(M: tAs) Masters of the Art

It sometimes feels like the goal of Masters of the Art is to persuade you not to play masters of the art. It doesn't do anything so obnoxious as warn you off directly, but its depiction of the adventures of those who have pushed beyond the limits of Mage's standard 5-rank Sphere system often borders on "you are constantly held in check by everything in the universe - good luck."

Not even a joke. "In general, the most common use of Archmagic is in corrective action: preventing serious magical mishaps from becoming any more destructive. When an Archmage derails the time line or drops a flaming mountain towards Earth, other Archmages are quick to rectify the situation." Even in a book that has rampaging space beasts, synthetic universes, and full-on D&D-style liches, the setting can sometimes feel oddly constrained.

Did you know it's a good idea for an archmage to try and hold down a job? Fool, my job is creating planets. I need to maintain relationships with Sleepers to maintain my perspective? Nobody's getting in my social circle unless they're a dragon, pagan god, or angel of Principality rank or higher. I mean, yes, I might lose perspective, but as a person who can break Time, maybe the most adaptive perspective for me is the view from the mountaintop.

Although, Masters of the Art doesn't really approve of that kind of swagger. It's very consistent in the position that what you should be seeking is "Ascension" (you know, like "Mage: the . . ."). It even says, at one point that "godhood isn't the reward it seems." So whatever Ascension is, you know it must be good. Though, honestly, the way they describe it makes it sound a lot like death. There's a brief fiction where someone ascends, and from the perspective of our universe, she just disappears, never to have any noticeable effect on anything ever again.

Maybe that's just the atheist in me talking, though. Despite what the books imply about the Order of Hermes and the Virtual Adepts, the defining element of the Traditions is that they are religions (it's actually a huge missed opportunity that none of the writers of this game appear to have heard of the Singularity, because it strikes me as the perfect tech-Tradition eschaton). To be a mage is to be on a religious journey, and an important element of that journey is the final destination - the state of eternal peace and ultimate enlightenment from which you never return because any change in your condition would be a diminishing of perfection. I.e. Ascension.

I, however, can't help but think that the penultimate bliss sounds like a better deal. Safety and comfort in a mode of existence I currently understand, combined with the freedom and resources to be constantly doing cool shit for as long I want. Masters of the Art would call that "straying from the path of enlightenment" or "succumbing to the temptations of power," but I can't help but think about how every example of Ascension we've seen so far (which is, admittedly, just two or three) has involved the enlightened leaving behind the people and things they love in this world and then being of precisely zero damned use to them for the rest of time.

There is a suggestion that there could possibly be a global Ascension, where everyone becomes enlightened all at once, but as an idea it's tarnished by being the Technocracy's plan. I think this is one of those things that might change in later books (the Celestial Chorus, especially, want a group Ascension), but for now individualism = good and collectivism = bad.

All that being said, Ascension does appear to be preferable to archmastery, if only because Masters of the Art makes the rank 6-9 spheres into an absolute mess.

At best, they're lower-level powers scaled up and absent guidelines for their proper use. How many successes does it take to move a continent with Forces 7? Does the size of the continent matter? Can you move Europe separately from Asia or is that whole landmass a single unit?

At worst, the powers are so esoteric that it's hard to imagine a situation where you'd want to use them (Like, okay, I can "sense the universal mind," now what). Only the Time sphere really seems to have a clear escalation of utility, but even then you're kind of limited if you want to do anything but break the campaign over your knee.

Overall, I'd say this book is pretty skippable. They had a chance to really go all-out and show what the top of the power curve looked like, but they decided to go another way with it. Not that the religious themes weren't interesting on their own, but 87 pages weren't nearly enough to do that subject justice either.

One last thing of note - this is the origin of the infamous Avatar Storm. Since my first Mage book was the revised core, I kind of thought that was just how it worked. "Of course you're going to get the shit kicked out of you if you cross over into the Spirit World, why do you think they call it 'The Guantlet'?" However, now that I see it in its original context, I can see why it was so controversial. The penalties aren't quite bad enough to justify the "you're not allowed to go the umbra" arguments I remember from back in the early aughts, but it does feel a lot like a mission statement. Personally, I'm inclined to keep it, even so, but I understand why people hate it.

Ukss Contribution: When talking about the various supernatural creatures that Archmages might be friends with, it mentions that the Corax, were-ravens, "have an amazing intelligence network." And while that was surely not meant in a completely literal way, I can't help but imagine suave, were-raven spies. It's like they have their tuxedos built-in! Cute.

(M: tAs) The Spirit Ways

What a ridiculous lifestyle I've chosen for myself. Now I've got to explain The Spirit Ways to you . . . Who's going to explain it to me, huh?

Oh, all right. The Spirit Ways is in many ways the best Mage book yet. But it's also the one that's most likely to get you punched in the mouth by an Aboriginal Australian, and it all comes down to the fact that Mage: the Ascension probably shouldn't exist.

Seriously, who told you that it was okay to make Mage, White Wolf? Where did you get the fucking gall, the absolute hubris to try and bring Mage into this world? Grr. . . Aghh!

(reminder that I actually really love this game - it's like having a cool party bro who also started a cult)

So what's the deal with this book in particular? Well, it sets out to describe shamanism in the World of Darkness, and it includes the line, "Of course we have reason to doubt if whites even have souls."

Don't worry, I'm not about to lay any sort of "reverse racism" conspiracy theories on you (but also . . . ouch), it's just, this book is loudly, angrily, and . . . imprecisely anti-colonialist (like, seriously, just let the native kids wear blue jeans and t-shirts - the problem with their treatment at the hands of the Brazilian government doesn't really revolve around fashion), which leaves me with an intense curiosity about exactly how white this writing team was.

It's on the right side of issues like colonialism and slavery, but then it says things like "[captured Africans were] being educated to the ways of the white man's cruel god." And wow. I'm not sure I'm even allowed to have an opinion on this issue. Yes, missionaries were a part of the European imperial project and the forcefulness and impropriety of their attempts at conversion were a major factor in the obliteration of native cultures, but also . . . that's the faith of their descendants you're talking about and . . .

I have no idea where I'm going with this. I guess it's just not the sort of discussion we should be having in an rpg book . . . right?

