oMage v. nMage

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Longes
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Post by Longes »

Heaven's Thunder Hammer wrote:I'm still cheesed that M20 needed a whole other book to explain the magic in the game. "How do you do that?" itself is actually very good, but given the game is "Mage the Ascension" not "Phil Brucato: The Blathering" I'm fairly irritated the most important part of the game wasn't in the core book.[/u]
Too bad they released the core game mechanic in a backer-only PDF.
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Post by virgil »

Longes wrote:
Heaven's Thunder Hammer wrote:I'm still cheesed that M20 needed a whole other book to explain the magic in the game. "How do you do that?" itself is actually very good, but given the game is "Mage the Ascension" not "Phil Brucato: The Blathering" I'm fairly irritated the most important part of the game wasn't in the core book.[/u]
Too bad they released the core game mechanic in a backer-only PDF.
Whut?
Last edited by virgil on Tue Dec 22, 2015 8:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Longes wrote: Only not, because Paradox still explodes your zombies the moment you send him to the grocceries store.
Just give him a trench coat and tell everyone that he has a skin condition, or that he's a Wallking Dead cosplayer. Zombies are fairly easy for Sleepers to rationalize.
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Post by Heaven's Thunder Hammer »

It will be out soon. Backers got to see the pre-release version that needed some editing.
M20 How Do You DO That? is coming to DTRPG in PDF and PoD versions hopefully this week!
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Post by Shrieking Banshee »

I may be kinda late too the party but OWOD mage was more complex than: "Guys on one end want magic, ones on the other want people to have antibiotics".

Its a complicated situation, because in a sense its true. Many of the traditions where bad guys in the years past. Having fun with magic at the expense at the common man. Then the Technocrats came up and classified everything for the common man.

The complication is of course that somewhere along the top technocrats just thought "Wouldn't this be easier if everybody had the exact same opinion? Yeaaaah". And in thats always a bad deal.

Part of it is that the game designers where kinda dumber then the concept they made. And it requires a bit of flexibility to wrap your head around but the Technocracy didn't invent penicillin. They made the rules for it to be something that can cure people whilst simultaneously making homeopathic medicine impossible.

Its more Security VS Freedom, rather then Tech Vs Nature (Except for the fact that the authors are massive hippies). One size fits all VS Customization.

Many future supplements made the Technocrats a much more fair force so if you had objections to them, it was because of it authoritarianism, and not because they where all EEEEEEVIIIIL.

But that was my interpretation. I may have seen something good that the creators didn't intend.
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Post by Mask_De_H »

The thing about oMage is that it was so contradictory and dumb, as well as being an attempt at postmodern game design, that personal interpretation is the only way to make the motherfucking game work.
Last edited by Mask_De_H on Sat Jan 09, 2016 11:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
FrankTrollman wrote: Halfling women, as I'm sure you are aware, combine all the "fun" parts of pedophilia without any of the disturbing, illegal, or immoral parts.
K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote: See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
Whipstitch wrote:You're on a mad quest, dude. I'd sooner bet on Zeus getting bored and letting Sisyphus put down the fucking rock.
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Post by Shrieking Banshee »

Eh comes with the territory of a subjective reality, dumb, but also enjoyably dumb in my book. Like honestly I wouldn't say it was dumber then Harry Potter. As for postmodernist...Well Im like 1 guy on the site who understands that games can't cover everything in rules for every scenario so depending on the GM (At times, not always) doesn't automatically make everything a magic tea party. And I mean I have much more beef with games like FATE then ever with something like OWOD.
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Post by Mechalich »

The principle advantage of oMage is that you play a nominally mortal human who has been given agency to try and change the world, and that you can get with your buds, grab some help from your boss, and then actually go out and change it.

The way the game is structured is that you can pick almost any issue you can imagine, cultural, political, fantastical, conspiracy, and so on, that matters to any cultural group on the planet and build a campaign around it. Want to run a campaign about an alien conspiracy to murder JFK? oMage can do that. A campaign about finding the mystical island of Avalon so that King Authur can be brought back to take his rightful place as ruler of a renewed British Empire in 2012? oMage can do that too. A campaign where the players develop superintelligent AI to serve as mankind's benevolent deity and usher in a utopia? Check.

