Building Reality as We'd like! A Mage the Ascension Chronicle!
A magical experience limited only by your imagination and character's beliefs. Let's remake the world in our own image, let's play with possibilities!
TYPE
SYSTEM
LANGUAGE
EXPERIENCE
AGE
$29.49
/ Session
Details
Weekly / Monday - 12:00 AM UTC
Session Duration / 2.5–3.5 hours
1 / 5 Seats Filled
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Meet your party members
1/5
About the adventure
Reality is not fixed. Rather it is an agreed upon set of assumptions that is enforced by the collective will of humanity, known as Sleepers. Mages are those folks who recognize that reality is not static, and grasp that through the application of their will, channeled through rituals or other "mystical" or "scientific" approaches, reality can be changed according to their specific set of beliefs! There may be consequences if your alterations don't match up well with the communal beliefs, or Consensus, of the Sleepers. You as a Mage have the ability to reshape your reality to match your perceptions! How will you Ascend to your own version of "reality"? What will you do with these abilities? What prices are you willing to pay? This is a Mage game for beginners to learn the system, explore their Traditions, and understand the Spheres. Experienced players are absolutely welcome but should be willing to guide and support some new players along the way. Change reality to meet your perceptions! We will explore themes of oligarchy, climate change. I'd like to include some Tenets as well. All beliefs matter and have power. All people have beliefs, and the world reflects this. The choice to abandon humanity is a conscious one. The holes we dig are deep, but they should never be bottomless. Other magic exists. Although rare and strange, mortals are not cattle. Not stupid, not wise, not alone, we work the best in shadows. The ascension war is both internal and external. The main battle fronts are not only the entirety of the Earth and cosmos but also inside each of us! My intention is to run nothing but proactive, bottom up built stories and games in my future. I plan to start this game in contemporary times for the World of Darkness, but other times and settings are negotiable as well. We will have a brief voice interview together, to make sure we all will mesh well. After that, I would like for you to meet up in Discord voice chat with several players and myself. For a session 0 to begin working out our character concepts, together. We will be recently awakened and still adjusting to our life as Mages, together, in our small Chantry or group consisting of the Player Characters and appropriate Backgrounds. We will discuss themes, expectations, safety tools and answer any questions about the world. I plan to discuss and build our characters together and run a 30 to 60+ minute prelude for each, before we truly begin, to discuss your character in greater detail. The intention being to add their associated NPC's, flavor and stories into our chronicle, together! I am seeking to assemble more reliable groups of players who love to share the spotlight and encourage each other in play! I'd like to build groups which I can enable to be proactive. To help build the world together as a group, through the actions, histories, goals and desires of each Player's Character. More to come after session 0!
Game style
Puzzle / Mystery Focused
Theater of the Mind
Roleplay Heavy
Rules as Written (RaW)
Game themes
Meet the Game Master
5.0
(31)
2 years on StartPlaying
150 games hosted
Highly rated for: Teacher, Knows the Rules, Creativity
Average response time: 2 hours
Response rate: 100%
About me
Hail, fellow gamer and well met! Aho. I've enjoyed many years (and still learning!) as a Storyteller/GM/DM and sometimes player. Typically, with a wonderful variety of groups, systems, styles and people! If you try me out, I do my best to allow for a lot of roleplays. You will experience a fair amount of tactical combat as well as some time for exploration. You will most likely laugh and enjoy yourselves while forgetting some of your real-world troubles. You will experience my calm voice and demeanor over which many have said that I should be in voice acting or radio work. With a long background in theater and customer service I often feel as though I may have been meant to do this pro GM thing... It has been a fulfilling yet challenging experience so far! (Profile pic with Mark Twain at his old house) I believe that on a deeper level, the things we create become reflections of our selves. The fantasies that we create embrace a lot about who we are in real life. They can represent the things we want to accomplish and experience. The fights we want to win and the values we wish to cherish or reject. A roleplaying game gives us the opportunity to do so safely in a comfortable, relaxed space for such fantasies! My intention is to enable a sacred, safe place for your imagination to roam freely, where each of us can play off and with each other in harmony. One of my favorite games ever was with a large group in my college days. Everyone played their own Dark Elven Matron mother, totally evil. Complete with their own noble House. Deep down in the in the Underdark. Daughters, males, slaves, evil Lloth worshippers and all... it was a furious game of note passing, deceit, backstabbing, building power and survival. Insanely challenging but great fun, with permissions of course! This and several other campaigns have lasted for several years or more of play time and have always been highly enjoyable! I do tend to get a little hyper-focused on these games. I also tend to prep way more than is actually required. Part of that is because I am neurodivergent with ADHD and some definite overlap into the Autistic Spectrum. I often recognize and genuinely empathize for others with these and other societal differences and hope that you'll feel safe and included in the environment that I work to provide. I've learned through time how to manage much of it though there's always room for new challenges. In addition, when not gaming I do love to kayak, raft, e-bike or hike in the great outdoors whenever possible. I love to read, a lot. Mostly TTRPG books nowadays but I've read a decent library of sci-fi, fantasy, including many other types through the years. Many in a hammock outside in nature (wish I could be there more!). I join and host several drum circles each month. I have dabbled in drawing and painting quite a bit through my years. I spent a lot of time making jewelry as a silversmith too. Leathercraft, tool work and dyeing was probably my first hyperfocus on arts and crafts though. I've been known to watch a bit of video entertainment, as I cannot always give reading the focus it deserves. Sometimes, I just need to not think so much, which can be challenging as my kind of neurodivergent! My hyperactive self tends to be way more mental than physical. I find myself empathizing with the Indigenous communities throughout the world for the terrible things, including genocide, done to them and their ancestors. I believe that we should listen to many of their voices and begin to resume roles as caretakers of the land, even if only for the sake of our descendants on this world. Parts of this come from the fact that I love gardening and natural landscaping. I helped run an organic wildflower nursery for many years too. I've built many miles of rock walls as well as hiking trails. I have planted literally thousands of trees throughout the years. Even more than that in perennial herbs and flowers! Check out the profile point boxes on this page for a little more insight into me and my style if you'd like. Hope we get to meet and play some games with you sometime soon!
