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Blockhouse posted:Once you convince yourself that you personally know what's best for humanity it's really easy to give yourself a pass on basically anything.
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Apr 26, 2021 22:08
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Don't think I've posted about my game for the last two sessions, the players have said they don't want their characters to die before we start playing IRL which obviously limits what can potentially happen. What's really cool is that the last two sessions have been the characters actively planning on and sharing the messages/odd experiences and it's been pure larp basically. The first IRL game is gonna rule.
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Apr 26, 2021 22:20
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Kavak posted:That makes sense. The Banishers are right, aren't they? The Banishers absolutely think they know what's best for humanity (and also are in a different game line). Banishers generally think they know for a fact that it's ok for them to serial murder mages for being mages.
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Apr 26, 2021 22:54
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Joe Slowboat posted:The Banishers absolutely think they know what's best for humanity (and also are in a different game line). Whatever their oWoD equivalent is. The Only Good Wizard Is A Dead Wizard
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Apr 26, 2021 23:27
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Most of the factions advocating for the death of Wizards in the oWoD are also wizards, and it's more Death To All Wizards*. *Except Us And The Wizards Who Obey Us
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Apr 27, 2021 00:07
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Joe Slowboat posted:(and also are in a different game line). Speaking of Better Mage, anyone have any insight on when we're likely to start seeing spoilers for Tome of the Pentacle?
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Apr 27, 2021 00:11
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Kavak posted:Whatever their oWoD equivalent is. The Only Good Wizard Is A Dead Wizard Those drat wizards think they know better and that reality should change in some fashion in a way that might be dangerous, but we know better and therefore have the right to kill all the wizards! Huzzah! E: No clue, but I'm eagerly awaiting the Tome.
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Apr 27, 2021 00:52
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Kavak posted:Whatever their oWoD equivalent is. The oWoD equivalent to Banishers is Hunter: the Reckoning. Speaking of Victorian Mage, though, do they ever go back to revisit the buried secret that before Promethean: the Created ever existed, Prometheans were a fascinating but ill-defined offshoot character type hidden in a recounting of in-game history in an oMage supplement? I think the timing would be approximately right. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Apr 27, 2021 |
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Apr 27, 2021 01:19
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drat mages. They ruined magic!
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Apr 27, 2021 01:20
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Blockhouse posted:drat mages. They ruined magic! You mages sure are a contentious splat
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Apr 27, 2021 01:23
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Just glad the Syndicate is back, baby!
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Apr 27, 2021 01:29
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Blockhouse posted:drat mages. They ruined magic! Psh, only if you buy into Atlantean dogma
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Apr 27, 2021 01:37
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Can mages force the great work or does it not count if a mage makes it happen since mages can do whatever they goddamn please
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Apr 27, 2021 01:39
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Yeah you just grab a soul that nobody is using and shove it into the Promethean, easy. Sometimes you've gotta jolt it with divine fire but that's pretty standard, doesn't do 'em any harm.
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Apr 27, 2021 02:01
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I Am Just a Box posted:The oWoD equivalent to Banishers is Hunter: the Reckoning. PLease go on
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Apr 27, 2021 02:34
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FirstAidKite posted:Can mages force the great work or does it not count if a mage makes it happen since mages can do whatever they goddamn please I don't think so; even Archmasters can't create new souls. An Archmaster could maybe redefine a Promethean as having always been human by altering history, and thus create a human who 'used to be' a Promethean in a history that doesn't exist, but by doing so they would probably piss of the Qashmalim. And the Qashmalin seem to operate on that level, same as Luna, so said Archmaster may have just started a personal War in Heaven. Just shunting someone else's soul into a Promethean seems more likely to create a Promethean with a soul in them than a full human. This seems like it would be deeply unsafe and probably spiritually radioactive. Now, I bet a Mage could do a lot to help the Great Work along, if they were able to resist the Disquiet; Mage Sight and careful occult interference could probably make the Pilgrimage a lot easier, or at least give the Promethean easier access to human society to learn and develop. And it would give the Mage a hell of a lot of Arcane EXP. (And if they have Disquiet, they might decide they can get more knowledge out of interfering at the moment of the Second Dawn, ruining everything super hard.)
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Apr 27, 2021 06:32
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Just glad the Syndicate is back, baby! Had a bunch of Tech players in a Discord game go on and on about how the Syndicate *tried* to shift the world towards a more equitable model but whoopsiedoodles they caused the 2008 crash or something similar doing so. gently caress if I know i was playing a gutterpunk Solficati that just called them The Filth and alternated between seeing how high he could get and The Great Work.
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Apr 27, 2021 06:54
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Joe Slowboat posted:Now, I bet a Mage could do a lot to help the Great Work along And if there's one things we've learned, it's that Mages trying to force along a spiritual Awakening using their powers has zero downsides.
