(Trinity 1e)Hidden Agendas

 Hidden Agendas is one of those short corebook-overflow supplements that White Wolf liked to do. It's filled with odds and ends, and is mostly pretty interesting, but it doesn't go into depth on any one subject and the material is not connected by a theme.

The biggest surprise for me was learning that the Trinity universe has space pirates. I guess this is something that maybe I should have inferred, based on the fact that spaceship stats were printed in both the Core and the Technology Manual, but I don't know what to tell you. I guess I had the vague feeling that they were supposed to be rare. You can't have pirates if the very fact that you're in a spaceship automatically narrows down the pool of suspects to, like, eight guys.

So I went back and checked the earlier books. I'm vindicated by the confirmation that none of the other entries directly mentioned pirates. However, I'm also embarrassed to learn that the one time we get hard numbers for a spaceship's production run (for the Offworld Enterprises Ltd Pathfinder freighter) the figure is 100 ships a year, with probable demand easily being twice that much.

The funny thing is that I have no excuse for this. I remember reading these spaceship descriptions quite clearly. I think what happened is that I internalized the idea that space travel = interstellar travel, and there is a legitimate bottleneck when it comes to FTL. Only the teleporters and the new jump ships can make it, and there is explicitly only one jump ship, now that the Upeo Wa Macho have disappeared. I guess I just forgot that there could still be a lot of traffic between areas of our own solar system.

Thus pirates.

This book mainly discusses their ambush and combat tactics, but unfortunately doesn't get too deep into their culture or history. There's enough material to inspire an adventure (I like the idea of rescuing someone who is being held hostage aboard one of their vessels), but not quite enough for a campaign.

There's also a tantalizing bit of metaplot here in the section about fringe religion. There a new cult that worships the hidden progenitor aliens who empowered the Psi Orders, and though the text implies that they're mostly guessing about that, the group's name is the "Doyo." Do they genuinely have contact with the Doyen or is the name based off of something else? Intriguing. 

That section also answers another niche question that I would never have thought to ask, but which I remember from a Baha'i's commentary on the religion's use in Trinity. The reason the Baha'i headquarters was relocated to the moon is precisely because they were kicked out of Mount Carmel by Temple Judaism.

It's a plot point that makes me vaguely uncomfortable, just because there's no clear indication of Temple Judaism's context within the greater Jewish faith. Having a rogue sectarian faction close the borders of Israel is maybe the sort of story you could tell in a sci-fi universe, but only if you center it on the Jewish diaspora and the displaced local population. Without having Orthodox and Reform Jews sitting on the sidelines disapproving, Temple Judaism feels kind of antisemitic. Unintentionally, I'm sure, but it's definitely something they should have spent more care on.

What else? Let's see . . .

Antarctica is rapidly become a capitalist hell-hole, but the process is slowed because the continent is mysteriously cooling. I know global warming wasn't as big an issue in 1998, but that's a weird plot hook.

Also, the Antarcticans call themselves "Borealites," which is a neat name, but wrong for the hemisphere.

Some Chitra Bhanu may have survived. Further details will have to wait until they write some.

There may be an AI in the Trinity universe, but it's not directly confirmed, and the book it would have been in (The Ministry splatbook) was never published.

Finally, swinging back to pirates, they occasionally use fusion warheads to attack ships, implying that such things are commercially available. I don't even want to think of the setting implications.

Overall, Hidden Agendas was a fun book and a quick read, but nothing that I was terribly missing from my Trinity collection (aside from the obvious bit about the ubiquity of space travel, that is).

Ukss Contribution: There's a brief, but desultory section about an avant garde architect that had some neat sci-fi buildings. My favorite was The Summit Center. A big skyscraper that was mounted on a rail that circled a Martian crater. It made one revolution per day for no apparent reason. Every great science fiction or fantasy setting has to have something so pointlessly impractical.

(AD&D 2e)The Crusades Campaign Sourcebook

 This fucking book.

It's not that it's bad. Quite the opposite, really. The Historical Reference series has had a pretty high level of quality, and The Crusades Campaign Sourcebook doesn't disappoint. It's just . . . It's a book about the Crusades, published by TSR in 1994.

It would be easier if the book were racist. I know how to handle a malevolent book. However, this particular one tries - and largely succeeds - at presenting a humane and balanced look at the time period. But it also has lines like -

"Although early Crusades were often marred by episodes of brutality and religious intolerance . . ."

Oh, were they?! Religious intolerance? In a Crusade?

I could pull quote after quote of this curious semi-naivete. One more -

"The few incidences of Frankish brutality greatly hindered the process of negotiating peace with their Muslim neighbors."

I mean, I'd quibble with the word "few" here, but the general sentiment is correct. The Crusades Campaign Sourcebook doesn't shy away from the awfulness of Crusades, but it also never quite gets away from the idea that we're supposed to find that surprising. That we will sympathize with and excuse the Europeans is simply taken for granted.

