Tabletop Game / Mage: The Awakening

Ready to believe ten impossible things before breakfast.

Mage: The Awakening is a tabletop RPG made by White Wolf as part of the Chronicles of Darkness line. The story goes that long ago, people all over the world had dreams that brought them to Atlantis. Once there, they undertook a spirit quest that enlightened their souls and gave them magic powers. Thus the Mages Awakened. Unfortunately, the good times soon ended: Mages wanted to get to the Supernal World, the source of all magic. To achieve their plan they built an enormous ladder that let them travel the gap between worlds. This ended badly, as these god-like Mages abused their newfound power, forcing others of their order to climb the ladder and fight them. This war broke the ladder, destroying the connection between earth and the Supernal, and thus magic— and replacing it with an evil, magic-destroying realm called the Abyss. Atlantis fell, and the rest is history. Literally.

Now the Mages seek to find lost arcane secrets, prevent the Abyss from further corrupting Earth, act as badass mage cops, find magic in normal life, and rebuild the ladder to the Supernal. They are thwarted by Abyssal demons, servants of the Exarchs, those Mages who made it to the Supernal, and pretty much everybody in the World of Darkness.

Which, sometimes, is for the better.

The various Splats of Mage are as follows:

The Paths: The inborn classification of the Awakened, representing the Supernal Realm and Watchtower the mage visited during his Awakening. Each Path has an affinity for two kinds of magic, but a deficiency with another.

The Paths

• Acanthus: Enchanters on the Path of Thistle, who Awakened to the Watchtower of the Lunargent Thorn in the Realm of Arcadia, Acanthus mages tend to be easygoing, sometimes to the point of carelessness, due to their grasp of Fate and Time magic — it’s hard to be worried when you’ve seen what’s going to happen and you can tweak the dice so you know it’s going to work. However, the magic to which they’re born is subtle, and they have little ability when working with overt Forces. Associated with the Fool (0 or XXII) Tarot.
  • With the Second Edition, the Acanthus gained a new sobriquet of 'Witches', drawing on their alternate character focus as masterminds who plan out events and shape destinies. Those in the Seers of the Throne are also called 'Prophets'. The two keywords of the Acanthus are Choice and Consequence. They are associated with both the Fool and the Wheel of Fortune (X) cards of the Tarot.
• Mastigos: Warlocks on the Path of Scourging, Scions of the Watchtower of the Iron Gauntlet in the Realm of Pandemonium (Hell), the Mastigos tend to be driven and intense. Their ability to use Mind and Space magic to twist their enemies’ paths and thoughts alike make them dangerous foes, but their abilities focus on the intangible and impermanent, making it hard for them to affect Matter. Associated with the Devil (XV) Tarot.
  • With the Second Edition, the Mastigos gained a new sobriquet of "Psychonauts", drawing on their alternate character focus as philosophers of the soul, diving deep into the mysteries of the psyche. Those in the Seers of the Throne are also called 'Watchers'. The two keywords of the Mastigos are Confrontation and Transgression. They are associated with both the Devil and the Temperance (XIV) cards of the Tarot.
• Moros: Necromancers on the Path of Doom, visitors to the Watchtower of the Lead Coin in the Realm of Stygia (The Nothing After Death), Moros are often (though not always) dour and stern. They have dominion over Death and Matter, following the archetype of Pluto or Hades. Both of these things are dead and lifeless, though, and Moros have difficulty learning the ways of the Spirit. Associated with the Death (XIII) Tarot.
  • With the Second Edition, the Moros gained a new sobriquet of "Alchemists", drawing on their alternate character focus as those who facilitate inevitable change and unavoidable evolution. Those in the Seers of the Throne are also called 'Executors'. The keywords of the Moros are Transition and Permanence. They are associated with both the Death and the World (XXI) cards of the Tarot.
• Obrimos: Theurgists on the Path of the Mighty, Scions of the Watchtower of the Golden Key in the Realm of the Aether (Heaven), the Obrimos tend to be devout and fervent. They often believe that they were granted their magic by some deity or deities (although given the fundamental order in their Realm, they respect science as a field and are often its greatest advocates among mages), and have power over the Forces of the natural world and the Prime ways of magic itself. However, as creatures so filled with life and power, they have little tie to the powers of Death. Associated with the Strength (VIII) Tarot.
  • Second Edition gives them the sobriquet of "Thaumaturges", drawing on their nature as those who impose order and scientific structure on their magic, same as the order and structure of the Aether, and as seekers of fundamental truth and wonder. Obrimos on the Seers' side often call themselves "Reckoners" too. Their keywords are Power and Command. Unlike their brethren, they actually have three Tarot cards associated with them; the Hierophant (V), who codifies divine patterns into mortal laws and scripture to give order and discipline to the world, and the High Priestess (II), who uses intuition and self-knowledge to rule the invisible realms of thought. Both are perfectly valid ways of seeking Strength, both power over knowledge and the wisdom to use it gently and productively.
• Thyrsus: Shamans on the Path of Ecstasy, who Awakened to the Watchtower of the Singing Stone (Stone Book in 1st Edition) in the Realm of the Primal Wild (Hungry Jungle/Enchanted Forest), the Thyrsus are wild, primal, and passionate. Their ability with Life and Spirit magic makes them strong and gives them many allies among beasts and spirits alike, but this magic is wild and untamed and limits their ability to work with the Mind of another. Associated with the Moon (XVIII) Tarot.
  • In Second Edition, the Thyrsus Watchtower is the Singing Stone, and their additional sobriquet is Ecstatics, drawing on their alternate focus as those who gain understanding through personal experience of the primal ways. Those who side with the Seers are known as "Stewards". The Thyrsus keywords are Boundaries and Intercession, and they are associated with both the Moon and Hermit (IX) cards of the Tarot.

The Orders: The chosen, sociopolitical Splats of the Mages. The five Pentacle orders listed below work together (usually) in order to gain power and defend against common enemies. Each Order holds a philosophy on the best way to develop and use magic, as well as a common view on how to interact with Sleepers and the World. Four of the Orders (sometimes called the Diamond Orders) claim descent from organizations which existed in the days of Atlantis, although this can't be confirmed.

With the Second Edition, it is made clear that the Pentacle are an alliance between two Sects of mages — the Orders of the Diamond, and the Council of Free Assemblies (known as the Free Council).

Orders of the Pentacle

• The Diamond aren't literally descended from Atlantis, but rather, that symbolic imagery is something they try to incorporate into themselves. The Diamond generally follow an "As Above, So Below" principle, by finding signs of the Supernal left over from the Time Before.
  • The Adamantine Arrow: Descended from the Ungula Draconis (or "The Claw of the Dragon") from ancient Atlantis, the Arrow believe that the best way to hone one’s strength (magical or otherwise) is through constant conflict, contest, and trial, and that the strongest and best should rise to lead. They often serve as the warriors and strategists of a Consilium.
  • The Guardians of the Veil: Inspired by Atlantis’s Visus Draconis (or "The Eye of the Dragon"), the Guardians believe that Magic should be kept carefully and hidden from the world. They feel that Paradox widens the Abyss, removing further magic from the world, and thus they oppose vulgar magic whenever possible. In a modern Consilium, the Guardians usually serve as spies, secret police, and the like.
  • The Mysterium: Descended from the Alae Draconis (or the “The Wing of the Dragon”), the Mysterium believe that the collection and gathering of knowledge is the highest calling a Mage can seek. They seek out artifacts and tomes from ancient Atlantis, gather them safely, and sometimes share what they have learned — for a cost. They serve as a Consilium’s teachers, loremasters, scientists, and archeologists.
  • The Silver Ladder: Heirs to the Vox Draconis (or " The Voice of the Dragon"), members of the Silver Ladder believe that it is the fate of all Humanity to Awaken and that until then the wisest among the Awakened (which is, often, the Ladder mages themselves) should lead them well. They often serve modern Consilia in positions of leadership or oversight.
• The Council of Free Assemblies was formed relatively recently by an alliance of 'Nameless Orders', both ancient non-Diamond traditions and modernist assemblies of mages. They follow an "As Below, So Above" principle, by asserting that the culture and actions of humanity reflect the Supernal and thus Supernal Truths can be found in human culture. They also follow democratic ideals and a heavy rejection of 'servants of the Lie'.
  • The Free Council: The only Order not claiming Atlantean descent, the Council was born in the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent social turmoil of the early 20th century. They believe that the works of unAwakened Mortals possess as much magic as the works of the Awakened, and that democratic rule is the best way to run a Consilium. They are activists, revolutionaries, scientists, and often members of a Consilium’s “loyal opposition.”

The Pentacle is opposed by various rival mage factions and antagonists.

Enemies of the Pentacle

• The Seers of The Throne: Servants of the Exarchs, the tyrannical mage-gods that broke the ladder upon reaching the Supernal. The Seers are the third Sect of Awakened mages that the other two allied to thwart. They gather in shadowy conspiracies and cults, each dedicated to a particular Exarch. When not stabbing each other in the back or currying for their god's favor, the Seers strive to strengthen the Lie, making sure that as few mortals Awaken as possible, and that those that do serve the Exarchs' will.
• Banishers: For whatever reason, sometimes a Mage's Awakening is traumatizing rather than enlightening. Emotionally scarred and revolted by the power they now possess, Banishers view magic as an unnatural perversion of reality rather than a higher spiritual truth. Some seek to tear down the Mages' various social structures. Others won't be satisfied until every Awakened individual on the planet is dead, at which point they will kill themselves (thus, by their twisted logic, ensuring that no one ever practices magic ever again).
  • In the Second Edition, the term 'Banisher' covers a lot of ground. Some may be Mages who personally believe that magic is more harmful than helpful, and now are trying to stop others from using it. Some may belong to certain Legacies that destroy or consume magic to their own ends. Some are Banishers as detailed above — the 'Banishing' they suffer is an Awakening that went wrong, and now they experience every bit of magic as spiritual trauma, including their own sixth sense. (In game mechanics, this is represented by Banishers having mortal Integrity instead of mage Wisdom as their Karma Meter. Thus, they suffer a 'breaking point' whenever witnessing magic.)
• The Scelesti: Servants of the Abyss, the aforementioned magic-destroying realm, who want to transform the world into an Infernal Paradise in the name of their masters. Technically Always Chaotic Evil, but they would say they're more Above Good and Evil, viewing the world as Order Versus Chaos, with them being the "Chaos".
  • In the Second Edition, the term 'Scelestus' covers a lot of ground. Some are regular mages who purposefully reach out beyond their magical capabilities, which taints the spell with Paradox. Some belong to Legacies that deal extensively with the Abyss. Some make pacts with Abyssal manifestations — ephemeral Gulmoth or astral Acamoth. The last are mages who abandon their Supernal Watchtower and join an Abyssal Ziggurat, which is the perverted and twisted reflection of a Watchtower. Scelesti represent nihilism, those who would destroy all of the world.
• The Mad Ones: Mages whose Wisdom score drops to zero become Mad, fractured souls who cannot control their magic and whimsically warp reality. Through the fractures in their soul, their magic leaks out and flares out their Nimbus and even summons Tulpa, which are basically sentient magic spells. The Mad represent consuming obsession, a warning against mages to safeguard their Wisdom in employing magic.
  • As of Second Edition, these mages work mostly the same, but have been renamed to the Rapt, reflecting how they are beholden to the obsessions born from what broke their souls.
• Liches: Liches are mages who try to live well beyond mortality and thus gain some form of immortality. If there's a way to cheat death, there's a lich who's used it: some drain lifespans from others, some become body-snatchers, some offload their fate onto others, and so on. Then there are those who try to become an ephemeral being — a Spirit, Ghost, or Goetia. Liches represent fall from humanity, what mages may become when their disdain for Muggles reaches its highest.
• Reapers: Reapers are mages who exploit souls of Sleepers and Awakened alike. They declare that Your Soul Is Mine!, and then use it for varying purposes. Reapers represent ultimate act of hubris, the idea that your purpose and desire outweighs the cosmic significance of a person's existence in the universe.
• Left-Handed Legacies: Some of the Legacies mages can join are declared Left-Handed by the rest of Awakened society, and are ostracized. Many of these Legacies practice beliefs and magic that are considered immoral or highly dangerous. Still, they manage to survive by hiding their Legacy status and infiltrating the Orders, or are sometimes hidden by allies who consider them useful. The largest of Left-Handed Legacies grow into a Nameless Order, cultures that exist outside of the tripartite sects. One such example are the Tremere, who also qualify as both Liches and Reapers.

Terminology, with translations: Every Mage (Character) once traveled in a dream or vision to one of five Supernal Realms, ending this visit by signing their name to that Realm's Watchtower and gaining affinity to the corresponding Path (class). Each Path has special affinity to two Arcana (spell groups) of Magic. Most Mages choose to join an Order (faction) of like-minded will-workers for instruction and support. A city full of mages usually organizes into a Consilium, often including one or more Cabals (parties) of allied mages. Some Mages join a Legacy (Prestige Class) to refine their souls and magic, gaining more power and a respite from Paradox.

In other words, there's some Grouped for Your Convenience going on, but it gets realistically muddy and complex.