I don't want to tread into "keep politics out of my tabletop rpgs" territory. It's just that there are some issues that are so sensitive, so immediate, and so fraught that they deserved to be discussed openly and frankly, by people who know what they're talking about, not couched in clumsy fantasy allegory by a freelancer who did an admirable, but clearly insufficient amount of research.

I mean, if you're going to say with a straight face that "Australia can prove once and for all that such a situation is possible, white man living in harmony with his Dancing brothers" that's got to indicate that maybe you need to widen your net a bit with your sources (although, between this and Trinity's version of Australia becoming a haven for immigrants . . . maybe there was someone at White Wolf who was giving them bad information).

The Spirit Ways winds up recapitulating the original sin of the Dreamspeakers' creation by treating "shamanism" as a kind of globally homogeneous practice. And even when it acknowledges that the Verbena, the Cult of Ecstasy, and the Euthanatos all contain elements of shamanic practices, only the Dreamspeakers get it completely right (everywhere, all the time). It almost breaks out into self-awareness when discussing the Order of Hermes - "the distintiction between shamanism and religio-magical beliefs becomes a very thin line, often crossed" - but it never quite sees past the implicit racial coding in its descriptions.

So why did I say that The Spirit Ways might be one of Mage's best? Well, firstly, it's really not all bad. Aside from some painfully 90s-liberal blinders that lead it to describe Africa as "hell" (though at least they blamed the right culprit, even if they attributed it to "the West's rape of the Earth mother" and not "the IMF screwing them re: infrastructure funding") and Siberia as "paradise" (::shrug::), and a tendency to tread dangerously close to "noble savage" stereotypes, it mostly puts in an effort to be inclusive and respectful (even if it sometimes seems performatively so). For all that it acts like it can talk authoritatively about shamans on six continents, it also usually takes pains to remind the reader that practices vary.

(Though, the four things that all shamans have in common, according to The Spirit Ways - "Every shaman, bar none, knows how to play . . . the drum . . . knows at least one technique for entering the spirit world and exiting it successfully . . . is capable of healing at least a few types of sicknesses" - also, they all undergo a painful symbolic death as part of their initiation.)

But more than just grading on a curve, The Spirit Ways is genuinely fun, hitting a great balance between fantasy, horror, and intrusive mundanity. Shamans are just mages. Putting a pin in the colonialist framing of shamanism (which weighs heavily here even though the book tries to use that framing to establish an anti-colonialist identity for its heroes), all this book is really describing when it talks about intermediaries between this world and the spirit world, who make deals with divine beings in exchange for incredible powers is mages. When your definition of "shaman" is broad enough to cover 80% of humanity's territory and 90% of its history, it's not that much more of a stretch to just tip in the rest of religion and mysticism and call it a day.

And when you view The Spirit Ways as nothing more or less than a Mage: the Ascension supplement, then what you get is a guy who talks to a cockroach to save himself from cultists . . . and who receives that aid in the form of a swarm of cockroaches crawling down his throat to move his body around like a super-strong puppet. You've got a mischievous mentor character taking his apprentice on a sojourn into the spirit world, where wisdom comes in the form of riddles. You've got healers of sickness, both physical and spiritual, moving into the blighted cities (White Wolf really hates cities, for some reason) to become the focal point of new communities. You've got World Trees and strange drugs. And the thing where you can go on a Dream Quest to work large-scale magical changes on the world? That should be a mechanic instead of a rote.

Like I said, it's pretty great. Even if there are times I want to hide my face in second-hand embarrassment.

One last thing I want to mention - I'm pretty sure this book is non-canonical when it comes to the Celestial Chorus. It makes it pretty clear, several times, that shamans as a group hate the Celestial Chorus due to the damage Christian proselytizing did to traditional religious practices. But the books have always been really inconsistent about how much of that the Chorus was involved in (sometimes they are responsible for the Inquisition, sometimes they fell to the Inquisition). The Spirit Ways portrays them as the masterminds behind the western imperialist program of conversion, but that's a depiction that at odds with both their most recent material and what I remember of them from Revised, so for now I'm just going to call it an outlier.

Ukss Contribution: Mages can make a particular type of magic item called a fetish, which is basically a physical item with a spirit bound inside who may or may not use their powers on your behalf, based on a variety of factors. Most of the Traditions find the creation of fetishes to be needlessly cruel, usually because the more powerful sorts of spirits need to be forced or tricked into the items.

However, the Dreamspeakers make ethical fetishes by binding only Gafflings, the lowest rank of spirits. According to this book, they actually enjoy inhabiting a well-made fetish because they want to feel useful. I think that's pretty cute.

I'll probably drop the word "fetish," both for the obvious reason and because it feels a little appropriative, but there will be minor spiritual beings who make their homes in precious items and help out those items' owners from time to time. I'll probably call them Gafflings, even though the term is a bit broader than that in the World of Darkness source material.

(M: tAs) Initiates of the Art

I'm getting really excited for the arrival of Revised edition. Orphan's Survival Guide was like a proto-Revised. Guide to the Technocracy was Revised-compatible. And Initiates of the Art feels a lot like a Revised book that's arrived just a little bit early. If it weren't for the lack of the weird, busy page-borders, I'm not sure I'd have been able to guess that it's technically second edition.

Unfortunately, while Initiates of the Art is a decent enough book on the merits, it suffers from Revised edition's greatest weakness - an often regrettable reluctance to include overt fantasy elements in their urban fantasy game. Magic is covert, shrouded in coincidence, because it is dangerous to be too blatant with your spells, but that can unfortunately translate into a magical world that looks quite a bit like our own.

I need to tread carefully, because I don't want to overstate the case. I actually really enjoy Revised's "magic exists in the cracks of the mundane world" approach, and it would be wrong to say it never went all-out in painting those cracks with bold, bright colors to contrast the grey. However, it would be accurate to say that they don't do it here. (And I know, I know, this isn't technically a Revised book, but it really feels like one).

The problem, I think, is two-fold. First, this depiction of life as an apprentice is not nearly sensual enough. People become apprentice mages because they've seen impossible shit and now they want to do impossible shit. But for all it talks about maintaining relationships and holding down a job (useful, character-building stuff, mind you), it never captures the awe of awakening to a magical world. When it talks about magic at all, it's in a very cerebral way - it's interesting, but it runs the risk of making magic seem like something you do to win arguments with other mages, rather than something that gives you amazing superpowers.

