this point. They're also the conservative/reactionary counterpoint to the Technocracy, still overtly Christian and West European and fancying themselves as aristocrats and philosopher-kings.

In addition to those two, we have the Dominion Church, a ecumenical religion centered around Awakened people that dates back to ancient Persina times and the Zoroastrians. Dominion believes in a two-tiered system of revelation--God doesn't particularly care about the specifics of what the sleepers believe as long as they worship one god, and he has chosen only the Elect (Awakened) to know his true nature and protect sleeper belief from the masses. Dominion itself is relatively small, but it has a lot of influence over world religions, playing on the old conspiracy theory that things like the leadership of the Catholic Church are not really Christian but part of an older mystery cult. Most of its power actually comes from various "affiliate organizations"--genuinely sleeper-religious groups of mages, sorcerers, or hunters that Dominion manipulates, mostly Christian, Islamic, or to a lesser extent Hindu. The Order of Reason potentially actually started as one of these.

Dominion actually got extremely close to achieving Mass Ascension by making enough people believe in an omnipotent god that an omnipotent god almost actually came into being (this is the goal of their secret A6+ masters)--the Order of Reason unknowingly screwed this up in the eleventh hour. They're also actually descended from the same Zoroastrian roots as the Hermetics, although you should never tell them that.

The Wu Lung are still around in China--I'd envisioned them basically as described in my writeup, except for the fact that in this case the Five Elemental Dragons splinter faction is much smaller, and the remaining mystical Wu Lung are still very influential and actively contesting control of China with the Technocracy. There should be a similar group in India rooted in traditional Hindu mythology, and probably one/several in sub-Saharan Africa as well.

Likewise, the Hermetics are still around in Europe and still somewhat politically influential in their own right. They're increasingly growing closer to Leviathan to the point that it's sometimes a bit hard to tell their paradigms apart if one forgets about the hypertech.

Beyond that you have the Council of Traditions which largely represent traditionally marginalized cultures across the world. It should be noted that this does not mean "groups oppressed by Europeans"--organizations that were traditionally dominant in their homeland's political or mystical spheres like the Wu Lung and Hermetics would never have joined the Traditions. Interestingly enough this actually makes them more similar to the Disparates of canon, and they should absorb several Disparate groups while shedding some of their own members. There are probably hundreds of small traditions--the Council is just a vaguely UNish body they use mostly to talk shop. The Choristers are especially notable Traditionalists simply because they're Dominion defectors.

You also have various religious mages who aren't coopted by the Technocracy/Leviathan/Dominion, but most of them are smaller groups--they're too splintered over doctrinal issues to really become a major force on their own, with the Protestant and Catholic mages and the Sunni and Shia mages and so forth fighting each other just as much as everyone else. On top of this, you have Banisher groups from your old writeup who align themselves with paradox--most of these are not organized, although there are a couple that actually manage to be a slightly threatening force (I kind of have a vague idea of Majestic 12, interacting with paradox spirits by thinking they're aliens, for one).

Then finally you have various postmodernist/solipsist groups, where the line between mage and outright marauder often starts to get very blurred, and the reincarnationists/Nephandi who should no longer be babyeatingly evil but rather people who just genuinely believe that this world sucks so much it needs to be brought to an end. Maybe to start over, maybe to not exist at all.
 
Last edited:
I definitely agree that Mage would be a lot more interesting if it had more factions. On the other hand, I'm personally kind of skeptical of having the objectivists play up the consensus angle--I would actually rather that no one knows the details of the Consensus except maybe some postmodern near-Marauder groups, since it plays up the paradigm warfare aspect more. As a matter of fact, most factions shouldn't really even have a a clear distinction between the awakened and non-awakened--Mages really are just "superhumans", doing things better than normal humans.

The consensus angle is important because 'this works when it didn't work before' or the alternative, 'this doesn't work but it worked perfectly fine before' is a huge problem for explaining things. Like, realistically speaking, especially in a multipartite free for all, someone is going to discover that shifting global ideology and belief can affect the ability for your guys to do awesome things with shiny stuff.

