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ProfessorCirno posted:At a certain point I feel nMage is or at lest could be about Indiana Jonesing it up - complete with fighting off nazis - and then using your discoveries to punch fascism to death both literally and metaphysicaly,
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Nov 29, 2018 21:56
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MTA is a cool setting but no game has ever made me feel so much like I'm not smart enough to run it
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Nov 29, 2018 21:58
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Blockhouse posted:Mage is a cool setting but no game has ever made me feel so much like I'm not smart enough to run it Mage probably makes me feel the most like that, but I have similar feelings about Demon, Promethean, and Mummy.
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Nov 29, 2018 21:59
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Kurieg posted:Mage probably makes me feel the most like that, but I have similar feelings about Demon, Promethean, and Mummy.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:01
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Dave Brookshaw posted:In short - a character won't ever meet an Exarch. They are as Horde Prime is to Skeletor, as Morgoth is to the Nine, the unseen presence offscreen that the big bad reports to. Well, I get that if they met them then either the character wouldn't be a PC any more, or the Exarch wouldn't be an Exarch any more, but is there anything to say that the current Exarchs couldn't be toppled from their thrones and reduced to Supernally-powerful but still phenomenal and instantiated entities like Pangaeans?
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Nov 29, 2018 22:02
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quote:Far from doing it for the lulz, the Pentacle suspects that the Exarchs reinforce their rule over the universe constantly because they have to. They entered the Supernal Realm in order to rule it, so are now trapped having to actively do that, as that's all they are, now. They don't exterminate mages (but insist that Seers try to figure out a way to make all mages Seers) because they *were* mages, so they need mages to exist in order to keep existing. If every human everywhere became pacifist, the General would find itself severely curtailed.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:02
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Cardiovorax posted:Ok, now this is an antagonistic motivation for them that I can understand and find reasonable. They got themselves stuck being the gods of suck without realizing what they were getting into, and now they're so busy investing everything they have into making sure suck continues to exist so that they can exist, they basically have no time for any other goals. It's kind of darkly comical, but it works as a comprehensible reason for why they spend all their time being actively evil for evil's sake. Black comedy is an underappreciated aspect of the nWoD cosmology. I always like to say that the mythology of Werewolf is basically analogous to Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, except that Kennedy was a prehistoric animal-god. e: this also means you get to portray Luna as Marilyn Monroe 
Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Nov 29, 2018 |
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Nov 29, 2018 22:03
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Black comedy is an underappreciated aspect of the nWoD cosmology.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:07
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Cardiovorax posted:Ok, now this is an antagonistic motivation for them that I can understand and find reasonable. They got themselves stuck being the gods of suck without realizing what they were getting into, and now they're so busy investing everything they have into making sure suck continues to exist so that they can exist, they basically have no time for any other goals. It's kind of darkly comical, but it works as a comprehensible reason for why they spend all their time being actively evil for evil's sake. Good news: you're talking to the dev for Mage 2e.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:07
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Mors Rattus posted:Good news: you're talking to the dev for Mage 2e.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:10
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See, I don't find that particularly comic except inasmuch as actual dynasties of monarchs are comic. "You have no choice, if you want to be king, but to continue to enforce the monarchy with all its accompanying injustices" is just... how kingship works, and the Exarchs are Kings of the Lie. And that's now their definition; I feel like saying 'they're stuck doing that' ignores that they are the verb, you know? They are the thing that rules, they may have once been more personal, but they chose crowns of adamant over anything more nuanced or complicated. What I'm really curious about is what the Ascended look like; I know the Corpus Author canonically Ascended and now shows up occasionally to help out her Order, the Mysterium - so that implies that if you Ascend without going full Tyrant God you get to keep more of your complexity and personality. That or the Exarchs just always were power-hungry assholes, and being immortal, cosmic power-hungry assholes who know what happens to the Gods who lose is basically the same as being a flatter symbol than the Corpus Author. She's cool, I like her. Tuxedo Catfish, I imagine the Exarchs would end up like any Old God of the Supernal when the Fall happened: Bound or sunk in the Abyss. Though, if the plan is to end the Abyss entirely after the Exarchs are overthrown, there's a real question of 'where do we put the eternal symbols of tyranny in our just world' - will they by Bound, or are they just going to be floating around the Supernal like ghosts, looking to someday return to power? I mean, this is 'how many angels can dance on the head of a pin' levels of abstraction when the immediate answer is, who cares where we put them, just get them off those thrones. e: like, that kind of logic of having started and being unable to stop underpins so many systems of injustice that I think acting like it's just slapstick, rather than a fundamental part of autocracy that it can never relax its grip on the world's throat, lest it be overthrown, misses something really valuable. Something present, I will note, in the Technocracy's descent from good intentions to fascistic evil. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Nov 29, 2018 |
