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The Mysterium aren't the good guys and altruism was likely not a motivator behind creating them. Their Cryptologos heritage is why the true world histories and advanced scientific discoveries remain in vaults, because humanity needs to earn it. And also the origin of the Jnanamukti. The Author isn't a good gal, she's just a god with a seeming vested interest in the organization she helped make. Meanwhile, we've got a lot of portraits of the sort of people who seek and attain archmasters. Mage is very upfront with it's views on power, what it does, and the type of people who would seek it.
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Feb 11, 2019 20:42
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The thing about "non-problematic liches" is that there are honestly a bunch of problems with mages and their power and privileges, and those problems get worse and worse as you get older and less and less a part of humanity. Any lich, even if they didn't get that way by victimizing anybody, is probably going to become some kind of issue if they don't gently caress permanently off into the Realms Invisible to gaze into their navel.
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Feb 11, 2019 20:48
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The Mysterium are the good guys and if you really deserved access to all that lore you would have passed the appropriate trials and harrowings by now.
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Feb 11, 2019 20:57
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I Am Just a Box posted:The fact that its corebook gets this across so vividly and in so many different ways is why I still sometimes rank it as just the best CofD game. Shut up mages, second place is Changeling. (I do like Mage.) These are all great points, thank you! I think the second one might be the biggest, there should have been more about what demons do day to day, how they relate to the world and people around them and how they fight back against the Machine. I really hope we get more Demon content one day, it is by far my absolute favorite part of CofD and I really love GMing and playing it.
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Feb 11, 2019 21:07
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Joe Slowboat posted:I feel that's somewhat unfair to liches. She's not the only canonical one. There are three (three!) examples of Archmasters who achieved Ascension in the setting; The Progenitor, former Minister of Hegemony who created the Hive-Souls and was rewarded with eternal existence as a lesser Exarch under the Unity. Quite self-evidently not a good person. The Corpus Author, who - yes, sure, she made the Mysterium. She did it by welding the "knowledge is the sole valuable resource" Order, who *were* the faction in the Diamond responsible for promoting mundane learning among Sleepers, to the "Sleepers are scum that magic flees from" apocalyptic weirdo Order. Aethenea stopped being somewhere mages would store things like crop rotation manuals and examples of engineering in case Sleeper society forgot them, and the Mysterium is the most anti-Sleeper Pentacle Order. She got her way, but she left a gaping hole in magical society it took centuries to fill. And that's if you believe the Free Council now fill it. Screw the Corpus Author. The Keepers of the Word were doing just fine. And, lastly, Merlin. We know the Author and the Progenitor's Orders, and can guess at their former Paths, but Myrddin Emrys is the Ascended archmaster the Pentacle know the most about - he was Welsh, he was a Silver Ladder Acanthus, he created the Walkers in Mists Legacy. He also used his archmastery to link the land's Fate to its king's and deliberately caused the destruction of Camelot to seal his Noumenon. He got away scott-free, everyone else had their timeline retconned by the Exarchs. He killed the Aeons of Fate doing it, so that they reformed as Mordred. Even now, if anyone with Arthurian cabal symbolism gets a little too close to leadership, there's a chance Nimue (an Ananke, that Merlin created) will show up to wreck their poo poo, because he programmed her to destroy Camelot and hosed off to the Supernal after the deed was done. The Silver Ladder, naturally, thinks Merlin was aces.
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Feb 11, 2019 21:15
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The Mysterium aren't perfect by any means, but they are firmly on the side of fighting God in the name of humanity, which is the Ascension War. I'm of the opinion that the Ascension War is good; the Exarchs need to be thrown down, and mages should believe that. Paradox and the Abyss are what motivate the Mysterium's practice of cryptologos - the fact that magical artifacts and knowledge are eroded by Quiescence is a pretty decent reason to keep the truth secret and give it out to those who can be trusted not to break it. I don't agree with the Mysterium's priorities in sharing gnostic wisdom, but I can't actually fault their terror that magical knowledge be lost forever in the fact of the Abyss and the Throne. If Mage takes the position that magic, Gnosis, the pursuit of Supernal Truth, is bad (and the degree to which mages are different from most humans is the degree to which they become worse), then Mage is taking the position that humanity's natural position is servitude to powers outside of our understanding. And that this gnostic servitude is better than the idea that humans might try, in whatever flawed way, to change the world. If I thought the gameline really took that position I would be a lot less interested in it, because that position is terrible. Thankfully, I'm pretty sure Mage believes in the possibility of people working to change the world, and doesn't consider a desire for the power to do so an inherently sinful tendency. Yes, plenty of people who desire power are awful, but the desire for the power to change the world (magic) is presented as neutral in itself. E: well, I guess I've been told. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Feb 11, 2019 |
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Feb 11, 2019 21:18
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I mean, none of that means magic is value-negative, or that you can't be a good person in the Mysterium or Silver Ladder. Just, y'know, day one: mage society is kind of lovely and needs fixing.
