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The Void Engineers are also the one convention that skirts the line of 'heresy' within the Technocracy, because their members openly acknowledge (at least among themselves) that what they're doing is, in fact, magic with a different coat of paint. The rank and file of the other conventions have no idea that they're actually mages, because every Technocrat undergoes a form of brainwashing during recruitment and training, courtesy of the New World Order. It makes them (almost) completely subservient to Control and unable to accept the existence of 'magic' at all. However, the Void Engineers have a division that's responsible both for mental health and counseling, and also deprogramming all of their members. It's why they're also the only ones not at risk for being mind-controlled by Threat Null. Edit: Also, the Syndicate is even worse than some realize. They're the one convention that doesn't believe that all people should get to Ascend. They're completely devoted to the idea that there will always be haves and have-nots, and a majority of people need to be Sleepers just so that the Awakened can feel more special about themselves. Additionally, there's a faction within the Union that wants to create an Orwellian cyberpunk dystopia with the brainwashed Sleepers at the bottom and the Technocrats themselves all the way at the top. How influential that faction is seems to vary from sourcebook to sourcebook, and one of the Ascension scenarios covered a civil war between the 'bad' Technocrats and the 'good' ones. Pussy Cartel fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 20:22
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GrimRevenant posted:Which basically sums up why Mage: The Awakening (new World of Darkness) is the way it is. Well...technically the Avatar Storm made it so that no one can linger outside of Earth for very long without risking getting turned into a spirit. Permanently. That alone took care of most everyone that thought leaving Earth was the best solution. Also Entropy getting split and the Data aspects getting pulled out of Correspondence/Space are both reasons why I hate nMage.
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Dec 16, 2014 01:07
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Wanderer posted:Threat Null are thus four factions of Void-Adapted Technocrats who aren't human anymore, pursue a bizarre version of their former Convention's ultimate goals, regard themselves as the real Technocratic Union, and who can "convert" Earth-bound Technocrats in seconds by employing the old Technocrat brainwashing as a sort of mental infection vector. Since the Void Engineers actively deprogram their people once they're beyond the other Conventions' reach, they're immune to Threat Null's conversion tactics, but a big part of keeping Earth safe from Threat Null thus lies in making sure that the Earth-bound Technocracy has no idea Threat Null even exists. The Void Engineers are thus allies of convenience with the Traditions, most commonly the Sons of Ether and Euthanatos, against Threat Null. Not only that, but part of becoming a spirit means becoming an exaggeration of ones own personality traits and goals. Those Technocrats that were trapped off-world by the Avatar Storm/Dimensional Anomaly happened to be the most conservative and obsessed of the bunch, such as Control itself. When they became spirits, they basically became parodies of themselves taken to the ultimate conclusion of their own madness. Being spirits, they can't really get to Earth normally, but they can always corrupt their still-mortal cousins, and maybe even find a way to get summoned on Earth the way the Nephandi always try to bring their supposed-gods over. Pussy Cartel fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Dec 16, 2014 |
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Dec 16, 2014 01:43
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Cythereal posted:Oh, I agree steampunk tends to look neat, but the underlying philosophies behind a lot of steampunk settings and the original writings is very bothersome to me and highly relevant in a setting like oMage as I understand it. No, I don't really want to live in the resurrected British Empire's glory days, thank you very much. Racist, classist, and sexist as all hell, and I have issues with that level of naked imperialism. Funnily enough, it's repeatedly stressed in the books that as hidebound and crotchety as the Traditions can be, the Technocracy has a really big problem with being pretty much treating white/male/straight/"Christian" as the ideal. Comes up repeatedly in the NWO books especially that women and minorities get hushed and run into glass ceilings. It was Technocratic conservatism, combined with their backing the Axis in WW2 and murdering Alan Turing, that led the Virtual Adepts to rebel. The Anarchs claim to be anarchists, but the VAs take anarchism and socialism very, very seriously.
