The Inside Scoop on Gaming

The Book of Mirrors is a refreshing experience just because it feels like a transition point between the old and the new - when Mage stopped being about philosophy and technology and a dozen different commentaries and started being just about telling a good story that happened to include mages. Fortunately, it's also got a buttload of handy information for the Mage player.

Like what? Well, for one thing, the first chapter is entirely about how to run a campaign. Some of the advice is a bit abstract, but there's a lot of truly useful advice, like how to structure a campaign, or how to deal with new players, or alternate Chronicles, and so forth. The only problem that I have is with the sample players detailed in a brief fiction segment in the game; they spit out ideas for Mage characters and adventures at a drop of the hat, which seems a little unrealistic given my experience. On the other hand, my players were online, and didn't have access to the Mage books. Plus, some of them seem to get way too much into the game - at the end of the chronicle, a player writes an in-character e-mail that invests way too much emotion into an in-game event; the Storyteller even winds up almost crying because of the emotions involved. It doesn't come off as genuine; it comes off as obsessive and more than a little creepy. It's a small miscalculation in what's overall a very handy chapter.

The FAQ is long and interesting, dealing with several core concepts of the Mage world and answering some questions that definitely needed to be answered, like why certain Mage books contradict each other, who can become a Mage, what players need foci for, whether mages are susceptible to the Delirium or not, and the point that not all Orphans are Hollow Ones. The value is tremendous; I don't want to detail it for fear of spoilage, but it's good stuff all around. One problem that it does have is in running seekings, which still come out as fairly straightforward - moving through chambers, moving through fire, kicking over guardians and so forth - but the problem is that it's easy for a player to say "I'll demand the guardian let me through, jump through the fire, swim through the lake of eels, and take the next level of Arete." There's nothing...personal to it, nothing that really works with the player. I know that Harrowings were nicely defined in Wraith - both first and second editions - but Seekings still strike me as too ill-defined.

Subsequent chapters work beautifully with the Marauders and the Nephandi, detailing their intents, methodologies and specifc game rules; here's where you can find out how Marauders are able to avoid Paradox, how they handle their own personal Quiets and so forth. There's even details on how Marauders are able to form their own cabals of a sort - their Avatars talk to each other, planning meetings by drifting their mages into those situations. There's details on the specifics of madness, including about twenty different types that Marauders can partake of, advice not to let them be silly so much as utterly chaotic, details about various Marauder organizations - including the Umbral Underground, which makes Marauders genuinely threatening, and the Bai Dai, whose method of freeing reality is to kill sleepers until there's not enough of them left to form a consensual reality - and notes about crossing over with other games. Malkavian vampires and the Changing Breeds are on the side of the Wyld; it's not surprising that they'll ally with Marauders.You have everything here that you need to use Marauders within your ame.

The Nephandi get somewhat shorter shrift. Since they're essentially mages who happen to serve the Wyrm, they've got no particular special rules; however, they do have a remarkable philosophy behind their actions. They're trying to put a suffering reality to sleep by force, and since everybody wants to keep living - pesky mortals - the Nephanid have to resort to rather extreme measures, like killing everybody. Some of them even figure that they're aiding reality, by putting it through a destruction test. Wonderful, wonderful stuff, the kind of subtle and incisive commentary that makes Mage worth reading. There's a list of allies and ranks for the Nephandi that'll be helpful for organizing the opposition; and, in one of the best crossovers that I've ever seen within a White Wolf game, the true power behind the Nephandi is revealed. Believe me when I say that it makes perfect sense and adds an entirely new dimension to the Nephandi and their goals. I'm given to understand that a lot of this material is reprinted from the Book of Madness, wihch deals with the Nephandi and Maruaders in much more detail; however, it seems like the cream of that particular product was skimmed off and placed here.

The Technocracy is next, and in this case, it's a portrayal of the Technocracy as adversaries and villains. Rather than being the virtuous crusaders portrayed in the Player's Guide, they're noble crusaders who have been corrupted by their own power. And the stance on technology and its power is actually reasoned - rather than being blindly anti-technology, the intent here is to point out that technology has its flaws as well as its vritues. There's a lot of detail about the structure of the Technocracy - where it gets its funding, how it performs its operations, the names of the various strata of the Technocracy and so forth. A lot of this information is reproduced in the Guide to the Technocracy, but there's also some useful information on Technocratic areas of control. It won't replace the Guide to the Technocracy, but if you're just intending to use them as NPC villains, this has enough information to run them on a slightly deeper scale than the main Mage rulebook suggests.

