The Inside Scoop on Gaming

I picked this thing up as soon as I saw it. I'd been thinking about what was in the Mage Tarot for a long time, mostly getting an idea of it from the example layouts printed on and within the various books - on the back cover, in the title page, that kind of thing. And they looked fascinating, blending the familiar imagery of the Mage universe with moments that seemed truly alien - a jester with a chalk white face, black hair and black eyes dancing on the upraised maw of some kind of hideous creature. The net result was to suggest the truly alien crossed with the conventional - and mind you that this was in the early days of magick, when it still had a vaguely comic-book feel of inspired craziness.

So, anyways, I grabbed the Mage Tarot without thinking; and, in a sense, I'm not disappointed. There's a lot of wonderful imagery, especially when the cards directly reflect something from the White Wolf experience. The suits - wands, swords, cups and staves - correspond to a faction within the Ascension War, and also to the particular type of Essence that particular faction happens to follow. The Major Arcana - I.E The Sun, The Hierophant, The Lovers, The Devil and so on - represent different ideas and supernatural races in the World of Darkness, including the Traditions - each with their own card - and the other three factions, whose individual factions aren't much covered. In a sense, the Traditions get over-represented; but at the same time, each Tradition has its own idea, whereas the Marauders represent madness, the Nephandi evil and so on.

The cards themselves, in order:

The Major Arcana are probably the most eye-catching of the cards; Joshua Gabriel Timbrook's lines are very clean, with the shading taken care of by computer coloring. The only unfortunate part about Timbrook's art is that his body and facial types seem very similar - there's enough difference to tell them apart, of course, but the multiple examples of a single style spaced so close together tends to wear out your appreciation. The correlations are pretty decent - the only minor clinker being the Virtual Adepts, who get the Mage card as the embodiment of the wizard. At the same time, a Tradition as recent as the Virtual Adepts won't have a correlation in a deck whose archetypes are practically ancient. The Verbena are represented by the Empress, a naked woman looking menacing, reclining on a stump, a quarter-moon tipped staff slung over one shoulder and a cauldron of blood at her feet - it's a nice touch, harkening back to the first edition idea of the Verbena as the scariest Wiccans out there. The Sons of Ether are represented by the Chariot, Jet Boy, a Son of Ether holding up an electrical rod at the head of what looks like an ether-powered blimp, and that catches the 1930s style utopian science atmosphere perfectly. A Hollow One leans against a lamp-post, flashlight blazing into the sky, and that gets across the romanticism - and leaves out the Goth Talk mocked-by-Jhonen-Vasquez silliness - of the Hollow Ones.

The other Traditions, unfortunately, are mostly shown in sitting poses; the Akashic Brotherhood and the Order of Hermes kneel, the Dreamspeakers and the Celestial Chorus sit. There's nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but the Dreamspeaker portrayed just seems vaguely spaced out, rather than completely in tune with the spirit world. The Akashic Brotherhood drawing nicely conveys the spareness and balance of the Tradition, but the Order of Hermes card - the Emperor - seems to reflect the Middle Eastern Ahl-I-Batin rather than the arrogant European mages that wandered out of Ars Magica and into Mage. The Euthanatos card, The Wheel of Fortune, seems the most disappointing, a dark card dominated by a gigantic revolver - the chambers as "the wheel" - with a Euthanatos mage lying at its feet with his face painted like a skull; it's appropriate to the Tradition, but it seems disappointing given the depth of the Tradition. (If you've ever seen the Mexican Day of the Dead, you'll understand how remarkable the imagery of death is.)

