Awakened Inspirations

Mage: The Awakening, Open Development

Welcome back! It’s my last day at home before starting the Ohgod miles journey to Indianapolis and GenCon, but I think the poll on the last post is now comprehensively won by “Consilia,” and I thought I’d put the next post up.

Speaking of GenCon, I’ve now had the working draft of Fallen World Chronicle printed and bound, and will have it on me at the Convention. It’s missing two of the Arcana (but which two!?) and a few other sections, but it still contains Mysteries worth seeking. If you see me (I’m the pudgy English guy who’ll be hanging around the Onyx Path booth a lot) ask to see it.

This week, though, we’re taking a long look at the Inspirational Media list for Awakening.

I love media lists in game books. I always find something new recommended in them. The media list in the Awakening writers’ bible is accordingly quite long – too long to actually reproduce entirely in the book. But that’s what blog posts are for!

This, then, is where Awakening comes from:

Comics & Graphic Novels

Lots of people use film and television metaphors for roleplaying games – they “cast” their player and Storyteller characters and insert act breaks. I tend to think rpgs are a lot closer to serial comics – they have a somewhat elastic sense of continuity when they go on too long, and break down into chapters/issues that group into stories which are themselves part of larger arcs.

And the two greatest influences on Mage are comics.

Hellblazer is the original. John Constantine, nicotine-stained, trenchcoated asshole demonologist and mage, has been the character other occult detectives are measured against since he was a side-character in Swamp Thing. His jackdaw magical style fits Awakening‘s mages, but it’s his sheer inability to let a mystery go despite the ever-increasing fallout for those around him that really make him stand out. Vertigo are finally collecting the series sequentially, and the volumes released so far cover some of the best stories.

The Invisibles is the trip. Tonally, it’s closer to Ascension (unless you’re playing a particularly gonzo Chronicle), but the characters and the world they’re in is much, much closer to Awakening: the titular magician-terrorists assign “cabal” roles by symbolism, take on Shadow Names, and fight the forces of universal oppression in a world that’s a hologram between larger, Supernal realities. Its antagonists were a primary inspiration behind the Seers of the Throne; an early arc even has what Mage calls Profane Urim in it.

Other comics of potential interest include;

Promethea, an Alan Moore comic about a woman who merges with the Astral incarnation of magic. It features a Tarot- and Kabala-steeped otherworld that’s inspirational for the Astral Realms.

The Books of Magic, Neil Gaiman’s take on a modern-day mage. Ignore Tim Hunter’s close physical resemblance to another boy wizard (this came first anyway), and take a look at the initial miniseries if nothing else. Among meditations on the nature of magic, mystery, and choice, Gaimain utterly nails Atlantis in a single page.

Locke and Key, by Joe Hill (Stephen King’s son), shows a bereaved family go up against magical family secrets, a house of secrets, and what could easily be an Abyssal entity.

Literature

Mage draws on stories about obsession, conspiracy, and the occult.

Umberto Eco is good at dissecting the motivation of mystery-seekers; The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum are both appropriate for different reasons.

The Weird History fiction of Tim Powers mixes occult research with real events and spins yarns of magic crawling under the world’s skin. The best three books for Awakening are The Anubis Gates, Declare, and Last Call.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy and the Historical Illuminatus by Robert Shea and Bob Wilson mainline the kind of twisting, societies-as-mysteries we’re after for the Orders.

The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte shows the main character’s descent through a Mystery Play, and if you read the book instead of watching the movie you aren’t supporting Roman Polanski.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk depicts a particularly violent and strange Thyrsus Awakening. You shouldn’t die without any scars.

The Miriam Black trilogy (Blackbird, Mockingbird, and Cormorant) by another Chuck – former Hunter: The Vigil Developer Chuck Wendig, no less! – are about a drifter who sees the death of anyone she touches. Violent, sweary, and funny along with the horror.

Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show and Imajica show off different facets of Awakening’s world, with rival magicians, layers of reality and – in Great and Secret Show – something close to what Awakening means by “Atlantis”.

The best book for Awakening, though, for the sheer mood of layers on layers of strangeness, is Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, at least two layers of which could describe a Mastigos Awakening or Pandemonic Verge. Beware the Minotaur .

