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Mage: the Ascension
Mage Chronicles Volume 3
The End Is Nigh
The fate of the world hands by a thread. Samuel Haight, arch-enemy of Garou and Verbena, has learned a secret that could trigger the end. Meanwhile, San Francisco teeters on destruction. Only a gifted girl can save it, and the Mauraders and Technocracy both want her. Can the mages save us all?
Free Will or Fate?
Mage Chronciles Volume 3 featuers Loom of Fate and The Chaos Factor, two of the earliest sourcebooks released for Mage: The Ascension that have long been out of print. Now they're back under an all-new cover. Mage Chronciles Volume 3 Features
· Two of the original Mage supplements made available again in one volume
· Two complete stories for Mage, with crossover application to other Storyteller games
· Informaiton on locales across the World of Darkness - San Francisco, Mexico City and Jordan
The fate of the world hands by a thread. Samuel Haight, arch-enemy of Garou and Verbena, has learned a secret that could trigger the end. Meanwhile, San Francisco teeters on destruction. Only a gifted girl can save it, and the Mauraders and Technocracy both want her. Can the mages save us all?
Free Will or Fate?
Mage Chronciles Volume 3 featuers Loom of Fate and The Chaos Factor, two of the earliest sourcebooks released for Mage: The Ascension that have long been out of print. Now they're back under an all-new cover. Mage Chronciles Volume 3 Features
· Two of the original Mage supplements made available again in one volume
· Two complete stories for Mage, with crossover application to other Storyteller games
· Informaiton on locales across the World of Darkness - San Francisco, Mexico City and Jordan
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 6, 2000
16 people want to read
About the author
James Moore
327 books7 followers Librarian's note: There is more than one author on Goodreads with this name.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 11, 2020
Chaos Factor 1/5
This was a bad book. It might well be the worst Mage book. I've heard rumors that it was written over the course of three days, and it shows. It shows badly. In addition to a few structural reasons it was terrible, such as the soft racism displayed towards Mexico City, I'm just going to focus on individual, localized failings.
For one, the book needed some basic fact-checking and editing. It couldn't even be consistent within paragraphs. For example, if Mexico City lies in a valley of 600 square miles and has 20,000,000 people, then it's population density is 33,333 people per square mile. The book says 250, in the same paragraph as the other numbers. Note: none of the numbers are actually correct for Mexico City, either now or in 1993. Also, on page 7, it states a rough number of werewolves in the city and then says "no one knows for certain just how many werewolves live in the city." The book simply cannot even manage internal consistency.
The roles of the Aztec gods are quite confusing and frankly pointless, particularly Quetzalcoatl. The story would have been substantially stronger without being tied to Aztec mythology as tightly.
The NPCs are WAAAY too strong. There is no way that the PCs are active players int he plot when the book thinks that a normal Mage with a few years of experience has Arete 5-6, and a "powerful" one has Arete 8, numbers which players are likely to never come close to seeing. But then, there are also Generation 4 Vampires and Black Spiral Dancers of Rank 6.
Marauders are added in just because, they are not really thematically appropriate and the ones that are included are pretty much joke characters with names like "Raspberry Popart Salad" (maybe it should be "Poptart"? it's not clear that that isn't a typo) who is "Charles Manson on a bad hair day, but replace the swastika with a smiley face." Another one of the Marauders has Arete 9.
The backgrounds are perfunctory and unhelpful for NPCs. All of them are first person descriptions, not really BACKGROUNDS. The worst is for "Wanderer" who just has "My name is Mary Taylor. My father's name was Robert. May Gaia forgive me, I am a Skin-Dancer." That's it. THAT DEMANDS SOME EXPLANATION, especially given that she's hanging out with Gaian Werewolves (in the text of the story, easy to miss, is that she cleansed her Wyrm-taint from the rite that made her a Skin-Dancer in the appropriate Umbral Realm). In fact, Wanderer's very existence as a Gaian Skin-Dancer brings up the question of why the Garou don't use Black Spiral Dancer pelts to make kinfolk into werewolves, and then send them to the cleansing realm to get rid of the taint. This is more of a problem it introduces into Werewolf than anything else, though
Vampires mostly feel...tacked on, honestly. Thematically, Sam Haight is a functional Mage and Werewolf antagonist, he just doesn't fit the themes of Vampires (or at least, Haight as presented here doesn't).
