 Goto [ Index ] |
This review is going to assume basic knowledge of the Mage system, since the book is quite useless without it.
Physical Structure and Layout
Hardback, and with only 180-odd pages, it doesn't look to be in any danger of falling apart. The cover is truly beautiful- I'm a huge fan of the picture, which shows some complex-looking ritual in progress and features a glowing brazier, golem-like statue and mysterious creatures with flowers in their hair.
I'm slightly less pleased to discover that while the basic style inside is identical with that found in the Mage core book, we lose the glossy paper and gold-coloured embellishments. On top of this, the book is substantially more expensive per page than the Mage core book. I understand the hook-them-in-with-the-core-book-then-sell-supplements mode of selling RPGs, and I have a certain amount of sympathy for it, at least provided you do get a complete game with core book (which with Mage, I think you do, for the most part; perhaps I'll review the core book sometime too), but I can't help feel a little short-changed when I pay almost double the rate for an inferior quality book.
However, perhaps I'm being a bit picky. The pages are at least solid. The art, all black-and-white, of course, is mostly quite good, with a few very good pieces. I actually like the chapter-heading pieces a lot, despite, or perhaps because of, their simplicity. I also like the fact that fiction pieces are here kept to a minimum. There's one short piece at the beginning, which certainly didn't blow me away, and very short "scenes" at the beginning of each chapter. All in all, a perfectly servicable book, and I didn't actually spot a single spelling mistake, so kudos in that direction.
Chapter one: Fire
I've skipped the introduction, as it's a mere two pages long, and basically just explains what the chapters are going to be about. There are five of them, and they're called Fire, Air, Water, Earth and Void, with subtitles which attempt to explain what they're actually about. This one is basically about making up your own spells, as a player or storyteller, and making sure they're balanced and at the right level, as (presumably) the latter.
We start with a detailed look at the 13 practices- basically types of spell, split out by the level in an Arcanuum required to use them. For example, 2 dots in an Arcanuum are required to use the Practice of Shielding, to protect the subject of the arcanuum from something or to protect from the subject of the arcanuum; while 4 dots are required to use the practice of unravelling, to subtly unweave the subject of the arcanuum and destroy or entirely change it.
The practices were detailed in the Mage core book, but they got a single page devoted to the lot of them (I think, at least- I don't have the book to hand), and one of my biggest complaints with the core book was its poor attempt at explaining improvised spellcasting.
So does this improve matters?
Well, a bit, certainly. But I think a lot of space is wasted giving not terribly interesting text about what mages think of each of the practices and what their attitutes to them are (Personally I feel they should exist mostly as an abstraction for game mechanical reasons rather than being part of the mythos. But there you go.) while not enough is spent detailed what you can actually do with each practice. A single example of a spell using each practice is provided, and some of them aren't actually particularly typical examples. Anyway.
I'm also not convinced that the practices fully achieve what they're intended to. The practices of Knowing, Unveiling, Sheilding, Perfectly and Veiling work fine, but there's a slight tendancy for Fraying, Unravelling and Unmaking to simply be more powerful versions of the same effect, even though they are distinguished slightly; and more importantly, Compelling, Ruling, Weaving, Patterning and Making are really all simply "miscellaneous" categories, which doesn't help anyone very much. The book does admit this to a degree, but doesn't offer much in the way of a solution.
The chapter continues with a reasonable section on balancing spells and choosing an aspect for them. This is good advice. Concluding the chapter is a section on crossover play and how it applies to spells. Basically it consists of a long list of what Mage magic cannot do (change a Vampire's clan, change a Werewolf's auspice and the like) which I don't think is very helpful, quite frankly, as it's mostly either obvious or more a matter of taste.
Chapter two: Air
Subtitled "Spell Lore. It basically has three sections. The first is a long fluff piece on what magic feels like to use and how mages talk about their magic. This didn't really grab me, but your mileage may vary.
