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I'm probably the only person in the world who still plays kindred of the east but here's a fan-made resource I made for setting a KOTE game in Hong Kong: https://flamecourt.wordpress.com/
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Oct 27, 2018 22:21
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So I was rereading Guide to the Traditions, and wow, I had forgotten how much Ascension occasionally hated its protagonists, because it can't stop making GBS threads on them even in their own book.
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Oct 29, 2018 00:45
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Rand Brittain posted:So I was rereading Guide to the Traditions, and wow, I had forgotten how much Ascension occasionally hated its protagonists, because it can't stop making GBS threads on them even in their own book. Color me curious about this; I know very little about the Traditions from OMage. Was this intentional, or just not realizing how something like 'we're against modern medicine' comes off?
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Oct 29, 2018 00:57
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Joe Slowboat posted:Color me curious about this; I know very little about the Traditions from OMage. Was this intentional, or just not realizing how something like 'we're against modern medicine' comes off? The thing is, they aren't actually against modern medicine.
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Oct 29, 2018 01:11
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Joe Slowboat posted:Color me curious about this; I know very little about the Traditions from OMage. Was this intentional, or just not realizing how something like 'we're against modern medicine' comes off? This was in the phase of Mage Revised where the line was 'the War for Ascension is OVER and you are DUMB for thinking it's NOT so go magick up a soup kitchen and do some REAL GOOD!' Sometimes it could really overplay its hand of 'the Traditions are fractious and squabbling and can barely cross the street without help, to say nothing to take on the Technocracy or Nephandi.'
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Oct 29, 2018 01:14
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I always liked the idea that The Technocracy will basically crush the Nephandi accidentally, like, from their perspective of 'winning so hard it's ludicrous you people are even turning up' they can't even tell the difference, and the Nephandi, this massive threat to the other Traditions, get crushed pretty much as a byproduct.
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Oct 29, 2018 01:24
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This honestly deserves a more detailed response, so. Originally, so far back in the mists of time you can't even get decent scans, Mage: the Ascension was about the Council of Nine Mystic Traditions trying to keep the spirit of magic and freedom alive, and to free reality from the grip of the Technocratic Union, a faceless engine of Control. It's sort of hard to really generalize about how things were back in 1e, because this was back in the ages when White Wolf was even more inconsistent than it was in later days. That said, it was generally a thing that the Council of Nine were out to protect Sleepers, promote freedom, and demonstrate the reality of magic and ancient (or futuristic) ways. Meanwhile, the Union was out to stomp on the face on anything that wouldn't knuckle under. In the beginning, it wasn't even nailed down that they were human and not just spirits of fascism or something. Eventually, the Technocracy got more nailed down as being the descendants of the Renaissance-era organization the Order of Reason, who had started out with at least halfway noble intentions, albeit loaded down with a bunch of paternalistic stuff you can probably guess at, before getting hijacked by the money men and religious nuts and undergoing a metamorphosis into its modern incarnation, which likes to talk a lot about science but is determined to prevent people from doing any (because proper science wouldn't give people the answers they want them to arrive at). The Traditions were formed in response to the Order/Union's aggressions, out of mystical practitioners who often hadn't had any real organization before, in the spirit of working together and defending the traditions they represented, albeit loaded down with a bunch of paternalistic stuff you can probably guess at. Unfortunately it turned out that the online discourse was just not prepared to deal with heroic faith healers fighting against wicked geneticists, and there has always been a loud, aggressive set of voices who are determined to paint the Traditions as the bad guy, by talking about how they want to take away your toilets (not in the books), and are planning to control the paradigm so that God will give you leprosy (not in the books), and are basically just as bad as the people running a pogrom (named "the Pogrom" by the people doing it) against them. It was inevitable that some of this would get into the books, and a lot of Revised got a (deserved) bad rep for being really ashamed of ever thinking that magic was cool, and just generally wanting people to be ashamed of being in the Traditions. Eventually Mage20 made it canon that the Traditions hate light bulbs and wish everybody would go back to using candles, at which point arguing about it became mostly pointless.
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Oct 29, 2018 01:25
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Shockeh posted:I always liked the idea that The Technocracy will basically crush the Nephandi accidentally, like, from their perspective of 'winning so hard it's ludicrous you people are even turning up' they can't even tell the difference, and the Nephandi, this massive threat to the other Traditions, get crushed pretty much as a byproduct. Honestly, I always found the Nephandi extremely underwhelming, since in a game about ideology they're the guys who don't have ideology, just card-carrying evil.
