The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Mage is, I'm thinking, one of the best role-playing games that I've ever seen.

The basic precepts of the game are fairly simple. The players are mages from the Traditions, members of various magickal factions that are fighting in the Ascension War - a four-way fight for control of static reality. Right now, the Technocracy, who channel their magick through the trappings of technology, have control of reality. Thanks to their ascension to power, they've made technology the standard paradigm for the human race - everybody can use it, and nobody regards it as magick. It's also closed off the human race to the potential of magick, which means that using obvious magick in public causes Paradox - reality "biting back". The other two factions aren't any better; Marauders are utterly insane, while the Nephandi serve the otherwordly evils that shows up in other White Wolf products.

So you're fighting three other factions. So what makes the game so good?

More freedom than I've seen in any other role-playing game. You can be a Son of Ether mad scientist, fighting off Nazi Death Squid in the Hollow World. You can be an Order of Hermes detective on the trail of malign, voice-stealing ghosts. You can be a Virtual Adept, breaking into the static computer systems of the Technocracy. You can be a Celestial Chorus mage, hunting down the warped monstrosities of the Nephandi. And you can get them all together to fight a Technocracy strike team without kludging the mechanics to hell and back.

What makes this freedom possible, to a large extent, is the magick system. Rather than picking and choosing among a set list of spells, your character has various magickal aptitudes in the form of Spheres - Entropy, Life, Time, Matter and so forth. The more dots you have, the more than you can do with it. It's almost impossible to not be able to do an effect - want to reanimate a zombie? Spirit 4 (for fetching a spirit to animate the body) and Life 3 (to reanimate the dead flesh.) Throw a fireball? Forces 4. Read somebody's mind? Mind 3. Rather than giving you the set products, Mage lets you have the ingredients and lets you make the spell yourself. Included with descriptions of the Spheres are examples of various effects, which aids remarkably with understanding what each Sphere does. There's also stuff like foci and Quintessence to lend aid to your character - foci are required up to a certain point in your mage's development.

But there's two flies in the ointment. You can do obvious magick, like throwing a fireball in front of a crowd of onlookers, but it'll automatically create more Paradox for you. If you don't want Paradox, you have to route your magick through coincidental effects - things that "just happen" around your mage. And too much use of magick, coincidental or not, nets you Paradox, which later hits you with anything from a skin color change (for a one point Paradox burn) to the infliction of damage on the mage's body (for more than five points going off at once.) It's a system that encourages thought and allows even beginning characters quite a bit of power and freedom, and the Paradox backlash for obvious "vulgar" magick prevents power gamers from having a field day.

What also makes the game fun is the Traditions themselves. The Sons of Ether are the best example - a way to play mad scientists as they were truly intended, with their mad science represented through various magickal effects. Killer robots, death rays, Ether goggles, Victorian ships flying through the astral planes of the Umbra - the imagination boggles. They're an antitdote to the poison faux-seriousness of the rest of the World of Darkness, although it can be hard to break free of stereotype if you want a non-traditional Son of Ether.

The other Traditions are just as good, ranging from the Euthanatos, who carefully deal the Good Death to the (un)deserving, to the Verbena, neo-druidic mages who work in equal parts with plant life and blood, to the Virtual Adepts, who just recently broke free of the Technocracy in order to keep their vision of a cybernetic realm free of interference.

The only dog of the bunch are the Hollow Ones, who are basically Goths who can do magick. Making a tradition that depends on _any_ subculture, be it Goths or the Young Republicans, is asking for trouble. What's especially vexing is that it's been suggested that the Hollow Ones will make up the Tenth tradition. Them and grunge music, I imagine.

The game's built-in conflicts also lend themselves to a bunch of good adventures. Fighting against the Technocracy means that you're going up against either the real world - the financial domination of the Syndicate, or the shadowy manipulation of the New World Order - or science fiction, like the cyborg bodyguards of Iteration X and the biologically sculptured creations of the Progenitors. You can play it as a paranoid struggle for your sanity against the mind-control of the NWO, or a slam-bang shoot-'em-up against an Iteration X hit squad. And there's also the paradox of fighting against a force that's done enormous amounts of good for humanity - are they actually turning the world static, or are they just the victims of Tradition propaganda? (This conflict has only been hinted at in White Wolf books, which is an improvement from the first edition by far.)

