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Render Unto Moloch (M:tAw)

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Okay so
Museum = Moros almost 100% (death and all)
Zoo = Thyrsus?
Court = Mastigos probs, they are all about judging and shit
Church = Obrimos?
Stage = Acanthus

Ookkay.

[X] A Church; there is a priest and congregation, of course, but they are made of wax and wood. True faith left this place behind years ago, and now only the light remains. It streams down from on high, broken and repainted by windows of stained glass that stretch almost to the ceiling, and under its touch you could almost fool yourself into thinking the withered mannequins are strong and vital once again.

[X] A Stage; beyond it, a theatre long since abandoned. Velvet seats stand in long rows, encrusted with webs, dust lies in piles inches thick. Chains of silver and gold hang from your wrists and coil around your neck, and overhead old floodlights halo you in burning light. Your audience is old and emaciated, clad in finery several centuries out of date, and they stare at you with hollow eyes.



Also, a mildly relevant question to "enemy is the system" which we seem to have: how to do Matrix Lobby Scene in nMage?
 
[X] A Zoo; you walk between exhibits and around the edge of great enclosures, studying and being studied in turn. Here a horde of rats dig a warren in broken stone, there a flight of pigeons wheel back and forth between a hundred wooden aviaries. There are people all around you, cooing and laughing over the antics of those they came to observe, but they cannot see what you can. The horizon has sprouted bars, and from beyond giants with eyes of fire watch you with an inquisitive gaze.

[X] A Church; there is a priest and congregation, of course, but they are made of wax and wood. True faith left this place behind years ago, and now only the light remains. It streams down from on high, broken and repainted by windows of stained glass that stretch almost to the ceiling, and under its touch you could almost fool yourself into thinking the withered mannequins are strong and vital once again.
 
And here I was checking in to see if there's a clear leader yet... and I find the votes are split 21-20-19-18-15.

Apparently SV is torn on which kind of trippy dream vision is the best one to have?
 
[X] A Zoo; you walk between exhibits and around the edge of great enclosures, studying and being studied in turn. Here a horde of rats dig a warren in broken stone, there a flight of pigeons wheel back and forth between a hundred wooden aviaries. There are people all around you, cooing and laughing over the antics of those they came to observe, but they cannot see what you can. The horizon has sprouted bars, and from beyond giants with eyes of fire watch you with an inquisitive gaze.

All that spirit stuff sounds really cool
 
Maugan Ra said:
And here I was checking in to see if there's a clear leader yet... and I find the votes are split 21-20-19-18-15.

Apparently SV is torn on which kind of trippy dream vision is the best one to have?
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Seems a lot of people are liking zoo but forget that at this point you already said(if I'm wrong sorry) that musuem won the primaries and now we're just voring for second place
Also I have a question what does each vision give us in terms of arcana/supernal majors and minors if you don't mind me asking oh mighty ra
 
Rjrulew said:
If one of the 15 is a moros then I'm good ild ild like to be one throw in some shamanism and nature stuff, but eh can't win em all
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I really doubt a Thrysus is gonna be played as "now go into the wild and reconnect with your primal roots my friend, learn to love the biting insects", if only 'cause it's, uh, London yo. And London is pretty heavily urbanized. The Zoo metaphor is really applicable, there isn't much in terms of natural environment in England that hasn't been tamed or touched by mankind at some point, there's precious little that's really unknown or unexplored. Which is kinda the problem because you've got Roman spirits still around, jockeying for control with spirits of mass media and food crazes.

One of my favorite spirits in Shadows of the UK literally looks like Princess Diana and she's a sorta incarnation of "but how does this tragedy affect me, how does this national loss make me important", all about tying yourself into the media deluge and the synthetic and sometimes sycophantic displays of emotion it encourages. Everyone wants to be on TV.

(ALSO IF WE GO WITH ZOO WE CAN PROBABLY GET COOL SPIRIT FAMILIARS TO TALK TO JUST SAYING BUT HAVING A GHOST TIGER BUDDY OR SOME SHIT WOULD BE KINDA RAD)

Edit: I mean we also might get into screaming arguments with Ronald McDonald in the parking lot at 3 in the morning but nobody's perfect.
 