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Oct 29, 2018 01:26
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Rand Brittain posted:So I was rereading Guide to the Traditions, and wow, I had forgotten how much Ascension occasionally hated its protagonists, because it can't stop making GBS threads on them even in their own book. This is also The Hierarchy, which has multiple instances of "this hero of Stygia did a great thing and won a huge victory over Oblivion, so we shoved him screaming into a soulforge and made him into a book about it."
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Oct 29, 2018 01:38
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At least with the Hierarchy it’s easy to say that’s down to everyone letting their shadows get a little too influential.
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Oct 29, 2018 01:46
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Rand Brittain posted:This honestly deserves a more detailed response, so.
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Oct 29, 2018 01:47
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I'll be honest, the resistant reading of 'faith healers are bad, actually' has a lot going for it in what you describe. At least in a post-2000 American culture, where the worst people in power tend to find it preferable to undermine findings like climate change. Maybe his wasn't the case in the 90s, but I find it a lot harder to associate scientists with fascism than with opposing it. Edit: that's not to say canon arguments aren't the most tedious thing, but I'm really glad the Seers of the Throne dont fundamentally consist of 'social injustice is the result of not listening to faith healers.'
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Oct 29, 2018 01:49
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Basically it turned out that V was only barely fiction.
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Oct 29, 2018 01:53
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Joe Slowboat posted:I'll be honest, the resistant reading of 'faith healers are bad, actually' has a lot going for it in what you describe. The Technocracy write-up seems to be the one bright spot of M20. Sure, you have the 'I don't want to cure cancer I want to turn people into dinosaurs' types, but you've also got a lot of decent boots on the ground who are trying to wrangle the Conventions back into their stated mission. Using cyborg saber-tooth tigers and ray guns and secret agents so they come off as pretty rad in concept. Also they produced one of the scarier bad guy organizations in the game, being Threat Null which to sum up is essentially the Convention members out in the Far Umbra who were stranded when the Storm Wall went up in Revised - including the old, really powerful ones who'd get eaten by Paradox on Earth - and have started to come back... changed. /musical sting. And they are much cooler than Brucato's 'eh the Nephandi have taken over the Conventions also the Traditions suck hard and by the way here's my NEW favorite faction!' On a personal level, I don't know that Mage in any edition ever hit a sweet spot for me, something that made me go 'that's my Mage.' I could point to times in other lines pretty easy, but never for the ol' purple books. And that's not even to say there are no good books for the line - I love the Revised Akashic and Euthanatos books - but it feels like the line was undercut the most by the old WW's 'modern BAD old GOOD hey nonny nonny' mindset.
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Oct 29, 2018 02:50
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I tend to prefer 2e over Revised just because Revised is such a fuckin downer
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Oct 29, 2018 02:52
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Yeah, the TU works best when it's an organization stuck in a cold civil war between the worst excesses spawned of the enlightenment and the actual, quantifiable good the scientific method and rationalism have created. It keeps it from outright winning, giving the trads space to thrive and foster dissent, and also keeps it from being a clearcut "actual medicine that works independently of the practitioner" vs "faith healing, which actually works, but only if a dragon doesn't eat the faith healer first".
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Oct 29, 2018 03:05
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Joe Slowboat posted:I'll be honest, the resistant reading of 'faith healers are bad, actually' has a lot going for it in what you describe. Ascension has not aged well in that regard. The Technocracy is heavily rooted in US conspiracy lore, which is another way of saying it's all thinly veiled anti-Semitism when you get down to it. It's a game about fighting The Man and the man just so happens to comprise a cabal of evil bankers, the Deep State, globalists, and a conspiracy to control the world through newspeak in academia. Meanwhile, the kind of people believing that there's a conspiracy of bankers, globalists, and college professors controlling the Deep State have turned out to actually be kind of unsavory types.
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Oct 29, 2018 03:28
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I miss the good old days, when conspiracy theories mostly didn't spawn bombings and pizza shootings outside of Oklahoma City.
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Oct 29, 2018 03:55
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I've been itching for a game to run for my group that we havent touched before. Is Wraith as cool as it sounds?
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Oct 29, 2018 05:00
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Really, the Technocracy is just modern-day Imperialism and Colonialism and Capitalism given a face.
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Oct 29, 2018 06:01
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MonsieurChoc posted:Really, the Technocracy is just modern-day Imperialism and Colonialism and Capitalism given a face. No, that's the Exarchs. I don't know a lot about the Technocracy but I'm pretty clear on how it differs from the Seers of the Throne, and they are very specifically capitalism (the Chancellor), colonialism, and so on as the gods of a terrible cult. Unless you think the most meaningful opposition to capitalism is denying the lies of academia and modern science? LatwPIAT's account is a lot more convincing; as is often said, antisemitism is the socialism of fools.
