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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. 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. The second edition filed some of the rough edges off of that, however, up to the point where they released a book about how to run an all-Technocracy game. They were increasingly depicted as a powerful but flawed faction, much like the mystic Traditions, where their philosophy had some obvious weaknesses but they did have a series of increasingly valid points. The 2nd edition Technocracy might be the closest thing in the old World of Darkness to a faction that is unequivocally on the side of basic humanity. Then third edition came along and threw most of that in the gutter. It was a pretty sharp change in creative direction; now the Technocracy had just outright won, partially due to a phenomena that blocked off the spirit world from Earth, and anyone who wasn't a Technocrat was just playing out the string. I don't disagree with comments about the general philosophical flaws of Mage--I'm trying to be objective about it, since I really like the game and have a lot of good memories attached to it--but one of the biggest problems is that philosophical incoherence was slowly being addressed in 2nd, and then 3rd blew it up in favor of doing Orwellian Cyber-Wizards. AtomikKrab posted:I feel Mage could be improved a bit by like just making it a thing that the Technocracy is running the laws around EARTH but the rest of the universe has its own Consensus, and as scientists study more of the galaxy and wider universe it is coming up against the outside Consensus (and Aliens coming by using their own magic the gently caress with people or maybe free their minds or some stuff.) They kinda did that. There's a second-edition supplement called the Book of Worlds that talks about how things work in space. Basically, once you get outside of lunar orbit or so in oWoD cosmology, there is no Consensus and you can go hog wild. Paradox doesn't exist. There just aren't enough people out there to have a common idea of what reality is, so you get steampunk space-zeppelins flying alongside starships. Out there, the Ascension War is basically the Traditions and Technocracy occasionally exchanging fire, but generally happy to team up against worse things when they show up. There was a plot thread really late in third edition that went further into it, where the Void Engineers (space techno-wizards) had begun outright cooperating with other supernatural forces, because deep space is a Lovecraftian nightmare and you're better off with a vampire at your back, who at least was human at one point, than whatever the hell that thing is.
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Jul 29, 2021 22:01
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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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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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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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The Threat:Null thing is from the Void Engineers splatbook that came out in something like 2013 from Onyx Path, with a solid ten-year gap between it and any other Mage supplements from 3rd edition. The real short version is that 3rd edition included something called the "Avatar Storm," which cuts mages on Earth off from the spirit world, and also cuts anyone who was in the spirit world at the time off from Earth. Humans without that connection can handle being in the spirit world for maybe three months tops before they start to become spirits themselves, and one of the big flaws of the Technocracy is that they don't actually believe in the concept of a "spirit world." But it believes in them. Since the oldest and most powerful mages in the setting tend to go on retirement tours to the spirit world, various custom-built realities within the spirit world, and/or deep space, that meant most of those mages either died or became spirits. In the case of the Technocracy, that means the leadership of four out of its five major factions got stuck off Earth for long enough to get real weird. Hence, they became Threat:Null, which is the ultimate dark expression of each of those four factions' ideals (be careful what you wish for, etc.), combined with an Orwellian drive to forcibly subsume or destroy anyone who isn't part of their deal. Worse, because the Technocracy low-key brainwashes each of its operatives, any Earth-bound Technocrat who comes into contact with any element of Threat:Null will become one of them on the spot, as the indoctrination sets them up for rapid conversion. It's an interesting idea for an antagonist and you could get a lot of use out of them, but like I said, it's from a pretty obscure source. 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, I almost wrote something about this before. All of the original, first edition White Wolf games have the same problem, and that's Mark Rein-Hagen's weird ideas about what a roleplaying game actually entails. He never seemed to understand in any of the 1st-edition books that a tabletop game isn't going to be this perfect crystal castle of ideas that the ST and players will collaborate upon in order to tell a story of an individual's struggle against damnation/rage against the inevitable/etc. For example, both Vampire and Mage have an included gradual struggle towards theoretical, spiritual perfection that's treated as a character's ultimate endgame, but which is an individual goal that's difficult if not impossible to convey at a gaming table with other players involved. It's not until other writers get involved that the game line starts evolving any degree of mechanical consistency or textual consistency. Rein-Hagen is good at ideas, bad at worldbuilding and mechanics, and it's why the oWoD is built on as much sand as it is.
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Jul 30, 2021 16:52
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I would argue that via the Syndicate, it's more accurate to argue that the Technocracy encompasses hyper-capitalism than explicitly represents it. Similarly, the Ventrue in V:tM, being basically that scene in Being John Malkovich except everyone's Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, are a decent capitalist metaphor all by themselves.
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Jul 30, 2021 17:54
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Shrecknet posted:There's a reason I play Vampire and don't loving touch Mage. A coward's position, Del
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Jul 30, 2021 18:55
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eviltastic posted:this would be the part where I don't follow. I mean, the text quite pointedly says that their current goals are (1) control of everything, and (2) equality, even if it means cutting down those at the top. It then specifically describes their ideals as a warped form of communism, with the contradiction being that elites have to be there to impose that equality, drawing a comparison to the Soviet Union. The Technocracy didn't get particularly layered until much later in the line. In the second edition core rulebook, they're antagonists, full stop. Your reading's perfectly valid given what you had access to.