View Profile →Character creation
Creating your character
We will have a session 0 and all work together to build our characters, starting with concept and working our way towards beliefs and practices. We will establish themes and expectations as well!
What to expect
Preparing for the session
Welcome, please join us in https://discord.gg/fMtETQHkN9 or I am tlv_da_tsi if you need to find me... You'll need a free Roll20 account as well for our character sheets and dice rolling. There will be a variety of pre-made characters if you so desire... able to be fine-tuned before we begin and their personalities are all yours to work with!
What Craig B brings to the table
We will play in a safe, welcoming environment where we will all respect one another. We will most likely laugh a bit and get off subject occasionally. I hope this feels like a comfortable space where you can relax and just be your character. I try my best to do some voices and accents here and there and getting better. They don't always last long but should be enough to set off some imagination. I'm mostly a rules as written kind of GM but will occasionally hand wave it if we are getting frustrated or for something super cool that contributes to the story! We are looking for friendly, reliable players who'd like to have some friends in the online gaming community to roleplay, laugh and have fun with while playing some games and forgetting about stuff. You will be expected to treat everybody in the group with respect while trying your best to be kind. We will expect you to join us, on time and prepared, unless you've given us some prior notification. I'll be there to chat if you need anything. If your expectations are not being met, please let me know! I'm always trying to learn and am open to change.
Homebrew rules
Not Coincidental and Vulgar: ● Subtle magick fits into the established “reality” of our media-heavy age. It can be an odd act of coincidence (Pulling the right card out of a shuffled deck, walking across a squeaky floor without making a sound, opening an “unlocked” door that was locked a moment ago); a quiet, minor act of “occult” magic (suddenly changing your eye or hair color, stirring your coffee with a spoon you’re not touching, making an uncomfortably accurate reading with some Tarot cards); or an improbable feat we’ve come to expect from decades of mass media conditioning (outrunning an explosion, scaring off a street gang with a single glare, punching someone so hard you shatter his jaw, and so forth). Such acts seem unusual but not unnatural. For guidelines, see the sidebars “Hollywood Reality” (The Book of Secrets, p. 103), “Cinematic Damage” (Mage 20, p. 412), “Axis of Coincidence” (Mage 20, P. 533), and “Cinematic License” (Mage 20, p. 616). ● Uncanny magick seems unnervingly paranormal – possible, if you believe in such things, but not “normal.” To most people, it looks like magic… or like technology that does things which apparently defy the laws of science. Uncanny magick throws into question our entire idea of what is and is not “possible.” It’s the ritual that summons ghosts, or the unnervingly lifelike robot, or the girl so tough she walks through fire without getting burned, or the guy who levitates with the power of his mind. In reality zones that favor magical beliefs, more impressive acts of uncanny magick become possible: the witch can fly on a broom; the shapeshifter can become a wolf. In zones that favor modern technology, strange feats of hypertech – James Bond cars and Tony Stark power suits – are generally uncanny unless they clearly surpass existing physical laws and technologies, at which point they become extreme. ● Extreme magick just says “Fuck it” and throws its weight around. It doesn’t matter whether such acts are mystical or technological – they tear gaping holes in the fabric of Reality in order to let a mage enforce her will upon the world. Dimensional gateways? Summoned demons? Stopping time? Levitating trucks? That’s extreme magic! The Domino Effect After a certain point, the idea of Subtle wears thin. If mages are throwing around unlikely events in quick succession, optional rule then this might come into play. For every two wild coincidences within a single scene, the Storyteller may add +1 to the difficulty of subsequent coincidences. This penalty adds up, too: +2 difficulty after five Subtles, +3 after seven, and so on. To be fair, however, the penalty should come in only when those Subtleties affect the scene in noticeable ways: exploding gas mains, unlikely ricochets, unexpected appearances of the police… that sort of thing. Personal Effects that no one knows about except the mage who cast them (sensory enhancements, minor Trait boosts, etc.) should remain immune to this domino effect.
Equipment needed to play
Internet
Computer
Microphone
Platforms used
Safety
How Craig B creates a safe table
Lines and Veils will be posted in Discord chat. Session 0 will set expectations and other safety tools.
Content warnings
Safety tools used