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This role-playing game provides examples of:

• A Chat with Satan:Imperium requires you to overcome your inner sin. The relevant splatbook gives a wizardly mentor as an example: the mentor's Satan is his stubborn refusal to acknowledge that other people's methods are probably as good as his, which has cost the life of at least one prospective mage.
• Abstract Apotheosis: Subverted. In Imperial Mysteries, it's explained that a Mage can go to the Supernal and merge with it, subsumed into one of the many Symbols that define the world. The challenge for a Mage seeking Imperium is going to the Supernal, gaining the ability to manipulate Symbols, all while still being herself. And the Exarchs did it before you.
• Accidental Good Outcome: Fate magic can manufacture these; for example, it can make you slip on a banana peel so you'd dodge a bullet or make someone mistakenly leave the door into a secure building open for you.
• Acid-Trip Dimension:
  • The Supernal Realms are "not locations ... but a near-infinite collection of platonic truths". Concepts like linear time, spatial dimensions, cause and effect, and whatnot don't apply, because the Realms are where reality as mortals understand it is generated. Consequently, only the most powerful beings can visit even temporarily: it's necessary to filter the Realms through a personalized set of metaphors and symbols, and even then, prolonged exposure will break the mind, overwhelm the soul, and delete the poor bastard from reality. It's mentioned that a sufficiently talented archmaster can make a gateway to the Supernal Realms for anyone to pass through, but they have easier ways to kill people.
  • The Abyss is a gangrenous non-reality filled with everything that could have been but is not. Intruders from the Abyss pervert or outright ignore natural laws, because the Abyss has none. The rule book notes that a thrown rock might accelerate endlessly, hover in place and suck the heat away from the area, or ignite in a cloud of venomous worms. The only places in the Abyss where there are consistent (if unrecognizable) rules are, themselves, immeasurably powerful and completely incomprehensible entities. One example given is the Blasphemous Scribe, a dark alternate history of Earth that becomes more real the more extensively its phenomena are documented in the real world. Too much, and Earth and the Scribe will switch places...
  • The Lower Depths are just as weird. For all that the above realms are weird, they at least carry a reflection of all ten Arcana, the principles that make up existing and define Awakened spellcasting. The Lower Depths? Each one lacks at least one. Which could be such things as Matter, or Life, or Space, or Time, or Mind...
  • The Shadow is comparatively sane, being the animistic reflection of the physical world. Any particular natural feature might be alive, though. Is that particular lake the spirit of a benevolent oasis that provides life and sustenance to a region, or the incarnation of dark water and the terror of drowning? Better find out before you fill your canteen.
• Actual Pacifist: the splatbook Signs of Sorcery introduces Obligations, vows Mages can take to gain Mana. One of those vows is a Vow of Pacifism and it sometimes takes form as this trope.
• Advanced Ancient Humans: The ancient sorcerer-kings of Atlantis ruled with wisdom and compassion until the Supernal War that tore Atlantis, and reality, asunder. Of course, this is the story told by the people who have a soft spot for Atlantis.
• Adventurer Archaeologist: The Archaeomancers are a faction of the Mysterium who specialize in searching old ruins for artifacts. Since those ruins tend to have hostile magic, traps, and/or ghosts, practiced archaeomancers are usually well-armed and magically adept.
• Aerith and Bob: Grimoire of Grimoires has a grimoire take the form of a black metal/industrial album put together by a band called Schattenbahn. The band's lineup is Blixa Dark, Hellson, Regenfeuer, Doktor Kultur... and Andy.
• Affably Evil:
  • If Anumerus wasn't trying to destroy reality through the twisting of numbers he'd be a pretty nice gentleman.
  • Dr. Lynden Chambers is a kind, albeit creepy, old mage with a PhD in Art and History who works in the Boston Athenaeum. He is always happy to help out a mage with any information he/she might require and constantly offers invitations for dinner to simply talk. He is also a nihilistic abyss-worshipping Scelestus whose touch can read your past like a book or corrode any object.
  • Theumiel, the example Aswadim (basically a Scelestus archmaster) in Imperial Mysteries. All he wants is a peaceful Shadow... so he's willing to use the Abyss to create one. The book actually recommends he be used as a Friendly Enemy, since he just wants a compassionate world, but thinks the World of Darkness prevents that.
  • The Old Man, or the Saint of Paradox at the edge of the Astral Plane. He's kind, friendly and gentle, permits no harm to come to those in his presence, and laughs the Scelesti who worship him away (and if they haven't become truly surrendered to the Abyss yet, encourages them to abandon their path). He never encourages anyone to give into the void, and yet, for some unknown reason, he is compelled to negotiate on its behalf whenever a Scelestus master wants to become recognized as a powerful servant of the Abyss.
  • By and large, the setting easily lends itself to this, as it deals with highly abstract forms of good and evil. To the unAwakened, it is entirely possible to interpret the Seers as the good guys, at least until you find out what they're willing to do (and have done).
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Lustrums in a nutshell; failing to construct one as a non-native Supernal being will worse than kill you.
• A God Am I: Anyone with Gnosis 10 and anything less then saintly Wisdom will practically say these exact words. To an extent, it's the goal of every single Mage to say these words and have the magic to back it up. And the archmasters have achieved it. That's when the real work starts.
• Akashic Records: The Daksha Legacy can consult the Records with their third eyes. Initially, they can only read the past; at their highest levels of power, they can read what is yet to come as well.
• Alchemy Is Magic: Awakened magic can look like or behave like alchemy: Any mage with a good knowledge of Matter can roll a spell into a salve or ointment for later use, and it's possible to perfect any one of the seven planetary metals.
• Alien Geometries:
  • Some of the Supernal Realms all of the time, and all of the Supernal Realms some of the time.
  • Messing around with the Space Arcanum can create this kind of effect to a limited extent and duration; you can also build your own pocket dimension to this aesthetic.
  • The Crossways, False Demesnes, the Halfway Houses, the Nemesis Continuum, the Temple of Zanak Khan and Twisting Mazes all thrive on this, all of them being cases of Abyssal intrusions afflicting Space and geography (and dreams in the case of the Temple of Zanak Khan) instead of the more common forms of Abyssal intrusion.
• Alien Non-Interference Clause: Archmasters are expected to avoid throwing around divine-class power in the Fallen world. They even have a term for it: the Pax Arcanum. It's perfectly acceptable to rewrite all of reality through altering the Supernal, but being too blatant in the Fallen is likely to wreck things for archmasters as a whole (plus, selective enforcement of this rule is to the benefit of the Exarchs, who are its most ardent defenders).
• All Myths Are True: Subverted; part of being a mage is sorting through which myths are true and which are not. Note that, in this case, "true" probably means "contains a tiny kernel of actual supernatural, historical or cosmic insight which was either implanted or leaked through into the human consciousness", while "not true" probably means "was deliberately fabricated by other mages in order to mislead those who would seek the truth, was deliberately fabricated by other mages in order to manipulate the course of human culture, or was just a myth that people came up with".
• All Part of the Show: The third Attainment of the Blank Badges Legacy is this: it lets them explain away Paradox, with explanations ranging from "We're filming a movie" to "We're doing a pyrotechnics demo" to the utterly blatant "We're calling down magic from the Supernal Realms."
• The Almighty Dollar: The Chancellor, Exarch of Matter, is a malevolent entity who seeks to dominate the world through greed, scarcity, and shallow materialism.
• Alternate Continuity: The Prince of 100,000 Leaves is an Abyssal Intruder one of these. The history it postulates (and tries to make real) is not nice, even by the standards of the World of Darkness.
• Always a Bigger Fish: If an archmaster can't do something, this is usually why. The Pax Arcanum is a thing partially because the Exarchs (who are as far above archmasters as archmasters are above mages) enforce it in the most serious cases. And while in principle, such conditions as vampirism and lycanthropy are just symbols in the Supernal and can be rewritten at will, there are powerful sponsors protecting all such beings' natures, and any archmaster who tries to (for example) cure vampirism will attract their unfriendly attention.
• Ambiguous Gender: The Daksha are a Legacy of Mages who seek to ascend to a higher evolutionary stage. That higher form happens to be three-eyed and hermaphroditic, which apparently extends to personality and gender identity. To confuse matters further, they are able to shift to a biologically male or female form at will.
• Anatomy of the Soul: The importance of the soul means it gets a fair bit of attention. Besides describing what the soul is (the source of inspiration, will to live, curiosity, empathy for others, and sense of connection to the world) and the effects of its loss, the soul is also the basis of magic, and manipulation of the soul can be used to gain powers. The soul is also the basis for an individual's Mental World, which contains worlds which personify their personality, experiences, and dreams, and is inhabited by beings such as their daimon (personification of their desire for self-improvement, and personal criticism) and goetic demons (personifications of vices and flaws). Individual souls are also connected to the soul of humanity as a whole, and the earth itself.
• Ancient Conspiracy: The Seers of the Throne are devoted to ensuring that humanity remains ignorant of the Gnostic truths of the universe by keeping as much control of human culture as possible, and directing it away from any supernatural insights whenever possible and necessary, a goal they have been pursuing since the time of Alexander the Great. The Seers are organized in the manner of an extremely convoluted bureaucracy, with none of the members knowing the entire structure of it, and with the potential for members to be appointed to offices which are ultimately meaningless, but which can be taken so seriously that they eventually 'evolve' a meaning, based on the importance attributed to them. The Guardians of the Veil and the Silver Ladder are also arguably ancient conspiracies, albeit with arguably more altruistic goals (the former seeks to prevent humanity from finding truths they are not ready for, the latter seeks to help all of humanity to Awaken). It's Played With in the sense that their potential power is limited by their secrecy (as in, Right Hand Versus Left Hand) and that they spend so much of their time fighting amongst themselves that their own schemes have a tendency to turn against them due to lack of supervision.
• And I Must Scream: Simply put, this will crop up. Whether it's what happens when possessed by a Goetic Daemon, to being locked in an other-dimensional prison, this trope will be present eventually; on the bright side, Players can do this too. The first installment in the preview chronicle can be resolved by trapping a Sloth spirit in a TV remote control — what you choose to do with the remote afterwards is up to you.
  • Victims of Dark Angel Aphasia literally, The Crossways, The Twisting Maze... the entities of the Abyss tend to this behavior when they aren't out for wholesale slaughter.
• Angel Unaware: Archmasters are caught up in a cosmos-spanning cold war with entities of equal or greater power, so most of their dealings with lesser mages are anonymous and indirect. Most have vast networks of agents and pawns, most of whom have no idea of the archmaster's true power.
• Angelic Abomination: Angels of the Supernal Realm of Aether are close to the Biblical version of angels. Their manifestations are uniformly striking, beautiful, and alien. Whirlwinds of fire or peacock fans of burning eyes are as common as winged humanoids, androgynous and unearthly.
• Animalistic Abomination: Certain Abyss manifestations have the shape of animals but are anything but. Also, the "monsters" mentioned in Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras: animals infested by Paradox and mutated into creatures who instinctually recognize sorcerers as the origin of their pain and attacks them.
• Animate Dead: the Death Arcanum lets you do this as well as give commands to ghosts, and the like.
• Animorphism: The Life Arcanum lets you shapechange into animals, change animals into other animals, or change other people into animals.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: The Astral Realms are seen as the home of the anthropomorphic personifications of individual, human, and universal concepts. Includes beings such as the daimons (the personification of an individual's desire for self improvement), the goetic demons (personifications of dark, repressed feelings and desires), every god ever worshipped, and the most powerful beings in the Realms, the Aeons (the personifications of the fundamental magical facets of reality). Among the most memorable personifications are Anubis, Death (most popularly taking the form of a scythe-wielding skeleton, a faceless cloaked and hooded figure, or an attractive woman dressed in black (possibly inspired by Death of the Endless)), Martians, typhonides (personifications of humanity's self-destructive tendencies) and the personification of teenage rebellion (often appearing as James Dean).
• Anti-Magic: The entity Madame LaTourre has innate anti-magic to such an extent she functions as a Man of Kryptonite. She can permanently destroy both enchanted items and Hallows^note places that naturally produce supplies of Mana, nullify spells, erase wards, drain mana from other beings, and generally screw shit up for casters. To highlight how she defies all the known laws, she's equally capable of affecting all supernatural beings, not just mages, letting her mess with vampire Blood Magic, changeling glamours, werewolf rites, promethean alchemy, whatever she pleases.
• Anti-Magical Faction:
  • Banishers, who use their magic only for the purpose of destroying other sources of magic, are this from the get-go in the corebook.
  • Night Horrors: The Unbidden introduces the Lucid, effectively the Banisher equivalent of Sleepwalkers, who are driven insane when they sense magic and who exist as fanatical, utterly merciless killers of mages and destroyers of magical lore & items that make many Hunters look calm and reasonable.
  • The Seers of the Throne are the Hypocrite variant; their goal is less "destroy all magic" and more "destroy all magic that we do/can not control".
• Anti-Regeneration: the Abyss has the power to deal "resistant damage" that can't be magically healed. This is most often caused by absorbing the backlash from a Magic Misfire, but Black Magic practitioners can draw on the Abyss to inflict it as well.
• Apocalyptic Log: The Hildebrand Recording from Grimoire of Grimoires describes an attempt at capturing a seance with a ghost on tape. The poor researcher got an Eldritch Abomination instead, which proceeded to toy with his psyche before ripping him to shreds.
• The Archmage: Archmasters are the rare mages who have made a second visit to the Supernal Realms, which breaks the five-dot limit on individual Arcana and lets them achieve godlike feats. However, they have a mutual agreement not to act overtly under most circumstances: the Pentacle Orders, Exarchs, and Abyss all have archmages following them, and open competition between cosmic powers would end badly for the universe. Of course, indirect action and outright cheating are another matter...
  • For reference: a typical starting mage with two gnosis and two ranks in matter (a dice pool of four) can turn water into wine and walk on water without any particular effort. An archmage has a rank of 6 or more in his discipline, and a prerequisite minimum of six in gnosis, giving him a minimum dice pool of twelve. Additionally, the likelihood of something going wrong increases with gnosis, and the most common result of paradox occurring is for the spell to go out of control and hit the wrong target. An archmage casting a spell to warm up his coffee can easily accidentally liquefy a nearby skyscraper instead. There's a reason they stick to teaching beyond the pact...
• Arcadia: Makes up the basic framework, but filled with Fairy Tales and their motifs (some of which are fractured) and bound together by the Theory of Narrative Causality. Also inhabited by the Fae.
• Armies Are Evil: The Praetorian Ministry of the Seers of the Throne invokes this: when war becomes atrocity, enlightenment (and thus, Awakening) is the last thing on anyone's mind.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Invoked by the first-edition spell "The Inescapable Question", which causes any question to cause the hearer to stop and ponder its meaning and answer (it is noted that particularly savvy mages can get the effect by simply asking "Why?"). In effect, the spell adds a distracting veneer of profundity to a question that can be a completely inane Ice-Cream Koan.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: According to the main sourcebook, tainted Hallows can "curdle milk, blight crops, sicken animals and children, attract ghosts and corrupt spirits, and ruin television reception."
