My Ascension (Part 3)

Mage had been my formal introduction to the "World of Darkness" series of games. These were interlocking RPG settings that ranged from Vampire: The Masquerade to Demon: The Fallen and everything in between. The core d10 rules were (mostly) the same, allowing characters of all types in interact with one another.

(Be careful, though. They weren't all balanced to the point of being chummy. For example, you wouldn't want to be a novice Hunter and get on the bad side of your Vampire buddy. There's definitely a food chain.)

Each new book exposed another layer of the "World of Darkness", or oWoD. The books I played most with are collectively referred to as the oWoD since they're the "old" World of Darkness. Just over a decade ago, a new series of books with updated rules and setting started flooding shelves which fans lovingly refer to as the "New World of Darkness".

Anyhoo, Vampires, Werewolves, Changelings . . . they all walk among us, living in their secret societies, enacting their secret rituals, and participating in their own feuds and fiefdoms. The lengths that authors like Mark Rein-Hagen went to present these worlds as parallel to our own has always fascinated me. If you've ever seen Blade or read an Anne Rice novel, it's not hard to imagine how a group of vampires could be posing as club kids, but in books like Changeling, fae lore was applied to some rather common human occurrences. These clandestine societies aren't emerging, they've been here all along, coexisting (or at least, attempting to) with mankind.

Use of the "real" world in oWoD games was encouraged so much that eventually publisher White Wolf would eventually put together city-specific sourcebooks. I never had any of these myself, but I could see a younger me getting absorbed into the Chicago or New Orleans sourcebook, cross referencing the landmarks mentioned in each with their real-life counterparts. It's a neat angle, and a fun way to expand a game.

The interconnected nature of these games led to some hilarious altercations during my time as a oWoD storyteller. One player was a Vampire of the Camarilla sect, adhering to strict traditions and enforcing Kindred law. He clashed quite a bit with the two free-wheeling Mages in our group, who wanted nothing more than to expose shams like "The Masquerade" as if they were The Lone Gunmen or something. Those particular players didn't get on so hot in real life either, resulting in bickering from both sides that would morph in and out of character. Funny how players try to create a character that isn't like them, but most times in the area of role playing, let their own personality traits shine through.

The World of Darkness was always something I wanted to be more involved with, but I drifted away from gaming for a spell and even got rid of my books. (D'oh!) In 2007, I saw some of the New World of Darkness products at a Barnes & Noble and decided to give them a try. Naturally, there was a lot of hate from older fans about them even existing, but I was surprised at what I'd found.

To be continued . . .

Thanks for reading!
Twitter: @ChrisBComics
E-Mail: backissuechris@gmail.com

My Ascension (Part 2)

Monism is the belief in a singleness or oneness of a concept. A center point that applies to any art or discipline. As a technique evolves over time, divergent paths form.

Monism is at the center of Mage: The Ascension. According to the lore presented in the core rule book, groups like the Nephandi of the Near East brought about the "Mythic ages" through their study and worship of deific forms. "God" is a word that gets thrown around a lot, especially in my neck of the woods, but it's a fitting title for these thoughtforms, as they shift bodies and slither from one century to the next.

A single God. How quaint. How simple it must be to live under one divine structure. You're probably wondering what this has to do with a role playing game. It's all about communicating with gods! Let's circle back to that tiny apartment where I participated in my first Mage session . . .

Like a 'Nam flashback, the scene returns to me. I can "see" it still. My character attempted to use matter manipulation to trap an agent of the Technocracy within the wreckage of his own overturned S.U.V. After a jump-scare right out of Terminator, my fellow mages and I were relieved to learn that the Technocratic agent was in fact disabled, and his final threatening gesture was little more than a death rattle.

(Assuming robots can "die", but that's spitting hairs.)

Before we could celebrate out victory over the establishment, Paradox set in. While bending metal and rubber and concrete to my will was an impressive feat, I'd upset something old and primal in the universe. A strange sensation enveloped my character, then a sharp pain. Then a bulge appeared under his shirt . . . I remove it to find something that wasn't there before: a tiny limb, fresh and pale and underdeveloped was growing from my abdomen.

I made a mistake. My magic hadn't been coincidental enough. I'd pushed on the walls of reality and reality said, "No bruh," and pushed back. So there we were, running back to our safe house after barely surviving a bout with the Technocracy, a gimpy little arm protruding from where it shouldn't.

I warned you things would get weird.

A couple of years later. A different campaign. A different character. I had much more history and lore under my belt, and I was better prepared for what my storyteller was going to throw at me. And I had a secret weapon, to boot. I had "God" on my side, or at least something very similar.

A member of the Virtual Adept (one class of Mage), I utilized telecommunications to make my psychic commands more coincidental and less offensive to the universe. Thanks to Neil Gaiman's American Gods, I had a different understanding of how deific forms might operate in our world and I wanted to use that knowledge to the fullest.