So I'd suggest that the Technocracy actually accept psychics a bit more. They'll believe in an objective world, but with some sort of Psychic Field Theory, where humans disbelieving in something hard enough can actually make shit stop working. This sucks, so their goal is to either: 1. Suppress all that from happening, or 2. Make people believe in exactly what they think the objective reality is. Are they right? Are they wrong? Who knows? That's up for the ST to declare and you to find out. The thing is, they don't believe the Awakened are all psychics either-in fact, given that an Awakened person doesn't count for consensus anymore, they should probably have the theory reflect that.

So some people have meaningful psychic ability, but most don't. Some of them can actually harness it (psychic psychics), others need tools which most can't use (wizard psychics), and then there's everyone else who are pretty much as psychic as bricks. They probably assume encouraging people to become psychic is Bad, and thus should be minimized, but because there's no overarching idea of Reality Deviance as such (or else they'd be declaring that their goal is the genocide of every one of the other factions and that would be Bad for them) they can tolerate limited psychic interference as long as it doesn't get actively disruptive-a la Revised's "live and let live" attitudes.

This is probably similar for Leviathan, while the mystics have their own theories with regards to magic. Until you get Arete 6+ nobody should have a true idea of consensus and magery being an extension of force of will.
 
Hm.

On the one hand, I really like the idea of Leviathan, for the rather petty reason that it's got that Unknown Armies style true technomagic feel, mixing science and mysticism in a meaningful, core-metaphysics way. I'm not sure it should steal the Operatives, though - if nothing else, the new... uh, New World Order will still need highly trained boots on the ground on occasion, even if it's considered inelegant.

The Dominion Church... maybe? I'm skeptical, but in all honesty I don't know enough history or sociology to guess if that'd work. My instinct is that as written the Church would exclude most Mages that were pious before Awakening, though.
 
The consensus angle is important because 'this works when it didn't work before' or the alternative, 'this doesn't work but it worked perfectly fine before' is a huge problem for explaining things. Like, realistically speaking, especially in a multipartite free for all, someone is going to discover that shifting global ideology and belief can affect the ability for your guys to do awesome things with shiny stuff.

So I'd suggest that the Technocracy actually accept psychics a bit more. They'll believe in an objective world, but with some sort of Psychic Field Theory, where humans disbelieving in something hard enough can actually make shit stop working. This sucks, so their goal is to either: 1. Suppress all that from happening, or 2. Make people believe in exactly what they think the objective reality is. Are they right? Are they wrong? Who knows? That's up for the ST to declare and you to find out. The thing is, they don't believe the Awakened are all psychics either-in fact, given that an Awakened person doesn't count for consensus anymore, they should probably have the theory reflect that.

So some people have meaningful psychic ability, but most don't. Some of them can actually harness it (psychic psychics), others need tools which most can't use (wizard psychics), and then there's everyone else who are pretty much as psychic as bricks. They probably assume encouraging people to become psychic is Bad, and thus should be minimized, but because there's no overarching idea of Reality Deviance as such (or else they'd be declaring that their goal is the genocide of every one of the other factions and that would be Bad for them) they can tolerate limited psychic interference as long as it doesn't get actively disruptive-a la Revised's "live and let live" attitudes.

This is probably similar for Leviathan, while the mystics have their own theories with regards to magic. Until you get Arete 6+ nobody should have a true idea of consensus and magery being an extension of force of will.

Psychics were something I actually originally intended to slot largely in Leviathan, which gets most of the pseudoscience stuff that's split between the Technocracy and the Etherites/VAs in canon. When it comes to paradigm shifts, the I've always liked the idea that the Technocracy internally has a bunch of different competing explanations for why that sort of stuff happens much like actual scientists--there are those who think that reality deviants are channeling energy from alternate universes, those who think that the universe is actually a simulation, those who think all those few black swan events were just coincidences, and so forth. Plus, for most of its existence pretty much every paradigm shift that happened was to the Technocracy's benefit--they've really never had to deal with their stuff suddenly going out of consensus the way other factions have since their paradigm matches scientific advancement even closer than in canon, which means that going "our early stuff were prototypes that were buggy, now it works completely" like they do in canon is more or less satisfying--and in the few cases where it's not people start suggesting things like the Enlightened Anthropic Principle.

