Barbelith Underground > Temple > Mage: The Ascension and other RPGs

Haven't really fully read all of this thread, I just thought I'd speak up, since I'm the biggest Mage geek I know (owning all the books, save Bygone Bestiary and Red Sign). I've been playing Mage for years, and have used it to try out just about every different paradigm idea that came into my head (from macroscopic stage magicians treating reality as an audience to biology grad students who spent 5 years with an Andean tribe learning their Science).

The interesting thing to note with Mage in regards to post-modernism is that the very idea of the Spheres has a certain post-modern/chaos magic feel to them. Look at DA: Mage, every Fellowship has their own Pillars for working magic. But the Council essentially organized the grand unification theory of magic, drawing all the disparate styles into a single set of 9, forever pursuing the theoretical 10th that would lead to Ascension. The game is heavily based on hermetic principles of the power of the Will, of a grand design to the universe (albeit that design is one where the architect is humanity), and on a path that will eventually lead to trasnceding to a higher state.

I think a good deal of the way I think about the occult was shaped by Mage, simply becuase it makes ideas like consensual reality, theurgy, hermeticism, and technomagic approachable concepts rather than complicated abstracts.

Of course, that doesn't change the fact that Mage games ran one of two ways: Absolutly fucking mindblowingly good, or "slaughter-the-ST-and-all-his-family" bad. Mage was a game where the players and the ST either "got it", or they didn't. If they DID understand the game, it went really really well becuase everyone came up with intricate paradigms and examples of how their powers functioned ("Holding my ruby amulet high, I invoke Gabriel, Archangel of Fire, through the seal inscribed within the gem, bending his fury to my will and unleashing him upon the Men in Black!"). If it didn't, it became just another version of Dungeons & Dragons ("I cast a Forces 3/Prime 2 fireball at them while holding my Forces focus which is ummm...a ruby amulet").

I think the best Mage game I played in was a Laws of Ascension LARP through the Toronto Camarilla. The game was wonderfully run, and everyone put a lot of thought into their characters. We'd have times when, in a lull in the action, we'd be sitting around on couches arguing paradigm. We were encouraged to keep character diaries for the evolutions of our paradigms (or at least the STs thought it was really cool when we did), and to really use our paradigms as a lens to see the world.

The biggest magical benefit I've found from Mage is what I call "masking", dunno what other people call it (I think this is what some folks call a "fiction suit"), but its sort of a cross between making a servitor and making a soul jar. I put a portion of myself into the character (this works far better in Mage than anywhere else I've found), and the character becomes a facet of how I see magic, or how I COULD see magic. An exercise in occult lore and occult understanding, a reason to do research, and a reason to create new ideas. I once wrote a 4000+ word paper that was designed as a fragment of my Son of Ether's thesis on fusing the Science of the remote Andean tribe that trained him with modern technology and materials. It's really trippy.