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[Chat]: the Awakening
Jacobkosh
Gamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
Gamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
Mage: the Awakening is a roleplaying game, one of the best roleplaying games ever, and its 2nd edition has literally just come out as of a couple hours ago.
What is Mage?
The TL;DR:
Old Mage was a game about consensus reality, and belief affected reality. So there's a guy who believes in voodoo, a guy who believes in medieval alchemy, a tribal animist, and a mad scientist and they're all on the run from the bad guys who convinced the world that the only reality is "science." In New Mage, magic is a real fact of the world. You're not a dude who believes in magic in a world where belief makes things true; you're a dude who believes in magic because he can stop time and shoot fireballs from his hands. The magic would work even if he stopped believing in it.
What is magic? Plato talked about the concept of forms, of ideal, perfect concepts; the perfect square, the perfect ideal of a chair or whatever. Nothing in reality can actually match the Platonic ideal, because the concept is too big; any individual person, for instance, is just one tiny facet of the huge concept of "person." But mages can see into that world or forms. They can see the symbols that are the blueprints for reality and they can change those symbols to change reality. (Add the symbol "dead" to someone you don't like; turn the symbol for "empty plate in front of me" into the symbol for "steak dinner.")
The world of symbols and forms, the world of magic, is called the Supernal Realm. Our world and the Supernal Realm used to be a lot closer to each other and magic and wonder were everyday, common things. Then some assholes fucked it up.
There are a lot of stories about how it got fucked up. (One big difference between OWoD and NWoD is THERE IS NO ESTABLISHED CANON. They are built as toolbox settings with lots of elements for GMs to mix and match at will. The answer to any mystery can be "what your GM wants it to be" rather than "look it up on pg 73 of Pierced Vampire Dicks of New York, volume 3".)
The most popular story is that a group of mages became greedy and ambitious and performed a powerful spell to send their consciousness into the Supernal Realm to seize the controls of reality from the inside and make themselves kings of everything that ever was, is, or could be. Another group of mages followed to try and stop them. The war broke reality in half and the orderly, clean universe of the past was replaced with the Fallen World - the fucked-up world that we live in, where anything like perfection and revelation seem forever out of reach. Between the Supernal World and the Fallen World grew The Abyss, a crack in reality that corrupts and distorts everything traveling from the Supernal to the Fallen World. Because of the Abyss's distorting influence, symbols have less power, ideas have less meaning, and magic is less powerful. (Also the Abyss sometimes sends tentacle monsters into our world. It's a bad neighbor.)
Mortal, temporary things aren't really meant to exist in the Supernal, and the mages who sent themselves there lost their individuality and became pure concepts. The hubris-filled jerk mages who tried to overthrow reality became living, sentient embodiments of the concepts of repression and tyranny - of domination, slavery, war, hierarchy, and so forth. They're called the Exarchs, the secret gods behind the world. They like the world the way it is - Fallen, corrupt, and irretrievably broken - because it means nobody will ever cross that barrier again and try to knock them down from their throne.
But the mages who fought them became concepts too, and they chose to embody themselves as Watchtowers, beacons of magic shining Supernal light across the darkness of the Abyss. The Watchtowers call to people who are a little more active, a little more curious, a little more awake than everyone else, and show those people the light of magic. When you see that light - however it manifests in your life - that's called Awakening, and that's when you become a mage.
A mage who Awakens suddenly can see, firsthand, that the world they thought they understood is a lie built by evil gods and the entire human race are prisoners in a cosmic jail.
What mages do with that knowledge is up to them.
Some of them try to hoard the knowledge, to recover all the power that was lost before the world was broken. Some of them try to defend themselves, or the people and things that matter to them, from the new world of horror they can see. Some of them believe that the irresponsible use of magic widens the Abyss and might eventually destroy reality completely, so they try and keep it secret and safe. Some of them think that this power comes with responsibility and it should be put to the service of the human race. And some spend their time and energy trying to keep the others from all killing each other.
Others decide that if they're in cosmic jail, they may as well try to get on the jailers' good side by ratting out the other inmates.
All of the mages, whatever their motivation, are also looking for power, because even if you aren't a narcissistic person and you have noble aims, you still need power to accomplish them; and they're looking for answers, because in magic, knowledge and power are the same thing. They're curious people who can't help but stick their noses into stuff, which is why they noticed that something wasn't quite right with the world in the first place - and the more mysteries a mage solves, the more Truth they uncover, the more glimpses they catch of the perfect Supernal World, and the more they can tune into its magic.
But it's really easy to learn something and a lot harder to have the wisdom to know when to use it, and mages who bust out the crazy spells too often risk inviting Paradox - letting a piece of the Abyss into the real world to hurt or corrupt them or someone around them. Paradox can be avoided with time and careful preparation...but sometimes, when you really need to make that spell happen RIGHT NOW, the risk of letting just a little bit of Paradox in doesn't seem too bad...
So Mages are basically occult detectives, spies, seekers of lost artifacts, or problem solvers. Their magic tells them that something weird is going on, they go try to figure it out, bad shit happens, they do magic to it, and if they're not careful or clever they might invite Paradox into the world and be very sorry about it. And if they survive and solve the mystery - if they find the lost forbidden city from before time, or clear the ghost out of the haunted hospital, or whatever - they get that little bit more powerful and are able to make just a little bit bigger mistakes.
It's a game about power and wisdom with the entire cosmos as the playing field. Also sometimes your @Elldren accidentally lets a sex demon loose on a major city. These things happen.
+30
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Oh well, farwell Over[chat], you never had a chance...
USURPER!
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
this checks out
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
for real, which is why it and Dark City and The Thirteenth Floor (all released the same year!) have an enduring place in my heart
for whatever reason, gnosticism touches my boner places
I guess it's not worth my time to try to get people to play GitS instead of Overwatch though. *sniff*
On the upside, reality itself is turning cyberpunk so you have that to look forward to instead
yeah
I GUESS
fiiiine
Hopefully with a better ending.
I read this 3 or 4 times, thinking
is this some rude way of talking about hillary, saying she's a man and
and then it finally clicked
patriarchy!
T_T
Check out my site, the Bismuth Heart | My Twitter
praise the sun?
Think I did well enough on the first one to queef out a B tho
Did you know I bought Black Closet the other day?
I super love it, but it's really hard.
you and me both
despite the lurking ancestral sense deep in the back of my subconscious that my boner places are just fabrications of the demiurge meant to trap me in a corporeal state of metaphysical ignorance
you and me both
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
My not owning hatoful boyfriend is unintentional!
I intend own hatoful boyfriend at a future time.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
but gnosticism forbids boner touching doesn't it
you might like the quasi-coding puzzles of human resource machine, the cute aesthetic of a boy and his blob (you can hug the blob!!)
mini metro is cool if you like those sorts of logistical/mgmt games
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
lolololol
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/05/growth-of-income-and-welfare-in-the-u-s-1979-2011.html
TC deleted his "shout it from the rooftops" remark when commenters pointed out that the paper (against convention) uses "the fifth quintile" to refer to the top 20% rather than the bottom 20%
yeah I have very vague memories of playing boy and his blob on nes, that and the subway game were the ones that seemed most enticing
life is unfair *turns on linkin park, mopes*
D-does this mean you are my pigeon boyfriend now?
Basically ITT Jacob is an Exarch and this is a fallen chat
He's old guard Mage.
but gnosticism is great and that long play report I don't remember the name of with a PC named Kali made me really want to try Awakening
yes