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Feb 11, 2019 21:25
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Joe Slowboat posted:E: well, I guess I've been told. You're assuming that "Ascended" equals "Ascended Archmaster". It doesn't. There's lots of ways to Ascend - as many as there are people who've managed it - and *most* mages who escape reality for good are... Fine. You catch whispers of them in the Supernal World, come across a Verge generated by their Sarira, hear a rumor about a mage three Consilia over who was so Wise he transcended. Archmasters ascend by deciding what great change they want to inflict on the universe and breaking it until it falls in line. Their way is the most certain (it's proven to work in a minority of cases, given luck and deftness in the Pax Arcanum) but one of the most selfish. Humanity's natural position isn't servitude, but Gnosis has to be in balance with Wisdom or you gently caress it up for yourself and everyone else. And mages are predisposed away from that balance.
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Feb 11, 2019 21:26
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I can’t help but notice that despite the Corpus Author’s machinations, mankind has not forgotten how to do crop rotation. We should by no means allow this rank editorializing to confuse our picture of the Mysterium and Diamond as a whole.
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Feb 11, 2019 21:49
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Ecco was trying to warn us this whole time! They Came From Beneath the Sea! would be perfect for this; just update it a bit from 50s B-movie to 90s Action Film. Alternatively, it'd make a badass Ascension game, in the same mold as The Invisibles.
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Feb 11, 2019 22:29
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Ahhh that makes me want to run a 90s-style Dolphin-Crystal-Pyramid-Energy game with a heavy Lisa Frank Vaporwave aesthetic. Bermuda Triangle all the crash site for a Lemurian ship whose resonant energies disrupt modern navi systems. Martha Stewart weaponizing Feng Shui to keep the masses obedient. Rainforest Super Sentai, wait that's just Captain Planet nevermind.
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Ironslave posted:The Mysterium aren't the good guys and altruism was likely not a motivator behind creating them. Their Cryptologos heritage is why the true world histories and advanced scientific discoveries remain in vaults, because humanity needs to earn it. And also the origin of the Jnanamukti. The Author isn't a good gal, she's just a god with a seeming vested interest in the organization she helped make. Meanwhile, we've got a lot of portraits of the sort of people who seek and attain archmasters.
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Feb 11, 2019 23:05
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Ferrinus posted:I can’t help but notice that despite the Corpus Author’s machinations, mankind has not forgotten how to do crop rotation. We should by no means allow this rank editorializing to confuse our picture of the Mysterium and Diamond as a whole. Who knows what else got locked away from the Keeper's Vaults?
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Feb 11, 2019 23:06
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The Taco Bell Breast Man menu from Achewood.
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Feb 11, 2019 23:10
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Dave Brookshaw posted:Who knows what else got locked away from the Keeper's Vaults? The question is, does it matter? If it was genuine arcane knowledge, we want it locked away so that it doesn't diminish and disintegrate due to the tides of pancryptia. If it's a schematic for the steam engine or the cure for cancer, well, what's the actual allegation here - the Mysterium failed to divulge important historical or scientific information to the masses, or deliberately kept it hidden? It's not like mystagogues are the only mages who could ever have used time magic to retrieve a schematic for a light bulb or hypodermic needle from the future, or indeed that mankind's ability to make use of those things is bottlenecked by pure abstract knowledge rather than the development of supply chains and infrastructure (or like, Exarch whims; I bet you'd have some serious problems if you tried to go around curing the black plague too early). The preservation and re-dissemination of some awesome poem or biography from the library of Alexandria would be a nice public service, but its utility in the fight against the Exarchs' dominion over sorcery is highly debatable.
