With League winding down and the group running out of 1930’s American landmarks to blow up we are moving our focus elsewhere. Initially we were to do GURPS Exalted, but that’s becoming more of a nuisance than a joy. So we asked you, America, to call our 1-888 number or text your votes. We would like to thank Coca-Cola and AT&T for sponsoring tonight’s results. And now, after you, the American people, jammed our phone lines and sent millions of texts, we have tallied the votes and picked a new game.
It is GURPS Mage: 1485.
For those of you who hired therapists to help you work out the events of Mage ’57, here is a statement. Late Gothic / Early Renaissance Mage is far more complex and difficult than what you went through. In fact, it’s a totally separate entity. And yes, entity is an appropriate word for those of you reading this because you’re bored at work. It’s a living beast. Over time, it takes on its own form and personality. Sometimes it’s a horrible, fanged monster, other times it’s a mother’s gentle kiss on your forehead. Now, more people want to play this newest timebomb.
For the players, and those of you who are interested, here’s the info about the game.
It begins in the early winter of 1485 (yes, that winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York). The game will take place mostly in the Savoy region of France (though you don’t have to be from there. In fact, due to the nature of Mage you can be pretty much from anywhere. More on this later on.) Your character will have an appropriate job for the time and a similar sort of mentality. In other words, no time travelers, extra-dimensionals, or anything inappropriate to the world (which can have a loose definition). Your characters will be normal humans despite being…well…Gods.
“Wait!” you say “If my character is a normal person for the time period, then why is it called Mage? Why am I God?”
Simply put, your character can perform Magick (that’s not a typo, but an appropriate spelling). Before I continue, I need to spend a few paragraphs defining what that is.
True Magick is not parlor tricks, staged theatrics, or even Magic Missiles. You do not carry crickets and rose petals in your trousers. No. Here, Magick is the act of altering or creating reality to suit your own whims and wishes. Everything that you see and experience is made of clay, and you are its sculptor. Here, reality is purely subjective and what others know to be a true and absolute thing can be torn down and replaced with your vision with just a few simple thoughts and some subtle actions. There are many philosophical implications of that, which, you should take a moment to ponder.
“How can I do this? Am I psychic? Or do I just know how to cast Magic Missiles because I studied it the night before?”
Not at all and stop with the Magic Missiles. They went out of style years ago. You can do this because the voice in your head says you can. This voice has showed you just how the world really is and unlike most people you listened to it rather than try to pretend its not there. You did not panic when exposed to the truth and instead, for whatever reason, embraced the madness and rejoiced in the void.
To make what your character can do poignant , let’s take a look for a moment at the average citizen within the Savoy region in 1485 (also known as you, or at least the mask you put on when you wake up).
About 95% of everyone within twenty miles of your character is illiterate or at best can read a few words slowly. Most everyone has never traveled beyond ten miles of their home. They work six days a week at some sort of farm and on the seventh they attend church, which is their only way to experience something other than working. Most of them have heard non-church music (or any music) only a few times in their lives and the only books they know of are the Bible and that one the tax collector writes in. If you have disease, the only known cure is to paint a white cross on your door (a similar belief was practiced until Victoria’s reign). This illness that you got was either God punishing you, or was caused by witchcraft and certainly is not from when you drank the pond water where everyone poops. It was definitely a spell from your neighbor and that spooky wife of his. Then, as you slowly die at the ripe old age of 40, you look up at the blue sky and wonder what the flat Earth will look like from Heaven. About 99% of people that live within twenty miles of you will die thinking all of this is correct.
This voice in your head is telling you that there is a better way and all the horrors that you see on a day to day basis simply doesn’t have to be. The world can be your vision, your dream. You follow in the footsteps of the philosopher kings and will plant the seeds of a great empire. But who's voice is telling you this, and why? Is it God, the Devil, the Fay, or the ancient gods you hear some people whisper about? Why where you picked, and not the king?
“Now let me get this right. I hear voices in my head at a time when innocent people are burned at the stake for turning serfs into newts. Is the game’s challenge to be burned at the stake last?”
You’ll be fine. There is a Hindu belief that a man who has lost all traces of sanity finds clarity in its absence. Also, you know very little about how enlightened ancient man was.
About 4,000 years ago, Lao Tsu wrote the “I-Ching”, also known as “The Book of Changes”. The I-Ching is often mistaken as a fortune telling method. The actual purpose behind it is to provide the user with the best path to follow and overcome any struggles they’re having. It’s interesting because this is the first time binary is ever conceptualized and used (a straight line with a broken line, a yin with a yang, a one with a zero). What makes it doubly interesting is that the I-Ching suggests that there are 64 possible outcomes to every event you will encounter in your life. Why is that 64 number interesting? The binary device you are using to read this document is based on multiples of 8’s. And, as was discovered in the mid twentieth century, your genetic structure, the patterns of your physical existence, is based on the outcome of 64 codons (genetic coding). You are binary.