Our group had infiltrated a secret hideout of the Void Engineers, a subsection of the Technocracy that specializes in extradimensional travel. They'd found something from beyond, a very old and very powerful machine that could tip the scales in their favor and obliterate magic once and for all.

Attempting to stop them from cracking the dimensional barrier and recovering the Old Machine, I used a megaphone to not only magnify my voice, but give a destructive sonic force to my words. Like the voice of the Almighty in Dogma, techno-skulls cracked and exploded from the force of the sound. My previous character's trick with the wrecked car paled in comparison to this stunt, but thanks to coincidental nature of the move and a hot roll of the dice, I received very little in the way of cosmic punishment.

The Judeo-Christian God might have sat this one out, but Hermes, master communicator of the Greek pantheon, was by my side.

As you can see, Mage: The Ascension (and all of the White Wolf games for that matter) tends to dip into much stranger territory than your usual run-of-the-mill Dungeons & Dragons game. To be honest, the two scenarios I (poorly) described up above are two of the more tamer instances of my friends and I tampering with forces beyond our comprehension.

Having at least a rudimentary understanding of how Mages work, the next step was to integrate some of the other character types from the World of Darkness. Free-wheeling mages fighting cyborgs is fun for a session or three, but the real wacky stuff begins when you incorporate vampires, lychans, and fae lore into your campaign.

It was time to go book shopping!

To Be Continued . . .

Twitter: @ChrisBComics
E-Mail: backissuechris@gmail.com
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My Ascension (Part 1)

After having cut my teeth on Dungeons & Dragons and the Star Wars d20 role playing games, I thought I was hot snot on a silver platter when it came to pencil and paper games.

But I wasn't hot snot at all. I was a cold booger on a paper plate.

Y'see, while Wizards of the Coast's games taught me the basics of how to build a world and run a campaign, it was Mage: The Ascension that taught me how to RP.

Yeah, that's right. Mage. Not Vampire: The Masquerade or Werewolf: The Apocalypse, but their ugly cousin Mage. The friend and fellow role player who brought me into the fold described Mage as "The Matrix before The Matrix". The Wachowski's science fiction opus was still fresh in my mind as the coolest thing since Super Nintendo, so it was the kind of descriptor that drew me right in.

(Well, I did have a brief run-in with the Street Fighter d10 game, but that's a whole other can of beans for another time. Let's just say our first and only game ended with Spanish matador Vega losing a bout due to what I now know as erectile dysfunction. I'll leave it at that. More to come in the future . . . maybe . . .)

Mage, and the rest of its World of Darkness brethren, aren't too dissimilar to D&D or Star Wars when it comes to the components used. You need pencils, character sheets, dice, and a couple of heavy hardback books. But that is where the similarities end. World of Darkness games (WoD for short) employ one kind of die for all decision making, from diplomacy to initiative to damage: the d10.

What's neat about this is that in a pinch, you could even play the entire game with a single d10. Of course that would make for a pretty long day at the office. The systems in the game have you performing multiple die rolls for single actions and trying to get "successes". For example, a player might have a chance to roll up to eight dice for damage from a particular weapon, but only die rolls of let's say, six or higher count as successes. The number of successes determines the actual damage dealt.

(Eh, explaining the minutia of these things might not be my strong suit.) 

Anyhoo, back to the differences. Characters in WoD games don't really "level up" in the traditional sense. Instead, experience points are used to upgrade individual stats and skills. I always liked this from a role playing standpoint. Rather than just having your character get magically stronger, you can explain your growth as training in a particular skill. It makes the whole thing feel less like Diablo and more like Final Fantasy X, with its sphere grid system.

The books themselves are a real treat. Whereas the D&D Player's Handbook is literally just a collection of races, classes, and other stat fields to be filled, the WoD books mix rules with narrative and have little short stories set in the world strewn throughout, simultaneously introducing you to a mysterious new contemporary setting while also being (for the most part) well-written little supernatural ditties.

I was immediately stricken by this as I flipped through my friend's Mage book. I probably couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but this strange new game had so much more personality than the d20 I'd encountered before. This world felt so fleshed out and full of nuance, while D&D felt vague and almost too open ended for me.

My first Mage session consisted of me and two other guys running for our lives from the Technocracy and trying to make sense of our bizarre and often inpredictable abilities. It was a learning experience and our Storyteller (the WoD version of a dungeon master) felt the best way for us to learn to swim was to be tossed into the deep end of the pool.

Like it says on the tin, Mage is a game about magic and how it functions in the real world. The influences on the setting are all over the place, from Kabbalah to modern chaos magic. As I would soon learn, the trick to using magic in Mage isn't about balancing spells per day or mana points, it's about making the things you do seem coincidental, so as not to disturb the fabric of reality and alert the fascist and very Agent Smith-like Technocracy to your presence.

When a player oversteps those boundaries, reality bites back. And that's where things can get weird . . .

To Be Continued!

Twitter: @ChrisBComics
E-Mail: backissuechris@gmail.com
More Gamer Stuff: Age of Mega