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Feb 11, 2019 23:50
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Pictured: How to be fun at parties. Unrelated to that, I have a great deal of sympathy for the Mysterium, just because "gently caress. That's cool. I wanna learn the poo poo out of that." is what drove my career choice, but it's gotten a bit more fun to use them in my games since their simultaneous mysticism, technocratic sympathies (and I don't mean Technocratic), and subtle or overt bigotries towards Sleepers started to filter in and make them more distinct than just "Mages who like to Mage really hard".
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Feb 12, 2019 00:29
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Dave Brookshaw posted:She's not the only canonical one. What books are these from?
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Feb 12, 2019 03:34
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Not sure about the Progenitor, but the Corpus Author is in both the Mysterium book and Imperial Mysteries.
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Feb 12, 2019 04:55
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I think I got this bit from something in Imperial Mysteries, but I always assumed that there were a fair number of Archmasters who Ascended and who weren't dicks, but they just split off into a different universe or something. That is, the Pax Arcana keeps everything static because in the game as written and played there still is a fight going on. I kind of thought that this didn't mean "therefore no one has ever Ascended (from Archmastery) by killing the Exarchs/Smashing the Abyss/(Re)Creating Atlantis/Awakening all of humanity" but instead meant "anyone who did any of those got to go live off in their own glorious timeline, which is definitely not the one we're playing in." And like, they exist in whatever weird form people like the Corpus Author exist in and every once and a while pop into their new utopias to be like "just checking to see if it totally rules? good, glad to see things totally rule, I'll just get back to being a platonic truth of this universe for a bit." I'm not sure exactly where I got that interpretation? But it seems a relatively decent way to square Ascended NPCs being terrifying obsessive jackass manipulators and with a potential Archmaster-Ascension-Seeking PC not necessarily being doomed to turn into one of those themselves. The Archmasters (and Ascended Archmasters) are all like that because, well, they're fundamentally centerist enough to keep the world as is - if they weren't, we wouldn't have a setting with conflict.
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Feb 12, 2019 06:54
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I just want to play Mage one day rather than drive myself nuts trying to run it.
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Feb 12, 2019 07:03
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SunAndSpring posted:I just want to play Mage one day rather than drive myself nuts trying to run it. This but actually playing Demon again. So few people run it in my experience.
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Feb 12, 2019 07:09
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Rubix Squid posted:What books are these from? The Progenitor’s from Seers of the Throne The Corpus Author’s from Mysterium and Imperial Mysteries Merlin’s from the 1e core book, Tome of the Watchtowers, Silver Ladder, Imperial Mysteries, Left Hand Path and the 2e corebook. They’re all just tiny passing mentions. All three are mentioned again in Signs of Sorcery.
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Feb 12, 2019 07:43
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Digital Osmosis posted:I'm not sure exactly where I got that interpretation? But it seems a relatively decent way to square Ascended NPCs being terrifying obsessive jackass manipulators and with a potential Archmaster-Ascension-Seeking PC not necessarily being doomed to turn into one of those themselves. The Archmasters (and Ascended Archmasters) are all like that because, well, they're fundamentally centerist enough to keep the world as is - if they weren't, we wouldn't have a setting with conflict. This isn't really necessary though, because the Exarchs are always going to be more influential than benevolent/humanist Ascended anybody, until the Ascension War is won (assuming it's going to be won). The Corpus Author could even have legitimately improved the world in a meaningful way - I'm not saying she did, it's clearly word of dev that actually she sucks - and the world would still look like this, because one person's heroic success at, say, advocating for women's rights, does not mean that sexism is dead forever. One Ascension clearly can change the world, but in relatively restrained ways. The Exarchs as written clearly aren't going down to one heroic Ascension, which is why it chafes that Ascended mages are either uninvolved or selfish jerks. If Wisdom both is the only way not to be awful, and means not trying to change the world (and there's plenty of real-world mystics and traditions who would agree with that statement), the game is fundamentally conservative. Yet one could easily have (flawed, messy) Ascended or Archmasters who are legitimately trying to improve the world in valuable ways, and are held back by various features of the universe - The Pax Arcanum is one possible way to implement that, sure, but it seems to further the same basic thesis. The Wise Ascended are completely absent from description, purely present as Golconda-like signposts towards a theoretical personal escape, and I find that corresponds poorly to one of the most interesting thematic elements of the setting. A Gnostic war on the Lie where if you accept the status quo and are not trying to find ways to change the world, the word for you is 'Seer of the Throne' - after all, they pay better if all you want is security - that's a more interesting game than 'anyone who really tries to change the world is doomed by hubris to never actually improve anything.' I mean, there's the ... I think the Boddhisattva faction of canon Archmasters, who think you can Ascend by helping other people and being virtuous, but the book gets drat close to calling them deluded and causing more harm than help by even trying, because they just cause the Exarchs to strike back harder.
