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This is an extremely uncomfortable book, and it's not clear to me that it's for the reasons the author intends. It spends a lot of time in 2nd person, which I hate because it always means that it assumes things about me that are false and it feels more personally insulting to assume that I think I'm "tragically hip" (I know I am not hip in any way, shape or form), for example. It's description of the streets is extremely dated, and some of the information is outright false (for example, that serial killers don't bother the homeless). The book spends a lot of time berating and yelling at the reader, which is a writing style I dislike greatly.
Overall, I can't recommend this book. Perhaps if you're running a game set in 1991, but almost everything it focuses on has changed drastically over the last quarter century, and all major indicators away from the view it presents of the violent criminal streets.
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The short version is: this is a good book, with a few editing issues, inconsistencies and missed opportunities.
This product describes a new Craft formed by North American drifters. They trace their roots back about 200 years, and the thing they have in common is a dedication to The Road. It's a strong offerring, despite several typos (easy enough to fix in a PDF release).
While strong, it suffers from several things that are either missed opportunities or tonal missteps. The whole thing opens by discussing the ancient human desire to cross over the horizon. With this in mind, there is no tie whatsoever to the Void Seekers, the Convention that became half of the Void Engineers, and whose fundamental nature was the desire to explore and who were described often as having some sort of wanderlust. The next odd moment was when Spirit was mentioned as an Affinity Sphere. while it makes sense in general for a group of travelers to have Spirit, this product has very little to say about spirits or the umbra and how the Vagabonds interact with it, rendering it a bit strange. The section covering Focus could have used a bit more expansion as well. It mentions a new Instrument, but from the preceding information, I had expected "The Unending Road" or something of that nature as a Paradigm level entry in the Focus. That said, Focus is often hard to pin down, and rotes are one of the key ways to do it, both describing what sort of magick is done and how the group does it, and sadly, Vagabonds lacks any section covering Rotes or Wonders.
Despite these flaws, it's still quite good, and the NPCs described in it have enough detail to at least be guest stars in a Chronicle that stays in one place as they breeze into town, things happen, and then they breeze out.
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The Fragile Path is an in-world document, one of several across the World of Darkness, but the only one specifically for Mage. All in all, a good document, though at times it's a bit tricky to read (the Song of Bernadette is interesting and creative, but not the easiest thing to follow). In the end, it's very much worth reading, especially if you're playing or running a game in the Sorcerer's Crusade era. However, a few things about it do fall flat: it doesn't actually sell that Eloine is so irresistable that everyone is falling in love with her, and the case for Heylel is even weaker. In fact, playing Heylel in charge is a baffling choice for the nascent council, given that the description of Heylel comes off as a wildly unqualified and erratic individual. Those things are forgivable, however, due to the fact that it's supposedly testaments from the survivors of the betrayal.
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This book is pretty good, though it shows its age and has largely been superseded by more recent books, like the Revised Book of Madness, Infernalism and Book of the Fallen. Still, it covers a lot of ground. It seems to less be about "madness" and more about "antagonists" as it has a whole chapter on Paradox, listing spirits, clarifying Realms and giving several theories as to how Paradox works from random mages. The Nephandi chapter gave a bit of meat to formerly vague antagonists, and the Marauders chapter inched away from "Mage dedicated to dynamism that appears insane" to "Metaphysically mentally ill mage" though with a subconscious devotion to Dynamism. The Demons and Demon Cults chapter doesn't really have a strong analogue anywhere else, with parts of it overlapping with future books, but still might be one of the better sources for infernalism in Mage. And the final chapter on Umbrood was surprisingly concrete.
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This is honestly the second half of the Mage 1e Core book. It finishes almost every thought that that book had, and opens the doors to further elaboration, moving the game towards 2e and softening the black & white feel of the original core.
The lease interesting section is the first chapter, which is just a pile of new Abilities, Archetypes, Background and the introduction to Merits and Flaws (which had been circulating in the other lines by this point.) The merits and flaws are particularly fun because some of them seem radically incorrectly priced. I admit, I'm also down on the extra Abilities, because I'm anti-secondary abilities in general with a very, very small number of exceptions.
Beyond that, the book really starts delving into how Mage works and how to actually make it work in practice. Chapter 2 just goes faction by faction, interspersing fiction with a discussion of each one's philosophy. It also includes the first hints of sympathetic Technocrats in the line, which gets expanded on later in the book.
