Tome of the Pentacle on DTRPG

[LostLight]

So, being a casual Mage fan, could someone please organize a bit for me what are the key differences between the Mysterium and the Keepers? Like, I can easily draw the line in my mind between the Mysterium and the Pancryptiates (and by the same logic, the Keepers and the Pancryptiates), but the thematic/copnceptual difference between the Mysterium and the Keepers feels a bit more "muddy" considering my relatively shallow familiarity with Mage.

[ArcaneArts]

So, being a casual Mage fan, could someone please organize a bit for me what are the key differences between the Mysterium and the Keepers? Like, I can easily draw the line in my mind between the Mysterium and the Pancryptiates (and by the same logic, the Keepers and the Pancryptiates), but the thematic/copnceptual difference between the Mysterium and the Keepers feels a bit more "muddy" considering my relatively shallow familiarity with Mage.

It would be a little insulting to suggest that the Mysterium is more basic than the Keepers, even if that's technically correct in that the Mysterium is concerned with "data" where the Keepers were concerned with what is done with the "data", so lemme see if I can find a better way to go at it.

Starting with their central statements, The difference between "Magic is Understanding" and "Magic is Alive" is a difference between tending to a fire and tending to an animal.

THe Keepers believe so long that you tend to magic in all of it's forms, that the Logos spreads like fire, enlightenment will follow. The Keepers are more inclined to believe in a sort of immersion learning method where Sleeper's are concerned-revelations will fall like dominos, so by giving as much chance to understand more and more to the unAwakened, the more and more they'll likely grok reality and eventually slip into the light-and with that, bring their own wisdom and perspective to the Logos that will open doors for. This is why mundane information and excellence of skill is valuable-even if it's not strictly magical in and of itself, the act of revelation on any front is assumed to open the soul to the possibility of more revelation, up to and including the Truth of the Supernal that will Awaken people. To this end, the economy of the Keepers is more akin to continually feeding fuel to the flame, the practices of the Xenia and Dora, as well as that of Honoring the Teacher, ensuring that opportunities keep flowing to those stoking and spreading understanding. Where the metaphor falls apart is that you can pour water on fire, where the Keepers don't really believe that magic/understanding can be hurt. You can maybe divert it's spread, stall it, but you can't ultimately damage Logos.

The Mysterium, by contrast, believe magic can be hurt, and even die-but critically, unlike either of it's predecessors, they also believe it can be healed. If you tend to magic in all of it's forms, and carefully let it loose in the right circumstance, it will come to and strike the right sort of person-but if you let magic out into the wrong sort of environment, you're going to have it kill itself in a thorn bush. In this metaphor, Sleepers often are the thorn bush, right alongside the mundanity of the Fallen world, so unless either show an inkling of the occult and magical, it's left alone-and if it has some, it's carefully cultivated* before they consider the dunk. The economy of the Mysterium is more interested in safeguarding forms of magic until the worth can attain it, and otherwise accumulate it.

A very crass way of putting it is that the Keepers were more akin to the Free Council, where the Mysterium hews more towards the Guardians.

*In contrast to, of all people, the Guardians, who have a similar bias but applies it to character rather than nature, and so if a person has no magical proclivity but shows the spark of responsibility with power, a Guardian is inclined to cultivate there where the Mysterium wouldn't, and visa versa.

[wyrdhamster]

I do have to wonder why there are Gulmoths and Acamoths emerging from, or presiding over, the seas and oceans when the vast majority of Awakened reside on land, thus the vast majority of Paradox also happens on land. I know that there's some mysterious lore tidbits here and there for Mother Ocean, but I wouldn't think a Pangaean would have much of anything to do with the Abyss.

The Mariana Trench containing an Abyssal Verge is awesome and horrific, though

Relation of first Underworld and Abyss to Ocean image in Sundered World Dark Era, maybe? 🤔

[Michael]

Makes sense. I mean, they're through there in Heaven, one of them is the actual symbol of tyranny through surveillance, but they really ought to need Sleepers to be carrying horseshoes and stuff to know what's going on.

