There are few game lines out there with as much of a mixed history as that of
Mage: the Ascension. Somehow it can manage to jump from brilliant and insightful to obtuse and leaden from book to book, or even from chapter to chapter, as in the case of
Guide to the Traditions. Mirroring the game as a whole, the book is a rollercoaster ride of ideas; some are great, some are intriguing and a whole bunch are just plain dumb.
After the usual White Wolf format of a smattering of opening fiction and an introduction chapter that tries really hard to set the tone for the rest of the book (at which it does succeed, I’m just as not interested in “mundane life and the ‘real’ world is soul-crushingly evil” as I used to be), we get to the meat. The first big chapter tries to address a lot of things people seem to have trouble with in Mage, from Paradox to paradigm. Unfortunately, while it’s heart is in the right place, it just isn’t able to really pull it off. There is some genuinely useful information here, such as the several different groups described as blending different Traditions together as well as the in-character section talking about foci or the sidebar about the assumed relationship between the Consensus and “reality,” but most of the rest is either well-intentioned prose that I simply cannot agree with or actually well-written in-character discussions that fail to impart anything I didn’t already know. A big block of space is dedicated to the discussion of a paradigm, for example, how to construct one and how it relates to your other traits (like Spheres and Essence). While showing people how to build a solid paradigm is a must for Mage (as is the realization that not every player has to come up with a whole new and detailed treatise on magick), the text intimately ties a paradigm in with particular Spheres, effectively turning what should be the effect of a paradigm into the keystone that lets the whole thing make sense. Trying to build an entire paradigm around a loose metaphor or a single Sphere is exactly the kind of thing that resulted in stuff like people thinking that a Dreamspeaker needs Spirit 1 to accomplish any feat of magick. “His paradigm is that he talks to spirits, init?” If the Hermetics can have wildly divergent and different paradigms without anyone even lifting an eyebrow, why can’t anyone else?
This mixture of the good with the not-so-good is then followed by a completely surprising chapter, the history of the Traditions. This is really the high point of the book, where the ideas of Mage comes together with much of the more down-to-earth and grounded tone of the recent revised edition of Vampire and it’s Guides. Instead of some one-sided diatribe about how the Technocracy was ultimately behind every source of suffering and calamity that the Nephandi weren’t blamed for throughout the years, we have an intelligent and frank look at the development of dozens of secret, paranoid conspiracies throughout the centuries. Between sidebars talking about what “branches” of each of the Traditions were doing in various eras and the main text unfolding the grand timeline, there is plenty of fodder here for historical or foreign settings for a mage game. Plus there was even a reasonable view of the Technocracy, showing how it was not always so overtly hostile to the Traditions and how it developed from a much more idealistic and noble establishment. That’s not something you often get in a Mage supplement, that’s for sure. The only downbeat in the chapter is the ending, where it talks about the recent events of the Mage universe. It may be partly be because of my distaste for most of the Mage metaplot, but I didn’t find most of this section that interesting at all, and the implication that technomagick is something of a newly arrived fad I don’t like at all. This is, however, just five pages in more than fifty of otherwise stellar material.
Now we get into the chapter that I had the highest hopes for after my initial flip-through. As you can probably expect from that kind of introduction, I was disappointed by the chapter covering the social and political environments of the Traditions. Most of the ideas contained within were rudimentary or obvious (don’t abuse your Acolytes or they might turn around and betray you), and the fact that the game fiction woven through the chapter didn’t really make much sense to me didn’t help either. The chapter tries to clearly lay out the organization of the Traditions, from the Council of Nine down to chantries down to cabals. Unfortunately, it lacks any real surprises or revelations as well as the blunt, no-nonsense tone that made the previous chapter so useful and enjoyable, at least in the main text. Some of the sidebars were genuinely useful, addressing basic assumptions of the game, from broad topics like whether or not global Ascension is even possible to more immediate and important questions for any given chronicle, such as just how important to make politics and intrigue.
