Mage the Ascension Question

[Saeviomagy]

One of the Protocols is "Protect the Sleepers; they are ignorant of what they do." (2nd Edition Mage rulebook, pg 46) The Sleepers are those who are not supernatural.

Well, first up I never said they considered humanity an enemy - they consider the technocracy (who, as far as I understand it are the foundations of science, which is currently what underpins reality) the enemy. Their goal is to wake all the sleepers, which necessitates showing them that reality is not what it seems, correct? Once all the sleepers are awakened, fully awakened, the total lack of belief in what is real causes the collapse of reality to be replaced by... whatever the masses of mages decide they want at any given time or place. If time and place even exist still.

That, to me, is replacing reality with chaos, and doing it in such a way that it practically ensures disaster on the way there.

 

[Razz0putin]

Seeten said
<Some people might be wargamer/gamer with no roleplayer, and be hard pressed to make a character, I guess, but they are the sort of players not apt to want to be involved with Mage anyway.>

and I second that however in defense of the first comment which seriously generalizes all rpgers I Haven't found a group that could play it. But that doesn't keep me from looking

 

[King of Old School]

Well, first up I never said they considered humanity an enemy - they consider the technocracy (who, as far as I understand it are the foundations of science, which is currently what underpins reality) the enemy. Their goal is to wake all the sleepers, which necessitates showing them that reality is not what it seems, correct? Once all the sleepers are awakened, fully awakened, the total lack of belief in what is real causes the collapse of reality to be replaced by... whatever the masses of mages decide they want at any given time or place. If time and place even exist still.

That, to me, is replacing reality with chaos, and doing it in such a way that it practically ensures disaster on the way there.

No.

1) The Technocracy aren't the "foundations" of science. They're mages who adopted science as their paradigm, and have succeeded in spreading it as the dominant paradigm in modern society. But they didn't create it, any more than the Celestial Chorus created monotheism in general or Christianity (the dominant paradigm in Europe until rational secularism took hold) in particular.

2) The Technocracy is the enemy, since one of their avowed goals is to eliminate any paradigm of magic beyond their own and to bring all mages directly under their authority. It has little to nothing to do with science. Without the Technocracy and the very real threat it presents, there wouldn't even be a Council.

3) Not every tradition holds the broad Awakening of the masses as a goal -- I can't see the Order of Hermes viewing such an occurence with anything short of dread and disdain, frex. The one thing the Trads could agree they want is a world safe for magic, rather than a magical world. There's a huge difference.

4) Not every element of reality is subject to the localized, immediate beliefs of the people in the vicinity. There was reality before there was human belief, and a lot of the big stuff (gravity, air, light) is more or less "fixed" by forces beyond mere human belief. The threat to reality posed by the ascension of a magical worldview is vastly overstated -- otherwise, the world before the rise of the Order of Reason would have been utterly chaotic. It wasn't.

For emphasis: the point of the Technocracy isn't science, it's fascism. Authority, conformity, dehumanization.

KoOS

 

[Mercule]

For emphasis: the point of the Technocracy isn't science, it's fascism. Authority, conformity, dehumanization.

Right. The tie to science is that many "modern" things foster this dehumanization -- automated factories, astronomy/biology that makes earth/humans less and less unique, technologic advances (eg. genetics) that allow us to "fix" a variety of "problems" that may define us, etc. The Traditions were representative of the ways real people, in the real world, confront and deal with some of these issues -- Hermetics = searching for anti-tech or magic, Verbena and Dreamspeakers = a renewed reverence and repect for nature, the Chorus = solice in God (Christian or otherwise), CoX = hedonism or tantric medititation, Akashics = various Oriental philosophies and more controlled meditations, SoE and Adepts = a zeal for the potential of science rather than submitting to its inevitability, etc.

The setting info for Mage always had bits that referred back to pre-modern times and portrayed the hubris and wrongness of the dominance of the Traditions. It was flat-out stated that Medieval Europe was no better than today, just different. The real advancement was that the Traditions, to an extent, learned from their fall and were now more a force of balance and moderation. They still had their hard-line adherents, but the promise of the Traditions lay in those who were willing to grow.

