Ascension [Mage: The Awakening]

Mage: The Awakening, Open Development

What seems like a lifetime ago, two months before the first of these Open Development posts, I was on holiday (that’s proper English for “vacation”) in the Orkney Islands. One day, I visited a Distillery and bought a reasonably old whisky. It’s sat, undisturbed, in its bottle in the corner of my living room ever since.

Three hours before I bought it, I sent the Writers’ Bible for Mage to the second edition writing team. The week after I returned, the Outline followed, and then we were well and truly on the road of producing a new corebook for this vast, complicated, wonderful game. The whisky was a present to myself. I’d drink it when we were done.

I’m drinking it now.

Mage: The Awakening Second Edition is now in Editing. This brings us to the end of Open Development.

Open Development Retrospective

It’s been a wild ride, this. Early days of readers voting for which core concept they’d see explained next, the satisfaction as details of our refinements to the game’s mechanics slowly came out and the fandom found them (for the most part) good. The terrible long months of redlining, when the blog went on hiatus, and the triumphant return. The cramming of the remaining Orders into the weeks before GenCon, as I realized I wouldn’t show you everything I wanted to before the game was locked off if I stuck to one post a week.

I always knew Awakening’s fans were a sleeping giant. You have (mostly) been a pleasure and an inspiration to interact with. I’ve found myself in far-flung internet fora I never thought I’d even visit.

And the feedback. Always the feedback.

I know, from experience, that it sometimes feels like we don’t listen. But I have read every message, every comment, every forum post. I asked for playtest groups, agonised when nearly a hundred volunteered, selected 10% of them and have been incredibly pleased by the detail and thought they’ve put in. Every single item they’ve reported has been considered. Granted, a handful have been “no, we’re not changing that,” but far fewer than you’d maybe think. Counting them on my fingers fewer.

Even setting aside the playtesters and just focusing on the comments here, in response to you lot, we have;

Built a better Spellcasting Quick Reference, adding it to the very end pages of the book for ease of finding it.

Tweaked the wording of almost every spell and Merit you’ve seen (yes, Egregore has been adjusted).

Beefed up the Mage Sight rules, enhancing the feeling of seeing the Supernal World that you seemed to really latch onto.

Changed some of the sample characters – the Arrow lawyer is a public defender now, not a prosecutor.

Changed “real name,” to “sympathetic name” and spent more time explaining it.

Recruited fans from the forums as setting consultants when they came forward with local knowledge about our featured cities. Who knew one of you lived in Salamanca? I didn’t, but I’m glad you got in touch.

And a host of tiny adjustments, refinements, and iterations. Everything from our explanation of Proximus’ powers to how we lay out mage society.

You haven’t been in charge, and I’ve stuck to the initial vision I had for the game back when we were writing God-Machine Chronicle. Right there in the Introduction is the heading “Addicted to Mysteries”. I read the Bible, and its the same game we’ve written over a year later. Where Open Development has come in handy is the small-scale specifics, clearing up misunderstood wordings and sparking ideas of what needed a few more words.

At GenCon, we announced the next game I’m Developing. Deviant doesn’t have an existing fanbase, so we won’t be able to do Open Development for it in quite the same style, but I am pleased with how this has gone, and I’ll be back.

Mage is now in the hands of its editor. Soon it’ll be with Art Director Mike Chaney to work his own kind of magic on it. I have supplements to outline – we’ve announced Signs of Sorcery and Tome of the Pentacle.

The Last Word

As promised, I’m going to close with the last section of the new corebook, by “I’m so glad we got her before she got *really* famous” writer Lauren Roy. This follows immediately from the text in the “Fate of Atlantis” post earlier on the blog.

Ascension

Whether the Fall was orchestrated by the Exarchs, caused by a war between factions of mages, or whether the sheer amount of magical energy was too much for reality to handle is a debate that’s raged on for thousands of years, probably since the first Awakened left stranded in the Fallen World first picked themselves up and brushed the disappearing dust of Atlantis from their knees.