• Artifact of Doom: Alpha-Zebra Mainspring. The Mysterium have no idea what it is, where it came from, how it got here, what it does or how to get rid of it. The first person to handle it touched it directly and was instantly struck dead alongside every single person he trusted closely. The second person to handle it, wrapping it in his coat, aged rapidly, started using powerful magic he didn't previously know, and slowly decayed to dust the next time he came in close proximity to it. The Mysterium don't let you near it without agreeing to have all experiences with it erased from your memory after you've finished. It's kept in a vault so ludicrously secure it would make the SCP Foundation green with envy and only accessible via teleportation.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence:
  • The Exarchs pulled this one off through the construction of the Celestial Ladder... and then they tore down the Ladder and created the Abyss, because phenomenal cosmic power was theirs, and no one was going to take it from them. On the bright side, the Oracles got up the ladder with them, and proceeded to kick the Exarchs around like soccer balls before they could finish cutting off the Supernal. The result was the Watchtowers, which allow humans to still Awaken even with the Abyss in the way.
  • For mages, ascension is more of a process than a single event. Awakening is the first step, using the Watchtowers left by the Oracles to ascend to the Supernal for the first time and then come back with powers. Archmasters cross the Threshold and enter the Supernal under their own power, becoming partially-ascended beings who are still able to act in the Fallen World, but are largely concerned with higher matters. And after completing Ascension, they climb up to the Supernal for good, (probably) becoming beings akin to the Oracles and Exarchs.
• Ascended Fanboy: It's not uncommon for an Awakened to have been practicing what Muggles think is magic before their Awakening. The main book opens with a short story about a Goth fanboy who awakened while performing a (mostly) nonsense ritual with Goetic elements.
  • Tellingly, details of how this usually turns out are expanded on in the Too Dumb to Live section below.
  • There's a sort of literal, deliberate, in-universe example of this in the Grimoire of Grimoires sourcebook: the Ancient Lands pentalogy, a five-book fantasy series that's wildly popular in unAwakened society, but also contains just enough actual magical knowledge that it's been known to Awaken the occasional Sleeper and teach them their first few spells. It was written by son of a Free Council mage who saw the Diamond orders as repressive, and the whole series is essentially a critique of their worldviews. It's depicted in a fairly positive light; Mages who Awaken by reading the books tend to have idealistic, anti-authoritarian streaks that drive them to do great things.
• Atlantis: The original home of Mage society. ^note which should be more accurately called "The Awakened City"; as a. Atlantis is just a Greek name for it, and b. there is far too much Fan Dumb about the use of the name. It's heavily implied that Atlantis was not a nice place at all; a powerful society that subjugated other weaker ones and enforced its hegemony. Some Mages (mostly sizable chunks of the Free Council) think Atlantis is just a myth, and that the story could have been a conglomerate of what happens when Mages get too proud. Which just makes things MORE confusing.
  • Clarified in the 2nd edition, and in the Dark Eras supplement. In ancient times, before the Diamond orders were formed, there were different cults and societies of mages, each with their own origin myths. While they all shared the notion of some idealized Golden Age and a Fall, each of their myths was also influenced by their cultural heritage. Awakened in India, for example, had an origin myth based on the Mahabharata and the Hindu scriptures. In Greece, a group called the Arcadian Mysteries had an origin myth based on Hesiod's Ages of Man, with the Bronze Age as the age of the Awakened Civilization. The Atlantis myth was formed by the antecedents of the Silver Ladder, philosophers who got Atlantis from Plato. This faction, the Atlanteans, inspired by Alexander the Great's goal of uniting the world, set out to intellectually codify and unite the various Mage beliefs into a single paradigm. Over time, the Atlanteans eventually became the dominant group among the Awakened, forming the Diamond Orders (hence the common use of Greek terminology). As Atlantis became the symbol of an idealized Mage society, each of the Diamond Orders positioned itself as fulfilling Atlantean traditions. Most of the Diamond mages don't actually care what Atlantis 'is', only that it existed and its use as a symbol as the once great civilization of magic.
  • Also, there is considerable confusion about which Atlantis is the source of all this tradition. One of the sourcebooks refers to no fewer than nine alternate cities 'lost to the waves'... from one country alone (India). Other sourcebooks point out that the wide variations in architecture, writing and art make it all but impossible to pinpoint where anything came from originally.
  • This is handwaved by claiming that the Fall had magical repercussions, as well as 'mere' physical ones, making it almost impossible to use modern methods to figure out what happened to Atlantis. Either way, all that one can be sure of from reading the various sourcebooks is that Atlantis is almost certainly impossible to restore or properly document in the Fallen World.
• Awesome McCoolname: Shadow Names. Taken by almost every mage, because knowing someone's true name makes them easier to influence with magic. These are usually also Meaningful Names; a mage's chosen Shadow Name will generally tell you something about their personality or their style of magic. In some cases, however, a Mage's shadow name will very carefully tell you absolutely nothing, or something completely false, about him or her... which may not be that smart, as Shadow Names are also symbolic roles that the ambient magic of a Nimbus seeks to fulfill — for example, if you call yourself Odin, hope you're not attached to both your eyes. It's for this reason mages prefer obscure Shadow Names, since the lack of knowledge helps avoid being over-defined into lack of free will. Truly paranoid Mages will take a shadow name on the order of "John Smith" and then go by an over-the-top nickname instead like "Maleficar the Red" just to make it seem like they're compensating and give them a round to pull out the spell-tool during the inevitable I Know Your True Name moment before the villain realizes he's goofed.
• Axis Mundi: In Astral Space, the Spire Perilous is a zone of no fixed form that links humanity's collective subconscious to the World Soul. Legend holds that it was the true Axis Mundi, bridging all realms of existence for Dimensional Travelers, but it shattered when Man Grew Proud and abused it to invade the Supernal Realms.
• Baby as Payment: The price for a bargain with the Courtesan, a gulmoth from the Abyss, is that it undergoes a Mystical Pregnancy and spawns a new Abyssal entity resembling the deal-maker.
• Badass Boast: Mages are not only prone to these, but prone to backing them up in spectacular fashion. A character in the core rulebook's framing story makes a particularly impressive one:
  Morvran: For I walk in the Mists now and see the time that is yet to be. I will see the shadow of your coming before you have even decided your intent, and I will thwart you before you even put your pawns into motion. I will be watching from the Mists, and you will not sense it. If you move against me again, not even the Abyss and the Hidden Lords you worship will keep my hands from your neck.
• Badass Bookworm: Khonsu, Mysterium Censor. Astonishingly well-read, excellent memory for trivia and well-versed in esoteric religion and philosophy. Also sets cannibals on fire with his mind.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: While they're technically on the side of the good guys, this is more or less the stated ethos of the Guardians of the Veil: they do the bad things (and take the associated hits to their karma, purity, and wisdom) so the "good guy" Orders won't have to. They tend to prefer the other Orders don't know what the Guardians have had to do to keep the Pentacle safe at all, and a lot of their rituals and positions involve the Order being ritually unclean and despised by the purer Orders.
• Becoming the Mask: The Guardians of the Veil have a series of techniques for quickly assuming and dropping false identities, which can result in slowly losing one's own true identity. One faction of the Guardians believes that the only way to properly execute their duties is to Become the Mask, throwing away one's own ego.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy:
  • The Merovingians are said to be a Proximus Dynasty that was destroyed when they started demanding that mages recognize them as the rightful heirs of the Atlantean kings.
  • Arthurian Legend was a result of an Archmaster of Fate building a perfect kingdom based on Because Destiny Says So. It was erased from history and fell into legend, but Medraut, the destiny of kingdoms to fall from within, has become the symbol of the Arcanum of Fate.
• Better Living Through Evil: The high end of the standard Resources merit will allow a character to live like a millionaire ($50,000 in disposable income a month). Membership in the Seers of the Throne, however, makes a character eligible to take the Luxury merit, which at its higher level allows him or her to live like a billionaire. (The drawback, unfortunately, is that Resources belong to the character, while Luxury belongs to the Seers as a group and can therefore be revoked.)
• The Big Guy: The Adamantine Arrow are the strong-arm battlemages of the five orders, often known to be simple and ascetic.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: What the conflict between the Pentacle and the Seers of the Throne is like. On one hand you have a group consisting of mystery cult knowledge mafias, dangerous revolutionaries, egotistical paternalist pseudo-theocratic dangerous revolutionaries, oath obsessed martial cultist, and messianic secret police cult with ridiculous martyr complex. On the other hand you have a world controlling cult that want nothing more for humanity to be so miserable and/or apathetic that we will be nothing more than slave to the very principle of tyranny.
  • A Lighter Shade of Gray: It should be noted that all the people in the first hand have an ethos based around noble reasons. The Silver Ladder's paternalism is based around the fact that they really are wise enough to utilize magic and feel responsible for bringing others up to their level. The Free Council's revolution obsession comes from their recognition of the Seers being that bad. The Adamantine Arrow's oaths and honor are self-explanatory, if more neutral than they would like. The Mysterium wants to protect its knowledge for everyone who wants to discover it. And the Guardians of the Veil are, when it comes down to it, a police force whose entire ethos revolves around protecting Sleepers from being abused by magic, protecting magic from Sleepers, and stopping irresponsible mages. The Seers' real problem is that they're the only Order for whom selfish jockeying for power is things working as intended, as opposed to a corruption of righteous ideals.
• Black Like Me: 2e includes a list of Vows mages can undertake as long-term Oblations to gain Mana. In addition to the classics such as abstinence and poverty, there's the Vow of Assumption, where a mage (usually a straight white cis male) uses Life magic to live as a member of a disadvantaged group in order to understand the burdens they carry. Of course, this has fallen out of favor in the present day, as younger mages tend to view it somewhere between cultural appropriation and blackface.
• Blessed with Suck: It is not fun to be a supernatural being. That said, Mages have it slightly better than some of the other supernatural creatures. Slightly.
  • This is certainly the viewpoint of (born, as opposed to ideological) Banishers, Mages who usually serve as antagonists for the PC Mages. Banishers believe that magical power is inherently wrong and evil, and only gather it so that they can destroy other Awakened (usually before taking themselves out in a blaze of horrible glory).
  • Being Awakened does give you extra protection against having your soul ripped out. This is a survival trait, because mages are the most likely beings to attract soul-eaters in the first place.
  • There are few things more delicious to all the mind-numbingly evil forces out there than an Awakened's soul. Except, for some reason, the Gentry from Changeling: The Lost — they only take Sleepers. The reason? The Fae are hiding from the Mages because their supernatural firewall, the ability to change the world with one's will, has extra pointy bits against them.
  • Being a human of the Ractain Strain gives you a powerful memory, a super sense for supernatural activity, and whenever you first experience a life-threatening incident, without dying, your body produces a disease that can spread the infection very quickly. And your appearance is so bizarre you're barely able to interact well with society because you're so damn ugly. Oh, and Ractain Strain is an Abyssal Intruder.
  • The major thematic reason that this applies is hubris. Because mages have so much power with so few drawbacks, when they screw up, they tend to screw up really big.
• Body Horror: Abyssal intrusions can take this form; abyssal spiders, flesh intruders, red worms, and Sinister Organ qigong are examples given in Intruders: Encounters with the Abyss. Mages with sufficient power in the Life and Death Arcana can do some nasty things to people, as well.
• Boomerang Bigot: Banishers really, really hate mages, despite the fact that the two groups went on the same trip to the Supernal Realms and came back with knowledge of magic. The difference is that while regular mages viewed the experience as akin to religious awakening, Banishers viewed it as more like Mind Rape and feel an instinctive revulsion every time they use magic— that is, save for those who rationalize their powers as divine weapons against evil occult forces.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Since they discount the existence of good and evil as anything other than lies, Scelesti morality tends to be... off.
• The Call Knows Where You Live: The angelic messenger Metathron is the personification of this trope, being charged with delivering tragic Calls To Adventure by a being responsible for creating heroes. Unfortunately, it never understood that the would-be heroes are supposed to overcome their tragedy, not be destroyed by it, so Metathron ended up going rogue and now delivers destructive Calls to people it thinks can't rise to the challenge of becoming heroes.
• Capitalism Is Bad: Capitalist ideology is a creation of the Exarch of Matter. Its ultimate goal is a world of venal materialists who treat everything, including other people, as commodities and can be easily controlled through their greed.
• Capital Letters Are Magic:
  "Note Important Capital Letters. Magicians Use Lots Of Capital Letters."
• Cast From HP: Mages can mitigate the effects of Paradox by taking it into their own Patterns.
  • And if they start to run low on mana, they can just rip it out of themselves. Yes, this does injure them in a way that magic can't heal, but sometimes you need those three mana points.
    • Need aside, this is probably the worst last resort option available to a desperate Mage, essentially a Dangerous Forbidden Technique that comes with no guarantees it can help the situation, with bonus points if Paradox screws up the next spell and leaves you drained of mana and even more injured. Though, the first Life Attainments alleviate this somewhat.
• Cast from Sanity: Antinomian Sorcery channels the reality-eroding power of the Abyss and threatens the combined Karma/Sanity Meter with each use, thanks to it linking its practitioners' souls to a gangrenous realm of Things That Cannot Exist instead of the pure Truth of the Supernal Realms.
• Church of Happyology: Extremely thinly veiled in the form of the Church of Panography (which is actually a front for a Banisher cult called the Militant Auditing Division). They even have magical items called "Suppressive Thetan Energy Auditing Devices" to detect mages, and a celebrity member who has ADHD, is an outspoken critic of psychiatry, is infamously prone to manic outbursts, was set up with a young actress willing to have his child to help his image (whom he's very adamant about really, really being in love with), and is secretly bisexual.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Played with. At first it seems like the subconscious disbelief of non-Mage humans can aggravate the effects of Paradox. However, the Disbelief in question isn't a Muggle not believing in magic so strongly that it can make a spell go poof. It's a flaw in the structure of the Sleeping soul caused by the shard of the Abyss that every Sleeper has. It's also possible for mages to learn magic according to mundane belief systems, which can provide numerous benefits. However, that works because religious or occult traditions can contain fragments of Supernal truths, not because Sleepers believe in them.
• Clock of Power: A theme in the Cult of the Doomsday Clock: Their home Pocket Dimension, the Clocktower, is a time-themed Eldritch Location that enhances their own magic, impedes outsiders, and contains portals to any location on Earth.
• Combat Clairvoyance: The four-dot Time spell "Past as Present" is basically this: it lets the mage casting it read the immediate future of all of the spell's subjects, and act to hinder or help them as she pleases.