If you want to do crazy-shit fantasy set in something vaguely resembling the modern world oMage is a pretty good fit. For example, if any of the ideas behind Scion seem at least vaguely interesting to you, they probably can be run better using oMage than using actual Scion. There are fun ideas sprinkled across Mage, a suitably cohesive and trusting gaming group can use them to do fun things.

None of that, however, makes Sphere magic a halfway decent system from a mechanics perspective, the Traditions anything less than utterly incoherent, or the prevents central role of technology in the setting from constantly out-dating huge chunks of the source material simply trough natural progression (I feel for the people who tried to write the VA book, I really do). oMage is a huge fucking mess - sometimes a fun hot mess - but always a mess.
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Post by Mask_De_H »

Does anyone have a translation to English for what Banshee just said?
FrankTrollman wrote: Halfling women, as I'm sure you are aware, combine all the "fun" parts of pedophilia without any of the disturbing, illegal, or immoral parts.
K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote: See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
Whipstitch wrote:You're on a mad quest, dude. I'd sooner bet on Zeus getting bored and letting Sisyphus put down the fucking rock.
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Post by Username17 »

Mask_De_H wrote:Does anyone have a translation to English for what Banshee just said?
Mostly he's shouting "Dunning-Kruger!" over and over again like he was a goddamn pokemon.

But to the extent that he has a viewpoint he wants to express other than "My half-assed opinions are wicked sweet and solve all problems, why haven't you dumb assholes embraced them already?" it's that he thinks he has a solution to the enigma that is Mage. That he knows what the whole thing is really about and that he can rationalize it all into a coherent whole. And all he has to do is ignore a whole bunch of things actually written about the setting and also pretty much everything about the world we live in.

So he's going back to the old "The leaders of the world are bad because they restrict freedom!" canard. It's pretty much all you have to go with if you want to portray the Technocracy as bad guys, because of course life today is very much nicer than it was in ages past. Humans live longer, healthier, happier, and more self actualized lives. So all that's left is the sort of weird libertarian self sufficiency ideal that having a more interconnected society is inherently bad because it robs you of your personal agency and self sufficiency. That working a job to make money to go to the store and get food and pornography is robbing you of your natural right to farm in the dirt and hunt rabbits or whatever the fuck you'd do to stay alive outside an advanced society.

It only makes any sense at all if you basically completely ignore the fact that the rugged individualism meme it depends upon is 100% romanticized bullshit. That in fact, the entire idea that you had a right to think your own thoughts is entirely new and a product of the scientific revolution. In actual history, it was considered extremely normal for the King of wherever you happened to be to set people on fire if they didn't claim to believe in the right flavor of sky gods. And indeed, for the next King to have somewhat different ideas of what everyone should believe and then run around setting people on fire when and if they didn't claim to have changed their minds to whatever the fuck the new truth was supposed to be.

TL;DR: Banshee has some half baked ideas of how Mage is "supposed" to work. These ideas do not hold up to scrutiny. They are not internally consistent, let alone being consistent with the Mage game as written or real world history or morality. He is also very smug about his ideas, and is annoyed that people haven't independently come up with the same head canon as he has.

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Post by Longes »

One of the biggest problems with portraying Traditions as the good guys is that one of the members are Euthanatos. And Euthanatos are literally the Assassin Guild from Wanted (movie), who go around killing people based on what their oracles tell them. And these are the good guys.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Longes wrote:One of the biggest problems with portraying Traditions as the good guys is that one of the members are Euthanatos. And Euthanatos are literally the Assassin Guild from Wanted (movie), who go around killing people based on what their oracles tell them. And these are the good guys.
But, the guild from Wanted were the good guys. Except Morgan Freeman, he was a villain.
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Post by Mechalich »

Personally I've found that the only way to rationalize the Traditions as the good guys is to view Mage through a utopian revolutionary lens.

Some, though not all, of the Traditions, can make the claim that in their idealized mass-ascended world life would be better than in the Technocracy's idealized mass-ascended world. Other can claim that it would be equally good though based on different values and they also claim that the Technocracy's structure makes their revolution impossible. Heck, Mage Revised, unwilling to blame the Technocracy for everything any more chose to blame the masses for failing to accept the promise of science sufficiently and as a result the victorious Technocracy couldn't remake the world into a Culture-esque post-scarcity society.

