Mage:the Awakening is out. Opinions?

[Masleh]

Wow, and here I thought most of the stoires about Enworld were exagerated (kidding, keep those flamethrowers in the pants)

anyway I don't possess old Mage corebook and have never played old Mage (Mage the Ascsension yes?, I'm slightly confused because many of you claiming to be such experts on the setting have mussed the two in multiple examples, though given the maturity in these judgement based arguments I suppose I can't complain)

This said, from what I've heard about Mage the Ascension (which is relatively little, mostly net sources ((you know, that thing that has little statistical value ) I was deeply intrested in Mage the Awakening, a chance to get into the new beginnings of something based on a system that I couldn't get enough of. (I bought as many MtAs as I could, meaning only fluff books to use in my D&D campaigns) What you've done with Mage the Awakening, as far as I can tell, is make a book for the masses. Great business sense, but leaves me feeling a little depressed. Here, I'll do a breakdown for you.

-In my opinion, your What the hell moments-

-The Supernal Realm- Okay, this is far and away better then an Atlantis Mythos, and despite what is said on these boards, is a larger focus of M:tAw then said city, thing is though, it makes absolutely no sense. We have no idea what the Supernal Realm is, or why our "souls/Daimons" would be there in the first place. Did people (or at least the Awakened)
origionally come from the Supernal Realm? If we were tossed down from the heights for trying to reach it, why would we (our Daimons) be there in the first place? Or, when a Mage casts spells, what about the Supernal realm is so special that the Mage may make his desires manifest there? We already have a realm of conscious and unconsious dreaming, so what's the point of the Supernal other then as a source of energy?

--what could have been done to fix this--- Explain more of the Supernal Realms, espescially its clearly Subjective nature. Explain what the Supernal is, why do Mages wish to attain that level of existence?

-Atlantis- Don't get me wrong, I love Atlantian myths, but this is so small and one natured that its inclusion as a central theme is mind-boggling.-

--Don't just use Atlantis.don't just explain Atlantis and have it out, there's so much more that could be done with it. The City of Pillars, the Tower of Babel, R;lyeh, the list is endless, so why are Mages limitied to this one city? It's inferred that many cultures created their own versions of Atlantis, but that's never specifically stated...it should have been. And please, if I'm wrong, correct me with a page number. World culture was woefully ignored here, which brings me to my next point.--

-of Dragons and Exarchs and Oracles oh my!-
........really? Honestly, think about it a second and ask yourselves what exactly it strips away from humanity. Vampire is about the kind of monster a person can become, Werewolf is about the kind of monster a person can become, Mage is about the kind of monster that the truth can become. But humanity isn't lead to the Truth through their own enlightenment of a Truth, they're led to it by dragons (even if these dragons are only symbolyic) Suddenly the Truth isn't something that has any kind of fear, it just is, it's just a kernel of knowledge. It goes from to oh. That's what I think alot of people have a hard time about understanding Mage though, it's just as horrible as Vampire or Werewolf, but in Mage the horror and the monster is the Truth. As if this isn't bad enough, modern "mages" now get enlightenment soley from metaphysical graffiti on a Watchtower BUILT BY SOMEONE ELSE. The problem here, the shallowness of the new setting (or I could be mistaken, could be all of Mage in general) is that the Truth is never really the characters, he's always getting it in kernels handed down from On High. This is the kind of thing I'd expect to see in Call of Cthulhu, not what I was expecting out of Mage:tAw.
-

--I've got no idea how to fix that big glaring mistake. This is what determines whether or not the system is worth salvaging (at least in my opinion)--

-
Orders: What exactly differs these from job descriptions? The only clear differince in IDEALOGY instead of simply method is the Free Council (allarmingly similar to the Inviticus of Vampire). They're differint in only the way they carry out their business. Even the real differinces of idealogy contradict each other with no room for a middle ground. (specifically the Gaurdians of the Viel and Free Councils suports of hiding the occult from Sleepers and Enlightening the masses, respectively) I realize it's been made painfully clear in many parts of the text that the GotV only divert Sleepers away from the dangerous occult, and aren't as bad as the Seers of the Throne, but...if it looks like an apple, tastes like an apple, and smells like an apple, then chances are it's an apple. No matter how many times or how forcefully the text tells me it isn't. But back to the Orders. As was already pointed out you have four factions that do differint jobs within a larger group, the Atlantian "orders" should have been One order, with five around them. They aren't seperated by ideal or philosophy, but by role. And don't just spout off "It's in the book" read me or find me the exact passage that shows a differince profound enough to hinge a major portion of the game on.
-

--Solution: Make the Atlantians a seperate order, create new orders as needed. For inspiration see M:tAs or Planescape,

Minor Beefs
----

Rotes- It's been said already, but I'll chime in with the chorus, this is too close to comfort to the list of spells we get from games with a Vancian system, most of the reason people come to Mage is to get away from such limiting notions.