This is probably a coincidence. Another coincidence is that the Kabalistic Tree of Life has 11 Sephirot (or paths to divine existence. Actually 10 plus a hidden one). In String Theory, the universe has 11 dimensions. There is also the correlation between Kabalistic concepts of the mind and body and to the relations between energy and matter within the theory or relativity. Heck, even the good old Fibonacci sequence, later called the Golden Spiral, is yet another coincidence (You know this numerical sequence. Its 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and you see it advertised within those “What’s you IQ?” pop-ups). Well, that sequence went ignored for hundreds of years and was barely a footnote. Then, recently, we began to notice the Golden Spiral’s mathematical structure in almost everything. It’s in the structures of galaxies, in fractals, and even in the structures of molecules. Even many of the complex mathematical designs of mandalas, designed to bring you into a trance and towards an altered state of consciousness are being studied by quantum physicists today for their complexity. Once you get past the crystal waving, there is something oddly significant going on here and is something that we are just now beginning to discover.
It is possible that certain people knew things way before they should have and that they couldn’t explain it. Or it’s just coincidences, like I said. Or a third thing I'll explain in a bit.Believing that coincidences are simply coincidences is fine. It’s also fine to believe that coincidences are events laid out for a specific purpose, and that these purposes are to help you grow spiritually. Some imaginary voices in your head are silent but deep and not all paths lead to ruin. Most paths lead to joy or at least enlightenment.
In your life, how many pleasant coincidences have you had? How many were seemingly some sort of karmic revenge on something you did? How many times have you seen someone on the street that you haven’t seen in years and what was the outcome? If it didn’t mean anything to you, it may have meant a lot more to them. Is there a path? What lead you to actually read this right now (I mean outside of the “This guy did a lot of fart jokes. Why he no make funny here)?
Believing in coincidences is, in the case of your characters, similar to the way they can perceive divinity. Most at this time (then and now) believe that God is just a wise old man with a long beard and a white robe who knows everything. But it’s quite possible for you to believe (and quite heretical) that God is a fractal algorithm in search of Self definition and who has no idea what is happening in the universe He created. In other words, you believe that God is just like you and suffers by your side. Is that the god you are? Either way it depends on how you want to play your character.
Note: For you Mage 57 players, that paragraph was a clue on how to defeat LAM.
“Ancient people were still burned at the stake too, you corpulent, smelly, nerd.”
It is typical for people to think you are the only gift in the universe. Did you seriously think you were alone? Did you think that there weren’t hundreds of you if not thousands around the world? You are just one within this generation. Your type has been around for as long as Adam, and has mostly pushed the world’s minds forward either through misery and suffering or harmony and love. It’s rarely harmony and love, by the way.
No more than a few days travel from Savoy is the rebirth of classical thought. We have unshackled ourselves and stumbled out of our collective caves. Now, for the first time are embracing the light. Men are not simply surviving and leaving behind shadows that will be swallowed by time. They are using their minds as God intended. They challenge notions, and consume new concepts. We want to learn, we need to learn, to live. We need to grow as people and become something greater than what we are now. The birth of the Renaissance is a short trip in so many ways.
As far as the Magus are concerned, that’s vaguely irrelevant. The Renaissance is just someone reusing ideas that may have been yours at one time and taking credit for it. Yes, they will paint a nice picture or design something that will be common in a few hundred years. In fact, most brilliant ideas are stolen and the best thing you can do is to watch someone take your genius and recreate it badly and then repeat your idea badly over and over again because they lack the wit to actually come up with their own original thoughts.
This applies to your characters. The insights from the “Gods on the Earth” were written down, lost, recovered, and reintroduced. Keep in mind, it’s hard to interpret what your characters can do on paper. It comes naturally to you, so if you have to teach it to someone, you have to leave a lesson plan only for those who may someday understand.
If you saw the secrets of the universe, it would be hard to describe. It’s like describing Jazz or Zen. It’s impossible. You could paint a soulful portrait or compose music to recreate it. But you couldn’t create a detailed definition of it or instructions on how to recreate it. So, you come up with introductory concepts (like pointing out significance of things in the hope that someone will see it your way) it will create a path along which mankind can follow to get to where you are today.