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Nov 29, 2018 22:11
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quote:See, I don't find that particularly comic except inasmuch as actual dynasties of monarchs are comic.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:15
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Yawgmoth posted:your av text is the most Mage thing ever. Yeah, that's kinda it. Your goal may be to Indiana Jones it up and find secrets that could lead to you fighting Big Evil, but that doesn't mean you can't gently caress it up real bad along the way because naw, you totally got this, and who's to say otherwise, you're a Mage after all.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:18
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Cardiovorax posted:It works for plenty of other games, so I can't complain there. That the primary antagonist is basically a bunch of divine idiots collectively "well, gently caress" to themselves for 10000 years running isn't what I was expecting to find, but it makes me appreciate the game a whole lot more. The idea that oppression binds and twists the oppressors too is everywhere in the nWoD. In Geist 2E one of the potential endgames is ritually lobotomizing and devouring your Geist, giving you tremendous power... but inextricably linking yourself to the Underworld, which is a dying, broken shithole. In Changeling, the Gentry don't just kidnap people for amusement, they do it because without minds other than their own to relate to their existence is horrifyingly meaningless and dull and lacks the dramatic flair they need in order to even exist. In Demon, the God-Machine isn't really personalized, but Angels are generally short-lived creatures because they're constantly killed and recycled for parts by the very entity they serve. Being an Exile isn't much better, and being an Integrator means everyone around you is constantly (and rightly) suspicious of your motivations and whether you're really on their side. In Promethean, becoming a Centimanus primarily gives you the power to break and dominate other monsters the way you would an animal, but it's also fundamentally sterile and selfish, and physically and mentally warps you into something unstable and wounded. Vampire of course is just literally about being a domineering parasite and hardly needs a write-up on this front. Joe Slowboat posted:e: like, that kind of logic of having started and being unable to stop underpins so many systems of injustice that I think acting like it's just slapstick, rather than a fundamental part of autocracy that it can never relax its grip on the world's throat, lest it be overthrown, misses something really valuable. Something present, I will note, in the Technocracy's descent from good intentions to fascistic evil. I don't really see the two as exclusive in any way. The comedic side is the Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator to the reality of Hitler and Nazi Germany. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Nov 29, 2018 |
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Nov 29, 2018 22:18
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Well, I get that if they met them then either the character wouldn't be a PC any more, or the Exarch wouldn't be an Exarch any more, but is there anything to say that the current Exarchs couldn't be toppled from their thrones and reduced to Supernally-powerful but still phenomenal and instantiated entities like Pangaeans? Injured, sure - the Seers have a roster of four Exarchs that are the most important, which has changed within the last 200 years (Nemesis, an Exarch which is a bit complex to explain but is basically the knowledge that you are being oppressed without knowing who the oppressors are - its last major Seer Ministry were big into the Klan and similar societies, and it appears to also represent, supernally speaking, the Gauntlet - went from being one of the top dogs to second division, while Eye, the Exarch of being controlled by being observed, rose up) and looks to maybe be happening again as Unity (Facism and Xenophobia) and Chancellor (materialism) keep steering their Seers into internecine conflicts. And among the panopolies of deceased, imprisoned, or fled Supernal gods, the Pentacle occasionally finds Artifacts belonging to individual Exarchs, some of which appear to be dead. No one's quite sure how the Dethroned Queen got Dethroned, but she definitely did. But the reverse is also true; Progenitor is an Exarch that seems to be lesser in the pecking order (it isn't one of the ten big Iron Seals) and serves Unity. It was also a Seer of the Throne archmaster who Ascended after creating a new form of perfected (well, by Unity's standards) human life. Like, within historical record. If you are exceptionally good at your job as a Seer, you can get yourself a Throne.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:19
