As almost everyone reading this already knows, Jack Vance passed away on the 26th of May. Given how little of his work I’ve actually read (The Green Pearl and most of The Dying Earth), it may be presumptuous to maintain – as I do – that his work has greatly affected […]
After thirty-one sessions, my Mage: the Awakening chronicle, “No Justice Like Mob Justice,” has come to its end, as one of the players is moving away, and it seems more practical to end the chronicle and start a new game (of something that is not Mage) rather than introduce a […]
A conversation about magic in the Marvel universe over in Google Plus today has me thinking about the greater role of magic in storytelling and games. A ton of different sources factor into my thinking here, starting with Merlin and the wizard-heroes of the Kalevala, continuing through the Wizard of […]
It’s interesting to me how conversations about specific topics sometimes crop up in multiple unconnected places at the same time. Just as Ryan Macklin is discussing disadvantages and experience points in his blog, there’s also a lively exchange on experience points going on in Google Plus. The G+ conversation is, […]
My most recent session of Mage: the Awakening has reminded me, quite directly, of the problem of time in the system. I’m not talking (well, not directly) about the Realm of Time, which – all things considered – is pretty cogent. No, in this case I’m going back to the […]
One of the most significant challenges that I’ve faced in running Mage: the Awakening is working out how to structure a satisfying challenge. For all that the many books of new Mage include chapter after chapter of advice to GMs on different kinds of campaigns one could run, ideas for […]
We’re about fourteen sessions into my Mage: the Awakening chronicle, and I’ve been pondering the game’s system of distributing experience points. Mages receive the normal share of experience that all World of Darkness characters receive (“general experience”), as well as earning a secondary pool of Arcane Experience.
At present, the tabletop systems freshest in my mind are Arcana Evolved (a cousin of D&D 3.5), D&D 4th edition, Technoir, Mage: the Awakening, Over the Edge, and to a lesser extent A Song of Ice and Fire RPG. This odd melange of systems and genres naturally leads to a […]
For reasons having everything to do with Dust to Dust, I started thinking about how a character in Mage would conceal a weapon from various levels of searching. While I don’t have specific plans along these lines in my own Mage game, characters might very well want to sneak a […]
In my last post, I talked a bit about spells that combined Arcana to do interesting things. This time around, I’m looking directly at the character sheets of the mages in my game so that I’m creating things they might want to buy their way into – attainable within 1-2 […]