We're not supposed to. It's not a good impulse. The book goes out of its way to highlight the achievements of Islamic culture and urges us not to look at the Muslims as "evil pagans." Saladin is "the most glamorous figure of the Crusades" and the book has not a single bad word to say about him. But it also assumes we're going to be heavily invested in the successful prosecution of a Crusade.

It's weird as hell. I think the DMing chapter is as close as we ever get to a concrete expression of the book's point of view: "This sourcebook has not glossed over the injustices and petty hatreds that often (ed: "often"?!) dominated the Crusades, but a campaign should approach the era differently . . . When obsolete medieval attitudes (bigotry, xenophobia, casual cruelty) would keep players from fully enjoying the game, replace those attitudes with more modern beliefs."

I think we're supposed to view it like a team sport. The pope will call for a Crusade, the Fatimid Caliph will counter with a Jihad, and Jerusalem passes back and forth between sides like a football, but in the end, it's all in good fun. You get some outdoor exercise, maybe slay a few infidels in a rough and tumble manly sort of way, but there's no hard feelings.

And I don't know. Maybe 1100 CE is long enough ago that the wounds have healed. I'll admit, it doesn't always feel that way, but I think that may be because Islamophobia has gotten worse over the past 25 years.

Plus, I've played two different "Crusader Kings" games, and it would be pretty hypocritical of me to start demanding that the Crusades be treated with all the same sensitivity we expect for more recent atrocities.

Despite some Orientalist leanings - the two major Islamic states are described as corrupt and "ripe for conquest" and the Assassins are literally called "terrorists" (which I'm pretty sure was a racially-loaded term even in 1994, and is only forgivable because it's somewhat accurate and they are presented as being allied with the Franks) - I do feel compelled to recognize that TSR published a book about the Crusades, in 1994, that directly and unambiguously rebuked the fucking "Deus Vult" memes we're seeing today. That's not nothing.

Mechanically, this book is about as good as you can expect for AD&D second edition. Priests inexplicably keep their magic powers in "historical" games, but the rules for modifying those powers are better thought out than we've seen in the past. For more fantasy-oriented games, it suggests using the Sha'ir kit from Al Qadim to represent both Arabian sorcerers and European witches, which is an idea so good and so obvious that I'm ashamed I didn't think of it first.

The curation of spell lists is a little weird. There's a suggestion that you could replace mages with psionicists for fantasy-genre games (a good idea I did have), but when it trims the power list, it says that Control Flame is inappropriate, but somehow Disintegrate is fine. I'm not saying they picked powers at random to exclude, but I can think of no better explanation.

Overall, I'd say that The Crusades Campaign Sourcebook is better left as a historical curiosity. It's not nearly as bad as the worst of its contemporaries when it comes to presenting non-European cultures, but it does fill a niche - minimally cynical fantasy adventure against the backdrop of the Crusades - that simply doesn't need to be filled. Try using it today and your best case scenario is that your players are as confused as I am.

Ukss Contribution: One of the new kits was the "Pardoner" rogue. They're con artists who pose as priests and sell indulgences and relics. The fake relic trade is one of those historical oddities that I always found morbidly fascinating, and I could probably find a place for it on Ukss.

(M20) The Book of the Fallen

I almost gave up on this book after reading the Preface. It was titled "Evil Is Not A Toy" and it attempted to set a mood for The Book of The Fallen. This was going to be a book about the sort of grimy and unglamorous monsters that might exist in real life. It does this by relaying a series of various upsetting anecdotes from Brucato's past about people he knew who were threatened, assaulted, or worse. It broke my heart about a half-dozen times in a row, but once I'd recovered a bit, I was forced to ask," if evil is not a toy, then why are you using it in your game?"

After a break of about 24 hours, I decided that it would be a shame to get so close to the end of Mage and not see it through, so I dove back in. Eventually, I would find a fairly useful and intermittently interesting book, but that "why are you doing this" was never far from my mind.

I couldn't quite figure out an answer until near the end, in the Storytelling chapter - "[It] can be fun and intense in a sort of disgusting, under-the-skin, vulnerable sort of way." So many times, I'd read something in this book and think, "that's intense" or "that's disgusting" or "that really got under my skin" and my reaction would be "how could you write that and then continue to write the rest of the book - how are you not seeing the many, many off ramps you keep putting in the text." In retrospect, I guess they thought they were describing something fun.

I'm not a total prude. I understand the concept. Discomfort is not totally incompatible with pleasure. "Those hot wings were delicious - my mouth was on fire." Absent the important context of the first part of the statement, the second part would sound strange. "I bit into this chicken and now my mouth is burning" - "OMG, I'll call poison control!"

That's what significant portions of The Book of The Fallen are like, like I've just wandered into one of those macho spicy food conversation. Brucato likes his roleplaying sessions so intense that you need aftercare when they're done. The very idea makes my skin crawl.

There's a sidebar in this book, called "Cartoon Evil and Realistic Evil" and it pretty much sums up the book's philosophy: "Realistic evil is uncomfortable as hell and rooted in atrocities people actually commit. . .Mage is a game, of course, and so even a realistic-evil approach should be, to some degree, enjoyable to play." My notes for this section are literally "WHAT?!" But while I could roast the hell out of this section (describing your own game as "to some degree enjoyable" is almost as big a self-burn as the Mage Storyteller's Handbook suggesting that GMs "chuckled at the word 'fun'"), I'm going to refrain because I think it gets at something important.

