Mage: The Awakening Chronicler’s Guide
Dec. 8th, 2012 11:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroNot quite the usual storyteller’s guide, this book is billed to be less about tips for running a campaign, and more for ideas on how to create ones that keep Mage: The Awakening fresh and interesting. It includes how to run Mage in other genres, both system changes (particularly to account for differences in paradox) and shallow setting/mythos changes; how to re-skin the magic system as psychic powers or hypertech; and a bunch of campaign suggestions.
I think something that I really look for in gaming books, particularly in White Wolf books, are ideas. Some are better than others. In this case, it doesn’t go far enough with any of the ideas: They’ll come up with an interesting hook or base, but then give one or two suggestions for building on it and switch to something else entirely. It’s shallow. Nothing gets fleshed out; it’s all either jumping-off points (that are either weak or generic) or frameworks. At points it feels like the authors were as underwhelmed with the Atlantis myth and mythology as I am, but editorial mandate meant they needed to conform to it. That, or they were under deadline to just get a book out the door.
One of the ideas has the character’s magic coming from a different source from everyone else’s. Which is a cool idea, but I’m already running that, melded with time-travel, Ultima fan-fiction, world-level sandboxing and interpersonal dynamics. (In their defense, the real-world historical tie-in setting for that idea was one of the strongest in the book.) Another involves magic being a way for cthuloid beasts to make their way into our reality…which I’ve also already run, though I mixed it with memory alteration, the question of identity, coming-of-age, abuse of power and college hijinks. Only one story idea used the “Atlantis/the Supernal is a lie!” twist I’d been hoping for all book, though it was still rather bare-bones and, in retrospect, predictable.
Another concern I have is that because everything is so shallow, I have to wonder how much it’s actually been playtested. My favorite system/setting hack was actually the very last one, with Mage redone as a superhero comic. It includes rules for multipliers that make effects huge and splashy and super-powerful, which concern me if they are insufficiently playtested: I like running games with powerful characters, but there’s “I can change a small aspect of the world if I try” and then there’s “I can expect my plan to turn the world from a disk into a sphere to actually work.”
Something random that pisses me off about this entire series of books: The title headers aren’t distinct enough, and therefore new sections are hard to discern. I had a bunch of moments of, “Wait, that’s it? We’re talking about a new idea now?” because the idea hadn’t been fully developed and the headers for a new sub-section and a new topic entirely are the same, and they’ve abandoned the concept of logical pagination entirely.
Overall: This is useful if you are relatively new to running full campaigns and particularly like Mage: The Awakening, but there are better overall resources for the new GM (the D&D 4E Dungeon Masters Guides were quite good) and better sources of really interesting campaign ideas (which include most of the old World of Darkness line and a bunch of the Fast Forward Entertainment D20 books I’ve reviewed in the past).
I think something that I really look for in gaming books, particularly in White Wolf books, are ideas. Some are better than others. In this case, it doesn’t go far enough with any of the ideas: They’ll come up with an interesting hook or base, but then give one or two suggestions for building on it and switch to something else entirely. It’s shallow. Nothing gets fleshed out; it’s all either jumping-off points (that are either weak or generic) or frameworks. At points it feels like the authors were as underwhelmed with the Atlantis myth and mythology as I am, but editorial mandate meant they needed to conform to it. That, or they were under deadline to just get a book out the door.
One of the ideas has the character’s magic coming from a different source from everyone else’s. Which is a cool idea, but I’m already running that, melded with time-travel, Ultima fan-fiction, world-level sandboxing and interpersonal dynamics. (In their defense, the real-world historical tie-in setting for that idea was one of the strongest in the book.) Another involves magic being a way for cthuloid beasts to make their way into our reality…which I’ve also already run, though I mixed it with memory alteration, the question of identity, coming-of-age, abuse of power and college hijinks. Only one story idea used the “Atlantis/the Supernal is a lie!” twist I’d been hoping for all book, though it was still rather bare-bones and, in retrospect, predictable.
Another concern I have is that because everything is so shallow, I have to wonder how much it’s actually been playtested. My favorite system/setting hack was actually the very last one, with Mage redone as a superhero comic. It includes rules for multipliers that make effects huge and splashy and super-powerful, which concern me if they are insufficiently playtested: I like running games with powerful characters, but there’s “I can change a small aspect of the world if I try” and then there’s “I can expect my plan to turn the world from a disk into a sphere to actually work.”
Something random that pisses me off about this entire series of books: The title headers aren’t distinct enough, and therefore new sections are hard to discern. I had a bunch of moments of, “Wait, that’s it? We’re talking about a new idea now?” because the idea hadn’t been fully developed and the headers for a new sub-section and a new topic entirely are the same, and they’ve abandoned the concept of logical pagination entirely.
Overall: This is useful if you are relatively new to running full campaigns and particularly like Mage: The Awakening, but there are better overall resources for the new GM (the D&D 4E Dungeon Masters Guides were quite good) and better sources of really interesting campaign ideas (which include most of the old World of Darkness line and a bunch of the Fast Forward Entertainment D20 books I’ve reviewed in the past).
