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A Storytelling game of magick-with-a-k.

I was a Vampire: the Masquerade kid in the 90s, and Mage: the Ascension almost entirely passed me by. I vaguely knew about it through hearing people at my high school's Gaming Club talk about it, but none of them ever ran a game and so I had no direct experience with it. About the closest I got was that after I saw The Matrix, I had the amazing insight that this was the story of a Virtual Adept's Awakening! As soon as I got home, I and went to White Wolf's old website with all the spinning ankh gifs, clicked on the Mage forums and, in an act that would characterize my behavior on the internet to this day, I noticed that there were two dozen other threads with the exact same brilliant insight and closed Netscape Navigator without posting anything.

Other than occasionally reading about it on the internet or seeing the charred wreckage of the many flamewars the game inspired, I knew very little, and I finally figured that I should read it for myself and learn what all the fuss was about and why it seemed to inspire so much passion from its fans. And yeah, pretty much from the opening fiction Mage: the Ascension grabbed me by the imagination and didn't let go. I mean, look at this quote:

Compromise is dangerous in the realm of the mage, and survival runs at premium rates. Night glitters here like bloodstained glass, and the world seems caught between a madrigal and a scream. The woods are dark and monstrous, the cities labyrinths of steel and pavement. In the shadows, beings out of nightmares plot and bicker. Welcome to the World of Darkness, a distillation of modern twilight.

And that's a great start, but it's not all angst. It's got starship battles off the moons of Jupiter! It's got cyborgs fighting wizards in pointy hats! It's got 500-year-old mages hidden in secret spirit realms! It's got horrific Lovecraftian abominations from the dark between the stars! It's got manifested concepts of justice and purity! It's got secret conspiracies fighting to control the very fate of the world! It's set in a twisted reflection of our world!

It's pretty much tailor-made for me to think it's great, honestly. A game where belief literally creates reality and the main factions all have different approaches to this leads to a great gaming background. The Technocracy wants to nail down the rules of the world and apply them equally everywhere and is deliberately wiping out anyone who doesn't fit into that vision (they even call it "the Pogrom"), but as a side effect, anyone can take penicillin for an illness and effectively "do magick." The Traditions fight for the freedom of individuals to decide for themselves and for the possibility of every single human's eventual Awakening, but the result back when they were ascendant were warring wizards and most people at the mercy of the supernatural things stalking the Earth.

Sure, the concept of Consensual Reality and technology as magic is ridiculous if you think about it for even a moment, but it leads to great stories. I love the idea the book teases that early on in human history, there wasn't really any "the world," but rather a bunch of isolated world-islands, each with slightly different natural laws and separated by a shifting wilderness that didn't have any sapience to firmly nail down its traits. When there were spots on the map marked "here there be dragons," it was literal. I also like the idea that the rest of the universe and the spirit world are one and the same, and that there are alien grays ("Ka Luon," in Mage's terms) who show up and abduct people for inscrutable reasons and that the similarities between faerie folklore and alien abductions are because it's the same kind of being doing the stealing. Or maybe not. And the Void Engineers, one of the Technocratic factions, send out space marines to fight all the alien horrors that try to invade the Earth. That's amazing. The sheer breadth of stories you can tell with this game boggles the mind.

The character types available do a good job of indicating that this is not your normal game of playing mages. Sure, there are the Order of Hermes, who are your stereotypical bearded old men with musty tomes and ravens perched on skulls, and the Verbena, who are witches that dance naked beneath the full moon, and the Dreamspeakers, who are basically every real-world shamanic and traditional religious/spiritual practice shoved into a single Tradition and rendered only slightly less racist by the note that this was an exonym imposed on them by the other members of the Council. But there's also the Sons of Ether, who build death rays and clockwork golems and star-faring etherships and practice SCIENCE!!!! with all the inherent exclamation points. There are the Akashic Brotherhood, who are wuxia martial artists. There are the Virtual Adepts, who played an important role in The Matrix. There are the Hollow Ones, whose entire life is set to the Sisters of Mercy. Hey, it was the 90s.

Each Tradition specializes in a Sphere, which is one of the ways that magic effects reality. Spheres include ones like Life or Time or Mind, the effects of which are pretty obvious, but also Correspondence, which effects the relationship between different places, or Entropy, which is about death but also about chance and fate, or Prime, which is about the raw essence of magic itself. There are plenty of examples of what each Sphere can do, but I can see a lot of room for interpretation and a lot of arguing when people don't agree.

