Tome of the Pentacle on DTRPG

[proindrakenzol]

I MUST KNOW ABOUT THIS.

Sometime later, when I eventually pick up the book…

What are they like, just to tease me, please?

The big takeaways are: Merits instead of Skills for prerequisites and self buff + primary factor duration + adv duration is fine to call "always active."

[21C Hermit]

The big takeaways are: Merits instead of Skills for prerequisites and self buff + primary factor duration + adv duration is fine to call "always active."

The latter I assume is a quality-of-(player-)life improvement for all Legacies and Legacy writeups.

The former I believe is an alternate rule for build-your-own Legacies?

[Michael]

Factions were my beeline. I was not expecting TELM to be Heretical.

Neither was I. Although, it earlier clarifies that 'heretical' in this context has the much softer meaning of 'likely to annoy the local Hierarch'.

[Cauthon]

21C Hermit One thing of interest with the House is that their Capstone is (I think Indefinite via Conditional Duration? The activation ritual makes it effectively always-on anyway) Veil of Moments, which ends and needs to be reactivated if they leave the city. Since it doesn't explicitly make an exception to the "no spending XP under VoM" rule, there's a good case to be made for the upper echelons of the house becoming a council of stagnant immortals.

[Isator Levi]

I'm going to save reading this properly until I can devote some proper attention to it, but just perusing the table of contents I'm getting that it's brimming with fascinating content. The number of Consilia is particularly exciting.

[21C Hermit]

21C Hermit One thing of interest with the House is that their Capstone is (I think Indefinite via Conditional Duration? The activation ritual makes it effectively always-on anyway) Veil of Moments, which ends and needs to be reactivated if they leave the city. Since it doesn't explicitly make an exception to the "no spending XP under VoM" rule, there's a good case to be made for the upper echelons of the house becoming a council of stagnant immortals.

Oh my. Maybe there’s a few old cities out there whose City Father ‘spirit’ is actually an ancient Metropolitan.

[Guest]

self buff + primary factor duration + adv duration is fine to call "always active."

Excuse me, could you give me pp about this?

[proindrakenzol]

The latter I assume is a quality-of-(player-)life improvement for all Legacies and Legacy writeups.

The former I believe is an alternate rule for build-your-own Legacies?

I've gotten some pushback from a few people for using Merits instead of Skills in a couple Legacies (not here, iirc).

Excuse me, could you give me pp about this?

"pp"?

[Guest]

Sorry, page !
it is sad been ignored.

[Michael]

I really like Chapter 1. It brings back a whole bunch of 1e weirdness and slots it in nicely. Plus a lot of the new stuff is really interesting. There's a little filler, but not too much.

Uchronia are a really great addition.

The subtle redo of Paternoster's origin is both more interesting, and kinda funny.

Given the granularity of the events mentioned in the timeline, I was surprised Orpheus doesn't appear, but you can't have everything.

[Second Chances]

I really like Chapter 1. It brings back a whole bunch of 1e weirdness and slots it in nicely. Plus a lot of the new stuff is really interesting. There's a little filler, but not too much.

Uchronia are a really great addition.

The subtle redo of Paternoster's origin is both more interesting, and kinda funny.

Given the granularity of the events mentioned in the timeline, I was surprised Orpheus doesn't appear, but you can't have everything.

And I’m pretty sure that chapter tired to get us absolutely everything XD

[ArcaneArts]

Chapter 2 starts off to a delighful bit of weird geography informing weird societal differences. Mage 2nd wanted to break the tier system, and by golly, by gosh, TotP is dedicated to that idea.

[Cauthon]

Chapter 2 starts off to a delighful bit of weird geography informing weird societal differences. Mage 2nd wanted to break the tier system, and by golly, by gosh, TotP is dedicated to that idea.

It's funny how much of it parallels the "Orders aren't monoliths" conversations that were had not to long ago in these forums.

[espritdecalmar]

There's a lot I'm liking about this book, but the "Global Overview" section is idiotic from top to bottom, I'm sorry to say. You get two paragraphs to talk about a place and Brazil doesn't believe in the Supernal and the US is full of Nazi-mages. WOW!!! Only the similar section in Guildhalls of the Deathless I think is brimmed with the same type of silly-headedness ("Mother Africa is home" is permanently branded into my corpus callosum and not in a good way) in a Chronicles book. None of anything said in these handful of pages is worth considering for any actual Mage game; it's just tepid centrist handwringing for the most part. No section in this part has the breathing room to say anything interesting beyond Eurocentric liberal guilt and bland overcultural stereotypes. I was actually on-board with the first paragraph of the Zajia section until the second explicitly connected each Chinese philosophy to a different Order; that can go to hell for all I'm concerned. Jesus. Nothing in that part adds up to anything meaningful and that's so frustrating for what has been bandied about as the last Awakening 2e book. All any of this part does is limit ideas rather than expand them. Kant would not approve. I do however like the write-up of the Keepers of the Word. They seem like cool cats. I'd join them if I were a mage in the period they were active. Just kidding, I would never be a mage; I would never Awaken. There's a strong wind blowing outside my window right now, or maybe it's a car with problems.

[proindrakenzol]

My biggest problems are:

The use of "Yeshua" to refer to Jesus is giving me really gross Messianic vibes. Just call him Jesus if it's so important to include him.

King Solomon (why not call him Shlomo ben David haMelekh?) could not possibly have been a Guardian, he predates them by nearly a millenium. Also, Guardian philosophy, like that of all the Diamond, is intrinsically Hellenist...making a Jewish king, and the only Jew Jews actually care about mentioned in the book I've seen, a part of hellenist group that doesn't even exist yet is an odd choice.

And, of course, the Haifa writeup. Mt. Carmel is not some equal opportunity holy site. It was a Canaanite holy site that became a Jewish holy site after the northern Canaanites were assimilated into Israelite culture. The "contemplative Catholic order of Carmelites" only "found their home there" after the Catholic invaders massacred the Jewish population during the Crusades.