Part One
Mage: the Ascension showed up in 1993 as the third installment in White Wolf’s World of Darkness series. Where the first two in the series were innovative representations of monsters familiar to pop culture, a “mage” was a much more nebulous concept. Anyone looking to map them onto a Universal Monsters movie poster was coming up short.
Mage quickly gained a reputation as a cerebral game in the way its contemporaries weren’t. The game’s elevator pitch rewrites reality itself long before it gets to your fictional wizards start casting spells and whatnot. It wasn’t the first RPG about esoterica, but it was the first one exposed to a (relatively) large audience. It was stoner dorm room-level philosophy, maybe, but it was something a lot of people hadn’t seen before.
Mage’s cosmology also anchored itself in something like the real world of its time. The modern occult in RPGs before wasn’t tangible to players. The American gamer geek of the mid 1990s was never going to fight Deep Ones with a shotgun. But they could walk into a New Age shop in most towns, or find half of Mage’s bibliography in their local library. At a time when the Satanic Panic was still ringing in your ears, an RPG that had a direct link to occult and minority religious practices that existed in the real world without (literally) demonizing them was wildly engaging.
For the Uninitiated
If you aren’t already familiar with Mage, this is me trying to hit the high points. Trust that there’s a lot more to it than this.
Mage’s protagonists are members of the Nine Traditions, a loose alliance of people who have Awakened to the magickal ability to rewrite reality according to their will. Each Tradition is itself a loose coalition of ideas of how magick works. Hidebound patricians of the Order of Hermes inscribe arcane formulae cribbed from ancient grimoires. Libertine mystics of the Cult of Ecstasy lose themselves in sensations from drugs and sex in order to see through time. These and others are all Traditions, nominally allies in a war for reality.
The force that pushes the disparate Traditions together is their overpowering common enemy, the Technocracy. Founded as a magickal order itself long ago, the Technocracy is the reason all other magickal practices have diminished in over centuries. Technology is their magick, and they promote it in pursuit of a perfectly mechanistic, predictable and safe reality.
The truth that every form of magick simultaneously leads to and conceals is that the rules of reality itself are a mass subconscious consensus. We can all experience the same event, but the reason why that event happens is a kind of lie agreed upon. Every person (“Sleeper” in Mage lingo) has a part in setting this consensus, but mages (the Awakened) can influence it more than most by force of will.
Magick, is just achieving some effect according to the rules of reality as the mage understands it, rather than the mass consensus. If the end outcome of the mage’s reality is something that the consensus could also explain, then it works well enough. Magick that straight up can’t happen under the accepted laws of reality, however, is a lot harder and brings on a backlash called Paradox, especially if it happens where a Sleeper can experience it.
That’s their war for reality. The Technocracy’s own magick works easily and with little Paradox because it plays by a set of rules that they have spent centuries conspiring to make the dominant paradigm of the Sleeping masses. To do this, they not only have marginalized the belief systems represented by the Traditions, but they’ve hunted the mages themselves nearly to extinction.
Why Do You Care
Mage isn’t an RPG I’ve had much to do with in the past 30ish years. The fact that it’s on my mind at all is part midlife crisis and part the recent revamp happening at White Wolf, but mostly the political/economic/technological eschaton we’ve been staring down for the last decade.
If the armchair occult philosophy of Mage seems a little pretentious, please understand that at the age of 13, I got absorbed into this game immediately and irrecoverably. Mage was (in order) the first RPG I ran and the first one I played. I hadn’t been able to rope my junior high friends into D&D or Shadowrun, but somehow this was the game important enough that I had to force on them. I read every book from its bibliography I could find, while i ignored any assigned reading from class. I was insufferable.
When I got to high school, I was adopted by a group of older kids who loved that they had someone willing to put up with Mage’s bullshit and to referee the hours-long arguments it started. That might sound bad, but when we stayed up until dawn arguing about a vague part of the rules, at least it was a different fight than we had last week.
I started to fall off of Mage as I got increasingly Online. The larger the community you got involved in, it seemed like the smaller the conversation got. Eventually, there was only one thing to say about Mage, and I was frankly sick of hearing it.
In This House We Believe
If you know Mage, you know this part. If you read that summary, you probably started to see where this was headed. At some point, someone had to ask the Internet a fair question: Are the Technocracy actually the good guys here?
Mage’s text is clear that its villains started out with the noblest of intentions. The world as they knew it was a mess: if your crops weren’t growing, maybe you sowed under the wrong phase of the moon, maybe you angered the fairies, maybe you should’ve sacrificed a lamb or a person. In that situation, someone coming along and saying the beans have to take turns would be welcome.
Humanity existed in a confusing jumble of competing realities, beholden to an elite cadre of sorcerers to make sense of it. The Technocratic vision is clear: create a single reality, and give people tools that let them do what it used to take magick to. Our reality, our tools, given benevolently to the masses.
To a lot of the online commentariat, the answer was a resounding yes.
Anyone who had a computer, a reliable Internet connection and enough free time to chat in English about RPGs could see how beneficial scientific and technological progress had been. To them, and presumably to everyone else. The mid 1990s were a golden age, a time of right and reason. It was the End of History! Mage might be a work of fiction, but it was inspired by a lot of real world philosophy, so it stood to reason that since any real people with complaints about the world order were just whiny layabouts, their make-believe counterparts must be as well.
No great surprise that this became The Interpretation so quickly and inescapably. On its surface, Mage was an interesting enough RPG. But it was truly fascinating to the elect who were serious and mature enough to decipher the book’s hidden message. Everything is the other way around. We’re saying the good guys are bad and the bad guys are good, because only people smart enough to read it in a mirror can be trusted to do it right. The knowledge was so compelling, so secret, that it very soon couldn’t be avoided. I stopped following Mage, as the question had been asked and answered, but the secret message apparently continued. The keepers of that hidden knowledge are still out there, telling everyone they can as they’ve clamored for a new edition that will finally get it right.
Sufficiently Advanced
It’s 2026, and I’m thinking about Mage: the Ascension again. We inhabit a confusing jumble of competing realities. We’re beholden to people who bend the world to their will according to rules that were never taught to most of us. We’ve been given tools and told we can do magick, whether we to or not. Everything is under control, more than ever before. I don’t know if the beans are still taking turns, but I keep checking to see which ones will make me sick. Ascension is just around the corner, they say.