User Profile

[Dave Brookshaw]

It's formally "Enraptured" - "an Enraptured mage" or "the Rapt"

[Dave Brookshaw]

They're right. You have misread it. You can reuse the same item for multiple Yantra slots, but it does use those multiple Yantra slots. You don't get to say "oh, my dagger is gold, so it's both a weapon *and* a Path metal" at Gnosis 1....

[Dave Brookshaw]

Some mages do worry about that. Also, Awakening requires a genuine revelatory confrontation with the Lie, so telling people that magic exists (even Sleepwalkers who can see it safely) has a small but measurable effect on their chances of Awakening - many Pentacle mages seriously worry that by allowing Sleepwalkers into the Orders they're reducing the future mage population.

[Dave Brookshaw]

Well, for a start, that's an Origin, not a Clade, so

Edit: But yes, Origin's mechanical effect is to tweak your starting dots and touchstones of the two traits...

[Dave Brookshaw]

The thing about the Mysterium having originally been two rival Orders is from 1e; it's continuity between editions, not a change. The Tremere... Are a bit fuzzier. They were "allies" of the Diamond during the middle ages according to 1e, so while them now explicitly being a lost Order is new to 2e, it doesn't contradict anything.

Anyways, the major change to faction backstories in Mage 2e is the Banishers, who now definitely aren't a lost Atlantean Order.

So in 1e, the Timori Banishers are a lost Order and the Tremere are a Legacy. In 2e, the opposite is tr...

[Dave Brookshaw]

It's pretty much the opposite - other people only matter to Remade in so much as whether the Remade sort them in the "friends" or "enemies" column....

[Dave Brookshaw]

No, so mage frequently do tell them. They just can't show them....

[Dave Brookshaw]

That's what "The Veil" in the Guardian's name is - the law against revealing magic to Sleepers. It's meant for the protection of Sleepers from the soul-damaging effects of the Abyss more than for mages' protection, and it gets broken a lot....

[Dave Brookshaw]

Amusingly, and counter to the "they must regard it as a threat!" fandom, the only canon relatuonship between cosmic entities is the one between the God Machine and Exarchs, thanks to a Demon sourcebook.

They actually get on suspiciously well, and send Seers / Angels to help one another out periodically, which winds Pentacle mages and Demons up right proper

[Dave Brookshaw]

If the mage gets 3 successes with a Praxis (not a rote) and chooses to bypass the withstand on an unmaking spell... The spell isn't withstood and the subject likely dies. Depends what the mage is Unmaking.

[Dave Brookshaw]

No no no no no. The Orders aren't a narcotics anonymous group.

Vampires' covenants are means by which vampires, who have innate urges toward becoming inhuman ravening monsters, find something to do with their time that maintains Humanity, or at least sets behavioural limits.

Mages (except a tiny subset of Banishers, and Rapt) *do* understand, instinctively, that wisdom is a thing. They call one another The Wise, and laud mages who have what they call Sophia. The Orders -all of the Orders - have behaviour rules that reinforce Wisdom in some ways but excuse or even cheer...

[Dave Brookshaw]

Left Hand Path is the book that made me apply to be Mage Developer; the game ddn't have a regular person at the time (Eddy and Matt McFarland did individual books) and we were slightly constrained in what we could do as we couldn't make any decisions for the whole game line.

BUT! It's (and to a much, much lesser extent Imperial Mysteries) is pretty clearly the game evolving into its second edition. The Orders are mostly as they'll end up, it's got the moral nuance of all mages being kinda awful, and looking at why the red lines mainstream ones do have are there that I associate with...