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Nckdictator posted:Can’t say that without linking it. Forgot to do that, sorry. https://writeups.letsyouandhimfight.com/monsieurchoc/charnel-houses-of-europe-the-shoah/
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Jul 30, 2021 00:19
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Wanderer posted:One of the things I thought was interesting about how Mage was developing over the course of its second edition was that its overall metaplot was moving in a direction that made the Technocracy much less cartoon-villain. Incidentally Technocracy Reloaded for Mage 20th Anniversary Edition was released as of July 21st. Still reading it so I don't know if the 'modern' Technocracy version matches up with the first, second, or third edition interpretation. Or if it is its own thing. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/354689/M20-Technocracy-Reloaded  Anyway to get this thread really spicy, someone do a political analysis of Kindred of the East and then try to square it with Vampire the Masquerade.
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Jul 30, 2021 00:49
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Wanderer posted:In the original edition, it was very much magic antiheroes vs. The Man, with the Technocracy as basically every information-suppressing villain from '90s pop culture rolled into one. The introduction even has a newbie mage show up with a katana hidden under his trenchcoat. They knew what they were about. That's just Shadowrun with more steps!
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Jul 30, 2021 00:59
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MonsieurChoc posted:Technocracy are the bad guys not because they believe in Science, but because they're Western Imperialism and Capitalism. You kind of screwed up your games subtext when you have vampires, demons and occult secret societies, but imperialism and capitalism has nothing to do with them. Instead those things are the direct fault of scientists (free pass to team good guy granted to mad scientists). If I recall previous internet discussions, they had to add some text somewhere saying ‘vaccines don’t work the way you would logically expect them to given the rest of the setting, they are actually a good thing and definitely not an excuse for the Technocracy to microchip the masses’.
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Jul 30, 2021 01:07
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radmonger posted:You kind of screwed up your games subtext when you have vampires, demons and occult secret societies, but imperialism and capitalism has nothing to do with them. Instead those things are the direct fault of scientists (free pass to team good guy granted to mad scientists). Oh man if the wizards don't get into the vaccines and chemtrails as written, the vampires definitely will.
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Jul 30, 2021 01:09
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radmonger posted:You kind of screwed up your games subtext when you have vampires, demons and occult secret societies, but imperialism and capitalism has nothing to do with them. Instead those things are the direct fault of scientists (free pass to team good guy granted to mad scientists). Vaccines are simply a magical spell that protects from disease, trying to add tracking magic to it would just ruin the spell Technocracy puts the tracking magic in your tap water.
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Jul 30, 2021 01:14
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radmonger posted:You kind of screwed up your games subtext when you have vampires, demons and occult secret societies, but imperialism and capitalism has nothing to do with them. Instead those things are the direct fault of scientists (free pass to team good guy granted to mad scientists). I forget if someone's mentioned it in this thread, but White Wolf's politics make a lot more sense when you realize it was a company of young left-ish people trying to make counterculture RPG games in the 90s...that was headquartered and staffed in Stone Mountain, Georgia.
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Jul 30, 2021 01:14
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radmonger posted:You kind of screwed up your games subtext when you have vampires, demons and occult secret societies, but imperialism and capitalism has nothing to do with them. Instead those things are the direct fault of scientists (free pass to team good guy granted to mad scientists). It's important to remember that when the Technocracy was founded, their first targets weren't demons or vampires or werewolves, but other mages whose belief and culture they didn't like. Their members included early capitalists, colonialists and religious fanatics. The only group who really believed in helping everyone, instead of using it as an excuse similar to The White Man's Burden, were the Craftmasons which is why they got murdered by the other Technocrats.
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Jul 30, 2021 01:47
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MonsieurChoc posted:Oh you better believe there's Vodou! First off, within Vampire itself there's the Samedi, a Bloodline of vampires who all look like decomposing corpses with a special Necrosis-based Discipline. Their Founder, and the closest thing they have to a leader, is only known as The Baron. Then there's the Serpents of the Light, an offset of the Setites who instead follow their own Voudoun religion and also are members of the Sabbat. Then later-on they introduce a bunch of Blood Magic not limited to clans and of course Vodou Blood Magic and Vodou Necromancy are part of the deal. [claps hands] absolutely perfect, sounds like it's spooky creepy black people death magic hex curse poo poo hazily informed by the most fantastical pop culture stereotypes about vodou. i could ask for nothing more appropriate for 90's tabletop franchises
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Jul 30, 2021 01:50
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It's worth noting that we have not yet truly entered the poo poo dimension when it comes to either incarnation of the World of Darkness. I know this because nobody has posted word one about Beast: The Primordial, the worst WoD splat ever made by anyone.
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Jul 30, 2021 01:52
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Staluigi posted:[claps hands] absolutely perfect, sounds like it's spooky creepy black people death magic hex curse poo poo hazily informed by the most fantastical pop culture stereotypes about vodou. i could ask for nothing more appropriate for 90's tabletop franchises The writers got better at doing research as time went on, and the nWoD has a lot less of that stuff as a result, but the oWoD is full of that. A bunch of white guys from the south trying to be multi-cultural without doing research so their ideas are all based on stereotypes and movies.
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Jul 30, 2021 02:26
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Gulping Again posted:It's worth noting that we have not yet truly entered the poo poo dimension when it comes to either incarnation of the World of Darkness. Oh no you've said the forbidden word.
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Jul 30, 2021 02:27
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Gulping Again posted:It's worth noting that we have not yet truly entered the poo poo dimension when it comes to either incarnation of the World of Darkness.