So maybe the Akashic Brotherhood (everyone gets Nirvana), the Celestial Chorus (one with the godhead), the Cultists of Ecstasy (transcendental love), the Dreamspeakers (unified cosmos), the Sons of Ether (steampunk utopia), and the Verbena (naturalistic utopia) can kinda sorta work under the justification of 'if we win everything will be cooler.' The Euthanatos (endless cycles) and Order of Hermes (rule by the elect) explicitly can't, and the Virtual Adepts aren't actually a Tradition so much as a bunch of rebellious programmers who are really pissed at their bosses.

The problem with this approach is that the Traditions have been getting their buts kicked since literally before they were founded according to Mage canon and so joining the Traditions and expecting victory is rather like joining Maoist guerillas in Nepal and expecting world wide Communism in one's lifetime. It's delusional, and the books admit as much, describing Tradition mages as guerillas in the war for reality.

That being said, you can absolutely use the Mage: the Ascension rules to play Technocracy: the Enlightenment, which is easily a 100% better game, or you can play Mage plotlines that are totally orthogonal to the war for reality and ignore the Technocracy entirely where your characters are interested primarily in personal achievements - which is what Mage Revised told people to do - and that can be fun so long as the GM can provide achievements that the players actually care about. Or you can embrace the gray on black morality conflict and have Tradition Mages go wail on the Nephandi, which is less fun than having Technocrats do the same thing, but still viable.
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Post by Mask_De_H »

The personal achievement part is also kind of what the gonzo science fantasy shit turned into, as well.

The Trad/Crat war is deeply stupid and requires all sorts of mind caulk to even reach something playable, which is why WW gave up on the Ascension War with Revised. By Guide to the Traditions, they gave up on the Trads even being an organization you cop to, and instead created all inclusive groups like Hunters that didn't suck and The Xavier Institute of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Stepping into the future, the Trads and the Crats should have been no more than After Sundown Cults your enterprising young Orphans entered or worked with at their whims. You could give them favored paradigm like AS has favored sorcery or Shadowrun has magic styles and have that fucking mean something
FrankTrollman wrote: Halfling women, as I'm sure you are aware, combine all the "fun" parts of pedophilia without any of the disturbing, illegal, or immoral parts.
K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote: See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
Whipstitch wrote:You're on a mad quest, dude. I'd sooner bet on Zeus getting bored and letting Sisyphus put down the fucking rock.
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Post by K »

You could keep the Trad vs Tech war if you did it like this:

The Technocracy are the villains because they represent unchecked power. They are corporations without government oversight, shadow governments subverting democracy, and financial institutions that cause suffering when there is a profit. They are basically the evils of the modern world because magic makes all these problems worse.

The Trads are the heroes only because they are the only ones not buying in and cashing a paycheck. Your average Euthanatos doesn't even have a credit rating, much less an opinion about which choice of two or three Blue or Red candidates he is allowed to cast a vote for.

So they fight. Each individual mage is trying to hit that Arete 10 where they get to be a god and no one really knows which team is going to get the football and who is going to get smacked down for crimes real or imaginary when this god Ascends and realizes he knows kung-fu.

The Technocrats know that the Trad mage is someone without the protection of any of the Technocrats and thus the victim of choice for whatever scheme, plot, or theft that random Technocrats have in mind in their personal plan for enlightenment, and so the Trad mage runs into his first magical creature organ-legging operation or his first mind-control brothel and suddenly realizes that evil shit is going down and they are coming for him next if he doesn't actively start making some plays.

So that's how you keep the philosophy without falling into pointless and damaging discussions about subjective reality-bending. The Ascension War becomes about which life-style is going to be the destiny of mankind when someone finally Ascends.
Last edited by K on Sun Jan 10, 2016 7:40 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Shrieking Banshee »

Eh, I don't think your being fair on all the traditions here. I mean the euthanatos are insane, but everybody is working together more out of requirement then any super strong sense of personal agreement.

I mean you kinda keep forgetting what ascension under the Technocracy is which is a massive robotic hive mind.