I was thinking of Nazars for that example. Like, talismans with eye imagery are pretty common. Panopticon already have the idea that mundane actions related to their patron feed back information to it. It'd just be mechanising that.

As for horseshoes, I dunno, have an archmaster do it? Nail a horseshoe to a door and it acts as a target for an ongoing Fate/Space Dynamic spell that wards the door against Mastigos mages.

Perhaps while one is at it they can make the spells of the Awakened require three days of meditation

I'm sure a ruin of the time before could do that if you really wanted.

[Professor Phobos]

The other thing that'd be nice is a set of consistent keywords for anti-magical effects. So for example, the Arisen are immune to Time Magic, and they are Timeless, so we could assign "Immunity to a Particular Arcana=Xless" keyword. Deathless, Spiritless, Mindless, etc.

Then you could do Resistant which is just extra Withstand, something for "anti-Yantras" which make magic more difficult under certain conditions - hard to scry someone on the ocean for example. Maybe "Draining" for stuff that bleeds or charges Mana, "Polluted" for stuff that augments Paradox, "Warping" for things that run the risk of magical mutations, "Reflective" for when the Mage has to accept a Condition to pay for the spell, "Scourging" for when an effect makes magic hurt, "Consuming" if it increases the severity of Obsessions, and so on.

Presumably you'd want to trawl archaic Greek or Latin terminology for the actual keywords to ensure we continue to stack impenetrable jargon for funzies.

[LostLight]

snip

Thanks for the clarification. Do you think that (theoretically speaking) is there enough "conceptual space" for both the Mysterium and its predecessors to coexist (in case of a theoretical setting Shard or something along those line, like a Nameless Order diverging from the unification), or are they "mutually exclusive" (that is, the Mysterium covers enough of the "conceptual territory" that having it coexisting together with the other two is redundant)?

[ArcaneArts]

Thanks for the clarification. Do you think that (theoretically speaking) is there enough "conceptual space" for both the Mysterium and its predecessors to coexist (in case of a theoretical setting Shard or something along those line, like a Nameless Order diverging from the unification), or are they "mutually exclusive" (that is, the Mysterium covers enough of the "conceptual territory" that having it coexisting together with the other two is redundant)?

More mutually exclusive. The writing on the two Orders actually does a good job making the later Mysterium show the stitching of the Corpus Mysterium did to the other two to make the new Order (Which is weird, praising something that makes the finished product somehow look sloppier than it did before), and a setting that tries to play to them not only has to contend with how all three occupy the same space, but more importantly don't get eaten up by the their contemporaries in the Free Council, Silver Ladder, and Guardians-which is a bit of a shame, I'm feel my fandom of the Keepers grow as time goes on, and I'm weirdly defensive of the Pancryptiates even if I kind of hate them.

Open season on their Signature Order Merits, though! (Arrows in particular should fight tooth and nail of Exoteric Arete)

Unrelated and a bit grasping at straws, if we take the notion of the Free Council as the Anima Draconis, regard the Mysterium as it's constituent parts instead of a coherent whole unto itself, and argue that the continued usage of the draconic symbolism keeps the Tremere symbolically included in the group, the parts of the dragon expressed through the Pentacle number 7, which is symbolically significant for the Tremere. Coincidence? Almost assuredly, definitely having to stretch to arrive there, but ominous to consider nonetheless.

[Nicolas Milioni]

More mutually exclusive. The writing on the two Orders actually does a good job making the later Mysterium show the stitching of the Corpus Mysterium did to the other two to make the new Order (Which is weird, praising something that makes the finished product somehow look sloppier than it did before), and a setting that tries to play to them not only has to contend with how all three occupy the same space, but more importantly don't get eaten up by the their contemporaries in the Free Council, Silver Ladder, and Guardians-which is a bit of a shame, I'm feel my fandom of the Keepers grow as time goes on, and I'm weirdly defensive of the Pancryptiates even if I kind of hate them.