I think that the problem is that Timbrook had to work within the imagery of the Tarot, where all of the cards tend to have traditionalimages - the Hierophant is always sitting, the Emperor is always kneeling, and so on. At the same time, some of the other correlations are brilliant; the Kindred are represented by the Death card, with a vampire drawing a curtain back to reveal a stormy sea of blood, a chessboard in the foreground and a victim to his right. The Werewolf is the oddest, a Black Fury in Glabro (humanoid) form wrestling with some kind of odd Wyrm creature - a little later, the Luna card much more accurately represents what the Garou are about, a woman rising from what looks to be a sea of blood while werewolves howl in the background. Wraiths are accurately represented by the Hanged Man, but the card itself is a bit too colorful for the gray hues of Wraith. The Changelings are the Fool, and so on; there's also Golconda, Judgement Day (Gehenna), Ascension and Gaia represented, and nicely so. Any Vampire Storyteller wanting to give his players a scare could easily slip the Judgement Day card into a prop, just waiting to fall out when the right page of a diary is opened.

Beyond the Major Arcana, the tarot deck is broken up into the different suits, and this is where other artists get a chance to shine. Alex Shiekman, in particular, does a fantastic job of blending the imagery of Mage with the tarot deck; they take the Suit of Staves. A female Order of Hermes mage grabs lightning out of the sky with her staff. A Son of Ether flies on a Wile E. Coyote contraption of ragged cloth, support struts, and rocket engines. The Virtual Adepts search in vain, equipped with the best that Dexter's Laboratory has to offer. John Courage, a rogue Man In Black, fires a laser beam from his finger while trapped on a carousel. A Verbena poses on a motorcycle, surrounding by kneeling acolytes. It's great stuff, utterly laden with symbolism, although the Euthanatos-associated card has little to do with the nature of the Tradition itself.

The Nephandi get the utterly bizarre artwork of John Cobbs, whose artwork you'll recognize from the borders of most Wraith products - it usually seems out of place, but in the case of the Nephandi, it fits like a key into a lock. Water's everywhere, the human figure twists like taffy in the sun, and everybody seems to be celebrating the joy involved of going over to the Dark Side, willingly, lustily, joyfully. It's definitely some freaky stuff, and while it occasionally lapses into stuff that just seems too exaggerated to be "real" - three mutated women, joined at the hip, with their child sliming off beneath them - the imagery here is good enough. There's a lot of disturbing art available out there, but I think that Cobb was the right choice.

The Marauders get the short end of the stick. And then some. In the game, Marauders are servants of the Wyld - chaos mages whose minds have been permanently insulated in their own eternal Quiet, doing things that would annhilate ordinary mages from the Paradox backlash. The cards representing the path of Dynamism - uncontrolled change - are drab, static pieces that have almost nothing to do with the idea of dyanmism, instead featuring a series of static poses and odd images. The art isn't bad, and the imagery is powerful - a figure shrouded in odd armor walking on a tightrope, five daggers in hand, looks back at the two daggers he's left behind and cannot reclaim. But it doesn't fit the suit of dynamism - nothing is changing! - and it ill-fits the Marauders. There is one image, a dragon breathing fire onto a factory, that gets across the destructive madness of the Marauders, and the dynamism suit, but it doesn't do much beyond that. Pity. Larry MacDougal's art is nicely evocative, and the images are nice, but they're a mismatch for what's being portrayed. (I think that there might even be a reference to Matt Wagner's Mage in there - a black girl with a baseball bat reminded me of Edsel.)

The Technocracy rounds out the set with the Suit of Pattern/Pentacles, and the artist - Dan Smith - will likely be familiar to players from In Nomine, and, more importantly, INWO, the collectible card game version of Illuminati. After staring at countless Illuminati cards, the artwork is almost too familiar; I keep expecting to see affiliations on the bottoms of the cards. Then again, it's neat that the art's associated with a game of endless control and backstabbing. The artwork itself covers the broad range of the Technocracy nicely, ranging from an armored hand erupting from the ground, Technocracy-inscribed disk in hand, to a Technocrat dropping coins near a homeless waif, to an enforcer looking disgruntled at the loss of what looks like cocaine, to a woman manning the controls of a machine in the middle of a jungle. Especially nice is the Queen of Pattern, a woman sitting on a techno-throne while working on a project; behind her, vividly enough, is a mask with only the most cursory of faces on it, hooked into the machinery of the chair she's sitting on. Unfortunately, the artwork for the card that I described above - the one with the jester dancing in the maw of the monster - is here, and the art doesn't catch the bizarre imagery of the original. The replacement isn't bad, but it didn't catch my eye the way the original did.