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Apr 27, 2021 08:35
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I mean hanging out with a mage will almost certainly be valuable for Argentum milestones, and of the supernaturals, mages are probably the least trouble to pretend to be One of the Tribe, but trying to reduce the friction on a Pilgrimage is probably...counterproductive.
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Apr 27, 2021 15:07
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citybeatnik posted:Had a bunch of Tech players in a Discord game go on and on about how the Syndicate *tried* to shift the world towards a more equitable model but whoopsiedoodles they caused the 2008 crash or something similar doing so. gently caress if I know i was playing a gutterpunk Solficati that just called them The Filth and alternated between seeing how high he could get and The Great Work. 
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Apr 27, 2021 16:31
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If you are going to play the baddies, you might as well go all in!
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Apr 27, 2021 17:38
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Mulva posted:And if there's one things we've learned, it's that Mages trying to force along a spiritual Awakening using their powers has zero downsides. Help, not force. You do realize it's possible to, say, talk to a Promethean and ask? People act like Mages are incapable of conversation, which is ridiculous, because Mages transparently love talking about everything endlessly.
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Apr 27, 2021 18:03
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Joe Slowboat posted:Help, not force. You do realize it's possible to, say, talk to a Promethean and ask? Mages talk more than act. It’s hilarious the levels of pedantic they get when they can just cast magic instead.
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Apr 27, 2021 18:13
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Joe Slowboat posted:Help, not force. You do realize it's possible to, say, talk to a Promethean and ask? I don't think they mean force as in doing it without the Promethean's consent. I think they mean force as in the 'help' is attempting to force it to occur faster than would/should occur naturally through actual personal growth and experience. Throwing the kid in the river to force them to swim rather than providing actual lessons, as it were. I think "Would you like me to help you complete your Pilgrimage?" is a really seductive thing for a Mage to say. Getting permission to force development is still forcing development, even if it isn't forcing the Promethean to give consent to try. Which seems like it would have all these wonderful ways of backfiring. Could this turn a Promethean into a pseudo-Pandoran? Force their Disquiet to intensify? Change their Refinement? Summon a Jovian or Qashmallim?
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Apr 27, 2021 18:38
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A mage helping doesn’t equal force anymore or less than destiny does. And mages can even check that destiny thing too. Throwing a soul in something is ham fisted, but why should that matter. Archmages are going to be doing other things, you know, things that matter more than one possible person when you can dabble at a much larger scale. Maybe one mage takes an interest, but I’d expect it’s more rare than the conversation about it is. And it’s much more likely that mages sit around and talk about it, the metaphysics, and the ethics of it than actually doing anything about it. It could make for a fun story at least. It has a good hook, and would definitely lead to those session encompassing conversations between mages.
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Apr 27, 2021 18:45
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Yeah when I said force I didn't mean force as in "do a thing without permission" but force as in making it happen faster than would naturally occur. I dunno what the limits of mages are so if they can't create souls or transform azoth into a soul through mage bullshit then maybe they'd just wanna study up on it a ton if the great work is specifically something they cannot recreate themselves.
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Apr 27, 2021 19:26
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"Trying to use a Mage to speedrun your own Pilgrimage" feels like a good way to get a Centimanni, but pointed out, that's not that peculiar to Mages. It's funnier with Mages because so much of what Mages are about is Hubris, but other than doing something stupid to try to fill a Refinement without the lessons learned (which I think is something a Mage could do, or at least could do more easily than most of the others) sure, getting help from a Mage is about as likely to be a problem as anything else. And since "asking for help and receiving it with grace" is a pretty good instinctive milestone for Prometheans, could be very important. I think almost every supernatural has access to the same strategy that would afaik be a real dick move to Prometheans: supernaturally convince them they've fulfilled a Refinement they haven't, or perhaps worse convince them they haven't fulfilled a Refinement they have (which is a hell of a hook for making a Petrificati).
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Apr 27, 2021 19:30
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Lord_Hambrose posted:If you are going to play the baddies, you might as well go all in! That's always been my issue with the softening of the Techies since even the modern 'woke' ones are only where they are due to centuries of exploitation as touched on in the Victorian sidebar posted earlier.
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Apr 27, 2021 19:54
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It should be noted, pretty much everything to do with qashmallim and creating Prometheans is outside the realm of things Mages can do, explicitly. The Divine Fire doesn’t cooperate much with mages.
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Apr 27, 2021 20:11
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citybeatnik posted:That's always been my issue with the softening of the Techies since even the modern 'woke' ones are only where they are due to centuries of exploitation as touched on in the Victorian sidebar posted earlier.