Chapter 3 is rules, and Mage honestly needed rules badly. Clarification of magick, introduction of Talismans, Do, etc. Certamen gets its first rule set (though that's something Mage still struggles with) and some rules for computers are brought in, which combine with the Virtual Adept Tradition Book and Digital Web to make Mage have the most thorough rules for 1993's computers in any RPG I've ever seen.
Chapter 4 is great for players, but not as interesting to me now that we're in 20th anniversary edition: a list of rotes and wonders (and some mundane equipment). It gives a roadmap for actually creating interesting effects in the game, though many need updating to be used at a table today.
The final two chapters really work best as one. Chapter 5 is really interesting, showing in-world parables for the difficulties of a mage's path, learning from a mentor, how Avatars and Essences actually work, among other things. The strongest bit though, is the brief history of the Technocracy. Though some of it has been retconned (especially by the Technocracy books and Guide to the Technocracy) it gives the point of view of the Union and really makes Technocratic characters look interesting. It closes out with the final chapter, a collection of essays on writing mage, running mage, and how to interpret things for mage.
Overall, an essential book for Mage first edition, and still a useful book today.
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Ascension's Right Hand (4/5)
This book fits into the frame of the Vampire supplement Ghouls and the Werewolf supplement Kinfolk. Somehow, in the minds of most, it hasn't become as iconic, and people out in the wild need to constantly be reminded that it exists. I recommend it regularly, and it's a solid book, though largely superseded in ways that the others haven't been.
The sections covering mundane allies and companions for mages has been largely subsumed into Gods and Monsters, as have the sections on Familiars, though it has valuable discussions of how the various factions handle these things differently. The discussion of more aware allies sits in the Sorcerer books, which present many more varieties of Numina.
Honestly, the main problem is that the book is dated. An update to it would be essential reading for running a Mage game.
Halls of the Arcanum (4/5)
Who are the biggest nerds in the World of Darkness? The Technocracy? The Order of Hermes? None of them hold a candle to the Arcanum.
Normally, I'm not a huge fan of the 1st person style for game books: though ambiguity leaves room for creativity, often clarity is what's needed. Here, though, it worked quite well. The story is told through the notes and letter, primarily of a new member joining the Arcanum and learning about it, but also from the founders of the society. The section on the Arcanum's secrets is told from the point of view of a Hermetic mage who has been investigating them. Fitting for such an organization, it leaves everyone in the dark.
Generally well-written (though there are a few cringe moments, like when it describes people with the G-slur, as WoD often did back in the day) the book is a useful companion to Ascension's Right Hand, showing what happens to occultists who don't end up attached to a Tradition but still have a burning need to know.
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Who are the biggest nerds in the World of Darkness? The Technocracy? The Order of Hermes? None of them hold a candle to the Arcanum.
Normally, I'm not a huge fan of the 1st person style for game books: though ambiguity leaves room for creativity, often clarity is what's needed. Here, though, it worked quite well. The story is told through the notes and letter, primarily of a new member joining the Arcanum and learning about it, but also from the founders of the society. The section on the Arcanum's secrets is told from the point of view of a Hermetic mage who has been investigating them. Fitting for such an organization, it leaves everyone in the dark.
Generally well-written (though there are a few cringe moments, like when it describes people with the G-slur, as WoD often did back in the day) the book is a useful companion to Ascension's Right Hand, showing what happens to occultists who don't end up attached to a Tradition but still have a burning need to know.
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I was expecting this book to be far worse, based on the way that some of the people involved in it talk about it. It wasn't very well-written over all, some of the terms were used in ways that were extremely awkward, for example, and it was organized quite differently than the other 1st Edition Tradition Books. There was also a moment of just strangely random homophobia that came out of nowhere, which is just...bizarre.
On the other hand, telling the story through flashbacks into the past lives of a single character was interesting. It includes a fairly detailed viewpoint on the Grand Convocation. Tempering that, though, is the involvement of the three Celestines in what is framed as a basic "introduction to the Akashics" Awakening type of story, which seems a lot more hands on than Celestines are usually depicted.
Overall, it was a bit different, and in some ways it works, though in others it didn't. But certainly, it could have been worse.
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This book is...ok. And didn't age well. A decent first introduction to the Virtual Adepts. It covers who they are, the origins of the Digital Web via Alan Turing, and the so very important to future Mage supplements Dante through the course of the book. On the other hand, the primary Virtual Adept Chantry has 56 kpbs internet (or worse, intranet), and rotes are all uniformly half a megabyte, which is itself strange that they'd all be the same size.