The second is basically a list of new spells. It includes sidebars on cloaking spells (by adding Prime 2 to them) and spatial and temporal command (which makes using advanced area and prolongation factors easier if you have access to the Space or Time arcana respectively). These I like. The new spells are OK, but I'm not generally keen on spell lists so much and would prefer solid rules for working out how to place an effect among arcana and level (with particular note to combining arcana), which is what the first chapter tried (and, in fairness, partially succeeded) to do.
The last section of the chapter is about rotes. I was pleasantly surprised to find this to be the best bit of the chapter, as I generally don't like rotes. There's a new merit which lets mages cast rotes and do things related to the skill used in the rote at the same time, which like many merits is way over-priced but is quite interesting.
Then there's a section on all the skills and how to choose which ones to use for a rote, and the best bit of the whole section, which goes by the disappointing name of "Factor Bonuses". They basically give you bonuses to spell factors (sometimes any, sometimes a specfic factor, like Potency or Targets) if the spell is successfully cast, provided you do something significant to the "style" of the rote. For example, one rote using the Alter Accuracy spell called "Dance of the Sun Knife" gives you a +2 Potency bonus if you peform a minute-long dance before you cast it, and one attack spell gives you a bonus for shouting a terrible war cry as you cast it.
Factor bonuses are specific to an individual rote, and different rotes that basically generate the same effect may have entirely different factor bonuses because they were created by different mages with entirely different views about magical style.
I love these, quite frankly. I just wish there was more advice given about how to create some as a storyteller (and stop them from getting out of hand by being too powerful). There's also the slight issue that a rote with factor bonuses is clearly better than one without and the rotes presented in the core Mage book don't have them. Oh, well- they're not that difficult to think up.
One rule I would quite like is that using High Speech is a +2 factor bonus itself, which weakens the High Speech slightly (it no longer makes it easier to cast a spell in the first place) and allows one to balance rotes by deciding that some come from non-Atlantean "barbarian" mages and don't have High Speech as a factor bonus (i.e, it doesn't work). But this isn't mentioned- merely an idea of mine.
The chapter ends with a list of rotes with suitable factor bonuses, which serve as nice examples. Unfortunately the designers missed a perfect opportunity to have a rote that used Computer as its skill, which is a shame, since as far as I know there aren't any.
Chapter three: Water
This is the fluffiest chapter, with next-to-no rules in at all. It also has hands-down the best illustrations, but that's a side point. I often don't like fluff, but this is actually very good fluff.
It's basically about magical style. One can adopt a classical Atlantean style, which the core Mage book basically assumes you will do, or can assume magic works quite differently. It even allows players to come up with entirely different "creation myths" other than the one described in the core book for their view on how magic came about, though it does stress that there will likely be a lot in common between different mythoi. It almost admits that the four Atlantean orders as described in the core book only really exist in America and Nothern Europe and not even everywhere there, and that other quite different orders with less or even no direct connection to Atlantis exist elsewhere, but it tries to inist that they'll be likely to conform to the four basic types- warriors, secret police, scholars and viziers and have at least sympathy with their respective orders elsewhere, which I think was something of a mistake. However, it's refreshing to see the possibility of other groups.
Then we get a lot on high speech, magical gestures, magical tools, glyphs, use of mana and so on, and how they might vary for different magical styles. There's then two examples of alternative approaches. One is short and designed purely as an example of tweaking Atlantean spellcasting slightly. The other is "technomagic", which players of earlier editions of Mage might find hauntingly familiar. Magic as advanced technology, in summary.
The chapter concludes with a bit of Mage politics. As I find the politics the least interesting aspect of the game, this mostly bored me, but I do very much like the new rules for the Duel Arcane, which basically add a scissors-paper-stone, bluffing and tactical element to it. This was needed because the basic rules for it are completely dull.