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Feb 12, 2019 08:10
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The Ascension War isn't something being fought between the Exarchs and the rest of magekind, it's the self-important maneuvering of a bunch of Archmasters who are trying to claim the prize. It will never be over unless modes of existence and human ambition themselves change. The Exarchs could go down to a single heroic Ascension. I'm not sure how I'd tell that story, but it could be the case. At least one Exarch has died, and the how of it is a big question mark. The game doesn't posit that victory is impossible, it invites you to ask the question of whether or not it is, and shows that the people you'd assume would be the best candidates to topple the thrones of heaven are probably the worst candidates. It also shows all the rest are predisposed to not being their best selves due to their nature as obsessives who are rewarded with power for disregarding their superegos. The Bodhisattva entente isn't dangerous and inhuman because they invite more strikes against them, they're that because they elect that certain people are more worthy than others of their lessons, and then turn other people into lessons for their chosen few. The Bodhisattvas cause broken Awakenings and create Banishers as lessons.
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Feb 12, 2019 08:44
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Yeah, see, that's precisely the issue: Rather than actually painting a picture of the failures of human ambition, the Archmaster content just suggests that those ambitions are all pursued in the most evil ways possible. The Boddhisattva entente by that description goes out of its way to do things in the most dehumanizing and cruel way possible, when with even a fraction of the resources available to Archmasters pulling a Sword in the Stone on people without harming others would be child's play. That's not to say all Boddhisattva characters should be saints, but the constant suggestion that 'anyone who tries to use magic is bad because Hubris' is just not doing anything like what the line is capable of. At its best, the line discusses hubris in terms of worthy causes and real danger of overreach or mistakes, combined with the existence of real bad actors both in the Pentacle and composing the Seers (plus the Tremere, the Scelesti... there's no end of Evil Wizards Doing Evil Hubris). I really appreciate that 'accepting the status quo' is how Mages are fast-tracked into the Seers. If the game is actually humanist, as opposed to just critical of transhumanism*, then that's sort of necessary. On the other hand, it reads, at times, like a long-form metaphor for why 'immanentizing the eschaton' is actually bad, and having ambitions to use magic to improve the world are childlike fantasies of the id - as you've so aptly suggested, Ironslave. Not always, but the gameline is at its weakest when it takes that position. That kind of fundamentally conservative ethos isn't the core of the Awakening gameline at all, nor do I think the devs would argue for it, but it's certainly not missing from the game's content. *The Silver Ladder, iirc, considers eternal life a totally worthwhile goal... but wasting time on your own eternal life without a good reason, as opposed to working towards Imperium and eternal life for all, is seen as less worthy. That's a fascinating and hubristic position that's genuinely humanistic, but also doesn't prevent them from being morally complex. And is a lot more interesting than 'all Ladder mages are basically self-interested bastards pretending to care about humanity at large.'
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Feb 12, 2019 09:05
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Rand Brittain posted:The thing about "non-problematic liches" is that there are honestly a bunch of problems with mages and their power and privileges, and those problems get worse and worse as you get older and less and less a part of humanity. Any lich, even if they didn't get that way by victimizing anybody, is probably going to become some kind of issue if they don't gently caress permanently off into the Realms Invisible to gaze into their navel. Besides, as an ambitious mage, would you like your Hierarch to be some immortal skeleton or spectre that rules the Consillium hundreds of years? Imagine some obstinate old dick whose ideas of society was last challenged during the French Revolution just staying in power forever, never letting anyone else lead. How much time would you need before suddenly finding evidence that this guy was actually eating pregnant mothers and implanting Gulmoth in fetuses all along?