The factions are decent, and represent several different approaches to "Everything is Data" (to use M20 terminology), the epistolary format works well here, though it's so interwoven with the Digital Web that the whole book feels incomplete. Fortunately, the Digital Web book also exists, but reading this without the other would leave a lot missing.
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A three star review usually means that a book was mediocre. Just ok. In this case, it doesn't. It's because some aspects of the book are great and others are terrible. Starting with the terrible: the layout is AWFUL. I could not imagine the layout being botched this badly until I saw it myself. Between changing constantly between 2 and 3 column, often with the middle column empty or almost empty, switching between white text on black and black text on white, and having white text on black on pages that you might want to print separately as references for your group, it's a complete disaster. I hope that W5 and other 5e line books do better in this respect, though I suppose they could compete to do even worse. The art is mediocre to bad. They went with this photographic art that honestly was extremely not thematic for the World of Darkness. They would have been better off either tracking down the original run Vampire artists and commissioning them or else picking entirely new artists who draw in a similar style. The art was also inserted poorly, often with little to do with the text near it, or art that is clearly meant to illustrate something but with no explanation of what. And of course, it committed the cardinal sin of the World of Darkness: it made the vampires look like dorks. From the Ventrue who forgot to zip his fly to the 8-character pieces for each clan, they just look...bad. And lame. Also on the bad list, though they insist it's intentional, is calling the Tremere "Hemetics." It's not clever, and just looks like there's a typo in "Hermetics" if you know anything about the history of the game.
The setting also has some strong negative points. The Second Inquisition is a fine idea, and I love that the Camarilla fucking up was responsible for it, but the idea that there's a conspiracy in the govenrments of the world like this that they're keeping secret is so absurd...no WikiLeaks, no "In Russia, we have no Vampires, but the US is ruled by them!" no drunken agents blabbing that they're government funded vampire hunters? I admit, I always have this problem with conspiracies that don't have a survival-based reason to stay secret, and there's a lot of them in the WoD, but I find this one particularly ridiculous.
Other setting things are really a mixed bag, but moving on, the mechanics are quite solid. Of course, they're 90% Vampire: the Requiem mechanics with 10% modifications to handle the new Hunger system, but they're streamlined and they work. They streamlined character creation a bit too much, changing it from "You have these dots, distribute them" to "Your attributes are 4, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 1, distribute them" and similar with abilities, but that's easy enough to house rule (though it does net result in lower attribute totals, which is in line with grabbing mechanics from CofD)
The best thing about the streamlined mechanics, though, is that they made Willpower into a health-type stat (I hope some types in 5e can spend Health like Willpower can be spent!) and use it for social combat (and presumably mental), and Vampire has needed a social combat system since the beginning, it significantly reduces the ludonarrative dissonance of playing characters engaged in petty politics but having no mechanics to support petty political challenges.
All in all, actually reading V5 makes me a bit more hopeful for future 5e lines. The mechanics, the thing most likely to carry through, are sound. The setting has many problems, but part of that for me is that I don't like Vampire itself very much, and neither White Wolf directly nor Modiphius is in charge of writing the core book for W5 (the only other core that has been announced), so setting details are mutable. The layout problems could continue, depending on how strict the requirement to style-match is, but I hope there's a return to traditional art, two-column pages (with sidebars instead of mid-bars...or just no sidebars, they often should just be main text sections) and consistently black text on white paper, especially for mechanics pages.
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Interesting rules. I haven't tried to play with them yet, but they seem like an interesting method to generate writing prompts for a story. Though marked as a World of Darkness book, the mechanics inside look very Chronicles of Darkness (assumed difficulty of 8, changing dicepool rather than target number, etc).
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This is a nice little book describing 100 books that a mage could have on their shelf. The books are fairly sparsely defined with a title, author and a very brief description. They are good for a bit of flavor and could act as the basic version of a grmoire. the biggest criticism I have is that the text is handling a two-page spread as a single page, which makes it more awkward to read.
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Creator Reply: |
I thought that template didn't seem to be working right. I've uploaded a new version that should fix it, although I may upload another version again at a later point, as I wasn't entirely happy with this one. |
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"The Technocracy is wrong." The Void Engineers start out with a strong critical statement. Of course, they don't mean this morally, they mean it in the sense of incorrect. The Technocracy's fears, echoed in every other Revised Convention book, that the Void Engineers might abandon the Union, are baseless. Instead, the Void Engineers are clinging to it, desperately trying to keep things together because only with the Union can they keep Earth safe from entirely new classes of threat.