Although, to be fair, part of the reason it's like that is because it's more or less forced to be by the Mage rules. The only thing you can do with the first rank of a Sphere is sensory magic. Now, don't get me wrong, I'd love to have the ability to see in the dark, read auras, or determine how much charge is left in a battery by smelling it, but for all the utility these 1-dot spells may have in my day-to-day life, in the context of an rpg, they don't necessarily feel like my character is taking the first step on a path of miracles.

They're doing the best with what they've got, but I'm left with the feeling that maybe someone who's an apprentice relative to a sorcerer can still be a jaw-dropping badass compared to an ordinary slob like me. At the very least, give the apprentices 2 dots in their spheres, so they can occasionally have a tangible effect on the physical world.

Although, it's actually questionable how much of the blame for this I should put on Initiates of the Art. At its heart, the problem is that Mage: the Ascension is completely broken at Arete level 1. It has been since the first edition core and it continues to be up through the 20th anniversary edition. I might find fault with this book for encouraging this mode of play, but honestly the character creation chapters of every Mage core include rules that charge you points for making a character that's not completely miserable to play. They don't even have the decency of telling you that you must spend those points, as a kind of character-creation tax, if you want the game to be even minimally functional (though Revised does seem to suggest that it's expected, whereas 2nd "recommends that you raise it no higher than 3," M20 implies that you're cheating yourself out of the fun of the early game if you do it too often, and 1st edition is pretty neutral).

It's important to note, that when I say Mage is "broken" at Arete 1, I don't mean that it's too low in power level for me to enjoy. That's just a matter of opinion. Everyone has their own preferences there. No, what I mean is that mechanics of the Storyteller system break down and your attempts to use magic will become a cruel farce. Basically, the system is not set up for you to roll a single die for anything, let alone your character's main shtick. And the magic system in particular will punish you for trying.

For example, if you are trying to see in the dark for the rest of the scene (a completely reasonable use of your powers that should probably just be a passive ability), you need to roll 3 successes. With only one die, you'll need to make it an extended roll. The difficulty is 4, which means the chance of doing it in 3 rolls is 34% The chance of botching in that same time frame is 27%. The likeliest outcome is doing it in 4 rolls, with a 2/3 chance of success and a 1/3 chance of botching (that these numbers add up to 1 is a coincidence, though if you fail all 4 rolls, your chance of rolling at least one botch is 81%). The reason for this is that with one die, you botch every time you roll a 1, and the number of permutations that does not contain at least one "1" shrinks fairly rapidly. After 7 rolls, you are more likely to botch than not, regardless of what the original target number is. Starting at 4 successes, you are generally more likely to botch than you are to succeed.

That's to say nothing of the action economy in combat, or the pointless tedium of open-ended repeat rolling in more sedate scenes. It's just a complete clusterfuck.

My mathematical intuition tells me that if you want the game to work more or less as the fiction suggests it should, apprentices should roll approximately 4 dice for spells. The idea for an apprentice game is a good one, and Initiates of the Art gives you a lot of good ideas, despite its system limitations, but if you want it to actually feel like you're playing novice sorcerers, Arete 4, Rank-2 Spheres is my suggested minimum power level.

Before I wrap up, I also want to point out a bit of shifting canon - Avatars (the mysterious oversouls that let you do magic) are discussed here as directly as we've seen so far. Established facts - everyone has an Avatar, but most are too weak to do magic; who gets the strong Avatars seems random, or at least subject to the inscrutable whims of reincarnation ("the Awakening is as likely to strike an otherwise normal person as to empower some occult fantasy mysticist"); it is possible to destroy your own Avatar accidentally, by misusing magic (but no mechanics for such are given).

I can't say I like this new canon all that much. If you can't earn an Awakened avatar, and especially if the wise elder mages can't teach you how to find one, it kind of diminishes the religious themes of the game. I mean, it's not necessarily the case that various religions believe you can achieve enlightenment through your own effort, but it's a little weird for, say, prospective Celestial Choristers to not have to believe in God, or for the long, formal training of groups like the Order of Hermes or the Akashic Brotherhood to have no effect. The game is about finding a path and pursuing it, and while I think it's reasonable for the vast majority to fall off the path before achieving enlightenment, it's also highly weird that those who succeed seem to do so mostly by chance.

I'm just going to file that under "White Wolf's strangely aristocratic approach to supernaturals" and subsequently ignore it for my personal games.

Ukss Contribution: This is a tough one, because it's mostly about cool fantasy stuff being just out of reach. The masters are gone, no one trains in a Horizon Realm any more, and the most impressive of the suggested rotes makes it so you can stay awake all night.

However, it does talk briefly about the idea of Sanctums - areas so affected by the resonance of your magic that your spells no longer cause paradox. In keeping with the overly-cerebral nature of the text, it fails to describe all the jaw-dropping shit you're sure to see in a basement or garage where the Earth's natural laws are held in abeyance, but that's something I can fill in on my own.

Aberrant: Project Utopia

If there is one character who is emblematic of Aberrant: Project Utopia's worldbuilding, it is Aaron T Peloit, the chief archivist for Project Proteus, the sinister conspiracy inside Utopia. The Proteus chapter of the book is framed as a series of leaked documents, detailing the hierarchy, methodologies, and infamous deeds of that organization, including the assassination of dissenters and political leaders. At the end of the chapter, Mr Peloit explains his reasoning for leaking the documents by citing two outrages in particular - the clandestine nova-sterilization scheme and the fact that Proteus has spies within Utopia itself, creating a culture of paranoia among operatives like him. Those two reasons, and those reasons only are why he's taking the risk of revealing this information. Otherwise, he thinks Proteus is doing good, necessary work, even to the extent that they deliberately sabotage peace operations in regions like Kashmir (30,000 civilians dead in the first two days of fighting) in order to have a reliable way of assigning troublesome nova to suicide missions. He doesn't like Director Thetis looking over his shoulder and he thinks maybe novas should be allowed to have babies, but aside from that Proteus should still be able to keep doing what it's been doing, because an organization like Utopia can't achieve its noble goals without someone in the shadows, doing its dirty work.