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Apr 27, 2021 20:14
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I kind of appreciate contemporary books' attempts to sanitize, contextualize, or even explicitly call out as bad the early or modern-day Technocracy because whatever liberal pablum they barf up is such ripe ground for oppositional readings. Even that excerpt posted earlier in this thread ultimately does make excuses, wrenching the reader's gaze from the systemic demands of capitalism itself to whether individual OoR members are coincidentally evil or vulgarly evil.
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Apr 27, 2021 20:45
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Ferrinus posted:I kind of appreciate contemporary books' attempts to sanitize, contextualize, or even explicitly call out as bad the early or modern-day Technocracy because whatever liberal pablum they barf up is such ripe ground for oppositional readings. Even that excerpt posted earlier in this thread ultimately does make excuses, wrenching the reader's gaze from the systemic demands of capitalism itself to whether individual OoR members are coincidentally evil or vulgarly evil. I think the excuses are made on behalf of the player rather than the diegetic Order of Reason characters. A certain contingent of Ascension fans expect a playable write up for the Technocracy and Order of Reason, so Brucato has to make allowances for that even though his ideological stance on what the faction symbolizes is pretty clear. The issue is that the developers for the gameline have created and indulged that expectation all the way back since the Sorcerer's Crusade came out. To take a hardline stance on the faction, like arguing that they are morally equivalent to the Nephandi, would contradict around twenty five years of published material. That tension between the political arguments Brucato hopes to make and what the gameline actually is can be found all over the Victorian draft (as well as in the Mage 20 core). For instance, in the Dreamspeaker writeup there's a passage about how the term "shamanism" is an invention of imperial folklorists to characterize a diverse swath of religious practices as primitive, undeveloped versions of Western religion, but the idea of a shared, pan-cultural concept of shamanism is a cornerstone of the Ascension setting and the Dreamspeakers are still in the game. It functions as an apology for the problematic assumptions of 1993, but as a game published in 2021 the cracks are showing.
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Apr 27, 2021 21:06
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FirstAidKite posted:Yeah when I said force I didn't mean force as in "do a thing without permission" but force as in making it happen faster than would naturally occur. At least as of first edition's Imperial Mysteries, modifying a major supernatural template is within the bounds of imperial magic, which hypothetically suggests that a Promethean could be made into a human by an archmaster with the appropriate quintessence (though perhaps as a soulless human for whom you'd separately have to steal a soul from someone else for). What that quintessence would be exactly is worth considering, as is the fact that the same ability of imperial magic also allows archmasters to artificially Awaken mortals as supernal sorcerers— and the result is always that the artificially awakened sorcerer is driven mad. Just because you can do it doesn't mean you can do it clean. It's also worth noting that imperial magic accomplishes this through the practices of Entities and Excision, which respectively bestow and strip away complex and supernatural properties. Transforming a promethean into a human is not likely to be quite the same process as transforming a vampire or a sin-eater into a human. Vampires and the bound are the results of transformations worked upon human beings, whereas in the case of prometheans, you could easily make a case that there is no "entity" to "excise"— a promethean is the result of having fewer real natural properties than a human, not more-but-missing-a-few-here-and-there. This hypothetical might suggest that an archmaster could work some transformation upon a promethean that might better approximate a human existence, but that the result still would not be, technically speaking, properly human. Imperial Mysteries is conspicuously silent on specific things that can be done to Prometheans, despite being quite specific about what can be done to vampires, werewolves, changelings, and sin-eaters. So it might also be the case that supernal magic simply can't directly alter properties of the Divine Fire at any level of mastery, in the sense that Death rules the properties which make up the nature of vampirism, and Life and Spirit the properties of a werewolf, but that the Divine Fire does not sufficiently fall under the descriptions of the Arcana.
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Apr 27, 2021 21:20
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Mors Rattus posted:It should be noted, pretty much everything to do with qashmallim and creating Prometheans is outside the realm of things Mages can do, explicitly. The Divine Fire doesn’t cooperate much with mages. Good point, I'd forgotten about that since I've been seeing things from the Promethean side and I don't like using Mages in general but particularly do not like adding them in as a secondary aspect of a campaign.