• Comes Great Responsibility: This is more or less the central theme of the game. A mage firmly understanding this is paramount, because the alternative is not pretty. Any mage insufficiently responsible will almost inevitably end up murderous, self-obsessed, completely lacking in objectivity or fundamentally debased. At least a significant minority of such people end up as all of the above.
• Continuity Nod: Played with; the Seers of the Throne offered to join with the Nameless and form a Technocracy to rule the world. The Nameless disagreed violently, and became the Free Council. Also an amusing double shout out if you know the old WoD well: the Free Council are essentially shout-outs to the Virtual Adepts and Sons of Ether of the old WoD, who left the Technocracy after a violent disagreement between those who wanted to make a better world (the Adepts and the Sons) and those who wanted control.
• Contrived Coincidence: Fate magic specialises in this. Low-level spells can give you small strokes good luck (like finding a 20$ bill) or bad luck (dropping your wallet in a puddle), mid-level spells can find you that thing you need in a haystack, and high-level spells can outright cause any physically possible non-supernatural event in their area, no matter how improbable. Young person getting a heart attack? Check. Finding a winning lottery ticket? Check. Having a frozen turkey fall from a passing plane and stake the vampire you're fighting? Put enough oomph into the spell and you get it.
• Cooking Duel: The eccentricities of mage society mean that virtually any form of magical (or occasionally non-magical) contest can be used with the same legality as a traditional Duel, although simply throwing magical attacks at one another is considered the least sophisticated of them.
• The Corrupter: Pretty much any being from the Abyss will naturally fall into this.
  • Acamoth, for example, are Abyssal spirits trapped in our world who can offer tempting boons to mages, such as increasing an Attribute for a month or not aging for a year. The price is that they get to take your soul on a nightmare tour of the Abyss, forcing you to experience committing acts of degeneration and to save against losing Wisdom.
  • Gulmoth, their cousins still in the Abyss, offer a variety of services, such tutoring in exchange for the sacrifice of a small animal, or killing an enemy in exchange for one of your fingers. The catch is that they don't give a damn about your finger, and would happily offer their services for free, because their real payment is the moral degeneration that comes from making deals with beings that want to destroy your species and your world.
• The Corruption: The forces of the Abyss seek to eat away at the Tapestry of Reality, "unraveling" individual Patterns with its dark influence. Should it come as any surprise that Abyssal forces love to invoke this trope?
  • Noteworthy example: the Nemesis Continuum, a set of Abyssal physics problems that blatantly contradict the laws of physics as we know them. They force themselves into the minds of scientists, causing said scientists to obsess over the contradictions. Said obsession erodes physical law around the afflicted scientist, which in turn may lead to someone coming across the equations, which he starts to obsess over...
  • Anumerus: an Abyssal entity of Anti-Numbers and Negative Numerology, when in his most powerful physical presence 1+1 can not equal 2, period.
• Cosmic Horror Story: Subverted; The Abyss is just itching to squirm into reality and corrupt everything before its ultimate destruction... but the real horror is that you let it in, either through incompetence, hubris, or more likely both. There's only one entity in Intruders that comes in without prompting by humans, and it's not even malevolent.
  • The subversion hits even harder in Imperial Mysteries: There's a class of feuding entities who possess divine power as one of their lesser abilities, and with work can remake the world entirely, only kept in check by their brethren. They're called archmaster mages, they retain what makes them human, and you can play as them. And you can Ascend.
  • The Lower Depths. Even things from the Abyss are afraid of it. From what little information given in the books, the Lower Depths is a series of worlds devoid of one or more Arcana, and thus existence as we know it. They are, however, quite comprehensible in their motives— they want to devour what Arcana they lack so they can have a complete existence. Then they... do nothing. Literally, all the Lower Depths things presented in the books sit around until prompted to do something, and then return to cooling their metaphorical heels. That isn't to say they aren't terrifying (the Seers use one, the Tutor, to create Hollow Ones), but they aren't actually trying to destroy reality in any fashion. In fact, they'd actually be helpful against the forces of the Abyss, since they would destroy the reality the Lower Depths want.
• Cosmic Retcon: The Seers of the Throne believe that the Exarchs of Time and Fate, the Prophet and the Ruin, went back in time and prevented Atlantis from ever existing. How successful they were depends on your GM.
  • Turns out this is how archmasters operate: true Ascension involves changing the world into what you think it should be, and this can involve a lot of cosmic revision.
• Crapsack World: Especially for humans. Some Mages try to fight this. Others just make the crapsackiness worse. It is possible to solve all of the troubles of the world, but the fact is each act towards fighting for said better world is cripplingly hamstrung by so many complications and problems.
  • Also part of the appeal of the Seers after their Sourcebook came out — they aren't as powerful as the Technocracy was, but they're twelve times as evil; it specifically mentions that their plans for the world require them to make it as oppressive and helpless as possible.
• Crazy Enough to Work: Grimoire of Grimoires has the Ancient Lands Pentalogy, a series of popular High Fantasy novels meant to serve as a way to induce Awakening. This would normally call down a legion of Guardians of the Veil, were it not for the fact that it shows promising results, making it something of a holy grail for the Silver Ladder and the Free Council. As a result, the Guardians mainly have to make do with Moral Guardian groups, who are ignored.
• Crazy-Prepared:
  • You can choose to either be like a reality-warping Batman, or you can just shoot yourself in the head to save time as you will die without any sort of forward planning. Unless you're a very skilled Acanthus: then you can just hit rewind.
  • In Imperial Mysteries, beings with attributes and skills at superhuman levels may get "reversal points" allowing them to retroactively declare crazy preparations, because they're superhumanly good at whatever it is.
• Cult:
  • The Guardians of the Veil have a secret set of beliefs that they go to great pains to ensure the other Orders do not know about. The philosophy itself is called the Diamond Wheel, and the entire point of it is to find/create the Hieromagus who will bring about a new, glorious golden age for mages around the world. Of course, they don't like it when someone makes steps in that direction without following the philosophy of the Diamond Wheel, which leads the Guardians to take action...
  • The Paternoster both is a cult and loves to create them to distract sleepers from the truth.
  • And then there are the cults the Orders love to create. The Guardians use Labyrinths — mixtures of fringe religions, secret signals, and front organizations — to try and lead people towards Awakening, with the intent of shunting those who'd be unworthy of Supernal knowledge down an alternate path. The Silver Ladder, meanwhile, makes use of Cryptopolies, two parts government conspiracy to one part mystery cult, to groom Sleepers for more enlightened rule.
  • The Diamond Orders themselves can be considered cults too.
• Cursed with Awesome: Mage souls are incredibly potent, the universe now actively hates a vast majority of who they are, they have several groups trying to kill them for existing, and if they try to use their powers in front of anyone who is not another supernatural, they risk blowing themselves up. Also, while they don't appear to have the vampiric need for blood, the werewolf's short temper or other internal downsides, Pride will drive them down the slippery slope as quickly as a vampire's hunger. In summary, Mages get great power and are less likely to get screwed, but when they DO get screwed, they aren't coming out of it alive, much less sane. And even when they aren't, a mage is often their own worst enemy anyway, as successfully altering the universe can easily Go Horribly Right.
• Damaged Soul: The Mad have souls so damaged that their magic leaks out of its own volition, to say nothing of their, er, madness. They usually get this way by driving themselves off the bottom end of the Karma Meter, but some were unfortunate enough to have their Awakening go horribly wrong instead.
• The Dark Arts: The technical term is the Left-Handed Path, the way of magic that leads to destruction and ruin, for you as well as everyone else... at least, according to dogma. As it turns out, what "Left-Hand Path" really means is "the path of magic that ignores taboos", such as "don't make magic based on actually defying the Atlantis story" (Heretics), "don't play with souls" (Reapers), and "don't seek immortality" (Liches). This isn't entirely propaganda, and there are good reasons for the taboos; a few Left-Handers are genuinely Not Evil, Just Misunderstood Anti Heroes, but the vast majority fly screaming off the slippery slope.
• Dark Is Not Evil:
  • The Moros "Necromancer" mages, who have the capacity to be as good or evil as any other mage. That said, there's a Moros-only Legacy of Black Magicians (Tremere Liches), but that's because of what they do to sustain their immortality — they eat souls.
  • Also could apply to the Mastigos, who develop mind-warping powers, as well as the ability to bend space to their will. What realm do they visit to Awaken? Pandemonium, often compared to Hell. It works more like Purgatory, as the Awakening itself tends to help keep them on the straight and narrow.
  • The Mastigos have a Legacy of Well-Intentioned Extremist black magicians, the Fangs of Mara, who literally Mind Probe monsters to find out what they fear and use it against them. Tragically, however, they tend to go crazy from the Mind Rape such activity entails. (Hey, it's like peeking at Jeffrey Dahmer-Hitler-Manson's innermost desires. Except worse.)
• The Dark Side: A major theme of the game is that power corrupts; the more a Mage uses his magic to screw over others or do petty shit he could have done without magic, the more likely he is to want to keep doing so.
  • Tome of the Mysteries also adds Abyssal magic, wherein a Mage can let a little bit of Abyssal taint into his magic for numerous positive effects. However, it's addictive, and it's not long before the Mage develops Abyssal sympathies...
• Dark World: Several, but the one which appears most commonly is the Shadow, the animistic reflection of the mortal world, filled with spirits which constantly hunt and devour one another in a sort of ethereal biosphere. There's also the Astral Realms (which contain every single idea and view of the world that humanity has had, including some really warped viewpoints), the Underworld (where the dead who cease to be ghosts go), and several Abyssal incursions can do this too.
  • Then there are the Outer Reaches from Summoners, which are just... weird.
• Deadly Graduation: The Guardians of the Veil require trainees to execute someone who has committed a capital offense. Downplayed as, unless the Guardians have a valid target, they stage it with a simulacrum or a magically protected agent rather than kill an innocent. Moreover, some recruits are expected to perform the execution on their own initiative without being ordered to kill.
• Death as Game Mechanic: The Death spell "Undying Zeal" allows a mage to escape death by sacrificing their magic and transforming into a Revenant Zombie. Revenants are obsessive and inevitably lose their minds over time, so the sourcebook warns the Game Master to confirm that the player and character are really prepared to go the distance.
• Decadent Court:
  • Mages are actually generally a bit nicer about this than, say, Vampires. The Consililum is usually a sort of common-law court based on precedent, and so at least it tends to be predictable. On the other hand, Mages are human, and knowledge is power (literally), so they can be like a pit of fireball-using vipers if they want something to happen.
  • Take vampiric society up to eleven and add a bit of insufferable smugness and self-deception, and you've got the Seers of the Throne in a nutshell. This is at least one reason why they aren't as powerful as they could be.
• Deal with the Devil: A particular variety of Abyssal entity, the acamoth, specalize in this — in return for romping around a mage's subconscious, they'll grant further powers.
  • The Harper family, either a clan of inbred rednecks or inbred Corrupt Corporate Executives, their ancestor made a deal with something nasty from the Abyss. Seems to be the only case in the entire World Of Darkness setting where the humans making the deal weren't screwed over or eaten; in fact from their perspective it's never cost them anything they valued.
  • How many Left-Handed Legacies recruit more members.
• Deity of Human Origin: The Oracles and Exarchs. Archmasters get to call themselves this too. In all cases, "deity" is probably underselling the power these beings have.
• Demiurge Archetype: The Father isn't really God, he's actually an unimaginably powerful Atlantean sorcerer who has become the personification of every negative trait of religion and none of its positive ones. In this way he's even more similar to the Gnostic Demiurge than the other Exarchs.
• Demonic Possession: One reason why summoning magic is not a good thing.
• Despotism Justifies the Means: The Seers don't want anybody out of their control to gain enlightenment.
• Digital Abomination: The Shard is an Abyssal Intruder that takes the form of a free-to-play MMORPG. It works by luring in dedicated players who are willing to give their lives over to the grind for bigger and better loot, then promising them true endgame content if they collect the right items and perform a ritual to open a gate to another realm. This digital ritual actually ends up opening another gate to the Abyss, allowing more of its influence to spread and causing terrible things to happen to the players. Once that's done, the game shuts down... until another wave of invites for the hot new MMO go out.
• Dimensional Traveler: Mages can enter Astral Space with meditation at a Place of Power, the Shadow with advanced Spirit magic, and even The Underworld with mastery of Death.
• Disintegration Chamber: The Translators are a Banisher cell who believe they're rooting out alien infiltrators and teleporting them back to their home planet in a jury-rigged Magitek "Translation Chamber". They're delusional. The "aliens" are fellow mages; the Translation Chamber disintegrates its victims with a mana overload and scatters their remains across The Multiverse.
• Dream Land: The Astral Realms have three distinct levels, two of which fit this trope.
  • The Oneiros is each individual's personal Mental World, and thus the only one not fitting this trope.
  • The Temenos is the collective Mental World of humanity, containing the sum total of all human knowledge, belief, and experience, albeit shrouded in metaphor, symbolism and subjectivity. Each concept has its own realm, and they are either ruled over by gods (all gods ever believed in exist in the Temenos) or archetypes. Travel is made by locating aspects in one realm and moving to another connected to it by word association. It is possible for the realms of ideologies to enforce belief in their ideology upon visitors.
  • Even deeper is the Anima Mundi (also called the Dreamtime), which is essentially the Mental World of the Earth itself. Its entirely inhuman perspective can wash away any unprotected human mind that tries to pass through it. It contains the Earth's perspective on humanity (represented as a vast swath of destruction), nature (which is filled with animal and elemental archetypes; notably, the animal archetypes are devoid of Animal Motifs) and the wider universe (represented as an incomprehensibly large void filled with bizarre objects and beings).
• Dying to Wake Up: Travelers in the Astral Realms take damage to their Willpower points instead of Health. If they "die" of willpower loss, they wake up mentally exhausted but physically sound.
• Ectoplasm: Death magic can produce ectoplasm in the form of neutral white goop. As a conduit to Twilight, it reflects images of un-manifested ghosts, and ghosts can easily manifest through it.
• Eldritch Abomination: Anything from the Abyss. It may be as small as a breadbox or as big as Yog-Sothoth, but it warps reality in its wake, and not in a good way. They are at least able to be defeated— if not easily.
  • With the right Arcana, the Mages themselves can become Eldritch Abominations, or at least Humanoid Abominations, relative to Sleepers.
  • 2E introduces the Annunaki, the worlds of the Abyss. No, not gods, worlds. Abyss-born Eldritch Locations in the Fallen World are explicitly limbs that the Annunaku in question is reaching into the Fallen World, and they are aware of everything that goes on in one. Everything that comes from the Abyss is an aspect of or symbiote with the Annunaki. The Prince of 100,000 Leaves, above, is the most prominent.
• Eldritch Location: The Supernal Realms from which mages draw their power:
