tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8845696765575423727.post6783489048109795096..comments2024-03-17T07:30:34.150-07:00Comments on It Came From The Bookshelf!: (D&D 3rd) Book of Vile DarknessJohn Frazerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09530954140171528163noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8845696765575423727.post-14192480363346976252024-03-08T10:42:58.249-08:002024-03-08T10:42:58.249-08:00I feel like my opinion of the Technocracy is a bit...I feel like my opinion of the Technocracy is a bit more nuanced than all of that. The tricky part about them is that I am a materialist and an atheist and so I'm inclined to go easy on the one group in mage that is closest to my real-world point of view, but it's difficult to do without inadvertently becoming a murder-apologist, so perhaps I overcompensated. That being said, alignment doesn't factor into it, because I never characterized them as cosmologically evil (and, in fact, if there was any group I'd remove from Mage, it would be the Nephandi, for exactly that reason), but they are villains because they are regular people who choose to use institutional murder as a vehicle for policy. And unless and until they stop doing that, their other good deeds have to be viewed in the lens of an ideology that exerts violent oppression on its political rivals. John Frazerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09530954140171528163noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8845696765575423727.post-66036469356033693902024-03-07T23:14:02.615-08:002024-03-07T23:14:02.615-08:00(continuation)
And what's the deal with their...(continuation) <br />And what's the deal with their supposed fascism? Fascism is a form of social order in which large financial capital, the government and the military-industrial complex merge into an indivisible entity, and Technocracy is not a state for this definition to apply to, just as it does not completely control any of the human states. Is Technocracy authoritarian? Of course. But "sci fi fascists" is just a meaningless slur (and the more everyone uses this word just as slur the more it gets watered down, to the benefit of the real fascists) which is supposed to somehow justify why all the good deeds of the Technocracy should be discarded and the focus should only be on bad (whatever they are). Phil Brucato in M20 shared the insight that Pogrom in the third edition was an imposed attempt to simplify the setting by removing the factions added in the second edition, and was poorly received by the entire writing team, especially considering that it makes no sense within the setting - not only the Technocracy has more important things to do than to exterminate Mages who are not even participating in the Ascension War, but they are simply not able to simultaneously find and storm all these Crafts that have been hiding for centuries, so the biggest atrocity of the Technocracy was not even conceived by the writers but was imposed on them for doylist reasons.<br />So maybe the conclusions of this post about the disadvantages of assigning good and evil beings instead of good and evil deeds can be applied to Mage: Ascension too? The setting still has techNephandi and Threat Null, if enemy magical cyborgs are a mandatory element of the game. <br /><br />And in The Operative's Dossier there are absolutely charming plot hooks about the Technocracy's attempts to establish a truce and cooperation against common enemies with the Cabals of Tradition and the Disparate Alliance, mostly ending in scolding the Technocratic agents for all their real and imagined sins, but there is room for diplomacy; and the long-collaborating separate groups of technocrats and trads simply took this opportunity to make their cooperation official according to technocratic documents. As was rightly noted in previous posts, the Technocracy-antagonist is outdated, because the corresponding fears from the 90s are a thing of the past and replaced by completely different ones, but the Technocracy-protagonist with whom the Traditions have an uneasy truce has enormous plot potential (as does Disparate Alliance which is awesome, but for which, unfortunately, there is practically no material. 2e Book of Crafts and M20, and in M20 many potential factions participating in the Disparate Alliance are mentioned, but we know nothing about them except a couple of lines of description. It feels like somewhere there should have been an M20 Guide to the Disparate Alliance, but whatever)Nameless Myriadhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08698018728892339992noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8845696765575423727.post-661219424450619742024-03-07T23:13:29.127-08:002024-03-07T23:13:29.127-08:00(ew, apparently there is a limit for a size of com...(ew, apparently there is a limit for a size of comment? So it will be several parts) <br />I have now voraciously read many of your blog posts and thoroughly enjoyed them, at times vehemently agreeing or vehemently disagreeing with what I read, and here you perfectly pointed out the hypocrisy of a separate tag for “evil” attack spells, as if dying from non-evil ones wasn’t unpleasant at all or trifle. I no less agree with the conclusions about alignment (in general, I think that it ceases to make sense if you try to treat it as a real moral status and not just an indicator of what spells a creature is vulnerable to). But then I thought - in this blog you treat Technocracy as a creature with an evil alignment :D<br /><br />They can't have good actions because their alignment is evil, so all their actions have to be reframed or questioned as being from an unreliable narrator. It doesn't matter if they tried to save San Francisco in Loom of Fate in the first edition, only have Marauders and Nephandi on their "kill-on-sight" list and the rest of the supernaturals are usually left alone until they cause a mess, as stated in the Guide to the Technocracy in the second edition, Void Engineers defend the Earth from evil spirits in both of their splatbooks (which you decided not to believe because there are no evil spirits in the setting who want to take over the Earth. Well, except for banes, of course. And the Void Engineers would have noticed if no one tried to break through through their lines of defense, isn't it? They still have to get funding from the Syndicate for this, it is unlikely that the Technocracy will sponsor a line of defense against imaginary enemies), they killed the vampire Antediluvian who threatened humanity in the third edition, and one of the protagonist factions in the fourth edition (where the degree of corruption or it's absence is left to the Storyteller's discretion). That is, this characterization of them was always there, but did not fit into the evil alignment. Nameless Myriadhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08698018728892339992noreply@blogger.com