Regardless, I think the game is a mess, everybody can be subjective in it, and so whatever.
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Post by Mask_De_H »

So you make it Shadowrun after fucking the Nasuverse, K. Which is kinda-sorta what oMage 1st was going for, maybe.
FrankTrollman wrote: Halfling women, as I'm sure you are aware, combine all the "fun" parts of pedophilia without any of the disturbing, illegal, or immoral parts.
K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote: See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
Whipstitch wrote:You're on a mad quest, dude. I'd sooner bet on Zeus getting bored and letting Sisyphus put down the fucking rock.
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Post by Mechalich »

You can certainly make the Technocracy horrifically monstrous. That's easy - it's the WoD, converting anything to off the moral deep end is trivial. The problem is, that doesn't make the Traditions good. It also doesn't make the traditions any less incoherent as a group.

It is trivially easy to imagine a member of each of the Union's conventions working for the same company, or going to the same country club, frequenting the same bar, or sitting around playing smash brothers (the Progenitor always plays as Mewtwo).

It is horrifically difficult imagining members from all nine traditions getting together for a meeting and having it not degenerate into a shouting match and possible violence (and of course the actual sourcebooks come right out and say that this happens).

The Technocratic Union is quite possibly the most coherent and logical supernatural faction in the entire WoD (which might have something to do with why it's the most powerful...or it could be the nukes). the nine Mystic Traditions can't even coherently answer the question of whether or not certain members count as vulgar witnesses to the others for the purposes of Paradox.

In order for the Ascension War to not be dumb, the Traditions themselves have to not be dumb, and they aren't.
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Post by Shrieking Banshee »

I think now I understand your criticism, and that makes total sense to me.
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Post by vagrant »

Basically, the only right choice is to be a Hermetic and rule the world. (Or try, at least, but you keep getting eaten by vampires.) I digress. K hit upon the only rational way to keep the Technocracy as the bad guys - they are the conspiracy, and they don't wanna give us electric light and public plumbing, they want WORLD DOMINATION of some sort of financial-authoritarian leaning.

It's interesting to note that in M20, the technocrats have access to a sphere called Primal Utility instead of Prime, and it's less 'fucking the actual magical essence of reality' and more 'treating reality's magical essence as fungible and fuck-with-able financial instruments'. You can easily see the banksters and hedge funds that our reality spawned as actual financial wizards who actually invented a spell called 'Collaterized Debt Obligation Derivatives' and fucked the world for personal profit and lulz.
Then, once you have absorbed the lesson, that your so-called "friends" are nothing but meat sacks flopping around in the fashion of an outgassing corpse, pile all of your dice and pencils and graph-paper in the corner and SET THEM ON FIRE. Weep meaningless tears.

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Post by K »

Mechalich wrote:
It is horrifically difficult imagining members from all nine traditions getting together for a meeting and having it not degenerate into a shouting match and possible violence (and of course the actual sourcebooks come right out and say that this happens).
If I were writing it, the Traditions can't have a meeting because they'd be too small in number and scattered for that to work at all.

If you set up the Traditions as the obvious losers of the Ascension War, vastly outnumbered and on the run, it works a lot better. Then your personal group of mages of various Traditions makes sense because you are banded together for common defense because there are no Tradition Chantries willing to take in or even talk to another refugee without a very good reason.

The ray of hope is that some Trad mage might Ascend and flip the whole system on its head, and until then it's hiding in the shadows and doing runs on Technocrat installations to keep your local Technocrats too unbalanced to crush you outright.

That's a pretty big departure from the WoD's "this supernatural race is all about internal politics, so just a reskin of VtM", but I think it'd be a different and better game in a lot of ways.
Last edited by K on Sun Jan 10, 2016 5:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Mask_De_H »

K wrote:
Mechalich wrote:
It is horrifically difficult imagining members from all nine traditions getting together for a meeting and having it not degenerate into a shouting match and possible violence (and of course the actual sourcebooks come right out and say that this happens).
If I were writing it, the Traditions can't have a meeting because they'd be too small in number and scattered for that to work at all.