  • Imperial Mysteries makes them even more Eldritch — as it turns out, the Supernal Realms are a World of Chaos as well, with the five being general types of subrealm that emerge: an archmaster venturing there literally needs to force it into a form he can understand simply to survive (the Watchtowers do this during Awakening). Since it contains the platonic forms of everything, doing anything there causes the Fallen World (called the Phenomenal World by archmasters on the basis that everything they learn about the cosmos suggests that it's naturally like this) to change (an example of archmaster play has an Alienated trying to restore the Supernal god of Justice accidentally rewriting history so that a Roman mystery cult survives to the modern day as a major religion, though he swears to fix it).
  • Not that the Fallen World is lacking in Eldritch areas of its very own. Mages call areas where the Supernal has butted through the Abyss and is now manifesting on Earth Verges (Demesnes are artificial versions of them made via soul stone). They're places where magic becomes a hell of a lot easier... and where Supernal entities regularly venture to explore, which can be good or bad.
• Enforced Cold War: The Pax Arcanum forbids archmages to kill each other, to mess with each other's stuff (what "stuff" means is often a fuzzy area, but includes both objects and people who are associated with the other archmaster), or to use Imperial spells to interfere with each other in the Fallen World. Even the Aswadim are a part of this understanding. However, there are a couple of limits. First, retaliation; if another archmaster broke the rules, you're allowed to break the rules to punish them (including killing them if it's serious enough). Second, the exact edges of the rules are fuzzy and subject to politics, just as they are among lesser mages. And third and most importantly, the Pax does not apply to Imperium Rites. In the Supernal, the Ascension War is just that: War.
• Equivalent Exchange: Imperial Practices require a Quintessence to cast; the Quintessence is supposed to symbolically match the spell and often "balances" it, such as death paying for life. The value may not actually be equal, but it should be symbolically so.
• Escaped from Hell: Death masters and archmasters are famous for kicking down the doors and walking back out with reinforcements after they've technically (due to previous fiddling with death/life/time magic) or actually (with pure death magic, cheating and willpower) died.
• Everyone Has Standards: The Fallen Pillars are a Legacy of extreme ascetics, calling for a mage to abandon every material trapping, want, and need. They forbid the use of almost any tool or magical item... save one: they fully allow the mages who join them to use a dedicated magical tool (which gives bonus die when spellcasting), so long as it's handmade (most fashion and dedicate crude knives). This is because the Fallen Pillars view spellcasting as a means of crafting and testing one's soul, and blowing a test of one's very soul because you won't use a magical tool is vanity, not enlightenment.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • The Seers of the Throne to the Pentacle Orders.
  • The Supernal Watchtowers have Abyssal counterparts named the Dur-Abzu, created from the fears and doubt of everyone that has gone to the Watchtower. It's mystery play is usually the inversion of the ones from the Supernal, absolute isolation for Pandemonium, endless rot for Stygia, etc, etc.
• Evil Feels Good: Wisdom is lost by not showing remorse for misdeeds.
• Evil Twin: The Goetia in regards to each individual person they were summoned from. They aren't automatically evil: they just exist to promote the feeling, thought, impulse or vice that they represent, and don't have a choice in what they do. In the case of your Wrath or Lust, though, it's often indistinguishable from evil as defined by society.
  • The Daimon is the embodiment of one's desire of self-improvement. They usually manifest as contrarian embodiment of the person's personality, but whether or not they are evil is another matter entirely.
• Evil Versus Evil:
  • Even though Banishers have been known to gather into cults and many learn the Sense Banisher rote not long after their Awakening, most meetings between Banishers don't go well. Since their worldviews tend to be inherently narrow, a fellow Banisher that isn't immediately recognized as a kindred spirit gets lumped in with the enemy.
  • The Seers and Banishers are none too fond of each other.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: Any time Abyssal beings or the Scelesti appear, everyone else nearby— including Seers, Banishers, and Reapers— will team up to stop them.
• Expy: Probably unintentional, but the Mad are a lot like Witches who can pretend to be human. And, uh, almost completely at fault for their state.
  • A closer example to the witches in the Mage setting would be the Qliphoth, would-be archmages who failed to achieve archmastery and instead got consumed by the abyss, turning into mindless shells of their former selves as their souls are warped beyond recognition, complete with their own maze-like worlds that are also capable of trapping other mages as well as sleepers inside of it.
• Eye of Providence: An eye on a pyramid is one of the symbols of the Eye — the Exarch of Space and a malevolent personification of Big Brother Is Watching — and of its Panopticon Ministry.
• Face–Heel Turn: Usually, the Aswadim (Archmasters of the Abyss) were not Scelesti when they were mages — Scelesti simply don't live long enough to attain archmastery. No, most Aswadim started as Pentacle Order magi who gazed into the Abyss after they attained the Supernal.
• Fake Identity Baggage: A mage can forcibly exchange names with a victim through an Abyssal bargain. This renders the old name useless for I Know Your True Name purposes, but saddles the mage with the metaphysical baggage of the victim's identity — relationships, enmities, guilt, and the like — all distorted by the intrinsic wrongness of the theft.
• Fantastic Racism: Given that mages have the power to literally redefine reality to conform to their wishes, it's kind of natural that a certain tendency towards utter hubris is prevalent, and that this in turn leads to them looking down on others.
  • It's noted that mages often tend to look down upon other supernaturals (even as they envy them for the comparative ease of their powers functioning), due mostly to their being "one trick ponies". The stereotypes about Urathra in the corebook are especially negative.
  • The Daksha is a Legacy based on the idea that mages are the Master Race.
  • The Jnanamukti are founded on an extremist viewpoint that mages can only reclaim their former glory by utterly destroying all Sleeper culture and all non-mage supernatural. Even the most arrogant of other mages tend to think they're crazy.
• Fantastic Time Management: The Mind arcanum can create parallel trains of thought to perform multiple mental actions (like research, composition, or reasoning) simultaneously. Mages can also shape their dreams to literally do the work in their sleep.
• The Fettered: Idealized by the Adamantines. For others, Tome of the Watchtowers has vows that can give you one mana per week per vow.
• Fights Like a Normal: The Adamantine Arrow, as per their function as a martial order of warrior-mages, believes that all of their members should be one of these, able to display mundane combat skill in addition to being a skilled arcanist. Their training program is supposed to reflect this, but in practice rookie Adamantine Arrow characters aren't notably more formidable than anyone else. At the apex of their power, however, they become Magic Knights.
  • Also, many Sleepwalkers, people who haven't Awakened, but aren't under the effect of Quiescence any more. The sole ability they have is that they don't aggravate Paradox any more (i.e. don't screw up magic by being non-supernatural creatures who witness it), so they're effectively living in a society with people who can set you on fire with their mind, with nothing more than their own natural talents and wits.
  • Probably the biggest change in general going from the Old World of Darkness to the new one is that mortals, mortal skills, and mortal talents are all tied to mechanical systems on par with supernatural ones (rolling a fixed pool of dice with successes translating into damage for attacks, limits on how much a supernatural effect can protect you, etc). As a result, one of the more popular power-gamer mage builds is one dot in every arcanum (to see all magical effects), high gnosis (to resist magical effects and raise trait limits) and everything else in mundane skills and stats. For reference, this means that the most powerful mage build in the game can't actually do any magic, they're just Batman with ether goggles.
• Friendly Fireproof: Apprentices of Fate can Invoke this, excluding specific people or categories of people from Area of Effect spells.
• Functional Magic: Draws from higher realms outside of existence that basically serves as the highest embodiment of ideas. Split into ten Arcana: Death, Fate, Forces, Life, Matter, Mind, Prime, Space, Spirit, and Time.
• Genius Loci:
  • The Annunaki, the rulers of the Abyss, are literally sentient worlds the rest of their foul brethren and poisonous laws live in. Mostly unable to manifest on Earth, thank all that is holy, but Scelesti are known to summon aspects of them as pseudo-Verges, and making reality a bit flexible until they leave or someone banishes them.
  • Every archmaster is a world unto themselves, and their Chantries are built inside their souls.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Imperial Mysteries has a lot of this. Even the Aswadim and the Tetrachs have legitimate points, and even the Bodhisattvas have a dark side.
• God in Human Form: From Seers of the Throne, the ochemata are fragments of the Exarchs, and are occasionally sent down to be bodyguards / advisors to the highest-ranking Seers of the Throne. They are frighteningly powerful; a single ochema is more than a match for even a well-prepared cabal of high-level mages due to their Supernal Perfection ability. The books suggest using them as messengers and plot devices, as setting them against the party is a great way for them to get slaughtered. Especially if said ochema is an archmage. To make things better, Imperial Mysteries reveals that generating ochemata is actually an ability of all archmages, Pentacles included.
• Go Mad from the Revelation:
  • Played with — Awakenings are generally born of incredible stress combined with a growing understanding of the supernatural aspects of the world, and thus often indistinguishable from developing schizophrenia or a comatose state. In all cases except born Banishers, they get better again after their mind returns from the Watchtower.
  • Subverted horrifyingly with Dissonance and Quiescence. See Mind Rape for more.
• Gone Horribly Right: The Unbidden has Gnomon, a time-traveling homunculus created to give his master "all the secrets of the universe" ahead of time. As it turns out, packing a lifetime's worth of experiences into one's head over the course of two seconds using an inaccurate method at best is... rather reckless.
  • This is also one of the most common ways for a spell to backfire, especially at the higher-dot levels where spells are potentially infinite duration or downright permanent to the point of not even being dispellable. A spell lasting longer than intended or hitting more targets than intended (perhaps giving a boost to enemies in addition to allies) are classics, as is an attempt at mind-reading hitting everyone in the room and being impossible to turn off.
  • Even magic that isn't being altered by paradox has a strong "be careful what you wish for" aspect, since your own hubris is the primary enemy of the setting. Just because you want to be the smartest guy in the room, and can do that by raising your intelligence, doesn't mean you should in a world full of hidden observers more than savvy enough to see you crack an impossible puzzle in half a second and immediately identify you as supernatural.
• Gone Horribly Wrong:
  • The Lucid from The Unbidden are Sleepwalkers who had something go terribly wrong in transition from Sleep to Sleepwalking. Being anywhere near a mage drives them insane, and they usually respond to it with violence. Watch out, if they Awaken themselves.
  • The book doesn't give a definitive origin for them, but one of the supplied theories suggests that they were an attempt to breed a better Sleepwalker, which also falls under this trope.
  • The origin of the False Awakening in the same book also fits this trope.
• Gothic Punk: Less so than the old game, but still present in places.
• Happiness in Minimum Wage: According to Legacies: The Sublime, one of the most powerful mages in Britain, Thaïs, lives a quiet life as a sweetshop clerk, occasionally giving life-changing advice but mostly preferring to be left alone. She also might be a literal saint from Heaven.
• The Heart: The Free Council is definitely the faction most prone to being The Heart, wanting to bring democracy and modernization to Mage society, possessed of often the least archaic or austere Mages. Though they just as easily fall to hubris as any other Order
• Heaven: The Aether is described as a transcendently beautiful place of constant energy, light and music, inhabited by angels.
• Hell: Pandemonium is described as a place of pure thought, where all spatial points warp to fit people's perspective (its hellish nature is more of the self inflicted variety; the idea is that, faced with a place of pure thought, most people will unconsciously confront their worst aspects) and is inhabited by demons. This confrontation is, however, meant to test the Mages who Awaken there so they can overcome their faults and improve themselves rather than just a place of suffering, so it functions more as Purgatory than Hell.
• Hell Gate: Irises can lead to the Abyss (Aberrances) or Lower Depths (Scars) as much as any other place can. Enter not at all, unless you happen to be a Scelestus initiating yourself at the source.
• The Hero: The Silver Ladder, who are often in charge of the other Mages, attempting to organize them into a viable front against the Exarchs and recreate a fully Awakened society.
• Heroic RRoD: How paradox works in Second Edition. Instead of spells always being either vulgar or covert, the default is that no spell will cause paradox. However, if a mage wants to, say, cast a spell without engaging in a lengthy ritual, or target something they aren't touching, or have the effects last more than a few seconds then they have to spend Reach. How much Reach a mage can safely use is determined by their skill with the arcarnum and the level needed to cast the spell in question, and exceeding this value causes Paradox. In addition, trying to retain control of too many spells at once also requires Reach, meaning that a mage can also overload themselves that way.
• Hive Drone: The Seers of the Throne have access to a group of servants referred to as "Hive-Souled" who are essentially a single mind/soul born in multiple bodies (generally twins or triplets, although modern science has allowed them to greatly increase the potential numbers). Each individual body of a Hive-Soul is essentially just a single component of their collective mind, having no individual personality, and shares experiences and memories instantly with other bodies. It’s difficult for any of them to act in a non-synchronized manner unless they are skilled at multi-tasking. For the purpose of magic, they also count as a single target; any spell cast on one of them affects all of them equally. This extends to any kind of physical alteration (including, unfortunately for them, injuries).
• Humanoid Abomination: Both ochemata and archmages have the immense power and distant mindset of one. There are more earthly examples though: just ask the Mad when you find one of them. Better yet, given how they're walking, sociopathic tempests of destructive magic who, when frustrated, spontaneously spawn living spells that only exist to clear obstacles by any means necessary, don't.
• Hungry Jungle: The Primal Wilds is described as a vast ecosystem where absolutely everything is alive and vibrant, constantly seeking the thrills of all manner of physical sensation. Its inhabitants are simply called beasts.
• I Know Your True Name: Guess how you can locate someone anywhere in the world and drop the magical equivalent of a guided missile on them?
• I'm a Humanitarian:
  • Mage + Cult + Goetic magic + Gluttony Vice = Delicious.
  • The Devourers of the Flesh Legacy from the Adamantine Arrow are, at best, half-feral warrior mages who gain strength by hunting down the enemies of the Arrow and... er, yeah. Those with lower Morality tend to skip the "enemies of the Arrow" part.
  • Cultists of the Prince of 100,000 Leaves (an alternate history banished to the Abyss) are this. In the "Prince" history, mankind as a whole engages in cannibalism on a regular basis, and the cultists do so not just to emulate that history, but because they believe doing so can invoke Ret-Gone... eating a person can erase them from existence, bringing the world hat much closer to the "Prince" version. The worst part? The book indicates they may be right.
• Immortality Immorality: It's commonly believed that the only ways to achieve true immortality require either undeath, hurting others, or both (and some mages philosophically believe that immortality is immoral). Known methods include Soul Eating, eating other mages' Gnosis, and annual bargains with the Abyss. The Free Council recognizes the right to work toward immortality so long as one doesn't hurt others, but once you start killing to prolong your life, they'll cut it short for you.
• Inhuman Eye Concealers: Mages in the Cult of the Doomsday Clock commonly gain time-themed Paradox brands from abusing magic. Sinister Shades are the Cult's standard uniform anyway, but for many members, they hide eyes that have become clock faces or digital watch readouts — a dead giveaway to both Sleepers and enemy mages.
• Interrogating the Dead:
  • Mages with basic knowledge of the Death arcanum can divine a corpse's cause of death and interact with earthbound ghosts. More advanced spells can compel obedience, and masters can call up ghosts from The Underworld for questioning.