However, the game is not just about teaching people to be something better. It’s about using your understanding about the nature of reality to do what is needed. To help, here is a list of what your people are doing around the world right now.
- In China, a brother and sister play a lullaby to a dragon the size of a mountain range. Doing this will stop the earthquakes that have been damaging a nearby region.
- In Bagdad, a sultan rides a wind-up mechanical horse and moves so fast that he a dusty blur on the horizon within seconds.
- In South America, a man receives a dire warning from a feathered serpent. The other priests surrounding him try to see the spirit through the consumption of a foul tasting tea.
- In Eastern Europe, the dead are commanded to rise and do.
- In India, an old woman is beaten. Her attackers die of strange ailments days later.
- Throughout Europe, many secret societies have been established to keep your abilities hidden from everyone and at the same time there are many universities that are determined to find you and then find them and possibly find themselves.
To put this in an RPGer perspective, it’s Da Vinci-esque balloons with propellers shooting cannonballs at dragons.
“Sorry, bud. I faded out after that Hindu quote thingie. Just tell me what I can do in game terms”.
You can control reality. Reality control comes in spheres (they are the 9 pillars of consensual reality, some of which you can control) and each sphere has a set of power levels within it.
Each character will have a set amount of spheres and levels at the beginning of the game. Unlike previous games, you will have the spheres assigned to you at random. You, however, will pick the levels.
Here is a listing of the spheres, a quote that may help get you in the mood, and a description of what it is.
Correspondence: “In My Father's house are many mansions” - John 14:2. You can control distances and space. In early levels you can see what is going on miles away from where you are. At the higher levels you can teleport or even put a mountains in your pocket.
Entropy: “Death is not the worst that can happen to men.” – Plato. You can control probability. In early levels, you win coin tosses. At higher levels you can control the coin toss, or even kill a man with a coin toss.
Forces: “Out of compassion I destroy the darkness of their ignorance. From within them I light the lamp of wisdom and dispel all darkness from their lives - Bhagavad Gita. You can create / control energy (electricity, light, sound). In early levels, you know a storm is coming. At higher levels you shoot lightning from your fingertips, or even create “Golden Spiral” type forces.
Life: “Nature is the art of God” - Dante Alighieri. You can create / control living matter. In early levels, you can diagnose a disease by looking at someone. At higher levels, you can change people into toads, or dragons, or even create duplicates.
Matter: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” - Michelangelo. You can control inorganic things. In early levels, you can piece together a jigsaw puzzle upside down. At higher levels you can change lead into gold, or can make a feather weigh a thousand pounds.
Mind: “We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.” Lao Tzu. You can control the mind. In early levels, you can train your mind to never forget specific details. At higher levels you can read minds, control minds, or even detach your own mind.
Prime: “Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it.” - Chief Seattle. Prime is the building block of all reality. Depending on how many levels you have invested in it is how complex the pattern you can control. You can alter small things at low levels, bigger objects, people, and eventually souls. Note: if you wish to create something out of thin air you will need at least two levels of prime. Otherwise you will turn things into other things (lead into gold, sound into light, etc).
Spirit: “For every soul, there is a guardian watching it.” – The Qur'an. You can control spirits (ghosts, demons, etc). You can ask for the aid of smaller ones at lower levels. You can banish the bigger ones at higher levels.
Time: “Croesus will destroy a great empire.” – Pythia the Oracle to Croesus before he destroyed his own empire. You can control time. At lower levels, see into a possible future, you can control local areas (like aging a bottle of fresh wine) all the way up to hypothetically time travelling.
Now you see what I mean by “Can be from anywhere”. You could easily be from China or the American plains and living in France due to a mishap with Correspondence, Sprit, or even Forces. You will stand out in the crowd a bit should you choose to do this. As I said, each one of these spheres has certain levels to gauge just how much of that reality you can control. There are five levels in each sphere. When you start this, you cannot have a level above 3. Below are a description of the levels. I decided to use forces as an example since most people seem to grasp that better.
Level 1 – The self. You can detect things, or control things within the self. With forces, you can sense if a storm is coming in. With mind, you can manipulate your own mind and perform many tasks such as writing two separate letters with both hands.
Level 2 – Local miracles. You can start manipulating the basics of your spheres. In forces, you can start a fire in your hands, or blow the Gandalf ship smoke ring.Level 3 – House sized miracles. Here is starts getting good. You can do the classic wizard things. With forces, you can cast lightning bolts and fireballs. You can make small waterfalls run up the hill. It’s still somewhat local.