If you set up the Traditions as the obvious losers of the Ascension War, vastly outnumbered and on the run, it works a lot better. Then your personal group of mages of various Traditions makes sense because you are banded together for common defense because there are no Tradition Chantries willing to take in or even talk to another refugee without a very good reason.

The ray of hope is that some Trad mage might Ascend and flip the whole system on its head, and until then it's hiding in the shadows and doing runs on Technocrat installations to keep your local Technocrats too unbalanced to crush you outright.

That's a pretty big departure from the WoD's "this supernatural race is all about internal politics, so just a reskin of VtM", but I think it'd be a different and better game in a lot of ways.
The generic Orphan chronicle is supposed to be this, but with Traditions assholes trying to convert or court you, too. You're ass out, on your own with only your crew of disparate practitioners, trying to stay low and hit back against the Man when they fuck with yours. Ascension is your way of getting out the game, potentially changing things for the better.

You have to own the Punk part of Gothic Punk if you want the 'Crats to be bad guys without fighting for freedom from the tyranny of flush toilets. You also need to make tech a Sleeper thing instead of a Crat thing.
FrankTrollman wrote: Halfling women, as I'm sure you are aware, combine all the "fun" parts of pedophilia without any of the disturbing, illegal, or immoral parts.
K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote: See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
Whipstitch wrote:You're on a mad quest, dude. I'd sooner bet on Zeus getting bored and letting Sisyphus put down the fucking rock.
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Post by Mechalich »

K wrote:If I were writing it, the Traditions can't have a meeting because they'd be too small in number and scattered for that to work at all.
The Traditions have to meet some sort of minimal threshold number to exist as a functional concern, probably a few hundred mages for each (divided across 3+ sub-factions and spread globally that's not very many, it wouldn't be hard to be, say, the only Etherite in Belgium). In that scenario they could easily be outnumbered 5 or even 10 to 1 by the Technocrats (assuming ~50,000 Awakened globally, which would be in line with the Vampire population) so long as you don't attribute significant numbers to the Crafts, Marauders, or Nephandi (I'd put all of those together at around 1K, maybe a little more if you wish to accept large numbers of fallen Technocrats).

Even in that scenario though, members of most of the Traditions can easily meet. Mages aren't Vampires, they can walk around normally, drive cars, and take commercial airline flights. Many are not technophobic at all and can hold Skype group calls anytime they want (and for those that are technophobic there's rotes that can do the same thing). This is actually one of the advantages of Mage over Vampire in that you can very easily just jet off to Turkmenistan to search for ancient artifacts if that's what your campaign demands.

I do think the Traditions work fine as individual mystic organizations. Most of them have at least a fairly high level of internal consistency and unified worldview. It's the Tradition Council and the overall idea of the Nine Traditions together as some sort of unified faction that is the big problem. There's a lot of word caulk in various Mage splatbooks that tries to pretend that the Traditions have all made peace with each other, but its mostly BS and generally each Trad has good reason to hate about half the other Trads at least as much as they hate the Technocracy.

I actually suspect oMage plays best if you run a mono-tradition chronicle, though certain Trads are relatively poor fits for that because they are naturally very weak in certain spheres (like the VAs and Spirit), and good luck convincing a table to actually do that.
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Post by Mechalich »

K wrote:If I were writing it, the Traditions can't have a meeting because they'd be too small in number and scattered for that to work at all.
The Traditions have to meet some sort of minimal threshold number to exist as a functional concern, probably a few hundred mages for each (divided across 3+ sub-factions and spread globally that's not very many, it wouldn't be hard to be, say, the only Etherite in Belgium). In that scenario they could easily be outnumbered 5 or even 10 to 1 by the Technocrats (assuming ~50,000 Awakened globally, which would be in line with the Vampire population) so long as you don't attribute significant numbers to the Crafts, Marauders, or Nephandi (I'd put all of those together at around 1K, maybe a little more if you wish to accept large numbers of fallen Technocrats).

Even in that scenario though, members of most of the Traditions can easily meet. Mages aren't Vampires, they can walk around normally, drive cars, and take commercial airline flights. Many are not technophobic at all and can hold Skype group calls anytime they want (and for those that are technophobic there's rotes that can do the same thing). This is actually one of the advantages of Mage over Vampire in that you can very easily just jet off to Turkmenistan to search for ancient artifacts if that's what your campaign demands.