Feeble enemies- The primary antagonists (Exarchs and their earthly proxies the Seers) just seem a little over-rated as villans go. They're one order compared to the Atlantians five, they have no real reason to be better connected to the upper reaches of society excpet as granted by the Exarchs, who may or may not exist. We're told their here to keep the Sleepers in their place, but never told why this benefits the Seers or the Exarchs. They work logicaly enough I suppose, but one would think that one order would have been wiped out by the other four by now.
-----------

---What I do like----
Connection to the Spirit Realm
Less emphasis on the weirder aspects of the meeting of sorcery and science
Elimination of the more bizarro Mage cults
Inclusion of Atlantis (yeah, I liked it. Abit too much influence, but I'm glad it was there)

----Conclusion----
White Wolf created a very sellable, very playable game. But that's all they've made, a game, with all the lack of depth that implies. Mage the Awakening is a system of rules useable to play sorcerors in the modern world, and does that effectively, but they've lost sight of what it -means- to be sorcerors in the modern world. Take all those rituals and rites of every religion, and one will come up with about 99% of our modern basis for magic. If all this is true, that means that magic must simply be based on belief. Because magic in this setting isn't, magic just comes off as a tool, no more or less exciting then mundane methods. Mage the Awakening takes out what was for me it's predecessors greatest appeal; that it bent magic to modern sensibilities while keeping the wonder. Awakening on the other hand does neither of these.

When you bought Mage the Ascension you bought a story you could tell in your own way, and a oreat story at that. Mage the Awakening is simply another game system. Efficient, but depressing compared to what it could have been.

 

[GRIMJIM]

Ah screw it, I think people are intelligent enough to get what I'm saying and the only inherent bias I'm seeing is being used by the people batting down the criticisms.

I really wanted to like this and I didn't score it badly, just 'average'.

Opinions on RW Occult tradition differ as much as opinions on gaming, so that side of the argument isn't going to get anywhere either. Suffice to say I don't regard using Blavatsky as a reference as in any way increasing credibility there, the old fraud.

Ultimately the source of the problem is likely that oMage was so open to interpretation it could be all things to all people while sharing a common language, compared to that the flaw in Awakening is it's one-true-wayism.

 

[eyebeams]

You forgot Cayce! How could you forget Cayce?

Which is pretty much what he said as most of those authors have very little to do with contemporary occult reading. While Blavatsky and the others are known, they have pretty much been dropped by modern occult as science has dropped ether theory. The old Mage with it's willworkers and paradigm magick is much closer to Crowley's definition of magick and the recent works of Hine and Carrol. Victorian occult revival is pretty much forgotten and most treat the NAZIs as kooks going along with the original posters opinion that it falls more in line with "My First Spellbook" (published by Llywellyn, I'm sure). The mentioning of the Abyss and even the watchtowers are much closer to current occult theories than the inclusion of Atlantis and these are not in step with much more than Hermetic tradition which is the belief that magic is learned through knowledge. Belief that magic(k) comes from the standardized monoteistic god via prayer would be more kabbalistic. The kabbalah is a hermetic tradtion, but a hermetic tradtion does not have to be monotheistic. I doubt if many of my "wicca" (I use the term loosely) friends would see much of their magic in the current explanation let alone the ones that actually attempt at recreation of pre-Christian religions. Of course there is no standard list of texts on magic and each person's veiw is probably skewed as mine is due my association with the OTO and various chaos magicians.

Crowley wrote extensively about Atlantis in Liber 51. Give it a read some time.

Atlantis is a large part of the contemporary occult mythos (as evinced by its presence in occult literature that you personally don't like. Then again, I think Crowley is nonsense and is yoga lectures are particularly embarrassing, so YMMV) as well as the historical occult mythos. These are facts. They just happen to be ones that you probably don't care for. In fact, Atlantis has the advantage of being a place with an enduring influence on the Western occult tradition (from Plato to Bacon to the present) instead of being a matter of a few decades' of recent fashion (like "Chaos Magic").