The Void Engineers were hit hard by the Dimensional Anomaly, and this book delivers on those chases beautifully. From the opening fiction (and the closing) showing a group of Void Engineers (and an Iteration X stowaway) to the text of the book, lots of changes are explored and the Void Engineers will never be the same. It even closes in the last sentences with the last Revised advancement of the meta plot: the Nephandi retaking Mus from the Technocracy, putting in another chapter of the saga started in the Mage 2nd Edition core book's opening fiction.
The book is organized similarly to other Convention books, but it has an extra chapter in it. It starts with a history of the Void Engineers, particularly updated to the present, discussing some of the changes (Existential Threats Directorate instead of DSEATC, etc) and it is the first of the new Convention books to have a jargon section, which makes an excellent reference (rather than having to skim through to find things like rankings and other bold-faced terms like in the others). The Void Engineer takes on the other Conventions and the Traditions are quite different from other Conventions: the Void Engineers value openness and science so they like the Progenitors and hate the New World Order (especially with all the deprocessing that they need to do). They tolerate the Syndicate and worry about Iteration X. Oddly, among the Traditions, the Void Engineers have grown close to the Euthanatos, their fellow fighters against Threat Null. It's also mentioned that working with Etherites against Null is extra effective.
Chapter 2 provides rankings, honors and awards, the requirements to become a Void Engineer, and a discussion of the methodologies. It's well-done, but nothing that isn't the same as the other Convention books, just about the Void Engineers instead of a different Convention.
Chapter 3 is something different. Chapter 4 will contain more standard things (procedures, devices, etc) but Chapter 3 focuses on the Void Engineer Cosmology and what is out there. It even has a map, placing the Horizon at the asteroid belt (and talking about how it has moved over time, and the Void Engineer goal of pushing it further and further out) and a discussion of how to get to virtually any place in the known Universe. Then it hits on four pages just on the Dimensional Anomaly, how it works and how they deal with it, before turning to a discussion of specific places, like the Cop (both old and new), Darkside, and the Void Engineer views of the Shard and Shade Realms. But after that, it hits the big deal: Threat Null. First mentioned in the Syndicate book and alluded to constantly throughout this one as a dire threat that they can't tell the rest of the Union the details of, we find out why at the end of Chapter 3. Threat Null is the Technocratic Union, or at least, the descendants of it that were lost in the Anomaly. Now, mutated and changed by the Void, they've become a sort of metastasized version of themselves, and when they meet Processed Technocrats, they speak with the voice of Control. The biggest mystery left completely unresolved with them, though, is why there are no apparent Void Engineers in Null. Null is probably the most innovative antagonist added to Mage since near the beginning, and I look forward to seeing how it develops as the line comes back to life.
Chapter 4 is back to the Convention book routine, by and large: notable engineers, some legends (which include the narrator of the history in the 1st Edition Void Engineers book, now a known Nephandus) and more information on Station Yemaja which was mentioned several times in Progenitors Revised. Then general advice for STing for Void Engineers and a Voidship crew. Dimensional Science and Void Correspondence are fairly straightforward alternate approaches to spheres. The best thing in this section, though, are the Voidcraft rules. How to build them, how much they cost, what spheres are required, and how Voidcraft Combat works, along with several examples, including the X160 Qui La Machinae, which costs roughly $7.8 billion to build. This high price explains why the Technocracy doesn't have an absolutely massive fleet, and sets up great possibilities for Void Engineer salvage operations: why build a new $7.8 billion ship when you can try to find an old one (if you have a lead) and can fit it up and upgrade it for much less?
Overall, an excellent book and an excellent end to the Revised line as M20 got off the ground. Hopefully, some of these threads will be explored further (M20 mentioned them, but Technocracy: Reloaded could do something, and hopefully if and when it happens, there's M5).
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"Reality is in the black." The Syndicate book opens up as optimistic as the New World Order book did, but the book itself actually sells their optimism. Whether you agree or not with their philosophy, it's absolutely dominant in reality and bringing them power and influence.
This book had some problems that the others lacked (we'll talk about numbers in a minute), and others that they had but less so (such as a need for more editing), but overall it was still an excellent book and necessary for anyone who wants to play Syndicate characters or use them as believable NPCs.
Regarding the Enlightened population and hangers on, the book suggests that Extraordinary Citizens are created by adversity: the economic downtown is what they credit the rise of the Extraordinary Citizen covered in both NWO and Progenitors. They also suggest that the mage population is MUCH higher than other books have indicated, referring to "tens of thousands of Constructs" which, even by generous notions of how many mages there are, would indicate some that have no Enlightened personnel at all.