A deeply cynical take on an organization that was advertised, in the Introduction, as being "as close to the good guys as you can get in a realistic setting." But that's just what you expect from White Wolf. The back of the book contains the line, "Guiding Humanity to a Better Tomorrow . . . One Atrocity at a Time." Cynicism is what you signed up for.

What makes Aaron T Peloit the mascot of this book in particular is who he decided to leak the information to. Andre Corbin, the disgruntled former employee fired from Team Tomorrow for having too much attitude, Count Raoul Orzaiz, the most charming man in an international nova-supremacist organization, and General Thomas Dwayne Endicott, a US military officer who was spearheading the development of anti-nova weapons. These were the people he thought would set aside their differences and come together to reform Project Utopia instead of ruthlessly exploiting the information to destroy the organization for their own, personal, philosophical, and political reasons.

Now, granted, Corbin in a designated Sexy Bad Boy, and thus above suspicion in these kind of subtle machinations, but even with that mulligan, that recipient list was naive as hell. It's that peculiar mix of cynical and naive that characterizes Aberrant: Project Utopia to me.

It is basically the premise of this book that Philanthropy Will Save the World. Utopia is a private organization that gives away its money however it sees fit and it's mostly working out okay. Private medical research. Private disaster relief. Private environmental restoration and geoengineering. Private law enforcement. Bankrolled by the profits of nova-driven science (that they are implausibly empowered to regulate with no obvious oversight). And these initiatives do indeed go a long way towards addressing the world's problems.

Despite my intimations of sarcasm, this isn't that big a deal. It's just one of those funny little ironies that for all of Aberrant's desire to avoid genre cliches like super-inventors failing to change the world or spandex-clad vigilantes, it wound up stumbling into the most problematic idea in superhero fiction - that ordinary people are unable to solve their own problems and must wait around for their superiors to rescue them.

This is where Aberrant's background cynicism helps it out, though. There are forces in the Aberrant universe (thin on the ground as they are in this particular book) that are highly critical of Utopia, and while I think their cries that Project Utopia is a fascist organization are misplaced, it is at least something to recognize that the superhero genre is one with fascist overtones, and Utopia, by deliberately cloaking itself in superhero tropes (Team Tomorrow started fighting organized crime because people "seemed to expect the comic-book-hero-like novas to do comic-book-hero-like things") invites those kind of comparisons.

And here is where it gets tricky, because there's a part of Utopia that's subversive, and there's a part of Utopia that plays it straight.

Project Utopia subverts the superhero genre by making its Justice-League analogue into an organization that exploits novas. Not just with Project Proteus, but in its very conception. Its motto is "Creating a Brighter Tomorrow with the Power of Today," but there is a fundamental split - the Power comes from novas, but the people who get to define "a Brighter Tomorrow" are largely baselines. Novas can be entrusted with positions of great responsibility - Caestus Pax is not just Team Tomorrow's frontman, he's also the administrative head of the entire department - but ultimately, they are not in charge.

Although Aberrant is hardly the only superhero setting to explore these ideas, it is interesting in the context of the greater Trinity-universe metaplot. Eventually, it's all going to go to shit, and it's not at all clear what side of the human-nova war Utopia's novas are going to come down on. The Project fails, and it owes that failure in no small part to its hubris and its mistrust. Though Aberrant: Project Utopia is largely optimistic, it doesn't entirely forget this dramatic irony. It's always lurking there in the background.

But then there's the other half of it, the naive part. Utopia's good deeds are interesting because they at least make an effort to include stuff that's not normally covered in superhero narratives - when they deliver much-needed supplies to disaster victims, nova powers allow for a much more efficient logistics chain; the water-mastery lady can create economically significant amounts of fresh water and so they send her to fill wells in drought-afflicted areas; and so on.

That's all very well and good. The thought they give to different ways superpowers can be used is Aberrant's greatest strength. Where it starts to get a little problematic is when Utopia's philanthropy takes on an uncomfortable "white savior" sort of energy.

It's hard for me to pin down with precision, but Utopia does a lot of work in "the Third World" and while I could go on a pedantic tangent explaining the origin of the term in Cold War era geopolitics, it's probably not necessary. We all understand that it's a euphemism for "poor," perhaps with some additional racial and cultural baggage. I don't necessarily want to pick on White Wolf for this, because it would have been really easy for them to write an rpg all about the USA and Europe and people back then likely wouldn't have noticed. So, the attempt to make a truly global superhero game, one where the Justice League is more concerned with clean water and education than bank robberies in NYC, where the headquarters are in Addis Ababa - that's not nothing.

 But . . . there are no named African employees of Project Utopia (there is some mention of Ethiopian locals working at the Team Tomorrow Central Headquarters as groundskeepers and the like), and certainly none in a position of leadership. It makes their charitable efforts on the continent seem like something they're doing to Africa, instead of in cooperation with local organizations and governments.

Take their signature achievement - Project Eden, the "terraforming" of the Ethiopian highlands. I spent 15 minutes or so trying to narrow down where exactly this would have taken place, but I'll admit it might be a task beyond my research abilities, because the only candidates I could find all seemed to be places the real-world Ethiopian government has declared protected nature preserves. In any event, the causes of Ethiopia's famines are more complex than "lack of arable land." While climate plays a role, political factors are just as important. Often, the food is there, but people are too poor or isolated to access it.

And look, I'm not going to act like I have any clue how to meaningfully improve material conditions in any of the countries of Africa, but that's kind of the point. I'm just a white guy, half a world away. I'm not going to know more than the people who are actually living there, which is why local leadership is so important. Utopia employs Mega-Intelligent novas to come up with elaborate plans to improve the world, but those novas don't necessarily have mega-empathy, mega-humility, or mega-lack-of-racism, and as a result, the plans are often big, splashy one-off gestures, implementable only by superhumans, and completely orthogonal to the specific social conditions of the intended beneficiaries. It's a specific kind of technological arrogance we've come to recognize in the real world - Elon Musk if his child-rescuing submarine actually worked.

