Difference between revisions of "Mage: The Ascension"

Revision as of 00:09, 16 January 2018

The Mage sphere on From The Ashes: Detroit by Night uses rules from Mage 20. We will generally be accepting applications for Traditions and Orphan PCs with a couple of exceptions and notes. Read on for specifics!

Overview

Mages are regular ol' mortal human sorts empowered by cosmic understanding and a force of will.

The World

There is no Avatar Storm. Xerxes Jones did not drop a spirit nuke. The gauntlet has thickened in response to the apparent Technocratic victory over our realm, and during the period of crumbling morale and wartime stressors - Doissetep did, in fact, succumb to infighting and rioting that destroyed the very horizon realm itself, erasing that august chantry from existence. We reject the Heylel plotline almost in its entirety. Doissetep was the victim of the hubris of its masters - and was destroyed largely by a group of ill-contented acolytes and apprentices who, 'en masse', decided to stage a revolution. They lacked the necessary knowledge and mastery to keep Doissetep running, however, and ultimately all were doomed. Horizon, the ruling seat of the Council of Nine Mystick Traditions, still exists, but they have taken to hiding behind the bureaucracy - rarely deigning to make direct proclamations. A network of Tribunes and Magistrates execute the various codes of conduct for Tradition society, but at the end of the day, only the most egregious offenses warrant that kind of involvement. Each tradition and chantry polices its own, now. Because we have the old Council still, we reject The Sphinx.

The Second Massassa war is greatly overstated, but we see echoes of those kinds of conflicts in Detroit - the Order of Hermes, in particular, reserves a special hatred for Vampires, and House Tremere in particular.

Knowledge of these events is extremely rare, but for our own purposes, this OOC explanation is necessary to avoid questions.

As a consequence of the apparent Technocratic victory, we adopt the 'Technocratic Paradigm' as our default understanding; if it looks like magic, it's vulgar.

We temper this with a minor form of the 'Reality Zones' metaphysic. There are places where what humanity believes does not hold sway - in large part because humanity believes the rules do not hold sway there. A house that a whole community believes to be 'haunted' will permit many magical feats there - coincidentally - that would be vulgar elsewhere. Holy places are especially prone to this effect, and sanctums are artificially constructed reality zones in this sense. The further you are from people, the more people believe that anything is possible.

Chantries and Horizon Realms are rare, but many exist and several of those that exist are very powerful. Doissetep has been replaced by a more decentralized Traditions society. Generally speaking, nodes are also rare - casualties of the same war that claimed so many chantries (on both sides). The term 'Chantry' simply means a common, usually fortified, physical location to which Mages have associated themselves through bonds of community. These bonds are usually bonds of shared paradigm, especially in this 'post Pogrom' age. In the past, cross-tradition 'war chantries' were more common, as diverse and disparate Mages formed alliances to fight common enemies. Around powerful nodes such communities still exist - sharing the common bond of wanting to protect and make use of the natural resource. In general, however, chantries tend to be single-tradition affairs.

Horizon Realms are expensive both in terms of construction costs and in terms of the quintessence required to sustain them. They are always associated with nodes, and loss of their nodes endangers them; quintessence can be manually imported, tass can be burned to fuel the Realm, and mages can spend continuous effort to keep the place going - but absent a force to sustain it, these realms float within an Umbra that has a strong inertial force pulling the realm towards a return to the natural state. Untethered realms suffer from unstable location and eventually succumb to that pressure, reabsorbed by the Umbra, usually with the ephemeration of all within.

We use Sorcerer: Revised, so yes many Traditions (especially the Order of Hermes, Dreamspeakers, Celestial Chorus, Cult of Ecstasy, and Verbena) include Hedge Wizards and Psychics among their ranks. Each Tradition represents a larger, global community of people who share a belief set, rather than a necessarily organized institution.

Locally

In the 1980s and 1990s, Detroit was one of the primary battlegrounds during the Technocracy's Pogroms of that era. The Council of Nine Mystick Traditions committed substantial resources to the fight, recognizing Detroit as a potential 'sleeping giant' in the Syndicate's back pocket. The battles successfully denied the Syndicate whatever resources Detroit represented, and it is fairly widely understood that The Traditions considered Detroit to be a success story.

By the 2000s, however, Detroit has fallen off the radar as far as The Traditions are concerned, and the mage presence there dwindled. There are, generally speaking, no mages and no significant magely presences in Detroit after 2010. No one really noticed this happening, nor does anyone really care anymore. Those mages that come to Detroit do so for their own, personal reasons.

House Rules

(Main article: House Rules: Mage) (coming soon)

Application Process

(Main article: Applications: Mage) My application standards are HUGELY ABBREVIATED and specific. I do not want 20 pages of prose. Think of what you're going to send me as your character resume, rather than your character movie. It's nothing against your writing - I just know what I need to run stories for you and the amount of time I have. Read the main article for specifics.

Allowed Books

• Mage 20
• All others on a case-by-case basis. Check with The Undisputed Truth.

External links

(Eventually!)