The Nephandi and the Marauders aren't as fleshed out; while they are detailed extensively in the Storyteller's Guide and the Book of Madness, they don't appear here as much more than a vague description. Including the rules for Marauders and Nepandic magick that were in the Storyteller's Guide in this book would have been helpful, but I imagine that the desire to sell extra books naysayed that decision. Can't say that I blame them.

So, what's wrong? Well, for one thing, the mood of the book has changed dramatically. The 1st edition of Mage was almost like a comic book, with big, sprawling battles between the Traditions and their various enemies - the Technocracy was eeeevil, like 1984 on a caffeine jag. There was a lot of reference to changing the world, and dynamic views of the world, and everything was based slightly more on philosophy and what _could_ be rather that what was. The sweep was epic, rather than personal; and while the black and white view of the world was grating, it was hard not to like after you accepted it as such.

I wouldn't say that the new mood is a bad thing; it's more much more personal, with more focus on the personal journey towards Ascension and less emphasis on the conflicts between monolithic structures. Partially a good thing, but it tends to de-emphasize the scale of the conflict - it changes the stakes from being the whole world to just your own self. It's something that can still be played up, but I miss the expansive world view of the original.

Mechanically speaking, the game has problems. While creating a character is simple - the standard 7/5/3 attribute mix and 13/9/5 skill distribution, there's always a hangup in explaining how Arete works. Simply put, you can't have more dots in any Sphere than you can in Arete; but you get six points in Spheres to begin with, and only one in Arete. That means that you have to buy your Spheres first, up to the desired level, and then spend freebie points later to get your Arete up to match. It's a weird, cart-before-the-horse bit of bad mechanics that always took me about five minutes to explain to anybody new to the game - and it even makes you mentally spend your freebie points before you get them. Bad form, there.

There's also the matter of the fight mechanics, which never cease to be complicated. To make things worse, they're also laid out poorly - it was never really explained, at least not to my knowledge, exactly what a dice pool is. And if you split your dice pool in Dex + Melee in order to dodge, do you use your dice in Dodge, or just the dice left over from splitting your pool? Combat involves a storm of dice-rolling, a failing to every White Wolf game. They're not fatal errors, but they do grate when they fall through when playing.

Also, the book seems awfully eager to steer you into the Umbral realms. The first dozen pages of the book are a tour of reality, courtesy of a faintly condescending, cutesy Dreamspeaker mage, and most of it is spent in the Umbral realms. While the Umbral realms are great, so is the real-world conflict between the various factions of the Ascension war. Material for a later game.

Artisticially, the book is pretty decent. A lot of it seems to be awfully vague - that guy with the knife could be a Nephandus, or a Euthanatos, or an Order of Hermes mage on a bad day. You could take a lot of the art completely out of the book and put it in something else, like Vampire, and it would fit. The non-specific nature of the book is something that prevents me from getting a really good idea of what Magely battles look like, and a lot of them are just communions between two parties, or a Mage pulling off a single effect. (If, indeed, they are actually mages, and not consors, spirits or warped Nephandus or something.) Sometimes there's even no direct link, like a man blowing a gigantic horn on top of a mountain - a mage, or just advertising for Riccola?

The portraits of the various Tradition mages are still good, though, having survived from the 1st edition. One thing that I'm especially unhappy about is the pictures between the various chapters. While the pictures dividing the sections are okay, combining useful flavor text with vivid depictions of the Nephandi, Marauder and Technocracy viewpoints, the chapter pictures are blurred, Adobe Photoshop-created collages of what are supposed to be the Traditions; it looks like the World of Darkness as viewed by a hallucinating midget with cataracts. It's awfully annoying, especially since the original chapter pictures were much better.

So, overall: Mage is absolutely worth your money. It's got the most flexible magic system I've ever seen, one of the more vivid settings that I've sen in a role-playing game, and can be modified to suit just about any setting that you might want. While it has some minor flaws here and there - some of the art, the Hollow Ones - those are greatly outshined by the game's merits. It is one of the best games that White Wolf has ever put out, and worth every penny that you might pay for it.

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 5 (Excellent!)

