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I actually quite like using the Nephandi - they're a big part of my planned plot. But I also like having the Craftmasons still exist in secret as a counterforce locked in a terminal conflict with the Ksirafai and their own worst impulses.
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Jul 24, 2023 15:37
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Loomer posted:I broadly agree. I think a lot of it could've been avoided by presenting the Traditions as purely political blocs of often radically distinct groups, which the Revised books did their best on but really needed to be baked in from the start. Its part of why I've got the Scots 'Euthanatos' in here - they don't consider themselves Euthanatos, the Euthanatos barely recognize them as legitimate, the Choristers are very much uneasy about the 'I will execute great vengeance on them with wrathful rebukes. Then they will know that I am the Lord, when I lay my vengeance upon them' vibe, and so while they're broadly understood as part of the Council they're not really comfortably anywhere. I have a few more I can ramble on about too for the same effect of this idea that the real unifying factor of the Nine Traditions is actually that they're just shifting alliances of convenience in an ongoing struggle for resources, power, and security. Re-reading the Revised Euthanatos that sort of thing is perfect for them as the only thing that really unites that particular Tradition is a vague idea of the Good Death and nobody really wanting to hang out with spooky death mages other than spooky death mages. You can boil down Etherites and the Adepts into very broad 'hardware' and 'software' and both of those outfits were barely coherent to start with. (In a way that kind of amuses me you could almost do the same comparison about the Verbena and Dreamspeakers.) The trend, for lack of a better term, feels like Jess Heinig's influence on the line because it went away - and the line really went downhill - after he left for whatever reason, although Malcom Sheppard's work along those lines certainly didn't hurt. Revised AB and Euthanatos are both really good. At one point they talked about Christian Verbena but I honestly can't find the source so I may have just made it up but I would swear to seeing it. Mage-related, I am unduly irritated by the Chantry background in M20. If you're going to give pool ratings, give some creation rules. They talk about the ones from The Book of Chantries but that's one of the first books for the game - I think maybe even like the third book - but also not to use those.
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Jul 24, 2023 15:57
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Dawgstar posted:Re-reading the Revised Euthanatos that sort of thing is perfect for them as the only thing that really unites that particular Tradition is a vague idea of the Good Death and nobody really wanting to hang out with spooky death mages other than spooky death mages. You can boil down Etherites and the Adepts into very broad 'hardware' and 'software' and both of those outfits were barely coherent to start with. (In a way that kind of amuses me you could almost do the same comparison about the Verbena and Dreamspeakers.) The chantry creation rules in Book of Chantries are wack, and specifically the overly complicated number crunchy version of the rules. And yes it was the third book released for 1e 
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Jul 24, 2023 16:12
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Dawgstar posted:Yeah. I'm guessing the book is trying to convey they're more motivated to fight the Technocracy* but it's not like the Traditions as portrayed are any less so, so it really does feel like Brucato read a book about Polynesian religious practices and wanted to make a Craft out of it although I do think most of the Disparates are pulled from elsewhere in the game line. Listen, this capitalism stuff? It's fine. In fact, it's good. Except, a shadowy cabal of malefactors has corrupted it from within. We just have to find and root them out and things will be swell. The interdimensional fiend-mancers, we gotta get 'em.
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Jul 24, 2023 17:11
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Rand Brittain posted:Also if you try to explain what the Disparates are doing right that the Traditions are doing wrong, it's hard to come up with an answer that's not "the author decided he liked them better." Also if you write bad guys into your adventure you’re literally doing devil magic by thinking about it, this is different from what crazy people said during the Satanic Panic because
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Jul 24, 2023 17:24
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It would make sense to me if the various Traditions, caught between the Scylla of the rising Technocracy and the Charbydis of the Hermetics doing their thing, gained some degree of artificial ecumenical unity in order to avoid getting either wiped out or glommed into Ex Miscellanea. So you might have had four or five distinct holy-magic-of-the-LORD small-t Traditions which glommed together into the modern Chorus, et cetera.
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Jul 24, 2023 17:37
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Nessus posted:It would make sense to me if the various Traditions, caught between the Scylla of the rising Technocracy and the Charbydis of the Hermetics doing their thing, gained some degree of artificial ecumenical unity in order to avoid getting either wiped out or glommed into Ex Miscellanea. So you might have had four or five distinct holy-magic-of-the-LORD small-t Traditions which glommed together into the modern Chorus, et cetera. Honestly that's what the early Revisted Tradbooks present the Traditions as. Like in the Euthanatos you a collection of groups with influences from the Celts, Greece, India and the African continent among other weirder groups and none of them with much to do with the other save very broad strokes.
