The Inside Scoop on Gaming

White Wolf has been starting up a strange pattern with its Mage supplements lately. Actually, given that it's White Wolf, maybe not so strange.

First, there was Digital Web 2.0. It was quite a bit better than the original, because it made the Digital Web seem more like the Internet rather than the usual pseudo-Gibsonian "rack up 50,000 points in the video game for a free life and an entry into the corporate mainframe" model of computers in RPGs.

Then we got Destiny's Price 2.0, cunningly split into two supplements: The Orphan's Survival Guide and Tales of Magick: Dark Adventure. Destiny's Price was a supplement about the cold, cruel, sexually fetishistic streets and the ninjas that live there (see page 98). The Orphan's Survival Guide got the cold, cruel etc. streets, and Tales of Magick: Dark Adventure got the ninjas. I wasn't that excited about Destiny's Price the first time around, and I don't really see why I needed more of it.

Then we got one big honkin' compiled Technocracy Splatbook 2.0, with the Guide to the Technocracy which I loved like all right-thinking people.

And now we have The Spirit Ways, or Dreamspeaker Splatbook 2.0. Oh sure, The Spirit Ways asserts that Dreamspeakers aren't shamans, but frankly I can't spot any differences. I kind of liked the original splatbook--it wasn't great, but it was competently done, meaning I could read it and still want to play a Dreamspeaker (unlike, say, the Verbena or Celestial Chorus books). So did we need another book on the same topic?

Well, I'm not sure we did. Don't get me wrong, Spirit Ways has its good points. Like the Guide to the Technocracy, it begins to address one of the most serious problems with Mage. The fundemental premise of Mage is that reality is the collective sum of our beliefs, and somebody with sufficiently strong beliefs can impose their view on the world. The laws of physics, for example, are just one particularly effective paradigm. So why is it that all magick fits into one particular nine-sphere structure? Shouldn't the magickal effects a mage can produce be entirely dependent on the beliefs of the mage? The nine sphere paradigm just doesn't work, even for the groups in Mage. For example, the Technocracy shouldn't consider Forces and Matter to be different spheres--after all, E=MC².

Unfortunately, this is a little hard to implement. One option would be to write different magick rules for each tradition/convention/craft/assorted splat. While an effective device for forcing games to buy every single supplement, the rules would quickly become unmanageably huge. Plus, what would you do when characters go to learn from somebody who comes from a different tradition? Mage would have collapsed under its own designers had chosen to go down this path.

The other approach is to go with vague, one-size-fits-all rules and then depend on the players to create the flavour the story demands during game play. This would probably end up looking a lot like Over the Edge, with each magickal path being custom-designed for each character, plus some handwaving to help the GM set difficulty numbers for particular feats. This probably would have been the best solution. Instead, Mage tried to create a generic framework for all magic.

However, books like the Guide to the Technocracy, and now The Spirit Ways, have attempted to make up for this problem by trying to add colour to the generic system used in Mage. It's a brave effort, but it doesn't really disguise the fact that everybody, from a shaman in a stone age cannibal headhunting tribe on a South Pacific Island to the most Big Science technocrat, has their cool powers defined by a single set of rules. But at least they're trying.

Like most White Wolf books, and many gaming supplements in general, The Spirit Ways makes heavy use of "flavour text" to gets its points across. Almost all of the book is written in-character. Sometimes this is good--much of what I liked in The Spirit Ways was the subjectivity of the shamanic worldview. This comes across nicely in the intro, one of the few (the only?) non-Amanda intro sequences in the Mage canon. For a pleasant change, the intro manages to be relevant, interesting, and more than a little creepy. I don't like roaches.

Chapter One: A Life Apart is the best part of the book. It describes the shamanic worldview from the inside, using in-character text--but it gives that information from the viewpoints of several different shamans from different cultures. This lets us have a sense of their similarities and their differences, so we don't end up being told that a shaman from sub-Saharan Africa thinks the same way as one from the Amazonian rainforest.

Chapter Two: The Tongue of Spirits is where signs of trouble first start to appear. After the cultural variety of Chapter One, it's a little hurtful to be hearing about Gaia again. Nevertheless, this chaper has some useful information about the state of shamanism worldwide (though the bit on Australia seemed a little wacky), shamanic ritual, and the shamanic paradigm. It also has a section on shamans in various Traditions that is best avoided, particularly the bit on Virtual Adept shamans. Trust me.

Chapter Three: Walking the Spirits is where the book begins to decline. We're treated to a 20-page in character story about a fledgling mage taken on a tour of the Umbra by his mentor. There's very little in here that's new; in fact, most of it was done previously, and done better, in The Book of Worlds, or Umbra: the Velvet Shadow, or Rage Across the Heavens, or...

