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I had some brief thoughts about Mage: the Ascension a little while ago that I've been musing on. I've got a whole bunch of the purple books on my shelf and it's been a while since I've looked through them or, more than that, thought critically about them. When I didn't feel like picking up the full narrative of Oryx and Crake (which is another book I've got some opinions on, now that I've finished it) I picked up the Euthanatos Revised splat and read it.
Ascension has some problems in that it reads like a freshman's understanding of post-modernism mixed in with a healthy dislike of having to wear a suit to work. I tend to read post-modernism sympathetically, but the declaration that there are no facts is true only on a pedantic, technical level. It's like saying that reality is a shared illusion because of the problem of not being able to verify the realities that other people experience except through metaphor or that we don't technically have a free will because of physics and chemistry. Yes, well, it's a big leap from the ramifications of that on a small and large scale to a setting where the scientific method is a lie we teach to children to strengthen consensus. While I understand that it's just a game, there really are people out there that believe that vaccinations cause autism and there was recently an outbreak of smallpox in a power-of-prayer megachurch.
Mage is a game that should be able to be played by enthusiastically throwing fireballs at black helicopters piloted by men in dark suits with mirrorshades, but I feel that it needs a rewrite that the setting presented stand up better to criticism like that.
I feel like things might be more successful if the setting wasn't presented as if things like the scientific method weren't total bullshit but that the eventual semi-static universe that we've ended up in is a natural tendency. Items have mystical properties and react well to magic, in some cases, but gunpowder is a physical object and when the materials that combine it are put together, it always would have combusted as it does. Getting more than that physical reaction is the property of magic. Yeah, there are places where the forces of entropy or dynamism overwhelm the universal constant state, and that happened more in what they called they High Mythic age - the Order of Reason's crusade was less about consensus than it was about whittling down the influence of high mythic creatures and oppositional willworkers. Consensus is important in terms of what magic you can actually get away with, and the Technocracy is less about uplifting mortals than it is about exercising control.
Ascension has some problems in that it reads like a freshman's understanding of post-modernism mixed in with a healthy dislike of having to wear a suit to work. I tend to read post-modernism sympathetically, but the declaration that there are no facts is true only on a pedantic, technical level. It's like saying that reality is a shared illusion because of the problem of not being able to verify the realities that other people experience except through metaphor or that we don't technically have a free will because of physics and chemistry. Yes, well, it's a big leap from the ramifications of that on a small and large scale to a setting where the scientific method is a lie we teach to children to strengthen consensus. While I understand that it's just a game, there really are people out there that believe that vaccinations cause autism and there was recently an outbreak of smallpox in a power-of-prayer megachurch.
Mage is a game that should be able to be played by enthusiastically throwing fireballs at black helicopters piloted by men in dark suits with mirrorshades, but I feel that it needs a rewrite that the setting presented stand up better to criticism like that.
I feel like things might be more successful if the setting wasn't presented as if things like the scientific method weren't total bullshit but that the eventual semi-static universe that we've ended up in is a natural tendency. Items have mystical properties and react well to magic, in some cases, but gunpowder is a physical object and when the materials that combine it are put together, it always would have combusted as it does. Getting more than that physical reaction is the property of magic. Yeah, there are places where the forces of entropy or dynamism overwhelm the universal constant state, and that happened more in what they called they High Mythic age - the Order of Reason's crusade was less about consensus than it was about whittling down the influence of high mythic creatures and oppositional willworkers. Consensus is important in terms of what magic you can actually get away with, and the Technocracy is less about uplifting mortals than it is about exercising control.