Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition by Phil Brucato
My rating:
Blurb:
“I tell you this: We are Divinity.
Reality is ours to bend. To subvert. To command.
We have that power – all of us.
Not everyone knows what to do with it, or uses it well.
Most of us never realize just what it is we are or how much we can do.
Those of us who do… well, some of us are monsters.
Manipulators. Parasites. Tyrants. Fanatics.
And the rest of us never see that monster in our own mirror, only in the reflections of those folks who are not “us.”
Here’s the truth, though: We are ALL “us.” We are ALL gifted,
We can ALL change the world. Most of us remain asleep.
A blessed few Awaken. Fewer still use that power wisely.
And none without consequences.
And so, reality is up for grabs. Where do you stand?
And will you Fall… or Ascend?”
What’s in it?
• Updated profiles of the Council of Nine Traditions, the Technocratic Union, and the Disparate Crafts… with many unexpected developments.
• An epic history of magick and its factions.
• A compilation and clarification of essential and optional rules, including martial arts, vehicles, hazards, cybernetics, the Otherworlds, and far more besides.
• Overviews of paradigms, practices and tools – the focus of your Art.
• Detailed explorations of the epic concepts involved in Mage.
• Chilling looks at the Nephandi and Marauders.
• The Nine Spheres, plus their Technocratic variants.
• Old favorites and new faces from among the Awakened Ones.
• Reality Zones, Paradox, Quiet, the “coincidental vs. vulgar magick” debate, and far, far more…
• New full color original art by Michael William Kaluta, Echo Chernik, Steve Prescott, Christopher Shy, Larry MacDougall, and other classic Mage artists, as well as classic B&W pieces carefully chosen from the earlier editions.
Review:
I took my sweet, sweet time reading this. it’sa huge book—in terms of pages as well as of weight. Actually, that’s the kind of book that makes me feel like breaking into a church to steal a lectern and respectfully place the latter on a pedestal in my living-room, so that I finally have an appropriate reading spot. Except that the whole act wouldn’t be respectful in many other ways.
Anyway.
I discovered Mage: the Ascension in 1998. Possibly earlier than that, if you count the times I had seen it mentioned in RPG magazines. At the time, I was a representative of that rare breed of young (and incidentally female) Storytellers who intended on doing something with this game, apart from using it as a doorstopper. We used to joke about how you needed to go through a whole tube of aspirin before being able to understand what it was about. And yet, I still wanted to try my hand at it.
I never came back from that experience. Even during the years I had stopped gaming, Mage had never left me, not really.
This game is full of possibilities. Full of ideas. Bursting with potential. It’s all about what you do with it, about viewing the world in so many different ways. About interpreting reqlity about you. About shaping your own reality—as a much needed reminder, too, that Reality is what we make of it, mages or no mages, and that at least for some things, for a lot of things, there may come a time when you have to decide: do I want changes to occur, and will I be the driving force behind those changes?
This new edition was a joy to read, from one end to the other. Even some 20 years later, it’s still holding that special place in my little shrivelled black heart.
And I shall blame it henceforth for adding “why not run a Technocracy game” to my long list of “must do’s”
