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Dulahan
Joined: 01 Mar 2008
Posts: 7
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 Posted: Sat Mar 01, 2008 12:05 pm Post subject: [Mage: The Awakening] The Soul Cage |
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[Mage: The Awakening] The Soul Cage
The Boy child is locked in the fisherman's yard
There's a bloodless moon where the oceans die
A shoal of nightstars hang fire in the nets
And the chaos of cages where the crayfish lie
Where is the the fisherman, where is the goat?
Where is the keeper in his carrion coat?
Eclipse on the moon when the dark bird flies
Where is the child with his father's eyes?
These are the Soul Cages
He's the king of the ninth world
The twisted son of the fog bell's toll
In each and every lobster cage
A tortured human soul
These are the souls of the broken factories
The subject slaves of the broken crown
The dead accounting of old guilty promises
These are the souls of the broken town
These are the Soul Cages
'I have a wager' the brave child spoke
The fisherman laughed, though disturbed at the joke
'You will drink what I drink, but you must equal me
And if the drink leaves me standing
A soul shall go free'
'I have here a cask of most magical wine
A vintage that blessed every ship in the line
It's wrung from the blood of the sailors who died
Young white bodies adrift in the tide'
'And what's in it for me my pretty young thing?
Why should I whistle, when the caged bird sings?
If you lose a wager with the king of the sea
You'll spend the rest of forever in the cage with me'
These are the Soul Cages
A body lies open in the fisherman's yard
Like the side of a ship where the iceberg rips
One less soul in the soul cages
One last curse on the fisherman's lips
These are the Soul Cages
Swim to the Light
He dreamed of the ship on the sea
It would carry his father and he
To a place they could never be found
To a place far away from this town
A Newcastle ship without coals
They would sail to the island of souls.
- Sting, The Soul Cages
Welcome, faithful reader!
This Actual Play is the meeting of two groups - I'm the overly-wordy person responsible for A|State: Eye of the Needle, Everway: Long Road Home, Deliria: Into the Woods, hopefully one day Deliria: The Good Parents, but most especially Mage: The Awakening: Broken Diamond.
Broken Diamond ended on a high, the only high in a particularly turbulent time for me. I worked for a certain major UK bank, you see, which got itself into difficulties in late 2007. Combined with my Fiancee getting a job offer, I upped sticks and moved to the South.
Where I quickly acquired the storyteller and player of the excellent "Hunting Ground: Echoes of the Past" as my new gaming group.
So say hello to Chris (Acrozatarim) and Agena (Mrok Girl)!
Now, I haven't actually started *running* this game yet - and I have yet to even meet Agena in the flesh. I've got a whole bunch of stories in my head, though, and the theme and mood of the chronicle have rapidly evolved into something solid over the last few weeks. There's been a flurry of PMs behind the scenes hashing out character ideas and explaining bits of the setting.
Today, I felt like it turned a corner. So I'm starting this thread off "early", which gives me an opportunity to do something I've always wanted to: Go into the creation process. This, then, for the next few weeks, is the process of creating a chronicle. If you just want the game itself, come back in a while.
Next up: The Initial Spark |
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Caerwyn
Joined: 01 Mar 2008
Posts: 5
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| Posted: Sat Mar 01, 2008 12:07 pm Post subject: |
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The Fallen World - a prison for human souls, bound by the Abyss and manipulated by the Exarchs. Preyed upon by a multitude of creatures, spirits and intruders from elsewhere.
Mages are the only ones that can see the bars. They breath the Supernal air once - only once, during their Awakening, and are then trapped back in the Cage for the rest of their lives. Magic is both a great gift and a great curse, the curse of having seen the Real, Supernal world which you are now forever denied.
Close your eyes in a Demense. Meditate on the Resonance of a powerful spell. Catch a glimpse of a Cryptid from across a fog-shrouded moor and smell, just for an instant, the breeze coming through the bars of the Cage.
-------------
I never intended to run Mage again.
Is true. I was intending, while running Broken Diamond, that I would move on to Star Wars Saga, or maybe Blue Planet (I have a long-running fondness for Blue Planet). But the abrupt end to the old game made me realise that yeah, actually, there was an awful lot left to cover in the game.
Which is where The Soul Cage comes in.
This Chronicle will very deliberately shy away from the facets of the game heavily covered by Broken Diamond. It's an attempt to do the OTHER side of Mage: The Awakening
So, before I even moved house, I made a brief plea for players on the other thread and got myself to thinking.
First job - go through the themes identified of the game and see which I felt I'd "done" and which I didn't. Then see what gaps in the background there were, and what material in the game line I'd liked but been unable to use.
Themes
Masks and Identity Crisis / Everybody Lies / Paranoia
Mages are never who they pretend to be. Rejecting the names that the world gave them, either out of fear of them being misused or out of a desire to break from the person they were, almost all Awakened take a Shadow Name - at it's least a meaningful moniker that serves as their "callsign" but at it's most an entirely new persona. The person they *want* to be, and would be if they weren't in the Fallen World. Vampires grow fangs when they drink blood, Werewolves transform and Changelings and Prometheans hide their true appearance beneath illusions, but Mages have their "game-face" too.
They just don't have the luxury of knowing themselves which one is real. Is Beltane pretending to be Robert, or is Robert pretending to be Beltane?
And what if he decided to be Athame in the next Consilium over? Who's going to know?