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Jul 30, 2021 02:46
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Toph Bei Fong posted:And that's okay. I've made peace with it. In the meantime, I can play Esoterrorists to scratch that itch Slightly off-topic, but you may also like a comic that's running right now called The Department of Truth, which feels like a Mage game with its serial numbers filed off.
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Jul 30, 2021 03:18
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Shrecknet posted:To shut this down before It goes anywhere, the concept of Beast was playing boogeyman like Freddy Kreuger or Candyman. Unfortunately, the main writer decided to go all-in on "here's how you power your abilities by molesting children" instead of the more sensible "here's how you power your abilities by scaring people with spooky stuff, not by molesting children what the gently caress gary?!" Randalor posted:
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Jul 30, 2021 03:23
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MonsieurChoc posted:The writers got better at doing research as time went on, and the nWoD has a lot less of that stuff as a result, but the oWoD is full of that. A bunch of white guys from the south trying to be multi-cultural without doing research so their ideas are all based on stereotypes and movies. See also: Kindred of the East
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Jul 30, 2021 04:41
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Archonex posted:Awakening though is commonly used on these forums as a weird masturbatory screed of how _____ poster would (ironically, much like the mentioned rear end in a top hat old wizards) use magic to forcibly insert their own political beliefs as the dominant motif of reality. To hear people talk of it on here it's less of a game and more of a really tiresome and kind of nightmarishly hypocritical politicized thought experiment that certain folk just can't seem to pull free off, hence the joke of magechat being a big part of the game and being utterly inescapable. Mage: The Awakening, or nMage or whatever, breeds a different kind of pointless obtuse discourse than oMage did. I much prefer it! It's explicitly political discourse because unlike oMage the metaphysics of the setting are relatively clear. In nMage, the platonic realm of pure ideas that reality is but a shadow of is A Thing and Mages can manipulate it. Everyone gets a vision of it once, when they figure out how to do magic, and spend the rest of their lives obsessed with it-- usually with the goal of physically entering it and becoming a pure symbol. Once Upon A Time* some Mages figured how to do that, and then to cement their power slammed the door shut behind them. These are the "Exarchs," who became living symbols of oppressions, and they run a large a dominants group of Mages-- the antagonist faction-- called the Seers of the Throne. They are quite literally run by beings that are now pure platonic forms that once were people but are now the actual platonic truth of things like "Capitalism" or "The Patriarchy" or "Xenophobia" or "Social Darwinism" or whatever. They're a bit like the Technocracy in that they brutally enforce the status quo and try and limit the number of mages (so they have less competition) but they don't have any ideals, really. The Mages who work for them do so because they're offered power and an easier life than in the PC-faction and a free pass at using their magic to live large in the physical world. If they're really, really good at their job and survive the brutal factional infighting, a Seer might get to become basically an avatar of "Colonialism" or whatever and sort of live on forever as part of the whole evil machine. The PC Mages are called the "pentacle alliance" or the "diamond orders" and have some bullshit about Atlantis* that unifies them despite each have a distinct history and culture... but basically they are just various revolutionary groups in a sometimes contentious alliance. Rather than like, particular marginalized groups being particular splats-- like in Ascension-- you have tendencies and social organizations. So there's the revolutionary militia, the theoreticians / archivists, the political leadership, the uh let's generously say "commissars", etc. Because the game wants to be nuanced, all these organizations are pretty loving flawed. Plenty of people join the political side of a revolutionary political movement and end up paying lip service to change while grasping onto power for power's sake. This happens in the game too, but there's NOTHING like the equivalency in Ascension where "umm maybe the Technocrats are good, actually?" The most venal and self-serving pentacle member who "won" the setting would still be a clear improvement, since even "suddenly way more people can use magic" and "a power hungry rear end in a top hat mage is in charge" is better than "few people can use magic [and therefore cannot fight back]" and "a power hungry immortal symbol of the concept of oppressions is in charge." ANYWAY as a result of all of that nMage chat is less metaphysical and more about revolutionary politics and theories. Do we really need the commissar / secret police faction? Are the political leadership pragmatists keeping the whole thing together or a group of vanguardists out to make a magic oligarchy? Is it ever acceptable to work with a Seer? (No.) It gets pretty contentious, as anyone who posts about leftist / revolutionary politics might know. It completely rules. *okay so the Original Sin of the writing of the first couple of nMage books was like "Atlantis was a real place and all magic came from Atlantis and the bad guy wizards were Atlantean kings and the good guy wizards were their advisors and..." IMO it was a too hard course correction from oMage's "relativism! everything is true!" Newer books are like "Atlantis is/was/will be some kind of perfected society of Mages. It might have existed, or maybe will exist, or probably got written out of history when humans got up into the platonic truths of the universe and started loving about. It's relatively important as a symbol of a magical society, and symbols are important in this setting, but you don't have to like actually trace everything back to some golden age bullshit if you don't want it." Digital Osmosis fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Jul 30, 2021 |
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Jul 30, 2021 04:50
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Seems like Werewolf missed the crazy drama. All they had were the "my Indian name would be Proud Eagle" wannabe wiccans and a bunch of (in retrospect) furries.