Level 3 – House sized miracles. Here is starts getting good. You can do the classic wizard things. With forces, you can cast lightning bolts and fireballs. You can make small waterfalls run up the hill. It’s still somewhat local.
Level 4 – City sized. Now we jack up the effects budget. Here you can enshroud a city in darkness, summon a plague of hail and fire, or just create a terrible storm.
Level 5 – County-wide. The big boys. Volcanoes, typhoons, blizzards, tornados, singularities, etc.
“Awesome! Can I…”
Yes, you can combine them. Here are some examples.
Example 1:A musician from Germany hears that the town of Hamelin has a rat problem. He arrives and offers to remove the rats for a considerable sum. He plays his flute and leads the rats to the river to drown them. He does this by either having “Mind” at level 4 and uses his flute skill as a focus, or he combines Mind and Forces (figure about two in Mind and two in Forces). The spell uses Mind to control and Forces to send out the controlling sound. Later, when the town refuses to pay, he leads the children out with the same music. Technically, he could still use the Mind at 4, or if he’s using the Forces / Mind combo would need mind at level 3. Children are actually more difficult to control than rats no matter what you may think.
Example 2:A local woman is not invited to a party at the King’s castle. As revenge, she places a curse on the daughter. The curse states “She will sleep forever until she is kissed by a handsome prince.” The woman decides that inbreeding has made many of the princes poor candidates and seems like a good idea at the time. The curse requires either Life or Time at level 4. Life will slow the heart down and freeze her (and give her the appearance of being dead), while time will stop localized time and will preserve her for as long as possible (and make her look like she’s sleeping). For the “kiss by a prince” clause, you will need Entropy at around level 3. Though this could also all be done with Entropy at 5. The princess is then locked into a tower surrounded by giant thorn bushes. The bushes will attack anyone who tries to rescue her. The giant bushes would be Life 4 (or 5 if the Disney version is to be used) and possibly Spirit of around 3. Assume there are some guardian spirits there which can be locked up in the plants and guard the princess. Of course, using Time of level 2 would have foreseen the prince from another land that didn’t marry their own cousins show up and ruin her curse.
Example 3:Our final example is about some Fae blooded women who foresee that if one specific prince marries a commoner, their offspring will be great boon for the lands and for their own interests. So, at one particular ball they decide to take an ashen-faced commoner with a highly specific shoe size and make her presentable for the prince. They turn her rags into a fine gown and glass slippers (Matter 2. Actually matter 5 to make it an unbreakable glass shoe), clean her up (soap and water, or Spirit 3 to make that Disney self-scrubbing brush effect) and let her natural beauty shine through (Life 2 could be used if natural beauty is not there). To make her transportation and drivers they take a pumpkin and turn it into a coach (Matter 4 due to the complexity and artistic detail of the coach). They then take some field mice and transform them into drivers. The act of physically changing them is Life 4. And to make them drivers is Spirit (at least level 3, or possibly Mind 4 to program them). However, the so called godmothers decide to make this encounter a mystery and therefore intriguing to the prince. So they add a clause to the spell. The girl’s glamour will vanish after the clock rings 12 times. That will be Entropy 2. Then, after putting the glass slipper on her unique feet, and after her wicked stepsisters hack their own feet up and still don’t fit, the prince and the commoner live happily ever after.
“Oh man, I am going to make tons of money, and destroy my enemies with my mind!!! My pig farmer is going to rock!”
I wish I could live in a world without enemies.
As I mentioned, you are not the only one who can do what you can do. Once you are discovered, locals will either force you to make them kings or will try to kill you for practicing witchcraft. Kings will want you to destroy their enemies. Guilds will want you to destroy the kings. Religions will want you to spread their word and their vision, or want you dead if you oppose their beliefs. Then the sprits, vampires, monsters, old enemies of man will see you as a threat and will want you dead. In fact, you will more than likely be killed and your body will be thought to have magic powers and then that will be torn apart like fresh bread and whatever they can tear away will be held on to, or you will be exhumed and your rotting flesh will be whipped for your crimes.
Lets also remember, you are not the only person with a voice in your head. Most men are not really big threats. Others like yourself are.
Which brings up a point. Spellcasting is not as easy as thinking it will happen. First, when dealing with other ascended, it is a matter of who believes something more. Mage combat is very intricate and very deadly and can come down to a single dice roll. If you balk as a character and disbelieve what you are doing, you will die.Also, the so-called normal people are a threat as well just by their existence. You see, most everyone has a spirit within them, similar to yours. Theirs is asleep, however, if they encounter their reality being altered, there is a chance that they can negate it. Their own spirit will protect them and your spell is ruined (in 1957 mage, this was the “Bad synaptic feedback effect”). People believe in spirits, vampires and the like, so pulling some of this off will be kind of easy, however if you are within a large crowd and you start shooting lightning bolts, there is a slight chance that someone will disbelieve what is happening and negate your effects. So if you are around humans, try to be subtle.