  • If a dead mage created a soul stone in life, another mage can use it to summon their shade and demand up to three services. Common choices include magical tutelage, skill training, and information.
• Invisible Introvert: Enforced; much like its counterpart in Ascension, Occultation allows mages to make themselves unmemorable and undetectable to Sleepers. However, it requires the mage using it to have as few connections to society as possible, to the point that if the user ever becomes famous, Occultation ceases to work until they've passed out of the public eye and been forgotten about. As such, it's dependent on the user being an asocial hermit, especially in the case of those powerful enough to affect supernatural entities as well.
• Jedi Mind Trick: The main use for the rotes of the Mind Arcanum; while other Paths can learn it, the best users are the Mastigos and the most frequent users are likely to be Guardians of the Veil fixing things, victims, witnesses... Leading to the stereotype of the Guardians of the Veil often being Mastigos.
• Jerkass:
  • The Supernal Wind, from Night Horrors: The Unbidden, is the fractured mind of an Exarch who took a wrong turn getting to Earth and looked directly into the Abyss. How much of a jerk is he? When he fully possesses an individual, he or she takes a penalty to Social rolls because he's that much of an asshole.
  • Anyone casting The Final Spell of Eli Ben-Menecham is intentionally making themselves being completely incapable of not being a Jerkass, as the spell excises the Mage's virtue from his/herself.
• Karma Meter: Wisdom, which overlaps somewhat with Sanity Meter. Wisdom measures a mage's ability to successfully strike a balance between the powers she wields, her own needs and desires, and the needs and desires of others. There are direct mechanical benefits to keeping it high, and penalties for keeping it low.
  • One could say that Wisdom is the Jerkass Meter; the descriptions of behaviours that characterize low Wisdom Mages paints them as a Jerkass, while on the other end of the Wisdom scale it's impossible to be a Jerkass.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Every Mage that survives beyond the initial A God Am I stage without getting eaten by a passing Abyssal Intruder.
• Knight Templar: Ooooooooh, boy.
  • Of the five Paths, the Obrimos have a reputation for being self-righteous and fanatical.
  • Banishers, mages who think magic screws up the world, and kill other mages to stop it. The irony is that they actually envy normal mages, who seem to (and do) cast spells without the instinctual revulsion most Banishers feel towards their own. The only examples in the book where this isn't the case are Anti-Villain Richard Paine and Aaron Murphy: the former is being deceived by the Seers of the Throne, the latter is a sociopath who is simply hunting Mages for his own sick thrills.
  • The Jnanamukti from the Mysterium sourcebook, who believe that sleepers are to blame for everything that's wrong with the world. The Jnanamukti believe that three things stand in the way of reclaiming the lost glory of Atlantis: Sleeper civilization, Sleeper technology and "the Fallen Supernatural" (i.e. all supernatural beings that do not claim descent from the Supernal Realms). Their answer to these problems, respectively? Destroy all Sleeper civilization, Destroy all Sleeper technology, Destroy the Fallen Supernatural. In case you still see any possibility of them being portrayed as Well Intentioned Extremists, consider the fact that they approved of the Holocaust. Their association with the rather unnerving Daksha Legacy also doesn't do them any favors.
  • On the other end of the scale (ie, straddling the line between an Anti-Villain version of Knight Templar and Anti-Hero Well-Intentioned Extremist), are the Logophages, from Legacies: The Ancient. They realize (not think, realize-other sourcebooks have examples) that, despite the typical byline of "knowledge is power" among mages, there are some secrets Man Was Not Meant To Know. Since humanity (or at least, human-derived supernaturals) are the only inhabitants of the Earth that they know of, they have decided that they need to eliminate said secrets, via honing Laser-Guided Amnesia to a science, stealing knowledge from the minds of other people and then erasing it from their own (the name comes from the Greek term for "Word Eater", a pretty good descriptor of the process). The subtext is that the reason that they're Left-Handed is not their goal or methods, but that they can very easily abuse their power.
  • Most conflicts within the Mage community (excluding anything involving Seers, Demons, the Abyss or mere Spirits), tend to be because almost every Mage acts like a Knight Templar whenever anything compels them to interact with other Mages.
• Knowledge Broker: The Echoing One is an Abyssal spirit that can be summoned to grant any knowledge, no matter how obscure or long-lost, so long as it was not deliberately hidden. The price one point from the summoner's current and Maximum Wisdom per question.
• The Lancer: The Guardians of the Veil are sort of everyone's Lancer, working for Mage society as a whole to cover up their mistakes without complaint.
• Language of Magic: The High Speech. It's very complicated. It may or may not have been the same language that the citizens of Atlantis spoke, and it's unclear as to whether they invented it or discovered it. Its full lexicon and grammatical structure are unknown, and it is theorised that due to the metaphysical damage done to reality during the Fall, it may be unknowable. Khonsu, a member of the Mysterium, describes it as something approximating "a form of mathematics that also describes the numbers that compose it." Most mages only know enough of it to give their magic a small boost — Sleepers can't even hear it, let alone understand it.
  • In one of the flavour stories, when Khonsu attempts to talk to a sleeper while using it, it appears as the same unpronounceable symbols you see in the books. The sleeper, meanwhile, complains that it hurt his ears.
  • Reflected mechanically in that a mage may only take one dot of the relevant language merit, which corresponds to a bare minimum of functional literacy and the ability to have a basic conversation only with great effort.
  • For reference, the default mythological source of the language are the Dragons, long-extinct or missing beings who once casually wandered the supernal and all other realms and founded Atlantis accidentally by flying through some dreams once.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: It's kind of the default tactic for Guardians of the Veil clean-up crews; naturally Mastigos are often the most common Path found in the order, but not overwhelmingly so.
  • The universe itself does this to sleepers with insufficient resistance stats where spells themselves are concerned in the form of the quiescence: If they witness magic and it's possible to simply forget it, they do so. If it's not possible to outright forget or they're on the borderline will-power-wise, they are forced to rationalize it away instead.
• The Laws of Magic: A number of these are used as part of the setting and how the magic system works.
  • The Law of Names and the Law of Contagion are the most prominent. Spells of the Mind and Spirit Arcana work better if the caster knows the target's true name, while personal belongings can be used to help target an opponent from afar with magic.
  • The Arcana of Life and Matter could be said to use a variant of the Law of Similarity; it's easier (in terms of the magical ability needed and the skillchecks to pull it off) to turn something into something similar than it is to turn something into something very different. For example, turning kernels of corn into angry wasps is pretty simple. Turning a man into a rat or solid stone is considerably more difficult — and turning a bug into a human or a seed into a gold coin even more difficult than that.
• Lighter and Softer: Compared to its previous version, Mage: The Ascension. The law of unintended consequences is just as much in play, but largely you're a powerful being none of whose antagonists are innately any more powerful, whereas in the Old World of Darkness the big supernatural world wars had already happened and the player characters had lost four centuries ago, with no real hope of regaining ground in the conflict.
  • Also to the Chronicles of Darkness as a whole. It may be a Crapsack World, but Mages genuinely have the potential to make it better. . . and that potential literally lies sleeping in the soul of every single mortal on the planet.
  • Darker and Edgier: On the other hand, the Technocracy is Well-Intentioned Extremist and, as shown in the end, Mages can work together to reach worldwide Ascension. The Seers of the Throne however are just massive assholes that rule the world due to taking orders from the closest things to God, where God is the living symbols of tyranny itself.
• Lovecraft Lite: Your enemies are things that can legitimately give Lovecraft nightmares. But you have such powers that you can challenge them to a staring contest, and somehow come out the winner. The theme of the game is "the danger of hubris", not "run and hide from unspeakable things".
  • Made even more blatant in 2E: The Abyss is explicitly called out as the realm of Untruth; what would give Lovecraft nightmares are not representatives of the true nature of reality and its fundamental hostility to humanity, but unwelcome invaders whose nonexistence is fundamental truth that his brand of nihilism is invalid, to the point where any understanding of the hidden laws of the actual Fallen World completely immunizes you to its passive influence. This is in spite of introducing the Annunaki and the omnipresent influence of the Exarchs.
• Mad Scientist: Having an Abyssal Assistant gradually turns you into one, while being one (as in, derangements literally grant you bonuses) helps to understand the mathematical proofs of the Nemesis Continuum. Curiously, being an actual physicist makes the latter harder, as you know how reality works and the Continuum is not it.
  • On the heroic side, we have the Threnodists, a Legacy of quantum physicists who believe that the quantum world is the foundation of all magic and consciousness. It is for this reason that they go out of their way to recruit people with mental health problems, since they have a unique perspective on quantum consciousness. This attitude is exemplified by their quote:
  "Voices in my head, yes. I'm their imaginary friend. You too."
• Mage-Hunting Monster: Some entities from the Abyss are drawn into reality to feed on mages' powerful souls:
  • The most extreme Paradoxes spawn an Abyssal intruder of variable power level. Some attack the mage directly, but others harass them as a gremlin or Evil Doppelgänger, and the worst might play the long game as a powerful corruptive force.
  • The Invisible Codex is a mage-parasitizing monster: it impersonates a Spell Book, creates obsessive interest in the mage who finds it, and drains its new owner's life away.
• Magical Sensory Effect: Each mage has a personal "nimbus" that manifests when they perform vulgar magic, such as a Holy Halo, a drum beat, or the sight of spectral animals. Normally this is only visible to beings with Supernatural Sensitivity, but they can also intentionally reveal it to Sleepers with effort.
• Magical Seventh Son: "Magical Traditions" introduces Southern Conjure as a "flavor" which offers a special merit called "Seventh Son of a Seventh Son" that basically turns any mage into a walking, talking Fate Arcanum magnet.
• Magic Fire: Salamanders from Astral Space can create a Platonic ideal of fire in the physical world. Items forged in the fire are similarly perfected, drastically reducing the cost to imbue them with spells.
• The Magic Goes Away: Kind of. Also inverted in that the departure of the dragons, according to the introduction, was what caused humans to discover magic in the first place.
  • Well, it doesn't so much "go away" as "become mundane". As mortal mastery of the universe increases, Magi have been more and more restricted. Essentially, in the middle ages a mage could drop literal magical nukes, but that ability moved into the hands of mortals in the scientific lead-in to 1945 and now they can't.
  • Inverted according to the Free Council, who hold that the symbols and techniques aren't weakening, just CHANGING, and possibly even strengthening. They sometimes back this up by pulling out "now-impossible" rotes from a walkman, four AAA batteries and a smartphone opened to the wikipedia main page.
• Masquerade: Pretty much the raison d'etre for the Guardians of the Veil, who protect magic from publicity — often by any means necessary. All Mages tend to keep things hush-hush, if only because doing magic in front of normal humans is a good way to call down paradox to eat your face.
  • Breaking the Masquerade would cause magic to cease functioning. Sharing magical secrets with Sleepers weakens magic as a whole, and Magic has actually become weaker over time. Resurrecting the dead and making permanent changes to living patterns were possible in the past, but now lie solely in the hands of the Archmasters. This is, however, according to said Guardians of the Veil, who may have a source bias, and the quote itself is a throwaway. So maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. Mage cosmology is confusing like that.
• Masquerade Enforcer: There are two main ones that appear:
  • First, the dreaded Paradox caused by the Abyss. Whenever a mage tries to use powers , they have to draw it across the Abyss and into the Fallen World. Because of this, the Awakened are always at risk of pulling some of the void's essence into their spells. All mortals have a shard of the Abyss within their souls, through which the Abyss can see any magic occurring in the mortal world. Thus, the more muggles see the mage, the greater the chance the Abyss will lash out at the mage. If mages are not careful, they can trigger a Paradox, resulting in anything from a painful backlash, to the Abyss itself corrupting reality.
  • Second, the Exarchs, the living symbols of tyranny that seek to keep humanity from the Supernal Realms. They set up the Abyss to stop people from Awakening. Then also worked to set up and work through their mortal agents the Seers of the Throne. Occasionally, they send ochemata to aid their mortal servitors.
• The Men in Black:
  • Division Six, but they're not a real government agency. They're actually the pawns of a Seer of the Throne (aka, a member of the evil society of mages that the player characters are assumed to be against).
  • Summoners adds the Men in Black, who are Men in Black in the original, conspiracy theorist sense of the word. They're inhuman, alien, and not that good at pretending to be like us. They're rather fond of performing impromptu lobotomies on people who cause supernatural incidents or talk about having seen them after having been warned before.
  • The Guardians Of The Veil do a similar role, cleaning up magical messes and investigating unaccounted for supernatural incidents. Think of them as Mages In Black.
• Mental World:
  • Mages can travel into, and warp both their own dreams and the dreams of others. They can also go further beyond the mere subconscious and into a person's Oneiros (one of the three Astral Planes), which is their own soulscape. It contains the Anthropomorphic Personification of their desire for self-improvement, their darker urges, their fears, and their Flaws and Derangements (if they have any). It also contains the sum total of all a person's knowledge and experience, albeit shrouded in metaphor and symbolism (or in the case of memories, the subjectivity of the experience). It's possible to travel even deeper into the Tenemos, which is the collective unconscious of humanity.
  • Archmasters can make internal sanctuaries called chantries by finding a location they identify closely with and forming a physical reflection of it within their souls. Though not as mutable once they're made, they are manifestations of the mage, who is as aware of the chantry as of their own body.
• Metaplot: Averted, as with the rest of the Chronicles of Darkness.
• Mind Rape: Dissonance (the revised version of Disbelief) in 2E. Whenever a non-Sleeper sees magic, his or her mind naturally tries to grapple with the impossible reality of the Supernal, which is naturally impossible for anyone not a mage. This is not what causes the Integrity check-rather, it's because a Sleeper's unawareness of how strange the world truly is allows the Abyss to slip in and bombard the poor witness' mind with its version of what is truly happening. It's not pretty. The Quiescence? Is a coping mechanism by the subconscious to scrub itself of the fundamental horror of the Outside (the corebook even calls it a mercy). Averted completely for Sleepwalkers — whether they picked up low magic themselves in the form of Psychic Powers, thaumaturgy, or whatever, they know perfectly well how the actual occult foundations of the world work, and that the Abyss' version of events is utter bunk-the Void is the domain of reality's rejects, things that are not true and can never be true under the current version of reality. So it doesn't try. On the flip side, using Prime to give Sleepers Mage Sight or turning them into Sleepwalkers will do this too .
• The Most Dangerous Video Game: The Shard is an Abyssal intruder in the form of a viral, supernaturally addictive MMORPG. It lures its most obsessive users into long quest lines that serve as genuine Summoning Rituals, creating more Abyssal intrusions and shattering the users' bodies or minds with the backlash.