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Feb 12, 2019 09:42
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Mage is a game about hubris and obsession, with a side helping of the corrupting nature of power. I have no idea why someone would look at that and assume that the line would somehow become more hopeful when discussing the biggest fish in that pond of gnostic horror. What it all boils down to is this: Mages don't get jack for being Wise and restrained people. Their ultimate goal on the road to being wise and restrained is being Wise and restrained. Meanwhile, they gain grand cosmic insights by pushing the envelopes and risking things precious both to them and other people, and grow tremendously in power for adopting the sorts of mindsets which justify that. The far end of that is Lichdom* and Archmastery. This is not a system which selects for well-balanced people in positions of influence or agency. Mage is a horror game. And the eschaton being immanentized isn't a good thing to most people. Most people enjoy living or at least prefer to live, most people don't want the world to end, and especially not because some jackass who talks to planets insists it's for their own good. *liches should be guys the Silver Ladder holds up on a pedestal, but they have the same stigma as any other Order. The one Order that doesn't seem to have any issue with it is the Free Council, considering a number of its major founding figures are liches and still around.
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Feb 12, 2019 09:51
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"Immanentize the eschaton" is also and particularly a conservative description of liberatory politics - 'you want to make heaven on earth happen, and it never will." It's a way of describing a desire for change that tries to make it look foolish, naive, and fundamentally self-destructive. A great modern-ish example would be Fire in the Minds of Men which claims occultism and Freemasonry were behind all the revolutions of the past two hundred years. A historical example would be the fact that it was leveled as a criticism against abolitionists. Historically, people saying 'you shouldn't try to change things for the better, human nature means nothing will change' have not been the ones I'd side with, intellectually or politically. I find Mage much more interesting as horror if a better world is possible, and we still have the Exarchs. Nihilistic impossibility, in the cosmic horror mode, is significantly less interesting (or at least, we have so many of those games already) such that I would much rather have a Mage setting that's about the actual horror of real life: A better world is possible, and yet it's not present. We could have a just society; instead we have the one we have. If Mage is a game so totally about hubris and obsession with no potential positive outcomes, then there's no actual temptation to power other than what the Seers offer. If there is, actually, a chance at something better and brighter, then the fact that the world is what it is becomes atrocious. Gnosticism traditionally believes in a positive, even liberatory higher truth - it just also states that none of us are ever likely to attain it (well, in practice, most Gnostic traditions are pretty clear that the people hearing the Gnostic gospel are in fact the elect and totally are going to attain that higher truth to some degree; Valentinian Gnosticism is positively fluffy, with even the demiurge destined to be redeemed). e: and again, there are many paths to power that are clearly morally atrocious, within and without the Diamond Orders, to the point that I feel the niche of 'hubristic predatory ambition' is well and truly populated. I'm not calling for the Tremere to be written out of the setting, or even for the many lovely parts of the Diamond to be erased. The game has that, it can do that. All I'm saying is that variety is the spice of life. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 11:37 on Feb 12, 2019 |
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Feb 12, 2019 11:32
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Joe Slowboat posted:If Mage is a game so totally about hubris and obsession with no potential positive outcomes, then there's no actual temptation to power other than what the Seers offer. If there is, actually, a chance at something better and brighter, then the fact that the world is what it is becomes atrocious. Gnosticism traditionally believes in a positive, even liberatory higher truth - it just also states that none of us are ever likely to attain it (well, in practice, most Gnostic traditions are pretty clear that the people hearing the Gnostic gospel are in fact the elect and totally are going to attain that higher truth to some degree; Valentinian Gnosticism is positively fluffy, with even the demiurge destined to be redeemed). I'm a little reluctant to jump to "Gnostics = good guys"; just because they happened to lose the fight over what Christianity would look like doesn't mean the Christianity they'd arrive at would have necessarily been better than the one we got.
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Feb 12, 2019 12:38
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I had my first Mage session and honestly I found it pretty hard to sell anyone on the Mysterium. The main points I went with were the "no, everyone cares about researching magical poo poo, but these guys are really into it more than anyone else", that they're a truly global organisation where your rank means something worldwide, and that they're about safeguarding knowledge, which also means keeping it out of the hands of normies. I tried to make the sample NPC sympathetic within the bounds of the campaign but I had no takers and everyone seemed more interested in the here-and-now. I ended up with what looks like one obvious Arrow, one Silver Ladder, one Free Council, and one Guardian. Fitting in a Guardian is easy ("I was encouraged to join you guys to keep an eye on you") but I'm curious as to what kind of mission statement they manage to come up with as a cabal in the next session.