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Dec 16, 2014 03:15
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Cythereal posted:If I were to run an oMage game, I suspect I'd say that the Technocracy murdering Turing is something the Virtual Adepts made up. Humans have never needed supernatural slap fights to do lovely things to each other for petty reasons, and Ada Lovelace could easily be played up as a Technocratic heroine. Iteration X straight up says that the VAs made it all up, but then NWO goes on to say it actually did happen, but it was all an accident because some of the NWO's MiBs thought 'intimidate' meant 'pump full of lead'.  I'm a sucker for the VAs, and those Etherites that go for pulp instead of steampunk.
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Dec 16, 2014 03:23
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Robindaybird posted:That's like over half the oWoD books regardless of line, it gets pretty insufferable To White Wolf/Onyx Path's credit, they made things a whole lot less insufferable later on.
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Dec 16, 2014 04:18
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xanthan posted:What happened in that book? Was it the equivalent of all those weird endings for Vampire like Caine seeing Abel in an ally or 40 days and nights of blood draining rain with you stuck in a church? Pretty much that exactly. A bunch of different possible end scenarios were included: 1: The 'default' ending was global Ascension as all of humanity awakens and creates a weird state in which every person gets their own utopia overlapping with everyone else's. 2: A Technocratic scenario in which the good Technocrats fight the Orwellian ones for final control over humanity's future. 3: One where the Nephandi create a post-apocalyptic demonic dystopia. 4: One in which a meteor may or may not destroy Earth. 5: And finally a scenario in which aliens steal magic from humanity. Pussy Cartel fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Dec 16, 2014 |
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Dec 16, 2014 05:21
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Wanderer posted:There's actually a fun concept for a character in the first Sons of Ether Tradition book: you're an actual no-foolin' golem, a year-old artificial human who was built in a lab. Your creator didn't think you were sentient in the classic sense. Then you Awakened. To say nothing of Frankenstein's monster being an Etherite himself, after his creator went mad and died.
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Dec 16, 2014 05:39
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MarquiseMindfang posted:That is completely fantastic. Get a child's toy gun and hang enough wires and flashing lights and complicated looking circuitry and mirrors off it and you can magic up some lasers and nobody will care. Are the people who use this method basically weird in-game metagamers? The real heart of Etherite theory is that they believe in a subject-centred view of the universe. Basically, an exaggeration of the observer effect, quantum mechanics, and Schrodinger's cat. What's true from one person's perspective might not be from someone else, and so Science! should be individualistic and idiosyncratic. Ether is just their weird metaphor for what each Etherite seeks, although it's also literal for some of the older Etherites.
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Dec 16, 2014 19:16
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The best ending a wraith could hope for is to come to terms with their own death, let go of everything that ever mattered to them, and then finally die for real. It's not creepy, but it's pretty heavy stuff. Edit: And of course mechanically speaking Transcendence isn't nearly so easy as just saying "Yeah, I'm dead and want to move on."
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Dec 25, 2014 06:19
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Aumanor posted:What I mean was: what happens if something supernatural completely changes a large group of mortal's idea of what is possible and what is not. I mean, if a Tremere for example would start throwing eight or nine dots Thaumaturgy abilities at some point you'd get pretty convinced that the so-called laws of physics are loose guidlines at best, right? Not only would people need to believe what they saw, but they'd also need some sort of explanation that can fit those powers into their own paradigm, and even given that, mages wouldn't be able to throw fireballs without risking paradox. Either fireballs would be defined as "thing vampires can do", or it would be something anyone could conceivably learn. If the former's true, then mages would still have to use their magic to create fireballs. If the latter's true, then either a given mage would have to learn the "mortal" technique for fireballs, or they'd have to mimic it with their magic. There is absolutely no way for a mage to use their magic without risking paradox, and mages can't learn "static" forms of magic like those used by hedge magicians and other supernaturals because mages are fixated on the big picture in some metaphysical way.
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Jan 21, 2015 23:11
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Aumanor posted:On this topic: what does Gehenna do to the Consensus? Depends on whether Vampire or Mage takes precedence in a given ST's campaign. The Ascension scenarios assume that Gehenna, if it happens, is mostly offscreen and low-key. VtM itself was never written with the Consensus and Mage's crazy metaphysics in mind, and just assumes mages are, well, wizards of some kind.