“So, what kind of a character should I make? And how do I do it?”
Well, lets assume you have a concept and wish to create a character. We are using 4th edition rules and you will create a 150 point character, with -25 points in disadvantages and 5 quirks. Do not put any points into any Mage rules stuff yet. That will come later.If you are still a bit leery on the GURPS, you must still come up with a character. I’ll do the numbers, just give me an idea. For inspiration, you can go to this website and download a free book called “GURPS Historical Folks” which will give you a pretty good overview of exactly what skills a brother keeper would have and what a Majordomo is. It looks cheesy, but is accurate. There is also a 4th ed conversion supplement which you can get here.
We also worked out the option to research what your great, great, great (many greats later) grandparents were doing in 1485 and you can base your character on that. The more research you do, the more impressed I will be. I’m not saying there actually are gifts involved, but I will be impressed.
After you have made your character or made the concept, we enter “Ascension” mode.Here is what I will need from you.
1). You will have to divide the number 6 into segments. You may either have two or three segments, but must add up to 6 and can not be divided up more than three times and no single # can be higher than 3. In other words, pick one of these: (3 + 3), (2 + 2 +2), or (3 + 2 + 1).
2). Next, you must pick your gifts. Here you will decide between “Earth” and “Heaven”. You have five points to put into each category. For example, 2 in Earth, 3 in Heaven, or 0 in Earth and 5 in Heaven, you pious so and so.
3). Now comes something unique to the game – your magic skills. In 1957, the characters brought the skills as M/VH skills. So it would cost 8 points just to bring your one skill level up to your IQ, and 8 points for each sphere which required its own skill. Now, we are going to do things differently. You have the option to pick a skill and use that as your spellcasting skill. In other words, if you have the spirit sphere, you can link it to your music skill and summon spirits as you play a song (see the movie "Kwaidan" for more info). You can either tie all of your spheres to it or have a separate skill for each sphere. I am willing to work with you on that and will tell you if your idea is brilliant or will be a waste of points. I’m sure you will have questions on that, so I’ll leave that open for when we meet.
4). Now that you have a clearer idea of the character, you will spend an additional -25 in disadvantages. Please keep the disadvantages appropriate to the character and try not to overload on the harmless ones as it will make your character seem more annoying and whiney than disadvantaged.
5). Once that is out of the way, I will take your characters back and work out their “hidden” points. These are part of the Heaven / Earth thing and some other items which go into the mechanics of the numbers. I will then tell you if you have extra and how you want to spend those points.
6). Now you have a bunch of numbers that give you the basics of what the character can do. Lets breathe some life into that character and give him a soul.We do this with something known as “Chinese Portraits”. Take a look at your character and answer these questions as best as you would imagine them to answer.There is no right or wrong answer for these. This is just something to give you a better idea of your character. You can also try this on yourself and see what your answers are. It’s like Mad Libs for the soul.
If I were a natural phenomenon I’d be:
If I were a metal I’d be:
If I were an animal I’d be:
If I were a color I’d be:
If I were a mythological creature I’d be:
If I were a human activity I’d be:
If I were a weapon I’d be:
If I were an object I’d be:
7). Remember to pick the area you are from as you will be starting off in that area. This way, I can pick the language skills and so on. The default language is going to be “French”.
8). Finally, for an extra gift, you must pick a card from, the Tarot deck and describe why that best epitomizes your character. You can’t just pick a single card and say “That’s me and I don’t know why. I think the card is pretty”. No. If you want the gift, you have to explain why. In other words, make it seem like you put some effort into this. “I picked The Empress because my character is female” ain’t gonna cut it. I would suggest something from the major arcana.
9). It’s going to be kind of hard to describe this game and will make more sense as you play it. If you are looking for some references to give you ideas, I would suggest reading Wikipedia on some of the topics we discussed. If you are looking for a movie to watch, I would suggest Kwaidan (as I mentioned here) and the 1957 Ingmar Bergman classic “The Seventh Seal”. Don’t get that confused with the Demi Moore movie, “The Seventh Sign”. The Bergman film is a bit ponderous and may not be for everyone. But if you haven’t seen it, it’s quite nice and can give you a perspective into your world.
I’m sure you will have many questions. We can discuss this Saturday.
No comments:
Post a Comment