The story itself is mediocre at best, but has a random sidequest that happens in Petra, Jordan for no reason. It has no bearing on the plot and should have been cut as pointless. The Jordan sidequest does bring up a few other issues, though. For one, there's the Mage part of it, which refers to "the Israeli faith", quite possibly the most awkward euphemism for Judaism, which is not mentioned explicitly at all. Though I suppose some credit for being one of the few places in the World of Darkness to mention Jewish mages and actually have Kabbalah belong to Jews. A second issue is that Petra, Jordan is treated like a place that is top secret and only known to exist to some. It, in fact, has a Wikipedia page, on which there are photographs of tourists. Going on Google Maps, I found hotels there. This is a bizarre inclusion.
The ending seems unsatisfying, which it must be with such powerful NPCs around. The amount of player input into how things go is limited.
The most frustrating thing is that I can see all sorts of potential in this story and other Sam Haight things, but it has been badly squandered, yielding the most hated NPC in the entire World of Darkness. Not by characters, but by players and STs. And it didn't have to be this way.
Overall, The Chaos Factor was a disappointing end to a story full of squandered potential, and in a sense, a fitting end to all of this nonsense.
Loom of Fate 3/5
While it is common to find good stories told poorly, this is the opposite, a mediocre story that is told well (in many respects). It structured in a very mutable way that in some sense proves that you CAN write a canned story for Mage. On the other hand, the story itself is lackluster at best, with Marauders treated as a generic group and in this case with a motorcycle gang of identical marauders who have no trouble working together and seem to be more motivated by pursuing the Wyld than by their mental illness, whatever it may be, a strange plot involving turning an Orphan into a Pattern Spider, and a random piece at the end indicating that it crosses over with Werewolf.
Overall, it's not the worst Mage book, and there's something charming about the sheer unsubtlety of names like "Norna Weaver" for someone with a big Destiny who will become a Spider. However, it also faces a lot of traditional early Mage book problems: the Technocracy doesn't make particular sense (why is the Syndicate described as Spirit specialists when the Void Engineers are there? Why would they all show up to a meeting in a relatively normal building in weird clothing? Why does the world of darkness always sacrifice logic for aesthetic?) for example.
So, it's a so-so story, not one I would be interested in ever running, but it gives hints about structure for the writing of stories in the future, though unfortunately it was the last stand-alone story for Mage (and arguably the only one, as Chaos Factor was cross-line).
This was a bad book. It might well be the worst Mage book. I've heard rumors that it was written over the course of three days, and it shows. It shows badly. In addition to a few structural reasons it was terrible, such as the soft racism displayed towards Mexico City, I'm just going to focus on individual, localized failings.
For one, the book needed some basic fact-checking and editing. It couldn't even be consistent within paragraphs. For example, if Mexico City lies in a valley of 600 square miles and has 20,000,000 people, then it's population density is 33,333 people per square mile. The book says 250, in the same paragraph as the other numbers. Note: none of the numbers are actually correct for Mexico City, either now or in 1993. Also, on page 7, it states a rough number of werewolves in the city and then says "no one knows for certain just how many werewolves live in the city." The book simply cannot even manage internal consistency.
The roles of the Aztec gods are quite confusing and frankly pointless, particularly Quetzalcoatl. The story would have been substantially stronger without being tied to Aztec mythology as tightly.
The NPCs are WAAAY too strong. There is no way that the PCs are active players int he plot when the book thinks that a normal Mage with a few years of experience has Arete 5-6, and a "powerful" one has Arete 8, numbers which players are likely to never come close to seeing. But then, there are also Generation 4 Vampires and Black Spiral Dancers of Rank 6.