The fact that the Technocracy hasn't really suffered from a huge paradigmatic setback yet (they piggybacked off of Dominion causing a shift from mysticism to organized religion, from there led the charge going from religion to scientific thought, and then got off on the better end of the Order of Reason civil war that led to Leviathan splitting off) is pretty much why they're the strongest conspiracy around at the moment. It also breeds hubriiiiiiis that could lead to their downfall.

Hm.

On the one hand, I really like the idea of Leviathan, for the rather petty reason that it's got that Unknown Armies style true technomagic feel, mixing science and mysticism in a meaningful, core-metaphysics way. I'm not sure it should steal the Operatives, though - if nothing else, the new... uh, New World Order will still need highly trained boots on the ground on occasion, even if it's considered inelegant.

The Dominion Church... maybe? I'm skeptical, but in all honesty I don't know enough history or sociology to guess if that'd work. My instinct is that as written the Church would exclude most Mages that were pious before Awakening, though.

NWO doesn't lose the Operatives, they're just kind of deemphasized--most of the time when you see them, they'll just be men in black doing grunt work. Superspies are still around, they just lose the mystical conspiracy symbolism from things like their supposed Templar descent in canon and have to compete with Leviathan's own superspies.

I'll freely admit that Dominion is kind of a stretch. The process basically started with me wanting to make a big faction of religious mages, then realizing that there are so many schisms within each major religion that just having one religious conspiracy with global reach would be impossible, then coming up with the idea of a secret mystery cult to tie them together. They're by no means the only religious mages around--they might not even be a majority--their power just comes from the fact that they actually manage to organize religious mages whereas otherwise they tend to devolve into squabbling even faster than most mages.
 
Mage 20 is pretty solid.
And Congratulations. You've just went from someone I thought was confused and hoping could be convinced to someone I'd really rather see stop arguing, because your opinions are clearly so divorced from mine that there is no way you'll ever end up agreeing with anything I do about the game line.
I know im repeating myself, but my question has been hidden under another Technocracy vs Traditions argument.
I personally would recommend Revised as one where the rules only need to be read twice to get a general idea of what the heck you're supposed to be doing (all the other Owod editions take at least five), or going to Awakening, which also has confusing mechanics, but at least doesn't have consensual reality, so once you get the idea down there is much less interpretation and arguing needed. I strongly suggest you stay far, far away from M20, as my personal experience of having that as my introduction to the line was to drop it entirely for four years until I started reading Panopticon.
 
People who dislike the ruleset of GMC dislike it somewhat (that's a whole big debate) and there are a lot of people who aren't that interested in the Strix, yet despite that I have to say it's very, very solid. And the GMC thing is a big whole debate, so it's not some thing where it's universally panned and nobody will ever like the system so you might as well not bother.

Yet despite these potential problems, it's very solid, the Clans and Covenants are covered very well (IMO, of course), the powers are simple to understand and thematically relevant, and it's definitely what got me into Vampire as opposed to 1e, which was all over the place and had a disappointing corebook.

Ah, cool. If the ruleset is solid and the ideas more a toolkit for your own interpretation like I've read, I think we have a winner.

To all you guys who kindly responded about Mage (and I'm interested in Ascension) - how are the 2e/revised rules? Are they fairly solid or a nightmare to wrestle with, like I've heard?
 
Ah, cool. If the ruleset is solid and the ideas more a toolkit for your own interpretation like I've read, I think we have a winner.