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Jul 30, 2021 05:01
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MonsieurChoc posted:Technocracy are the bad guys not because they believe in Science, but because they're Western Imperialism and Capitalism. I thought the bigger meta argument was fought in the not-canon-but-also-canon-multi-splat-canon where the Technocratic Soviet Union ultimately lost to a vampircally controlled West, this being one of the bigger examples of non-mages forcing reality consensus changes upon the technocracy. And various vignettes where vampires would sass mages and get away with it. Correct me if I"m wrong but didn't Ventrue fart out to where the Tradition strongholds were they proceeded to poo poo on the senior mages and mock and scold them, and get away with it? Then there was the parts in Werewolf which were "If you REALLY want to save the world/reality, get a mage NPC ally..." Cobalt-60 posted:Seems like Werewolf missed the crazy drama. All they had were the "my Indian name would be Proud Eagle" wannabe wiccans and a bunch of (in retrospect) furries. It was a different lower key type of grossness. Werewolf the Forsaken has an anprim and eugenicist undertone (some tribes were far worse about it than other), with blood purity and descent being a core component of some types of woofiness. And as mentioned, the whole appeal to white nerds with a Dances-with-Wolves complex who thinks being shapeshifted into a wolf solves that particular romantic ethics problem. It was an earlier Canary-in-the-coal-mine of how there is both reactionary anti-imperialism (See also, Nazbols ranting about GLOBOHOMO or whatever) and progressive leftism anti-imperalism and sometimes they can get mixed up and its never good. There was also the idea of eco-terrorists in the 90s showed up in fiction a lot until it became apparent in reality there would be no new Weather Underground inside the continental U.S. because people didn't actually care that much. Rainbow Six and other mil-fiction, in addition to Werewolf, was really reaching to find a new conflict post-fall of the Soviet Union. Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Jul 30, 2021 |
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Jul 30, 2021 05:02
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Cobalt-60 posted:Seems like Werewolf missed the crazy drama. All they had were the "my Indian name would be Proud Eagle" wannabe wiccans and a bunch of (in retrospect) furries. Werewolf had its share, but like Mage, it got better writers about halfway through second edition that started weeding the really dumb poo poo out a bit at a time. Unlike Mage, its third edition was actually a pretty massive improvement. The biggest strike against it to this day, to my mind, is that the deformed offspring of two werewolves are called "metis," and are still called that in the 20th anniversary edition. If there was one thing they should've changed...
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Jul 30, 2021 05:29
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Werewolf, even moreso than Mage, always had the lowkey problem that the players/writers often tended to be on very different pages over whether the protagonists were genuinely heroes against The Man, or deeply flawed antiheroes from lines whose hubris created most of the evils that they now struggled against. The ones who didn't buy into the idea that they were still playing monsters often manifested in kinda problematic ways, but most that I encountered was just general anprim and ecoterrorism stuff.
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Jul 30, 2021 05:38
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Gulping Again posted:It's worth noting that we have not yet truly entered the poo poo dimension when it comes to either incarnation of the World of Darkness. Beast? What's that? Some sort of fan project or something? There's no WoD game named Beast, I assure you! (But for real, Beast is pretty  +  +  if you think about it even a little bit, and even moreso when you read about the abuser who wrote it. Learning more about it will not make you happy. Read the above link only if you want to be upset.)Wanderer posted:Slightly off-topic, but you may also like a comic that's running right now called The Department of Truth, which feels like a Mage game with its serial numbers filed off. This looks pretty cool! Thanks for the recommendation
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Jul 30, 2021 05:42
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Killer robot posted:The ones who didn't buy into the idea that they were still playing monsters often manifested in kinda problematic ways This is the primary problem with a lot of games across the World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness. e: Primary in the sense of most common, not as a silver bullet that lays them low.
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Jul 30, 2021 05:58
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Ironslave posted:This is the primary problem with a lot of games across the World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness. This is very true, but at least most Vampire players seemed to get that they were monsters, even when they went into dashing antihero stuff.
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Jul 30, 2021 06:07
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Every now and then a piece of Werewolf's politics is pretty on point though. One early supplement had the suggestion that the Werewolves were starting major forest fires in the Amazon to frame a large corporation active in logging. Back in 2019, Bolsonaro alleged the Amazon fires were exactly that - radical environmentalists trying to turn people against good, honest businesses! It wasn't, of course, but it was a bizarre moment.
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Jul 30, 2021 07:35
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Loomer posted:Every now and then a piece of Werewolf's politics is pretty on point though. One early supplement had the suggestion that the Werewolves were starting major forest fires in the Amazon to frame a large corporation active in logging. Back in 2019, Bolsonaro alleged the Amazon fires were exactly that - radical environmentalists trying to turn people against good, honest businesses! It wasn't, of course, but it was a bizarre moment. There's a lot in late second, early third Werewolf that hit pretty close to home. There's a big Pentex sourcebook from around 2000 that everyone knows nowadays because it's got the self-parodying Black Dog chapter, but the rest of the book is dedicated to several shell companies within Pentex that could serve as potential villains. One of them is a video game developer called Sunburst, and I remember one of the details that was presented was that Sunburst's games always make sure to present the natural world as malevolent and lethal, while encouraging players to exploit it and/or kill everything within it, as a subtle piece of anti-environmentalist propaganda. At around the same time, I started playing Chrono Cross, where the first real quest is to go murder the poo poo out of a bunch of lizards in the forest so you can get one scale from each one to make a necklace for the main character's girlfriend. It was a bit of a "...wait a minute" moment.
