Part 1 -Overview

So you want to play Mage: the Awakening? Well, youve got great taste in game, but youre a glutton for punishment! Mage has some utterly kickass lore and an impressive array of powers, but its also horribly convoluted to the new player. Fortunately, Im here to help you along your way to unlocking your latent potential and helping you get into this game. Buckle up and dive into Mage: the Awakening! Mage is a game of Sorcery & Secrecy. As a PC, youve discovered the gnostic nature of reality and through a personal trial that led your soul beyond the world you knew - have inscribed your soul in a Watchtower embodying a Platonic ideal. Thanks to Awakening, your soul can remake the world in 10 impossibly broad capacities called Arcana, which deal with concepts like Time or Matter or what-have-you. You're a newborn god! The problem is, the World doesn't like you fucking with it. It will slap down your broad attempts to change it, hard. Furthermore, the World has made it so that ordinary humans, the very people you love and cherish, are an anathema to your wonder-working: should they gaze upon your miracle-working, you risk the chance of breaking Reality-As-You-Know-It and causing things from OUTSIDE reality try to eat all that you love. This is a very basic primer: The Philippine Gamer has a good list of intro articles for your to peruse:
http://philgamer.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/mtaw-what-is-mage-the-awakening-about-long-but-awesome/

http://philgamer.wordpress.com/2012/11/22/nmage-musing-its-not-about-being-able-to-find-stuff-out-its-abouttrying-to-forget-what-you-saw/

http://philgamer.wordpress.com/category/roleplaying-games/world-of-darkness/mage-the-awakening/mage-theawakening-101/

Part 2 Necessary Books

In order to run Mage, you need more than WoD core and Mage Core. Unlike some other WoD lines (like Hunter the Vigil or Changeling), Mage is a little half-baked. White Wolf left out a LOT of vital stuff from the Core, so prepare for some page-flipping.

THE HOLY TRINITY:

WoD Core - Duh. Youre not playing World of Darkness if youre not using the Big Blue Book.

Mage: The Awakening Core The game you wanna play. Its pretty, it has some cool ideas, and it communicates (however poorly) what the game is about. It is lacking a few things (mostly on how magic works, so you need at least ONE other book in order to pull this off Tome of the Mysteries - Chapter 1 is How To Do Magic & should've been in core. The rest of it is quite good, but chapter 1 is VITAL for Improvised Magic. If you buy no other mage books, you must buy Tome of the Mysteries, mage Core and World of Darkness core

THE BBEG SPLATS

These books help to flesh out the antagonist factions. Seers on the Throne - Dickish mages who want to control your ass (and the rest of reality, too). These are the best human antagonists in Mage, and this book characterizes them beautifully. Intruders: Encounters With The Abyss - Remember how I said reality broke when you dun goof with magic? This how your GM will break reality and drink your delicious tears. My favorite book from the gameline. The Left handed Paths - I need to read this yet, but the opinions are universally awesome. These are mage social deviants, folks who decide to play with reality in their own strange, horrific way.

METAPHYSICS
Astral Realms - Did you know your PC could have an entire campaign inside their own soul? A muchneglected part of Mage's metaphysics, the soul is so deep you can go spelunking in there. My 2nd fav book Werewolf the Forsaken But this is another splat altogether! I heard you cry. Trust me, Im a wizard. Read Appendix I about the Spirit World. Youll thank yourself later. Summoners - Less vital than the others, but having a list of spirits a GM can throw at players is always a good idea. Imperial Mysteries The mages Epic Level handbook, this chronicles what happens when you break free of the World and explore higher realities. An Anon summed this up best: What happens when Archmages can rewrite Symbols? You get an edit war. Imagine Wikipedia. Now imagine Wikipedia is all of Reality.

Other Stuff
Armory & Armory Reloaded Combat comes up. These are new weapons, new weapon rules, and all manner of goodies. Armory Reloaded also includes some combat hacks, some of which (Automatic Damage for firearms) are must-haves for any game.

World of Darkness: Mirrors Rules are made to be broken, and this treasure-trove exists to help understand how to break the rules properly. This book opens up so many options for you to play with the Storyteller Systems rules as you see fit, and is a must-have for anyone who ever wants to play any nWoD game. Reliquary Any mage worth their salt will have a few magical items kicking about, and this book is littered with goodies. Hunting for trinkets like this can jumpstart plots and aid out PCs in a pinch.