As a matter of fact, I'm fairly sure that some of the cards are re-designs of the cards that Joshua Gabriel Timbrook oriignally did - you can spot the original versions in the opening chapters of various Mage supplements, including the dancing jester that I was thinking of before. I wish that they'd left the originals in and split up the Major Arcana among the various artists, just so that the cards don't seem quite so monodimensional. It's nice to have one artist for each suit, but I think that it tends to wear out the eye to see the same type of art repeated over and over again, no matter how good the artist is.

The booklet that comes with the cards is useful in some respects, less helpful in others. There's examples of the Celtic Cross, linear and circular spread readings, which'll be helpful to those who are - like me - mostly unfamiliar with the Tarot. Unfortunately, the section involving using the Tarot deck in regards to play, character creation and the like, are largely left up to the imagination of the players and the Storyteller. That'd be okay, but there's no way to use the Tarot cards in the same way as Fate points in Deadlands, or like Netrunner cards in a game of Cyberpunk. The symbolic influence is helpfull, but they'll only be significant if the Storyteller picks them out beforehand; drawing a fistful and trying to discern some meaning from them on the fly will be difficult. The actual explanations of the cards are nice, occasionally pointing out the signature characters within the cards within the explanations of the cards themselves.

It's a nice prop, especially if you can figure out how the cards can be used within your own game. There are a few things that I wish that they'd changed, mind you, but if you're deep into Mage, or the Tarot, these cards are a mighty useful purchase.

Style: 5 (Excellent!)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)