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Cardiovorax posted:I like it because it makes sense to me in terms of comprehensible human motivations. No one wants to become the god of evil just for the sake of continuing to do evil forever, they want the power for something and becoming god of evil is just the way they plan on getting it. Doing that and then realizing that you should've been careful what you wish for? That is one of those fundamentally human tragedies that I think can really carry a setting. Yes, they're evil, and they choose to continue being evil, but at least they're not Literally Wizard Snidely Whiplash. Yeah, that's about my point - it's not just 'I fell down the stairs of evil for all of human history.' I imagine most of the Exarchs are pretty ok with their deal, and are in fact doing fine in their palaces: They get to be God. For the Father this is probably a significant part of his motivation, on its own, based on what he demands. Quite possibly they consider themselves better than the Old Gods who came before, and consider ruling eternally beyond time their just reward. Or they just can't imagine giving up power, now that they ARE power. In any case, I think 'god of evil' flattens it - they're gods of _power_ and of _control_, and it just happens to be true that _power and control_ over other people is not a nice thing. They wanted to rule the world, and they consider the state of humanity a fair price to pay for power, especially since they aren't paying it themselves.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:20
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Dave Brookshaw posted:And among the panopolies of deceased, imprisoned, or fled Supernal gods, the Pentacle occasionally finds Artifacts belonging to individual Exarchs, some of which appear to be dead. No one's quite sure how the Dethroned Queen got Dethroned, but she definitely did. Oh wow, this is incredibly rad and exactly the kind of thing I was imagining when I talked about the Exarchs being at their best when they're historically contingent. Is there somewhere I can read more about this?
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Nov 29, 2018 22:21
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The secret answer to the questions the Exarchs pose is, like D&D, to kill every last wizard and scatter their ashes. But then, Werewolf was always my favorite of any given WoD edition.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:24
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Joe Slowboat posted:In any case, I think 'god of evil' flattens it - they're gods of _power_ and of _control_, and it just happens to be true that _power and control_ over other people is not a nice thing. They wanted to rule the world, and they consider the state of humanity a fair price to pay for power, especially since they aren't paying it themselves. I mean, the fact that this is a lovely character motivation is basically what people hated about beasts being basically about nothing else in their original incarnation, so I don't think that's a particularly controversial view of things.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:25
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Cardiovorax posted:That would work better if they weren't so transparently gods of the abuse of power. They're intrinsically embodying a bad thing and I prefer the kind of villain who originally did a bad thing for what they thought were good reasons over the type of who's all Rita Repulsa all the time and perfectly fine with it. To be fair, you were meant to play Beasts. Exarchs aren't PCs.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:28
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Dave Brookshaw posted:(Nemesis, an Exarch which is a bit complex to explain but is basically the knowledge that you are being oppressed without knowing who the oppressors are - its last major Seer Ministry were big into the Klan and similar societies, and it appears to also represent, supernally speaking, the Gauntlet This is fascinating, and very different from the way I've run Nemesis, which I understood as oppression by ignorance of underlying factors - the Exarch of not recognizing the Shadow exists, and thus being unable to deal with it, hence the Gauntlet. Which is pretty different from knowing you are oppressed but not knowing who by. I also interpreted the Nemesis as having a major stake in maintaining the captivity of the Bound, moreso than other Iron Seals, because its 'job' is to both control and cultivate nonhuman entities that terrorize and threaten humanity. My Nemesis also has a major sideline in oppression by reliance on expertise, which grows out of that ignorance: The Nemesis wishes to ensure that only Exarch-worshipers can negotiate the spirit, can 'save' humanity from the enemy the Nemesis cultivates. A spiritual protection racket, in a sense, both in the literal sense of the context of the WoD and in the general sense. But, this could also be applied to technology, or nationalism with the Unity: this Nemesis oppresses by controlling the relationship of the oppressed to an Other. This is mostly because my campaign focuses on a Bound (and the Tremere trying to [redacted] with it) and I wanted an Exarch with a Ministry and an aesthetic to associate with things. The Nemesis seemed functional for that.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:31
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Cardiovorax posted:That would work better if they weren't so transparently gods of the abuse of power. They're intrinsically embodying a bad thing and I prefer the kind of villain who originally did a bad thing for what they thought were good reasons over the type of who's all Rita Repulsa all the time and perfectly fine with it. Sometimes people are just bad. Honestly, I appreciate that the Exarchs, at heart, are something just frankly inherently evil, because hey, evil exists. You don't need to water down your villains. Sometimes people are just lovely. They took power through force and oppression, and have no reason to ever stop doing that, until you actually force them to stop. And hey, maybe at one point, one or two of them did have good intentions. In fact, I bet MOST of them honestly think or still think or whatever that their rulership is the proper and right way of things. And they're wrong, and evil, and have to be stopped.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:36