Part 3 the Arcana

Well, now you got your books. Have you read em all? Good! Understand any of it? Dont tell fibs, youre as confused as the rest of us. But thats okay Uncle Magefan is here to help it all make sense

Lets get down to the mechanics! Arcana are your powers. They govern broad principles within the World of Darkness, such as the concept of energy, or the idea of living cells. What does each school of magic do?

>Matter - Relates to matter. Allows you to manipulate physical material.

>Spotting weaknesses in objects, strengthening things, turning one thing into another thing and at the highest levels creating things.

>Mind - Relates to the mind. Allows you to manipulate the psyche.

>Reading minds, making yourself smarter, manipulating memories and mind controlling people.

>Space
Relates to the distances between stuff. This allows you to manipulate space, and spatial relationships. Note that it synergises REALLY well with everything, by way of the Sympathetic Casting rules. >Map areas, scry, ward things and teleport.

>Fate
Relating to coincidences. Allows you to manipulate probability. >Win coin flips, improve rolls, hex people and cast geas.

>Forces
Forces and energy. >fireball, lightning, telekinesis, creating a small sun

>Life

Living things. >Shapeshift, improve your body, heal, turn things into other things.

>Death
Corpses, ghosts, entropy, decay and negative energy. >Zombies, control ghosts, rot stuff, steal life energy.

>Prime
Magic, and the intangible metaphysical glow bits (mana) which fuels its presence in the Fallen World. >Counterspells, enchanting objects, manipulate auras, deal with raw mana

>Time
Time. >See the past, attempt to see the future, speed yourself/slow others, travel at most a couple of seconds into the past.

>Spirit
You really need to know about the nWoD cosmology to use this well. There's a reflection of the material called the Shadow or the Spirit world. Everything in the real world has a spirit, even stuff like truth or death. Spirit lets you deal with them. >Summon spirits, control them, deal with souls, create spirits.

Most of these are fairly self-explanatory for now. It canget a bit dicey in places, though: an eternal debate still rages over whether transmuting a glass of Orange Juice to a glass of Milk is an act accomplished via the Life or Matter arcana. Most GMs would say that to do the juice JUST the juice would require Matter, but some insist that Life would also work. The official White Wolf line is that since the juice is not part of a living thing, Matter would be a better choice of arcana, but nerds love to argue. I prefer to argue that the Higher Realms run on laws of metaphor and abstraction , and then give any arguing players a dirty look if they start to rock the boat. Ultimately, GM judgment should be the final answer use Rule Zero of RPGs as liberally as necessary.

Part 4 the 13 Practices

There are 13 Practices in Chapter 1 of Tome of the Mysteries. These are, broadly speaking, the primary 13 ways a mage can interact with one of the aforementioned arcana. * The Practice of Compelling (the ability to make nudge or gently compel an outcome in a way

which is slightly more favourable than normal, i.e. inflict dumb luck or make things seem happen which seem odd, but not unlikely - think temporary magical equipment) the Practice of Knowing (Gain basic info about a thing NOT sense data, but an understanding of what the thing is) the Practice of Unveiling (Be able to perceive a thing through your senses) ** the Practice of Ruling (accomplish a basic feat within the Arcana manipulate a person, place, thing in some way.) the Practice of Shielding (grant an armor bonus to a thing) the Practice of Veiling (conceal a phenomenon or thing) *** the Practice of Fraying (damage a thing) the Practice of Perfecting (improve or repair a thing) the Practice of Weaving (alter the capabilities or change the function of a thing without fundamentally changing the nature of a thing) **** the Practice of Patterning (Alter phenomena between roughly related types, redefine parameters of said phenomena a basic catch-all for magic which you dont know where else to put it) the Practice of Unraveling (damage a thing, hurt the knowledge or ability of others, or harm the capacity of the phenomenon) ***** the Practice of Making (Make something from nothing) the Practice of Unmaking (make something cease to exist)

It doesnt look like it from reading these, but even a single dot in an arcana is POTENT AS FUCK. To let me impress onto you how powerful this can get One dot, and you can know ANYTHING about which falls under an Arcana's purview.

What does this mean? Well, with one dot Matter you can know the exact chemical composition of ANY non-living substance by glancing at it. You can know that the cookies are poisoned just by looking at them. You can tell the purity of the cocaine as easily as you can see it.

