Occluded Sun wrote:FrankTrollman wrote:The Nephandi are actually boring and minor villains. They send their souls to hell to take a level in badass so that they can try to move forward with their plan of destroying the universe. Which is just a dumb plan no matter how you look at it.
The smartest examination of the topic I've encountered stressed the point that all of the factions in
Mage wanted to break people out of Unenlightenment (except possibly Marauders), all used very different methods, and all had fundamental self-inflicted problems reaching that goal. The Nephandi want to free everyone from the Endless Dream, not by transcending individuals, but by undermining the Dream itself. How making people's lives unpleasant contributes to this isn't clear. Oh no, dead puppies floating in pools of afterbirth! Guess I'd better abandon my self-imposed delusions then...
It might be more interesting to have a faction that tries to attack the consistency of the Tellurian and the 'sanity' of individuals in order to shatter the illusion humanity has wrapped itself in. Sort of a fusion between Marauders and Nephandi. Unlike the Technocracy or the Traditions, which are trying to impose their own preferred sorts of structure on humanity's dream, this faction would try to impose disorder in an attempt to cause everyone to realize the dream's nature and reject it.
Basically what this comes down to is that Mage is a greedy and horrible setting. The fundamental conflict is basically like the Underpants Gnomes, save that it's
five steps and both Step 2
and Step 4 are "?"
Neither you nor I has the first fucking clue what you could do or not do that would be helpful for waking people up
out of reality as we experience it. That's a nonsensical event and there is nothing that you could obviously do or not do in reality (that is to say: the sum total of all objects, people, and actions that we will ever or could ever interact with or perceive in any way) that would help or hinder that in any way. And then on top of
that shit sandwich, after everyone wakes up the rules of reality stop applying and then... what? I don't know. You don't know either. By definition the rules of "reality" including
cause and effect are out the window at that point. But the thing
after that is supposed to be "profit."
So basically someone having step 1 be "steal underpants" is as good a first step as any, since by definition anything you could do or not do to any person, place, thing, or idea is "in reality" and therefore not meaningfully in the direction you're supposed to trying to take things. Mage is a game design failure state. You literally can't even imagine what an action moving towards your goal might look like, nor can you imagine what the goal itself might be like. That's some seriously zen shit right there.
There are few enough Traditions and they are successfully grouped into three groups of three such that you can actually remember what they are and do. I mean, there's the three spheres that cover everything in the universe that exists, has ever existed, or ever could exist. Then there's the three spheres that collectively account for all dimensional quantities and qualities the universe appears to have. And then the three entire spheres that deal entirely with things that don't actually exist at all and are somewhat hard to describe. So those are totally
fucked, and
way overpowered, and laughingly piss in the Cheerios of all the other factions (including factions that haven't been written yet) by being incredibly greedy and flippant with the setting, but you can in fact remember what they
are. So there's that.
Basically Mage has the animism problem that we were talking about for Werewolf. You can't have a rational discussion about or take informed actions with respect to the Spirit World, because it's so far outside the bounds of your conceptual space that even beginning to have a handle on what is and is not in the setting is something that is laughable to even attempt. And the thing is... that's
one sphere in Mage (Spirit) and there are
eight more, many of whom are just as bad (especially Prime, but also Mind and Entropy).
You have to chop Mage down to size if you want to have an intelligible conversation about anything. Even if you just want to have an intelligible discussion about
Mage. And if you want the actions of Vampires and Demons to mean shit for shit, you have to chop Mage down to size even more. Even the relatively coherent spheres like Matter are simply obviously way too fucking powerful to have the rest of the setting be in any way recognizable as anything. And the incoherent spheres like Prime are all that and a bag of chips.
Basically, Mage from the viewpoint of Mage is just unsalvageable. You pretty much have to pick the simplified Mages from the back of Vampire or Changeling who just cast regular spells. You can go ahead and port in some of the oMage faction names, but the entire Ascension War is just too big and weird for anyone to ever even begin to use.
-Username17