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Mors Rattus posted:To be fair, you were meant to play Beasts.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:37
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Cardiovorax posted:That would work better if they weren't so transparently gods of the abuse of power. They're intrinsically embodying a bad thing and I prefer the kind of villain who originally did a bad thing for what they thought were good reasons over the type of who's all Rita Repulsa all the time and perfectly fine with it. See, I disagree. They're gods of absolute, unquestionable power. That kind of power is inherently abusive, if it has to have a real mechanism. They know better than anyone that their thrones are not safe; they killed Gods to take over Heaven, after all. They wanted to rule the world, they rule the world, and if they weren't willing to do whatever it takes to stay in power they wouldn't have become cosmic rulers in the first place. There is no such thing as a benevolent dictator, and the Exarchs wanted to be dictators. Hell, their rulership is literally no worse than real historical dictatorships, because they are the hypostasis of real historical dictatorships! With some added supernatural stuff. I think it's pretty easy to believe that people who just gave up their mortal form for immortal transcendence and immense power wouldn't decide 'hey, this is nice and all, but I need to make sure the next batch of wannabe deicides have as much of a chance as I had.' They chose to be symbols of unquestionable rule, and the only unquestionable rule is tyranny. If they had any interest in democracy, they couldn't have become what they are at the start. Plus, cognitive dissonance is probably even worse when you have literally remade yourself into a symbolic representation of your cause. I guarantee any historical dictator can justify to themselves why their rule was the best possible option, and they're not literally gods. Turns out, subject position matters! Kings are usually in favor of monarchy. Cirno's right - not every villain is tragic, except in the sense that they became someone so willing to oppress others. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Nov 29, 2018 |
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Nov 29, 2018 22:37
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quote:See, I disagree. They're gods of absolute, unquestionable power. That kind of power is inherently abusive, if it has to have a real mechanism. quote:Sometimes people are just bad. Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Nov 29, 2018 |
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Nov 29, 2018 22:40
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Oh wow, this is incredibly rad and exactly the kind of thing I was imagining when I talked about the Exarchs being at their best when they're historically contingent. Is there somewhere I can read more about this? That the Seers aspire to become Exarchs isn't news (it's kinda the ultimate point, for them - "We Reign in Hell so we may one day Serve in Heaven" and all) but really explained in their book, which is also where the servitors in question (Hive Souls, for those keeping score) were first explained. The Pentacle Orders' books contained a *lot* of very high-rating Artifacts that are a bit Exarchy around the edges (like, one of them's outright said to be an Exarch's soul stone) and the Dethroned Queen's panopoly - plus the ritual once you have all five Artifacts to become an Exarch by assuming her Throne - is the driving plot of the 1e book-length adventure Reign of the Exarchs. In 1e, Seer Ministries were said to rise and fall with new forms of human oppression, and their patrons often with them. From the Seers book and Mage Noir, we knew that the Eye was the most recent archigenitor but not who it replaced, and from Left Hand Path we knew that a Ministry on its last legs was exterminated in the backstory of the 1e Scelestus signature character. What we've done for 2e is join those two halves up. So, in Dark Eras 2, you'll get an era which has the Nemesis' Ministry when they were in their pomp. We're committed to increasing the historicity of Mage's setting - along with the changes to the Supernal World and the new Paradox system, it was one of the three main design goals of the new edition. For the Pentacle, it means taking isolated examples like the Mysterium having been two seperate Orders until some Ascended gluing them together (in their Order book and Imperial Mysteries) and using them to design a believable coherent backstory for Mage's setting - why do they constantly use Greek words for Indian concepts, how do they know what they know about the nature of reality, what's the evidence for the Time Before, that sort of thing. Some of this process is out already; Dark Eras 1, Mage's 2e corebook. Some is still to come in things like Dark Eras 2, Signs of Sorcery - which does go into the Exarchs as they're Supernal beings, so you'll get rules for the Iron Seal Aedes, the list of Exarchs, how their commandments work, the 2e rules for Hive Souls along with Progenitor's backstory, etc - and the upcoming Night Horrors book which has a few Seer characters in it. We also recently invented over a dozen minor Ministries, both still-active and historical so that every major Exarch has at least two instead of everything being the four majors plus Mammon, and we're trying to figure out what book to put them in. Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Nov 29, 2018 |
