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Inside the Chapter House
Publisher: White Wolf
by Charles S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 04/02/2023 15:47:22

This collection of sorceres for use with M20: Sorcerer fill out some examples if you want to run something involving the Arcanum. The characters are solid, and there really isn't much else to say.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Inside the Chapter House
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Tome of Rituals
Publisher: White Wolf
by Charles S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 04/02/2023 15:43:15

This book is exactly what it says it is: a collection of rituals for use with M20: Sorcerer. One of the problems that the Sorcerer books have always had is a lack of rituals, and though M20: Sorcerer mitigates this to an extent, there simply isn't enough variety of rituals for players who aren't interested in coming up with their own. This book helps a lot, including rituals for all the Paths in M20: Sorcerer. They're generally good (though there are a couple that seem borderline but that's inevitable with a large number of items like this and the flexibility of WoD's, and Mage in particular's, rules).

Strongly recommended for anyone looking to run or play M20: Sorcerer



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Tome of Rituals
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Paradigm Explored: Fairy-Faith
Publisher: White Wolf
by Charles S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 03/17/2023 17:29:57

Another solid entry in the Paradigm Explored series, Fairy-Faith explores the worldview of mages who derive their workings from stories of the Fae. It includes notes for crossover with Changeling, some solid merits/flaws, rotes, and wonders, but by far the most interesting thing is the discussion of House Diedne. That discussion is full of great plot hooks, and is the portion that I am most likely to use in a game. Overall, a great addition, and a strong recommendation for anyone looking for more paradigm deep dives.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Paradigm Explored: Fairy-Faith
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Fireball Run
Publisher: White Wolf
by Charles S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 02/21/2023 15:53:37

A good start to the Darkness Over Dallas series. It introduces some characters, kills some, has some of them emerge victorious. Generally well-written, looking forward to reading the next one.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Fireball Run
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M20 The Operative's Dossier
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
by Charles S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 06/06/2022 12:37:27

I'm sad that I didn't like this book more than I did. It would be generous to call mage's history with science and technology to be hit or miss, and for me, this book missed in quite a few places. There are so many things that look like what I wanted out of it, but yet fell flat.

A note: this is a review of the backer copy (post-layout), and some details may have changed between this and the final version.

Start with translations. I don't know how, but the M20 line continues to do a bad job with translations, Japanese particularly (which I notice better due to speaking it). Most egregious is the "White Metal Dragons" being translated as "Howaito Kin Ryuu" which...why would they use the borrowed word for white instead of the native word? And also this would create a compound noun not a three-word phrase, so it'd contract likely to hakkinyruu or byakkinryuu (written 白金竜). It's a quibble, but one I keep returning to as I see things like the original draft of M20: Victorian Age (post-editing version not yet available at the time of this writing) using "jidai" to mean future (it means "era") and I know it's a thing that effort has gone into fixing. And yet.

The rest of the chapter on Constructs and Symposiums is...fine. Nothing really special, still annoyed from T:R where they came from with naming an ANTARCTIC station "Ultima Thule" though, given that "Thule" indicates North.

The Unlikely Allies section seems to mostly say "The only people in the Union that anyone would ally with are dissident groups that may or may not be on the verge of leaving the Union" which was a bit disappointing. This was an area that I admit I was looking for a bit of guidance in for how to get groups to work together, and a lot of it was "Well, they won't. Unless the Technocrats have a foot out the door. And even then, maybe not"

Digital Web 3.0 is confusingly organized (why are there two distinct Augmented Reality subsections separated by several pages?) and seems to be a bit mixed on whether the Internet and the Digital Web are the same, but it leans towards "yes" and I definitely think that Mage would benefit from a firm "No" that lets the Digital Web be more timeless and not bound to any specific version of the Internet. It does come close to Reality Zone rules with the Paradox and Spheres Work Differently sections on page 65, though, that was good material and should be expanded in the future.

Technomancer's Toybox was good, the highlight of the book. The Construct creation system was a bit shallow (no notions of flaws, all features come from a common point pool with no distinctions between them) but it gives a decent base for expansion, which I'll do. And Terranorming and the Reality Zone mechanical effects for Chantries also gave something useful to start from for an under-developed area of the game, actually fighting the Ascension War other than with bullets and fireballs.

The Mission Statements chapter was fine. It didn't do much for me, but they, as with other things, provide a good place to start.