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Apr 27, 2021 21:34
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are you ready for Kindred: The Embraced SEASON TWO???? https://twitter.com/THR/status/1387106397075251207
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Apr 27, 2021 21:46
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pospysyl posted:I think the excuses are made on behalf of the player rather than the diegetic Order of Reason characters. A certain contingent of Ascension fans expect a playable write up for the Technocracy and Order of Reason, so Brucato has to make allowances for that even though his ideological stance on what the faction symbolizes is pretty clear. The issue is that the developers for the gameline have created and indulged that expectation all the way back since the Sorcerer's Crusade came out. To take a hardline stance on the faction, like arguing that they are morally equivalent to the Nephandi, would contradict around twenty five years of published material. I mean, I think it's perfectly fine to make playable Order of Reason characters. You can play as a Seer in Mage: the Awakening, and more to the point you're allowed to make a regular old World of Darkness character who's a cop or a soldier (and you're allowed to make a D&D character who's a, you know, adventurer), so what's the big deal? And a stance that the OoR is morally equivalent to the Nephandi wouldn't really make sense, either; it's not that they're not as bad (What's "bad"? Are we talking about total reduction of lifespan summed across all affected human beings, level of personal depravity, number of seconds removed from the lifespan of the universe...) they're just different, and certainly more palatable and comprehensible on a character-to-character level. I actually think the OoR thing is distinct from the Dreamspeaker thing. Dreamspeakers are absolutely a weird and arguably racist kludge that needs to be swallowed with the grain of salt. On the other hand, the OoR are just, you know... the spread of capitalism across the globe. It doesn't matter if your OoR character is personally racist or whatever; capital itself is bigger than of its servants, and its were-wolf hunger for labor outstrips the virtues and vices of any of its agents. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Apr 27, 2021 |
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Apr 27, 2021 21:50
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Mors Rattus posted:It should be noted, pretty much everything to do with qashmallim and creating Prometheans is outside the realm of things Mages can do, explicitly. The Divine Fire doesn’t cooperate much with mages. It's very much the case that while Archmasters are ridiculously, absurdly magically potent and can go toe to toe with nearly anything in the setting, they have pretty clear limits on what they can do at those high scales. Even within the realm of Supernal manipulation, Archmasters are still not Ascended and still not gods - in fact one way to Ascend is to become the high priest of a Supernal God that was banished from the Supernal by the Exarchs, and help them find their way back in. Qashmalim and the Divine Fire are operating, apparently, in the region of gods (fitting, given the name). Presumably they have their Supernal representation/description, and have something to do with the soul, but it's not something Mages can approach even with Archmastery. Though this does raise a question I find very funny: Can an Archmaster turn a living human into a Promethean?
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Apr 27, 2021 21:52
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Joe Slowboat posted:Though this does raise a question I find very funny: Can an Archmaster turn a living human into a Promethean? Through a single spell? Sure. The spell is called Ananke, but it calls itself an angel when talking to the promethean it coaches through killing a guy and putting him back together. If you really care about the resulting promethean being the same "person" as the living human, there's probably some sequence of Mind spells that can record a complicated matrix of memories and personality inclinations to then bolt onto the newly risen being. If you're good at Mind that'll get you about as close as a ghost would be to being the same metaphysical person. Including the full metaphysical, philosophical continuity of experience? Probably can't accomplish that. That probably includes the numinous absorbed experiences of the human soul, which moves on shortly after death. Prometheans don't have those. But whether full philosophical continuity of experience meaningfully exists in the first place is arguable. Anyway all of that poo poo's pretty evil to actually do. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Apr 27, 2021 |
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Apr 27, 2021 21:58
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I actually don't remember what either Imperial Mysteries or 2E says about this, but is there hard information on the ability of an arbitrarily powerful mage to, rather than turn a vampire or Promethean human, just... make a human? Like, can you snap your fingers (or snap your fingers after hours of grueling ritual complete with super-valuable sacraments) and produce a newborn baby or a full-grown adult ex nihilo, or even turn a marble statue or lump of clay into such a being, rather than having just summoned them in from an alternate timeline or similar? Technically, all you'd need is Life 4 to take some existing organic matter and turn it into a fresh human body (or Life 5 to just make a human body pop out of nowhere). Similarly, Mind 4 or 5 could give your newly-created human a consciousness. After that, if it's a priori impossible (or at least totally unheard of) for any existing level of supernal magic to manufacture a soul, then you're out of luck. It's funny, because you'd think that a combination of Prime 5, Fate 5, Mind 5, Spirit 5, and Death 5 could actually conjure a soul directly, since it's those five subtle Arcana that souls are made of, right? But presumably this doesn't work (even for mages who have the staggeringly high Gnosis required to be Masters of five Arcana), and you need some unavailable X-factor (the "Divine Fire", most likely) to actually get a human soul rather than some weird facsimile that maybe looks normal at first but turns out to be the seed for a horror movie after a while.
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Apr 27, 2021 21:59
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:The modern Technocracy is Elon Musk saying "look I'm saving the world through electric cars and epic bacon space travel!" while getting started off of apartheid emeralds, and continuing to be Elon Musk I was gonna say 'Technocracy' reads deeper and more explictly sinister than that but then realised you were right and fell into a deep, grim ennui.
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Apr 27, 2021 22:01
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