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Jul 30, 2021 07:54
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Both editions of Mage are about revolutionary politics in the face of global capitalism. Awakening is better for a number of reasons, but people really sell Ascension short because they've failed the test it puts in front of them. On one side, you have the imperial west, which is objectively strangling humanity to death. On the other hand, you have a variety of factions united against the imperial west, some of them drawing from the past, some of them drawing from contemporary counterculture, all of them with a bunch of weird flaws and poor historical track records and so on. Are you with them or against them? Will you fight, or will you perish like a dog? There's no third option, because capitalism doesn't give you one; you can fight it or you can be devoured by it. A lot of Mage fans were fooled by Guide to the Technocracy and similar books into thinking that capitalism is good. Awakening is a lot more blunt with its politics, so while you get a lot of genuine pro-Technocracy roleplayers who either don't realize or don't care that they're on the side of fascism, people who are pro-Seer of the Throne are mostly doing bits.
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Jul 30, 2021 08:02
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The Technocracy also has a theoretically salvageable 'SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!' faction, for that particular nerd fetish of musk-esque technoimperialism.
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Jul 30, 2021 11:23
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Didn't the overwhelming majority of the Technocracy's leadership dive too deep into deep space and get turned into some incredibly horrible thing named something like THREAT:NULL or was that a fever dream?
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Jul 30, 2021 11:38
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Gulping Again posted:Didn't the overwhelming majority of the Technocracy's leadership dive too deep into deep space and get turned into some incredibly horrible thing named something like THREAT:NULL or was that a fever dream? So, I only vaguely remember stuff about it. So feel free to correct me on the stuff i'm likely very wrong about. But from what I remember from long ago: Threat Null is literally an abstract manifestation (Backed by maybe some higher ups that have become avatars of the reality of what the Technocracy is, due to staying in the weirder parts of reality for too long. Maybe the Weaver is involved in it too, but that's just speculation due to some text that suggests that the higher ups in question may have been infested by spirits aligned with it or something similar to that.) made manifest of what the Technocracy is going to become if their views are taken to completion. As a result, it's hard to get into it without getting into the negative aspects of the Technocracy. Basically, imagine a bunch of crazed transhumanists that have just completely divorced themselves from their humanity, all while having the modern Technocracy's intolerant traits to other ideologies or even things fundamental to being human like free will. Mix the borg, the agents from the Matrix, Elon Musk on a permanent "Science for the sake of science!" binge while on a bunch of dissociative personality inducing hallucinogenic drugs, and a hive minded hyper-authoritarian and you get something resembling their various factions and unified ideology. They are essentially the Technocracy with none of the redeeming traits or any remnant of decency or even basic humanity. And I mean that last bit in a metaphorical and literal sense. And to be clear, their version of Earth if they won would be such a nightmarish dystopia that it'd make even Pentex and the utmost fanatical adherents of the Wyrm screech in absolute terror. The Technocrats are no exception to being subject to the horribleness of this dystopia either, meaning there's no Awakening-esque "The Seers expect to be exempted from all of their evil oppressive bullshit." hypocrisy. What this means is that everyone suffers if the Technocracy gets their way. Everyone loses. No exceptions. You'd think that the Technocrats would want to fix this Caine level ideological and occult flaw in their organization! But you'd be wrong since A. Most Technocrats (Void Engineers excepting. More on them later.) in the know don't give a drat and are convinced that someone at the top will come up with a fix any day now, meaning they can just ignore the issue. If you want an example of the thought process of a bunch of fictional wizards in this situation then think of it like how politicians would rather foist the responsibility off when it comes to climate change and rely on someone else coming up with a fix so they can keep pursuing more personal interests. The awful secret is that there's no one at the top. All the magical Elon Musk's of the world are relying on a kafka-esque system of occult and practical bureaucracy and leadership that moves as much under it's own inertia due to existing as much as it does through a unified ideology that is fundamentally self destructive and destructive. The ones that are likely higher up than them are part of Threat Null as well. Meaning salvation is decidely not forthcoming without them actually being willing to themselves make some sacrifices for the greater good of of the future of humanity, be willing to be more accepting of other ideals, and generally get their hands dirty in stopping the potential of their worst selves. Which they won't, since they're the platonic equivalent of an empty suit expecting an empty room full of decidedly nonexistent suits to handle all their problems. B. Even the ones that do care and would be more representative of 2nd ed's more seemingly heroic Technocracy are thoroughly hosed since Threat Null, being a future distillation of what the Technocracy is, has the control codes that let them control the members of the Technocracy. Since, yes, the Technocracy was stupid and arrogant enough to brainwash it's own members with a means to make them subservient at a moment's notice without wondering what would happen if the activator for it ever fell into the wrong hands. As a result the moment Threat Null pops into normative existence everything is going to come full circle as the Technocracy itself is going to become the victim of it's own oppression. C. On some level, the Void Engineers seem to realize how hosed up the rest of the Technocracy has become* and are trying to keep the existence of Threat Null a secret for fear of what might happen if the rest of the Technocracy found out about Threat Null. For the most part this is partially because Void Engineers themselves were always one of the token good guys that seemed to buy into the more noble ideals of what the Technocracy originally set out to do. The other part is probably an unstated and not unreasonable concern of what the response is going to be regarding some of the necessary actions needed to keep Threat Null out until it can be dealt with. Since they discovered how utterly hosed up Threat Null is they've become more militant (presumably to try and take out Threat Null themselves, amongst other things) and have even gone so far as to prolong the avatar storm to the detriment of many other very powerful mages, since it's keeping Threat Null from reaching Earth. They've even gone so far as to break the mind control that the Technocracy put on them, letting them presumably at least make a valiant last stand if they fail in their efforts to keep Threat Null out of reality. The latter of which is potentially really bad if word gets out, since it means that they'd essentially be rogue agents in the eyes of some members (who themselves are part of the reason why the Technocracy are antagonists) of the Technocracy. Or to put it another way, the Void Engineers are in the middle of having a Sons of Ether tier epiphany that the Technocracy was probably a bad idea in the long run, even if it did fricassee a bunch of eldritch abominations like the Ravnos antediluvian to keep Earth safe. It's to the point where there literally isn't a known Threat Null version of the Void Engineers (all the factions in the Technocracy have a hosed up counterpart except for them) for debatable reasons.