”CharlieFoxtrot” posted:
Most representations of magic anywhere you see -- other games, books, movies -- are very, very narrow. And they have to be, because if you take things to their logical conclusions, you'd be experiencing stories about utterly frightening and incomprehensible alien entities. You can create energy from oblivion? Of course you're going to use it to sling fireballs and nothing else. Gravity is just a slider setting that you can bend to your will, and you're going to use it to play a loving sport? You and the others around you can step outside of time, render distance meaningless, and end life with the speaking of a single word, and somehow your psychology and society is organized no differently than the mundane world? Bullshit.
Mage lets you go beyond that. It has many interlocking themes, but one is the hope and potential for limitless growth. We all start life as babies, mewling and crying, barely sensate and driven by unformed instincts. Some of those babies grow into scientists who are on the bleeding edge of discerning the building blocks of the universe, into artists who can channel raw passion and longing and emotion into artefacts that make the souls of the masses ache and leap and laugh, into leaders who galvanize the multitudes into action in service of a higher and intangible ideal.
To Mages they are all still babies.
For a Mage, each new discovery is paradigm shift upon paradigm shift, changing the way she views the world utterly and irrevocably. And each step along that path of power draws her away from not only other Sleepers, but other Mages as well. (As an aside, I think that's one of the key advantages Awakening has over Ascension, in that progression leads to isolation and differentiation. Whereas in Ascension as you grow in power you learn that everything agglomerates together. So you're murdering and rending reality... over cosmetics?)
The House of Ariadne knows that the city, that glorious jumble of stone and electricity and flesh, has its own soul -- and it's singing to us. The Blank Badges know that identity is a function of others' perceptions, and seize control of it in service of a permanent revolution beyond mundane ken. The Imagineers have perceived that we are all made of thoughts, and try to isolate that to the point of transcendence.
But the world that would be the Mages' playground is governed by unknowable and insidious entities that shackle souls with an omnipresent Lie, and they are bound by a system that pushes back as they probe the frontiers of the mind and reality. They are constantly reminded that power and knowledge comes with limits and costs. And they perceive that they are trapped in a system that threatens to plunge everything they know into Abyss after Abyss.
For example, there exists a book, incomplete. It exists in snippets and fragments, in intrusive thoughts that appear ex nihilo in random people. If they were ever to be collected and completed, they would be an Abyssal entity that exists as an entire universe, erasing all of history and rewriting it into a demonic, tormented hellscape.
Confronted with this friction and with this forbidden knowledge, some Mages go mad. Some forsake all semblance of human morality. Some search for a way out. And some choose to fight.
Honestly, sometimes I think that Awakening leans so heavily on Atlantis because leading off with Gravity's Rainbow isn't the best way to move product.
tl;dr: Doctor Manhattan is an Archmage
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