Shadow Scryers, A Homebrew Mage: The Ascension Spirit

Official supplements are great, but they're not comprehensive. Sometimes you need a creature or NPC that doesn't exist in available books, or you need to tweak something that exists to fit your chronicle better, or maybe you just want to throw something unexpected at your players. In that case, you might just need to build something new to drop into your game.

That's how I ended up with the Shadow Scryers.

Below is the information I wrote up for the homemade spirit I created for my latest Mage chronicle. Feel free to use it in your own games, or tweak it for your own purposes. Enjoy!

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"Look, shut up a second and listen to me. I'm not safe here. Call it paranoia or whatever, but I swear, when I left Blake's hidey-hole with the relic, something followed me and I can't seem to-"

Malcolm whirled, certain he saw something moving at the edge of his vision. The motel room was empty of anything that shouldn't be there, other than himself, the cell phone he was using to check in with his pal, and his bag by the door, but he couldn't shake the feeling that someone or something was watching him.

"...I have to go. If you don't hear back from me in one hour, get to the chantry and get help."

He hung up his cell phone, then opened up his custom camera app and scrolled through the different filters. First Material, then Flora/Fauna, and on and on. When he cycled to Spiritus, Malcolm nearly dropped his phone. Standing in the far corner was a tall, slender, shadowy humanoid figure staring at him with milky white eyes.

Swallowing his fear, Malcolm moved slowly, cautiously, toward the door, silently praying that whatever that thing was, it wasn’t easily provoked. He glanced away only for a second to grab his bag, the one hiding the stolen relic, the spirit's empty eyes following him all the while.

Unlocking the door made the spirit's head tilt ever so slightly, but it made no movement to intervene. That was fine by Malcolm. He opened the door just wide enough to slip through, then sprinted the rest of the way to his car and peeled out of the parking lot.

And still he felt as though he was being watched.

Much like their close Sendings cousins, Shadow Scryers are spirits compelled to serve a specific purpose. Where Sendings are messengers – disembodied communications with images and voices but no set form to speak of – Shadow Scryers are spies, intended to quickly locate and quietly observe a person or place and report back their findings.

Spotted easily enough by mages well-versed in the spirit ways, those with only a heightened awareness of their surroundings might catch fleeting glimpses of movement in their peripheral vision. When discovered, a Shadow Scryer continues observing until action is taken against it. When attacked, it defaults to the flight category of "fight or flight" reactions, sometimes instilling sudden and crippling terror prior to fleeing, to better avoid being pursued.

Shadow Scryers vary in appearance, taking the form of urban legends, mythical creatures, ghostly figures, even aspects of long forgotten gods and mages. Despite their name, they are not formed from shadow, although they do prefer darkened corners when spying. Although these entities appear to have some form of sentience and survival instincts, their silence makes discerning their true purpose all but impossible.

In game terms, Shadow Scryers can be summoned and compelled to act by any mage as per the Spirit/Dimensional Science Spheres. These spirits make ideal eyes and ears for those who wish to avoid direct attention, but still want to gather information from afar. It should be noted that these entities are not fighters, but their instincts strongly deter those from following the spirit back to its mage master.

Willpower 3, Rage 4, Gnosis 10, Essence 25
Charms: Flee, Influence, Soul Reading, Terror, Track

The Magick System of Mage, or "What Do You Mean, There's No Spell List?!"

"Mages are supposed to have spell lists, right? Where's the spell list for Mage?"

The short answer is, there is no spell list. At least, not like you'd find in a game like D&D.

Jareth is totally a D&D sorcerer multiclassed as bard.

The long answer is, Mage's magick system is so robust and versatile that a simple spell list really wouldn't do it justice. Since this game assumes you're playing a mage, there's no need to call attention to whether you're playing a sorcerer or a cleric as you might in other games. There's no spell slots to keep track of, no daily limit to the amount of spells you can cast, no need to mark down which ones you can use for the day... in short, Mage is all about making your mage a badass who can cast a wide variety of spells, not just a short list of them.

Instead, Mage's freeform magick system revolves around two important mechanics: Spheres and Arete. The Spheres embody the nine spheres of influence (get it?) that mages can use in their magick. These are:

• Correspondence - the Sphere of spatial location. Any spell that you want to cast over a distance greater than line of sight will use this Sphere, such as scrying, teleportation, or co-location.
• Entropy - the Sphere of probability and decay. Any spell that affects chance or fortune will use this Sphere, from curses and blessings that affect people's luck to affecting the health or decay of a person or thing.
• Forces - the Sphere of energies and elements. Any spell that incorporates fire, electricity, radiation, wind, gravity, light or sound will use this Sphere, from invisibility to cones of silence to changing the weather.
• Life - the Sphere of organic patterns. Any spell that affects a living creature, person or animal, will use this Sphere, including healing magicks, shapeshifting, or altering someone's apperance or physical attributes.
• Matter - the Sphere of inorganic patterns. Any spell that affects non-living material, from chairs to buildings (even corpses, for you necromancer types) will use this Sphere to conjure and shape them as you please.
• Mind - the Sphere of mental prowess. Any spell that affects the mental faculties, either yours or someone else's, will use this Sphere, from creating simple illusions to outright mind control and manipulation.
• Prime - the Sphere of raw magickal power. Any spell that creates something from nothing will use this Sphere, in addition to enchanting people or items, fueling magickal attacks, and powerful countermagick defenses.
• Spirit - the Sphere of the Otherworlds. Any spell that affects spirits, ghosts, and the realms outside of and beyond the physical will use this Sphere, in addition to travel to other worlds and realities.
• Time - the Sphere of temporal location. Any spell that you want to send forward or backward in time uses this Sphere, which is useful for precognition, speeding up your reaction time, and even freezing another spell to go off under special circumstances.

Aang excels at the Forces Sphere.

Any time a mage casts magick, they'll use the above Spheres to figure out if they can pull it off. If you're lacking ranks in a particular Sphere, you may have to get creative to come up with an alternate way to pull it off, pending Storyteller approval. Fortunately, the Spheres overlap with each other in significant ways, and a truly creative player can do a lot with just a few ranks. While it's tempting to throw a lot of points into Spheres so you can do crazy things with them, there IS a game mechanic in place to make sure players don't go too wild with power. That mechanic is Arete.

Arete is like the "cast magic" trait of Mage. The higher the score, the more your mage understands how reality works and how it can be shaped by the Spheres. As a result, you can't have more ranks in a Sphere than you have dots in Arete. If your Arete is 3, none of your Spheres can have a rating higher than that. That's also the highest rating you can have as a beginning character, and it's the most expensive trait to raise with experience points as the game goes on. Sorry, power gamers.

Arete is also a rolled trait. Unlike the Spheres, which are primarily a way of tracking what your character knows, Arete is a reflection of what they can do. If we're going off of the aforementioned Arete 3, that's 3 dice you'll roll to cast an effect, versus a target number of the Storyteller's determination. The more dice you roll that meet or exceed that target number, the more successes you'll be able to put toward making a strong magickal effect.

That's because Willow needs to raise her Arete instead of her other traits.

For example, one of my players wants to scry into a nearby building. He wants to look beyond his line of sight and through the walls blocking his vision to get a better idea of the layout. Correspondence is used in this effect for sensing beyond his immediate area, and Matter is used to get a measure of the physical structure itself. If he wanted to take note of how many people are inside, he'd throw Life into the mix, but he doesn't have that Sphere yet, so he'll settle for the building layout. To cast the effect, he'd roll his Arete of 2 and hope for at least one success if he's in a hurry, or take his time with it to roll multiple times and accumulate successes for the effect.

There's a bunch of other smaller things that go into casting magick in Mage, but those two elements are at the center of it all. Once you wrap your brain around those, the rest is gravy.

Do you have any questions about the core of Mage's magick system, or how it's used in actual play? Post them in the comments below and I'll jump on those lickety-split!

Street Level Mage vs. Epic Fantasy Mage, or "This Is Gonna Get Weird."

If you've been playing/running Mage: The Ascension for as long as I have, you may have noticed a sharp tonal shift between Mage 1st and 2nd Edition (or pre-revised) books and Mage Revised (AKA 3rd Edition) books. There's even a slight tonal shift between Mage's 1st and 2nd Editions, but it's not nearly as abrupt or impactful on Mage's overall setting. And for those who have never played any of those editions, or only played one of them, let me nutshell this shift for you.

"...Not quite what I meant, but close."

In Mage's pre-revised editions, things were weird. 1st Edition kicked it off with the Book of Chantries, which introduced some pretty "out there" concepts such as animate castles housing a cult of assassins and a proto-Hogwarts of politics and power stationed on a realm tied to Mars (the planet, not the Greek god), and the first Digital Web book that introduced us to a realm where the internet was a virtual cyberpunk world unto itself. Mage 2nd Edition continued that trend with Horizon: Stronghold of Hope, Beyond the Barriers: The Book of Worlds, and Digital Web 2.0, all of which threw open the doors of possibility and invited players and Storytellers alike to take their games out of the familiar and into some truly weird worlds where anything is possible. Want to throw your mages into a video game? How about an epic battle on the deck of a spaceship against alien horrors? How about an old-fashioned trek through mystical lands filled to the brim with creatures that you've only heard about in myths and legend? All of that is doable in Mage, and more!

Then Mage Revised came along and slammed those doors shut with a heavy gust of wind from the Avatar Storm. This plot element, designed to make crossing over into these fascinating and bizarre worlds more difficult, was part of an effort to ground the game in the same gritty, vicious streets of the World of Darkness' flagship game, Vampire: The Masquerade. As a result, Mage Revised only gave us one book on the worlds beyond, The Infinite Tapestry, and that tome was not nearly as extensive as the Book of Worlds was.