** *One thing that isn't mentioned is that the Technocracy technically wasn't founded by a bunch of capitalists (They didn't even exist back then.) and corrupt/intolerant religious types that wanted to exterminate every ideology but theirs but rather people who genuinely despised the fact that the medieval equivalent of the traditions were originally basically the Exarch's from Awakening as mortal mages due to them hoarding magic while acting like callous and corrupt poo poo birds towards mundane humanity. All that awful poo poo the Technocracy came up with occurred later on as the Order of Reason got the upper hand against their enemies and became far more lax about pursuing their ideals. Back then, what's now the Technocratic Union's (Then known as the Order of Reason.) views probably looked a heck of a lot more appealing if you gave a poo poo about the well being of humanity at large and it's future. Having people die young of preventable diseases and seeing them perpetually stuck in a lovely existence as a serf to a feudalistic and medieval environment, all while being preyed on by various malicious supernatural entities due to a lack of technology and knowledge in exchange for you yourself having magical power is a lovely thing to turn a blind eye to if you're an empathic or decent person. It's to the point that even the official wiki goes on to say this as it's very first words on their predecessor organization: quote:The Order of Reason, founded in 1325 CE, was a group dedicated to the protection of humanity from the depredations of the supernatural – specifically mages, and more specifically the Order of Hermes. A look into how their opposition, the Order of Hermes, viewed humanity at large posted:The new millennium brought several upheavals. The Bubonic Plague devastated the Order of Hermes' infrastructure and led to further disgruntlement among the population for the arrogant wizards in their towers, who lorded over the peasants like kings and cared nothing about their plight. Keep in mind that the Order of Hermes is the group that gave us such wonders as VtM's Tremere (Famed for mass soul eating they later framed the Salubri for, horrifying human experimentation on par with the poo poo the rebel angels got up too, the mass extermination of a potentially token good clan of vampires, and for generally being just utterly sociopathic hyper-authoritarian power hungry scum who'd go on to betray almost everyone that ever met them.). They also weren't at all against straight up exterminating houses that fell afoul of their politics or were momentarily vulnerable due to politics or something else. There's a reason even Phil Brucato said that the Technocracy were originally the good guys and were the better option depending on the version of Mage that's being used. **People say that they think that the reason why there's no Void Engineers counterpart that's visible in Threat Null's ranks is because they'd just go off further into space to explore things that even the Void Engineers can't find. But i'm of the opinion that given their actions it's just as likely that they were eradicated by the other Threat Null factions since it's evident given their increasing militarization (To the point where they've literally gone and added the concept of space marines to their repertoire. And never mind that there's implications that it's slowly becoming their main thing above even exploration due to them throwing everything they can at stopping Threat Null and other apocalyptic threats.) that they're basically the token good guys of the Technocracy and are very much not cool with Threat Null or some souped up Nephandi stuck outside of reality having their way with the world. Factor into that them breaking their social conditioning/mind control and Threat Null can't just use the control codes on them, which leaves violence as the only other alternative. Archonex fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Jul 30, 2021 |
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Jul 30, 2021 12:25
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Ferrinus posted:Both editions of Mage are about revolutionary politics in the face of global capitalism. Awakening is better for a number of reasons, but people really sell Ascension short because they've failed the test it puts in front of them. On one side, you have the imperial west, which is objectively strangling humanity to death. On the other hand, you have a variety of factions united against the imperial west, some of them drawing from the past, some of them drawing from contemporary counterculture, all of them with a bunch of weird flaws and poor historical track records and so on. Are you with them or against them? Will you fight, or will you perish like a dog? There's no third option, because capitalism doesn't give you one; you can fight it or you can be devoured by it. I guess this is where we have to agree to disagree, because I can't see a world in which the traditions "win" being much better for the common person than their current situation. Maybe if there were a faction styled after the YPG and PKK, but the Traditions themselves all organize into hierarchical structures wherein the "enlightened" dole out their knowledge to the masses, either based on religious organization or guru based personality. They didn't have the foresight to provide us with a Bone Gnawer or Children of Gaia faction who are concerned with the poor masses of "regular" people. Like, what does the world look like if the Traditions win? A modified version of Torg? How does day to day life go by in a society where the Verbena control consensus, and how is its treatment of the poor and infirm that different from under the Technocracy? And how does that differ from the mindset of a guy who thinks that the world would be better if we just let the Catholic Church control everything, but with Catholic scratched off and Wicca written in? If one doesn't like life under the Order of Hermes, can one just walk one country over and try out the Sons of Ether for a bit? Who is feeding people if the Order of Hermes is in charge? Are there still farmers and miners to produce the raw materials that the magicians need to do their magic? Or do things like hungry and thirst magically disappear without Capitalism? Which Tradition "wins" in the end? Because many of them aren't peaceful live and let live type organizations, and it's difficult to picture the Celestial Chorus, the Euthanatoi or the Order of Hermes not attempting to convert and control the other Tradition's followers immediately when given the opportunity. I understand the argument the game presents, but I don't find the answer it gives of anti-scientific libertarian anarcho-primitivism particularly compelling. It's similar to how I think racism is a genuine problem, but don't think that Tariq Nasheed or the Black Hammer Organization provide a workable solution to it.