All in all, I think this book has the beginnings of a lot of useful systems, and would really benefit from having been substantially larger. A tighter theme focusing on Allies, Procedures and Devices, and Mission Statements under the title would have been fine if we could have gotten separate Digital Web 3.0 and a "Book of Constructs" type of thing, with more details and more thought out Digital Web work and the fully detailed Constructs with a deeper creation system (though not quite the mess that Book of Chantries had). So, a solid book, inspiring a lot of ideas, but it left me a bit disappointed with what was there.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
M20 The Operative's Dossier
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M20 Technocracy Reloaded
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
by Charles S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 05/20/2022 00:34:41

This book is overall...good. It just rubs me the wrong way. The book starts with a very jokey, Paranoia-esque tone that feels very off for Mage. Honestly, that's the thing about this book, there's a lot of good things, but it feels off in a bunch of ways. For example, putting Machine Learning under Iteration X instead of the New World Order is certainly a choice, but not one that makes sense to someone who knows machine learning and how closely tied it is to data science (this could also create an ItX/NWO rift/rivalry over AI approaches, adding potential stories that are just being ignored). There's other places that are just baffling, like getting approximately the same number of words about Control as about sexuality within the Union, followed by a bizarre set up regarding family life that would cause almost every actual human being to abandon the Union.

Overall, though, there's a lot of useful material, particularly on the Conventions and their Methodologies, some interesting Union projects around the world (with some oddities there as well), and especially if you don't have the old Guide to the Technocracy it's useful, though it does assume that you have the Revised Convention Books rather than standing on its own as part of the 20th Anniversary Edition.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
M20 Technocracy Reloaded
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Slaughter in the Death Dimension
Publisher: White Wolf
by Charles S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 04/04/2022 15:42:02

This was better than its name had any right to be. An entertaining story and setting piece for Mage, though not one that can be (or should be!) entirely taken seriously. It's definitely over the top, and at times feels like a satirical Technocracy game, but taking place among the Euthanatoi, with their committees for forming committees and petty politicking among themselves (mostly as backstory) that isn't usually seen from that Tradition. It contains quite a few NPCs, and could be an interesting group to interact with in a Victorian-ish era game.

That said, the product needs work. The layout could improve significantly (all pages have border on one side, there's honestly too many images and they're placed awkwardly) and a strong hand at editing would have gone a long way.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
Slaughter in the Death Dimension
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The Hermetic Hipsters Guide to the Nine Mystic Traditions
Publisher: White Wolf
by Charles S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 03/30/2022 01:20:58

This book consists of short fiction, some art, a background, and then several merits for each Tradition designed to add some individual flavor to them derived from the Revised Tradition Books. These are largely well-balanced, diverse, and capture aspects of the Traditions that have thus-far been absent from the M20 line.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
The Hermetic Hipsters Guide to the Nine Mystic Traditions
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Book of Fragments
Publisher: White Wolf
by Charles S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 03/29/2022 23:54:47

Minor Spheres were first introduced in the Revised ST Handbook, and though they seemed like an interesting idea, they were completely undeveloped and badly overpriced for what they were, making them interesting but largely unused. This book fixes those problems, nailing down a stronger set of mechanics for Minor Spheres and giving nine examples. This book finally makes Minor Spheres worth considering, and not just the ones listed. I hope that the author or others follow this up with additional options.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Book of Fragments
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Paved with Good Intentions
Publisher: White Wolf
by Charles S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 03/29/2022 15:14:43

This is a late entry in the Year of the Road event and it's bringing a focus on the mechanics of driving, vehicles in general, and chases. Right off the top it throws out the usual "Talents have no penalty, Skills +1 difficulty, Knowledges you can't roll" rule for what happens without the appropriate Ability to make it a whopping +3 difficulty when lacking Drive (or Athletics or Ride as appropriate) for vehicle maneuver, and placing the maximum difficulty at 10, which does awkward things to the Storyteller System (which is why it largely caps difficulties at 9 since Revised). The skidmark frame for the pages was creative, but im place it make the text a bit harder to make out, though this will vary based on vision of the reader.

The vehicle maneuvers and chase mechanics are solid, though it led me to wonder if the Martial Arts Maneuver system in M20 could be adapted to Drive Maneuvers to manage this effectively. There's lots of modifiers for road conditions (mixed with car conditions) and then some tables of vehicles of various sorts. It proceeds in chapter two to cover similar considerations for mounted maneuver and combat, including quite a bit of detail on lances for your Dark Ages game needs.

Finally, in Chapter 3, the supernatural stuff appears. First there's a few merits and flaws for driving in general, before moving on to system by system material. For vampires, there's a couple of horse revenants, for werewolf there's several gifts, for mage there's alternate engines, a sort of drivable familiar like thing modeled as an Ally (and with Arete misspelled), for Changeling there's a set of treasures.