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Jan 22, 2015 21:10
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Galick posted:So, been a while and I can't quite remember what half this poo poo does so: Sure, I can give a rundown of the spheres. Correspondence: Manipulation of space, connections, and relationships. One dot: basic scrying. Five dots: Rooms bigger/smaller on the inside than the out, stacking multiple locations on top of one another, being in multiple places at the same time, physically transferring people and things to/from the Digital Web. Entropy: Manipulation of decay, probability, and fate. One dot: little twists of good or bad luck, always knowing the odds of something. Five dots: Multi-generation curses or blessings, disintegration. Forces: Manipulation of energy of all kinds: One dot: Sensing/reading energy. Five dots: Total transmutation or creation of energy. Life: Manipulation of living/biological organisms. One dot: getting a feel for how healthy/sick something is and why, sensing living organisms. Five dots: creating new species, perfect cloning, reviving the dead (physically). Matter: Manipulation of physical, non-living matter. One dot: finding/locating specific substances, sensing what exactly something is made of. Five dots: creating entirely new elements. Mind: Manipulation of thoughts and emotions. One dot: sensing the presence of other intelligences, reading people's emotions. Five dots: creating sapient minds or snuffing them out. Prime: Manipulation of magic, avatars, and the fundamental structure of reality. One dot: sensing quantities of quintessence (mana) and resonance. Five dots: tapping reality itself for free quintessence, unmaking real things to free their quintessence, interacting with avatars. Spirit: Manipulation of spirits, souls, planes, and other dimensions. One dot: sensing spirits, peeking across the Gauntlet. Five dots: creating spirits and souls. Time: Manipulation of time and causality. One dot: knowing what time it is exactly, picking up on temporal manipulation. Five dots: perfect time travel (but not without the usual risks), freezing subjective time for oneself or another entirely. Oracles and archmages can go past five dots, and at those ratings things mount up until the mage in question can do literally anything imaginable within a given sphere. Period. Pussy Cartel fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Jan 23, 2015 |
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Jan 23, 2015 16:57
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Omobono posted:Could Life + Mind + Spirit 5 equal perfect resurrection, in theory? Honestly, that's something the game was never clear on. Some editions said that that effect would create a perfect resurrection, while other editions said that only spheres above 5 could manage it. There was a huge disconnect in power levels between 1st/2nd edition and the revised edition, which tried to turn the game into something low-key and street level. I'm pretty sure the upcoming 20th anniversary edition is going back towards something on par with the 2nd edition, which allowed for resurrection and poo poo like that.
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Jan 23, 2015 17:56
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ulmont posted:Perfect resurrection below level 6 spheres seems inconsistent with there no longer being any reliable way to achieve immortality through magic, aka the Tremere problem. Funnily enough, 1st and I believe 2nd edition made it possible to stop or undo aging using Life, and below 6, at that. The drawback was that being found out by a Sleeper would trigger a backlash, and just having your aging frozen would leave you with permanent Paradox. There's also whatever method the FACADE Engineers use to create 'backups' of important Technocrats, which is technically a sort of immortality/resurrection. Pussy Cartel fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Jan 23, 2015 |
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Jan 23, 2015 22:43
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System Metternich posted:The White Wolf Wikia has a comprehensive list of all vampiric disciplines along with powers and examples for each dot you can invest in them. While I only know the oWoD setting from this game, it seems to me that generally speaking the mage spheres seem to allow for broader actions than comparable disciplines. Like comparing the Time Sphere: Just like the Vampire disciplines, 9 and 10 dot spheres are listed as basically being godlike powers that are discussed only in the vaguest terms. So yeah.
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Jan 23, 2015 23:52
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Granted, Netchurch was a Malkavian, so he probably wasn't seeing things the way everyone else would in the setting.
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Jan 25, 2015 21:53
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Wanderer posted:One neat trick you can do in some versions of Mage is use Prime to transmute the other supernaturals' stats to raw Quintessence, though. You point at a vampire and he's a few blood points lower now. Of course, in oMage if you have enough Prime you can in theory break anything down into raw quintessence. It'll be vulgar as all hell, though. Pussy Cartel fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Jan 29, 2015 |
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Jan 29, 2015 21:10
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Good on you for finally finishing the slog through this mess of a mod. were they thinking with this poo poo?
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Aug 8, 2015 19:39
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