One dot in life? You can identify every strain of microbe living on your hands, you can tell the exact breed of guppy by looking at it. You know that the spots on grandmas face are a sign of cancer, you know how far long its progressed, and you can see the exact order her organ systems will shut down in once it hits terminal stages. Two dots lets you do crazier things. You can conceal the presence of alcohol on a breathalyzer in your body despite having drunk half the bar, you can make a burning building invisible to infrared detection, you can render yourself immune to the touch of the caustic effects of an acid bath, and you can scry on anyone in the world, so long as you can get one of their personal effects. Im not going to even touch the higher-level stuff. Things become even crazier when you combine arcana. Want to know the exact times of death of all six hundred and sixty-six people in the hotel? Time 2, Death 1 and a little improvised casting will give you down-to-the-second details on the exact order everything happened in. Remember how I said the Space Arcana allowed for Sympathetic casting? If you have two dots in Space, and want to cast a spell on someone (say, light someone on fire with your mind), all it takes is some degree of personal effect (Theres a table on PAGE which lists the penalties) which allows for you to do that. Distance is no object. If you know someones name, whether theyre in the room with you or on the other side of the planet, they suffer whatever effects you wish, should you will it. Now, remember that anyone can do that to you, too. Once you start combining arcana, shit gets on like Donkey Kong.

Part 5 - Improvised Casting

Most mage learn at least a few Rotes, pre-packaged spells like D&D magic. They do one thing REALLY well, and are activated like any other World of Darkness power (roll a pool of Attribute dots + Skill dots + Supernatural Skill/Arcana dots. If you get at least 1 success, you do

the effect.) Rotes cost XP to learn, but can do some pretty neat (if limited) stuff. (NOTE: The rotes they give in the Core books are of varied balance. Some are utter shit, some are incredibly OP. IMO, GMs should provide a list of approved rotes their players should consider to start withless tears happen that way). But rotes are little wee babby things compared to Spontaneous Casting, aka Improvised Casting, aka Willworking. The TL;DR version of it is this: if you can imagine it, it becomes real. The process RAW is more complicated than I make it you here, but the basics remain the same Step 1 - Come up with what you wanna do. "I wanna weld this metal door shut. I want to increase this NPC's endorphin levels. I want to draw a winning poker hand." Step 2 - Figure out which Arcana would work best with this. This can be a bit tricky - is transmuting orange juice into acid Life or Matter? (Both I and the book say Matter is fine for this - see the Rote Transmute Liquid - but some Storytellers disagree. Be sure to negotiate with your Storyteller, or better yet, discuss ahead of time! ! Step 3 - Look up the 13 Practices, and figure out which one you want to fit this into. [See: http://philgamer.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/mage-the-awakening-101-arcana-basics-the13-practices/] Step 4 - Roll Gnosis +Arcana, bitch! It's time for MAGIC! Pic related is a more detailed explanation

Part 6 Paradox
Congrats, you've cast your spell! Unfortunately, this fucks with reality, and reality is a nasty asshole towards Mages. Guess what time it is, kids? It's Paradox time! Paradox is the dread of Mages, the hand of god coming down and saying "no!" when you've done your damndest to make your dreams come true. Paradox is also wonky-ass shit in need of a facelift. Paradox is what happens when a Mage casts a Vulgar spell (a spell which 'blatantly defies the laws of reality') or any spell which a Sleeper (read: ordinary mortal) witnesses you doing. Basically: if you come upon a situation when an ordinary mortal would call B.S., it's time to fire up the stove and get cookin' some Paradox-flavored pancakes. However, it doesn't work quite as easily as that. The wording is very vague as to what 'blatantly breaking da roolz' is, leaving many a poor player left to puzzle out for 20 minutes whether or not their attempt to fix a relatively simple problem via magic will or

won't blow their faces off. You'd think that the various Rotes, labelled as Vulgar or Covert already, would be a handy wat for the game's creators to give the players a general idea as to what rules-breaking meant to them, but the choices are really strange. A Mind arcana spell which makes someone have violent moodswings or fucks with memories is a Covert affair; a Fate arcana spell which tweaks the odds so that an lightning strikes at the right place at the right time or that you win a minor prize at the lottery risks being Vulgar. This leads to a LOT of bitching about MIND IS BROKEN (Which, rightly, it is), as - for some reason people in the World of Darkness would never call BS on mind control the same way they would on other magical effects.