Overall, it's a solid book. Probably the vehicle mechanics are the best part, certainly the part I'm most likely to use, I found the supernatural material to fall a bit flat, though the revenant horses were the most interesting of them. If you're going to run a game involving a substantial amount of vehicle work, whether travel, chases, etc., this will be a useful addition to your collection.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
Paved with Good Intentions
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A Blessing and A Curse
Publisher: White Wolf
by Charles S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 03/29/2022 15:00:00

A solid little mini-story from Travis Legge, A Blessing and a Curse is largely an excuse to get Tradiiton PCs to stop in Rockford, IL to check on something weird, and which ties in to the Technocracy Reloaded Jumpstart material. The story is short and doesn't have particularly high stakes, but does what it sets out to do by giving the PCs a reason to turn a stop at a gas station into the hook for several future stories. The only real critique I have is that, despite the title, the situation in question doesn't really seem to have much negative consequence for the relevant NPC, so there's little reason for the PCs to want to remove it, but that's a minor issue given that they've already stopped to investigate at all by that point.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
A Blessing and A Curse
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Creator Reply:
Thank you so much for your thoughtful review! With regard to negative consequences attached to the relevant NPC, I think it will be a matter of each group's tastes and temperaments as to how that is interpreted. Some will undoubtedly see nothing wrong with leaving things as they are, while others will see an inherent risk in supernatural attention being repeatedly drawn toward the NPC. The Rule of Shade is a concern for many mages, and the blessing puts that in jeopardy. Having said that, I think it's totally fair to say once they've stopped to investigate the events, the story has served its purpose. It's very much left to the players' agency to determine how best to interpret and address the underlying cause, or whether to address it at all.
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Tale-Singers
Publisher: White Wolf
by Charles S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/29/2022 19:06:36

This Craft is well conceived and written. The book notes that they rarely make good PCs, but as NPCs, quest-givers, and ways of life to try to protect, the Tale-Singers are excellent. Plus, it's helpful for getting a feel for the group's magick with 9 rotes and 3 wonders. A good supplement, and useful, often in ways that aren't immediately obvious for fleshing out a mage chronicle, an encounter on the road, or a way to bring the wider world into the city the characters live in.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Tale-Singers
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Ascension's Landscape: Setting Refinements and Story Hooks
Publisher: White Wolf
by Charles S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/18/2022 23:58:01

Ascension's Landscape fits an essential niche in the Mage ecosystem. All sorts of essential questions that are often unspoken are brought up and discussed, with several possible resolutions. From "How many mages are there?" to "What makes the WoD dark?" it's a collection of things that an ST really needs to think through before setting up their game, often things that it is essential that players know before they can make appropriate characters. I recommend it to everyone interested in running Mage or thinking about what actually makes the setting tick.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Ascension's Landscape: Setting Refinements and Story Hooks
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Never-Real Worlds
Publisher: White Wolf
by Charles S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/13/2022 14:20:42

Never-Real Worlds provides charts for randomly generating Paradox Realms. Implicit in it is an approach to Paradox Realms that isn't quite in the books but makes them much more functional: that they should be a series of small challenges to overcome for the player and character (and suggests using some aspects of this book for other things, like Seekings and just strange corners of the World of Darkness). Overall this is welcome. Turning a thing that is honestly only vaguely defined in the official supplements into something with enough structure that sending a PC to a Paradox Realm doesn't truly destroy the flow of the game (or act as a non-standard Game Over) is a good achievement. The book also has a fun approach to the art: most of it is landscapes from artbreeder, a publicly accessible AI, which lends a certain "not quite right" and surreal quality to much of it.

The only significant criticism I have is that the author seems to think that 2d10 and d20 but no 1 are similar probability distributions, and may not realize that one of the tables is going to be very strongly weighted towards a few outcomes when it seems the intention was to make them all about equal. An easily fixed problem as most games should have a d20 lying around, or can simulate it with an odds/evens roll for the tens digit and a d10 for the ones digit to get numbers 00 through 19, adn either add 1 or call 00 as 20 as a workaround.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
Never-Real Worlds
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Fallen Mages Ready Made Characters II
Publisher: White Wolf
by Charles S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 12/09/2021 14:48:36

Very similar to the first volume, in ways both good and bad. The characters are slightly more detailed, and they have original art, pushing the $3 pricetag of this volume to the top end of what I would consider reasonable. That said, the typos, grammatical issues, and mechanics issues (Arete 3 character with 2 Spheres at 5) continue, and there are a couple of awkward side effects of the layout, but I'm not counting that too strongly against it.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
Fallen Mages Ready Made Characters II
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