The Fate of Atlantis [Mage: The Awakening]

Mage: The Awakening, Open Development

A long time ago – what seems like an incredibly long time to me, but is probably actually about a year and a half, I had a conversation with Ian Watson. I was newly-minted Awakening Developer but still claiming to not be in threads because second edition hadn’t been publicly announced. Ian was recently released from similar restrictions with Trinity.

He told me of an anecdote he’d heard about Steven Hawking. When writing the Brief History of Time, the Professor had been warned by his publishers that equations turned the general science reading audience off. Every equation in his attempt to popularize then-cutting-edge physics would reduce the work’s impact. If you know anything about Physics, you’ll know that physicists do double-duty as mathematicians most of the time. At the high end, it’s almost all math.

Still, Pfr Hawking took the advice on board, and the book ended up with only a single equation in it. E=MC2. Once.

“It would be interesting,” Ian said “to see a version of Awakening that treated the word “Atlantis” the same way.”

“It sounds like you’ve read my outline,” said I.

Atlantis and the Occult

Here’s something you might not be aware of, if your only exposure to occult practices is through other roleplaying games. The 19th Century societies that produced most of the western modern occult were chock-full of Atlantis-Seekers. Mage is (thank you forum-goer I can’t remember the name of who said this) “Neo-Platonism by way of Theosophy,” and part of Theosophy’s baggage is the belief in ancient civilizations who were more enlightened. Plato’s story was a minor curiosity for centuries, limited only to the few people who’d ever head of him (although it informed things like the Arabic legends of what happened to Irem, Mummy fans!) but became popularized when 19th Century occultists got hold of it. Mediums claimed to have Atlantean spirit-guides. Proto-Archaeologists looked for it about as often as they looked for Troy. Over the last century, it’s gone from the province of secretive societies and cultural imperialists to the stuff of cheap paperback “popular science” books. Enter any new age shop, and you’ll find a book about Atlantis.

Some problems with that, and our responses to them as game designers;

Atlantis as used by the Theosophists was a hellova racist idea. The reason these fringe groups went around co-opting 3000-year old Greek parables and inventing places like Lemuria, Mu, and Ultima Thule was to explain how “savage” cultures could have produced their own ancient civilizations. It’s the same thing that only a few decades ago led to “the Pyramids of South America must have been built by aliens, because brown people certainly wouldn’t have been able to”. It’s offensive on many levels. How to make a roleplaying game drawing on the modern occult without being colossal racists ourselves? How can we make a game claiming that the Fall was caused by a particular myth, especially one as White as Atlantis, without alienating anyone who isn’t of European descent?

First, we make it clear that Atlanteans didn’t build Machu Pichu. Human history in the new World of Darkness stands on its own merits – no one is “descended” from Atlantis or “barbarian kingdoms”. Atlantis never existed in the Fallen World; it’s a symbol, nothing more. Mages know that the stories about it aren’t literally true, even that it wasn’t called “Atlantis”, but use them because they’re good Yantras; they’re symbolically true, which is the foundation of magic.

Second, we confront the uglier side of occultism head on with open eyes. The Fallen World Anthology features a story in which the characters meet a tribe of Rmoahals, while one of them complains that Rmoahals aren’t real and the very concept of them is offensively racist. Factions like the Daksha play up the nastier elements of theosophy. The Mysterium, with their globetrotting Mystery-seeking ways, have “culturally appropriate stuff” as one of their suggested means of falling to hubris.

The first edition of Mage did both of these things, but not loudly enough for first impressions – if your sole exposure to Atlantis in Mage is the lengthy section in the corebook, you can be forgiven for not waiting until Secrets of the Ruined Kingdom, Mysterium, Imperial Mysteries, and a dozen other books introduce doubt after doubt about the “official story”. Yes, Amy Wu was a signature character from the beginning (and she still is, as you’ll see when Thyrsus comes around,) but she’s one of fifteen.

Problem two; if we make it clear that “Atlantis” didn’t ever exist in the WoD’s current timeline, that denies us the use of it for another plank of Awakening’s source material: pulp horror-magic stories of ancient temples, ancient curses, and vanished histories. Things like Cxaxa Queraphis and her Heart full of Flies from Reign of the Exarchs, bloody monuments to vanished sacrifices in the Astral Realms, barely-understood defenses built around tombs containing unimaginable horrors.

We’ve picked up the suggestions here and there in the line (especially in Secrets of the Ruined Kingdom, as you’d expect) that “Atlantean” sites are impossible to date or connect to one another and gone for “they still exist despite having no origin after the Fall, and what’s more they’re all from different Atlantises.” That frees the Storyteller to go all-out on artifacts from peoples who never were without worrying, and matches up with the super-Paradox of universal retcons from Imperial Mysteries.

