Like, seriously, what was going on with Mage: the Awakening, 1st edition? Every time I read a new supplement for this game, there's something awful and weird, that throws a monkey-wrench into any notional ambition of coherent worldbuilding. My operating theory, after reading Summoners, is that they're doing it on purpose. That if we could subpoena the emails of White Wolf, circa 2005-2009, we would see a conspiracy at the highest levels, where the people in charge of the editorial direction of the line knowingly, and with malice of forethought, pursued a calculated strategy to make the overall cosmology of the game as janky and unpleasant as possible, so that there was not even a shadow of a possibility that nuMage could accidentally develop into a beloved urban fantasy game. Mage: the Awakening was conceived as gnostic horror in a world of dark neo-platonism and the only fucking escape from that is through mythos horror. Tentacled monsters might crawl out of the Abyss to eat your soul, but fuck you if you ever think you're going to ride a dragon. The ratchet only turns towards "grim."
And now I'm going to do my trademark move where I support this scurrilous (and possibly even libelous) assertion with some oddball quote that seems to make another point entirely:
The tales of the Forest Primeval remind Thyrsus mages of the Primal Wild, and legends of tricksters the world over, beneficent or malevolent, remind the Acanthus of their trip to Arcadia. To the Awakened, it's not hard to see where humanity got these stories - they are remnants of memories from before the Fall.
Mages with a slightly broader experience of the world, though, disagree. Yes, the "Fae" of Arcadia resemble legends of faeries, but there are other beings in the World of Darkness that claim the title, and they don't seem to have any Supernal understanding about them.
And there it is. It's subtle, but unmistakable: someone is fucking with me, and I'm like 99% sure they know they're doing it. This book tells you how to summon faeries from Arcadia, but, you know, you can't just take that at face value because the game is set in a world where an entirely different group of godlike eldritch beings calls themselves "faeries" and the inaccessible world of magic they hail from is also called "Arcadia," and so it is vitally important that you understand these two things are completely different (probably, unless you want them not to be, in which case no one can stop you, just like they can't stop you from doing any other non-canon interpretation).
I will grant you, it's more than a bit risible that I'm letting this bother me, but it's a pattern. In the Pandemonium section there's a sidebar titled "Demons and Other Demons" because, you know, you can't have a realm of self-described demons named "the place of all demons" and not address the fact that "Awakened scholars generally accept that the inhabitants of Pandemonium are not 'demons' in the classical sense."
Oh, they generally accept that, do they? These "Awakened scholars?" There's a consensus in the field. That's what you're saying?
And I'm sorry for the dangerously high sarcasm levels there, but they fucking do it again! From a sidebar in the Thyrsus section, "Are Totems, in fact, spirits . . . It's possible, but that isn't the sort of question that needs a definitive answer in a game book, because it's not the sort of ting that a cabal is going to realistically be able to answer anyway."
(Incidentally, the sidebar's overall answer to its own rhetorical question was, paraphrased, "yes . . . but no.")
So, on the one hand, I'm being an utter pill about something with a very obvious Doylist explanation. Mage: the Awakening isn't actually Mage: the Awakening. It's more like World of Darkness: Mage: the Awakening. And the World of Darkness is a place of multiple parallel and redundant cosmologies, none of which are subordinate to any of the others and maybe that doesn't always make for satisfying fiction, but there are incentives, both social and economic, at a deep structural level that ensure it's going to always be that way. If you were designing a standalone setting, you wouldn't have both a Stygia and an Underworld, a Forest Primeval and a Primal Wild, or an Arcadia and an Arcadia. You'd instead think long and hard about why you were including different elements. What are you hoping to gain from including faeries and demons and angels and how does including the places where these things come from help you achieve your goals?
Maybe it's unreasonable of me to expect standalone worldbuilding from nuMage. Certainly, the books never exactly promised it. (Indeed, the necessity of the nwod core practically argues against it). And I think if I were merely dealing a situation where the mage cosmology failed to elegantly account for things that only exist because they are part of other WoD games, then I would not have such a problem. I fully believe that Mage would rather not have vampires, rather not have werewolves, so these creatures' fraught relationship with awakened magic is very clearly a compromise. Where Mage: the Awakening loses me, however, is that I don't think demons, angels, faeries, nature spirits, and the souls of the dead are afterthoughts or concessions. I believe they are fully intentional parts of the setting, with plenty to say about the game's themes. I think a lot of thought was put into the Supernal inhabitants. Which makes it weird that the book seems to only grudgingly admit their inclusion.
