Please share tips and resources for Mage the Ascension

[MNblockhead]

Check out Mage Made Easy, by the guy who wrote M20. It's a collection of advice and hacks to make the game easier to digest and run:

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

Well worth a look.

How Do You Do That breaks down the magic system with examples and systems to use:

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

These are some cheat sheets I gave to my current batch of players (they summarise stuff in M20):

Creating Effects: M20 Cheat Sheet.pdf
Sphere Ranks: M20 Sphere Summaries.pdf

This is a general index I found online (can't remember who made it - sorry). It pretty extensive and handy:

Dropbox - Error - Simplify your life

www.dropbox.com

Your idea of starting as Orphans and learning through play is the perfect way to go. The M20 Quickstart isn't great at explaining the game - it's more of a collection of rules excerpts. Mage Made Easy is a better place to look. But you should definitely start small, focus on a particular area and theme, and just explore that through play. Set a scope that you and your players are comfortable with and just stick with that. Mage is a huge game, but your chronicle doesn't have to be. My chronicle just turned 25 this August, and we started out with stuff like "save this church from being demolished because it's a Node" and "rescue your brother from the Nephandus" and "accidentally blow up the Technocracy safe house with a tragic gas explosion" and the like. Tight focus works well - the story will grow organically from there.

Fire off any questions you have as you go - myself or another Mage fan will be happy to jump in and share our thoughts. They will all be contradictory, of course, but that's Mage

Thank you! This is great! I'll definitely hit you up with questions as I get started.

 

[MNblockhead]

@Mark Hope Do you know whether there are any VTT systems or World Anvil templates that support Mage character sheets? We will probably just stick to the interactive PDF files, but I would be interested if there are any online-play assets for MtA 20th.

 

[Mark Hope]

@Mark Hope Do you know whether there are any VTT systems or World Anvil templates that support Mage character sheets? We will probably just stick to the interactive PDF files, but I would be interested if there are any online-play assets for MtA 20th.

I do not know that, sorry. There may well be but I am unaware of any - my online games are run using Zoom and Shoutcast and are quite light-touch when it comes to electronic assets.

 

[MNblockhead]

Gah! I should change this thread to MtA20 support group. Never have I had such a love/hate relationship with a game. The core mechanics are fine, the magic system is unique and flavorful and the primary reason for me wanting to run a MAGE game. I've been outlining campaign ideas and am excited when I'm doing that. But every time I have to go to the rule book, I want to toss it and work on my Cortex Prime game instead.

First, Onyx Press pads the book with so much fluff--pages and pages of stories. I would would love to a reference that was only the rules. I can always go to the main book for setting material. Also the rules in the main book are just terribly organized. Even character creation is a confusing mess.

I've built up a MAGE character sheet in Role, which will be an ideal platform for running my on-line MAGE game and having to design the character sheet has forced me to work my way through the rules more. Even the quick starts and reference guides are heavy for a system that just does not seem like it needs to be so complicated.

The whole attitude of the Onyx Press seems to cater to uber fans and an attempt to create some kind of an in-group. Even registering for the Onyx Press forum to post questions to Mage discussion boards was annoying. The random questions to register are all reference to other Onyx Press products requiring me to Google the answers, which was a big turn off.

Do people buy this stuff for lonely play? Do they just like reading all stories that pad all the books? Does anyone actually play the game? There are so few resources for the game that I seriously question whether it is meant to be played.

Just venting here. I'm pretty solid on the core mechanics and am now focused on getting more comfortable with the magic system.

But I wish there were published adventures for MAGE I could reference. I could really use a bunch of NPCs I can work from as well. Most likely I would be tweaking everything for my own campaign, but it would be nice if I didn't have to do EVERYTHING from scratch.

 

[MNblockhead]

Okay, so I found "God and Monsters", on DTRPG. This helps a lot. I wish I could filter on MAGE in DTRPG. Even after searching in DTRPG I didn't find this book until going through the Onyx Press blog posts. Not sure why they don't have a list of all their MAGE publications. They don't make buying their stuff easy.

 

[Voadam]

Okay, so I found "God and Monsters", on DTRPG. This helps a lot. I wish I could filter on MAGE in DTRPG. Even after searching in DTRPG I didn't find this book until going through the Onyx Press blog posts. Not sure why they don't have a list of all their MAGE publications. They don't make buying their stuff easy.

They do have a mage section on Drivethru, two actually. Here is the Mage20 one and here is their earlier Mage Revised one.

Go to the main Onyx Path publisher page on Drivethru (publisher pages are a category on the left on the main page), scroll down a little on the Onyx page and you will see icon entries for their currently 37 game lines, click on any one to see stuff just for that particular game line.

Also see the White Wolf page for similar things from 1e, 2e, and Revised before Onyx Path got involved.

There were never many pre-done adventures for Mage, Loom of Fate and the crossover Chaos Factor (Combined in Mage Chronicles 3) from 1e comes to mind.

 

[MNblockhead]

@Voadam Thanks, didn't come up in the system search in DTRPG. But I see that Onyx Path has a sub-category. Book marked!

I'll look at Loom of Fate and Chaos Factor. The Gods and Monsters book is actually very useful. I also got the DMs screen, which seems like it'll be useful.

 

[Voadam]

Yeah the system category there only goes down to the World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness level for the White Wolf games.

 

[Mark Hope]

The whole attitude of the Onyx Press seems to cater to uber fans...

At least as far as the 20th anniversary editions are concerned, this is pretty much exactly what is going on. They're compilations/love-letters-to-the-fans that try to bring together the previous three editions under one roof. As you've seen, this is somewhat unwieldy. The writing style in M20 is quite florid too, so it's not always a book that's easy to leaf through in order to find what you're after.

As you've seen, there are some good NPCs in Gods & Monsters. If you want to look at older editions, there are a few sample mages in Guide to the Traditions, assorted mortals and critters in Destiny's Price (stat blocks for these were repeated in Tales of Magick: Dark Adventure). There are sample characters in all of the Tradition and Convention books as well.

As for adventures, there were about a dozen in total, but only three were stand-alone products - Loom of Fate, Chaos Factor, and Angel of Mercy. Loom of Fate is quite interesting with lots of detail and dilemmas to work with. Chaos Factor is a batshit insane crossover with Vampire and Werewolf - good fun but completely over the top. Angel of Mercy was the first adventure for Mage and is a simple affair about stopping a demon summoning - I quite like it.

When it comes to building a chronicle on a general level, you might want to check out Book of Mirrors and the Storytellers Handbook. These are, respectively, the GM guides for Mage 2e and Mage 3e. The former is very 90s in feel but has some solid thematic advice on building a Mage game, running a chronicle. The latter is more rules-oriented and gives lots of interesting ways to hack and mod your game. Both are good.

Yes, people do play and run Mage . It is easily the most challenging game I've ever run but when it works it's very rewarding. I feel your pain, though. I bought the game, tried to run a session and it was a disaster. It took me eight more months of reading and prep to feel ready to start again. Not the most accessible way to get into a game at all. Worth it, though.

 

[Mark Hope]

FWIW, here are all the Mage adventures, with the products they appear in:

Angel of Mercy

Ascension
Judgment
The Revolution Will Be Televised
The Earth Will Shake
A Whimper, Not A Bang
Hell on Earth

Book of Chantries
Harvest Time

Chaos Factor

Digital Web
Tale Recursion
Deus Ex Machina

Fallen Tower
Win Free Stuff!

Hidden Lore
Shadows in the Rain

Infinite Tapestry
The Master's Voice

Loom of Fate

Manifesto
Alien Avatar