Mage: The Ascension
Author: Phil Brucato and Stewart Wieck Category: game Company/Publisher: White Wolf Publishing Cost: $28 Page count: 294 ISBN: 1-56504-400-2 Playtest Review by Darren MacLennan on 12/22/98. Genre tags: Fantasy Science_fiction Modern_day Conspiracy Gothic	Mage is, I'm thinking, one of the best role-playing games that I've ever seen. The basic precepts of the game are fairly simple. The players are mages from the Traditions, members of various magickal factions that are fighting in the Ascension War - a four-way fight for control of static reality. Right now, the Technocracy, who channel their magick through the trappings of technology, have control of reality. Thanks to their ascension to power, they've made technology the standard paradigm for the human race - everybody can use it, and nobody regards it as magick. It's also closed off the human race to the potential of magick, which means that using obvious magick in public causes Paradox - reality "biting back". The other two factions aren't any better; Marauders are utterly insane, while the Nephandi serve the otherwordly evils that shows up in other White Wolf products. So you're fighting three other factions. So what makes the game so good? More freedom than I've seen in any other role-playing game. You can be a Son of Ether mad scientist, fighting off Nazi Death Squid in the Hollow World. You can be an Order of Hermes detective on the trail of malign, voice-stealing ghosts. You can be a Virtual Adept, breaking into the static computer systems of the Technocracy. You can be a Celestial Chorus mage, hunting down the warped monstrosities of the Nephandi. And you can get them all together to fight a Technocracy strike team without kludging the mechanics to hell and back. What makes this freedom possible, to a large extent, is the magick system. Rather than picking and choosing among a set list of spells, your character has various magickal aptitudes in the form of Spheres - Entropy, Life, Time, Matter and so forth. The more dots you have, the more than you can do with it. It's almost impossible to not be able to do an effect - want to reanimate a zombie? Spirit 4 (for fetching a spirit to animate the body) and Life 3 (to reanimate the dead flesh.) Throw a fireball? Forces 4. Read somebody's mind? Mind 3. Rather than giving you the set products, Mage lets you have the ingredients and lets you make the spell yourself. Included with descriptions of the Spheres are examples of various effects, which aids remarkably with understanding what each Sphere does. There's also stuff like foci and Quintessence to lend aid to your character - foci are required up to a certain point in your mage's development. But there's two flies in the ointment. You can do obvious magick, like throwing a fireball in front of a crowd of onlookers, but it'll automatically create more Paradox for you. If you don't want Paradox, you have to route your magick through coincidental effects - things that "just happen" around your mage. And too much use of magick, coincidental or not, nets you Paradox, which later hits you with anything from a skin color change (for a one point Paradox burn) to the infliction of damage on the mage's body (for more than five points going off at once.) It's a system that encourages thought and allows even beginning characters quite a bit of power and freedom, and the Paradox backlash for obvious "vulgar" magick prevents power gamers from having a field day. What also makes the game fun is the Traditions themselves. The Sons of Ether are the best example - a way to play mad scientists as they were truly intended, with their mad science represented through various magickal effects. Killer robots, death rays, Ether goggles, Victorian ships flying through the astral planes of the Umbra - the imagination boggles. They're an antitdote to the poison faux-seriousness of the rest of the World of Darkness, although it can be hard to break free of stereotype if you want a non-traditional Son of Ether. The other Traditions are just as good, ranging from the Euthanatos, who carefully deal the Good Death to the (un)deserving, to the Verbena, neo-druidic mages who work in equal parts with plant life and blood, to the Virtual Adepts, who just recently broke free of the Technocracy in order to keep their vision of a cybernetic realm free of interference. The only dog of the bunch are the Hollow Ones, who are basically Goths who can do magick. Making a tradition that depends on _any_ subculture, be it Goths or the Young Republicans, is asking for trouble. What's especially vexing is that it's been suggested that the Hollow Ones will make up the Tenth tradition. Them and grunge music, I imagine. The game's built-in conflicts also lend themselves to a bunch of good adventures. Fighting against the Technocracy means that you're going up against either the real world - the financial domination of the Syndicate, or the shadowy manipulation of the New World Order - or science fiction, like the cyborg bodyguards of Iteration X and the biologically sculptured creations of the Progenitors. You can play it as a paranoid struggle for your sanity against the mind-control of the NWO, or a slam-bang shoot-'em-up against an Iteration X hit squad. And there's also the paradox of fighting against a force that's done enormous amounts