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Feb 12, 2019 13:16
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Kurieg posted:More relevantly to this thread. It also recently came out that Matt McFarland is not only a rapist, he was also still raping women while writing Beast. FFS
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Feb 12, 2019 13:18
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Gantolandon posted:Besides, as an ambitious mage, would you like your Hierarch to be some immortal skeleton or spectre that rules the Consillium hundreds of years? Imagine some obstinate old dick whose ideas of society was last challenged during the French Revolution just staying in power forever, never letting anyone else lead. How much time would you need before suddenly finding evidence that this guy was actually eating pregnant mothers and implanting Gulmoth in fetuses all along? Yeah, it's one of those things that isn't tainted in theory but once you start putting it into practice you start running into a bunch of problems related to unequal access.
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Feb 12, 2019 14:59
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Ironslave posted:Mage is a horror game. And the eschaton being immanentized isn't a good thing to most people. Most people enjoy living or at least prefer to live, most people don't want the world to end, and especially not because some jackass who talks to planets insists it's for their own good. Joe Slowboat posted:"Immanentize the eschaton" is also and particularly a conservative description of liberatory politics - 'you want to make heaven on earth happen, and it never will." It's a way of describing a desire for change that tries to make it look foolish, naive, and fundamentally self-destructive. Yeah and now we're back to why I don't really like the overall drift of Mage as a game line and loathe Wisdom-as-a-morality-stat. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Feb 12, 2019 |
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Feb 12, 2019 17:17
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Joe Slowboat posted:The Corpus Author could even have legitimately improved the world in a meaningful way - I'm not saying she did, it's clearly word of dev that actually she sucks - The developer is dead. If you think the Mysterium's good - and it obviously is, come on - then she did improve the world in a meaningful way, and hand-wringing over the Keepers' public libraries is like lamenting how poorly the Romanovs were treated. For the Mage setting to present a compelling and playable game starting in the year 20XX, it has to be true that no specific strategy for attaining any combination of magical power and gnostic ascension has served to unseat the Exarchs and establish a utopia on earth... so far.
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Feb 12, 2019 17:33
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Joe Slowboat posted:"Immanentize the eschaton" is also and particularly a conservative description of liberatory politics - 'you want to make heaven on earth happen, and it never will." It's a way of describing a desire for change that tries to make it look foolish, naive, and fundamentally self-destructive. A great modern-ish example would be Fire in the Minds of Men which claims occultism and Freemasonry were behind all the revolutions of the past two hundred years. A historical example would be the fact that it was leveled as a criticism against abolitionists. Historically, people saying 'you shouldn't try to change things for the better, human nature means nothing will change' have not been the ones I'd side with, intellectually or politically. And here one of my big peeves regarding describing these elements to other people come in: no one said it was nihilistic and hopeless. People are saying that the potential biggest obstacle to a Mage trying to make things better is themself. Constantine could make things better for people if he wasn't such a self-seeking wanker. Immanentizing the eschaton is the end of the world. Most folks don't want the world to end, they want it to change. The kind of thinking where if you place the seven keys of Fentoozler within the gate it will open and wash the world in holy light and reconfigure it into a better place is a problem among some powerful members of the Pentacle. And, usually, this also comes with the added bit of "and there's no cost too great." All of this instead of founding or financing better charities, or, say, educating the Sleepers (like the Keepers of the Word used to do).
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Feb 12, 2019 19:25
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Warthur posted:On the other hand you also had a range of Gnostic sects who basically promulgated the 4Chan NPC meme, claiming that great swathes of people were philosophical zombies with no spiritual component at all. (Some of them based this on bloodline and race, for a particularly chilling combination of ideas.) My point wasn't that Gnostic ideas were more moral than other strains, just that Gnostic Horror implies that there is a higher truth out there that's hidden away; the idea that only Gnostic believers really have souls or are the elect is clearly evil and fits the worst parts of Mage society (Diamond included) well. But my point is just that a Gnostic setting doesn't imply cosmic pessimism, and in fact most Gnostic creeds did believe things would turn out well in the end.