Chapter four: Earth
And then we have the crunchiest chapter. This is all about making magical items. It's basically a long list of spells you can place in an item, with a few spells relating to item-enchantment along the way. Some of them are quite interesting. There are alternative ways of relinquishing a spell (permenantly imbuing it in an item without having to maintain it) other than sacrficing a willpower dot, which is a pretty steep cost. They seem reasonably balanced and mostly quite good.
There are rules for cursed items. One oversight here is that there are two spells that do basically the same thing- Precious Malediction and Induce Hoarding Instinct, both of which confer One-Ring-like tendancies upon an object making it hard for people to want to get rid of. The rules are almost identical. However. The odd oversight I can accept.
Cursed item are relinquished by doing something unpleasant. The easiest way is simply hurting yourself and sealing the item with blood (or whatever your magical style dictates), though one can also do it by being thorughly evil-torture works. They seem quite interesting to play with, and actually add something of a horror element to the game, something which Mage for the most part lacks, whatever its designers might have intended.
Oh, and then we have Alchemy. Potions and lotions, oh my! Brew fame, distill glory, even stopper death... And that kind of thing. Putting spells into liquids or powders or whatever, and making them one-use. One slightly bizarre issue is that one can have Alchemy as an Occult speciality, but all the Alchemy spells, when learnt as rotes, use Science, Medicine or Crafts as their skills, not Occult. Its a speciality that doesn't work like any other speciality at all, which is an irritating inconsistency.
Finally a section on Soul Stones. While I like the idea, I still think there's precious little reason for a mage to create a soul stone of their own, and every reason to steal other people's- I think there really needs to be a strong advantage to creating your own soul stone to explain why ever do it, with all the risks it entails. Still, this section adds a couple more uses for your own souls stones- including a limited ability to use paradox-free magic, which is nice.
In conclusion, this chapter adds a lot of new stuff regarding magical items. Good if that aspect of the game interests you, almost worthless if it doesn't. There is one problem that vaugely worries me, and it's this. Almost all the spells regarding item creation are Covert. Makes sense, really, because what you're doing has no visible immediate effect. However, many of the spells are capable of creating quite obvious and unnatural results, so item enchanting to some extent just gives mages an easy way to avoid paradox. But I'm sure some house-rules could be thought up if players started abusing this.
Chapter five: Void
Subtitled "Greater Mysteries", and mostly for storytellers. This chapter has two amazingly good sections, and two very dull ones. The first of the latter is a bit of storytelling advice. Outside of the Werewolf core book, which somehow managed to get it right, I haven't seen any particularly good storytelling advice in WoD books, and this is no real exception. It's mostly about running NPCs and doesn't tell one anything very useful.
Then we get a lovely section on Paradoxes. I'd been waiting for this for the whole book and was beginning to think I wasn't going to get it. But here it is. Lots of advice on how to create interesting paradoxes of every type, including two creative horrors to use in Manifestation paradoxes. There are also some rules for making paradox worse, which I like because I don't think it's enough of a problem at the moment.
The second dull section is on Archmastery. That doesn't sound like a dull subject, but the book really doesn't actually say anything about it. It gives vague descriptions of what Archmasters do with their lives which sound a bit dogmatic, and fails really even to give enough information for a storyteller to include and NPC archmaster, even one that wasn't in direct opposition to the players.
The last bit is again amazing. It's about Abyssal spellcasting. I won't say too much, but basically it allows players (or NPCs) to gain powers over paradox and the ability to inflict aggravated damage with any spell at the cost of eventually going completely insane. Another horror element, and something (surrendering one's soul to dark forces in order to gain temporary power) that was missing from Mage. This is a fairly short section, but it may be one of the best in the book.
Conclusions
Tome of the Mysteries is a mixed bag. There's bound to be sections you won't use, but one the other hand there's bound to be sections that you will really like (as I did, though quite possibly not the same sections). Most bits are a lot more useful to a storyteller than a player, though even for a player there's the section on magical style. Thumbs up, I think.
Help support RPGnet by purchasing this item through DriveThruRPG.