It's a fine characterization. A very interesting premise for a story - "what if techbro philanthropists could really walk the walk," but I think you'd find that if the story is well-told, then the second act is going to be pure suspense as we wait for the other shoe to drop. Facebook has developed an app to eliminate 95% of all murders! But are they going to have the wisdom to navigate the power dynamics that arise out unevenly-distributed access?

Oh shit.

Going back to the Ethiopian example. Eighty percent of the country are already farmers, so how is this agricultural terraforming supposed to work? Are you spending billions of dollars to tear up the country's national parks so that millions of people can move? Or are you interrupting the livelihoods of millions of people while you do complicated geological stuff to their farmland? Either way, if the plan involves economic disruption and the displacement of large populations, why not just build a few hundred factories to give people high-paying jobs, industrialize agriculture on the now-vacated land, and just let people buy food? No new technology needed and you don't even have to destroy the country's irreplaceable geographical and biological treasures.

Not saying that plan is what needs to happen in real-world Ethiopia, just that these sort of rapid changes are almost always accompanied by massive unrest and total, irredeemable shittiness from one party or another ("after pa died, the bank foreclosed on our dirt farm") and there's really nothing about getting superheroes involved that's going to change that, not unless there's a nova with the power of "instilling equanimity in people being forcibly separated from their ancestral homes," (which is maybe a niche ability that would have seen a lot of use among history's worst regimes).

In any event, it's not a theme that gets much exploration, at least not in the self-aware way you get with the game's broader genre satire. Utopia's opponents are portrayed as incoherent reactionaries, indicating that the text is unaware of how fundamentally conservative it is as an organization (you want to fix Africa? maybe persuade the neo-colonialists to stop breaking it - or is that too "controversial" a stance for your carefully curated "apolitical" image?)

A potentially fruitful avenue that's never called out is how Utopia's top-driven philanthropic strategy dovetails with the more explicitly authoritarian and nakedly colonialist (you don't hire mercenaries to exacerbate local conflicts if you respect the autonomy of the people involved) Project Proteus. Proteus is consistently portrayed as a rogue agency, a conspiracy within Utopia, but also a force foreign to it. As much as it wouldn't do to say that the Utopians are insincere in their desire for a better world (that way lies too much cynicism), it is nevertheless possible to acknowledge that Proteus is a natural outgrowth of their conviction that they have a right to unilaterally change the world.

Ukss Contribution: This book makes the . . . interesting choice to take a break from thrilling superheroics just long enough to describe Project Utopia's accounting department - a move of which I heartily approve.

The boss of the accounting department is Juliana Waters. She's a total hardass who demands perfection, naturally, but also she loves celebrating employee birthdays. Insists on it, in fact. The book says it has something to do with her belief in astrology, but honestly, it works just as well without an explanation. Such a specific, human detail it almost makes me think she was based off a real person.

(M:tAs) Guide to the Technocracy

This is it, folks. Red Alert! Flame war potential - 99% This is not a drill!

Although, I think to some degree White Wolf was deliberately stirring the pot. Surely they weren't so naive as to think writing "In a way, science is a religion" wouldn't start a fight (seriously, I was a hair's breadth away from subjecting you all to a rant about metaphysics before I took a step back and remembered the point of this exercise).

But more to the point, the main culprit behind this book's well-deserved reputation for flamebait is its clear dual mandate to both present an unreliable pro-Technocracy narrator and to course-correct away from the Technocracy's earlier depiction as cartoonish supervillains. The fact that there's no obvious way to disentangle these agendas in the text itself means that everyone can bring their own biases to it and find canonical support.

Now, it's pretty clear that when the "Protocols" chapter says, "The Technocracy isn't about power. It' about using that power effectively, for the people that don't have it" that is a self-serving lie. Or at the very least, a comforting story the Technocrats tell themselves to justify how nakedly power-hungry their organization is.

And yet, just a little while later, in a sidebar that is, apparently, out-of-character (it addresses the Storyteller directly), it says, "The objective is to save people, not blow stuff up." And therein lies the confusion.

I doubt very much that we're supposed to take the "You're Already a Technocrat" speech at face value. It presents a false dichotomy between rejecting modern technology and accepting the Technocracy's authoritarian creed. And yet, the argument they make, that there should be someone out there doing something about all these monsters, and that the existence of the laws of physics is on balance a boon to humanity - that's a good pitch. It's almost possible to believe that you're in a story with 101 different types of fantasy monster and humanity's only hope is a group of self-appointed sci-fi warriors. That narrative speaks to people. You can believe that the Technocracy could recruit off of it.

Which leads us to the awkward question of "how much of it is true?"

Not all of it, not by a long shot. The expanded abilities in the character creation chapter include "torture" and "terrorism." And those are only the most mundane of the Technocracy's crimes. They quite definitely brainwash people, perform experiments on helpless innocents, and subvert the world's governments. Everything that's said about the Technocracy's noble motives must be viewed in that context. Ultimately it is about the power.

The way Guide to the Technocracy tries to square the circle is by presenting a corrupt organization made up of idealistic individuals. Mage: the Ascension is actually quite consistent in its faith that individuals are pure until they are corrupted by groups. The "God and the Technocracy" sidebar has perhaps the starkest, least-self aware example of this I've seen so far when it says that the Technocracy tolerates faith in a higher power, but views membership in an organized religion as suspect.

I can't be alone in thinking that it should be the other way around, right? It's such a reflexively 90s-liberal/new age thing to say that it almost has me thinking we should take more of the narration's reasonableness as face value, if only because the authors are including their sincere values as part of the text.

In any event, it asks us to believe that Technocrats can be sincere, at least at the individual/small group level. The aim is to make the conflict at the center of the game more nuanced, but it misses the most critical level of analysis. For all the history sections talk of rival schools of thought and the growing popularity of the theory that the Technocracy followed sleeper history instead of manipulating it, there is no real discussion of the Technocracy's role as an enabler of systems of oppression.

I mean, they were founded by Queen Victoria, for god's sake. But that is merely a historical irony. It's much harder to judge the meaning of lies of omission. The thing where they discuss the American Revolution without mentioning slavery is completely typical, but neither before nor after did it talk about colonialism at all. This is, of course, a classic propaganda technique, but I'm not sure whether it was intentional. I know for a fact that Mage is capable of talking about colonialism, and there have definitely been explicit connections between the Technocracy and European imperialism.  So this could just be a case of the book deliberately not mentioning inconvenient historical facts that make its subject look bad.