I think I got "Identity Crisis" well out of my system last time, but I still like "Masks". There was noone in the last setting that was... complex, Shadow-self wise. Everyone had their real names and, by the end, it seemed everyone knew it. I want to have situations where the characters have no idea who the Mage they're dealing with "really is". Where one of your closest allies or worst enemies, someone you've known for years, ups and vanishes and you have no way of knowing what happened to them - or if you read their orbitury last week - because you never knew what their name was. Where it's possible to be utterly alone in the middle of a Consilium because all those Mages you interact with? Might as well not exist outside of the Caucus.
Where, ultimately, the only people you *do* know for certain are your Mentor and Cabal mates.
Or at least, you'd like to hope you do.
Fighting Fire With Fire / Morals are for Mortals - Wisdom
Or "Using the tools of the Enemy". In the sense of "Mages controlling populations so they don't get out of hand, ignoring the fact that that's what Seers do", I think this was pretty much played out. In the wider sense of forgetting, for a crucial instant, that you're supposed to be the *good* guys, it's in no way done with.
The Mysterium never throws anything away. The most vile Daemonicons of Left-Handed Legacies, the secret names that can be used to summon the foulest things from the Abyss, they lock away but never destroy.
Because it might come in handy one day.
What if the solution can be found in the Left Hand path?
Magic is tempting. When you can achieve the wildest of your whims with a little dedication and study, your moral compass becomes a thing to pay very careful attention to. When you can kill a man with your brain, you have to guard your thoughts.
I never did the slide of Wisdom to my satisfaction last Chronicle. I want to get into it deep this time. What does it mean to be able to read private thoughts, or change fate? That kind of thing.
Atlantis and Alchemy
Here's the thing. As each and every Mage Supplement adds more to the Backstory (Mysterium and Adamantine Arrow are especially good in this regard) to Atlantis and the Fall, I like it more and more. I love the backstory to Mage. The continents that never existed. People with Aztec-sounding names from forgotten histories of blood and flies. Ancient temples built in Atlantean colonies to hide the things the Exarchs didn't want airing. Outside of the parts of Broken Diamond taken from Reign of the Exarchs, we never did this last time. We never ran away from the Temple Guardians through an impossible, collapsing n-space clutching a crystal skull.
I want to.
To those, I add;
Rattling The Bars
Mages are curious to a fault, and more capable than any other Supernatural of shining light (even if it's a deeply biased half-light of a specific colour) into the unmentionable corners of the World of Darkness. It's a big setting - even leaving out the Fatsplat "races", there's Cryptids galore, Zombies, Monsters, Mysterious Places, Ghost stories, Ruined Temples, Changing Breeds, Psychics, Spirits, the Astral Realms, Abyssal Manifestations and plenty - plenty of unclassifiable "others".
I want to explore the edges of the World of Darkness. Testing the bars of the Soul Cage.
And that's where the Chronicle got it's name.
The Soul, Caged
Which brought me to this one. Souls weren't a big thing in the oWoD - they remained elusive to Magic(k), and were something felt rather than observed. Awakening, though, has Death Spells to remove it, Legacies based on Evolving it, Soul Stones made of it, Tremere that consume it, Astral journies into it and an Abyss inside it.
Souls are going to be important to the Chronicle.
The Awakening
Broken Diamond, viewed from the long, is the story of an Ascension. A very long, trilogy-of-books drawn out Ascension.
Soul Cage will be the story of Awakening. We're going to start at the beginning, show the characters' Awakenings and apprenticeships. "Awakening", the revelation that your world has changed and won't ever go back, will be a hopefully constant, thrubbing theme. Expect plot twists and the Chronicle changing direction every few stories as more layers are peeled off it.
Now to get me some players. |
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HNO3
Site Admin
Joined: 29 Feb 2008
Posts: 5
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| Posted: Sat Mar 01, 2008 12:11 pm Post subject: |
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Woo hoo! I called the inspiration song
Already subscribed to this one. Looking forward to seeing the creation process in action, as it's something I want to do myself this year (once I manage to make it through the five M:tA books and a couple of normal nWoD books that have piled up on my desk...) |
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Argenon
Joined: 29 Feb 2008
Posts: 8
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| Posted: Sat Mar 01, 2008 12:14 pm Post subject: |
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My soul has been caged by this thread. I anxiously await more posts.
Glad to see you're taking another run at nMage! /subscribed |
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tim
Joined: 29 Feb 2008
Posts: 10
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| Posted: Sat Mar 01, 2008 12:16 pm Post subject: |
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The following phrase normally drips with sarcasm, rest asured, I mean it litterally this time:
This ought to be good.
__________________
Do you live on the Isle of Wight?
PM me, please.
'In 3e there's a sense that items, like feats and skills, are part of a comprehensive character makeup. In ADND they were more along the lines of crazy shit that happened to you.' - OldKentuckyShark
No longer collecting points. |
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zenten
Joined: 01 Mar 2008
Posts: 5
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| Posted: Sat Mar 01, 2008 12:18 pm Post subject: |
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You know, I swear sometimes, DaveB, you were put here *just* to make me happy.
Not only do I get a "preview" of Soul Cage...but you're actually taking the time to go over the Chronicle's Creation?!?!
My...freakin'....HERO.
That's all I got to say about that.
And, as if there was any other doubt..../Subscribed, Baby.
I look forward to both more of your ruminations on constructing the Chronicle (something I'm discovering I'm having a hard time with on my own), and the eventual beginning of it.
*grin*
YAY! |
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tim
Joined: 29 Feb 2008
Posts: 10
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| Posted: Sat Mar 01, 2008 12:20 pm Post subject: |
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Dave!
Fantastic! I love the premises you're working with here.
Like so many others: /subscribe |
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