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Nov 29, 2018 22:42
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Cardiovorax posted:That's the kind of thing that ends up with someone writing a splatbook about a Nephandi splinter cult that believes God intrinsically can't be omnipotent and omnibenevolent because they're mutually exclusive. I mean, I do in fact think the problem of evil is a big one for theology. And in terms of humans and the control of humanity... yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and say no absolute dictator has ever been a good thing. The processes necessary to maintain that kind of power are inherently abusive. If you want to have the power to coerce anyone in the world, you already have to be doing a ton of coercion to create that power, and the fact that you want it is itself bad, though understandable psychologically. e: The Exarchs did not, it's true, get to choose the mechanism by which the world would be ruled. It was always going to be Supernal control and command, which requires the world to reflect it such that the symbol is important to the world (see: The Free Council solution of creating utopia to gently caress up the Exarchs' thrones at the foundations). No symbol of friendship and human potential was ever going to be controlling the way the Exarchs would want, if they wanted to make the world themselves. They chose to be ten against the world; the modern Ladder wants to do it again, but everyone gets a say. Imagine being one of the Exarchs, a sage of Atlantis, who fought tooth and nail to break the sky and conquer Heaven, and being told 'every human soul deserves to have equal say in the universe as you.' If you're a truly, heroically good person, you might be able to step back from the crown. If you're the Exarchs, you grab it, and kick the ladder over. That's not psychologically unrealistic. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Nov 29, 2018 |
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Nov 29, 2018 22:43
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Joe Slowboat posted:This is fascinating, and very different from the way I've run Nemesis, which I understood as oppression by ignorance of underlying factors - the Exarch of not recognizing the Shadow exists, and thus being unable to deal with it, hence the Gauntlet. Which is pretty different from knowing you are oppressed but not knowing who by. I also interpreted the Nemesis as having a major stake in maintaining the captivity of the Bound, moreso than other Iron Seals, because its 'job' is to both control and cultivate nonhuman entities that terrorize and threaten humanity. See, that's cool, and a perfectly valid Nemesis Ministry. It's a big enough Exarch to contain both concepts. In my headcanon, which means it's not official unless I drop a reference to it somewhere in the future, but the Seers' equivalent of the Veil is attributed to Nemesis.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:45
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(Side note, I think that saying that the Unity was likely to be dethroned as one of the top dog Exarchs is one of the most timestamped elements of their presentation, in that it very clearly was extremely pre-2010s.)
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Nov 29, 2018 22:45
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I'm currently reading about George Fitzhugh, a 19th century lawyer and writer who was essentially the leading intellectual voice of the South and pro-slavery arguments leading up to the Civil War. Fitzhugh believed that the natural lot of most of humanity was to be slaves. Ironically, he personally wasn't all that big into scientific racism -- not that he disagreed necessarily, but rather that he thought the idea that only black people were fit for slavery was ridiculous. He had a raging hatred of Jeffersonian liberalism and on the influence of European philosophy on American thought in general, particularly the idea that people are inherently equal, and thought that an organized society where a few people made all the decisions and everyone else just obeyed was vastly superior to the chaos of competition under capitalism. Is this a deliberate ideological commitment to evil, knowingly playing the role of Snidely Whiplash? Well, no. On the contrary, the overwhelming motivation Fitzhugh had for being a public intellectual and propagandist was to morally justify the existence of slavery. At the same time, he's basically a proto-Fascist and his biggest complaint with owning human beings as property was that we only did it to other races instead of enslaving Yankees and poor Southerners too -- and moreover, enslaving them for their own good. He would have made a fantastic Seer.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:46
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Joe Slowboat posted:I mean, I do in fact think the problem of evil is a big one for theology.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:49
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Cardiovorax posted:That's just another way of saying "Orcs are always chaotic evil." No, because I'm not talking about orcs, I am talking about people. Human beings. Human beings who actively and intentionally hurt and oppress others so that they could be more powerful. At this point this is turning into a conversation about "but why can't I just debate them down?" EDIT: Like I like the Exarchs because all of this is so easily and horrifyingly believable because human beings have been doing this throughout history. There's nothing unbelievable about those in power being oppressive tyrants. That's the history of most people who have taken power!