Now, I like Vampire just as much as the next WoD fan, but Mage is so much more than just the cityscapes and the wilderness between them. Forcing that narrow view on longtime fans of the game felt insulting, as if we were being told that our style of play was wrong and that surviving the mean streets was the only way to really play Mage.

I'm here to tell you, both playstyles are valid.

Street level Mage is a great way to introduce those new to RPGs and/or the World of Darkness to the setting. Starting off in the familiar is not nearly as jarring as throwing players immediately into a bizarre high fantasy setting that is completely foreign to them. There can still be weirdness in the dark corners of familiar cities, and as the players become more comfortable with their surroundings, you can gradually build up to the unique and wondrous vistas that Mage is known for in 2nd Edition. Or, you can choose to ignore those other worlds. If the gritty, urban fantasy-style focus of Mage Revised is your cup of tea, that's valid, too. There's plenty of story to be told on the earthly plane without taking your player's characters out of the world they know, and the concerns of humanity are much more relevant to mages than those in worlds beyond.

Likewise, there's nothing wrong with the fantastical approach to Mage, so long as everyone understands that this is not D&D and you can't just run screaming at a dragon and expect to survive thanks to oodles of hit points. Even in its most high fantasy settings of gryphons and airships and floating castles, there's an element to Mage that drives home how human these characters really are. Despite their reality-bending powers, mages are still mortals who can be felled with one well-placed bullet, or one careless step on a rickety bridge, or one tragic encounter with the wrong creature. But they are also capable of amazing feats of resourcefulness and invention, and for centuries have crafted otherworldly vistas beyond the earthly plane. It's a tragedy not to showcase, even just once, the worlds that mages can make possible.

In the end, this should be an agreement made with your players as to what sort of Mage game they're going to be playing. It'd be upsetting to players who want to focus on earthly goals if they spend all their time exploring alien civilizations, and the same is true of those expecting a true wizard's journey into unknown worlds if they never leave their city of origin. Talk it over with them and try to accommodate their expectations.

And remember, there's no harm in letting things get a little weird for a few sessions.

Do you have any questions about street-level Mage vs. epic fantasy Mage? Post them in the comments below and I'll happily answer them all!

And Now For Something A Little Different

My talented partner, SB, is planning on running a tabletop game set in the World of Warcraft, and I've already made my character. I haven't played World of Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game in many, many years. It was my introduction to WoW, strangely enough, and the game that got me interested in checking out the MMO to see what it was all about and to explore the world that I was only imagining around a table. While I've played off and on since the days of the Burning Crusade expansion and the introduction of blood elves, it'll be nice to jump back into that world with more creative freedom than an MMO typically allows.

While we don't have a start date for the first game yet, I've started preparing for our eventual first session by writing up a short bio/intro for my character, Cynlan Dawnstrider. Inspired by the character vignettes that used to open every episode of Critical Role, I decided I was going to hit the highlights of who my character is and what major events shaped him into the character the other players will eventually meet. I've also decided to share that intro with you all below, along with an image of the character I'll be playing, generated from in-game assets with the help of Wowhead's dressing room feature.

Enjoy!

Like most blood elves, Cynlan was once a high elf born into a magister family - House Dawnstrider, to be exact - to parents who had mastered the magical arts. Unlike most blood elves, Cynlan had no talent for the arcane and quickly earned himself a place of ridicule in the family. He did, however, discover a knack for working with metal, and soon grew that talent into a skill for engineering. Little did he know just how valuable that pursuit would be once Arthas set his sights on Quel'Thalas on his path to becoming the Lich King.

His family dead and his home in ruins, Cynlan eagerly joined with the United Blood Elf Engineers' Union and pledged his services to their surviving ruler, Prince Kael'thas Sunstrider. In the process, he was swept up in an unfolding chain of events not of his making, events that severed the newly renamed blood elves' ties to the Alliance who wrongfully imprisoned them... events that allied them with Lady Vashj and Illidan Stormrage in Outland.

Ill-prepared to deal with the hardships of Outland and slowly falling under the sway of the fel energy needed to stave off a crippling mana addiction, Cynlan was desperate for a means to return home and regain some semblance of normality. He found the perfect opportunity as part of the unit that delivered a captured naaru to Silvermoon City as a source of power to curb their addiction. With the bulk of the city's reconstruction handled already, Cynlan languished without a purpose... until one day, the call went out to recruit for a new organization to protect the Quel'dorei from the forces of darkness: The Blood Knight Order.

Now having discovered an affinity for divine magic that rivals his parents' talent for its arcane counterpart, Cynlan Dawnstrider rose through the ranks, first becoming known as a dragon slayer, then becoming renown as a Champion of the Order. Augmenting his combat training with engineered wonders, Cynlan puts the "knight" in Blood Knight, and stands ready to protect his people from any evil that dares threaten them.