To all you guys who kindly responded about Mage (and I'm interested in Ascension) - how are the 2e/revised rules? Are they fairly solid or a nightmare to wrestle with, like I've heard?
Like I mentioned in the post above yours, my personal experience is that Revised needs to be read through twice in order to even understand what your powers are supposed to be (although I was reading them when my only other experience was horror at M20 and interest in the prologue of Panopticon), but I only understood 1st Edition because I'd already read Revised. I don't really know if they're hard to use without experience, because I still haven't found a Mage game to play in, and by this point I have a great deal of second-hand comprehension from Panopticon.
 
Yo @MJ12 Commando , how does that fix the whole solipsism angle that comes from Awakenings being personal things, or the massive sectarian conflicts that should be within groups as much as without?

I mean, oMages are Unknown Armies Adepts (Stolze worked oMage and probably just bit the idea) and you can't get people of the same School to agree on shit. They have pissant magic and no Quiet/Jhor/whatever the fuck we call Nephandi taint. Mages can bend reality to their will by squeezing their buttcheeks together tightly and have weird, idiosyncratic ways of doing things already baked in to their groupings.

Losing the "oh god the crats are going to murder fuck all of us/Friend Computer makes us work together" angle and keeping oMage cosmology even remotely the same means the whole thing collapses into a souffle of fuckery almost immediately. Like, the Choristers already make no sense; you're gonna say they gather together without the hegemony of the Trads? Or that a fucking Akashic's sense of Zen no-mind is going to play nice with Etherites and VAs who think that's woo bullshit? Or the Akashic is gonna put up with the postmodern bricolage that renders millenia of tradition into use-value or worse, a fashion statement?

The only group with a shared driving purpose regardless of style are the Marauders, funny enough, because their magic bullshit is a hat they wear over their crazy. For everyone else non-Technocracy (and in this setup, even the Technocracy factions), the hat they wear is the whole taco. It's not only "how the world should be," it's "how the world is"

Balkanization sounds good because of the oppressive duality of Crats and Trads, but the fundamental nature of this stupid, stupid, awesome game makes any such thing further than what it is now just doesn't work outside of pure Cabal to Cabal/mystery cult degeneration. (Again, an Unknown Armies thing).

Actually making the multiple factions thing work requires a shift to "belief shapes magic, your crew determines your style/your style determines your crew." Like Shadowrun does it.
 
How would you fix Changeling: The Dreaming, so that it becomes better, or it's an impossible task?

I always see the introduction of the factions (like the Disparate Alliance) as propaganda, that would explain all the creator pet traits they have.

-They banded together for protection, they don't like, or hate The Traditions, and The Technocracy.
-They are also infiltrated by the Naphendi.
-It's a shaky alliance.
-They also do mistakes, and crimes.
-Some of them are really racist, and sexist.

I run out of ideas.
 
How would you fix Changeling: The Dreaming, so that it becomes better, or it's an impossible task?

I actually did an in-depth review of C:tD a while back, so clearly I am an expert on everything forever :V

First things first, you have to decide what C:tD is supposed to be. Is it courtly faerie romance (in both senses of the term) where you bring creativity to the world and stop Unseelie Fae from eating people's creativity or is it about strung out artist-junkies trying to keep themselves from soul death in a world that actively hates them? The book says latter while the players say former; pick one and stick to it.

From there, shoot the Pooka out of an airlock and make sure "childlike wonder" and "bodice-ripper lust" do not meet in the middle like they do with the Childling Satyr or the magic breastmilk splat. You're aiming for Delirium from Sandman here, not Chloe "Kuro" Von Einzbern. You probably want to move Childling age up to 12 (at least), regardless. After that, have a solid antagonist faction: I like using Unseelie Fae, who act like the creativity parasites someone caught feelings over earlier, but Witches, Bygones, or [insert ham fisted western capitalist hegemony strawman no fuck you dad it's not a phase here] work too.

The mechanics...are 90s WW mechanics, but the magic system is neat. C:tD fails more on execution than setting or system.