• Muggles Do It Better: Ah-hah... no. Even the Free Council, who believe Humanity is inherently magical, admits that what human science can do is far inferior to what mages can do, what with the Mage ability to cure any disease, regrow severed limbs, dish out a Gender Bender, manipulate gravity, create life... the problem is that muggles screw up magic, which is something mages tend to angst about. It's pretty hard to know you could cure AIDS or Cancer, but if you do so for a muggle, you'll drive them insane in the process and a sickness in their very soul will eventually unravel the cure anyway.
  • The Silver Ladder's plan for this is, of course, to make everyone a Mage (or at least be easily capable of becoming one).
  • Subverting this is one of the main themes of the Period Piece sourcebook, Mage Noir, set in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Here, it's less 'Muggles do it better' and more 'Muggles do it quicker, more efficiently, more consistently and with less of a chance of breaking if people think about it too hard.' (Medicine and the then-recent breakthroughs in antibiotics are the main example) Muggles can do it better, but it's a much rarer occurrence. (The prime example here being the Atomic Bomb.) There's even a whole Legacy, The Quiescent, whose whole philosophy is 'Muggles can and are doing it better, so what right do we have to get in their way?' So, they strive to become as unnoticeable as possible and keep their magic as unnoticeable and as Boring, but Practical as possible.
• Muggle with a Degree in Magic: Though the Occult skill is open to everyone, Awakened magic is hidden from Sleepers by Disbelief and by mages alike. However, some promising Sleepwalkers get recruited by the Mysterium and can even rise to moderate status as "honorary mages".
• Multiple-Choice Past: The thing about the evidence for Atlantis? Each new piece of evidence that comes up is likely to contradict some other piece of evidence. There are about as many theories as to where and what Atlantis really was as there are mages. All that can be said is that there most likely was (or will be, or is...) at least one advanced Awakened civilisation.
  • Mastery of the Time Arcanum allows the Mage to temporarily rewrite their own past through Making. Unmaking, on the other hand, is the domain of true Time Travel (you're literally turning your past into your present, briefly — and any changes you make once you're back there stick).
• The Multiverse: Mage has the widest array of defined otherworlds of all the Chronicles of Darkness lines, giving it reason to bring in some of the other lines. There's the world proper, of course. Then there's the Shadow Realm and intervening Gauntlet, and while not portrayed on the multiversal map in the corebook, there are numerous mentions of ghosts and their home plane, the Underworld. Spirits and ghosts can appear in the world proper in the state of Twilight, immaterial and invisible. The Abyss stretches around these three (technically four) planes and attempts to blockade the five Supernal Realms.
  • Whether the Arcadia of Mage has any connection to the Arcadia and/or the Hedge of Changeling: The Lost is Shrug of God — that is, individual StoryTeller prerogrative. Imperial Mysteries suggests that the Gentry are gods whose peculiar relationship to time means they come from every Arcadia but the one the Exarchs rule (past, future, alternate, etc.). As of second edition Changeling, the two Arcadias are explicitly separate realms.
  • There are also the Astral Realms, which are probably the most 'proprietary' of the Invisible Realms that mages can visit. They are the realms of thought, ideas and souls. They are composed of multiple layers, starting from Oneiroi, realms of individual souls, the Temenos, the collective human soul and the Dreamtime, the soul and dreams of everything. It ends at the Ocean Oroboros — a black ocean that is the Astral representation of the Abyss. According to the mythology, on the other side of the Ocean lie the Realms Supernal.
  • Imperial Mysteries offers this as a possible explanation for archmages editing reality; they're not actually changing anything, they're just coming back into a universe where things operated differently.
• Mundane Utility: Doubly Subverted. At first it seems subverted — while it's possible to use magic for everyday chores, doing so is considered an (extremely minor) act of hubris and dings the Karma Meter if you're in its very upper reaches and that Paradox also makes most overt applications of magic just not worth it. However, it quickly becomes apparent that there's tons of covert magic where it's almost impossible to invite Paradox and using magic for Mundane Utility is as serious an offense as a selfish thought is — that is, it might and only might be an offense if you're a saint among saints.
• Mutually Exclusive Magic: Downplayed with Inferior Arcana. A Mage can still use the Inferior Arcanum of her Path, but suffers penalties for doing so and cannot learn beyond the second dot without the aid of a Mage for whom that path is not Inferior.
• Mythology Gag: Most to Mage: The Ascension:
  • The Perfected Adepts are inspired by the Akashic Brotherhood.
  • The Subtle Ones are based on the Ahl-i-Batin, a former Tradition (even taking Ahl-i-Batin as an alternate name).
  • The Uncrowned Kings riff on the Solificati (or Crowned Ones), another former Tradition.
  • One of the Scelesti's alternate names is the Nefandi, a reference to the Nephandi.
  • The Tamers of Stone are based on the Craftmasons, the founders of the Order of Reason.
  • The Thread-Cutters are based on the Euthanatos.
  • The Thrice-Great are Awakening's take on Hermeticism.
  • The Celestial Masters share a name with a faction of the Order of Reason.
  • The Hollow Ones of the Seers of the Throne share a name with Ascension's pseudo-Tradition.
  • Left-Hand Path mentions that an attack on Istanbul's Consilium by The Mad in the 11th century resulted in them being described as "Maraud" — as in Marauders, the previous line's term for "mad mages who reject your reality and break shit."
  • There's a portion of the Free Council that holds the idea that "Belief defines reality." That's exactly how magic worked in the World of Darkness, but NOT the new one.
• Neutrality Backlash: Both the Pentacle Orders and the Seers of the Throne consider mages who won't join up with some order to be Left-Handed. While in principle, an "apostate" is someone who left a sect they once joined, in practice most mages consider them exactly the same as The Oathbreaker. If you don't pick a side, then there must be something wrong with you.
• Non-Health Damage:
  • An Adept of the Life Arcanum can inflict temporary damage to a target's physical attributes, while Mind magic can do the same to mental and social attributes. Attributes can't be drained to zero and are restored when the spell ends.
  • The Death Arcanum's signature attack spell, "Rotting Flesh", inflicts a penalty on all the victim's social rolls equal to the damage dealt, on the grounds that its effects are just that gross.
  • Mages who make deals with Acamoth too frequently begin to suffer long-term penalties to all their spellcasting rolls as their souls erode from the strain. Unlike any other source of harm in the game, recovery takes a minimum of a year.
  • Formal Wizard Duels use a specially enchanted arena that causes attacks to target Willpower instead of health, so duellists only suffer short-term exhaustion unless they deliberately press themselves to the point of physical harm.
• The Nothing After Death: Stygia is a place of barren wastes filled with forsaken treasures and dead shades. Apparently, it's supposed to be the place the dead go to let go of their ties to the material world before moving on.
• Obfuscating Postmortem Wounds: Exaggerated — Death magic can alter a corpse to display a different cause of death under any non-magical scrutiny, even to the extent of making an incinerated burn victim look like they'd only had a heart attack. Given the Masquerade and the Crapsack World, the spell is often used to cover up monster victims and paranormal killings.
• Occult Detective: The game is explicitly inspired by Hellblazer and The Dresden Files, and a big part of Mages' shtick is "shoving their noses into Mysteries where they really, really don't belong".
• Oh, Crap!: Standard reaction to pretty much anything coming from the Abyss, with or without warning. Also common whenever a cabal is caught off guard by their enemies — in a game where being able to warp reality requires some time to prepare, being caught with your pants down is generally a death sentence for players.
• Omnicidal Maniac: The Scelesti. How much? They serve entities that have a stated goal of destroying everything, including themselves. And then replace it with a paradise where impossibility is no longer an issue, but that's an academic distinction to anyone who is not a Scelestus. (That said, Mage society is kind of like academia...)
• Only Flesh Is Safe: Matter powers only directly affect non-living matter.
• Otherworldly and Sexually Ambiguous: The Daksha legacy gain the ability to assume either or both sexes. It's part of their version of enlightenment and perfection.
• Our Dragons Are Different: They are ideas representing the concept of magic.
• Our Liches Are Different: A general term for mages who use Legacies to attain immortality. Most of them aren't particularly nice, though the Archangels of the Scions of God are usually exceptions. Tremere are the most infamous variety, and actually have a society of their own.
• Our Monsters Are Weird: The Abyss is one big honked-up pile of wrong that takes the form of everything from contagious aphasia to brain worms to cannibal timelines to evil grimoires to sinful dream temples out of a pulp novel to...
  • Your own Goetic doppelganger personification of your worst Vice. The Gloria Mundi introductory chronicle spends either 7 parts, or all 8 parts if you screw up, on fighting Goetic Vice spirits that do such wonderful things as frame you for crimes or luring you to rescue it from a cult of cannibals.
• Our Souls Are Different: They crossed from one reality (which is false), over an unreality (which is a horrible abomination) and into another reality (which is a magical reality), then back again... And that's just the first part of the character creation process.
  • Souls are even the source of magic! Unfortunately, it also makes any and all mages high priority targets for any kind of soul eating entity.
  • Mages can distill pieces of their souls into physical forms called soul stones. These have numerous uses, the most common of which is the creation of a demesne, a place where Paradox does not occur. There are some drawbacks; creating a soul stone lowers a mage's magical potential, and also makes them vulnerable to control (see Rule of Three).
  • Mages can even incorporate elements of the Supernal Realms into their very selves via a Legacy, allowing them to replicate certain spells without the risk of Paradox.
• Painting the Medium: The page of the core rulebook that describes the Anomaly Paradox, whereby reality is subtly but noticeably out of joint, has all of its text tilted at a 45-degree angle.
• Panopticon of Surveillance: The Panopticon Ministry is an Ancient Conspiracy in service to the Eye, a malevolent, quasi-divine personification of Big Brother Is Watching. Its headquarters is a Pocket Dimension in the form of a classical panopticon, with cells for its favoured servants and its reigning Minister's throne on a central pillar beneath the light of the Eye.
• Platonic Cave: Reality itself is the cave, a Fallen portrayal of the limitless wonder of the Supernal Realms. And even for those who manage to break the ropes and turn around to look at the way out, there are demiurges guarding the mouth of the cave, and a trench before you can even get to them.
• Power Born of Madness: The Mad develop unique abilities due to their Damaged Soul, not to mention invariably being a Mook Maker.
• Power Crystal: Mages use soul stones to create Demesnes and enhance their spellcasting. A soul stone is literally part of the creator's soul and magic, voluntarily separated and manifested; despite the name, they take many forms, from gems to perfect imitations of live plants.
• The Power of Blood: The symbolic associations of fresh blood have several uses in Life magic. It can substitute for a dedicated magical tool to protect against Paradox and serve as a sacrament for extended spellcasting.
• Power Perversion Potential:
  • You can develop the ability to transform into any shape you like, control others' minds, inflict or remove blindness at a command...
  • The Whipping Boys Legacy (described in Keys to the Supernal Tarot) is based entirely around using pain and BDSM as a path to enlightenment. Yes, some Mages shape their very souls in order to derive magical power from kinky sex.
• Pre-Character Customization Gameplay: Character generation starts with a Muggle and adds the Mage template, so the game suggests an optional "Prelude" chapter to play out how the character first Awakened to magic.
• Pride: If the Abyss doesn't get you in some form, this, in some way or another, will.
  • Case in point: Abyssal deals, vulgar magic, and other things that have a high or guaranteed risk of making things very bad for the mage in question typically have comparatively little payoff for the trouble they can bring. Why would anyone make use of them? If desperation doesn't factor into it, nine times out of ten it's because they think they can handle the consequences.
  • Pride is practically a separate cosmic force working against humanity.
  • The Silver Ladder, incidentally, consider this to be a virtue, not a sin. Just about everyone else thinks they should check themselves a bit.
• Primal Polymorphs:
  • Shapeshifting spells belong to the Life Arcanum which is represented by the Primal Wild, the platonic ideal of nature unbound, so most mages with an affinity for them — that is to say, Thyrsus — tend to be more in tune with the natural world than the trappings of modern society. Zigzagged in that it's not a hard and fast rule — one of the example Thyrsus in the second edition book is very Miss Marple-y (the prey-predator symbolism comes in via representing British colonialism, in her case), and that there's nothing preventing mages from other paths from learning enough Life to access those spells.
  • The Orphans of Proteus legacy take it a step further: they can innately take animal (or plant or mineral) forms and communicate with animals and Nature Spirits, and almost all of them take to the wilderness, sometimes abandoning human speech entirely.
• Properly Paranoid: Leads to a long and productive life as a Mage. It's not very reassuring that the Properly Paranoid is probably right or probably close.
• Public Domain Artifact: Several make their way in. It's typically ambiguous as to whether the Artifact is the actual one featured in the legends, simply inspired the legends, or was brought about because of the legends.
• Reality Warper:
  • A powerful enough Mage has almost no limitations in what they can do, making them the most powerful (with prep time) faction in the World of Darkness. Balancing this is Paradox, which has NO limitations and actively hates the mage.
  • Anything even remotely connected to the Abyss.
  • Becoming an archmaster involves walking up to your old limitations, flipping them off, and then claiming a bit of the Supernal for yourself so you can work Story-Breaker Power levels of Reality Warping. Balancing this, besides even meaner Paradox, is Aponoia, which is the tendency to change the world unintentionally in the process of doing what you want. It is possible to minimize risks and avoid this, but it's really hard.
• Reduced Resource Cost:
  • "Platonic exemplars" are rare, perfect versions of ordinary objects that are highly prized for Item Crafting. Rather than a permanent Willpower dot, it costs only a bit of Mana to imbue a spell into one, so long as the spell aligns with the object's function.
  • Mages with access to a Scriptorium, a specialized Magical Library, can learn rote spells from it at half the usual XP cost.
• Renovating the Player Headquarters: Mages can keep purely mundane Sanctums, but can also add features like magical wards, servitor ghosts, Summoning circles, and personalized Field Power Effects.
• Restoration of Sanity: Mages in the Legion Legacy gain powers by summoning Abyssal spirits to consume and replace their body parts. One of the capstone options is to replace their brain, curing all their Derangements and making them immune to new ones, all at the low cost of replacing their brain.
• Ret-Gone:
  • Nobody has ever failed to become an archmaster once they reached the Supernal. Or, more accurately, those who fail to achieve archmastery once they ascend into the Supernal cease to have ever existed.
  • An Abyssal intrusion of the Twisting Maze often does this to the people trapped within when it takes a place back into the Abyss, as well as the place itself.
• Role-Playing Endgame:
  • The core game suggests Archmastery as an endgame, where the Mage surpasses the normal limits of magic and goes into seclusion as an All-Powerful Bystander — in part because even more powerful beings are out there in a multiversal cold war.
  • The Imperial Mysteries sourcebook makes Archmasters playable and adds endgame mechanics for them: rewriting reality in accordance with their transcendent will and Ascending permanently to the Supernal Realms.
• Rule of Three: Mage tradition dictates that any mage who obtains the soul stone of another mage is owed three favours by them, after which they return the stone. Not returning the soulstone to its owner afterwards is a good way to become a social pariah, lose standing in the community and maybe even lose allies. It's not technically an actual crime against the laws of Mage society, but try convincing your peers, while refusing to give someone back a piece of their very soul, that you're not some evil tyrannical slavemaster or a Tremere.