I'm brought back to this other sidebar:
It bears repeating, here: the central struggle of the Awakened is to be found in the Fallen World, rather than in far-flung realms peopled by strange beings and alight with unearthly magics. This is particularly important to recapitulate with respect to the Realms Supernal, given the drive that many mages feel to attempt a return to the Watchtowers and the worlds in which they stand. But the attempt to do so is a fool’s errand. When, and if, a willworker is ready to return to the higher worlds, she will know; in the proper time, nothing will need to be forced and the road to the Supernal will reveal itself. No loopholes exist in the laws of the cosmos to make this process any easier. If they did, they would invalidate the entire Awakened journey.
(There's more, but it continues in a similar vein). It's an expression of a design ideology (that's like a design philosophy, but they get mad at you if you try and subvert it) that places an extreme emphasis on a particular type of story. As long as you're telling the right kind of story, Mage: the Awakening has your back. Step out of the lines, and it starts to get ugly. What's maybe a bit unusual, though, is that the humorless nuMage canon scolding does not revolve around lore, it revolves around vibes. That's what the duplicate faeries and demonless Pandemonium are really about. Yes, it wants to stay in crossover-friendly "demons and other demons" territory, by not giving the Supernal any sort of special priority over elements inherited alongside the broader world of darkness, but it also serves to keep the Supernal . . . pure. Things of the Supernal are unknowable and profound and abstract, so if there's something you're expected to fight or talk to or beat in a pie-eating contest, it can't be Supernal. It has to be a thing of the Fallen World.
Which means, by definition, if you're playing Mage: the Awakening, then everything you interact with kind of sucks. That's the world you live in. The World that Unnecessarily Sucks Thanks to Humanity's Hubris. Summoners breaks this model a bit, by introducing Supernal summoning, allowing you to directly (but briefly) interact with genuine Supernal entities, but it never really sells those entities as characters in a story, nor the Supernal Realm as a "place" where "events" can "happen." There's always this insulating layer of abstraction and "you are not enlightened enough to solve this mystery." I know it's all meant to serve the overall gnostic horror, but apparently "gnostic horror" means "you are trapped in a world that sucks, and we're going to dangle cool stuff over your head, the horror comes from it being permanently just out of reach."
And yeah, I guess that's a pretty solid bit of horror, but as a game, it suffers the fatal flaw of requiring players to buy into a world that sucks. In a way, my journey as a player mirrors the journey of the characters. I yearn for a bright isekai version of this setting, where Earth is at the intersection of the spheres of interest of these five magical realms, a battleground between the reflexively adversarial demons of Pandemonium and the . . . morally uncomplicated inhabitants of the Aether, who appear to us as terrible angels, where shades descend into Stygia and the ancient powers of Faerie and the Primal Wilds move across the land with their own inhuman agendas, and the player characters are hapless individuals, plucked from their lives for a life-changing adventure in these other realms, only to come back changed, able to impose the rules of these alternate realities onto the mundane Earth, and some of these mages are willing agents, others are catspaws, and some are exiles, who would resort to any means to get back. Crossing over might be rare in this version of the game, but since the Realms are merely other and not Supernal, it's really more of a matter of the needs of the story. And even if only the great powers of the Watchtowers can call souls across the void, there's still room for messages, ancient curses, and small discreet packages to make the trip. It all happens because the beings in every place are persistent individual characters with memories and comprehensible motives and defined powers and limitations that are able to drive plots and alternatively aid or hinder the PCs based on the particular situation at the table.
It's a beautiful, enticing vision, but I can never have it, because I am stuck in the goddamn World of Darkness. I don't know whether to sit in awe of this perfectly constructed genre trap or to roll my eyes because I'm at least 50% sure this only exists to preemptively avoid a repeat of the contentious transition from Mage: the Ascension 2nd Edition to Mage, Revised. The book is telling us, in no uncertain terms, that we are to stay the fuck away from the moons of Jupiter. I will give Summoners credit for giving us a tantalizing glimpse of what could be, but I will then remind you that Tantalus was being tortured.