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Oct 29, 2018 06:14
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Rand Brittain posted:(not in the books) Rand Brittain posted:It was inevitable that some of this would get into the books Rand Brittain posted:Eventually Mage20 made it canon that the Traditions hate light bulbs and wish everybody would go back to using candles, at which point arguing about it became mostly pointless. I mean, at this point, wouldn't it be more honest for your argument to not be "that's not what the Traditions are" coming straight out of the gate, but rather "sometimes the Traditions are that, but that's stupid and these other books' take is a more sensible conflict?" All the Mage stuff is in the books, even the Mage stuff that contradicts the other Mage stuff. I have to say I still come down on the side of "that's fundamentally a real hard sell in TYOOL 2018, no matter how much nuance you try to frame it with."
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Oct 29, 2018 06:55
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I personally have no problem with the idea of an aggressive hyper-mega-quantum uber-rationalist group turning into essentially a pack of fascists, because that is what has happened among the hyper-mega-quantum-uber rationalist groups in actual practice. Eliezier Yudkowsky is a low-level Technocratic agent. Gorefiend posted:I've been itching for a game to run for my group that we havent touched before. Is Wraith as cool as it sounds?
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Oct 29, 2018 07:06
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I Am Just a Box posted:I have to say I still come down on the side of "that's fundamentally a real hard sell in TYOOL 2018, no matter how much nuance you try to frame it with." So if you...Ascend? That can't be it. You, in 2018. Turn into a mage. Do they use Awaken? Anyways, you Awaken. And there's the big old Technocratic Union, basically every science conspiracy there is with some New World Order goodness. They probably want you to sign up, to get in with them and be a salariman/tyrant/corporate-science-backstabber. Or you can take a paradigm, and run with it, and maybe, I guess, help some people with it? I'm not quite sure what the end goal of the Traditions is. But are there any you could fit in with? This was my problem with Masquerade and Apocalypse. These Traditions aren't exactly what I think of when I think of 'poo poo yeah I want magic,' though I guess as a nostalgic kid of the 90s the Virtual Adepts would be cool, now. What else is popular? Satanic Witchcraft? Sabrina's got a show about that right now. Anime has made the prayer paper thing popular. Folks know voodoo and Santeria where I came from and apparently it's getting popular with the cartels. Keeping in mind that they aren't going to change it, because they want the old audience. What kind of magic tradition/paradigm would you want? nofather fucked around with this message at 07:26 on Oct 29, 2018 |
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Oct 29, 2018 07:23
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I don't think Ascension Revised ever took the kind of incredibly disparaging stance towards the Traditions you see in M20 now. It was just much less optimistic than earlier editions w/r/t the use and feasibility of actually fighting the Technocracy, although I forget exactly how they sold the reader on this so I'm not sure if it represented a commitment to base-building and dual power or craven end-of-history liberalism.
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Oct 29, 2018 07:47
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So, I really love Wraith. I think it's one of the best tabletop games period, and definitely one of the best games from its era. It's also incredibly depressing. To get at Wraith, I think it's important to think of it as a two-tiered game. On the larger tier, you have the massive factional conflicts. The Hierarchy, the upholders of the status quo, hold the line against the incursions of the Spectral threats, but they do so in a way that is literally and metaphorically objectifying, and that rarely helps the individual Wraiths within the Hierarchy. The Heretics are, typically, some brand of snake oil salesfolk, who offer convincing but false answers, which is particularly a danger for those that travel to the other pockets of stability in the Tempest, the Far Shores. The Renegades are weak and fractured and ultimately unable to do anything besides offer token resistance against the Hierarchy. The Spectres are an existential threat and, in many ways, an inevitability. Everything collapses into entropy and Oblivion, and almost every Wraith will either become a Spectre or be utterly consumed by Oblivion. You have other factions like the Ferrymen and the Guilds, but they're ultimately either part of the above factions or larger inconsequential to the political landscape. The other tier is the personal layer, and things aren't much better there. Every Wraith has a Shadow, which is sort of a combination of the Jungian idea of the Shadow and the Freudian Death-Urge. It's the voice in the back of the character's head, telling them to do awful things or to just end it all, which in many ways mirrors the sort of negative self-talk that people with depression in real life often have to deal with. On the personal layer, most Wraiths have a goal of working towards Transcendence, which is a way of moving on to whatever actual afterlife exists beyond the ghostly Underworld. In order to achiever Transcendence, a character has to resolve their connections to the living world, in the form of their Passions and