of good for humanity - are they actually turning the world static, or are they just the victims of Tradition propaganda? (This conflict has only been hinted at in White Wolf books, which is an improvement from the first edition by far.) The Nephandi and the Marauders aren't as fleshed out; while they are detailed extensively in the Storyteller's Guide and the Book of Madness, they don't appear here as much more than a vague description. Including the rules for Marauders and Nepandic magick that were in the Storyteller's Guide in this book would have been helpful, but I imagine that the desire to sell extra books naysayed that decision. Can't say that I blame them. So, what's wrong? Well, for one thing, the mood of the book has changed dramatically. The 1st edition of Mage was almost like a comic book, with big, sprawling battles between the Traditions and their various enemies - the Technocracy was eeeevil, like 1984 on a caffeine jag. There was a lot of reference to changing the world, and dynamic views of the world, and everything was based slightly more on philosophy and what _could_ be rather that what was. The sweep was epic, rather than personal; and while the black and white view of the world was grating, it was hard not to like after you accepted it as such. I wouldn't say that the new mood is a bad thing; it's more much more personal, with more focus on the personal journey towards Ascension and less emphasis on the conflicts between monolithic structures. Partially a good thing, but it tends to de-emphasize the scale of the conflict - it changes the stakes from being the whole world to just your own self. It's something that can still be played up, but I miss the expansive world view of the original. Mechanically speaking, the game has problems. While creating a character is simple - the standard 7/5/3 attribute mix and 13/9/5 skill distribution, there's always a hangup in explaining how Arete works. Simply put, you can't have more dots in any Sphere than you can in Arete; but you get six points in Spheres to begin with, and only one in Arete. That means that you have to buy your Spheres first, up to the desired level, and then spend freebie points later to get your Arete up to match. It's a weird, cart-before-the-horse bit of bad mechanics that always took me about five minutes to explain to anybody new to the game - and it even makes you mentally spend your freebie points before you get them. Bad form, there. There's also the matter of the fight mechanics, which never cease to be complicated. To make things worse, they're also laid out poorly - it was never really explained, at least not to my knowledge, exactly what a dice pool is. And if you split your dice pool in Dex + Melee in order to dodge, do you use your dice in Dodge, or just the dice left over from splitting your pool? Combat involves a storm of dice-rolling, a failing to every White Wolf game. They're not fatal errors, but they do grate when they fall through when playing. Also, the book seems awfully eager to steer you into the Umbral realms. The first dozen pages of the book are a tour of reality, courtesy of a faintly condescending, cutesy Dreamspeaker mage, and most of it is spent in the Umbral realms. While the Umbral realms are great, so is the real-world conflict between the various factions of the Ascension war. Material for a later game. Artisticially, the book is pretty decent. A lot of it seems to be awfully vague - that guy with the knife could be a Nephandus, or a Euthanatos, or an Order of Hermes mage on a bad day. You could take a lot of the art completely out of the book and put it in something else, like Vampire, and it would fit. The non-specific nature of the book is something that prevents me from getting a really good idea of what Magely battles look like, and a lot of them are just communions between two parties, or a Mage pulling off a single effect. (If, indeed, they are actually mages, and not consors, spirits or warped Nephandus or something.) Sometimes there's even no direct link, like a man blowing a gigantic horn on top of a mountain - a mage, or just advertising for Riccola? The portraits of the various Tradition mages are still good, though, having survived from the 1st edition. One thing that I'm especially unhappy about is the pictures between the various chapters. While the pictures dividing the sections are okay, combining useful flavor text with vivid depictions of the Nephandi, Marauder and Technocracy viewpoints, the chapter pictures are blurred, Adobe Photoshop-created collages of what are supposed to be the Traditions; it looks like the World of Darkness as viewed by a hallucinating midget with cataracts. It's awfully annoying, especially since the original chapter pictures were much better. So, overall: Mage is absolutely worth your money. It's got the most flexible magic system I've ever seen, one of the more vivid settings that I've sen in a role-playing game, and can be modified to suit just about any setting that you might want. While it has some minor flaws here and there - some of the art, the Hollow Ones - those are greatly outshined by the game's merits. It is one of the best games that White Wolf has ever put out, and worth every penny that you might pay for it. Style: 4 (Classy and well done) Substance: 5 (Excellent!)

Mage: The Ascension