Still, if you accept that Mage: the Awakening as a whole is a game that never quite found a compelling voice, and you extend it the grace to enjoy it for what it is and not what it could be (and I must confess, I can do this only in theory, I don't think I have it in me to play it as written), then Summoners is a pretty top tier supplement for the game. Unlike some others, I don't think it suggests a superior mode of play. It is pretty much an extension of all the virtues and flaws of the original core. But it is also a monster book, and that format rarely misses. Some of the entries were a little tryhard, like the suggestion that you could summon a spiritual manifestation of a character's "positive pole oedipus complex" from out of the dream realms, but the bulk ranged from "okay" to "good."
Although I do need to talk a bit about the exceptions. CONTENT WARNING: Sexual assault.
So, one of the credited authors on this book was exposed as a rapist. And some parts of this book lean a little bit on White Wolf's notorious brand of edgy horror that is willing to use rape as a source of shock value. And because this was a company-wide habit, and because the book was written at a time when Matt MacFarland was still incognito, it's possible that this is just a coincidence. You can summon a "courtesan" from the Abyssal realms and her deal is that she desperately wants to be the victim of a violent sex crime and will actually think less of you if you don't try to rape her and it makes me uncomfortable enough just at face value. The thought that this could be the product of an undiscovered rapist, projecting his fantasies onto a fictional demon, it makes me feel gross.
Although, the part of the book that most feels like it was written by a rapist was the Men in Black entry. Again, if I put my "generous interpretation" glasses on, it's possible that this could just be an unfortunate, but coincidental interaction between several White Wolf habits. Like maybe the only reason it reads as bad as it does is because of the company's otherwise laudable habit of switching between he/him and she/her pronouns when the gender of the characters doesn't matter. If the Men in Black think can't convince you to lie about a supernatural event you witnessed and "accept" their mundane explanation, they'll torture you until you do. Fair enough. That's in line with what we'd expect these mysterious (beings? people?) to do, especially in a dark and gritty horror world.
When you then continue the next paragraph by telling us "They attempt to grab the victim and hold her down." and then proceed to describe five distinct and lurid forms of violence in specific detail . . . it gets sketchy. There's nothing inherently gendered or sexual about pouring drain cleaner in someone's ear, but it came at the end of a list of things the Men in Black would do to "her" and the rhythm of the list felt . . . oddly enthusiastic. Either someone was so entranced by the intellectual challenge of describing the Men in Black's quirky and nonstandard methods of torture that they completely neglected to consider the gender politics of the pronoun choice (and this seems plausible, given that the section also had to pass the scrutiny of an editor, who as far as I know was not implicated in any sex crimes) or someone really enjoyed imagining and describing violence towards women.
I don't know enough about the behind the scenes production process to come to a conclusion. It's possible that I was just being too sensitive because I was primed towards vigilance by an infamous name in the writer credits. There are six other credited authors, so it's not even a case of "separating the art from the artist." It's more of an example of a bad apple spoiling the bunch. Because I can't be certain this section wasn't written by a rapist, I can't simply dismiss it as me being a bad fit for the horror genre as a whole (which I am. I would like Mage: the Awakening much, much more if they let the horror elements wither away to vestigial bits of unexpected spiciness instead of foregrounding them as part of the intended genre). For now, I'm going to chalk it up to being part of the burden of hindsight and not necessarily something that I should allow to ruin the book for me.
Overall, I'd say Summoners was a valiant effort, but I realize, now that I've come to the last of my Mage: the Awakening books, that I never really got to a point where I truly enjoyed the series. I think I kept being just interested enough to repeatedly give the game yet another chance to ensnare me, and it never did. Summoners didn't really move the needle for me, but looking at it as a complete work, I think it was a pretty fair test - if this book couldn't convert me into a Mage: the Awakening fan, it's likely nothing could.
Ukss Contribution: The book introduces a new kind of magical object called a "supernal echo." These are random-seeming items that, when brought to a Hallow (wellspring of magical power) will absorb the Hallow's power and start magically terraforming the surrounding area into something that resembles the Supernal realm it came from. They're all kind of cool, but my favorite was the Thyrsus example. It was a cat statue that, when powered up, would attract both cats and cat spirits, and mages with the ability to talk to spirits find that cat spirits are unusually cooperative.
I'll probably strip away the metaphysics and the specific spirit mechanics, but I like the idea of a magic statue that turns anywhere it's placed into cat central and will probably give it an analogous power to make it easier to communicate or interact with cats.
Reminder: Now might be a good time to donate to RAINN
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