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TenfoldShields said:
I really doubt a Thrysus is gonna be played as "now go into the wild and reconnect with your primal roots my friend, learn to love the biting insects", if only 'cause it's, uh, London yo. And London is pretty heavily urbanized. The Zoo metaphor is really applicable, there isn't much in terms of natural environment in England that hasn't been tamed or touched by mankind at some point, there's precious little that's really unknown or unexplored. Which is kinda the problem because you've got Roman spirits still around, jockeying for control with spirits of mass media and food crazes.
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Yeah, the choice to set the quest in London (mostly because I'm a Londoner and it appeals to me) made for an interesting set of challenges when it came to translating a lot of the basic assumptions of Mage and the World of Darkness in general. Shadows of the UK is a fantastic book that did a lot to help here, but yeah, the point remains.

The Thrysus are an excellent example. They're the Shamans, the people of the wild frontier, the ones who discard all the pretensions and the trappings of civilised society and get back to what is real and... that mindset basically just doesn't exist over here. Oh no doubt you can find some exceptions, but as a whole, it's a distinctly minor part of the British psyche. Over here, wilderness regions aren't the places that have never known the touch of man, they're the places that man has abandoned. The mountains studded with old and rusted mining towns, the highlands that stand silent vigil over the graves of their inhabitants, the woods allowed to grow for the beauty they provide...

Hence, a British Thrysus is liable to lean way more towards the Spirit side of their magic, rather than the Life side.
 
TenfoldShields said:
I really doubt a Thrysus is gonna be played as "now go into the wild and reconnect with your primal roots my friend, learn to love the biting insects", if only 'cause it's, uh, London yo. And London is pretty heavily urbanized. The Zoo metaphor is really applicable, there isn't much in terms of natural environment in England that hasn't been tamed or touched by mankind at some point, there's precious little that's really unknown or unexplored. Which is kinda the problem because you've got Roman spirits still around, jockeying for control with spirits of mass media and food crazes.

One of my favorite spirits in Shadows of the UK literally looks like Princess Diana and she's a sorta incarnation of "but how does this tragedy affect me, how does this national loss make me important", all about tying yourself into the media deluge and the synthetic and sometimes sycophantic displays of emotion it encourages. Everyone wants to be on TV.

(ALSO IF WE GO WITH ZOO WE CAN PROBABLY GET COOL SPIRIT FAMILIARS TO TALK TO JUST SAYING BUT HAVING A GHOST TIGER BUDDY OR SOME SHIT WOULD BE KINDA RAD)

Edit: I mean we also might get into screaming arguments with Ronald McDonald in the parking lot at 3 in the morning but nobody's perfect.
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Could you please explain to me what are nMage spirits?
Are they like Agent Smith and other ones from Matrix (aka bbasically sentient/sapient memetic entities of collective consciousness)? Or more like just spirits of everything that are for some reason hanging around, like in Shinto?

edit: well no, agents were, in fact, agents of the System so a bad example there I guess
 
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ctulhuslp said:
Could you please explain to me what are nMage spirits?
Are they like Agent Smith and other ones from Matrix (aka bbasically sentient/sapient memetic entities of collective consciousness)? Or more like just spirits of everything that are for some reason hanging around, like in Shinto?
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I think it's a bit of both but I'm far from an expert
 
ctulhuslp said:
Could you please explain to me what are nMage spirits?
Are they like Agent Smith and other ones from Matrix (aka bbasically sentient/sapient memetic entities of collective consciousness)? Or more like just spirits of everything that are for some reason hanging around, like in Shinto?
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The phrase "Silent Hill animism" has been used to describe the nWoD spirit world. It's not inaccurate.

Basically, when we get down to fundamentals, the spirit world is shaped by the essence produced by the material world. Trees make tree essence, dogs make dog essence and hunger essence and loyalty essence, shops make shop essence and greed essence and capitalism essence and so on. Pull enough essence together, and you get a spirit, a little cluster of (concept). At low levels, spirits aren't all that bright or strong. A tree spirit wants to grow, a dog spirit wants a pack, and so on.

Only, the thing about spirits is that they need to feed on essence - either the same kind of essence they are, or an essence kind that's naturally "preyed on" by their essence. So a dog spirit can eat all kinds of smaller animal spirits, or other dog spirits, and that makes it more "dog like". Alternatively, it can eat loyalty spirits and it becomes more of a dog-as-metaphor-for-loyal-protector spirit, or it comes across a murder scene, eats the death essence, and might become a Hound-of-the-Baskervilles-esque "dog as barghest and symbol of death".