However, Guide to the Technocracy's history section is also incredibly sloppy about a couple of things they have no obvious motive to lie about. It gets the timeline of the Sons of Ether and Virtual Adept defections completely wrong. The source of this confusion appears to be a misapprehension that the "Electrodyne Engineers" were the prior incarnation of the Virtual Adepts, when in fact that was the old name for the Sons of Ether. This resulted in the Adepts leaving the Technocracy in the early 1900s, which totally screws up the 20th century timeline.

It's possible that this was done on purpose, because a pro-Technocracy narrator wouldn't want to acknowledge that the rift with the Virtual Adepts came about because of disagreements about who to support in WW2 and the subsequent murder of Alan Turing. But this seems unlikely to me for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Mage has been trying to get away from attributing real-world atrocities to supernatural factions, hence the recent trend in canon to say that WW2 split the factions along national lines (so that American Technocrats supported the Allies, whereas German Technocrats supported the Nazis). Secondly, even if the mangling of the timeline was meant to be in-character obfuscation, who would that narrative be for?

I mean, I've just read every previous Mage book in chronological order and this is still a bit of obscure esoterica. I'm running through the streets screaming, "don't you see? The timeline doesn't add up!" much like one of the doomed World of Darkness conspiracy theorists who have had the misfortune to stumble upon the Technocracy.

Granted, it's unlikely to be the only one who noticed. The White Wolf fandom was known to be . . . intense. But this sort of subtle, indirect worldbuilding is practically guaranteed to cause conflict. If it was intentional then, like I said, this book seems designed for flamebait. The misplacing of the defections is probably just a mistake.

But that takes us back to our original dilemma. How much of the Technocracy's makeover are we supposed to trust, given that we've learned about it from known liars? Ultimately, what a Technocracy book really needs to do is confront the legacy of modernism head-on, both the good and the bad, in an honest and thoughtful way. "Good people working inside a bad system" only really works as a theme if you've got some inkling as to why the system is bad.

Although that's a pretty heavy theme for a casual roleplaying game. Despite the book's occasional suggestions to the contrary, you're probably not playing a Technocrat because you want to be a jack-booted fascist, even if we're just talking about the insensitive 90s sort of "fascist" who's just a super-strict guy who tells people what to do. No, the reason, ultimately, to play a Technocrat is because you want to change the genre of the World of Darkness into either mil-sf or a science fictions conspiracy thriller. That's what the idealist/authoritarian split is meant to accomplish. You're just a guy trying to protect the world using wacky sci-fi gadgets, but your bosses are the Illuminati.

It almost works, but unfortunately, the Technocracy is the one group in Mage: the Ascension that's objectively wrong. I guess, if we're being really precise about it, all of the factions arewrong, but the Technocracy is the only one that ever gets called out about it, the only one where the book says, "the truth is that the Union's agents fool themselves too."

How is that not what everyone does? Is not "fooling oneself" the very definition of "magic comes from belief."

The distinction, as near as I can tell, is that when the Traditions say their magic comes from spirits, or universal forms, or etheric disturbances or what have you, they are at least on the right path by calling their magic "magic" (even when they don't), but when the Technocracy says that their science allows them to create advanced technology, they don't realize that their science is actually magic. You can believe that your powers come from outside yourself. You can even believe that they operate along universal laws. But you can't believe those laws are quantifiable or explicable, because attempting to actually know something is the only surefire way in the Mage universe to ensure that you know nothing.

Either that or it's a cover for the fact that Mage's magic system is actually pretty bad at modelling sci-fi technology. Because the thing is, if Mage is really going to be the game it says it is, then the Technocrats kind of need to not be especially wrong. Oh, they can be wrong about morality, about the costs and benefits of their plans for control, about the danger the Traditions pose to humanity, but they should at least be right about the fact that they are using science. Or, at least, they should be as right as any magical paradigm can be. Because if the stakes of the Ascension war are reality itself, then their beliefs will, eventually, match what's real.

I actually think the issue here is that "science" is used rather mushily here. At the risk of inadvertently starting up the metaphysics rant we narrowly avoided earlier - science is an epistemological process, not a set of doctrines. There is some discussion of the scientific method, but it's not really applied. Instead, "science" is mainly used to mean "things that are scientifically plausible in the real world." So the Technocrats' "belief in science" really means "willful denial of the reality of magic." Hence, they are the only delusional Mage faction.

But if the Technocracy actually believed in the scientific method, then the empirically verifiable facts of mages doing magical things should lead them to pursue a working theory of magic just a little bit more robust than arbitrarily labeling certain things "reality deviants." After all, they don't have access to our world, so they can't actually distinguish between "things people can quite obviously do" and "things people should be able to do." The latter is always going to be formed by observations of the former.

(And I know no one asked, but my resolution to this dilemma was that the Technocracy actually does do real science, but what they study is Paradox. Their hypertech is what they've determined is the "minimally Paradoxical process" to achieve any given result, and they believe that any mage who doesn't do things their way is "polluting the Tellurian," and must be censured, even if their magic is cheaper, faster, or more effective.)

One way to untangle this mess is to claim that the Technocracy doesn't really practice science so much as scientism and that they are only really concerned with the authority that comes from the appearance of science. . .

Meh.

It's plausible, and it fits in with their role as modernist villains. A lot of shady shit has been done under the color of science - scientific racism, eugenics, cruel human experimentation - and in the World of Darkness, the Technocracy is the likely culprit for these evils. It would certainly help to get them back to their sci-fi horror roots.

It's just, if you take science away from the Technocracy, the only people left in the setting who do anything close are the Order of Hermes, and that doesn't really work (though, the Order's canonical unpopularity does bolster my theory that Mage: the Ascension is all just an elaborate revenge scheme for a poor grade in science class).

I think, though, that I'm just going to chalk this one up to another example of the book grabbing two sides of a contentious debate and saying "now you and them fight!"

Oh, man. 2000 words and I've still only used about half my notes. Let's just go through a few observations real quick.

