Mage: The Ascension

Note: We use discord to communicate about the game, including any day of logistics and last minute changes.

System

Mage: The Ascension (revised)

Summary

A group of former operatives flee from the Technocracy after being burned on a mission. Hounded up the West Coast by New World Order assassins, they must survive long enough to find a mage in Seattle who can help them start a new life. But in the electric jungle of the city, the eyes and ears of the Technocracy are everywhere...

Other Deets

• I will bring pre-gens. All you need is a pencil, and optionally a notebook.
• The game uses d10 dice pools. You can bring your own, but I will have some.
• You do not need to learn the system ahead of time, but you can get the basics of the setting from the short (and free!) quickstart on DriveThruRPG
• I run a pro-LGBTQ+ table.
• We will use the X-card system for content safety.

Reality Deviants

You killed the first one in Fresno. The suit had climbed out of a Cadillac and put a magazine of explosive rounds into the gas pump where you were filling your car. Your car went up in flames along with the assassin, so you left in his. That must have been their plan since the Cadillac tried to drive itself through a guardrail near Mount Shasta like it was trying to fly the rest of the way to Washington. Deciding that the highway was too dangerous, you continued by train. Somewhere near Portland the second one stepped through the side of a boxcar like it was made of rice paper. It was dark, so you could just make out the lights in his eyes. You figured the engineers only put them there for the psychological effect. Those glowing red eyes seemed to cause people to freeze up long enough for the cyborg to get them inside the kill radius of the bomb in its chest. But you somehow managed to survive that too, and you located the nearby Operator who you knew would be there because, until recently, you were one of them.

A few days ago you were standing in a cheap motel in Bakersfield. You were looking for a target, but found a letter instead. It was from the Doctor. It contained the facts: by the time you were done reading this he would be dead and they would be looking for you, and they would never stop. You weren’t exactly surprised, but you also hadn’t planned for this outcome because there wasn’t much planning you could do when the New World Order wanted you dead. You were only alive now because the Doctor had sent you here when he realized the hammer was falling. Too bad he only bought you a few weeks or months at best.

You had been working under the Doctor as a field agent for his research into reality anomalies on behalf of the New World Order, part of the Technocratic Union. You were an Operator, an expert in Adjustments - highly classified Hypertech capable of manipulating the facts of reality to produce whatever result your mission called for. You needed this edge because the subjects of your missions, so-called Reality Deviants, possessed a similar capability. The result was a game of rocket tag in which you struck first, or suddenly never existed. It had the convenient side effect of keeping you from ever having to talk to your targets or look them in the face. But that wasn’t a problem, because all you were supposed to do was neutralize the target, sanitize the area, and bag up the strange objects they surrounded themselves with.

But Technocracy-approved research wasn’t enough for the Doctor’s ambitions. He wasn’t learning anything from the odds and ends you collected from the deviants. He needed to talk to them, and so he did. Naturally that meant you started to talk to them too, and you started learning things. Outside the Technocracy, people called Reality Deviants were also called Mages, and the Adjustments you used were a variant of what they called Magic. They showed you that you could indeed fly without jet engines, or communicate remotely without a radio. Technology, it turned out, was simply one path to power among many, and you started to work their beliefs and paradigms into your own Technocracy-shaped practice. The resulting creole of tech and hedge witchcraft was impressive, to say the least.

But that made you dangerous because you started to see and understand things the New World Order didn’t want you to. Your new view of reality incorporated more than their tech, which made you a threat to their version of the world that they cultivated for the masses. You were branded a Reality Deviant, a contagious believer of an enemy perspective, which is why the Doctor and his whole lab got turned into a thin plasma and sucked into the air vents with you standing next in line.

Now you’re in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains in a small town called North Bend. When you got here you could feel the pulses of data washing through the twilight over the skyline. They know you’re here, and they’re looking for you. For now, it’s safer out here where the signal from the comm towers slaved to the New World Order network is weaker, but you can’t stay here long. They’ll find you one way or another - they always do. You figure your only hope is finding a friend of the Doctor, a mage you encountered periodically when your path started to deviate from the Technocracy’s. And to find her, you need to go into Seattle, into danger.