The more powerful a spirit gets, the bigger, smarter and stronger it gets - and usually more abstract, too. A tree spirit might become the spirit of the whole forest by eating all the other tree spirits and stopping others forming. The spirit of a house becomes a guardian spirit when it feeds off the safety essence made by its inhabitants. The minimall spirit eats the greed and envy of its shoppers and becomes a predator that eats everything that enters it, drawing them in with the offer of cheap bargains - except some spirits might come to a deal with it and live in its mouth, like symbiotic fish picking the teeth of a shark.

If a spirit eats the wrong kinds of essence and there isn't a connection between its concepts, it becomes a magath - an insane spirit drawn between its nonsensical athematic desires.

And this is going on constantly. Throughout the entire spirit ecosystem. Car spirits are raiding petrol station spirits and drinking their essence in the form of petrol. Pigeon spirits are eating everything they can because they're urban scavengers. And all these spirits are building up their own associations and their own concepts and flowing together and constantly, constantly warring - and them sometimes they break into the material world and start changing things so they can get more of their kind of essence being made. A murder spirit possesses someone to make them cause more murders. A car spirit starts whispering in the ear of a car collector to get them to blow their fortune on rare models. An old woman is driven mad by the cat spirit possessing her cat who pushes her into becoming a crazy old cat lady, all so it can have a cat essence farm.
 
Now the memetic entities of collective unconsciousness exist. They are just not spirits but goetias, entities of pure Mind. And while there are goetia of the collective unconscious, they can also be very individual. Your greed. Your sense of right of wrong. Your Oedipus Complex, and so on.
 
ganonso said:
Now the memetic entities of collective unconsciousness exist. They are just not spirits but goetias, entities of pure Mind. And while there are goetia of the collective unconscious, they can also be very individual. Your greed. Your sense of right of wrong. Your Oedipus Complex, and so on.
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So it's a bit like the green lantern entities in that they are simply a representation of certain universal constructs such as greed loyalty etc. while manifesting an independant will and/or conciousness(albeit basic inimost cases)is that a good way of putting it based on what the last two posts including yours said?
 
EarthScorpion said:
The phrase "Silent Hill animism" has been used to describe the nWoD spirit world. It's not inaccurate.

Basically, when we get down to fundamentals, the spirit world is shaped by the essence produced by the material world. Trees make tree essence, dogs make dog essence and hunger essence and loyalty essence, shops make shop essence and greed essence and capitalism essence and so on. Pull enough essence together, and you get a spirit, a little cluster of (concept). At low levels, spirits aren't all that bright or strong. A tree spirit wants to grow, a dog spirit wants a pack, and so on.

Only, the thing about spirits is that they need to feed on essence - either the same kind of essence they are, or an essence kind that's naturally "preyed on" by their essence. So a dog spirit can eat all kinds of smaller animal spirits, or other dog spirits, and that makes it more "dog like". Alternatively, it can eat loyalty spirits and it becomes more of a dog-as-metaphor-for-loyal-protector spirit, or it comes across a murder scene, eats the death essence, and might become a Hound-of-the-Baskervilles-esque "dog as barghest and symbol of death".

The more powerful a spirit gets, the bigger, smarter and stronger it gets - and usually more abstract, too. A tree spirit might become the spirit of the whole forest by eating all the other tree spirits and stopping others forming. The spirit of a house becomes a guardian spirit when it feeds off the safety essence made by its inhabitants. The minimall spirit eats the greed and envy of its shoppers and becomes a predator that eats everything that enters it, drawing them in with the offer of cheap bargains - except some spirits might come to a deal with it and live in its mouth, like symbiotic fish picking the teeth of a shark.

If a spirit eats the wrong kinds of essence and there isn't a connection between its concepts, it becomes a magath - an insane spirit drawn between its nonsensical athematic desires.