Problem three; if “Atlantis” is just a symbolic name slapped on a theoretical (and inherently, utterly unknowable) civilisation before the Fall to give Mages something to call it, why do the Diamond and Seers claim to be descended from it?

We’ve already talked about our solution to this in “New Order” last month. They don’t.

The Diamond Orders deliberately ape what they see as the Supernal sympathy of “Atlantean society” in order to become closer to the Supernal. It’s a role they’re playing, a vast communal Shadow Name. I’ve had to tell Neall Price off for calling it “the Atlantean Paradigm” in his drafts (a little *too* much winking at Ascension, that,) but the full name of the “Diamond” is based on it – “The Diamond Precept” is named after the Silver Ladder concept of “the Awakened are One Nation.” That before the Fall, magic was glorious.

That still leaves the Orders in need of a historical origin and a reason why they decided on “Atlantis” as a name for their shared spiritual one. You’ll get both in Awakening‘s tenth of World of Darkness: Dark Eras, which depicts the time the Greek, Indian, and Persian mages met and realized their cultural myths of a broken universe and a vanished people had something in common, and when the first Seers of the Throne split off from them. Which is the other part of the setting changes – Seers and Diamond mages sometimes claim that their cold war goes all the way “back to Atlantis,” that they’ve always been enemies.

They’re lying. The first Seers were factions in what would eventually be the Diamond.

As for why Atlantis didn’t enter popular occultism until the 19th century; blame it on the Nameless.

All of this comes together into a particular view of the Awakened City that draws on modern occultism while acknowledging and working around its baggage, that means the history of the World of Darkness still resembles our world’s with extra monsters.

The Disney Effect, and Order of Reading.

All of which is well and good, but we’re still talking about Atlantis here, and the idea seems inherently amusing and/or a turn-off for some people. Readers who don’t know or care about how authentic a setting element it is. Whose opinion can be summed up by… Well… This;

Laying my Developer cards on the table now. I’ve never seen the Disney movie in question. Atlantis to me is the Aion sequence from The Books of Magic, it’s Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis on my childhood 386. But I get why for some people, the word itself poses a problem.

If the difficulty is just the connotations of the word Atlantis, and it getting in the way of taking in what Mage’s Time Before is depicted as in the gameline, that goes all the way back to Ian’s conversation with me when this new edition was just a rambling email from me to Rich Thomas.

So, the Atlantis myth in second edition is not at the start of the book. It’s not even in the middle of the book. We describe the setting of Mage as it is now (which, yes, includes the Exarchs), and mention that the Diamond model themselves after a symbolic “perfect” society, but we’ve got other things to talk about, like Mysteries, the rules, and mage society. When we get to the Mysterious World chapter, we describe ruins of the Time Before, presented next to Supernal Verges and Chantries as examples of weird places mages investigate.

And, then, right at the end of the book, we have an Appendix, which describes Atlantis in terms of what mages have pieced together from Ruins, and what they believe about it. It’s by new-to-Mage freelancer Lauren Roy, and it’s one of my favorite parts of the new corebook. It transitions from talking about the Fall to talking about Ascension, and what it means for the Awakened, which is the literal last words in the book bar the character sheet, but I’ll save that for the final Open Development Blog.

We use the word “Atlantis” more than once, but the spirit of Hawking is with us. In the current draft of Awakening Second Edition, the word Atlantis appears 26 times (and most of them have been amended to “Awakened City” or “Time Before” in redlines,) compared to 106 in First Edition.

Our hope is that the changes we’ve made to emphasis and depiction of the Awakened City and the Time Before convince a few people who couldn’t buy into Awakening because of Atlantis to give the game another look, but here’s another serious note.

In this week’s Promethean Blog, Matt talks about the Humanist Buy-In of Promethean: The Created; how you can remove the urgent desire to be human from the game, but the gameline we publish won’t directly support it. Either you accept that part of the game, change it yourself, or you play something else.

Ultimately, Atlantis is part of Awakening’s Buy-In. There was once a civilisation, who achieved mastery of magic and broke the universe. The Orders, thanks to their Greco-Indian origins only a generation after Plato, call it “Atlantis.”

If that crosses a line in the sand for you, we can’t help you. It’d be easier to excise from Awakening‘s setting than Promethean’s humanism is – Atlantis is presented as a widely theorized origin for the Exarchs and the Lie, but absolutely nothing about them requires it. All you’d really be losing is the possibility of entering a time-lost ruin of neveryear and facing down what’s inside. And

Our hope – MY hope – is that you’ll buy in. Can’t do anything more than that.

Excerpt: The Time Before

And now, the half of Appendix Two in question!

Appendix Two: Legends of the Fall

“Where Humanity gets it wrong, by your time, is in imagining Atlantis as having any kind of quantifiable existence. Which of course it hasn’t; not in the way they imagine, anyway. There have been an awful lot of Atlantises, will be quite a few more.

“It’s just a symbol. A symbol of the art.