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Jul 30, 2021 15:00
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Oh, and as an addendum to that insanely  y mega post (Holy poo poo, I did not expect it to be so long. I had to rewrite large parts of it several times.  ) I should add that in a weird sort of way Caine is the tiniest bit responsible in a very tangential sense for mage society going so haywire. Remember that post about how Caine introduced the concept of murder to existence, which let the loyalist angels defeat the rebels, which lead to demons being created as the loyalists tortured the crap out of every rebel angel aside from Lucifer? Which is why Caine is kind of the ultimate villain of the setting in a darkly funny way due to how he fucks up everything by accident and is basically the catalyst for a whole bunch of poo poo inevitably going wrong outside of VtM itself? Well, Demon's storyline reveals that Lucifer was as mentioned exempted from imprisonment and being turbo-tortured alongside the other rebels. So over the millennia he started to work on trying to free his comrades from the most absurdly hosed up punishment ever. He started with his most trusted lieutenants during the war, planning on summoning them to earth and using their overwhelming power to kickstart the war again. He even went so far as to create religions that would enable their release and afterwards worship them to feed them Except when he found them he discovered something awful. They had all become insane, monstrously evil bastards who blamed Lucifer, God, and usually also humanity as well for their defeat and subsequent insanity inducing torture. Turns out a dip into the abyss is not good for your sanity. So, realizing how badly he had hosed up (...By not realizing his comrades couldn't keep it together until he could get them free. Or by assuming the evil/AWOL ones that needed to be taken down would have had an epiphany that they shouldn't have been such bastards to humanity. To be fair, that one wasn't really on Lucifer.) Lucifer set about a number of countermeasures to weaken the power of his lieutenants so that these Earthbound demons wouldn't go starting up a demonic apocalypse. One of them was the advancement of science over religion, to the point where religion would not be the dominant force in people's lives anymore. Which would deprive the Earthbound of their source of power. Meaning that the Order of Reason was getting a huge boost from Lucifer working in the background to save them all from death by batshit insane demon. Meaning the Order of Reason didn't have as hard as a time as they might have in beating down the medieval era mages. Meaning the Order of Reason got to slack off on some of it's ideals, leading to the Technocracy more likely than not and failing that definitely enabled their victory over the medieval era traditions regardless. Meaning that one salty ur-vampire murdering his brother because he thought that a god that was okay with sanity raping torture liked his brother more than him ultimately kickstarted the series of events and poor decision making that lead to the Technocracy happening. Suffice to say that the OwoD's take on religion is kind of hosed up. Archonex fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Jul 30, 2021 |
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Jul 30, 2021 15:22
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Toph Bei Fong posted:I guess this is where we have to agree to disagree, because I can't see a world in which the traditions "win" being much better for the common person than their current situation. Maybe if there were a faction styled after the YPG and PKK, but the Traditions themselves all organize into hierarchical structures wherein the "enlightened" dole out their knowledge to the masses, either based on religious organization or guru based personality. They didn't have the foresight to provide us with a Bone Gnawer or Children of Gaia faction who are concerned with the poor masses of "regular" people. See, this is what I mean about the metaphysics of the setting muddling the discourse in oMage and obfuscating Ferrinus' point. Like, I think these are valid objections, but also that Ferrinus' read is correct, and I think that the reason both of these can be true is because the oMage metaphysics are incoherent and unworkable. In oMage the villains really are capitalism, and also the hero's plans really are "destroy the germ theory of disease." nMage's politics are clearer, sure, but that's not the only reason the discussion is different. It's not just blunter political metaphors in nMage, it's also a metaphysical framework that doesn't make a victory for Mages something that's easy to imagine as utterly terrifying.