 

[kigmatzomat]

I think this is the sort of place where a good GM, who has a solid grip on what he feels the spheres do, and can convey that to the players, makes all the difference.

I must, regretfully, concur. I ran Mage 1e for a while and it nearly fell apart multiple times because what I thought, the setting books said, the rules described, and the players understood didn't mesh in the slightest. The game managed to continue but the people who were in the game the longest were the least creative because they'd been beat down so much by either myself or the rules.

I haven't played Mage:Revised but I'd recommend Mage:Sorceror's Crusade. The modern setting books were a bit more Jedi/New Age in a lot of regards that resulted in almost toothless-paradigms. M:SC forces a bit stronger adherence to paradigms while not limiting creativity within that mental framework.

As to the moral stances displayed within the game, I think I have to come down on the side of those who say the game wasn't so much against technology as it was for freedom of thought.

There were a few published supplements that painted the Technocracy in a gray light. I treated it like our own government; something so large that it naturally had a mixture of good and evil individuals. Some regions were generally benevolent, others domineering. As a whole it tended to be a bit...distant but not malicious. That worked out very well since the PCs had a couple of Technocrats who supported them, sometimes against other Technocrats.

My main evidence comes from the WoD history. The organization that eventually became the Technocracy was, in early times, called the Order of Reason. Before that, it was called the Order of Pure thought, and included mystics who were not scientific at all, but were very into doctrine.

M:SC covers this time frame in a bit more detail. "Traditional" mages tended to be a bit more provincial while the Order of Reason tries to usher in the Renaissance. Well, most of them, a few would be happy with everyone being good catholic peasants without all that uppity thought.

If you can find a group that can deal with the Mage magic system it can be an *incredibly* rewarding game. The most fun I've had playing a mage was in a Sabbat Vampire game where I was doing my best to conceal my arcane powers. The characters thought I was some kind of psychic since I generally relied on little beyond sensory rotes and a bit of creation magic to have whatever gear we needed "handily" stashed in the trunk of my car.

 

[Umbran]

Their goal is to wake all the sleepers, which necessitates showing them that reality is not what it seems, correct? Once all the sleepers are awakened, fully awakened, the total lack of belief in what is real causes the collapse of reality to be replaced by....

...something resembling the world before the Technocracy.

You keep calling the world without the Technocracy "total chaos". But you've got no proof that such would be the case. The only evidence we have of what it might be like is the world before the Technocracy solidified the paradigm - and that world was not "total chaos". People lived pretty darned well in it for thousands of years. The height of Arabian and Chinese and African civilizations happened before the Technocrats took control. Were those lands "total chaos"?

 

[Saeviomagy]

You keep calling the world without the Technocracy "total chaos". But you've got no proof that such would be the case. The only evidence we have of what it might be like is the world before the Technocracy solidified the paradigm - and that world was not "total chaos". People lived pretty darned well in it for thousands of years. The height of Arabian and Chinese and African civilizations happened before the Technocrats took control. Were those lands "total chaos"?

I think perhaps my problem is that I've got no concept of how far back the technocrats actually go. I always got the impression that the answer is "all the way back to prehistory". From some of the responses I'm getting here, I guess some other book clarifies that that is not actually the case?

 

[King of Old School]

I think perhaps my problem is that I've got no concept of how far back the technocrats actually go. I always got the impression that the answer is "all the way back to prehistory". From some of the responses I'm getting here, I guess some other book clarifies that that is not actually the case?

Technocratic propaganda (i.e. the IC stuff in GttTech) might suggest that small-t technocrats stretch back into prehistory, but pretty much everything else in the Mage line places the rise of what became the Technocracy in the European medieval period (i.e. late Ars Magica), with the Order of Reason. Component parts (e.g. the Cabal of Pure Thought) stretch back a bit earlier, but not much.

KoOS

 

[Umbran]

I think perhaps my problem is that I've got no concept of how far back the technocrats actually go. I always got the impression that the answer is "all the way back to prehistory". From some of the responses I'm getting here, I guess some other book clarifies that that is not actually the case?

Ah, that would be the problem. Whenever it may have begun, the Technocracy's reign pretty much begins with what we westerners would call the "Age of Reason". Basically, anything before the Renaissance is not under Technocratic rule.