• Science Is Bad: Subverted in the sourcebook about Seers of the Throne. The Seers draw temporal power from narrow-mindedness and the inability to accept that which people don't understand. An actual scientist (ie, a person skeptical enough to not take things at first glance, but open enough to accept the supernatural when it's in his face) is everything they hate and dread in a person. Thus, any mage who actually says this is (A) a Luddite with a morality 50 years behind the times, or (B) a Seer.
• Science Wizard: The game has a Point Build System and an Urban Fantasy setting, so many mages invest in skills like Academics and Science to support their magical abilities. Certain powerful mages are excellent academics and researchers in their own right, looking for supernatural insights in the material world.
• Screening the Call:
  • One of the duties of the Seers of the Throne is to prevent people from Awakening.
  • The Guardians of the Veil also do this, but in their case it's more testing people so that only those who'll be able to responsibly handle Supernal power learn enough to be able to Awaken, while the others are nudged into a Labyrinth that holds no real truth. The problem is that some of them decide to use the Labyrinth to, say, build their own cults of personality, and that's why nobody likes the Guardians.
• Sealed Evil in a Can:
  • Often the best way to deal with a troublesome spirit.
  • The Abyss is a larger unreality-scale version. Pity that the sealed can seems to have a revolving door for the evil...
• Self-Guarding Phlebotinum: A mage may invoke this trope in Item Crafting, adding enchantments that trigger when a non-designated owner handles the item. One option delivers a potent electric shock; another simply teleports the item away.
• Sex Is Evil, and I Am Horny: The Unbidden features Franklin High, a school under a persistent enchantment by a (now deceased, thankfully) mage who wanted a return to the sexual and moral purity of his youth in The '50s (stop snickering). The classes under its effects become idealized Happy Days-esque students, with a dislike of premarital sex, polaymorous behavior and homosexuality in any form. The problem, of course, is that the same hormones the enchantment represses are kinda vital to the development of the mind. 90% of the time, the alummni find passive outlets for that bottled passion (if creepy — it takes the form of the Fixation Derangement, meaning that the individual alummni literally cannot stop thinking about it). The rest of the time it just screws up the Karma Meter so that sexuality-related sins rank up higher than what would normally be there — like say, murder.
• Shared Fate Ultimatum: The three-dot Fate spell "Shared Fate" can enforce this, since it links two subjects together and causes each to take any harm the other suffers. It's played with, though, since the spell can also be cast in such a way that makes only one subject take all the harm that befalls another, or make a single subject also suffer any harm she inflicts on others.
• Sinister Surveillance: Extremely common, but the Guardians of the Veil and the Panopticon are still the most notorious examples.
• The Smart Guy: The Mysterium dedicates itself to finding ancient secrets and guarding those secrets, or using them to better mankind.
• Sourcebook: Standard for any tabletop RPG, the quality of the Mage sourcebooks varies somewhat but it's generally agreed that it averages better than most games.
• Spell Book, Tome of Eldritch Lore: As expected of a game about magicians, there are a lot of them, both benign and dangerous. The sourcebook Grimoire of Grimoires is dedicated to these.
• Spell Crafting: If you've got the power and the skill, you can do it.
• Splat: See the introductory text above for a breakdown of splats in this game.
• Squishy Wizard: Unlike some of the other World of Darkness entities, mages are physically ordinary humans unless they bolster themselves with magic.
• Stark Naked Sorcery: Like most of everything, skyclad casting can be used to help spellcasting if it has the correct symbolism for the spell. Furthermore, the Sodality of the Tor, a Legacy based on British witchcraft, uses skyclad dancing as part of its initiations and rituals.
• Stop Worshipping Me: The Old Man is a godlike spirit at least and is very possibly an Anthropomorphic Personification of the Abyss, but he has only laughter for mages who try to worship him. He's obligated to act as the Abyss's advocate when called, but almost nothing else about him is known.
• Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum:
  • The Abyss wants to destroy everything that reminds it of its own warped existence, i.e., the Universe.
  • On a lesser scale a Nativity intrusion will produce a child that may develop this power.
  • A Subverted Trope according to the Scelesti: the Abyss is nothing less than Primordial Chaos, and it wants to destroy reality because it's a mortal threat. Naturally, their mission is to help remove that threat.
• Summon Binding: In 1^st edition, the spells to control a ghost or spirit are separate from the spells to summon one, so the mage needs to act quickly after the entity arrives. In 2^nd edition, the summoning can be cast at a more advanced level to build a command into the spell.
• Summoning Ritual:
  • For the love of god, don't summon anything larger than your head! Half the creatures in the Sourcebook for Summoners are either toxic, madness inducing, undead monsters that can't be confirmed to have ever lived, Cthulhu-esque creatures from the Abyss, creatures incapable of understanding the fallen world from the Supernal, or extra-dimensional monsters that exist to lobotomize people. One of the only SAFELY summonable entities just drops some rare items out of the sky... oh, but you have to burn someone alive to call them up. There ARE instructions on summoning spirits, ghosts, and Cryptids (weird creatures from other universes that act like spirits and are implied to exist due to mortal belief), which are somewhat safer... but still potentially dangerous without the right precautions.
• Super-Empowering: This is theoretically possible for an archmaster, but it is not a good idea. Forcing an Awakening is an act of hubris on par with soul theft, and it usually will create a Banisher hostile to magic itself, as it's axiomatically being done on someone who's not ready - if they were, they'd Awaken on their own. Also, an archmaster doing this breaks the Pax Arcanum in a way that's virtually an engraved invitation to the Exarchs.
• Supernatural Hotspot Town: Invoked by one Cult that worships the Prince of Ten Thousand Leaves, a living Alternate History from the Abyss. By collecting enough of the Prince's artifacts, its reality has bled into the Cult's hometown of Savior's Rock, creating an Eldritch Location where Abyssal powers and creatures can slip into the universe.
• Supernatural Team: The default "Cabal" of Player Characters is one of these, for obvious reasons. Mages are distinguished by Paths, which define the areas of magic (e.g.: Life, Time, etc.) in which they're most proficient; Legacies, which help them hone specific abilities; and Orders, which adopt specific philosophies to develop their skills and function in the mundane world.
• Super Power Lottery: Mages can, effectively, do anything they can imagine, provided they can both think of the proper mixture of mystical elements and handle the strain of calling upon such power.
• Taken from a Dream: Many Wrong Context Magic artifacts and memories of lost treasures are found in the Astral Realms, and an advanced combination of Mind and Matter magics can temporarily copy one into the physical world. A more powerful spell can permanently transform one into a physical object, but the long-term consequences of tearing out part of humanity's collective unconscious are unknown.
• Tarot Motifs: Each of the Paths is associated with one of the Major Arcana (Acanthus — The Fool, Mastigos — The Devil, Moros — Death, Obrimos — Strength, Thyrsus — The Moon), an entire sourcebook, Keys to the Supernal Tarot, is dedicated to providing Tarot-inspired story elements, and there's a full Awakening-themed Tarot deck available.
• Temporal Paradox: Other than what happens when you draw Paradox when casting a Time spell, time gets weird around powerful Mages, which only makes dating Awakened Artifacts even harder. There are at least two artifacts possessed by the Mysterium in North America that, according to Time divinations, haven't been made yet.
  • Anything to do with Atlantis provokes temporal anomalies by its very existence, as the Exarchs erased it from history. In fact, it's suggested that they erased all potential versions of Atlantis, hence why each temple seems to be from a different if similar culture.
• Temporal Suicide: The highest-ranked Doomsday Clock Apocalypse Cultists are required to reach back in time and kill their past selves, allegedly freeing themselves from the "prison" of time and causality. In fact, the act lets an Abyssal entity devour their existence and take their place.
• Test of Pain: As embodiments of strength through adversity, demons of Pandemonium require their summoners to overcome a painful physical or mental ordeal. One demon, The Thousandth Cut, slowly lives up to its name until the summoner either imposes their will on it or passes out from blood loss.
• Thinking Up Portals: Mages deal with portals to other parts of reality so much they actually have an entire classification system for them, which they call Irises.
• Third-Party Deal Breaker: The Seal of Solomon is an artifact ring that empowers its wearer's touch to break any Pact with an otherworldly entity. It sacrifices a permanent Willpower dot and incurs the entity's wrath, but the steep cost can be preferable to the loss of life, sanity, or soul that such a Pact can demand.
• Too Dumb to Live: The Scelesti skirt this trope. Anyone who summons or otherwise willingly seeks contact with the Abyss for reasons other then killing it has taken a perfect 10.0 dive into this trope.
  • Summoning something from the Abyss for any purpose is explicitly a very bad idea. Summoning something for the purposes of fighting/killing it is the equivalent of smearing your naked body with barbecue sauce and then poking a sleeping grizzly in the nose with a toothpick to show him what-for, too.
  • The in-universe result of letting your Wisdom drop too low. Eventually, you'll care so little about maintaining logic and invoke paradox so casually that the universe will just... decide you don't exist anymore. Or that you retroactively never existed.
• Tragic Monster:
  • If there's a Seer-made monster about, odds are he's this— the Myrmidons are Punch Clock Villains forced into becoming minions of the Praetorian Ministry, Grigori are brainwashed ghosts enslaved to an artifact, and Hollow Ones have had their individuality and memories destroyed. Seers are not nice people.
  • Imperial Mysteries has the Qliphoth; failed Archmasters who have had their soul hollowed out and replaced with the lies of the Abyss, turning them into walking vectors for Abyssal intrusion. About the only thing Archmasters agree on is that killing them is a kindness.
• Translator Microbes: the 3-dot Mind spell "Universal Language" lets its subject understand and translate any language, broadly construed, with the exception of not letting Sleepers understand High Speech.
• Trick Bomb: Alchemy can imbue any Area of Effect spell into a grenade, so you can have bad-luck bombs, time-slowing bombs, anti-gravity grenades, or almost anything else the alchemist can imagine.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: The usual explanation for most of the morally-questionable stuff the Silver Ladder gets up to, and some of the stuff the Guardians get up to as well. It also doesn't help that their respective preferred paths toward utopia are mutually-exclusive.
• The Virus: Dark Angel Aphasia (a contagious Aphasia), Blood Worms (think tapeworms spread by vampires which eat magic), Abyssal Spiders (invisible brain stomping parasites summoned by abusing Mind Control), the Lethean (a memory eating demon), the Ractain Strain when infectious (bizarre ugly humans that carry a bizarre disease when they experience life threatening situations that causes one to be drawn into the Spirit World), Flesh Intruders (Donor Organ Rejection taken to the extreme), the Oath Of Ruin (an inbred clan of rednecks or Corrupt Corporate Executives depending on the needs of the game that carry Abyssal genes)... Essentially half of the entries in the Intruders sourcebook.
• War Is Glorious: Played with. Both the Adamantine Arrow and the Praetorian Ministry encourage people to think so, but only the Adamantine Arrow actually believes it.
• War Is Hell: The raison d'etre of the Praetorian Ministry. Given the setting, they're probably right. However, since they are Seers who specialize in causing war... maybe they should check the color of the kettle.
• Water Is Womanly: Of the Legacies that focus on Elemental Powers, the Tamers of Rivers were originally an all-female order of nomadic healers and midwives, and their membership remains mostly women in the present day. They're described as embodying Water, the most feminine element, as the River, its most feminine aspect.
• Wizarding School: The Mysterium are the ones who usually have this. The Cult of the Doomsday Clock have the Clock Tower, which is what happen if Hogwarts was ran by time-eating dementors and their doomsday terrorist cultist
• Weirdness Censor: Paradox, a flaw built into the very structure of the universe that gives explicitly Supernal magic (e.g., throwing fireballs and freezing time) a chance to backfire spectacularly. On top of that, there's Quiescence, which causes any blatantly magical activity observed by Sleepers (e.g., a demonic servitor crafted entirely from the raw stuff of magic) to decay rapidly.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist:
  • Consciously averted with the Seers of the Throne; the Seers are not the Technocracy, and they're painted as the Bad Guys from square one.
  • Played straight with the Fangs of Mara and the more extreme members of the Pentacle.
• Wild Magic: Night Horrors: The Unbidden details how magic isn't entirely under the control of mages, and at times can even be spontaneous or actively out of control.
• Winged Humanoid: Angels of Aether often appear as New Testament-style angels complete with flaming swords, wings, and amazingly buff muscles.
• Wise Serpent: A colossal snake is the preferred form of the Aeon of Spirit, a godlike embodiment of the Primal Wild. It's an unmatched source of information about the Shadow, the Spirit Arcanum, and many other things.
• Wizard Duel: The Duel Arcane, a highly formal method of combat, in which two mages choose Arcana to act as their Sword and Shield, enter a magically created ring, and pit their magical will against one another in the form of elaborate illusions. It is said to be the preferred method of resolving disputes, as it is quick, generally non-life threatening (attacks start off harming willpower before going to actual physical damage, unless the combatants agree to a Duel to the Death, which are rarely permitted) and has no collateral damage.
  Take note the ring for the Duel Arcane requires a mage with the Prime Arcanum to create; usually this is a third party nominated by the challenger but sometimes the challenger or rarely the respondent will forge the ring. It's acceptable to reject the challenge if the mage responsible for the ring is accused of not being impartial, no loss of face or honour is incurred and it's generally considered rude to coerce someone into accepting a challenge to duel or to choose a person that is biased to either party.
• Wizards Live Longer: Life magic can add from 30 to 130 years to a mage's lifespan just by keeping their body in peak condition. With Death, a mage can steal lifespan from others or even Body Surf, albeit usually at the cost of tremendous Immortality Immorality.
• Wizards' War: An important event in the backstory is the Fall of Atlantis, which involved one of these (even if the Fall wasn't a result of the War itself): when the Awakened that would go on to become the Exarchs built the Ladder that led to the Supernal, their opponents assaulted the Ladder with magical military force. Come the modern day, however, this trope is mostly Averted, as Sleepers witnessing magic tends to make said magic get dispelled — at best — or causes Paradox and results in all sorts of nasty things (like spells going horribly wrong or summoning gribblies from the Abyss) at worst.
• Wizard Workshop: Given the setting's Post-Modern Magik, a Sanctum can be anything from a penthouse to a motor home. Mages can outfit them with useful features like a reference library, premade summoning circles, Haunted Fetters, and a personal Place of Power.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Theumiel, a Scelestus archmaster who despises the fundamentally broken state of the World of Darkness and wants to change it... by having the Abyss eat reality so he can start all over again.
• Words Do Not Make The Magic: People gain magic by having their souls joined to one of the Supernal Realms. The High Speech is a handy Power Crutch to make spells a bit more reliable, but without that connection, it can't be used or even reliably perceived.
• World of Symbolism: What else do you think a setting that has a literal Platonic realm would be?
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: All Astral Realms operate on subjective time. The length of real time one spends in the Astral Realms largely depends on the degree to which you interact with them. So, for example, if you merely pass through a desert, it might feel like hours, but in real time, it will take about as long as it takes to say "I pass through the desert".
• Your Soul Is Mine!: An entire classification exists for Left-Handed Mages who steal souls — Reapers. The Tremere Liches eat them to prolong their lives. Silver Ladder features a non-immortality seeking version, the Carnival Melancholy, who burn souls they swipe for luck, while Left-Hand Path features Cloud Infinite, who use souls to augment their own mental abilities, and (Legion), who use the souls as a perfect disguise.

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