I do think the Traditions work fine as individual mystic organizations. Most of them have at least a fairly high level of internal consistency and unified worldview. It's the Tradition Council and the overall idea of the Nine Traditions together as some sort of unified faction that is the big problem. There's a lot of word caulk in various Mage splatbooks that tries to pretend that the Traditions have all made peace with each other, but its mostly BS and generally each Trad has good reason to hate about half the other Trads at least as much as they hate the Technocracy.

I actually suspect oMage plays best if you run a mono-tradition chronicle, though certain Trads are relatively poor fits for that because they are naturally very weak in certain spheres (like the VAs and Spirit), and good luck convincing a table to actually do that.
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Post by Longes »

Shepperd (one of the Mage writers-freelancers) gave this numbers for the mage membership:
Waaaay too many Nephandi in that breakdown. To be Nephandus you have to enter the cauls, not just be bad. Plus, they have the smallest number of canonical NPCs. I'd put their numbers at less than 5%. There are also probably slightly fewer Orphans, since the Traditions really are pretty good at assimilating mystics. The Crafts have been beaten down by the Technocracy, to boot, but we'll be opstimistic with both. Plus, there are quite a lot of Technocrats.

So I'd say:

Traditions- 40%
Technocracy- 40%
Marauders- 6%
Nephandi- 4%
Crafts- 10%
Orphans- 10%


Canonically, the largest are:
1) OoH (they recruit more than any other Trad and the House structure lets them incorporate many different styles)
2) Akashic Brotherhood (they recruit less than many Trads but have the largest population base to draw from).

After that, the Dreamspeakers and Celestial Chorus are supposed to be pretty large and diverse. The Verbena trail slightly behind these two. The Ecstatics are probably about the size of the Verbena.

The Virtual Adepts and Sons of Ether are probably about equal size and next largest after the trads above.

The Euthanatos are supposed to be smaller than the other Traditions.

To make some hard choices and put it all in a list, with breakdowns the ranking from largest to smallest would be:

1) Order of Hermes 15%
2) Akashic Brotherhood 14%
3) Celestial Chorus 13%
4) Dreamspeakers 12%
5) Verbena 11%*
6) Cult of Ecstacy 11%*
7) Virtual Adepts 9%*
8) Sons of Ether 9%*
9) Euthanatos 6%

*The higher ranks Trad may have a fractionally higher number of members.

Bill Bridges revised the numbers during his run, which were originally 1 mage per million or 1 per 500,000, to 1 per 200,000 ro 250,000. Let's make it an even 30,000 Awakened mages in the world.

That means the Traditions have 12,000 members.

So:

1) Order of Hermes: 1800
2) Akashic Brotherhood: 1680
3) Celestial Chorus: 1560
4) Dreamspeakers: 1440
5) Verbena: 1320
6) Cult of Ecstacy: 1320
7) Virtual Adepts: 1080
8) Sons of Ether: 1080
9) Euthanatos: 720

Breakdown by rank makes most Tradition mages Disciples, with a significant narrowing at Adept rank thanks to attrition and fewer apprentices because they tend to die more easily and because magic is generally in decline. So:

Apprentice 15% -- 1800 Traditionalists
Initiate: 20% -- 2400 Traditionalists
Disciple: 50% -- 6000 Traditionalists
Adept: 13% -- 1560 Traditionalists
Master: 1.9% -- 228 Traditionalists?
Archmaster: .1% 12 Traditionalists?

Ranks will tend to break statistical predictions as the increase. For instance, thr Masters and archmasters are probably doled out more evenly that Tradition numbers would suggest. By contrast, the Technocracy probably has a fairly strict pyramidial distribution, with the fewest on top and as many as half being "Apprentices."
The percentages don't add up of course.
The canonical explanation for why there are a lot of Akashics is that Akashics and Euthanatos are the only traditions that draft in Asia. And Euthanatos are a goddamn death cult, so Akashics have a better sales pitch. Of course this raises the question of why there aren't more Akashics than every other tradition. And the answer is "shut up, stop asking questions".
Last edited by Longes on Mon Jan 11, 2016 12:54 am, edited 2 times in total.
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