Oh, yes, and there’s that incredibly popular series about a Wizard Detective. The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher aren’t that close to Awakening, being a lot more pulpy, but some of them are quite good and Butcher deliberately follows the narrative beats of mystery fiction in his plotting.

Closer to Awakening’s setting are the Night Watch pentology by Sergei Lukyanenko—they’re very Russian, and the first two were adapted into movies you can probably find cheap on an on-demand service somewhere, but they deal with a world with a many-layered magical world underneath, only the shallows of which are accessible. If you need a hand grokking the Fallen / Supernal Worlds, give it a go.

Last, John Dies At The End and its sequel This Book Is Full Of Spiders by David Wong are horror-comedic looks at why you shouldn’t imbue an unprepared Sleeper with Mage Sight.

Film

The film adaptations of Fight Club, Night Watch, John Dies At The End, the Name of the Rose, and Club Dumas (The Ninth Gate) are all worth seeing.

Constantine is a frustrating adaptation — it ignores most of the character of the original, but is surprisingly faithful to the plot beats of the story it’s adapted from (“Dangerous Habits”, volume 5 of the current reprint drive, if you’re curious). Ignoring where it came from, it’s a perfectly good modern-occult film, and has one of the best depictions of Mage Sight committed to film.

If Fight Club’s a Thyrsus Awakening, then Donnie Darko is an Acanthus’ mystery play. Caught in a time loop punctuated by his own unjust, random death, a young man starts seeing time. The scene where people’s timelines extrude out of their bodies like silvery threads is pure Acanthus Mage Sight.

The non-superhero works of Christopher Nolan are all meditations on obsession in puzzlebox world. There’s something for Awakening in all of them – a quote from Memento opens Fallen World’s Sleepers Chapter, The Prestige warns of rivalry turned to hubris and murder, and Inception shows what it’s like to invade a victim’s Oneiros.

Of the two gnostic films that came out at the same time (and even shared some sets!) Dark City is more Awakening than The Matrix, if only because the hero has to stay in the prison of the real even after seeing through the Lie he’s been kept in. The Matrix has more flash and catharsis, while Dark City has more heart.

Television

There’s a TV adaptation of Hellblazer (again called Constantine) on the way this year, which I await with interest. Let’s hope it’s better than the ill-fated adaptation of the Dresden Files.

True Detective came out of nowhere to be one of the best inspirations for Awakening on the small screen. Rust Cohle is Mastigos as fuck.

The Lost Room deals with the aftermath of reality going wrong in a lonely desert motel room, transforming everything in it into a powerful artifact now sought after by occult conspirators.

Video Games

The Assassins Creed games feature rival conspiracies (one dedicated to freedom, the other control) astrally-projecting back into history to seek clues to the vanished magical civilization that created humanity and left potent artifacts behind. You can get all kinds of inspiration for Awakening from it, especially if you’re using a historical setting.

The Stanley Parable is short, but is The Lie in a three-hour experience. It’s also very, very funny.

Non-Fiction

If you’re interested in where Atlantis came from in a modern occult setting, try Joscelyn Godwin’s Atlantis and the Cycles of Time, a survey of the 19th and 20th century occultist movements Awakening’s cosmology and backstory are based on.

If you want to look at what people really thought about magic in European history, try Stuart Clark’s Thinking With Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe.

If you’re interested in the Supernal World, get your hands on an encyclopedia of symbolism. The original Awakening team recommended The Magician’s Companion: A Practical and Encyclopedic Guide to Magical & Religious Symbolism by Bill Whitcomb.

Ken Hite’s Suppressed Transmissions are also an excellent guide to the weird. Ken wrote on Secrets of the Ruined Temple, early in Awakening‘s line, and this series (originally written for Steve Jackson Games’ magazine) is worth the difficulty you’ll face in finding it.

Music

By popular demand, I have accepted the challenge from Stew “DJ” Wilson. I always blank when trying to think of the perfect track to go with an individual blog post, so thus far we haven’t had any, but this post is about all media, so I can put an entire playlist up.

And here it is

(Apologies for the last song, by the way. A certain someone bet me I wouldn’t include it. Pay up, Wilson.)

Next week!

I’ll be back home, I’ll be jetlagged, but I’ll be happy to spill the beans on one of our two most-requested topics. Paradox or Orders?

(Edited to add Fight Club, Wendig and Barker’s books)