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Jul 24, 2023 18:20
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Yeah, we have the Technocracy to thank for pretty much every modern Tradition, because there's no need to consolidate into a global organization except to fight a global threat. Even the Order of Hermes has absorbed a bunch of subsidiary schools and cults into itself in the course of adapting to the modern era. This is one of the many reasons that the "they're just as bad, they want to return us to the dark ages" fearmongering about the Traditions is baseless. How and why would they do that when they didn't even exist then? They're a more recent development than the Technocracy is!
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Jul 24, 2023 18:24
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Ferrinus posted:Yeah, we have the Technocracy to thank for pretty much every modern Tradition, because there's no need to consolidate into a global organization except to fight a global threat. Even the Order of Hermes has absorbed a bunch of subsidiary schools and cults into itself in the course of adapting to the modern era.  As always, it's their fault.
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Jul 24, 2023 18:28
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I blame the Solificati.
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Jul 24, 2023 18:30
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MonsieurChoc posted:I blame the Solificati. Now a charter member of the Disparates under their Children of Knowledge handle.
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Jul 24, 2023 18:37
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Nessus posted:Well, not the Order of Hermes. I put "even the Order of Hermes" into my post to head off this exact response! They've Katamari'd up a bunch of rival or unrelated occult conspiracies, and, even if they hadn't, you couldn't call them the same group that was lurking around remote towers in the middle ages any more than you could call the modern Republican Party the same institution it was in 1854.
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Jul 24, 2023 18:40
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Ferrinus posted:I put "even the Order of Hermes" into my post to head off this exact response!
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Jul 24, 2023 18:48
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Well, that's why the Republican party is such an apt example--
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Jul 24, 2023 19:13
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Nessus posted:Unfortunately, my posting paradigm requires me to center the negative role played by Hermetics in all plausible situations. The correct paradigm. gently caress them hermetic dorks. Hollow Ones best tradition 
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Jul 24, 2023 19:26
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joylessdivision posted:Hollow Ones best tradition They lead the Disparates! 
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Jul 24, 2023 19:56
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Dawgstar posted:They lead the Disparates! BRUCATO 
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Jul 24, 2023 20:03
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Revised Etherites for the win.
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Jul 24, 2023 20:08
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Folks, we all know which mystic organization is the real protagonist of Mage: the Ascension: the Pentacle, whose shadow war against the Seers of the Throne is the hidden mainspring of the apparent Traditions/Technocracy conflict.
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Jul 24, 2023 20:11
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Don't make me get the spray bottle, Ferrinus.
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Jul 24, 2023 23:56
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joylessdivision posted:BRUCATO They are also amusingly called 'Darklings' half the time.
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Jul 25, 2023 00:03
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MonsieurChoc posted:Revised Etherites for the win. I don't know how it aged, but I remember loving it back in the day.
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Jul 25, 2023 00:19
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Dave Brookshaw posted:Don't make me get the spray bottle, Ferrinus. This is basically the substance of every forbidden dream the Gate whispers through
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Jul 25, 2023 00:36
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ZearothK posted:I don't know how it aged, but I remember loving it back in the day. I dusted it off for a game of M20 recently and fell in love all over again. Game was set in Detroit so I went with a black garage owner, comes from a family heavily invested in the civil rights battle, he's trying to make his neighborhood better and hopes to make ecologically friendly cars acceptable to the consensus. I wanted to get the pov character from the book as a contact. Unfortunately game is on hiatus for now.
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Jul 25, 2023 03:39
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I think the most interesting thing about the Disparates is the notion that these small groups are Really loving Annoyed that the sorting hat shoved them in the wrong groups. The Ngomo as a whole got shunted into the Dreamspeakers because "oh hey they talk with spirits too!" when they're closer to High Ritual magic like the Hermetics. They're presented as being more focused on their own identity/focuses. Other than that they're mostly silly since, as mentioned by others, they're just Our Traditions Are Different. They did let me play a Solicati gutterpunk vaping alchemical fumes in his resperator as he spraypainted his way through the streets of London without needing to figure out all the fancy titles that the Hermetics used.
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Jul 25, 2023 06:53
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I would just have the Traditions be explicitly style based. Hermetic, Religious, Technomantic, etc. Then have cabals and factions and favoured Spheres tied to those styles - some more than one! And of course some factions are like "actually all Hermetic traditions spring from The Order Of Hermes", or "all Religious mages draw their power from The Actual One True God (mine)" but that's just their opinion, man. So splat books would be explorations of those different schools of thought, as well as pre-built cabals (both important and minor) that you could plug into your games or ignore.
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Jul 25, 2023 09:39
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Messy politics with magic involved can be a lot of fun. It can be tricky actually playing that through and reconciling it though.