It may be amusing that Mage brings up ideas of comics rather than the occult, but really, it is closer to comics than the occult. It is a game after all and that is to be expected. If I wanted to deal with real life philisophical issues, I have other resources for that.

Including your association with guys who believed in Atlantis mythology, via the OTO. Perhaps you should do more reading about them to avoid associating yourself with mythology that isn't to your taste.

Any more experts?

 

[eyebeams]

Opinions on RW Occult tradition differ as much as opinions on gaming, so that side of the argument isn't going to get anywhere either. Suffice to say I don't regard using Blavatsky as a reference as in any way increasing credibility there, the old fraud.

Yes, I'm sure your favourite magic people are much more convincing than other magic people. This is highly amusing, considering it directly contradicts your complaint that Awakening lacks inclusivity.

 

[Michael Tree]

Wow, and here I thought most of the stoires about Enworld were exagerated (kidding, keep those flamethrowers in the pants)

This thread is quite atypical for ENWorld. It's more of an RPG.net flamwar that's migrated here.

Rotes- It's been said already, but I'll chime in with the chorus, this is too close to comfort to the list of spells we get from games with a Vancian system, most of the reason people come to Mage is to get away from such limiting notions.

I like the distinction between rotes and spontaneous casting. I suspect that one of the main reasons why people are concerned about it being too much like a D&D spell list is that the book is sadly lacking in consise guidelines for what each level of arcana can do. They created a nice straightforward framework of what the different "practices" are, but then never described how they apply to each of the arcanum. The rote examples help, but without more straightforward backgrounds its very easy to lose the forest for the trees.

 

[eyebeams]

I like the distinction between rotes and spontaneous casting. I suspect that one of the main reasons why people are concerned about it being too much like a D&D spell list is that the book is sadly lacking in consise guidelines for what each level of arcana can do. They created a nice straightforward framework of what the different "practices" are, but then never described how they apply to each of the arcanum. The rote examples help, but without more straightforward backgrounds its very easy to lose the forest for the trees.

The practices are fairly well structured compared to Ascension's system, but I personally would have preferred them to be more front and center in the organization of the game.

A practice maps across two ranks: the basic practice is the minimum rank and the advanced is one rank higher. An advanced practice gives you preferential outcomes on the spell factors table and generally allows for one seyt advantage over its lower level counterpart.

In addition, there are special rules for certain practices that are (unfortunately), most succinctly modelled by existing rotes, such as Shielding. On the other hand, this is not much different than Ascension, where most spells were in fact extrapolations of existing core rotes (for example, you assigned Spirit 3 to Umbral stuff because you could get there with a rote of that rank) or because of informal "practices". The sense/manipulate minor/alter minor/manipulate major/alter major scale was one of a handful that existed behind the scenes. Awakening uses the same set of practices for all Arcana and formalizes them, but like Ascension, example and above all, the spell table, are what make the system run. On the other hand, unlike Ascension, Awakening doesn't make higher ranked spells weaker than lower ranked ones. Ascension had some awful math we couldn't get rid of for legacy reasons, and working around that was a constant design problem.

 

[GRIMJIM]

Yes, I'm sure your favourite magic people are much more convincing than other magic people. This is highly amusing, considering it directly contradicts your complaint that Awakening lacks inclusivity.

Not really, as the focus of Awakening is tightened down so the people I think of as 'laughable old frauds' are the ones you're quoting as being canonically relevent. In the old game that wouldn't have especially mattered as there was plenty of wiggle room for everyone to be right and it didn't matter if you thought your power derived from Machine Elves so long as you believed it strongly enough.

So yes, that IS highly amusing, but again, not the way you think.

 

[Funksaw]

You know, I haven't read Kult, but I wonder how it would compare.

 

[GRIMJIM]

You know, I haven't read Kult, but I wonder how it would compare.

Kult is an excellent game and does a far better job of placing a game in a gnostic framework IMO. Kult is far more horror oriented though and magic is not the be-all and end-all of it. I only own first edition and have read second edition but not looked at the newer edition that was released.

In play, with our groups at least, it has taken on a feel of Call of Cthulu through a Clive Barker lens. Clive Barker's earlier books are probably the best reference for the 'look and feel' of it.

 

[painandgreed]

This thread is quite atypical for ENWorld. It's more of an RPG.net flamwar that's migrated here.

I'm sure there's a joke in here somewhere about how Storyteller games are designed to invoke lots of drama and dialog.