May The Fourth Be With You [Mage: The Awakening]

Mage: The Awakening

Philosophy is odious and obscure;

Both law and physic are for petty wits;

Divinity is basest of the three,

Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible, and vile.

‘Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me.

— Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

Welcome back, faithful readers!

You’ve all been patiently and not-so-patiently waiting for Mage‘s release. Every Monday Meeting blog, someone asks about it. Every time I turn up on a different forum, someone asks about it. There’s a reddit thread asking about it right now.

Last time on Signs of Sorcery‘s Open Development, I said my next blog would likely be good news. And it is.

Mage: The Awakening Second Edition will be released next Wednesday, the 4th May

This will be the Advance PDF, and after a few weeks of collecting errata and mistakes eagle-eyed readers submit on our official forum, the book will then be locked and the Print-on-Demand option turned on. If something unexpectedly bad happens to us or DrivethruRPG, it could delay release, but the game has now been cleared by White Wolf and, from our point of view, is ready to go.

I should note that the Advance PDF won’t have an index – as with Requiem and Forsaken, we’ll do that after the open errata-gathering, when we update the pdf with any corrections.

The Road Behind

December 2012. That’s when Mage became more than a thirty-second conversation with Rich at GenCon (I said “would you be open to me pitching a Mage Chronicle Book?” He said “Yeah!”)

That’s when I pitched the Fallen World Chronicle.

2013 was spent on Vampire and Demon, until GenCon that year, when Werewolf and Mage were announced and work began. I recruited the finest writing team I’ve ever worked with and reexamined every aspect of Mage, at length. In May 2014, we had a writer’s bible the size of a thin sourcebook, a clear vision of what the mechanics would look like (even if it did call Reach “Shifts” and have other minor differences to the game being released next week) and an outline. By GenCon 2014 we had a nearly-complete first draft, and I was told the book was changing title to be a proper Second Edition.

Disaster struck first two of our writers, delaying the first draft by a few months, and then me, delaying the redlining. Still, by the following spring Mage was back out to the writers and I came to GenCon 2015 with a complete second draft that had been sent to our volunteer playtest groups. In late August 2015 the book went off to editing and art direction.

Then CCP sold White Wolf to Paradox, and the game was delayed again while our new licensor tackled the mountain of tasks needed to take over the property. By last Christmas, that had all resolved and we were putting the finishing touches on it as final art came in. Then text approval, layout, proofing, and finally the last few weeks of approval to publish.

It’s been a long, sometimes difficult, but incredibly rewarding road, and I wouldn’t have missed out on it for the world.

The Path Ahead

Signs of Sorcery is in Development (which will become more Open after the core’s release) and we have support material planned for the blog; 2e mechanics for Tremere, Scelesti, and Mad Ones, and some converted Legacies; the Cryptologos, Sisterhood of the Blessed, Perfected Adepts, and Orphans of Proteus. I’ve been thinking about ways to do a formal FAQ with our forums, too.

But that’s all for the future. For now, the long wait is nearly over.

Prepare to Awaken