And this is going on constantly. Throughout the entire spirit ecosystem. Car spirits are raiding petrol station spirits and drinking their essence in the form of petrol. Pigeon spirits are eating everything they can because they're urban scavengers. And all these spirits are building up their own associations and their own concepts and flowing together and constantly, constantly warring - and them sometimes they break into the material world and start changing things so they can get more of their kind of essence being made. A murder spirit possesses someone to make them cause more murders. A car spirit starts whispering in the ear of a car collector to get them to blow their fortune on rare models. An old woman is driven mad by the cat spirit possessing her cat who pushes her into becoming a crazy old cat lady, all so it can have a cat essence farm.
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Thanks for the explanation.
Also, how to phrase it....

I don't see the point of it so far. Not with "sometimes" influencing reality. From what you've explained I'd much prefer it to always influence reality, and be influenced by it in turn.
Otherwise, why should anybody care about spirits of the forest eating each other if this does not correspond to the forest itself shifting and twisting as Forest-As-Growth finally defeats Forest-As-Beauty and the place transforms from a cute picnic-parkland into overgrown, marshy and constantly evolving/expanding Old Forest?

Or vice versa, with human deforestation and controlled harvesting defeating more primeval spirits of forest and letting Forest-As-Beauty to reign supreme and remove all underbrush to allow for more domesticated forests with no wild animals but plenty of sunlit walkways and places for amateur photographers to do overexposed shots of sunlight streaming through the tree crowns - thus feeding it ever more.

It should be, as I understand, a thing about being a part of bigger ever-shifting world, with concepts being networked by a web of influences and interactions, so them not doing said influencing every moment would be kinda weird. Spirits which don't interact with the world might as well not exist.

I am not knowledgeable about the system and those who are (like, IIRC, you) tend to be fond of it, so I assume it can interact with the normal world in such ways quite frequently, right?
Or, if not: why makes them interesting then?
 
[X] A Court; the walls are decorated with portraits of your parents, smiling down at you. In the jury sit a dozen caricatures, with bloodshot eyes and teeth stained brown from drink. They watch you hungrily, fixated on your every word, while in the judge's box your twin sits and watches your fumbling speech with naked contempt.

[X] A Church; there is a priest and congregation, of course, but they are made of wax and wood. True faith left this place behind years ago, and now only the light remains. It streams down from on high, broken and repainted by windows of stained glass that stretch almost to the ceiling, and under its touch you could almost fool yourself into thinking the withered mannequins are strong and vital once again.
 
ctulhuslp said:
Thanks for the explanation.
Also, how to phrase it....

I don't see the point of it so far. Not with "sometimes" influencing reality. From what you've explained I'd much prefer it to always influence reality, and be influenced by it in turn.
Otherwise, why should anybody care about spirits of the forest eating each other if this does not correspond to the forest itself shifting and twisting as Forest-As-Growth finally defeats Forest-As-Beauty and the place transforms from a cute picnic-parkland into overgrown, marshy and constantly evolving/expanding Old Forest?

Or vice versa, with human deforestation and controlled harvesting defeating more primeval spirits of forest and letting Forest-As-Beauty to reign supreme and remove all underbrush to allow for more domesticated forests with no wild animals but plenty of sunlit walkways and places for amateur photographers to do overexposed shots of sunlight streaming through the tree crowns - thus feeding it ever more.

It should be, as I understand, a thing about being a part of bigger ever-shifting world, with concepts being networked by a web of influences and interactions, so them not doing said influencing every moment would be kinda weird. Spirits which don't interact with the world might as well not exist.

I am not knowledgeable about the system and those who are (like, IIRC, you) tend to be fond of it, so I assume it can interact with the normal world in such ways quite frequently, right?
Or, if not: why makes them interesting then?
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By influencing the material world, Earthscorpion was saying: "taking direct action beyond the barrier between the Shadow and the world of flesh." What you describe happens but it's a byproduct of the spirits existing in their natural state. Possession, whispers, even fusion are not what most spirits are able to do.

Also opening a gate to the Shadow and going there is rather high-level magic (Spirit 4 out of 5 I think). Going through the gate is ill-advised if you are not prepared for the journey. So even if we pick a Thyrsus we will mostly be dealing with the stragglers and border-hoppers of the spirit world.

A propos @Maugan Ra It's your quest but I think Life would still be important to Thyrsus in an urban environment. The cycles of the bodies, the adaptation of nature and the city, healing, sacred ecstasy beyond what society enables are part of what is to be a Ecstastic after all.
 
ctulhuslp said:
Thanks for the explanation.
Also, how to phrase it....