Fetters. Passions and Fetters are super important though, as Fetters allow for characters to heal and stay in the relatively safe Shadowlands and Passions are used to restored a character's magic juice. Once these connections have been resolved, the character then has to resolve their conflict with their Shadow, which does not get a lot of mechanical focus, but is definitely something that the character would struggle with. What happens then is anyone's guess, as Transcendence works kinda like death, with the character passing beyond, never return. No one in the setting even knows if this is a good thing, or if it's just a less painful way to get consumed by Oblivion. All of the systems of the game revolve around a palpable sense of decay, with the world being full of dangers and crumbling under the weight of Oblivion's presence. It creates a rather bleak world, but one that has a lot of room for emotional exploration. It's a game where hope is hard to find, but is all the more worthwhile in the face of that bleakness. Edit: Oh, and they blew up the entire setting before Revised edition came out, making it the first line to have its End Times book. Ghost themes would later be explored in Orpheus which, while I didn't like at the time because it wasn't Wraith, is actually a pretty cool, if less emotionally intense, game of its own, focused more on corporate espionage and the interactions between the living and the dead, with a gradually escalating metaplot revealed over the course of a limited series run that was, at least in my opinion, the only good metaplot in the old World of Darkness. Meinberg fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Oct 29, 2018 |
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Oct 29, 2018 08:12
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Ferrinus posted:I don't think Ascension Revised ever took the kind of incredibly disparaging stance towards the Traditions you see in M20 now. It was just much less optimistic than earlier editions w/r/t the use and feasibility of actually fighting the Technocracy, although I forget exactly how they sold the reader on this so I'm not sure if it represented a commitment to base-building and dual power or craven end-of-history liberalism. They didn't. Mostly the line really was 'it was dumb to spend all that time fighting on Nephandi battleships in the orbit of Mercury and not paying attention to the world' which to an extent is valid - letting the fantastical overwhelm the mundane to the latter's detriment - but it's how hard they went in that direction. And the blowback seemed to be 'well, we screwed up, of all the magical traditions we're the Charlie Browniest' which then got amped up in M20. It didn't help that Brucato had new toys he wanted to play with.
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Oct 29, 2018 12:08
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I Am Just a Box posted:I have to say I still come down on the side of "that's fundamentally a real hard sell in TYOOL 2018, no matter how much nuance you try to frame it with." It's a genuinely hard sell. It just gets harder because you have to deal with stuff like, uh... Shockeh posted:Sounds like loser Tradition propaganda to me. The Technocratic Union are just another Tradition, that happens to empower the whole of Humanity including Sleepers, sorry you wanted to be special Mage nerds. ...that. Which isn't really an accurate picture of the books, but it gets into online discussions 100% of the time. Dawgstar posted:They didn't. Mostly the line really was 'it was dumb to spend all that time fighting on Nephandi battleships in the orbit of Mercury and not paying attention to the world' which to an extent is valid - letting the fantastical overwhelm the mundane to the latter's detriment - but it's how hard they went in that direction. And the blowback seemed to be 'well, we screwed up, of all the magical traditions we're the Charlie Browniest' which then got amped up in M20. It didn't help that Brucato had new toys he wanted to play with. Yeah, the thing is, they could have accomplished their goal of "let's have mages doing things on Earth and not be laser-focused on the spirit world" by actually writing cool things on Earth for players to get hype about. But instead they went with "all those cool things we sold you books about before? They were actually lame, and you were a fool for thinking they were cool. And they blew up! They're just piles of dust now haunted by pathetic ghosts who still think they're relevant. But they're not, because they're dumb, and you're dumb if you want anything to do with them. Now go, and open up a soup kitchen, while doing as few spells as possible!" That said, Guide to the Traditions really is nearly as bad about being ashamed of the Traditions as M20 is, although M20 definitely takes it up a notch.
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Oct 29, 2018 12:16
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I always thought that the most interesting idea in M:TA was hiding in the Backgrounds section: Dream. Now the fluff on Dream varied but the core idea was that many mages were able to engage in a ritual practice and obtain correct, objective knowledge and methodologies to do tasks. These were not spiritual aphorisms or enhancements to their funky brain powers: If you made your Dream roll, you could learn how to program Ruby on Rails, or shoot a gun, or whatever. This is a more profound challenge to the Technocracy than summoning dragons, because it actually subverts what is conventionally called "reason" entirely. Whatever faculty that Dream represents, developed and refined, would be an entirely different way to organize knowledge.
