Games - Mage: The Ascension

Home > Listing Index > Games > Mage: The Ascension

	Games - Mage: The Ascension

Mage: The Ascension is a Role-playing game based in the World of Darkness, and was published by White Wolf Game Studio. The characters portrayed in the game are referred to as mages, and are capable of feats of magic. (However, the idea of magic in Mage is broadly inclusive of diverse ideas about mystical practices as well as other belief systems, such as science and religion, so that some mages do not resemble typical fantasy wizards.) In 1996, Mage: The Ascension won the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Rules 1995. In 2005, White Wolf released a new game marketed under the same name (Mage) for the new World of Darkness series, Mage: The Awakening, with some of the same game mechanics but with substantially different premises and setting.

Metaphysics

The basic premise of Mage: The Ascension is that reality is the way people believe it is, thus everyone has the capacity, at some level, to shape reality. In most people, known as sleepers, this capacity is dormant. The capacity itself is personified as a mysterious alter-ego called the Avatar, which is said to be sleeping. In a Mage, the Avatar is said to be Awakened, (many Mages have had encounters with their Avatars). With an awakened Avatar, a Mage can consciously seek to change reality via willpower, beliefs, and specific magical techniques.

The beliefs and techniques of Mages vary enormously, and the ability to alter reality can only exist in the context of a coherent system of belief and technique, called a paradigm. Such a paradigm organizes the way a Mage understands reality, how the universe works, and what things mean. It also provides the Mage with an understanding of how to change reality, through specific magical techniques. For example, an alchemical paradigm might describe the act of wood burning as the wood "releasing its essence of elemental Fire," while modern science would describe fire as "combustion resulting from a complex chemical reaction." Paradigms tend to be nuanced per the individual Mage, but the vast majority belong to broad categories of paradigm, e.g., Shamanism, Medieval Sorcery, religious miracle working, and superscience.

In the Mage setting, everyday reality is governed by commonsense rules derived from the collective beliefs of sleepers. This is called the consensus. The majority of Mages' paradigms differ substantially from the consensus. When a mage performs an act of magic that does not seriously violate this commonsense version of reality, in game terms this is called coincidental magic. Magic that deviates wildly from consensus is called vulgar magic. When it is performed ineptly, or is vulgar, and especially if it is vulgar and witnessed by sleepers, magic can cause Paradox, a phenomenon in which reality tries to resolve the apparent contradiction. Paradox is difficult to predict and almost always bad for the mage. The most common consequences of paradox include physical damage directly to the Mage's body, and paradox flaws, magic-like effects which can for example turn the mage's hair green, make him mute, make him incapable of leaving a certain location, and so on. In more extreme cases paradox can cause Quiet (forms of madness that afflicts mages and may leak into reality), Paradox Spirits (nebulous, often powerful beings which purposively set about resolving the contradiction, usually by directly punishing the mage), or even the removal of the Mage to a paradox realm, a pocket dimension from which it may be difficult to escape.

In Mage, there is an underlying framework to reality called the Tapestry. The Tapestry is naturally divided into various sections, including the physical realm and various levels of the spirit world, or Umbra. At the most basic level, the Tapestry is composed of something called Quintessence, the essence of magic and what is real, in game terms. Quintessence can have distinctive character, called resonance, including but not limited to dynamic, static, entropic, and other kinds of resonance.

In order to understand the metaphysics of the Mage setting, it is important to remember that many of the terms used to describe magic and Mages e.g., Avatar, Quintessence, the Umbra, and Paradox, Resonance, as well as the award-winning game mechanics a player uses to describe the areas of magic in which his character is proficient-- the Spheres, look, mean, and are understood very differently depending on the paradigm of the Mage in question, even though they are often described from particular paradigmatic points-of-view. In-character, only a Mage's Paradigm can explain what each of these things is, what it means, and why it's the way it is. And Mages, especially where paradigms differ, are more likely to disagree than to agree.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Mage: The Ascension ]

Searches on eBay

mage: the ascension