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graymachine
2008-04-08, 01:14 AM
I've developed a rough theme for a Mage: the Awakening game (old mage, not the new one that so badly wants to be the old) and I thought I'd put it through the considerable wine-presses that are the minds on this forum. The idea is both very simple and very complex: The worlds of techno-magick and arcano-magick have long since been seperated (for those that may be comping at the bit, yes, the idea came from an old vidjja magame.) In essences, at the Conclave of the White Tower ( a meeting I'm making up), near the later days of the Order of Reason before it became the Technocracy, the Archmagi on both sides decided that mankind was simply too young to deal with the greatness that they offered and so the severed the world, splitting it into two simplier halves, one mystical, one rational. The rational world is a place where the Awakened know solace with the machine, and the mystical is where the mystical take comfort in the unknowable. Both are good places to live if you do not want for the other.
The intro I'm playing around with in my head is, on one side a team of geniuses are calibrating transdimensional etheric subharmonics to sync with their element-zero quantum singularity to build a bridge to... somewhere else. Meanwhile, demagogues whisper mandalas to the ancient focal points at the heart of the world, a special few reworking the mana-flow to pierce the veil between worlds, building a bridge to... somewhere.
Obviously, the plot start with these two opposing, but similar crack teams of mages, both doing the same thing. To this point, neither world knows of the other, except for a few lost souls that bear ancient writings. When this bridge is joined, however, it awakens the Nephandi and those that they serve from a long stasis, giving them direction and purpose to once again take up the banner of unmaking.

This is kinda a basic outline of the plot; I was looking for some refinement, possibly a mechanical point or two. It's not something I'm actually expecting to be able to run, but it's an idea I'd like to explore.

nerulean
2008-04-08, 08:30 AM
This actually could run. Our group played a game more closely based on the computer games run in a slightly mangled combination of D&D and D20 Modern, and for the most part it was good fun. We were trying to discovered that crazy scientists were trying to amalgamate the two worlds in a way that was likely to cause everything to splode and had to stop them, eventually doing the re-amalgamation for ourselves in a much more peaceful manner.

Since we were playing a different system and I don't know Mage at all, I can't give you any specific mechanical tips, but I can tell you what went wrong in our game. For starters, magic was way, way too powerful as compared to technology - the only person playing a character from Stark ended up having to re-write his character sheet with a completely twinked set of rules to even begin to match up to the capabilities of the Arcadians, and he was still far and away the weakest in the group. By the end of the campaign, all the NPCs were written using D&D rules to make them viable, even the ones from Stark.

Another thing to watch out for is specific magical effects that are unbalancing in a non-magical world. A shatter spell is pretty innocuous beyond a certain level in D&D because magical items are immune to it and there comes a point when every item is magical, but my warlock happily shattered his way through all the technological equipment of Stark that had no such immunity.

If Mage can deal with that, then it's all good.