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Jul 25, 2023 10:36
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:I would just have the Traditions be explicitly style based. Hermetic, Religious, Technomantic, etc. Then have cabals and factions and favoured Spheres tied to those styles - some more than one! And of course some factions are like "actually all Hermetic traditions spring from The Order Of Hermes", or "all Religious mages draw their power from The Actual One True God (mine)" but that's just their opinion, man. So splat books would be explorations of those different schools of thought, as well as pre-built cabals (both important and minor) that you could plug into your games or ignore.
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Jul 25, 2023 13:54
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Nessus posted:I think a lot of the issue is that the Nine Mystick Traditions were clearly designed with the Hermetics first and then everybody else. Fair enough if you're going to use the Hermetics as your baseline but all that poo poo be sprawling. You could probably cut it down to five or six Traditions with sub-splat affinity groups, like Garou Camps, if you actually grew up from 'magical style, possibly influenced by historical region.' Also it feels like at least Hollow Ones and Verbena were both made with an eye towards "we've found these subcultures like our games." Which is fine, but I think it explains why they've always come off the worst, especially the Verbena. Verbena have always needed something like a Sheppard splatbook. The Revised book is... okay, I guess, aside from weird bits like the aforementioned part of the Tradition giving rise to Nazi Germany as was the style at the time, but there's nothing in there that makes me want to play them so it fails the Chupp Test.
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Jul 25, 2023 14:48
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The Verbena are good as a vernacular magic fellowship but now you’re including a ton of stuff. And this is before you even think about Asian or African magicians. Logically speaking there should be a lot of conjure men and voudoun in the group then, but the up front branding is so dang Wiccan.
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Jul 25, 2023 15:01
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Nessus posted:You could probably cut it down to five or six Traditions with sub-splat affinity groups, like Garou Camps, if you actually grew up from 'magical style, possibly influenced by historical region.' Yeah exactly this. A descriptive rather than prescriptive approach.
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Jul 25, 2023 15:03
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Nessus posted:The Verbena are good as a vernacular magic fellowship but now you’re including a ton of stuff. And this is before you even think about Asian or African magicians. We could simply solve this problem by not having got drat wizards in the goth elf game series.
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Jul 25, 2023 15:12
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You'd have your 'magic as science' group, which posits that magic works through formula, ingredients, and rituals/recipes/procedures/whatever. Order of Hermes chanting Latin and rubbing fur on amber to make a lightning bolt or Technocrat using an app to detonate a near by connected power relay, whatever. You'd have your 'magic as sacrifice' group, which posits that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. The sacrifice might be small and symbolic, or it might be a life for a life. Verbena is the classic example. You'd have your 'magic as spirits' group, where all magic is brought about through asking, imploring, negotiating, demanding, or controlling something to do something. Dreamspeakers, Celestial Chorus, etc. You'd have your 'magic as internal power' group, which channels magic as extensions of themselves. Akashics, psychics, Scanners, whatever.
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Jul 25, 2023 15:17
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I can't tell if these are joke posts describing Awakening or not.
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Jul 25, 2023 15:18
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Didn't ascension tie spheres to traditions as well? So if you wanted to be the best forces mage ever you had to be the forces tradition even if that didn't mesh with your character concept?
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Jul 25, 2023 15:19
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Kurieg posted:Didn't ascension tie spheres to traditions as well? So if you wanted to be the best forces mage ever you had to be the forces tradition even if that didn't mesh with your character concept? You get by default a starting point in the "pet" sphere of the tradition, but that's it.
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Jul 25, 2023 15:30
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Kurieg posted:Didn't ascension tie spheres to traditions as well? So if you wanted to be the best forces mage ever you had to be the forces tradition even if that didn't mesh with your character concept? Each tradition got a "free" dot in their preferred sphere. Which again is something that I'd keep for the Technocracy but toss out for a Traditions rework.
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Jul 25, 2023 15:30
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Even the Technocrats had subgroups. So a neuro cybernetic surgeon in Iteration X might have Life or Mind instead of Forces. And of course you can learn anything— other than the Techno variant spheres. Which I thought were a good direction for making groups distinct.
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Jul 25, 2023 15:46
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YggdrasilTM posted:You get by default a starting point in the "pet" sphere of the tradition, but that's it. And to M20's mild credit, they expanded the choice to two so you (probably) aren't locked into a Sphere you didn't want to use.
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Jul 25, 2023 15:46
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TheCenturion posted:You'd have your 'magic as science' group, which posits that magic works through formula, ingredients, and rituals/recipes/procedures/whatever. Order of Hermes chanting Latin and rubbing fur on amber to make a lightning bolt or Technocrat using an app to detonate a near by connected power relay, whatever. Which group'd be "magic as getting higher than anyone ever has before"?
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Jul 25, 2023 15:47
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