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Jul 30, 2021 21:09
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All I remember about mummies off-hand was that the first attempt at their book gave them at least one hilariously broken ability. Mummies could basically make anything else cease to exist by wanting it.Ferrinus posted:Since all these games are in one way or another about modernity, and therefore about capitalism, they're ultimately different takes on how to survive within capitalism, or how to carve out oases of self-determination within capitalism, or in the most ambitious ones - generally Mage, but sometimes Werewolf and Demon - how to destroy capitalism. If you were going to start talking about Werewolf as anti-capitalism, I honestly don't think you'd do much better than a read-through of Subsidiaries: A Guide to Pentex. There's a lot to chew on there, although the video game chapter in particular is very dated by now.
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Jul 31, 2021 19:47
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Fuschia tude posted:I want to know all about contemporary opinions of 90s video games as filtered through the lens of a tabletop RPG supplement My copy's still in storage. If anyone else has one, they're welcome to chime in. One thing I remembered by glancing at the Fandom wiki was that Tellus, the evil video game developer, is depicted as a crunch-culture powerhouse that releases flimsy, inexpensive products (so they produce more e-waste) and is running a deliberately addictive MMORPG that has rudimentary 2000-era VR capability. People have died or ruined their lives due to playing it, which is of course the point; there are a lot of things in the Pentex sourcebook that aren't necessarily meant as Big Evil Plans, but are just things that could eventually be part of the groundwork for one, or which just make life on Earth that little bit worse for everyone. Tellus is a fairly blatant stand-in for 2000-era Electronic Arts, created four years before the ea_spouse event, so this one got called in the air. That, in turn, suggests that the MMORPG in question is meant to be reskinned Ultima Online. What's a little weird in retrospect is that the fictional MMO, Eden Online, is about settlers searching the galaxy for other habitable worlds after Earth's environment has been destroyed. Not only does the quick-and-dirty description of the game sound quite a bit like the background lore for EA's later series Dead Space, where humanity roams around the galaxy cracking planets open like walnuts, but it also sounds more than a little like EVE Online, the owners of which bought White Wolf outright in 2006.
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Aug 1, 2021 17:58
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John Scott Tynes is fairly active on Twitter if you wanted to ask him a few of these questions.
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Aug 4, 2021 07:56
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Triskelli posted:Not tabletop games, but why do so many JRPGs have you fight & dethrone God? I'd need to go back and kick this around with a friend of mine for a bit, but taking a swing from what I know: There's a weird daisy chain of creative influences going into JRPGs. Japan never really got into Dungeons & Dragons, but the original Wizardry was a big hit over there, and Wizardry was self-consciously trying to be a sort of early D&D sim. Hence, there ended up being a whole generation of anime, games, and manga--Slayers, Record of Lodoss War, the original Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest--which are running off of a quirky secondhand recreation of Western boilerplate fantasy. It's why there are so many of the traditional D&D archetypes in JRPG character balance, particularly early on. As part of that quasi-medieval European setting that D&D generically has, it involves a church or something that looks like a church, and because there are very few practicing Christians in Japan, most Japanese developers have an outsider's perspective on its iconography. It already looks like fantasy bullshit to them, so they draw from it and use it to empower their other fantasy bullshit. Many of them also want to write stories about a band of teenagers who are, for one reason or another, rejecting or fighting against authority; their setting is a Western fantasy takeoff set in a medieval pastiche; there's no greater authority in that kind of setting than the church; and the developers have no particular veneration for that church, so it's a natural place to look for an antagonist. (This does not count most anything in the Shin Megami Tensei series, which is very self-consciously a comparative religion textbook with punching.)
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Sep 25, 2021 03:46
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Ratoslov posted:It's more direct than that, sort of. Huh. I had no idea, and that's really interesting; Wikipedia says a transcript of their campaign was actually serialized in a magazine for two years. Thanks for that.
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Sep 25, 2021 04:14
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Randalor posted:I don't remember the original Star Frontiers being quite so... openly racist. I'm guessing that "NuTSR" is going all-in chasing those horrible, horrible racist dollars and making big bank off of the controversy. What I suspect, after a conversation with one of the people who runs the No Hate in Gaming site, is that "nuTSR" is attempting to run a Steve Bannon-style "flood the zone with poo poo" attack, in an effort to disorient everyone involved and drum up support for themselves against the woke mob at Wizards. The general idea here seems to be that Wizards had legitimately let the paperwork lapse on the trademarks for TSR and Star Frontiers, but has also been selling ebooks for both brands since December 2021. In order for nuTSR to have filed for the SF/TSR trademarks, they would've had to have submitted a statement to say that nobody was using them at the time. That means they lied to the USPTO; didn't run so much as a single Google search on the topic; somehow thought they had a valid case; and/or were hoping Wizards would drop a check on their heads to shut them up.
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Sep 16, 2022 02:36
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Fuschia tude posted:Wizards even admits to the former in their legal filing, but says they have additionally also been selling books for both brands through their authorized third party reseller online continuously since 2012 or earlier. Yeah, that was a typo on my part. I wrote 2021, meant to write 2012.
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Sep 16, 2022 16:45
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