The next chapter deals with adversaries who don't come from the three major factions of the Ascension war - animals, for one. There's a lot of stats for them, and there's a nice touch where some animals have their damage tracks are personalized to the particular animal. (For example, the spider has a damage track of -1, Splat, while the frog has OK, -1, Squished.) I'm not sure that an animal will present any threat to a mage; it's just too easy for a mage to defeat an animal in just about every sense. A normal human will have a problem with an enraged elephant, but a mage just has too many options available to get out of it. There's some useful information on running deeper motivations for normal humans - very handy - and then a lengthy discussion of how to handle spirits within the game. It's some useful information, especially since spirits are a lot different than regular people - for them, there's no past or future, just now. The list of spirits after the chapter is useful, but one of them - the spirit of Death itself - has no practical purpose. It's too powerful to bind, impossible to deal with and can trash just about any mage, so why include it? Odd.

The alternate settings chapter is useful - for example, the rural setting is addressed, which is one of my favorite settings for adventures where I want to disorient players. (Think "Blair Witch" or the towering maze of corn in the otherwise awful "Children of the Corn".) There's sketchy details on running chronicles anywhere between the beginning of time ("Know how to make a flint knife? You're an Iteration Xer.") Interesting stuff, although the Rennaissance section has been supplanted quite throroughly by Mage: The Sorceror's Crusade. There's even a suggestion to play after the world has ended, whether by nuclear holocaust or by the Apocalypse of the Garou.

The final chapter is the one where I had the most trouble, mostly because of a particular essay about gender relations within role-playing. There's a bit of advice about how to run a game where a player brings along his significant other to play, which is...well, look, I'm a gamer; my social skills are limited to the primitive stuff, at best. I can't tell you if it's good or not. (I can tell you that I'm glad that I don't have to waste oodles of time figuring out who's going out with who and why, and what effect that'll have on everybody else and so forth.) The problem begins about when the author gets into sex roles, as in male and female; there's a lot of broad generalizations, some of them insulting. To paraphrase: "Women take rape, murder and so forth much more seriously than men do; what seems like harmless fun to the guys might be cheap or degrading to the women." Maybe so, but then again, the converse can be true. And no, male gamers do NOT automatically look to female gamers for nurturing roles.

I suspect that the books that the author was reading happen to be of the men-are-dogs variety, 'cause her observations do not jibe with what I've seen in real life. If you're watching for sexist language in the gaming sessions - even taping it - then you're about an inch away from being the kind of correctness cop that absolutely nobody wants to be around. (Sure, if somebody is acting like a jerk, call him on it, let him know that it's not acceptable - but monitoring conversations? Christ.) It's actually not as bad as I thought that it was, re-reading it; it's a sight better than the other essays in the book, which deal with symbolism in games and the mandatory mention of Joseph Campbell as an inspiration for your game. It might be helpful - essays are always of such broad import that it's impossible to say whether they're good for a game or not. They're a bit vague, but an interesting Storyteller can make something out of them.

Although I've never used it, there's a lengthy index of rotes, spells, Talismans and Merits and Flaws in the back of the book, helpfully arranged by book and page number. If you need to find out how much the Aura of God merit is worth, or where it is, here's the place to go. Unfortunately, it's also out of date and refers to books that may not be in print, but there are web engines out there that allow you to search for rotes, White Wolf and player-created.

Is it worth buying? I'd say yes. It's got a lot of great information about the Nephandi and the Marauders; it's got a thoughtful outlook; it's got a firm hand on the rudder of Mage. A lot of the information has been broadened into other books, but the core - the seed - is here. I'd say that this book belongs on any serious Mage Storyteller's bookshelf.