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Feb 12, 2019 19:26
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Ironslave posted:Immanentizing the eschaton is the end of the world. 
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Feb 12, 2019 19:29
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Ironslave posted:And here one of my big peeves regarding describing these elements to other people come in: no one said it was nihilistic and hopeless. People are saying that the potential biggest obstacle to a Mage trying to make things better [i]is themself.[/] Constantine could make things better for people if he wasn't such a self-seeking wanker. Ah, yes. Clearly, revolutionary critiques or attempts to change things radically are the problem, when we should be investing in non-profit NGOs. Incremental improvement with no eye to changing structural problems like the Exarchs, surely there has been no era in history in which that kind of, shall we say, Third Way has been a problem. Also the ANC were too full of hubris, apparently. E: while we're at it, do you have any opinions on whether it's ok for the Adamantine Arrow or Free Council to start fights with Seers? Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Feb 12, 2019 |
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Feb 12, 2019 19:30
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The Adamantine Arrow and the Free Council don't exist, I don't really have opinions on their policy. They're imaginary groups in a game that's stated its themes and tone, and given numerous examples of it. But if we're going to do a thought experiment: I want my government to be less corrupt, I want people to be better taken care of by the systems in their lives, and I want people to have the opportunity to self-actualize. I don't want someone I don't know who has appointed himself Hierophant of the Plangent Dimension to suddenly force his idea of heaven upon the earth without any input from others, upturning and ruining everything in my life and the lives of the people I know. If you take a few seconds to think about that, the possibility of that happening is horrifying.
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Feb 12, 2019 19:44
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Nobody can do that, though - the capacity does not exist. Or is it ok to talk about the moral dimensions of fictional characters only when it serves your point? Regardless: the Exarchs have clear metaphorical and thematic content, as do the Orders, pointing towards what you describe being fundamentally a break with that metaphorical space. No revolutionary group has that capacity; any one-shot end to the Exarchs would be a clear betrayal of the line's themes. Within those themes, there is a clear tensiont between the possibility of revolutionary activity and the kind of conservatism that says trying to make big changes is inherently unwise. Your answer to this is 'big changes, metaphorized, are clearly bad.' I think we have enough media that claims this - and Mage has potential to come down on the other side of that equation, with a nuanced depiction of the 'hubris' of fighting injustice.
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Feb 12, 2019 19:53
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Something to remember about all revolutions is that they burn everything down by their very nature. Not everyone will survive that, literally or metaphorically. The big theme of Hubris is in how you decide those ends justify the means; in whether you act within your reach and do everything you can to ensure that your actions meaningfully lead towards the desired goal with minimized secondary consequences, or whether it's worth the risk to just grasp for divinity now because later is too long to wait. I'm not a fan of the idea that Wisdom means doing nothing; merely that it means acting with as much caution and consideration as possible. A Wise Mage might genuinely want to bring about a new cosmic dawn; unseating the Exarchs and inviting humanity to Ascend en masse. The difference between the Wise Mage and the unWise one is how much thought and consideration they put into this; into whether it's right, into whether they have a right to do it, etc. No Mage game I've ever run or played has devolved into people deliberately just being dicks for no reason. Everyone thinks they have a tremendously good reason for doing what they do. Ironslave's Obrimos - Ash - is a walking apocalypse, preparing the way for the restoration of one of the Bound in a way that will set fire to the world's history. He wants to resurrect the symbol of Sacrifice and bring about a cleansing that will burn away the influence of the Exarchs by ensuring that the sacrifices of the oppressed always have meaning; that victory is obtainable through willing struggle. Ash is arguably a hero; a noble figure willing to sacrifice everything, himself included, to undo the influence of the Exarchs. He doesn't expect himself to be exempt from the purge. Countless people's lives will be rewritten; many will not exist, many more will come into existence. Ash is also potentially one of the greatest mass murderers humanity will ever see; willing to put his vision above the lives of millions or even billions of people. This is the essential thread about Mages being wankers, I think; that even when they're trying to do good things, they're still probably going to hurt a lot of people in the process. The tension between Gnosis and Wisdom is deciding whether that's worth it and how much you'll accept as you chisel the universe into your image.
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Feb 12, 2019 19:57
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