The cautionary tale here is not do not seek Ascension. It’s don’t make their mistakes. Ascension — the desire to cast off the trappings of the Fallen World and return to the Supernal World, to once more taste magic at its source and be a part of that source — is a desire that survived the Fall. The path to Ascension is neither easy nor straightforward. Willworkers have poured oceans of ink onto pages laying out the rumors they’ve heard of other mages who have achieved it for themselves. Rarely are these eyewitness accounts — the testimony of an apprentice, the careful notes of a peer within one’s Order — but instead come from friends of friends, a Mystagogue who heard it from a théarch who overheard a pair of Arrows discussing what their archmaster saw.

As with the scattered tales of lost cities, there’s truth to be gleaned from rumors of Ascended mages. No two legends are exactly the same, which is both heartening and despair-inducing for the Awakened who wish to bring their own about. With such differences, how can anyone know what’s required of him? With no single, clear, way to attain the Supernal, anyone is a candidate for Ascension.

Just about every mage has heard an Ascension story. They’re topics of philosophical discussion in Order sancta. Cabals debate details over bottles of whiskey late into the night. They whisper Shadow Names to each other, not their own, but the names of those mages who embodied magic itself. Mages who no longer exist in the Fallen World because they’ve become so much more. Their names and faces, the items their contemporaries associated with them or their magic style, are symbols now, contained within the Imagoes conjured in the mind’s eye when the Awakened cast their spells. Following are two names modern mages might have heard bandied about.

An Acanthus in the Silver Ladder, Xeras spent his life pre-Awakening studying string theory and special relativity. He never fully quit himself of his Sleeper life — his passions turned easily into Obsession, and he discovered you saw a whole lot more when you used mage sight to observe photons smashing into one another. Xeras saw time as a vine, sinking its roots deep into the soil, travelling and branching out below ground far from where the plant breaks the surface. He was last seen on his way to gain access to the Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois, though no records exist of his presence there. Notes he left behind are a mix of complex Sleeper formulae, commentary in High Speech, and several pages written in a language whose origins are yet a mystery. Time mages have used vines, his name, and some of the symbols from his last set of notes to power their spells.

All stories about Phrygia are stories of lonesome roads late at night. She was a Nameless Moros, and in the early part of the 20th century, she walked from one end of the United States to the other. Not quite a phantom hitchhiker, but perhaps the inspiration for the legend, the somberly-clad woman convinced many and more a driver to let go of the things that weighed heavy on their hearts. Phrygia was the passenger you unburdened yourself to as the clock swept on past midnight. After a ride with Phrygia, you were a better version of yourself. Lighter. She disappeared after the start of the Great Depression and hasn’t been seen since. Her likeness appears in several Tarot decks made by Awakened crafters, on cards signifying upheaval and change.

Neither Xeras nor Phrygia, nor any other Ascended, are remembered by the Sleepers who once knew them. The Ascended slip out of Sleeper memory like water through a sieve. The Quiescence sits heaviest upon close friends and family. People who saw the Ascended every day, if she kept any in her life, wax nostalgic for a short while, as though their loved one had simply gone on a long trip. They quickly change the subject, and resist attempts to return to it. The more distantly a Sleeper orbited the Ascended’s life, the foggier the memories get, until no one remembers her at all.

Mages, however, don’t forget. They seek out evidence of the Ascended with as much fervor as they hunt for evidence of lost Atlantis. More, perhaps, in the case of mages who feel it’s time to move on from what the Awakened were and focus on who they might best become. Finding proof of an Ascended mage’s passage is akin to a Sleeper of abiding faith coming into the possession of a holy relic: What you hold ties you, even tenuously, to the Mystery.

Ascension is an act of transformation. When the mage’s soul joins with the Supernal World, what she leaves behind at the moment she Ascends may be transformed as well. Bones turn to crystal. Locks of hair might become the finespun metal of her Watchtower, strong enough to string a talisman on and hang about one’s neck. These Sariras are powerful Artifacts, sought-after by dedicated mages as signposts to escaping the Fallen World. The place where the Ascension happened might also be affected: the Fallen World grows thin in that spot, opening a Verge to a realm that reflects the mage’s final moments. The environment itself can be profoundly, permanently changed — the waves of Life radiating outward from her body makes flowers bloom in the desert; the burst of Prime alters the area’s Ley Lines.

Atlantis’ fall put that reality out of mages’ reach. It separated them from great feats of magic, set most of the world to Sleeping. But the Awakened haven’t given up hope. The Supernal World is still there, the Watchtowers calling across the Abyss, come home, come home, come home. And the mages have heard the call.