Post originally by Killer Shrike at 2004-07-18 15:29:05
Converted from Phorums BB System

I too loved Mage. I started playing VtM when it first came out and had fun with it; one of the other players in the group ran it. Later Werewolf came out and another player ran it. I didnt care for Werewolf much, but it was serviceable.

Then 1st Edition Mage came out. As an Ars Magica fan I had been eagerly anticipating this game since its announcement. I was bitterly dissapointed, and IMO it was barely runnable in its initial state.

Fast forward a few years to 2nd Edition Mage. So much better. A fabulous concept realized, a fabulous game to run.

Of all the games Ive ever played none required you to think more about the world around you than Mage did. It was fun and mentally engaging both. Definitely not for everyone, but I loved it and had great fun playing it.

We dialed down the importance of the Traditions, making them much more like clubs or loose alliances than the monolithic organizations they are presented as. A Mage of a particular bent might be invited or seek to join such an organization (or one of their sub-groups described in the Tradition books), but it was much more like being in the Kiwanis or the Lyons club. It was notionally possible to be a member of more than one such organization assuming an individual Mage were so inclined and fit the criteria. Similarly their were other such organizations on the fringes as well. In short the limiting aspect of the "Nine Traditions" was curtailed.

Similarly the Technocracy was less chariacturized, though they were quite a bit more organized than the Traditions. Basically the Technocracy was used as depicted, but less cartoony/comic-booky and more conspiracy/noirish flavored.

Finally Paradox was de-anthropomorphized in our version of Mage. No "Mr. Wrinkle" or other such nonsense. Paradox was a force of natural law, like gravity or the weather, though obviously much more complicated and much less predictable. When Paradoxes occured, they either took the form of a Mage skewing reality around them in some unitended fashion which was often inconvenient and sometimes dangerous, to the more serious backlashes where "static reality" attempting to self-correct -- often by removing the cause of the anamoly.


Nevertheless, aside from our local interpretation of it, the 2nd Edition Mage books were generally great. When 3rd Edition came out I hadn't played in a while, but picked up a copy and browsed it in a store. I was very disheartend by the change in focus and overall tone of the 3rd Edition, and in many ways felt let down and also disinterested in playing a campaign under that version of the concept.


Anyway, excellent retrospective of one of the most interesting games that was ever published. I still keep all my Mage books and sometimes sit down and leaf thru one semi-reverentially, recalling the mind expanding possibilities of the game.