Brucato very graciously concedes that "cartoon evil" has its niche, but I think he fundamentally misunderstands the dichotomy at work here. When we're talking about evil as a narrative element in fiction, we should probably be talking about "tame evil" vs "wild evil." I'm not an academic, so don't expect a rigorous definition here, but what I mean, roughly is that tame evil stays within the confines of the work, as a piece of fiction and wild evil tries to get under the skin of the real person who's experiencing the fiction.

This isn't necessarily a moral distinction. Wild evil has its place, in works that seek to educate or inspire empathy or advocate for a cause or are so literary that they no longer worry about something as frivolous as "enjoyment." However, on a personal level, I feel much more comfortable with tame evil.

It's not something that necessarily maps to Brucato's distinction, though. Cartoon evil has certain advantages, given that it's practically tame by default, but it's easy to imagine going so over the top with the descriptions that it starts to make the audience feel unsafe. Similarly, realistic evil carries with it a certain risk, but that risk can be mitigated with framing and presentation so that it's tame in practice. The KKK is undeniably a realistic-evil villain, but there's a difference between a story that uses them as punch-fodder for the heroes and a story that delves deep into their point of view and tries to present it as an understandable product of their circumstances (even if they are still villains, in the final reckoning).

Although the really ironic thing here is that even if I were to grant the "Cartoon vs Realistic" split as productive and necessary, this book draws the lines wrong. According to the sidebar, realistic evil means "Anyone can be evil," whereas the Nephandi pursue evil for the sake of evil, a hallmark of cartoon evil. If you really wanted to make realistic evil a theme of your game, why wouldn't you just focus on the institutional and personal abuse that happens in the other factions? What goes on behind closed doors of a master-apprentice relationship? What crimes has the Technocracy committed in pursuit of its ideology of dominance. If the whole point of the book is we don't need supernatural conspiracies to explain evil, that real people are all too willing to commit atrocities without any prompting, then what need is there for the Nephandi to act as an intermediary? The Goatkids are already "what probably happened within five minutes of founding the Cult of Ecstasy." Why not just write "The Book of Fucked Up Shit You Can Do With Magic And By The Way It's Happening All The Time."

Fortunately, the book is mostly wrong about its own themes. There's a lot of interesting stuff in the middle that is sometimes gross and occasionally disturbing, but mostly pretty tame. There's a faction of Nephandi called the Exies, whose goal is human extinction and are mainly tech-focused mages who try to attract near-earth asteroids and engineer zombie plagues. I love them as antagonists, but, well, way to avoid "cartoonish," Book of the Fallen. 

The biggest contradiction inside The Book of the Fallen, though, is in the overall curation of its material. Frankly, for a Storyteller and a villain book, an awful lot of this only makes sense if it's player-facing. Like, the merits and flaws have point values. You can probably justify it as an attempt to provide the Storyteller with a rough guide to balance, but it's tough to pretend that their primary use is to help create NPCs (especially when the Infernal Investments pretty much throw up their hands and say "The cost-benefit ration errs on the side of disorder, not balance"). Likewise, it doesn't mean much as a gesture to omit the background point cost of your more disturbing magic items if you then proceed to include the instructions for how to build those items in their descriptions. Yeah, you don't want players buying them, but since you included concrete sphere numbers, it's actually pretty easy to figure out how much they should cost.

A few months ago, I got mad at Brucato for the terrible storytelling advice in The Orphan's Survival Guide - basically, "It doesn't matter if you cross the line, it's only a game." It's clear from The Book of the Fallen that he's grown a lot in the last 20+ years, because he now warns against crossing boundaries in the strongest possible terms, but it's also clear than in some ways he's still the same guy, because his advice here basically amounts to "get as close as possible to the line, because it's not just a game."

Content Warning: I am going to quote extensively from this book's section on sexual abuse. (whited out for discretion)

It’s important to be open, honest, and consent-minded if you consider bringing sexual violence into your game in any way, let alone to do so with Nephandi who can magickally force a victim’s body to respond, bend a person’s emotions toward unwanted desires, or alter people’s minds to that point where the victim remembers consenting to or enjoying the abuse. A Nephandus could use a Qlippothic approach to the Life Sphere in order to force an orgasm or a pregnancy. Forces and Correspondence allow an abuser to assault her target from a distance. A shaytan or adsinistratus might want to get up close and personal, though, and forego magick entirely in order to hone and enjoy his skills with intimate violation. Any and all of these assaults require direct communication between the Storyteller and the players, even something just as simple as stating, “I’m considering including sexual content in this game. What are your limits, and what would you like to be included or left out entirely?"

I added some emphasis there to show exactly what I'm talking about. The section is about how to include sexual abuse in your game. This is the last paragraph, after discussing how personal and fraught the subject can be. It opens with good advice about seeking consent and it closes with good advice about what seeking consent might actually look like, but then the middle part is all about how sexual violence is possible within the game rules.