“The True Atlantis is inside you, just as it’s inside all of us. The sunken land beneath the dark sea, lost beneath the waves of wet, black stories and myths that break upon the shores of our minds. Atlantis is the Shadow-land. The birth-place of civilization. The fair land in the west that is lost to us, but remains forever, true birthplace and true goal.”

– Neil Gaiman, The Books of Magic

Atlantis was the greatest city that ever existed. Atlantis was the height of Awakened potential. Atlantis was the place where every mage could be her best self, reach for and attain her brightest dreams, make the stars themselves gasp in delight at the wonders performed below.

Atlantis is a Truth ringing deep within a mage’s bones: the reverberation that thrilled through him the day his palm slapped against the base of the Watchtower; the flow of the ink or blood or tears he used to write his name — his Name — on its walls; the scrape of chisel on stone as he carved the letters deep.

Atlantis is a Lie the Awakened tell themselves.

Atlantis was, and then was not.

The Time Before

Mages have passed the story of Atlantis from mentor to eager student for as long as anyone can recall. Tales of the Golden City have simply always been told, though no definitive evidence of its existence have yet been uncovered. Sages speak of towers spiraling up and up, grazing the sky itself. We were priests and viziers, say the Silver Ladder. We were the guards and peacekeepers, say the Adamantine Arrow. And perhaps they would be, if it were more than a symbol. No consistent records survived the City’s catastrophic destruction. No one has yet found the evidence that proves, beyond a doubt, that Atlantis existed.

What the mages have, what makes them cling so tightly to the idea of Atlantis-that-fell, are pieces that simply don’t fit anywhere in this world. The Mysterium have a library full of explorers’ journals, their pages filled with sketches of ruins whose civilizations never existed. In far-flung corners of the world, mages have visited the graves of kings who were never crowned on this Earth, dug up the bones of impossible creatures, spelunked into caves whose painted walls couldn’t have been touched by human hands. Not according to the histories we know.

Sleeper technology is useless on these artifacts. Attempts at scientific dating yield unreliable results: this piece is from the Mezozoic Era, from 50 B.C., from the 13th century. It is a scant few seconds young and millions of years old. Should the machine be making that noise?

Time mages fare no better at tracing the origins of their colleagues’ finds. Most are left with skull-splitting headaches for their efforts, and days or weeks of temporal confusion afterwards. The Earth is far older than humanity; no matter how far back a mage looks, within human history or far before it, Atlantis is nowhere.

The evidence from these ruins and artifacts can’t be shaped into a single, consistent history. Tales of glorious cities and empires that existed in the time before time are sprinkled throughout world mythology. The Aztecs referred to Aztlán; the Mahabharata opens with the history of the Naga Kingdom; ancient Buddhist texts mention Shambhala. Call it Hyperborea or Brittia or Paititi. Name its people Pelasgians or inhabitants of the Dreamtime. “Atlantis” is a catch-all term, suggested for its familiarity to the Diamond Orders whose origins lay in ancient Greece.

Over the last four millennia, the Awakened have chased these conflicting-yet-similar stories to tease out one larger truth: a world existed before this one. Little and less is known about the inhabitants of the Time Before, but the Orders do agree on a few key points.

The Awakened existed in the Time Before.

Stories about these mythical cities center around characters who were something more. Many of them mention feats performed by wizards, magicians, the god-blooded. Others focus on men and women who were faster, stronger, cleverer than their adversaries. Whether those superlatives were granted by the gods or the sheer force of the heroes’ wills, there is no doubt they were more than simply human.

The inhabitants of the Time Before dwelt within, or Ascended to, the Supernal Realms.

It’s there in the cave paintings, if you know what to look for. It’s in a line of hieroglyphs whose revelations the Guardians of the Veil were reluctant to divulge once they’d been deciphered. It’s in a snatch of song sung in the High Speech, recorded in a lonely ruin by a Libertine. The Awakened of the Time Before shed their mortal skins and returned to the Supernal Realm that birthed us all, becoming beings of pure magic.

Their actions drastically changed the universe.

Their Ascension broke the world. The how of it is — at first blush — not as important as the conclusion drawn: the damage done by those original Awakened caused the Supernal Realms to drift out of our reach. It left us here in the Fallen World, with the Quiescence settling over the Sleepers and no easy way to reach across the Abyss and return to what once was. The effects of the predecessors’ actions were so devastating, they erased themselves from existence. The world that is now is the world that always has been: one where Atlantis is little more than a fairy tale. A myth. A legend. A Lie.

Next Week

No Poll, as I made David Hill a promise. He’s been hoping we’ll show some of his work, so we’re returning from the setting’s esoterica to the core of the game. It’s time to talk about Wisdom.

Oh, and literally as I wrote this blog post, Good Old Games have released The Fate of Atlantis rebuilt for modern PCs. If you haven’t played it, do.