Open season on their Signature Order Merits, though! (Arrows in particular should fight tooth and nail of Exoteric Arete)

Unrelated and a bit grasping at straws, if we take the notion of the Free Council as the Anima Draconis, regard the Mysterium as it's constituent parts instead of a coherent whole unto itself, and argue that the continued usage of the draconic symbolism keeps the Tremere symbolically included in the group, the parts of the dragon expressed through the Pentacle number 7, which is symbolically significant for the Tremere. Coincidence? Almost assuredly, definitely having to stretch to arrive there, but ominous to consider nonetheless.

when I write mage homebrew or run it, I run so every faction even left-handed and nameleess is truly On To Something. the Tremere just might have realized something before everyone else did;

[ArcaneArts]

when I write mage homebrew or run it, I run so every faction even left-handed and nameleess is truly On To Something. the Tremere just might have realized something before everyone else did;

That...has nothing to do with what I said?

[Michael]

I'm feel my fandom of the Keepers grow as time goes on, and I'm weirdly defensive of the Pancryptiates even if I kind of hate them.

I had similar impressions. For me there's something really compelling about the Keeper's symbolism of teaching and communication; like there's no other Order that has quite such a... nice(?) symbolism. Meanwhile, though their ideas are a bit obnoxious, the main emotion of the Pancryptiates is sadness which takes the edge off their ideas somewhat.

I think a case could be made that the Keepers were kinda poisoned by the Pancryptiates. They have this wonderfully wholesome focus on teaching and communication, then the Corpus Author shackles them to these awful neo-gnostics where their symbolism becomes simply holding onto knowledge. Not saying that the Mysterium is a dead end, but I think something was definitely lost in the transition, at least for the Keepers. Though, maybe that's it, bringing the Pancryptiates up required bringing the Keepers down a bit.

[Nicolas Milioni]

That...has nothing to do with what I said?

i meant to say that the tremere might know there having seven orders is important. but i might've misundertood you,kelly. sorry

[LostLight]

I must say I found it really amusing to see Ebla showing up in the Timeline section, considering that I personally have written a setting material about a sorcerous cult tied to the same city. I have taken a different route for it (mixing Mummy sorcery and Hunter), but the fact that this ancient city seem to inspire similar ideas is something I really liked to see.

EDIT- also, if it is destroyed by a Arisen, I'm totally impressed. What more did I needed in order to ground my Middle Eastern idolater cult in canon?

[ArcaneArts]

I had similar impressions. For me there's something really compelling about the Keeper's symbolism of teaching and communication; like there's no other Order that has quite such a... nice(?) symbolism. Meanwhile, though their ideas are a bit obnoxious, the main emotion of the Pancryptiates is sadness which takes the edge off their ideas somewhat.

I think a case could be made that the Keepers were kinda poisoned by the Pancryptiates. They have this wonderfully wholesome focus on teaching and communication, then the Corpus Author shackles them to these awful neo-gnostics where their symbolism becomes simply holding onto knowledge. Not saying that the Mysterium is a dead end, but I think something was definitely lost in the transition, at least for the Keepers. Though, maybe that's it, bringing the Pancryptiates up required bringing the Keepers down a bit.

This is the conflict I keep having to remind myself is something of the wrong way to go about it, the instinct to assign all of the Mysterium's good qualities to the Keepers and all of their worst ones to the Pancryptiates.

The reality is that the Keepers were actually pretty well poised with their own paternalistic attitudes to adopt the judgmentalism of the Pancryptiates, while the Pancryptiates were responding towards the big picture with a pretty reasonable response-after all, magic can be harmed, and the ways to enlightenment can be choked down-and in that performed vital action that helped keep a safety net around the incarnations of magic in the Fallen world. Impressions need to be tempered and critically evaluated here.

Now all of that said, and I say this as a Guardian stan, something has gone wrong when the Guardians of the Veil come across as more compassionate than the Pancryptiates.

when I write mage homebrew or run it, I run so every faction even left-handed and nameleess is truly On To Something. the Tremere just might have realized something before everyone else did;

I know I noted the non-sequitorialness of this earlier, but this has nagged at me, so a few notes:

1) Really not the point, but I really question the inclusion of the Nameless in what is otherwise a notional address of the villains of Awakening-like, you do know Nameless Orders aren't supposed to be bad, yeah?
2) The bigger point, you do realize the danger in saying every faction is On To Something, in that no, not everyone has a legitimate point of view on something, yeah?