Marauders are added in just because, they are not really thematically appropriate and the ones that are included are pretty much joke characters with names like "Raspberry Popart Salad" (maybe it should be "Poptart"? it's not clear that that isn't a typo) who is "Charles Manson on a bad hair day, but replace the swastika with a smiley face." Another one of the Marauders has Arete 9.
The backgrounds are perfunctory and unhelpful for NPCs. All of them are first person descriptions, not really BACKGROUNDS. The worst is for "Wanderer" who just has "My name is Mary Taylor. My father's name was Robert. May Gaia forgive me, I am a Skin-Dancer." That's it. THAT DEMANDS SOME EXPLANATION, especially given that she's hanging out with Gaian Werewolves (in the text of the story, easy to miss, is that she cleansed her Wyrm-taint from the rite that made her a Skin-Dancer in the appropriate Umbral Realm). In fact, Wanderer's very existence as a Gaian Skin-Dancer brings up the question of why the Garou don't use Black Spiral Dancer pelts to make kinfolk into werewolves, and then send them to the cleansing realm to get rid of the taint. This is more of a problem it introduces into Werewolf than anything else, though
Vampires mostly feel...tacked on, honestly. Thematically, Sam Haight is a functional Mage and Werewolf antagonist, he just doesn't fit the themes of Vampires (or at least, Haight as presented here doesn't).
The story itself is mediocre at best, but has a random sidequest that happens in Petra, Jordan for no reason. It has no bearing on the plot and should have been cut as pointless. The Jordan sidequest does bring up a few other issues, though. For one, there's the Mage part of it, which refers to "the Israeli faith", quite possibly the most awkward euphemism for Judaism, which is not mentioned explicitly at all. Though I suppose some credit for being one of the few places in the World of Darkness to mention Jewish mages and actually have Kabbalah belong to Jews. A second issue is that Petra, Jordan is treated like a place that is top secret and only known to exist to some. It, in fact, has a Wikipedia page, on which there are photographs of tourists. Going on Google Maps, I found hotels there. This is a bizarre inclusion.
The ending seems unsatisfying, which it must be with such powerful NPCs around. The amount of player input into how things go is limited.
The most frustrating thing is that I can see all sorts of potential in this story and other Sam Haight things, but it has been badly squandered, yielding the most hated NPC in the entire World of Darkness. Not by characters, but by players and STs. And it didn't have to be this way.
Overall, The Chaos Factor was a disappointing end to a story full of squandered potential, and in a sense, a fitting end to all of this nonsense.
Loom of Fate 3/5
While it is common to find good stories told poorly, this is the opposite, a mediocre story that is told well (in many respects). It structured in a very mutable way that in some sense proves that you CAN write a canned story for Mage. On the other hand, the story itself is lackluster at best, with Marauders treated as a generic group and in this case with a motorcycle gang of identical marauders who have no trouble working together and seem to be more motivated by pursuing the Wyld than by their mental illness, whatever it may be, a strange plot involving turning an Orphan into a Pattern Spider, and a random piece at the end indicating that it crosses over with Werewolf.
Overall, it's not the worst Mage book, and there's something charming about the sheer unsubtlety of names like "Norna Weaver" for someone with a big Destiny who will become a Spider. However, it also faces a lot of traditional early Mage book problems: the Technocracy doesn't make particular sense (why is the Syndicate described as Spirit specialists when the Void Engineers are there? Why would they all show up to a meeting in a relatively normal building in weird clothing? Why does the world of darkness always sacrifice logic for aesthetic?) for example.
So, it's a so-so story, not one I would be interested in ever running, but it gives hints about structure for the writing of stories in the future, though unfortunately it was the last stand-alone story for Mage (and arguably the only one, as Chaos Factor was cross-line).
Displaying 1 of 1 review