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Nov 29, 2018 22:49
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Mors Rattus posted:(Side note, I think that saying that the Unity was likely to be dethroned as one of the top dog Exarchs is one of the most timestamped elements of their presentation, in that it very clearly was extremely pre-2010s.) You are not wrong.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:49
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Dave Brookshaw posted:See, that's cool, and a perfectly valid Nemesis Ministry. It's a big enough Exarch to contain both concepts. Aw, thanks! I appreciate that - it can be a bit forbidding to have the dev pop in like this, but I really appreciate both your insight into the setting architecture and your approach to players like myself.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:50
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Dave Brookshaw posted:We're committed to increasing the historicity of Mage's setting - along with the changes to the Supernal World and the new Paradox system, it was one of the three main design goals of the new edition. I know I'm pretty critical of Mage as a game line compared to the nWoD at large, but I really appreciate that the team is thinking about this and making it part of the project going forward.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:53
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ProfessorCirno posted:At this point this is turning into a conversation about "but why can't I just debate them down?"
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Nov 29, 2018 22:54
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Cardiovorax posted:That's really something that I think edges a lot more into your own personal views on the workings of political power than a discussion about what the villains of a game about setting people on fire with your mind powers should be like, though. I mean, I appreciate your point and I think it's a good argument in a different context, but I don't really think there's any reason to make that the necessary conclusion here. "Power as the sheer, abstract ability to make things happen ex nihilo" is what mages run on. But... Mage is about power and magic as Neoplatonic symbolic structure. If Mage doesn't actually in some sense react, historically, to the shape of power and the means of it, it turns into Harry Potter. And Harry Potter is a snakepit of unconsidered power dynamics and reflections of colonialism and so on. Awakening is strengthened by precisely what Dave Brookshaw has referenced in this thread: historicity. Making the system of magic not only coherent, but reflect actual human relations and power dynamics when it can, consciously, rather than falling into them unconsciously. You can't discuss the Exarchs without discussing political power, because they are the sign and symbol of political power. e: Also, I'm confused where my argument doesn't attribute a deeply comprehensible and human motivation to the Exarchs. I just posit that 'desire to hold onto power' is a deeply comprehensible and human motivation that does not require a tragic personal misery, nor does it require making some kind of mistake. If anything, the mistake serves to hide the actual human dimension, putting it out of their hands and removing motivation from the equation. ee: Cirno's edit says this better and more succinctly, that all sorts of people through history have seized power and then been tyrannical. Why should human nature change just because the power is greater, and the timescale longer, especially given that the Exarchs themselves are now outside of time and metaphysically encouraged to run with it? Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Nov 29, 2018 |
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Nov 29, 2018 22:57
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Cardiovorax posted:No, it's not, and I'd appreciate it if you don't turn the conversation into that kind of internet argument, please. What I'm saying is "they're just evil" is narratively shallow and ignores that everyone has motivations. Not necessarily good motivations, and definitely not motivations that excuse what they're doing, but that doesn't mean they don't have them, and I prefer to have an idea of what they are over "they simply evil, no reason." Even if they only exist in my own head. They DO have a motivation, that you keep weirdly ignoring. Their motivation is "stay in power and lord over all other lesser beings." Like, no, people do not always look for power specifically to accomplish something. For a lot of reprehensible people, power is it's own reward. Being able to be better then everyone else is enough. Knowing that you reign is enough to excuse whatever actions you're about to commit. This argument legitimately seems to be your refusal to believe that people can be loving vile, and the Exarchs are an outgrowth of that. They are tyrants.
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Nov 29, 2018 23:00
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Joe Slowboat posted:But... Mage is about power and magic as Neoplatonic symbolic structure. Is this the point where we spin into the stage of nMage Chat that's about how Ascension portrays the Awakened as the best version of humanity, who could solve the universe if only they could work together, and Awakening portrays the Awakened as dangerous obsessives who get other people killed a lot? Like, if the iconic Ascension character is Neo, the iconic Awakening one is Constantine.
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Nov 29, 2018 23:00
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quote:Awakening is strengthened by precisely what Dave Brookshaw has referenced in this thread: historicity. quote:This argument legitimately seems to be your refusal to believe that people can be loving vile, and the Exarchs are an outgrowth of that. They are tyrants. I also really don't like the way you keep trying to make this about me having some kind of personal deficiency and inability to FACE THE HARD TRUTHS OF EDGY GOTHIC HORROR LIFE, BRAH and I don't want to talk to you anymore.
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Nov 29, 2018 23:07
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