I don't see the point of it so far. Not with "sometimes" influencing reality. From what you've explained I'd much prefer it to always influence reality, and be influenced by it in turn.
Otherwise, why should anybody care about spirits of the forest eating each other if this does not correspond to the forest itself shifting and twisting as Forest-As-Growth finally defeats Forest-As-Beauty and the place transforms from a cute picnic-parkland into overgrown, marshy and constantly evolving/expanding Old Forest?

Or vice versa, with human deforestation and controlled harvesting defeating more primeval spirits of forest and letting Forest-As-Beauty to reign supreme and remove all underbrush to allow for more domesticated forests with no wild animals but plenty of sunlit walkways and places for amateur photographers to do overexposed shots of sunlight streaming through the tree crowns - thus feeding it ever more.

It should be, as I understand, a thing about being a part of bigger ever-shifting world, with concepts being networked by a web of influences and interactions, so them not doing said influencing every moment would be kinda weird. Spirits which don't interact with the world might as well not exist.

I am not knowledgeable about the system and those who are (like, IIRC, you) tend to be fond of it, so I assume it can interact with the normal world in such ways quite frequently, right?
Or, if not: why makes them interesting then?
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This mostly comes back to the "setting as toolbox" approach that the new world of darkness generally takes. How much spirits affect the world around them is something that changes depending on the needs of your story - in a game of Vampire The Requiem, for example, the behaviour of spirits have only the vaguest relevance to your story, and as such can be assumed to just be general reflections of the world that only affect change over the course of generations. In a game of Werewolf the Forsaken, by contrast, the habits and behaviours of the spirits take centre stage and can be expected to dominate most campaigns, and as such their actions spill over into the mortal world with a much greater frequency.

Mage: The Awakening is somewhere in-between these two extremes. Mages deal with spirits on a fairly regular basis, but it tends to happen as part of a different story - you care what the spirits are doing because their behaviour forms a clue to the Mystery you are currently trying to solve, or aim to appease them so you can gain a valuable ally against a rival mage. Hence, in this case, they 'sometimes' affect the material world.
 
ganonso said:
By influencing the material world, Earthscorpion was saying: "taking direct action beyond the barrier between the Shadow and the world of flesh." What you describe happens but it's a byproduct of the spirits existing in their natural state. Possession, whispers, even fusion are not what most spirits are able to do.
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Yeah, most spirits aren't even going anywhere near that so much as bumping probability in their favor. The Forest-As-Terror spirit would be nudging people to get lost, helping aggressive animals succeed in attacking, while the Forest-As-Beauty are bumping social interactions and artistic endeavors...and not even regularly at that. Weaker spirits can't exert themselves that often.

Generally then, unless theres a big spirit honcho, a mage or some other spirit-touching spoopy messing with them, a spirit is going to be the manifestation of an entirely natural feedback loop. A Forest-As-Beauty spirit is never going to form from old growth forests packed with wolves and bears, because whatever influence it can do is going to be simply drowned out before it gets anywhere.

But an old growth forest cut down and then grown back as a national park? Might well have a powerful spirit out there that remembers when humans feared the dark, and has enough power to try to bring things back.
 
Maugan Ra said:
This mostly comes back to the "setting as toolbox" approach that the new world of darkness generally takes. How much spirits affect the world around them is something that changes depending on the needs of your story - in a game of Vampire The Requiem, for example, the behaviour of spirits have only the vaguest relevance to your story, and as such can be assumed to just be general reflections of the world that only affect change over the course of generations. In a game of Werewolf the Forsaken, by contrast, the habits and behaviours of the spirits take centre stage and can be expected to dominate most campaigns, and as such their actions spill over into the mortal world with a much greater frequency.

Mage: The Awakening is somewhere in-between these two extremes. Mages deal with spirits on a fairly regular basis, but it tends to happen as part of a different story - you care what the spirits are doing because their behaviour forms a clue to the Mystery you are currently trying to solve, or aim to appease them so you can gain a valuable ally against a rival mage. Hence, in this case, they 'sometimes' affect the material world.
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I have a very important system question.

What happens if you dramatically fail an attempt to summon an Abyssal being? Is it the inverse of dramatically failing to summon a Supernal being?

"oh hi uriel i actually intended to summon anumerus but i guess the fire of god will have to do. can u help me fuck up math"
 
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