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Jul 30, 2021 15:33
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Honestly I find that old mage better reflects the tendency for real world occult and pagan revivalists to imagine themselves as ideologically superior to existing systems of power when there isn't actually any reason to believe that they're not just a different flavor of the same basic thing
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Jul 30, 2021 15:49
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Digital Osmosis posted:See, this is what I mean about the metaphysics of the setting muddling the discourse in oMage and obfuscating Ferrinus' point. Like, I think these are valid objections, but also that Ferrinus' read is correct, and I think that the reason both of these can be true is because the oMage metaphysics are incoherent and unworkable. In oMage the villains really are capitalism, and also the hero's plans really are "destroy the germ theory of disease." nMage's politics are clearer, sure, but that's not the only reason the discussion is different. It's not just blunter political metaphors in nMage, it's also a metaphysical framework that doesn't make a victory for Mages something that's easy to imagine as utterly terrifying. The thing is, the idea of a reality where humanity has power to determine it's own fate and prosper by itself by way of science is explicitly not a bad thing. Where you're getting hung up is that the Technocracy has become less about being a force of protection and progress from it's Order of Reason incarnation and has instead become more of some sort of self serving oppressive nightmare. It's a plot point across multiple game lines (when it's looked at with a bit more introspection than usual) that science and technology itself is potentially a unilateral good when used properly. It's when you end up with a ceaseless lack of care towards the consequences of the pursuit of these things that you end up with a bad situation --- be it through the oppressive ideology of a fallen Order of Reason that gave up it's higher ideals and became the Technocracy or the rampant murder-suicide capitalist cult that is Pentex. This in no way exonerates the mages that made up groups like the Order of Hermes, who would want to roll back the changes the Order of Reason had worked towards. Nor does it mean that science or technology is inherently bad as the way the world was before they showed up shows that inevitably you get some Seer-esque mages running things callously and gallivanting about while normal people die of dysentery in a ditch. Ferrinus point is wrong not because of an obfuscated point he made (Which does exist.) but because he starts a line of reductive reasoning that when spun out to its end basically ends up with a Phil Brucato-esque conclusion that nature is inherently good and technology/science inherently equals capitalism or western society, which it decidedly does not. And I should add that i've read a quote from Brucato himself who once said something to the tune that the traditions were not the good guys opposing capitalism or whatever but instead dangerous luddites and that a big part of the problem is that the Technocracy needs to get it's poo poo together and act right. It was quite some time ago that I read the quote but I also clearly recall he even he explicitly cited the point that the traditions way of thinking fucks over all of humanity by rewriting reality to a primitive standard that leaves them in a supreme position of power for their own gain. Which is a very Seers sort of thing to do, I should add. fool of sound posted:Honestly I find that old mage better reflects the tendency for real world occult and pagan revivalists to imagine themselves as ideologically superior to existing systems of power when there isn't actually any reason to believe that they're not just a different flavor of the same basic thing Yeah, this is the actual thread relevant thing that you can take away from this Archonex fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Jul 30, 2021 |
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Jul 30, 2021 15:59
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Toph Bei Fong posted:I guess this is where we have to agree to disagree, because I can't see a world in which the traditions "win" being much better for the common person than their current situation. Maybe if there were a faction styled after the YPG and PKK, but the Traditions themselves all organize into hierarchical structures wherein the "enlightened" dole out their knowledge to the masses, either based on religious organization or guru based personality. They didn't have the foresight to provide us with a Bone Gnawer or Children of Gaia faction who are concerned with the poor masses of "regular" people. With this and the rest of the recent posts I see the sort of common pattern of X-Men writing, where every so often editorial notices that whoopsie we just did three worldwide plots in a year that involved either mutant supremacists or dumbass uncontrolled mutants coming within a hairsbreadth of destroying the world, so we'd better make sure that everyone even worried about this eats a lot of (mutant) babies so everyone knows their motivation is pure bigotry. In Mage, the traditions are a mix of people who either aren't useful allies against the initially described Technocracy-dominated world since their only quarrel is who's wearing the boot, or those who aren't useful allies because they want something even more horrifying for anyone not actually in their circle. So the easiest way to write out of that corner was the whole evil future selves plotline and stuff like that to make an "Oh no, it would be even worse!" stakes raising.
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Jul 30, 2021 16:08
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Digital Osmosis posted:See, this is what I mean about the metaphysics of the setting muddling the discourse in oMage and obfuscating Ferrinus' point. Like, I think these are valid objections, but also that Ferrinus' read is correct, and I think that the reason both of these can be true is because the oMage metaphysics are incoherent and unworkable. In oMage the villains really are capitalism, and also the hero's plans really are "destroy the germ theory of disease." nMage's politics are clearer, sure, but that's not the only reason the discussion is different. It's not just blunter political metaphors in nMage, it's also a metaphysical framework that doesn't make a victory for Mages something that's easy to imagine as utterly terrifying. This is very well put. White Wolf in general has a problem of metaphor drift. Like, we already have a very workable metaphor for capitalism in Vampire: old, calcified systems of control that attempt to absorb everything underneath them, and which exist forever the way corporations do. We also have the comically over the top Captain Planet villain in Pentex, responsible for both world scale destruction of the environment and toys that literally make children depressed and teach them to be sexist and abusive. And so of course, when the Mage metaphor for capitalism comes up, well, it needs to be tied into the other two: the Syndicate's Special Projects Division works alongside Pentex, and there are probably Vampires working with Hall and Nash and the rest of the New World Order, and so on. But then the metaphors fight each other? How are we supposed to read the Technocracy blowing up the Ravnos antediluvian with the ghost of the Hiroshima nuke? Are the Vampires now the persecuted minorities, rather than calcified capital? Is this instead now a metaphor for Capitalism supplanting Feudalism? Or is this just a way to move the metaplot forward and erase some mistakes White Wolf made in the early 90s? So, with most oWoD games, you end up with this strange mixture of "philosophical musings on the nature of trust, belief, and control" with "Doctor Blight and her computer sidekick MAL are hacking into the environmental agency's database to turn parks into legal dumping sites for Sly Sludge" and the reach of the former generally exceeding the grasp of the latter. Mark Fisher's Capitalism Realism hits on this very well: it's difficult to imagine a world not run on capitalist principles. In order to present a "reality war" one needs to provide a coherent and appealing vision of what that alternative world looks like and how it functions. oMage doesn't do that very well, in my opinion. nMage does.
