Author: Phil Brucato, Stewart Wieck, Kathy Ryan and others
Category: game
Company/Publisher: White Wolf Game Studio
Line: Mage
Cost: $29.95
Page count: 309
ISBN: 1-56504-405-3
SKU: WW4600
Capsule Review by Ricardo J. Méndez on 11/28/00.
Genre tags: Fantasy Science fiction Modern day

I've never been a White Wolf fan boy, I'll say that up front. I don't feel attracted by what I've seen about Vampire. The idea of running a game of powerful, mean, hairy killing machines isn't my cup of tea either. And Changeling, while pretty, was too cartoonish for my tastes. But after reading the striking Trinity main book, I decided that it was time to give the Albino Fleabag another shot. I request Mage: The Ascension from RPG.net (the only World of Darkness book I hadn't even skimmed through, so as to minimize my bias) and they were kind enough to send it over. Has it helped change my view of the World of Darkness in the way that Trinity helped push me a little closer to White Wolf?

Nope.

Mage is, unfortunately, nowhere near the quality of the Trinity contents nor the look of Changeling. This was actually supposed to be a playtest review, but so far I haven't been able to convince my players to give it a shot. Considering my lack of enthusiasm for the game, I can't hardly blame them.

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE

Let's start there. The book itself looks gorgeous, being a sturdy hardcover with gold lettering and glossy pages. Unfortunately, the art is nowhere near that beautiful page design of Changeling, with most of it being comprised of ugly comic-bookish ink drawings. Now, there's nothing specially wrong with comic-like art, but (a) it looks out of place in a book about mysterious and ancient orders and (b) its uniformness gives the book a nondescript flavor that doesn't help. There are some gorgeous black and white plates which I believe are included in color on the "Art of Mage" book, but most of the art throughout the book is amateurish and barely relates to the contents around it.

Yet another problem with the graphic design is that it doesn't help you know where you stand in the book at a certain point. Take, for example, Pagan Publishing's Delta Green (ironically, on said review I mentioned that the art was good but didn't reach the levels of White Wolf, having just recently seen Changeling and Trinity). However, Delta Green does something extremely well: the art on the borders of each section is different, and on opening the book you can tell at a glance in which chapter you are. Mage is covered in the same mass of symbols, which add nothing to neither the page look or the book's usability.

MAGIC SYSTEM

The magic system is interesting. It steers away from the AD&D-type kitchen-sink spell list system and instead provides a system that allows players to improvise on magical effects given a basic set of elements. For an example using AD&D spells: "Better Body" could be used for duplicating anything from water breathing or barkskin; and "Mutate Form" could supplant both alter self, polymorph others and similar. However, there aren't any clear examples of parameters a storyteller could use to gauge difficulty. Say a player wants to make him and his whole group undetectable by electronic means. Should the difficulty be use "Slay Machine", or does that cover only physical effects? If one wants to make his group invisible, how should difficulty progress? The system, while flexible, is certainly without guidelines to make it useful.

ORGANIZATION

Now, the book has one some serious organization problems. Concepts are mentioned before they are explained, apparently assuming that you know them from previous editions of mage. The lack of a glossary only hinders easy comprehension of said concepts, but at least the book has a decent index. And finally, chapter organization isn't intuitive at all: factions and the way they see magic spheres are placed before said spheres are explained and what little there is of the history of the world comes at the end of the book, for example. You'll spend quite a large amount of time just figuring the book out.

THE WORLD

What can I say about the world? There's always been magic. Magic users split into different Traditions, according to the way they believe that Ascension could be achieved (or not). The Technocracy - one of said factions - won some sort of conflict called "The Ascension War" and relegated the rest to obscurity. There's something called "The Umbra" that is apparently another world laid on top of ours, or layers of world overlapping this one. Mages share the world with vampires, werewolves, changelings and other assorted beasties.

That's about all you get. Is it our world? What really happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is there a secret history that has been influenced by magic more than we know it? How do mages interact with the other denizens of the World of Darkness? And for that matter, what is the World of Darkness anyway?

Sorry, what you see if what you get.

Really, that's about it. No secret history. No hidden truths about the world. Nothing except a 6 page timeline of the Ascension War, salted with some pretty large illustrations and leaving the text page count probably at 4 or less. With no real backdrop in which to set the mages, the book ends up feeling more like a kit for creating your own magic-plagued world than a living, breathing game world.

There *might* be a rich world behind Mage. You just won't find about it on this book.

GAMEPLAY AND SCENARIOS INCLUDED

Or lack thereof, actually, since there aren't any scenarios included. Coupled with the serious lack of world information, a storyteller that has never played Mage before will find himself at a loss of how to go about it.

This being the case, gameplay evaluation will have to wait for a future review.

OVERALL

In the whole, for a person who hasn't read any previous edition of Mage or possesses an extensive library of previously published material, like yours truly, the book feels like a tangled mess of curious ideas that the author intended to use later for a full book, but which were taken from his notebook still in draft stage and published.

Perhaps Mage comes at the wrong time, after I've read too many books and played to many games. For secret history, a world filled with magic and colorful factions trying to achieve enlightment I've got Nephilim. For powerful beings altering the world and jumping between ours and a parallel Earth I could only wish for Nobilis. And for fighting insurmountable odds I torment my players with Call of Cthulhu. Mage feels too bland, too uncommitted to its purpose to be of any use to me.

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)