If you own any of the above products, you know all of this stuff already. It's not like shamans have a particularly unusual view of the Umbra. I might find a description of the Umbra from the Technocratic side of the fence interesting, but this is frankly a waste of space. I'd have been much happier to see something new instead.

Chapter Four: Spirit Helpers, on the other hand, is a rehash of Axis Mundi. But at least it's shorter, and I don't have Axis Mundi. It discusses the relationship between shamans and their totems, using spirits as allies and enemies, and how a shaman can get a bad reputation in the spirit world. It is also not written as flavour text, which I guess explains how it manages to convey useful information and still be short. It's helpful for people, like me, who need to understand the way spirits are handled in the WOD but don't want to go shelling out good money on Werewolf products.

The Appendix: By the Numbers is the usual grab-bag of rules, rotes, fetishes, merits, etc.

Overall, The Spirit Ways does flavour and tone quite well, but falters when it tries to mesh the concepts of shamanic magick with the standard Mage cosmology. Unfortunately the writers were stuck with an impossible job; the more convincing they make their portrayal of shamanism, the odder it looks layered over a version of reality created by Mark Rein(splat)Haven. The first two chapters, which focus on shamanism and very little on the Mage world, work reasonably well. The last two...well, they barely even tried to explain how all this stuff goes together.

This is perhaps the biggest problem with Mage as a game line. The more that they define things, the harder it becomes to pretend that reality in the World of Darkness is subjective. How subjective can it be when there are over a hundred products available to describe it? Looking at the review above, you can see how many times I referenced other WW products. Eventually, any RPG setting, if it lives long enough, becomes so top-heavy with old material that only people who've been involved since the beginning can possibly know (and afford to own) all the crap necessary to play the game. I fear the WOD is well past that point now. Once you hit that level of detail, it becomes nearly impossible to find anything new to say, and so you inevitably end up recycling old material and dealing with increasingly obscure topics. On that note, I hear that Mage 3.0 is on its way...

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)