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Jul 30, 2021 16:11
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I also think that sometimes people end up reading into some of the stuff on display way too much and inferring a political or deeper meaning in it that might not necessarily be there. I mean, sometimes you just want to write something that's just loving cool for your big headliner events. How else are you going to explain stuff like the Ravnos Antediluvian (who is actually possibly a vampire that ascended to become a literal demon lord like this is some anime) waking up and mind raping a good chunk of the planet while a bunch of vampires from all over Asia band together to take it down by engaging in a week long epic kung fu battle with the Antediluvian under a blotted out sun? And then the finale has the Technocracy finally taking the gloves off once it's been weakened by the aforementioned vampires and displaying their implied power in the text in explicit form by just straight up nuking the thing out of existence with a sun powered death ray. And then there's an explosive stinger to it all where Enoch gets hit by the ghost of a nuke or something like that, the Underworld gets wrecked as a result of this, Wraith ends, and nothing is entirely the same again for several types of supernatural beings. Sometimes a giant sun powered death ray is just a giant sun powered death ray. Likewise, sometimes the ghost of a nuke blowing up the first city is just the ghost of a nuke blowing up the first city. Archonex fucked around with this message at 16:36 on Jul 30, 2021 |
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Jul 30, 2021 16:24
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fool of sound posted:Honestly I find that old mage better reflects the tendency for real world occult and pagan revivalists to imagine themselves as ideologically superior to existing systems of power when there isn't actually any reason to believe that they're not just a different flavor of the same basic thing I agree. The differences between Silver RavenWolf, Rhonda Byrne, Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, and Joyce Meyer are mainly ones of aesthetics.
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Jul 30, 2021 16:37
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Ronwayne posted:The Technocracy also has a theoretically salvageable 'SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!' faction, for that particular nerd fetish of musk-esque technoimperialism. Nope! They're just the expansionist wing. All of it's gotta go. Toph Bei Fong posted:I guess this is where we have to agree to disagree, because I can't see a world in which the traditions "win" being much better for the common person than their current situation. Maybe if there were a faction styled after the YPG and PKK, but the Traditions themselves all organize into hierarchical structures wherein the "enlightened" dole out their knowledge to the masses, either based on religious organization or guru based personality. They didn't have the foresight to provide us with a Bone Gnawer or Children of Gaia faction who are concerned with the poor masses of "regular" people. First, lots of real-life leftist factions - and certainly the materially successful ones - are organized hierarchically. If you think the problem is "hierarchy" rather than capitalism you've already been fooled by liberal ideology. Second and more importantly, the modern traditions aren't the ancient traditions, and couldn't be even if they tried. History has progressed too much. The Traditions, plural, are now an ecumenical organization dedicated to human liberation rather than to specifically the church of Rome or whatever. They contain two tech and one general grab-bag modern culture faction! Most if not all of the members of the actual old-fashioned wizard and druid traditions were, themselves, born in the modern era and have modern sensibilities. Turning back the clock isn't actually an option. Now - and this is good game design - every Tradition has a bunch of reactionary or at least counterproductive elements that make it more difficult for that Tradition to both work with others and defeat the Technocracy. A Mage storyline about actually freeing humanity is naturally going to involve internal struggle and rectification as well as involving external struggle against the enemy. But if you're like "who is feeding people [after the end of capitalism]" they've already got you. Archonex posted:This in no way exonerates the mages that made up groups like the Order of Hermes, who would want to roll back the changes the Order of Reason had worked towards. Nor does it mean that science or technology is inherently bad as the way the world was before they showed up shows that inevitably you get some Seer-esque mages running things callously and gallivanting about while normal people die of dysentery in a ditch. The Order of Hermes doesn't actually want to roll back the changes the Order of Reason worked towards. I mean, they definitely did many hundreds of years ago when the Order of Reason was a nascent power rather than a totally hegemonic Technocracy, but, again, the modern Traditions are whether they like it or not aspects of the modern world. If sick people get protective talismans rather than antibiotic pills they're still being cured. Phil 'Satyros' Brucato doesn't have a good understanding of the setting they're letting him work on. That's why he's like "oh well the Technocracy and Traditions are both bad, that's why I'm going to make up some new hip faction of actually-good mages." There's going to be a Brucato II who comes along and says that faction is actually bad and who makes up Mary Sue faction #4 or whatever, it just betrays a fundamental unwillingness to engage. Toph Bei Fong posted:White Wolf in general has a problem of metaphor drift. Like, we already have a very workable metaphor for capitalism in Vampire: old, calcified systems of control that attempt to absorb everything underneath them, and which exist forever the way corporations do. We also have the comically over the top Captain Planet villain in Pentex, responsible for both world scale destruction of the environment and toys that literally make children depressed and teach them to be sexist and abusive. And so of course, when the Mage metaphor for capitalism comes up, well, it needs to be tied into the other two: the Syndicate's Special Projects Division works alongside Pentex, and there are probably Vampires working with Hall and Nash and the rest of the New World Order, and so on. But then the metaphors fight each other? How are we supposed to read the Technocracy blowing up the Ravnos antediluvian with the ghost of the Hiroshima nuke? Are the Vampires now the persecuted minorities, rather than calcified capital? Is this instead now a metaphor for Capitalism supplanting Feudalism? Or is this just a way to move the metaplot forward and erase some mistakes White Wolf made in the early 90s? Individual parts of capitalism fighting each other tooth and claw is very realistic to capitalism, though. So is bloodsucking petty-bourgeoisie finding themselves proletarianized as they get ground beneath the gears of bigger and more advanced capitals. So is the inextricable link between wide-scale economic exploitation and sexism, ableism, racism, etc. It's our job to read the game and make conclusions; fantasy art needn't and shouldn't painstakingly set out one-to-one correspondences between imaginary and real events such that you open a corebook and find wizard George W. Bush leveraging rumors of wizard WMDs to invade wizard Iraq etc, and if any one of those elements is missing or even slightly different you just wave it off as a random story about nothing.
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Jul 30, 2021 16:40
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