This is why the good folks of /tg/ suggest house-rules, and why I (over the two years I've been here) have tried to collect those house-rules

Part 7 House Rules for mage

House-rules are always a fun part of any game, and in Mage they're vital. Most guys I've spoken to suggest cribbing a LOT of the stuff from the Mind's Eye Theater books. The World of Darkness LARPing community has a bit of a reputation on /tg/, but I'll be damned if these books don't patch up a LOT of the problems. There are a number of changes they suggest but they boil down to these things: 1 - Paradox Backlash is soaked as Resistant Lethal damage. When you start to get Paradox and don't want to summon a demon of Eat-Your-Face, you can take the Paradox inside your body. It soaked as Bashing, meaning you got a headache for an hour - this way, it's far more of a choice of damnations. 2 - Vulgarity is tied to dot-rating. 1-2 dot spells are always Covert, 4-5 dot spells are always Vulgar. 3 dot spells are left to GM discretion (aka Hilarity Ensues).

I have a few house-rules I kind of like as well. These may or may not work for your group, but they worked okay for my friends, so there's that. 1- When improvised casting, you need to get successes equal to the dot rating of the type of 13 practices you're trying to apply. It makes on-the-fly limited spells a little less awesome ("Aw, shit, 2 successes! I needed 3 successes to Fray that guy's trigger finger!"), but it helps to stop starting players from doing an extended rituals all day every day to Unmake whatever pisses them off at that moment. 2- Paradox is communal. Mages don't build up Paradox on their souls, they build it up in the Fallen World.

This makes things a little hairier when EVERY mage is now contributing to the deadly powder keg of Paradox every time they incur Paradox. This makes Mage-on-Mage conflicts particularly tense. It's even more fun when you have a bowl on the table, and you add a special Paradox Die to it every time someone dun goofed.

Part 8 In conclusion
As you can see, the game, for all its awesomesauce, is a little complicated. It's quite daunting for a new player, which is why I recommend you try World of Darkness with vanilla mortals first. Add on the Second Sight, Reliquary and Armory books, and you're in for a fun ride without all the house-rules and pretentious metaphysics and what-have-you. I highly recommend you read over the rules on spell-casting SEVERAL times, as well as Chapter 1 of Tome of the Mysteries. Playing will give you a clearer understanding than the books give, but the books are still better than the ramblings of a guy on the internet. I also encourage you to look up some of the Mage errata. In my first game a player who teleported a bathysphere to the moon to create a planet-scorching death-ray (under the precedents I had established this was perfectly fine), only to be to learn much too late that the errata specifically said Magic only works within the planet's atmosphere, so as to curb shit like that. If you must run your first WoD game using Mage, I recommend one of the storytelling adventure system products using Mage. You can buy them on DTRPG or scrounge /rs/, and they by-and-large should give you a feel for what a good Mage chronicle should feel like. I hope I've been able to help you somewhat. The World of Darkness is one of my favorite games, and Mage is particularly hilarious with the right group. However, it has a learning curve like running up a brick wall, and (like so many of the World of Darkness games) there are so many options to play with in the sandbox it can get overwhelming at first.

Appendix Chronicles and Soundtracks

>>23294376 Here are some tips on how to run a WoD Chronicle When running the game, have a Mortal life intro , let the PCs RP their first contact with the supernatural, then have a time-skip 1 month later when they've learned the ropes. They know the lingo, they can do basic shit without being a tool, they know about supernatural society and the like. From there, have them start with a few missions from a higher up ("Pick up takeout. Try not to kill anyone."), but grant the PCs the freedom to make their own choices. They wanna pick fights with enemy

factions? They bear the consequences! They wanna talk smack about the head of the Consilium? Go nuts! With Mage, you should avoid having a Mage mentor they can consistently rely on. Mages are fairly insular and self-sufficient creatures; having a mentor to turn to constantly (or to send them on errands) gets fairly silly fairly fast. Players should be a little uneasy asking anyone for help, but shouldn't feel threatened. A kind of 'tit-for-tat' rule should always be on your mind. Aside from that, the general rules for sandbox gaming apply. For further reading, look up The Philippine Gamer's Mage 101, as it's a very handy primer on a lot of these things. As well, WoD Index is supremely useful. White Wolf can't organize their books worth shit, so having a resource where folks list every rote, legacy, etc is very handy. http://wodindex.wikispaces.com/Spells As for music: >Dune - Spice Opera by Exxos http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL878D06468DB0AAA7 The Kara no Kyoukai OST by Yuki Kaijura >#1 http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3AA79C7EE87C5439 >#2 http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB37B0806010C7E7E >#3 http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE3341EAAFE14C39C >#4 http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22981BC6AF481834 >#5 http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL70FE05BB19AA6A45 >#6 http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE4475873B88095A6 >#7 http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9D744A15FBFD33EB