Who is that for?!

Well, not me, obviously. I do have to remind myself that this is a spicy pepper-type conversation. If the material were truly awful, just bringing up consent every now and again wouldn't be enough to redeem it, but the horror genre is deep and wide and I'm definitely out of my depth. Plus, I really enjoy Changeling: the Lost, which has similar themes (though if I had to pin down the difference, it's that C:tL is about survivors, whereas BotF is about the perpetrators), so I'm not going to get high and mighty here. 

However, if I'm being honest, my feeling is that the execution was inept. The parts about demons and evil wizards and other things you could punch was good. The esoterica chapter, though its only conceivable use was as a setting pitch, was good in a weird way. The mechanics were bad, but only because Storyteller system mechanics are always bad. However, the parts of the book that were trying to get me to take this all seriously wound making me take it so seriously that I no longer wanted to use any of this in a game. There's no way I would ever want to read a book that truly merited this book's Preface, let alone use it as inspiration for a witch vs cyborg story.

Ukss Contribution: This was not an evil book. Misguided. At times annoying. The first full paragraph so upset me that I wound up putting the whole thing down for about an hour after reading it. But not evil.

I think I'll go with the concept of an evil clothing company that makes murder suits for serial killers. Realistic.

(M20)Gods & Monsters

 I wasn't planning on reading two of my remaining three Mage books in a row, but I peeked inside the cover of Gods & Monsters, saw that it had 11 credited authors instead of just one, and felt a strange surge of optimism. And that optimism was well justified, because Gods & Monsters is the best book yet in the M20 line. The World of Darkness is too cool for anything as purely functional as a "Monster Manual," but if we acknowledge that the entry for "Cultist" is going to focus on a single, specific cultist and detail her whole backstory (while also not giving us any specific character stats), then the book still works as a rich source of encounters, plot hooks, and setting details.

Setting, in particular, is the ground that Gods & Monsters is going to live or die on. Though the book is admirable in its creativity and diversity - introducing sexy holograms, snakes with the head of an elephant, and the god Anansi, it raises some difficult questions about Mage: the Ascension's place in the urban fantasy genre.

Djinn get their own section heading. There's two full pages about their culture and history. The three sample djinn don't get presented as archetypes, but as individual characters with complex backstories. It's like the book is saying that Mage is set in a world where there just happens to be djinn out there. You take your kids down to story-time at the local library and maybe that one kooky librarian with the melodious voice could be slipping little Billy a book that had never been written, but which fires his imagination like it was made specifically for him. That's just a thing that might happen.

Now, you come to me and say, "hey, in this fantasy setting I'm working on, genies once lived on Earth, but King Solomon developed powerful occult techniques to trap them in vessels and make them do his bidding, triggering a massive war that humanity eventually won, but now it's thousands of years later in the modern day and Solomon's magic is mostly forgotten, leading to a new generation of genies who are willing to venture outside the City of Brass to find their missing and enslaved kin, unaware that the sorcerers are still out there, desperate to resupply their dwindling stock of genie slaves" and I will reply, "Good God, yes! Is this a five-book series or are you planning on milking that idea forever?"

However, we're not actually talking about "Wishes in the Wind, the Djinn Chronicles Volume 1," we're talking about Mage: the Ascension. And we're not even really talking about Mage: the Ascension, we're actually talking about the World of Darkness, and so the use to which we're supposed to put these djinn is unclear. Is the World of Darkness like Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Are you supposed to introduce monsters of the week drawn from real-world folklore and just fail to explore the setting implications until season 3 of the spinoff? Or is the djinn material meant to act as a specialized resource for Arabian and/or Taftani adventures?

I'm reminded of the Power Armor issue. Just as it would be weird to surprise your Vampire players with mechs, it would also be strange if they had to randomly deal with genies. . . But Mage is the game with Power Armor and genies and where you can write a letter to Santa asking him for rocket skates and your GM will have canonical support for making it happen.

It's hard to reconcile. You've got wild, anything goes kitchen-sink fantasy, but then you've got Paradox and Unbelief working to make sure that nothing disrupts the status quo. Which is the "real" Mage? I can't help thinking that Ascension works on an inversion of the Assassin's motto "Everything is true; nothing is permitted."

And maybe that's a cynical take, but it hangs over Gods & Monsters like a cloud. There's a ton of great material here, but also a sense that maybe you're not allowed to use it. Well, maybe "not allowed" is a bit strong, but Chapter 5 is "Crafting Characters" and provides rules for creating your own cyborgs or mythological creatures as player characters . . . while suggesting you take the "Unbelief" flaw which can kill you in as few as 7 rounds if you ever leave the comfort of a compatible "reality zone."

It's a little weird to think that here, in the second-to-last published book, more than 25 years after the first Mage core, we're still stuck in that same dilemma - is magic furtive and subtle or is it the embodiment of every fairy tale, myth, and fantasy epic in the history of the written word?

I suppose Gods & Monsters is a genuinely great Mage supplement because it can support both ideas while also being incredibly frustrating in its lack of commitment.

