Mage the Ascension: Victory of the Nephandi



I. Intro

We expected the fall of the Technocracy to be a victory for Humanity, the destruction of the shackles that bound creation, imagination, and people's capacity for Magick. Instead, we recieved a rude reminder that for all their controlling, stifling tyranny over the Consensus, the Technocratic Union were why billions of people can live lives of mass literacy, easy access to food, water, and medicine, and have a say, no matter how little, in how they are ruled. Now hundreds of millions are dying as the world goes to shit just so Magick can make its big comeback.

Oh, wait, the most powerful Magick is in the hands of the That Guy, the leader of the Nephandi, the biggest, baddest Mages who genuinely belive in bringing down Hell on Earth for everyone else because... Ascension is a lie and Humanity will always choose Darkness, they say?

Well, fuck that; we're fighting till the very end. They may say that sacrifice is futile, but we're fighting their darkness till the very end. The Council of Nine Mystic Traditions has been broken, battered, and had to face the skeletons in its closet, namely that the rise of the Technocracy was partly their - No, our - previous generations' fault. After all, we were so foolish as to believe that the promotion of beauty, wonder, and spiritual wholeness required us to rule over the Sleepers/Masses.

Enough regrets; the Nephandi are at the gates and render down our world to blood and ashes. Even if it means fighting beside the remains of the Technocracy, we will push back against the darkness... and maybe find hope.



Mere months ago, if you had told me that the Union would fall and we'd have to make peace with the Reality Deviants just to survive, I'd have had you reconditioned. But now, I see that we were no longer dedicated to the destructon of the maze of 'mortal slavery and supernatural predation' our Order of Reason predecessors opoosed long ago, but rather set up new labyrinths, ones that allowed the Nephandi and their 'Unnamed' leader to burrow into our ranks - And the Trads' own - and rot us from within to the point where many of us were jumping off the deep end thinking that erasing our enemies would lead to a better world, a world of peace, plenty, and where Humanity could solve its own problems by itself; no Gods or Masters.

That belief destroyed us. Now the Technocratic Union - The Technocracy - is a shadow of its former self, forced to find common cause with our most persistent enemies, The Council of Nine Mystic Traditions lest the world be worse than destroyed. This won't be easy; some may even say it is impossibly futile.

Let them. If there is anything us and the Trads have in common, it's that we believe in Humanity; we just have different ways of expressing it. For the Masses/Sleepers, we will fight to make sure that tomorrow is better than today, over and over again, until it becomes true.



TL;DR - This is a Mage the Ascension Roleplay, set in the Old World of Darkness (although I like the New World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness too) and using my own take on the Ascension book, with elements of Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition. You are all expected to be either Mages of some experience, but the option to be a newly-Awakened Mage with extra drive and talent is also there. Your job? To save the world now that Evil has finally won and undo that victory.



II. Lore

Quoting from the Unofficial Wiki Page:

Reality is not fixed, but rather a set of agreed upon assumptions enforced by the collective will of humanity, the Sleepers. Mages are those people who recognize that reality is not static, and realize that through the application of their will, usually channeled through rituals or other similar "mystical" or "scientific" practices, reality can be changed.

The specifics of their own belief, called a Paradigm, guides them into joining either one of the nine mystical Traditions (an ancient fellowship of mages of varying points of view), one of the five conventions of the Technocracy (an organization founded at the beginning of the age of reason to bring science and truth to humanity), or to strike out on their own as Disparates (unaffiliated mages), Marauders (mages whose paradigm has overwhelmed their sense of reality), or Nephandi (mages seeking to destroy or corrupt the world).

The central theme of Mage is the search for Ascension, not only for the individual but for all of mankind. What Ascension is, and how it is achieved is purposely left undefined.


And by that, Reality is actually what the given majority of people believe in any given time, Mages, including the Technocracy, are people whose willpower allows them to manifest an inner Avatar (Eidolon for Technocrats, who believe that their inner Avatars are just their inner genius) that symbolizes their ability to push against the capital-c Consensus and make their Magick (or for Technocrats, Enlightened Science) work. The Technocracy and the Traditions spent the past few centuries at war as to whether Humanity should ascend through reason and logic and machinery or ritual, spirituality, and emotional belief (and by that, in this setting, Science originally began as an attempt to make Magic legible and usable by the common person, but that wound up causing conflict plus the Technocracy ended up misusung Science).

Sadly, this conflict, with atrocities on both sides, allowed the Nephandi, Mages who served dark beings beyond the universe who want creation itself turned into a living hellscape where they can torment humans forever, to infilitrate both Traditions and the Technocracy and rot both from within and in this universe, almost destroy the latter.

Now the Nephandi under the Unnamed are conquering Earth and slaugthering millions, and reality itself quakes under the strain. They cannot be allowed to attain final victory... which is where you all come in.



III. Magic



Before the fall of the Technocracy and the victory of the Nephandi, trying to use Magick or Enlightened Science that went against the Consensus risked Paradox, which in turn was reality itself punishing the Mage for going against people's beliefs, either by directly burning/wounding them, driving them to madness, or banishing them to a pocket dimension or having hostile spirits hound them. Now, that effect has been reduced or even gone, but the Nephandi are the ones who profit the most from it.



IV. Character Sheet

[b]Name:[/b] (Your Name Here.)

[b]Appearance:[/b] (Anime or Realistic Pictures allowed; maybe Photos, but Art is encouraged more.)

[b]Age/Apparent Age:[/b] (Yes, Mages can make themselves look younger than they actually are, but most of the PCs should be adults. That said, yes, you can make a Mage that's 50/18, aka a 50yo who looks like an 18yo, but you are forbidden from making them look any younger for obvious reasons; show common sense.)

[b]Sex:[/b] (Powerful Mages can be any Sex or Gender they want; the Technocrats even have perfect gender reassignment procedures that completely align your body with your PC's gender. The Traditions have gender change spells, too.)

[b]Skills:[/b] (What are you good at?)

[b]Spheres:[/b] (Distribute 12 points among the 9 Spheres; you can have up to Level 3 in any of them:)

Correspondence:
Entropy:
Forces:
Life:
Matter:
Mind:
Prime:
Spirit:
Time:

[b]Short bio:[/b] (Your Biography.)



V. Rules

1) No Godmodding or Powergaming, aka no controlling other players' actions or having every move you make be 100% effective.
2) Any consenting relationship between people of the same age group is allowed, whether it's Homosexual or Heterosexual. If you cannot stand such things, don't post here in the first place.
3) Be polite to others.
4) Please notify me if you will be gone for more than a week. I will let you know if I will be gone for the same amount of time.
5) The GM reserves the right to control inactive PCs as NPCs to keep the plot moving.
6.) If anything conflicts with a strict reading of the Mage: The Ascension canon, the Sleepers/Masses changed reality to make it so.
7.) If you want to play a Vampire, Werewolf, Demon, or any other Template, you are in charge of writing up what powers your OC has; do not abuse this right to become more powerful than someone with Level 4 or 5 Spheres at character creation. And if you can prove that you know the lore for those Templates, the GM might consult with you from time to time.
8.) We're not using dice or stats (except for Spheres); we use the honor system, narrative necessity, plausibility, and common sense.