Technically, the first appearance of the infamous Red Star in Mage was in Tales of Magick: Dark Adventure, but it's addressed head-on here. Clearly, the wheels are in motion to make millennialism a major theme in the Revised World of Darkness.

Speaking of which, Guide to the Technocracy is not technically a Revised book, but I'd be shocked if it wasn't written with Revised compatibility in mind. A couple of noticeable Revised-era ideosyncracies are here - there's talk of a difficulty communicating with Horizon Realms (though no mention of the Avatar Storm . . . yet), and as near as I can tell, it's called "magic" rather than "magick," even in the out-of-character sections.

The sidebar in the character creation chapter that drew parallels between making a WoD character and filling out a standardized test sheet was really cute. I'm just surprised it took this long for someone to do that joke.

Much of the description around Technocratic magic tries to make Technocracy agents sound a lot like talents from the Trinity Continuum. I'd have liked to see that alternate game.

Some of the early-history, Sorcerer's Crusade callbacks suggest a kind of Dynastic Cycle between the Traditions and Technocracy, where each starts out as necessary reformers, gains power until they become corrupt, and are subsequently overthrown. That was my dominant theory of Mage: the Ascension politics for many years, though now I tend to think it overly callous to ignore the suffering that they create along the way.

Overall, I'd say that this book is a bomb dropped in the middle of Mage: the Ascension canon. I have no idea how it was actually meant to be used. I'm not sure which parts are trustworthy descriptions of the WoD reality. And it's shocking in retrospect how many ugly internet arguments revolved around people making selective, but perfectly valid interpretations of this text. I wouldn't say that Guide to the Technocracy actually makes the titular villains sympathetic (nor do I believe it was meant to), but it can quite plausibly allow one to pretend they are sympathetic. And in a game of make-believe like Mage, I'm not sure there's much of a difference.

Ukss Contribution: Exploding buttons - as a weapon, they strike just the right balance between quaintly ridiculous and stuffily aristocratic. Perfect for the witch-spies of Monte Carlo.

(M: tAS) Tales of Magick: Dark Adventure

This book is difficult to place in the hierarchy of essential Mage supplements. It's mostly pretty okay, but "dark adventure" isn't really a thing. The book acts like it's a thing, like it's a well-known genre with accepted parameters and we should all be nodding our heads going, "yes, of course, dark adventure. I'm familiar with it. Proceed." But it's quite clear that they are making it up as they go along, and it isn't until the "Inspiration" section of the Appendix (literally, the last two pages of the book) that it comes into focus.

"Dark adventure" is the genre that encompasses both Big Trouble In Little China and The Terminator. Mission Impossible is only barely included, but Face/Off is right in its wheelhouse. In other words, dark adventure is just that subset of action movies that the authors are not too self-conscious to admit they enjoyed.

Nah, that's too much snark, although the false dichotomy between "dark" adventure and so-called "high" adventure is this book's greatest weakness. The clearest contrast between these supposed sub-genres is given in a section discussing narratively-convenient coincidences. In "high" adventure, you might find a gun left behind at a crime scene and that can be a clue to help you find the killer. In "dark" adventure, the murderer probably left the gun behind on purpose, to incriminate you once you've carelessly put your fingerprints on it. If I had to sum it up (and I guess I kind of do), I'd say that dark adventure is what you get when you want action-adventure, but are unreasonably afraid of opening the door to "cheese."

There's a section that discusses this, and ironically it illustrates why the whole "dark adventure" idea is a creative dead end. It starts off describing something completely awesome (the villain's plan is an overly complex real estate scheme that involves orbital lasers) and then it follows up with an essay that amounts to "don't do that." It's just posturing, to be sure, but it's unclear whose benefit it's for.

Luckily, that stuff is pretty easy to ignore. The first half of this book is just an above-average White Wolf storytelling chapter. It's ostensibly about planning and running action-adventure games, but the bulk of the advice is from such a high level of abstraction that it could apply to nearly any genre ("oh, maybe the characters are interested in the plot because they're on a mission, yes, yes, that is a very good idea for my dark adventure game. I wouldn't think of using it for horror or political intrigue, nosiree.") But don't let my casual tone fool you, the advice is pretty good. Maybe a little basic, but also a lot more actionable than the "theme" and "mood" sections White Wolf usually favors. The part where it describes two dozen stock characters should probably just be printed out and issued to every GM right before they start their first campaign.

Nonetheless, the bulk of this book's value lies in Chapter 3. There it gives you a series of short campaign pitches, some generic and some that relate to the World of Darkness' slowly advancing metaplot. The generic ones are a little obvious, though I did enjoy the title "Mr. Big is Unhappy. Very Unhappy."

The metaplot ones, let's break down one-by-one:

The Concordia War - I'm a little annoyed by this one, because apparently metaplot can be introduced in the novels, and while I do own the relevant trilogy, it's not on my reading schedule. Still, it's described well enough to be used, and I guess I'm wondering if the Avatar Storm is in the works at this point, because between this plot and the next one, it feels a lot like they're doing some housekeeping with the game's more powerful legacy characters.

A civil war on Horizon, the Traditions' private planet that represents wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, but which they've curiously allowed to lie fallow for 500 years? The Council is disbanded, its members either dead or in hiding? Guerrilla insurgents, loyal to no faction, still lurk in the wilderness, striking out at attempts to rebuild? It's all very exciting, but it also feels a lot like they're trying to take away a safe place to hide.

The War of the Ruins - Speaking of which, Doissitep's gone. Completely blown up. I should have mentioned it when I was writing about Digital Web 2.0, because this particular conflict got an off-hand mention as the cause of The Great Whiteout, but it slipped my mind at the time. As near as I can tell, this is the first time it's actually tackled head-on.

It's a pretty great scenario. Basically all-out magical war on the surface of Mars as any number of interested parties attempt to loot the ruins of the formerly premier magical stronghold of the Mage: the Ascension universe. It's pretty much the epitome of what people are talking about when they reminisce about over-the-top old-Mage (dragons vs mechs on the surface of an alien world!)

Plus, I'm pretty sure that Porthos is finally dead. As much as I tried to resist the alternate character interpretation, I will confess to being slightly relieved.