Mage: The Ascension Tarot Deck
Author: Nicky Rea, Jackie Cassada, Stewart MacWilliam, Richard Thomas, Sam Chupp, Joshua Gabriel Timbrook, Alex Sheikman, John Cobb, Larry MacDougall and Dan Smith Category: Game Prop Company/Publisher: White Wolf Publishing Line: Mage: The Ascension Cost: $25.00 Page count: NA ISBN: 1-56504-433-9 SKU: WW4020 Capsule Review by Darren MacLennan on 01/14/00. Genre tags: Fantasy Science_fiction Modern_day Horror Conspiracy Gothic	I picked this thing up as soon as I saw it. I'd been thinking about what was in the Mage Tarot for a long time, mostly getting an idea of it from the example layouts printed on and within the various books - on the back cover, in the title page, that kind of thing. And they looked fascinating, blending the familiar imagery of the Mage universe with moments that seemed truly alien - a jester with a chalk white face, black hair and black eyes dancing on the upraised maw of some kind of hideous creature. The net result was to suggest the truly alien crossed with the conventional - and mind you that this was in the early days of magick, when it still had a vaguely comic-book feel of inspired craziness. So, anyways, I grabbed the Mage Tarot without thinking; and, in a sense, I'm not disappointed. There's a lot of wonderful imagery, especially when the cards directly reflect something from the White Wolf experience. The suits - wands, swords, cups and staves - correspond to a faction within the Ascension War, and also to the particular type of Essence that particular faction happens to follow. The Major Arcana - I.E The Sun, The Hierophant, The Lovers, The Devil and so on - represent different ideas and supernatural races in the World of Darkness, including the Traditions - each with their own card - and the other three factions, whose individual factions aren't much covered. In a sense, the Traditions get over-represented; but at the same time, each Tradition has its own idea, whereas the Marauders represent madness, the Nephandi evil and so on. The cards themselves, in order: The Major Arcana are probably the most eye-catching of the cards; Joshua Gabriel Timbrook's lines are very clean, with the shading taken care of by computer coloring. The only unfortunate part about Timbrook's art is that his body and facial types seem very similar - there's enough difference to tell them apart, of course, but the multiple examples of a single style spaced so close together tends to wear out your appreciation. The correlations are pretty decent - the only minor clinker being the Virtual Adepts, who get the Mage card as the embodiment of the wizard. At the same time, a Tradition as recent as the Virtual Adepts won't have a correlation in a deck whose archetypes are practically ancient. The Verbena are represented by the Empress, a naked woman looking menacing, reclining on a stump, a quarter-moon tipped staff slung over one shoulder and a cauldron of blood at her feet - it's a nice touch, harkening back to the first edition idea of the Verbena as the scariest Wiccans out there. The Sons of Ether are represented by the Chariot, Jet Boy, a Son of Ether holding up an electrical rod at the head of what looks like an ether-powered blimp, and that catches the 1930s style utopian science atmosphere perfectly. A Hollow One leans against a lamp-post, flashlight blazing into the sky, and that gets across the romanticism - and leaves out the Goth Talk mocked-by-Jhonen-Vasquez silliness - of the Hollow Ones. The other Traditions, unfortunately, are mostly shown in sitting poses; the Akashic Brotherhood and the Order of Hermes kneel, the Dreamspeakers and the Celestial Chorus sit. There's nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but the Dreamspeaker portrayed just seems vaguely spaced out, rather than completely in tune with the spirit world. The Akashic Brotherhood drawing nicely conveys the spareness and balance of the Tradition, but the Order of Hermes card - the Emperor - seems to reflect the Middle Eastern Ahl-I-Batin rather than the arrogant European mages that wandered out of Ars Magica and into Mage. The Euthanatos card, The Wheel of Fortune, seems the most disappointing, a dark card dominated by a gigantic revolver - the chambers as "the wheel" - with a Euthanatos mage lying at its feet with his face painted like a skull; it's appropriate to the Tradition, but it seems disappointing given the depth of the Tradition. (If you've ever seen the Mexican Day of the Dead, you'll understand how remarkable the imagery of death is.) I think that the problem is that Timbrook had to work within the imagery of the Tarot, where all of the cards tend to have traditionalimages - the Hierophant is always sitting, the Emperor is always kneeling, and so on. At the same time, some of the other correlations are brilliant; the Kindred are represented by the Death card, with a vampire drawing a curtain back to reveal a stormy sea of blood, a chessboard in the foreground and a victim to his right. The Werewolf is the oddest, a Black Fury in Glabro (humanoid) form wrestling with some kind of odd Wyrm creature - a little later, the Luna card much more accurately represents what the Garou are about, a woman rising from what looks to be a sea of blood while werewolves howl in the background. Wraiths are accurately represented by the Hanged Man, but the card itself is a bit too colorful for the gray hues of Wraith. The Changelings are the Fool, and so on; there's also Golconda, Judgement Day (Gehenna), Ascension and Gaia represented, and nicely so. Any Vampire Storyteller wanting to give his players a scare could easily slip the Judgement Day card into a prop, just waiting to fall out when the right page of a diary is opened. Beyond the Major Arcana, the tarot deck is broken up into the different suits, and this is where other artists get a chance to shine. Alex Shiekman, in particular, does