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

The Book of Mirrors
Author: Pbil Brucato, Brian Campbell, Richard Dansky, Deena McKinney, Kathleen Ryan and Ethan Skemp Category: game Company/Publisher: White Wolf Line: Mage Cost: $18.00 Page count: 160 ISBN: 1-56504-403-7 SKU: WW4302 Capsule Review by Darren MacLennan on 08/22/99. Genre tags: Fantasy Science_fiction Modern_day Historical Horror Conspiracy Gothic	The Book of Mirrors is a refreshing experience just because it feels like a transition point between the old and the new - when Mage stopped being about philosophy and technology and a dozen different commentaries and started being just about telling a good story that happened to include mages. Fortunately, it's also got a buttload of handy information for the Mage player. Like what? Well, for one thing, the first chapter is entirely about how to run a campaign. Some of the advice is a bit abstract, but there's a lot of truly useful advice, like how to structure a campaign, or how to deal with new players, or alternate Chronicles, and so forth. The only problem that I have is with the sample players detailed in a brief fiction segment in the game; they spit out ideas for Mage characters and adventures at a drop of the hat, which seems a little unrealistic given my experience. On the other hand, my players were online, and didn't have access to the Mage books. Plus, some of them seem to get way too much into the game - at the end of the chronicle, a player writes an in-character e-mail that invests way too much emotion into an in-game event; the Storyteller even winds up almost crying because of the emotions involved. It doesn't come off as genuine; it comes off as obsessive and more than a little creepy. It's a small miscalculation in what's overall a very handy chapter. The FAQ is long and interesting, dealing with several core concepts of the Mage world and answering some questions that definitely needed to be answered, like why certain Mage books contradict each other, who can become a Mage, what players need foci for, whether mages are susceptible to the Delirium or not, and the point that not all Orphans are Hollow Ones. The value is tremendous; I don't want to detail it for fear of spoilage, but it's good stuff all around. One problem that it does have is in running seekings, which still come out as fairly straightforward - moving through chambers, moving through fire, kicking over guardians and so forth - but the problem is that it's easy for a player to say "I'll demand the guardian let me through, jump through the fire, swim through the lake of eels, and take the next level of Arete." There's nothing...personal to it, nothing that really works with the player. I know that Harrowings were nicely defined in Wraith - both first and second editions - but Seekings still strike me as too ill-defined. Subsequent chapters work beautifully with the Marauders and the Nephandi, detailing their intents, methodologies and specifc game rules; here's where you can find out how Marauders are able to avoid Paradox, how they handle their own personal Quiets and so forth. There's even details on how Marauders are able to form their own cabals of a sort - their Avatars talk to each other, planning meetings by drifting their mages into those situations. There's details on the specifics of madness, including about twenty different types that Marauders can partake of, advice not to let them be silly so much as utterly chaotic, details about various Marauder organizations - including the Umbral Underground, which makes Marauders genuinely threatening, and the Bai Dai, whose method of freeing reality is to kill sleepers until there's not enough of them left to form a consensual reality - and notes about crossing over with other games. Malkavian vampires and the Changing Breeds are on the side of the Wyld; it's not surprising that they'll ally with Marauders.You have everything here that you need to use Marauders within your ame. The Nephandi get somewhat shorter shrift. Since they're essentially mages who happen to serve the Wyrm, they've got no particular special rules; however, they do have a remarkable philosophy behind their actions. They're trying to put a suffering reality to sleep by force, and since everybody wants to keep living - pesky mortals - the Nephanid have to resort to rather extreme measures, like killing everybody. Some of them even figure that they're aiding reality, by putting it through a destruction test. Wonderful, wonderful stuff, the kind of subtle and incisive commentary that makes Mage worth reading. There's a list of allies and ranks for the Nephandi that'll be helpful for organizing the opposition; and, in one of the best crossovers that I've ever seen within a White Wolf game, the true power behind the Nephandi is revealed. Believe me when I say that it makes perfect sense and adds an entirely new dimension to the Nephandi and their goals. I'm given to understand that a lot of this material is reprinted from the Book of Madness, wihch deals with the Nephandi and Maruaders in much more detail; however, it seems like the cream of that particular product was skimmed off and placed here. The Technocracy is next, and in this case, it's a portrayal of the Technocracy as adversaries and villains. Rather than being the virtuous crusaders portrayed in the Player's Guide, they're noble crusaders who have been corrupted