Project Invictus - Technocracy agents play a deadly game of cat and mouse as the secretive Project Invictus tries to root out the corruption of the Syndicate's Special Projects Division . . . and the transformation of the Technocracy to anti-hero protagonists is finally complete.

Maybe it's ramping up to the release of Guide to the Technocracy, but Tales of Magick: Dark Adventure is the most Technocracy-friendly book released so far (and I'm including their splatbooks). Even aside from their signature adventure, the book describes the Traditions as people "who would gladly plunge the world into a new Dark Ages just so they could have their power back."

Which is fair enough, but a definite shift in attitude. I actually don't know where the sweet-spot is in terms of presenting the factions. Too idealistic, and I start to feel like maybe that's something the books haven't earned - The Technocracy are canonically murderers and for all their talk of diversity, I've yet to hear any of the Traditions advance a plan that is inclusive of large numbers of sleepers. But too cynical and it starts to feel like maybe there's no convictions at work at all - I don't believe for a second that the Technocracy would embrace Christian-nationalism and science denial, even to stay in power or that the Traditions as an organization would simply replace one static paradigm with another.

The question doesn't really get a lot of attention here, but there is definitely some tweaking taking place and thus it's worth keeping an eye open for future adjustments.

The Hunt for Helekar - Nothing too surprising. These guys were villains from the beginning and now they're presented as action-adventure villains. A cool scenario, but I don't have anything cool to say about it.

Overall, I'd say that this book is a near miss. It needs to be a little less afraid of genre, a little more specific in its suggestions, and a little more willing to engage mechanics as well as narrative (there's a great section in the Appendix that suggests sphere ratings for various Hollywood visual cliches, but honestly, it would take a whole chapter to do that subject justice). It was a decent enough read, but I can see why the planned "Tales of Magick" series never took off.

Ukss Contribtion: This is a tough one. The coolest thing here is a whole planet. But as tempting as it would be to port over the wizard war on the surface of Mars, the stakes of the conflict and the motives of the combatants are so tied to Mage's backstory that it would be a nightmare to adapt.

The second-coolest thing is presented ironically. The short fiction of the "Hold the Cheese!" section includes a henchwoman described as "the trained killer, Capricorn." And while I'm still hopping around shouting "Zodiac Assassin Squad! Zodiac Assassin Squad!" the whole thing was presented as an example of what not to do, so going with that feels a little spiteful on my part.

Third choice it is then - House Helekar. Not the organization, but the actual house itself. The Grand Harvester of Souls has ripped it out of its foundation and is now using mechanically implausible plot-device magic to turn it into a mobile base for his followers' hit-and-run terrorist attacks. Teleporting murder temple is a damned interesting enemy in nearly any fantasy milieu.

(M: tAs) The Orphan's Survival Guide

CW: Abuse, racism, sexual assault, and more

I was all set to give The Orphan's Survival Guide a tentative thumbs up . . . and then I read the storytelling chapter.

This is my second version of this post. In the first, I may have written some . . . intemperate words where I challenged Phil Brucato to a duel to the death in the middle of Times Square. In my defense, though, I was provoked. When the chapter fiction gratuitously describes an incestuous rape and has the narrator describe the experience as "[feeling] like a condom dragged from a f-g-t's ass," how are you supposed to respond if not with incoherent screaming and punching at the air?

On the next page, it tells you that people on "the street" talk rough and it's actually okay to enhance the verisimilitude of your game by using racial slurs. It even helpfully provides a list, just in case, you know, you had trouble thinking of any. But don't worry, it's only racist if you mean it (very close paraphrase). Remember, "if your players get wigged, remind 'em it's just a fucking game."

Ooh, I'm on the verge of doing it again. What does it even mean to say "Most of the regulars claim to be bisexual; for the most part, this allows them to dress androgynously and fuck anyone they please without considering the true nature of their sexuality" (not from the storytelling chapter, granted, but something that irritated me, as a bisexual man, in much the same way).

Does The Orphan's Survival Guide deserve to be called "evil," then? Well, no book that includes the line, "some of us can handle Ebonics" can ever be completely innocent, but it's a tough question because my mind wasn't even going there until Chapter 5. It makes me angry, because I was previously prepared to focus on the much more interesting questions raised by the earlier chapters, so much so that I was only going to make a snide remark about the way that 90s White Wolf would just casually drop in rape references to make their gothic punk world seem "gritty."

I don't want to give White Wolf too much of a pass here. This is fairly classic "equal opportunity offender" (the word "Whitey" is included in the list of slurs) oblivious "ironic racism," and I'm sure the authors didn't mean it. But I went pretty hard on The Complete Barbarian's Handbook and the worst they did was suggest that Polynesian-expy "barbarians" are naturally lazy and you should play your character accordingly. No child prostitutes as suggested character archetypes at all.

I think it's the "turd in the punchbowl" effect. Really, only about 20% of this book deserves to be on your "worst of 90s White Wolf" podcast, and it would be so much fun to talk about silly-type "embarrassing" stuff like this book's frequent reverential name-dropping of The Crow, but, but . . .

The storytelling section advises you to give one of your characters AIDS. The quote "Got a sexual hang-up? Work it out." is 100% real. "Don't do the PC thing."

Don't . . .

Do . . .

The PC . . .

Thing . . .

As storytelling advice . . . GRAGHH!!!

There's good stuff in here. The first appearance of Penny Dreadful, wise sewer alligators who mentor young mages, the presaging of Mage: Revised's change in focus, The Associates, a cabal of high-society rogue mages who use their powers to commit impossible crimes . . . I could just talk about that stuff.

After all, in 1998 I was even more oblivious than this book. I fancied myself an anti-racist liberal, but I'd have argued hotly with you if you'd suggested there was anything wrong with the sentence "If a car full of homiez pulls up to the curb, crank some bad noise and get the blood pumpin'." And a rote that lets mages "darken their skin to blend into an ethnic neighborhood" would have just seemed like a sensible bit of world-building to me.

Is it not hypocritical then, for me to sit here in judgement, with my evolved 2020 morality, and condemn this work from a particular time and place, just because it was fixed into a static form?

Yeah, totally. The me from 1998 would have thought this book was totally badass, no argument. That still doesn't mean I want to talk about it today.

Ukss Contribution: None. You know what you did Orphan's Survival Guide. You know what you did.