And that leads to the biggest source of in-game arguments--Paradox. Anything that is obviously impossible incurs Paradox, so mages have to be circumspect with their magic. But what counts as impossible? Mage: the Ascension says that consensual reality is different in different places, and 45% of Americans believe in ghosts, so is summoning the dead in America coincidental, or vulgar? What's the difference between vulgar and vulgar with witnesses, and would summoning a ghost be coincidental if a believer was observing but vulgar with witnesses if a non-believer was observing? The intro fiction implies this when one of the mages weaponizes Paradox to cause a clockwork deathbot to wink out of existence when observed, but that requires the ST to determine who is watching every single time any spell is cast, so is that really the intent? And who exactly is "watching" when something is vulgar but not vulgar with witnesses? Is pulling a gun out of one's coat always coincidental, whether the gun is teleported from the mage's bedstand, created out of nothing, or just happened to retroactively have been there all along?

You should probably figure that out before you start playing. Hopefully without the GM and players killing each other.

Last but not least is the concept of paradigm and foci. After all, mages don't think of themselves as having Sphere ratings. There are specific tools and behaviors that let magic work. A Verbena witch might dance beneath the full moon to put a curse on her enemies, and couldn't hurl fireballs even if she had enough dots in Forces. An Order of Hermes wizard could hurl a fireball if he recited the exact words that compelled the forces of the universe to his bidding, but if gagged he can't do magic at all. A Son of Ether SCIENTIST!!! can't do any magic with dance or gestures or chanting, but he can certainly build an Explosive Ether-Connective Flame Projector to cause blasts of flame to appear where he points it. As mages' Arete rating goes up they start to realize that none of this is actually necessary, but it's an important part of a mage's mindset early in their career.

The rules that back all this up are...perfunctory, at best. The basic White Wolf system of Attribute + Ability as a pool of dice, roll versus a difficulty number and count successes, is actually really good for the kind of dramatic games about dramatic dramas that the book implies are the focus because it lets the GM quickly pick an appropriate mechanism and call for a roll. An Akashic Brother wants to spin a gun around their chiseled chest muscles before cocking it and pointing it in order to intimidate some Nephandi? Uh, Appearance + Firearms, Difficulty 8. Done.

The problem is that most examples given in the book require multiple successes, generally between two and four, and that 1s on dice subtract successes. This means that bigger dice pools are a problem because there's greater odds of rolling 1s, and higher Difficulties cause problems too for the same reason. At Difficulty 10, every die has an equal chance of rolling a 1 or a success, and I imagine that led to a lot of tears over time. Furthermore, the rules for magic require rolling Arete, which ranges from 1 to 3 for a starting character, against a Difficulty of the appropriate Sphere + 4, and it requires multiple successes to affect other people. I'm left a bit confused about how starting characters managed to do any magic at all without spending massive amounts of Quintessence all the time, which is thematic in enforcing a world where magic is dying away but not for one with spaceship battles off the moons of Jupiter. The note that a mage can choose how much of the Arete to use for a roll, with a higher amount allowing for more successes but increasing the possibility of 1s and thus of a catastrophic failure, does perfectly tie into the themes of hubris that Mage: the Ascension trades in, but I'm not sure its worth the effects on the rest of the system.

Most of the Spheres have "sense [x]" as their level one effect, so a starting mage can't do that much. And while there are plenty of examples in the book, a lot of them require multiple Spheres to accomplish anything, at a higher level and with more Spheres than a beginning character will have. Take a mage who wants to snap their fingers and light a candle. That takes a minimum of Forces 3 (for the flame), Correspondence 2 (to affect something further away), and Prime 2 (to make something from nothing). Starting characters only get six dots of Spheres, so it's impossible for a starting character to snap their fingers and light a candle.

But! What if the mage has Entropy and wants to reverse the progress of Entropy and have the candle deburn, creating flame in the process? What if the mage has Time and wants to pull a time when the candle is burning and overlap it with the present? And the candle is made of unliving physical material, so does the mage need Matter to affect it? Some of this comes down to what the mage's paradigm is, but the strict hierarchy of Sphere effects enforces a paradigm of its own, and there will inevitably be clashes between what the player understand their mage can do and what the rules say they need to do it. As above, make sure everyone is on the same page.

This utter ambiguity is part of why Mage is so famous at causing disputes. I remember hearing about someone who went on to the White Wolf forums, posted a thread with the subject "mage" and the first post only containing the word "mage," and by two pages it was already a flamewar. But despite all its flaws, Mage: the Ascension is just exploding with creativity and vital energy. I would have loved this game if I had read it when I was 16, but now in my 30s I have pretty much the exact same reaction. Nearly every page gave me more ideas for games, characters, plots, and stories, and by the end of the book I had enough to last me the rest of my life even if I never ran another RPG. I'd have to spend a good chunk of that wrestling the rules into something that actually works, but you know, I wouldn't mind. Mage: the Ascension is an excellent game that would definitely be worth the effort.

You may begin the flamewar below the line:

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