The Tremere (specifically, the Hollow Tremere) are a cult of vampire mages who want to feed all of reality to a thing that is in the Abyss but is not the Abyss(?). They may be correct in that these things exist and line up with the mythos they created, but they're not onto something in suggesting we should all throw ourselves into the gullet of a metaphysical dragon/nexus to ostensibly make a perfected and whole soul, and anything reaonsable they otherwise say is intended towards that end.

While it's important to remember that even crooked sticks can draw straight lines, it's also important to remember that the devil can quote scripture too, and thusly important to never mistake the message for the messenger, or more specfically that any given messenger is giving any given message for a reason (and that reason is not guarenteed to be reasonable, let alone anything else). A great deal of people are drawn into exploitative machinations through the momentum of reasonable presentation and emotional resonance, and even if the points are actually reasonable, and the feelings are real, that doesn't change anything is the end goal is to perform malevolence.

To borrow from a real world instance, it's good to debate, engage with, and encourage pursuits towards improving ethics in games journalism, and the feelings of being hurt by having social spaces previously deemed private and secure being invaded are real*, but the Gamergate movement from the middle of the last decade wasn't "on to something" just because it was borrowing the legitimacy of either of those particular facts, because at the end of the day the movement was ultimately about violence against minorities in gaming spaces. The legitimacy of either of those two points were both shield and honey trap, deflecting legitimate criticism away through the veneer of legitimacy, and attracting followers to the movements by getting people to get into the habit of agreeing with enough details and feeling emotionally compelled with enough anecdotes to initially agree and then self-radicalize to the movement's ultimate toxic ends.

To bring it back into more comfortable fictional spaces, another good example of this is the mistake "Good Seers of the Throne" threads frequently make, in that assuming reasonable and even sympathetic motivations are always at play in how and why people do the things they do. The Seers exist to support a tyranny and to benefit from it, and there's ultimately no avoiding that that's basically a terrible thing to do, no matter how much they otherwise curtail the predation of Supernal Gods or keep the Abyss from swallowing reality-at the end of the day, they want to profit off of human misery exploitation and climb the mountain of human sacrificed to power to gain more power. Individuals can be more complicated, but the organization on the whole is not onto something just because there are tyrants you very realistically will never beat.

*Real, though, is not the same as valid, given where this is going.

---

Anyways, assuming that I have the connection you were trying to make, my point was not "Oh, the orders of the Pentacle numbering 7 after jumping through hoops and all having Draconic symbology means the Tremere might have a point," it's "Oh shit, I wonder if the Tremere were trying to engineer something with that, if they did, they succeeded and it just needs to be acted on."

In that vein, one could make a reasonable argument that the Corpus Author might've had an ulterior motive in uniting two of the orders into one as a way to possibly thwart that, assuming it all isn't grasping at straws anyhow. I think it's all pretty threadbare, if a still interesting conspiracy theory, and definitely grounds as a story/chronicle seed.

[Nicolas Milioni]

This is the conflict I keep having to remind myself is something of the wrong way to go about it, the instinct to assign all of the Mysterium's good qualities to the Keepers and all of their worst ones to the Pancryptiates.

The reality is that the Keepers were actually pretty well poised with their own paternalistic attitudes to adopt the judgmentalism of the Pancryptiates, while the Pancryptiates were responding towards the big picture with a pretty reasonable response-after all, magic can be harmed, and the ways to enlightenment can be choked down-and in that performed vital action that helped keep a safety net around the incarnations of magic in the Fallen world. Impressions need to be tempered and critically evaluated here.

Now all of that said, and I say this as a Guardian stan, something has gone wrong when the Guardians of the Veil come across as more compassionate than the Pancryptiates.



I know I noted the non-sequitorialness of this earlier, but this has nagged at me, so a few notes:

1) Really not the point, but I really question the inclusion of the Nameless in what is otherwise a notional address of the villains of Awakening-like, you do know Nameless Orders aren't supposed to be bad, yeah?
2) The bigger point, you do realize the danger in saying every faction is On To Something, in that no, not everyone has a legitimate point of view on something, yeah?