a fantastic job of blending the imagery of Mage with the tarot deck; they take the Suit of Staves. A female Order of Hermes mage grabs lightning out of the sky with her staff. A Son of Ether flies on a Wile E. Coyote contraption of ragged cloth, support struts, and rocket engines. The Virtual Adepts search in vain, equipped with the best that Dexter's Laboratory has to offer. John Courage, a rogue Man In Black, fires a laser beam from his finger while trapped on a carousel. A Verbena poses on a motorcycle, surrounding by kneeling acolytes. It's great stuff, utterly laden with symbolism, although the Euthanatos-associated card has little to do with the nature of the Tradition itself. The Nephandi get the utterly bizarre artwork of John Cobbs, whose artwork you'll recognize from the borders of most Wraith products - it usually seems out of place, but in the case of the Nephandi, it fits like a key into a lock. Water's everywhere, the human figure twists like taffy in the sun, and everybody seems to be celebrating the joy involved of going over to the Dark Side, willingly, lustily, joyfully. It's definitely some freaky stuff, and while it occasionally lapses into stuff that just seems too exaggerated to be "real" - three mutated women, joined at the hip, with their child sliming off beneath them - the imagery here is good enough. There's a lot of disturbing art available out there, but I think that Cobb was the right choice. The Marauders get the short end of the stick. And then some. In the game, Marauders are servants of the Wyld - chaos mages whose minds have been permanently insulated in their own eternal Quiet, doing things that would annhilate ordinary mages from the Paradox backlash. The cards representing the path of Dynamism - uncontrolled change - are drab, static pieces that have almost nothing to do with the idea of dyanmism, instead featuring a series of static poses and odd images. The art isn't bad, and the imagery is powerful - a figure shrouded in odd armor walking on a tightrope, five daggers in hand, looks back at the two daggers he's left behind and cannot reclaim. But it doesn't fit the suit of dynamism - nothing is changing! - and it ill-fits the Marauders. There is one image, a dragon breathing fire onto a factory, that gets across the destructive madness of the Marauders, and the dynamism suit, but it doesn't do much beyond that. Pity. Larry MacDougal's art is nicely evocative, and the images are nice, but they're a mismatch for what's being portrayed. (I think that there might even be a reference to Matt Wagner's Mage in there - a black girl with a baseball bat reminded me of Edsel.) The Technocracy rounds out the set with the Suit of Pattern/Pentacles, and the artist - Dan Smith - will likely be familiar to players from In Nomine, and, more importantly, INWO, the collectible card game version of Illuminati. After staring at countless Illuminati cards, the artwork is almost too familiar; I keep expecting to see affiliations on the bottoms of the cards. Then again, it's neat that the art's associated with a game of endless control and backstabbing. The artwork itself covers the broad range of the Technocracy nicely, ranging from an armored hand erupting from the ground, Technocracy-inscribed disk in hand, to a Technocrat dropping coins near a homeless waif, to an enforcer looking disgruntled at the loss of what looks like cocaine, to a woman manning the controls of a machine in the middle of a jungle. Especially nice is the Queen of Pattern, a woman sitting on a techno-throne while working on a project; behind her, vividly enough, is a mask with only the most cursory of faces on it, hooked into the machinery of the chair she's sitting on. Unfortunately, the artwork for the card that I described above - the one with the jester dancing in the maw of the monster - is here, and the art doesn't catch the bizarre imagery of the original. The replacement isn't bad, but it didn't catch my eye the way the original did. As a matter of fact, I'm fairly sure that some of the cards are re-designs of the cards that Joshua Gabriel Timbrook oriignally did - you can spot the original versions in the opening chapters of various Mage supplements, including the dancing jester that I was thinking of before. I wish that they'd left the originals in and split up the Major Arcana among the various artists, just so that the cards don't seem quite so monodimensional. It's nice to have one artist for each suit, but I think that it tends to wear out the eye to see the same type of art repeated over and over again, no matter how good the artist is. The booklet that comes with the cards is useful in some respects, less helpful in others. There's examples of the Celtic Cross, linear and circular spread readings, which'll be helpful to those who are - like me - mostly unfamiliar with the Tarot. Unfortunately, the section involving using the Tarot deck in regards to play, character creation and the like, are largely left up to the imagination of the players and the Storyteller. That'd be okay, but there's no way to use the Tarot cards in the same way as Fate points in Deadlands, or like Netrunner cards in a game of Cyberpunk. The symbolic influence is helpfull, but they'll only be significant if the Storyteller picks them out beforehand; drawing a fistful and trying to discern some meaning from them on the fly will be difficult. The actual explanations of the cards are nice, occasionally pointing out the signature characters within the cards within the explanations of the cards themselves. It's a nice prop, especially if you can figure out how the cards can be used within your own game. There are a few things that I wish that they'd changed, mind you, but if you're deep into Mage, or the Tarot, these cards are a mighty useful purchase. Style: 5 (Excellent!) Substance: 4 (Meaty)

Mage: The Ascension Tarot Deck