Marauders As Antagonists, or "This Is All Critical Role's Fault"

If you'd asked me a month ago if I've ever used Marauders in my game, I would have said, "No." I primarily run Tradition games, so I make gratuitous use of the Technocracy as antagonists and Nephandi as villains. Hell, thanks to the Mage Revised era of the setting, I would frequently use the Traditions themselves against my players as antagonists, to highlight how flawed and messed up the Traditions can be.

But now if you ask me if I've ever used Marauders, I'd say, "Yes. Yes, I have, and it's all Critical Role's fault."

Maybe I should give some backstory on that, and what Marauders are in the world of Mage: The Ascension.

To quote the Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition core rulebook, Marauders are "Metaphysical schizophrenics whose impressions of reality are so disconnected from the Consensus that they effectively exist in their own reality wells." But what does that mean? In simpler terms, they're mages with strong mental illness. When you can reshape reality with the power of your will, a disconnect from the reality that everyone else can observe - where up is down, the sky is blue, and the laws of physics rule - is a very dangerous thing. Putting that power in the hands of someone who sees reality differently than others, whose mind works very differently from those deemed "normal" around them, can warp reality into something unrecognizable, and that's something that both the Traditions and Technocracy do not want.

Mental illness is a touchy subject, and it's part of the reason why I've never used Marauders in my game before. Personally, I've struggled with mental illness in the past, and some of my friends and loved ones are dealing with their own illness as I write this. In some media, the presence of mental illness in a character automatically classifies them as a villain (see just about every Batman villain ever), and while I do lean on some archetypes in my game more than others, I tend to avoid using mental illness in such a way. Marauders just seemed like something I'd never tackle in my games.

And then Critical Role came into my life.

For those unfamiliar with Critical Role, it's an online show that streams on Geek & Sundry's Twitch and Alpha channels every Thursday night at 7PM Pacific. In its 3-4 hours, a bunch of nerdy voice actors get together, roll dice and play D&D in a campaign that started off-screen years before they decided to add cameras and mics to the mix. They're a group of amazing players who use their platform to show how much fun TTRPGs can be, but also to support a number of charities and causes. Most recently as of this writing, Matthew Mercer, the group's GM, joined a stream on Patrick Rothfuss' Twitch channel to talk about mental illness and how he deals with it in his life.

What does all this have to do with Mage? Well, their campaign ended recently and, in the space between making new characters for a new campaign to begin on January 11th, Critical Role has been featuring one-shots of other game systems, with each player running a different sort of game. Taliesin Jaffe was the first to step up to the plate, and he ran a two-part Vampire: The Masquerade adventure where the players themselves were turned into vampires and unleashed on the World of Darkness version of the Geek & Sundry studios (AKA the Legendary Digital Network studios). By the end of their adventure, the LDN studios had exploded and a number of names that G&S diehards would recognize were revealed to be some flavor of supernatural entity.

It was a weird, wild, sometimes silly but often thrilling romp through the World of Darkness played out to an audience of tens of thousands of viewers, something that I'd dare say is a first for my favorite game setting. It was so much fun, in fact, that I incorporated their one-shot into my own game:

Yeah, Taliesin RT'd me, so I guess you could say I've arrived.

Throwing their game into the background of my own chronicle was one thing. Setting up a true homage that played off those events from a Mage perspective was another, and it was something I wanted to tackle after wrapping up a long story arc with my players. I didn't want to get into the nitty gritty of vampire clans and such, but I did want to pay tribute to Critical Role and their Thursday By Night adventure in some way.

Then it hit me. What if a newly Awakened Mage was also a diehard fan of Critical Role? What if the demise of the G&S studios and the apparent death of the Critical Role cast drove that new mage mad with sorrow? What if that Marauder-in-the-making decided he was going to carry on their work and bring the world of TTRPGs to life, quite literally, by reshaping reality itself?

I finally had a Marauder concept worth creating: the Game Master!

(Continued here!)