The fifth full chapter in the book looks at the Traditions as groups, and despite a very poor start where it looks at each one in turn only to reinforce or create stereotypes, it does contain a lot of useful information. The idea of “twisted Traditions” (that is to say groups that blend together elements of multiple Traditions) is revisited. Several more examples are provided (some of which are very cool) and there is even a look at how and why such mixing occurs, something even more useful than the examples, I think. Storytellers or players looking at some guidelines and things to consider when planning to smush two paradigms and groups together into a new whole should find something to get their noodle running here. The chapter closes out with some basic stats for templates of a variety of NPCs, from drunken college students to drunken old masters. I generally have little use for such templates, however, and found nothing to really grab my attention.
Having fully passed the apex of the book’s quality now, we move into the crunchy rules chapter, full of new traits and option rules for characters. Normally, I have nothing against that. I actually really like merits and flaws, especially in Mage (there were among the few really good things about the revised edition, actually), but some of the new traits and the introduction of the new “Adversary Backgrounds” were a little too much for me. While some of the new Backgrounds, like Cult and the expanded rules for Familiars were very neat, others were confusing, Demesne, for example. I’m really not sure what to make of that one, since there is precious little explanation for a trait that basically seems to boil down to the character carrying a personal reality around with them all the time. What kind of effect this has and even what it looks like are left frustratingly vague, even for a Mage book. The Adversarial Backgrounds that I mentioned above are pretty much what they sound like: Backgrounds that hinder a character and give points instead of costing them. It’s a fine idea and isn’t really unbalancing or anything, but neither does it really feel necessary when flaws already accomplish the same thing with a teeny bit less book keeping. They’re just kinda superfluous and don’t really mesh with the pattern of the rest of the Storyteller system.
Following that is the chapter with storytelling advice on how to run Tradition chronicles. Maybe it’s just me, but this chapter seems like what remains of a much longer one with most of the interesting stuff removed. Many of the sections seem rather short, like they are introductions and not the whole. This is reinforced by the fact that there is little new here, little that hasn’t been said a million times already in dozens of other White Wolf supplements. There are, of course, exceptions, like the mention of how the Technocracy isn’t everywhere but likes to make people think it is or the very nice and detailed look at how to use seasons as heavy symbolism in a chronicle. The fact that this “seasonal play” contains no real introduction, however, and feels like an example of how to apply symbolism is one of the reasons I think that either a lot was cut from this chapter or a lot more was planned. It could just be me wanting more meat as usual, but the cutting board left a mark on this chapter.
The book closes out with a chapter on “treasures,” though there are more locations and plot ideas than actual magic items, oddly enough. This was actually a nice up-note to end the book on, as while the items didn’t really excite me (and the “Tradition blades” made me groan) the locations and plot ideas sure as hell did. There’s a demon in a desert tempting people to let it free, a modern city carrying on an ancient tradition, a buried Nephandus bitter enough to poison the very land around him, and even hidden (and stylish!) repositories of arcane knowledge! Just the stuff great games are made of.
All in all, the Guide to the Traditions had it’s heart in the right place, but only really pulled off half of what it set out to do, if that. Good intentions will only get you so far, though, and the sometimes poor decisions and often worse editing didn’t help at all. There was enough here that actually reading it was more than worth my while (for the history section alone, actually), but if I had paid full price for this I would have felt cheated. If you’re planning on running a Mage game (since this is much more useful for Storytellers than players), the book raises a number of questions and ideas that you are bound to find useful, but unless you are completely new to the game, this is something you want to find on sale or in the used bin.
Note: I feel I should give some sort of explanation about the ratings provided. I’ve left both of them as average because while the book does have some pretty spectacular highs in regards to both style and content, it also has some frustrating lows. Style, for example, would have been “Class any well done” or higher if not for severe editing mistakes (like leaving art notations in the middle of the text). Anyway, ratings are arbitrary and kinda hard to pin down sometimes anyway.
Go to forum!
(Due to spamming, old forum discussions are no linked.)