Oh, and we get a character write-up for Jesus Christ. It doesn't have much reason to exist, because it doesn't take a side in the culture war (describing him as a "Rorschach test for the human soul"), but it does provide an interesting contrast to the write-up for the god Pan, which is far more specific, respectful, and over three times as long. "No wonder the Church felt threatened by Pan. In his core, the god was an equivalent of the Nazarene shepherd . . ."

Even with 11 writers, M20 is still a game with a point of view.

Ukss Contribution: First, a snarky observation from me - there is a sidebar about the fraught cultural baggage associated with the word "totem" and the inappropriateness of using it as a piece of game terminology and it seeks to reassure us that Mage, as a brand, is aware of the issue and doesn't approve of that kind of cultural appropriation . . . and ends with the conclusion that they are already in too deep to change the name of the "Totem" background. Which might have almost been enough, were it coupled with an actual apology and the title of the sidebar were something other than "Controversy is My Spirit Animal."

:slow clap: great job, guys

I only bring it up because my Ukss choice happens to be one of these Patron Spirits (hmm, maybe renaming the Background was pretty easy after all), and I would be remiss if I let that wild sidebar pass without comment (seriously, the game would have been less problematic if that section had been left out entirely, which is presumably not something you want in your sensitivity disclaimers).

Anyway, my choice is Mr Black, the stylish spirit of wealth who is in reality what tech billionaires and Wall Street guys imagine themselves to be. He makes conspicuous consumption look cool.

(M20)Book of Secrets

 BRUCATO!!!

 Sigh.

I'll confess, for the past seven months or so I've had this bizarre one-sided rivalry with Satyros Phil Brucato. Ever since I read the ridiculously offensive storytelling chapter of The Orphan's Survival Guide and very nearly challenged him to a duel to the death. 

It's probably for the best that I didn't, because I believe now that he may well be a real-life sorcerer. How else does one explain the precision-guided death curse that was this book's "Gender, Sex, and Magick" essay? Somehow, three years before I even made my intemperate comments, he must have  sensed them with his magickal abilities and wrote this section, secure in the knowledge that its deadly power would be delivered to the one and only person in all of human history stubborn enough to read it in its entirety.

No, I kid. The essay is more or less unobjectionable, saying more or less the correct things. It only made me uncomfortable because I've been spending the better part of the last month reading 1000+ pages of Brucato's writing and I've come to the conclusion that he is most likely a certifiable Weird Dude, and thus to have a two page essay about this particular subject so close to the end of the book, when I could see the light at the end of the tunnel . . . well, it felt a lot like what I imagine it would be like to be cornered by him at a party.

Brucato . . . Brucato . . . Brucato! Nobody asked. We were talking about mystically-themed superheroes in an urban fantasy rpg. We've all just sort of agreed to politely ignore the "sex and sensuality" instruments you've shoehorned into every other mystical practice. Do us all a favor and stop bringing it up.

I probably shouldn't be so harsh. It's clear to me that M20 bears the marks of his most deeply held religious beliefs, and as tempting as it would be to treat them with the same carelessness as he reserves for "fundies" or materialist atheists, I actually respect the choice. This is a work with a particular point of view, and as much as I don't personally agree with it, it does what art does - provide a window into another way of looking at the world.

It's just that he does The Thing again.

You know, The Thing. From The Orphan's Survival Guide where he includes a paragraph that is little more than a long list of slurs. The context is different. Instead of encouraging us to use these terms to make our portrayals "less PC" he is now inviting us to take a long look in the mirror and realize that the Nephandi are manipulating us through our hatred (yes, all of us, which is why "cracker" and "Rethuglican" get a place on the list alongside the genuine hate speech).

I think the context probably saves the section from being "evil," but it's also a huge mystery. A little while later, he asks the rhetorical question "Is this cutting a little close to home? Have the last few sentences seemed kind of heavy for your storytelling game?" And I can't tell how much self awareness he actually has here.

"Maybe they are. If so, the Nephandi can remain a distant presence in outer space, occasionally showing up as freaky cultists trying to summon a tentacled horror from the Void."

Is he really just pitching a much better idea that he should have gone with from the start, or is he talking down to us, calling us chicken because we might not want something as raw as a rape-apologist villain?

That's the downside to making your religion into an rpg. Making people uncomfortable starts to feel like a noble commitment to truth. 

It also means that you take certain things super seriously that the uninitiated would barely even notice. Book of Secrets winds up resolving one of M20's enduring mysteries - what does Brucato have against Revised's Resonance rules that he had to constantly take potshots at them in the core? Turns out it's a literalist interpretation of an arcane theological point so subtle that Brucato himself forgets to explain it. The only reason I was able to discern it was because I was given page references.

"In game terms, Synergy gives a new name to the Trait called 'Resonance' in Mage's Revised-era books. Because that trait essentially reversed the previous definition of Resonance (and even the definition presented on pps. 197 - 198 of Mage Revised), Synergy presents an optional rule that lets you integrate both traits into the same chronicle."