Also, the thing about Ascension groups is their potrayal works like postmodern literature critique: they mean nothing and say nothing, so people put all of their personal biases into them and call it fact. Just like mages themselves :V
 
Last edited:
How would you fix Changeling: The Dreaming, so that it becomes better, or it's an impossible task?
Or as an alternative take Lost's mechanics and weld the fluff of Dreaming to it. Then prune off the bits of both that you don't like.
The Hedge is basically unchanged, and the "True Fae" are those (insane, but not always completely hostile)fae nobles that were left behind in Fairie.
 
Last edited:
Define exactly what Banality is.
And homebrew the content of the books that White Wolf never released, since those were supposed to explain the fiddly bits of the Line.
Wouldn't giving an exactly precise definition be Banal in itself?

That being said, I think the definition found at the WWwiki gives the right impression of what it is/should be:
"Banality is a combination of many things, but mainly it consists of doubt, rationality, cynicism [presumably in the modern sense of the word], disillusionment, realism and a general unwillingness to embrace the fantastic. "

So when a person gives up one's career dreams and hopes and goes to work at McD, that's Banality.
When a person stops seeing science as a source of wonders and abandons the enthusiasm, and replaces that with rote memorization of formulae he neither understands nor tries to, that's Banality. (Compare to the much more dreamy attitude towards science and tech as evidenced by the Moon Landing era, or by modern people like Hawkings, the Numberphile people or the Periodic Table of Videos.)
When at the end of Gods of Egypt the hero pragmatically kills the villain saying that he's not as idealistic as his father, that's Banality.
When a kid abandons the idea of becoming a musician just because she found out that her idol isn't as perfect as originally believed, that's Banality. (Contrast with the idea of deciding to strive to be better as a result.)
When Scully pre-emptively refuses to accept the existence of the monster of the week despite the fact that there is no evidence of absence at this point, and some evidence of unusual explanations, that's Banality.

And Congratulations. You've just went from someone I thought was confused and hoping could be convinced to someone I'd really rather see stop arguing, because your opinions are clearly so divorced from mine that there is no way you'll ever end up agreeing with anything I do about the game line.
Now now, I think we finally found a Common White Wolf Target Audience Member in our ranks, and instead of rejoicing, you react as if you met a Starfish Alien.
 
Ah, cool. If the ruleset is solid and the ideas more a toolkit for your own interpretation like I've read, I think we have a winner.

To all you guys who kindly responded about Mage (and I'm interested in Ascension) - how are the 2e/revised rules? Are they fairly solid or a nightmare to wrestle with, like I've heard?

Uhh... Hmm... Based on what I remember, I found 2e easier to digest than Revised. But that's just me looking at the Magic Rules and Paradox of Revised and going ":wtf: da fuq? :jackiechan:" and ":eek: shit's lethal, :sad: how the fuck do we work magic?! :anger:" while 2e was a spectrum of ":???: :eyebrow: I get this :smile: :V"

Ultimately, the ability to understand oMage rules is dependent on processing power, comprehension, and critical thinking. These varies from person to person, so you might have a different experience than me.
 
Uhh... Hmm... Based on what I remember, I found 2e easier to digest than Revised. But that's just me looking at the Magic Rules and Paradox of Revised and going ":wtf: da fuq? :jackiechan:" and ":eek: shit's lethal, :sad: how the fuck do we work magic?! :anger:" while 2e was a spectrum of ":???: :eyebrow: I get this :smile: :V"

Ultimately, the ability to understand oMage rules is dependent on processing power, comprehension, and critical thinking. These varies from person to person, so you might have a different experience than me.

Well, I might grab a copy of Mage Revised and your suggested supplements (Guide to the Technocracy, Storyteller's Handbook, Guide to The Traditions) next payday then, with wikipedia on hand.

While the more esoteric elements that 2nd edition seems to have appeal to me, I do like that Revised is way more grounded. Although I'll probably end up getting both at some point.

1d4chan claims that the common way people played the game was via GURPS Mage or back-porting Mage the Awakening rules via the Mage Translation Guide, but... eh. It is a 4chan wiki.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top