The tension between the Syndicate and the NWO is a constant throughout the book. From terminology at the very beginning to later when the Syndicate comes out as anti-DRM, pro-net neutrality, anti-surveillance, etc, indicating a focus on bottom-up rather than top-down control. They've even got factions trying to mend the rift between the two Conventions, because a Technocratic Civil War would be an absolute disaster (and at this point, if M5 comes and doesn't bring a Technocratic Civil War, or give a strong reason it didn't happen, I'll be disappointed).
A minor aside: the sidebar "The Jewish Syndicate" on page 26 is a welcome addition. Jewish issues have not been handled well by Mage (or the World of Darkness in general, with one notable exception) and seeing this brought up explicitly was good. It was a small thing, but actually brought up and confronted one of the many issues that show up (I would have preferred also mentioning something about Media Control given the belief that Jews control the media, but it's still better than really all other Mage books).
The "others" section has a lot of meat to it. The discussion of the Traditions indicates that cultural appropriation is a powerful weapon against the Traditions: take their source cultures, commodotize and trivialize. Talking about the Masses, they indicate that they love humanity as it is, not how it "could" be like the other Conventions, and make a solid case for it. And, of course, there's the first mention of "Threat Null."
The book continues to hit standard points and moves on to Methodologies after the basic internal structure. And then, after said standard things, suddenly "The SPD is gone, no one knows what happened, but money keeps showing up." This is another metaplot element I hope is expanded on in the future, with the Werewolf/Mage crossover potential, it'd be almost criminal to ignore it.
The highlight of the remainder is Primal Utility, the third Technocracy alternate sphere. It's damn good, and adds a lot, removing some powers (Prime Weapons) but adding Primal Ventures to the game gives the Syndicate more depth and reduces the distance between game mechanics and setting.
As a closing thought, the Syndicate comes off as far and away the most mystic of the Conventions. In fact, the Syndicate and the Order of Hermes have many things in common. The focus on the power and necessity of a hierarchy, the power of Will (individual for Hermetics, Collective for Syndicate), the love of competition, and the high level of flexibility...just an interesting, though likely unintentional, comparison.
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"The Technocracy is sick." stands in stark contrast with the opening optimism of the NWO book that Progenitors comes out on the heels of. While the New World Order is depicted as optimistic but in many ways fundamentally corrupt, the Progenitors own their corruption in this book, though most of the text still downplays it to allow them to appear as heroes despite many of the terrible things that they are doing in their attempts to "heal" the Union.
Shattered by the Dimensional Anomaly, they've had to build themselves a new way of interacting with the world around them and the Union as a whole. The Progenitors, of all Technocratic groups, are experimenting with democracy in their Convention but at the same time, know that old ways die slowly. They're in many ways more self-aware than the NWO, who view their pathologies as triumphs, and instead they see themselves as sacrificing themselves for the good of the Union when they do horrific things.
The history section is solid and well-told, though nothing that readers of previous Mage books haven't seen before. The views on the other Conventions shows that they have diagnosed many of the Union's problems, and see the Technocratic Civil War and the Nephandic Infiltration issues as the two most pressing things (this is backed up by the opening and closing fiction focusing on bringing in Progenitors who have disappeared and using them to help mend rifts between NWO and Syndicate agents). The views of the Traditions, though, are less rosy than those of the NWO: the Progenitors find very little of value in the Traditions, and the growing Applied Sciences movement is in alignment with Iteration X on reinstating the Pogrom. The "other" section is most interesting, because it indicates that the very basics of Vampires and Werewolves is common knowledge within the Convention.
The Progenitors may be experimenting with democracy, but they're still organized like an academic department, with students, research assistants, primary investigators, etc. One of the most interesting parts of Chapter Two are the "micro" Methodologies, expanding the scope of the Progenitors and each of them just demands a proper fleshing out all on their own.
Much of the darkness of the Progenitors is hidden in the Procedures section, Primal Infusions and Primal Nets are described, and they are used to extract Primal Energy from the dying.
The most novel section is "Genegineered Creatures" which have the statistics for and rules for using fully non-human characters created through genetic tampering, such as uplifted dolphins, lizard people and modern dinosaurs. While a bit harder to justify without the Horizon Constructs, these add something truly new for the Progenitors, and there's hints that some of them might be capable of Enlightenment...so when a player asks "Can I play an Awakened Velociraptor" not only are there rules, but also explanations for why it might not be the best character concept (unless, of course, you plan your game to permit them.)
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