Now, if you read that sentence and thought, "wow, at last Brucato has cleaned up the train-wreck of Revised's Resonance rules," congratulations, you might be a wizard. However, if you're like me and you're totally confused about what the hell he's talking about, you might be tempted to go back and check the references.

If you're a Muggle like me, you might come away with the conclusion that the description of the Resonance trait and the definition of Resonance are 100% compatible, with no inconsistencies at all, let alone a total reversal. However, you're not seeing like a mystic and reading between the lines. The flaw in Revised's Resonance is that it divided Resonance into categories of Dynamic, Static, and Entropic.

You see, a materialist like me would read the Resonance categories as a taxonomy. Dynamism, Entropy, and Stasis are White Wolf's Metaphysic Trinity and every phenomenon in the Tellurian contains a balance of all three forces. Thus I would conclude that when a Mage has a Dynamic Resonance, of say "Fiery," then that is just an example of the sort of thing that would have a larger portion of Dynamism. Brucato, on the other hand, would say that if you call a Fiery Resonance "Dynamic" then what you are really claiming is that the Resonance is an emanation of Dynamism. 

And that is why he felt it was very important to point out that "Thematically, however, the distinction between internal and external origins is important. Mage is about self-willed individuals making powerful choices and changing the world, and so the notion of 'power-puppets' on cosmic strings contradicts a vital theme of Mage."

There's a part of me that wants to get angry at this sort of nit-picking. I'll admit, when I first read this, my thought was "Really, that's what was bothering you? That's what all that heavily-emphasized 'optional' business was about? That's what merited a dedicated sidebar and passive-aggressive renaming?"

But I think I get it. Throughout these books, Brucato keeps taking these driveby potshots at Revised, even when doing so is pointless and out of place (for example, he erratas a rule from Forged By Dragon's Fire to be exactly the same, almost to the word), but when you look at M20 as a work of religious faith, the pattern makes sense. Revised was the edition that was about "magic" instead of "magick."

Brucato keeps putting in these self-deprecating jibes about "the pretentious 'k'" but in the FAQ he explains it in direct terms: "Magick is an extension of the person who uses it, changing the world in accordance with that person's will to change it. 'Magic' is fundamentally different from magick, and so we brought back the original Crowleyian spelling of the word. To me, those two words mean very different things."

And that's not pretentious. Culturally specific, maybe. Offputting at times, sure. And I could definitely live the rest of my life in comfort never again hearing Aleister Crowley being referred to as "Uncle Al." But it's not pretentious. It's sincere. And as much as Brucato can get on my nerves at times (I guess having completely incompatible world views will do that), I can't help but respect the hell out of anyone with the guts to be that sincere . . .

(So long as he stops trying to talk to me about sex magick, Seriously. I just want to get to the punch bowl)

Ukss Contribution: Once again, Brucato is all over the place on Marauders, and maybe could use a more thorough education on sensitivity towards mental illness, but they are also one of the few places he allows himself to be truly mythic when it comes to the game's fantasy elements. I liked The Sleeping Lord, a sentient tree who intoxicates anyone nearby with raw chaotic energy.

Nobilis 3rd Edition

 Nobilis is less difficult than I remember.

I always feel a little self-conscious saying things like this, lest people are all, "ooh, John once thought Nobilis was difficult, what a dolt!" Or worse, "So John thinks Nobilis isn't difficult, let's double-check everything he says about it to make sure he's telling the truth."

But you know what, that's just my hang-up. I'm sure anyone reading this is a kind, generous soul who will give me the benefit of the doubt. Let's just say that the first time I read this book, I had a number of unanswered questions, whereas this time I didn't, and that's something that's probably attributable to reading Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine and various online conversations with people who had similar questions.

The thing that became abundantly clear to me, coming in to the book with this new experience, is that I was greatly overthinking it. A good many of my old questions would have been answered if I'd just taken the text at face value and interpreted it literally. In my defense, though, the writing here practically encourages overthinking.

Take this example from a section headed "Movements of the Soul"

The blueprint for a miracle is not in the Power's mind but in their heart and soul. It is not possible for them to plan out miracles of absurd elaboration; rather they make what is elemental in then, what is aesthetic to them, what is right to them. Their miracles are complete. They are things of incredible complexity and detail, for all things existing in the world are things of incredible complexity and detail. They are marvels, for to exist is to be a marvel.

But they are works of art and not design.

And so on, for another long paragraph. But the concept she's trying to get at is actually pretty simple - "Respect the social contract and don't waste your fellow players' time by trying to outwit the literal genie." It's a good warning, because you've got these godlike powers and there's going to be a strong temptation to try and get incredibly specific with them, but that's not to the game's benefit. Yet for all the utility of the rule, it's presented as a consequence of the setting metaphysics and given an ornate philosophical justification.

I don't want to come down too hard here, because this discursiveness is one of the text's best qualities, but it also means that when you have a simple question, you won't believe that it has a simple answer. Or, at least, I didn't. It's a very clever book, but I wasn't doing it any favors when I assumed that it must therefor have hidden meaning on every page. When it says "A game of Nobilis is a conversation" that's not a metaphor or an analogy, it's a specific and useful piece of advice.