The Tremere (specifically, the Hollow Tremere) are a cult of vampire mages who want to feed all of reality to a thing that is in the Abyss but is not the Abyss(?). They may be correct in that these things exist and line up with the mythos they created, but they're not onto something in suggesting we should all throw ourselves into the gullet of a metaphysical dragon/nexus to ostensibly make a perfected and whole soul, and anything reaonsable they otherwise say is intended towards that end.

While it's important to remember that even crooked sticks can draw straight lines, it's also important to remember that the devil can quote scripture too, and thusly important to never mistake the message for the messenger, or more specfically that any given messenger is giving any given message for a reason (and that reason is not guarenteed to be reasonable, let alone anything else). A great deal of people are drawn into exploitative machinations through the momentum of reasonable presentation and emotional resonance, and even if the points are actually reasonable, and the feelings are real, that doesn't change anything is the end goal is to perform malevolence.

To borrow from a real world instance, it's good to debate, engage with, and encourage pursuits towards improving ethics in games journalism, and the feelings of being hurt by having social spaces previously deemed private and secure being invaded are real*, but the Gamergate movement from the middle of the last decade wasn't "on to something" just because it was borrowing the legitimacy of either of those particular facts, because at the end of the day the movement was ultimately about violence against minorities in gaming spaces. The legitimacy of either of those two points were both shield and honey trap, deflecting legitimate criticism away through the veneer of legitimacy, and attracting followers to the movements by getting people to get into the habit of agreeing with enough details and feeling emotionally compelled with enough anecdotes to initially agree and then self-radicalize to the movement's ultimate toxic ends.

To bring it back into more comfortable fictional spaces, another good example of this is the mistake "Good Seers of the Throne" threads frequently make, in that assuming reasonable and even sympathetic motivations are always at play in how and why people do the things they do. The Seers exist to support a tyranny and to benefit from it, and there's ultimately no avoiding that that's basically a terrible thing to do, no matter how much they otherwise curtail the predation of Supernal Gods or keep the Abyss from swallowing reality-at the end of the day, they want to profit off of human misery exploitation and climb the mountain of human sacrificed to power to gain more power. Individuals can be more complicated, but the organization on the whole is not onto something just because there are tyrants you very realistically will never beat.

*Real, though, is not the same as valid, given where this is going.

---

Anyways, assuming that I have the connection you were trying to make, my point was not "Oh, the orders of the Pentacle numbering 7 after jumping through hoops and all having Draconic symbology means the Tremere might have a point," it's "Oh shit, I wonder if the Tremere were trying to engineer something with that, if they did, they succeeded and it just needs to be acted on."

In that vein, one could make a reasonable argument that the Corpus Author might've had an ulterior motive in uniting two of the orders into one as a way to possibly thwart that, assuming it all isn't grasping at straws anyhow. I think it's all pretty threadbare, if a still interesting conspiracy theory, and definitely grounds as a story/chronicle seed.

very good analysis,i don't have much to add but I do need to clarify that when I said "every mage faction is On To Something" with Capitalized words to Add Emphasis. I meant that every mage faction has at least some kind of factually correct knowledge of how the supernal really works. i know Seers and Tremere are cruel predatory jerks, I'm saying they have a point about knowing how the supernal really works. i'm not defending their actions, or saying they are morally good at all. and I'm sorry if it ever came out that way. That's why i included Nameless Orders,because many of them are Nameless, because they have different ideas about how the Supernal really works

[LostLight]

Honestly, after reading the whole Empty Yoga section of the timeline, it basically screams "write a Mesopotamian based Dark Era". Honestly, the ancient Middle East seems to be overflowing with mysteries to explore, and the idea of Babylon ending up as a "crossover setting" makes it so interesting to explore. The only thing which lives a bit of a sour taste in my mouth is Marduk's presentation even though it is really cool, as I am a Hunter fan and Marduk is a consistent mythological symbol of the Vigil, yet making it into an actual embodiment of the Vigil and tying it to the Nibiru shouldn't be difficult considering its nature is left undefined (and the Exarchs are, after all, big fans of keeping humanity alive. I wrote way too much about this concept specifically myself)