The Spirit Ways
Author: Rachel Barth, Scott Cohen, John Snead and Eric P. Taylor. Category: game Company/Publisher: White Wolf Line: Mage: the Ascension Cost: $15.95 Page count: 110 ISBN: 1-56504-453-3 SKU: WW4043 Capsule Review by Kevin J. Brennan on 10/17/99. Genre tags: Fantasy Modern_day Horror Conspiracy Gothic	White Wolf has been starting up a strange pattern with its Mage supplements lately. Actually, given that it's White Wolf, maybe not so strange. First, there was Digital Web 2.0. It was quite a bit better than the original, because it made the Digital Web seem more like the Internet rather than the usual pseudo-Gibsonian "rack up 50,000 points in the video game for a free life and an entry into the corporate mainframe" model of computers in RPGs. Then we got Destiny's Price 2.0, cunningly split into two supplements: The Orphan's Survival Guide and Tales of Magick: Dark Adventure. Destiny's Price was a supplement about the cold, cruel, sexually fetishistic streets and the ninjas that live there (see page 98). The Orphan's Survival Guide got the cold, cruel etc. streets, and Tales of Magick: Dark Adventure got the ninjas. I wasn't that excited about Destiny's Price the first time around, and I don't really see why I needed more of it. Then we got one big honkin' compiled Technocracy Splatbook 2.0, with the Guide to the Technocracy which I loved like all right-thinking people. And now we have The Spirit Ways, or Dreamspeaker Splatbook 2.0. Oh sure, The Spirit Ways asserts that Dreamspeakers aren't shamans, but frankly I can't spot any differences. I kind of liked the original splatbook--it wasn't great, but it was competently done, meaning I could read it and still want to play a Dreamspeaker (unlike, say, the Verbena or Celestial Chorus books). So did we need another book on the same topic? Well, I'm not sure we did. Don't get me wrong, Spirit Ways has its good points. Like the Guide to the Technocracy, it begins to address one of the most serious problems with Mage. The fundemental premise of Mage is that reality is the collective sum of our beliefs, and somebody with sufficiently strong beliefs can impose their view on the world. The laws of physics, for example, are just one particularly effective paradigm. So why is it that all magick fits into one particular nine-sphere structure? Shouldn't the magickal effects a mage can produce be entirely dependent on the beliefs of the mage? The nine sphere paradigm just doesn't work, even for the groups in Mage. For example, the Technocracy shouldn't consider Forces and Matter to be different spheres--after all, E=MC². Unfortunately, this is a little hard to implement. One option would be to write different magick rules for each tradition/convention/craft/assorted splat. While an effective device for forcing games to buy every single supplement, the rules would quickly become unmanageably huge. Plus, what would you do when characters go to learn from somebody who comes from a different tradition? Mage would have collapsed under its own designers had chosen to go down this path. The other approach is to go with vague, one-size-fits-all rules and then depend on the players to create the flavour the story demands during game play. This would probably end up looking a lot like Over the Edge, with each magickal path being custom-designed for each character, plus some handwaving to help the GM set difficulty numbers for particular feats. This probably would have been the best solution. Instead, Mage tried to create a generic framework for all magic. However, books like the Guide to the Technocracy, and now The Spirit Ways, have attempted to make up for this problem by trying to add colour to the generic system used in Mage. It's a brave effort, but it doesn't really disguise the fact that everybody, from a shaman in a stone age cannibal headhunting tribe on a South Pacific Island to the most Big Science technocrat, has their cool powers defined by a single set of rules. But at least they're trying. Like most White Wolf books, and many gaming supplements in general, The Spirit Ways makes heavy use of "flavour text" to gets its points across. Almost all of the book is written in-character. Sometimes this is good--much of what I liked in The Spirit Ways was the subjectivity of the shamanic worldview. This comes across nicely in the intro, one of the few (the only?) non-Amanda intro sequences in the Mage canon. For a pleasant change, the intro manages to be relevant, interesting, and more than a little creepy. I don't like roaches. Chapter One: A Life Apart is the best part of the book. It describes the shamanic worldview from the inside, using in-character text--but it gives that information from the viewpoints of several different shamans from different cultures. This lets us have a sense of their similarities and their differences, so we don't end up being told that a shaman from sub-Saharan Africa thinks the same way as one from the Amazonian rainforest. Chapter Two: The Tongue of Spirits is where signs of trouble first start to appear. After the cultural variety of Chapter One, it's a little hurtful to be hearing about Gaia again. Nevertheless, this chaper has some useful information about the state of shamanism worldwide (though the bit on Australia seemed a little wacky), shamanic ritual, and the shamanic paradigm. It also has a section on shamans in various Traditions that is best avoided, particularly the bit on Virtual Adept shamans. Trust me. Chapter Three: Walking the Spirits is where the book begins to decline. We're treated to a 20-page in character story about a fledgling mage taken on a tour of the Umbra by his mentor. There's very little in here that's new; in fact, most of it was done previously, and done better, in The Book of Worlds, or Umbra: the Velvet Shadow, or Rage Across the Heavens, or... If you own any of the above products, you know all of this stuff already. It's not like shamans have a particularly unusual view of the Umbra. I might find a description of the Umbra from the Technocratic side of the fence interesting, but this is frankly a waste of space. I'd have been much happier to see something new instead. Chapter Four: Spirit Helpers, on the other hand, is a rehash of Axis Mundi. But at least it's shorter, and I don't have Axis Mundi. It discusses the relationship between shamans and their totems, using spirits as allies and enemies, and how a shaman can get a bad reputation in the spirit world. It is also not written as flavour text, which I guess explains how it manages to convey useful information and still be short. It's helpful for people, like me, who need to understand the way spirits are handled in the WOD but don't want to go shelling out good money on Werewolf products. The Appendix: By the Numbers is the usual grab-bag of rules, rotes, fetishes, merits, etc. Overall, The Spirit Ways does flavour and tone quite well, but falters when it tries to mesh the concepts of shamanic magick with the standard Mage cosmology. Unfortunately the writers were stuck with an impossible job; the more convincing they make their portrayal of shamanism, the odder it looks layered over a version of reality created by Mark Rein(splat)Haven. The first two chapters, which focus on shamanism and very little on the Mage world, work reasonably well. The last two...well, they barely even tried to explain how all this stuff goes together. This is perhaps the biggest problem with Mage as a game line. The more that they define things, the harder it becomes to pretend that reality in the World of Darkness is subjective. How subjective can it be when there are over a hundred products available to describe it? Looking at the review above, you can see how many times I referenced other WW products. Eventually, any RPG setting, if it lives long enough, becomes so top-heavy with old material that only people who've been involved since the beginning can possibly know (and afford to own) all the crap necessary to play the game. I fear the WOD is well past that point now. Once you hit that level of detail, it becomes nearly impossible to find anything new to say, and so you inevitably end up recycling old material and dealing with increasingly obscure topics. On that note, I hear that Mage 3.0 is on its way... Style: 4 (Classy and well done) Substance: 2 (Sparse)