I also think a part of what's going on is that Jenna Moran is getting better as a game designer. CMWGE was a revelation, but Nobilis 3rd Edition is merely very good. When I wrote about CMWGE, I talked about the actor/author split in rpgs, and the way Chuubo's straddled the gap, but Nobilis doesn't really do that. The characters are so powerful that they are able (indeed are obligated) to assume some of the GM's traditional authority, and as a consequence it works best if the players are willing to indulge in author-stance-type reasoning, but it does not yet have a core gameplay that encourages that kind of thinking. You've got certain traits that replenish your MP if they inconvenience you, but that's not at all unusual for an actor-stance game. Hell, I'm pretty sure even D&D is doing it now.

It's this relatively traditional structure that got me into trouble. You make characters in a very actor-stance type of way, with character points that can be spent on skills, magical traits, and special gifts and that lead me to assume a traditionally antagonist GM/player split, but I was overthinking it. The book never told me that I should GM like a Dungeon Master, and indeed counseled the exact opposite, but I never took it at its word. I assumed I needed to up my game to cope with the PCs incredible powers.

It was only on this most recent read-through that I realized I was still beholden to the psychology of the dice. The rules of the game are that you can do what your traits say you can do, but sometimes you can spend points to temporarily raise your traits. My brain initially interpreted this to mean that point-spending filled the same mechanical niche as dice-rolling. 

In a traditional rpg, if you want to do something contentious, the GM has you roll the dice and a successful roll gives you permission to say, "yes, I do that." But the other part of that is that a failed roll gives the GM permission to say, "no, you don't." And so my instinct was to look at the intention system and the miracle effects chart and think, "how can I make spending points feel more like rolling dice - how do I get to say, 'no'"

Yet Nobilis isn't the sort of game where the GM often gets to say, "no." The PCs power level guarantees that - "The Nobilis can shatter mountains. They can break or rebuild souls. They don't even have to work very hard to do it." - but it didn't emotionally prepare me for the reality of what that means. It's structured like a traditional rpg, but it can't play like one, and that's why I initially found it so difficult. But once you get used to the idea that you're supposed to be saying, "yes, you can shatter that mountain . . . let me tell you about all the interesting shapes you see in the dust" then it actually becomes a pretty simple game.

So I'm an unapologetic Jenna Moran fan-boy, but I am forced to recognize that Nobilis is a work in progress, an inchoate form of ideas that would be developed to greater sophistication in later works. Yet I still love it, because when it's not being ambiguous about its rules methodology, it's got that unique blend of whimsy, imagination, and horror that characterizes Moran at her best. Cute balloon people! They'll drop you from the stratosphere if you insult them! Wear a parachute when you go to visit.

This book is frequently funny, often breathtaking, and only occasionally frustrating as hell, and that's why it's one of the treasures of my collection.

Ukss Contribution: So many great ideas, so specific to Jenna Moran's sensibility. I liked the suggestion in the character creation section that you could play a five dollar bill that was awakened to consciousness and granted godlike powers.

(M20)How Do You DO That?

Oh, I thought I was going to be so clever. I had a plan. You see, over the years (and especially over the last year), I've noticed certain . . . shortcomings in Mage: the Ascension's magic system. These would always get a call-out in my notes, but usually they were in books that had more interesting things going on, so I'd barely mention them. But I knew that sooner or later, I'd get to this book here, the one that's all about the magic system, and it would be so utilitarian and uncontroversial that it would be the perfect place to talk about the various ways that Mage's highly-technical, highly vague magic system failed to truly deliver on the varied, specific mysticism of its ridiculously ambitious premise.

What I failed to anticipate, however, was that How Do You DO That would be a strong candidate for the single worst mechanical book of any game I'd ever read. This is a Players Option: Skills and Powers-level debacle. Whatever problems Mage's magic system might have are far in the rearview mirror, because even by the standards of Mage, this book is a total mess.

I'm not sure how to even begin. So . . . regular Mage: the Ascension magic is like this unholy amalgam of a word puzzle and an odds-pushing dice game. You've got nine Spheres of magic and five levels to each of these Spheres. The first step to casting a spell is to frame your desired outcome in a way such that it can fit into as few of these 45 categories as possible (or, at least, into the subset of that 45 which you happen to possess). This may take a certain degree of glibness, but creativity is encouraged. Then, you consult the third axis of effect, the Magickal Feats chart and you start to negotiate - is it a standard feat like "altering your shape" or is it a difficult feat like "transforming yourself into a radically different shape." Then, since there's something like a 95% chance that whatever you want to accomplish is going to take more successes than you can reasonably hope to achieve on your 2-3 dice, you have a choice to make - is this worth giving up several of your combat turns to do, or, if you're out of combat, are you likelier to succeed before you inevitably roll a botch. Then you roll the dice a whole bunch of times until your Storyteller begs you to stop.