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Oct 29, 2018 12:36
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The problem is and always has been that there is no unity among the Traditions, it's a group that came together under duress and never managed to hammer out some core shared values or beliefs. Even something as simple as "Lets strive for Awakening and bringing magic back to the world!" stops dead when you ask "Ok, what's Awakening? And whose magic are we bringing back?". Because boy howdy have some of the Traditions brutally hosed over and marginalized some of the other Traditions in the long centuries of conflict. It's reduced to a support group for people going "gently caress the Technocracy" in a world where the Technocracy doesn't even rate you as a threat anymore. They never, ever, ever had a cohesive message on what the Traditions are, what they wanted to do, and why they were even doing it. Hard to pull for "them" when there is no meaningful them to begin with.
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Oct 29, 2018 12:36
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Firstborn posted:Zak S. is a psychopath. One of his most recent blog posts cites grognard.txt as some milestone in hatespeech on the internet, and later says SA is worse than Stormfront as far as tolerance. How can anyone keep a job while saying things this dumb? gently caress WW.
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Oct 29, 2018 12:41
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Mulva posted:The problem is and always has been that there is no unity among the Traditions, it's a group that came together under duress and never managed to hammer out some core shared values or beliefs. Even something as simple as "Lets strive for Awakening and bringing magic back to the world!" stops dead when you ask "Ok, what's Awakening? And whose magic are we bringing back?". Because boy howdy have some of the Traditions brutally hosed over and marginalized some of the other Traditions in the long centuries of conflict. It's reduced to a support group for people going "gently caress the Technocracy" in a world where the Technocracy doesn't even rate you as a threat anymore. They never, ever, ever had a cohesive message on what the Traditions are, what they wanted to do, and why they were even doing it. Hard to pull for "them" when there is no meaningful them to begin with. I mean, the thing is that nobody made them focus so heavily on the negative aspects of their own protagonists and insists that they're a bunch of directionless chumps fighting over seating arrangements.
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Oct 29, 2018 13:41
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Joe Slowboat posted:No, that's the Exarchs. I don't know a lot about the Technocracy but I'm pretty clear on how it differs from the Seers of the Throne, and they are very specifically capitalism (the Chancellor), colonialism, and so on as the gods of a terrible cult. The Exarchs are spiritual in nature, while the Technocracy is *zizekly* pure ideology. In fact, Ascension is pretty much a conflict of ideology. And While the Technocracy talks a good game about helping the masses, the truth is that it's a horribly unequal entity which tries to impose it's paternalistic, capitalist, imperialist view of the world by force and coercion. It's pretty important that the Traditions include a lot of non-European cultures (badly executed as they might have been in the early 90s).
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Oct 29, 2018 14:06
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Rand Brittain posted:...that. Which isn't really an accurate picture of the books, but it gets into online discussions 100% of the time. 
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Oct 29, 2018 14:16
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It was probably a doomed proposition from the start to try and sell the broad mass of internet-arguing nerds on the idea that "the faction that Elon Musk would belong to" is the bad guys.
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Oct 29, 2018 14:24
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Attorney at Funk posted:It was probably a doomed proposition from the start to try and sell the broad mass of internet-arguing nerds on the idea that "the faction that Elon Musk would belong to" is the bad guys. Maybe, but I'd like to see a version of the game that really committed to that take.
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Oct 29, 2018 14:43
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Rand Brittain posted:Maybe, but I'd like to see a version of the game that really committed to that take. Do you think you could staff out a line's worth of freelancers who could commit to it? Modern Onyx Path could probably swing it better than old White Wolf (nevermind new White Wolf) but there's only so many Malcolms Sheppard.
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Oct 29, 2018 14:56
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The Traditions need as clear a thesis statement as "You're already a Technocrat" from the Guide to the Technocracy. It doesn't matter if it's self-serving bullshit trying to get people to accept the status quo, it's remarkably simple and easy to understand bullshit that has the ring of truth. The Traditions have never, ever had anything that speaks that simply and powerful to what they believe and stand for.
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Oct 29, 2018 14:57
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Attorney at Funk posted:It was probably a doomed proposition from the start to try and sell the broad mass of internet-arguing nerds on the idea that "the faction that Elon Musk would belong to" is the bad guys. The pot-smoking scion of a colonial emerald mining family, trying to populate mars while creating underground magnet trains and home-flame-throwers works pretty well in the SoE.
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Oct 29, 2018 14:58
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Barbed Tongues posted:The pot-smoking scion of a colonial emerald mining family, trying to populate mars while creating underground magnet trains and home-flame-throwers works pretty well in the SoE. By aesthetic, but not by like... his actual job or ideology.
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Oct 29, 2018 14:59
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