by their own power. And the stance on technology and its power is actually reasoned - rather than being blindly anti-technology, the intent here is to point out that technology has its flaws as well as its vritues. There's a lot of detail about the structure of the Technocracy - where it gets its funding, how it performs its operations, the names of the various strata of the Technocracy and so forth. A lot of this information is reproduced in the Guide to the Technocracy, but there's also some useful information on Technocratic areas of control. It won't replace the Guide to the Technocracy, but if you're just intending to use them as NPC villains, this has enough information to run them on a slightly deeper scale than the main Mage rulebook suggests. The next chapter deals with adversaries who don't come from the three major factions of the Ascension war - animals, for one. There's a lot of stats for them, and there's a nice touch where some animals have their damage tracks are personalized to the particular animal. (For example, the spider has a damage track of -1, Splat, while the frog has OK, -1, Squished.) I'm not sure that an animal will present any threat to a mage; it's just too easy for a mage to defeat an animal in just about every sense. A normal human will have a problem with an enraged elephant, but a mage just has too many options available to get out of it. There's some useful information on running deeper motivations for normal humans - very handy - and then a lengthy discussion of how to handle spirits within the game. It's some useful information, especially since spirits are a lot different than regular people - for them, there's no past or future, just now. The list of spirits after the chapter is useful, but one of them - the spirit of Death itself - has no practical purpose. It's too powerful to bind, impossible to deal with and can trash just about any mage, so why include it? Odd. The alternate settings chapter is useful - for example, the rural setting is addressed, which is one of my favorite settings for adventures where I want to disorient players. (Think "Blair Witch" or the towering maze of corn in the otherwise awful "Children of the Corn".) There's sketchy details on running chronicles anywhere between the beginning of time ("Know how to make a flint knife? You're an Iteration Xer.") Interesting stuff, although the Rennaissance section has been supplanted quite throroughly by Mage: The Sorceror's Crusade. There's even a suggestion to play after the world has ended, whether by nuclear holocaust or by the Apocalypse of the Garou. The final chapter is the one where I had the most trouble, mostly because of a particular essay about gender relations within role-playing. There's a bit of advice about how to run a game where a player brings along his significant other to play, which is...well, look, I'm a gamer; my social skills are limited to the primitive stuff, at best. I can't tell you if it's good or not. (I can tell you that I'm glad that I don't have to waste oodles of time figuring out who's going out with who and why, and what effect that'll have on everybody else and so forth.) The problem begins about when the author gets into sex roles, as in male and female; there's a lot of broad generalizations, some of them insulting. To paraphrase: "Women take rape, murder and so forth much more seriously than men do; what seems like harmless fun to the guys might be cheap or degrading to the women." Maybe so, but then again, the converse can be true. And no, male gamers do NOT automatically look to female gamers for nurturing roles. I suspect that the books that the author was reading happen to be of the men-are-dogs variety, 'cause her observations do not jibe with what I've seen in real life. If you're watching for sexist language in the gaming sessions - even taping it - then you're about an inch away from being the kind of correctness cop that absolutely nobody wants to be around. (Sure, if somebody is acting like a jerk, call him on it, let him know that it's not acceptable - but monitoring conversations? Christ.) It's actually not as bad as I thought that it was, re-reading it; it's a sight better than the other essays in the book, which deal with symbolism in games and the mandatory mention of Joseph Campbell as an inspiration for your game. It might be helpful - essays are always of such broad import that it's impossible to say whether they're good for a game or not. They're a bit vague, but an interesting Storyteller can make something out of them. Although I've never used it, there's a lengthy index of rotes, spells, Talismans and Merits and Flaws in the back of the book, helpfully arranged by book and page number. If you need to find out how much the Aura of God merit is worth, or where it is, here's the place to go. Unfortunately, it's also out of date and refers to books that may not be in print, but there are web engines out there that allow you to search for rotes, White Wolf and player-created. Is it worth buying? I'd say yes. It's got a lot of great information about the Nephandi and the Marauders; it's got a thoughtful outlook; it's got a firm hand on the rudder of Mage. A lot of the information has been broadened into other books, but the core - the seed - is here. I'd say that this book belongs on any serious Mage Storyteller's bookshelf. Style: 4 (Classy and well done) Substance: 5 (Excellent!)