This is not a great system for any number of reasons, but it is, at least, vaguely functional. How Do You DO That is, ostensibly, a guide to step 1. It promises to give you examples of common effects and tell you where in the 9 x 5 x 20+ matrix these effects should stand. Unfortunately, the answers it gives you are frequently wrong.

I know, I know. What kind of stones I must have to claim that the book is the one that doesn't understand the magic system. How Do You DO That? was written by Phil Brucato himself, the main credited author of the M20 core. It is, by definition, as authoritative as you're going to get. And I honestly don't know what to tell you here. As far out on a limb as I am here, How Do You DO That? frequently gets the rules of the game wrong, and often in ways that take an already shaky magic system and make it complete garbage.

I'll give you an example of a simple, concrete error to try and ease you into my thesis a bit. The section on bypassing common security measures says "Entropy 2 . . . can toss glitches into equipment." And it absolutely can't. Entropy 2 is one of the most sloppily written Sphere levels, and thus the one most likely to get thrown randomly into a conjunctional effect "just in case," but the wording of Entropy 3 definitely resolves this ambiguity. Entropy 2 allows you to "Control Probability" which can, and often does mean just about anything, but Entropy 3 allows you to "Affect Predictable Patterns" and it explicitly calls out "making computers fail" as part of what it can do. You could, I suppose, make the argument that any given machine always has the chance to fail, and thus Entropy 2 should allow you to manipulate the probability of it failing, but by that logic, any event that has some finite probability of actually occurring, Entropy 2 can cause to happen.

Now, I trust, you can see why me picking on poor Entropy 2 is a low-hanging fruit in the realm of arguing about Mage on the internet, but it's important for you to understand that when I talk about How Do You DO That? introducing new bullshit into Mage's magic system, I am not talking about a book with any great degree of mechanical rigor. I would classify a lot of this book's mechanics more as "vandalism" than "innovation" (let alone "explanation" :shudder:).

Let's just jump right in to the worst example. Telekinesis requires the Mind Sphere. . .

I read these books alone, at night, in a quiet hotel lobby and I very nearly rioted. This is not just a bad rule. It's not just an erroneous rule. It is, in fact, a full frontal assault on the very premise of the game. 

Because you don't need Mind to move objects with the Forces Sphere. You need Mind to move objects with your, um, mind. Your Will alone, acting through nothing more than your knowledge of Forces 2, is sufficient to move objects. But if you want to move objects with your mind, you need Forces 2 and Mind 3.

I'm not sure I can even do anything here but rephrase the problem in increasingly dumbfounded ways. The rules are requiring the Mind sphere because the decision of how and where to move the objects is made in the mind, or perhaps because the mage believes their mind is responsible for the movement, but taken to its logical conclusion, this sort of reasoning would lead you to always penalizing a mage who believes in a particular theory of magic - if your elemental powers are a gift from the spirits, your Forces effects would require the Spirit sphere to use. If you believe that your martial arts practice cultivates internal energies, you need to supplement your moves with Prime.

Oh, wait, those last two examples are real. What's especially egregious about the second one is that you also have to spend Quintessence on effects that don't normally require it. Good thing you have Martial Arts equal to your Sphere level, or otherwise you wouldn't be able to use those techniques . . . like a common Brawler.

That's the hardest thing about this book to swallow, these weird, out of nowhere attempts at verisimilitude that mostly serve to elevate Brucato's personal hobby horses to the level of canon (one thing I can be absolutely certain of after reading this book is that there is nothing in the universe that will summon a taxi cab to you besides the Mind Sphere . . . or Entropy 2).  You can use martial arts as a mystic practice if you are a fencer who wields a sword with the Martial Arts skill, but not if you're a swordfighter who wields a sword with the Melee (aka "sword-wielding") skill. Although, in that case you should probably have Melee at a decent level because a realistic martial artist trains their Melee as a common secondary skill (don't blame me for this, blame the sidebar on page 59).

In order to create something with Matter magic, you also have to know how to build it without magic. No waving a magic wand and changing a pumpkin into a carriage, not unless you are already a master carpenter. And no cheating by downloading skills into your brain. This is explicitly called out as "a cool fantasy," but Brucato is not in the business of making a cool fantasy game, and thus it is not allowed.

And I haven't even gotten to the math yet. You know how you're supposed to use magic to deflect an incoming bullet? You're supposed to use your Arete as a dodge roll. If you followed the core's character creation advice (and you shouldn't have), that dice pool is 2. You could do worse by standing up, slack-jawed, and staring at the gun, but not by a lot. The thing that made me write "ARGH!" in my notes, however, was the subsequent suggestion that if you rolled double the attacker's successes, you could reflect the bullet right back at them.

I guess I should just go ahead and add "completely overhaul the Ascension magic system" to my rpg bucket list.

Ukss Contribution: Since this wasn't an offensive book, merely an ill-favored one, I guess I should probably pick something. I liked most of the example fictions (except the anatomically dubious one that suggested lady witches masturbate with their broomsticks . . . because Brucato), but it was a throwaway line near the beginning that I'll most remember fondly - if you transform a murderer into a mouse, you'll wind up with a mouse that looks like it wants to murder you. Cute.