YMMV / Mage: The Ascension

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Are the Technocrats authoritarian bastards out to crush imagination, or are they trying to make the world safe for humanity the best way they know how? Or both, given what a Crapsack World the World of Darkness is? Technocracy Reloaded outright lays out in its first chapter several perspectives one can hold on them.
  • In-Universe, this applies to how the Solificati reacted to Heylel Teonim's betrayal. Was it, as Heylel claimed, a way to show how powerful the Traditions could be if they set aside their differences? Was it a case of Heylel being Out-Gambitted by the growing power of the Order of Reason? Or was it a clear malicious act that Heylel tried to cover up with a weak excuse? The arguments over this ended up splitting the Solificati completely, leaving the Seat of Matter empty for centuries until the Sons of Ether defected from the Technocracy.
• Base-Breaking Character: The Technocracy. While they have plenty of fans, there is also a subset of the fandom who considers them as being still the bad guys of the plot (except for the Nephandi) even after the white-washing they received in later editions.
• Broken Base:
  • Mage: the Ascension has been described as everything is YMMV, due to the nature of the setting, but two topics stand out for just how easily they generate arguments, and how often discussions derail into them: First, how does the Consensus actually work? And, second, what is the morality of the Technocratic Union? The best answer for both is what ever your group decides.
  • Revised Edition's drastic changes to the setting and reduction in its scope. Some liked the tighter focus and Character Development on the part of various factions, others likened it to throwing out the needlenose pliers and torque wrench from a toolbox. The lack of options in the core gamebook, most notably playable Technocrats after making them the most sympathetic as any edition ever did, was another bone of contention.
  • The use of "magick" instead of "magic" in the 20th Anniversary Edition. Callback to the older editions of the game that underlines the exotic, otherworldly nature of what mages do, while also differentiating it from all the other kinds of magic in the gameline, or a needlessly-pretentious bit of snobbery that's only going to take up space in the book.
• Complete Monster:
  • Voormas, Grand Harvester of Souls and master of the Consanguinity of Eternal Joy, is a mage who began as a Thuggee cultist for Kali and Shiva. After numerous murders, he began to fear for his karma and obsessed over finding a way to cheat death. After taking out of the House of Hekela, Voormas turned it into a place of atrocity with countless murders through the world. Arranging numerous mass killings and other horrors through the world to reap Quintessence from the fallen, Voormas puts his plans into place at the Time of Judgment. Killing and reaping even gods and the souls of their realms, Voormas plans to destroy the Wheel of Life and Death, replacing it with himself and condemn all things to a static, unchanging world so he might never need to face the penalties that come after death.
  • The Unnamed, al-Aswad, the first of the Nephandi, was the first man to make a pact with the Outer Dark. Sacrificing his true name for power and assembling the Aswadim, the Unnamed is responsible for the proliferation of the evil Nephandi and their devotion to evil and spreading atrocity. Even sabotaging the Nephandi as not to see himself upstaged, The Unnamed has caused countless catastrophes over the ages. Taking center stage with the Time of Judgment in "Hell on Earth", the Unnamed performs a strike to instantly kill the majority of the world's Awakened, having almost all the Mages massacred as the heroes rush to stop him. Unleashing the horrors of the other side on the world, the Unnamed takes a seat to reign over mankind, having brought Hell on Earth while countless humans are slaughtered and others remain as tortured slaves at the Unnamed's cruel whims.
• Crazy Is Cool: The Taftani, a craft of mages hailing from the Middle East, uses the ancient Arabian legends of genies, magic carpets, magic lamps and myriad other fantastic things pulled straight out of the Arabian Nights as the basis for their magic. They see Paradox as a badge of honor for imposing their will on the universe and practice magic as blatantly as possible to change the Consensus. And they live lives of opulence and luxury, lavishing feasts and gifts on honored guests while regaling them with tales of bottling djinn or retrieving their assorted Wonders. At least until Paradox blows them up.
  • All mages have a bit of this; they live reality by their own rules.
  • Marauders, as the only beings in the Old World of Darkness who could reasonably summon a flying birthday cake made of baby dragons to fight their foes and see absolutely nothing strange about it, definitely qualify
  • Also worth mentioning are the Cult of Ecstasy and the Sons/Society of Ether, who gain their powers from distorting their own perceptions of reality and powering tech through sheer Rule of Cool, respectively.
• Designated Villain: To put it simply, fans of the Traditions when looking at Technocracy-oriented parts of the game line and fans of the Technocracy in Tradition-oriented parts of the game line will generally find that their favorite faction very much gets the short shift in the respective parts. This is partly because materials are often written from the perspective of one of these two factions, and thus materials will reflect the prejudices of the faction that they're written from. Also, it's to allow the individual Storyteller to adjust the game to have the mix of Grey-and-Grey Morality that they want.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Go ahead and take a look at the main page. You may notice that the Sons/Society of Ether is mentioned several times more than all the other Traditions combined.
  • The Technocracy itself may also count as this.
  • In-universe, the Taftani are one of the smallest organizations to receive any significant detail, and their lack of interest in larger inter-faction politics means that there is often no good reason to incorporate them into a campaign. Most mage GM's agree that it's worth it to include them anyway.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Like most of the first-edition games, White Wolf left a lot of unfortunate loopholes in play for truly ridiculous min-max crossover characters, such as the Skin Dancer ritual that could be used to make a Kinfolk mage into a full (albeit heavily Wyrm-tainted) Garou. By the time the third-edition games reached store shelves, most of those loopholes had been rather enthusiastically closed.
  • Even in a game where the entire point is that the players start breaking said game from minute one of the first session, ritual magic stands out as just completely blowing even what vague notion of balance there was into vacuum, because it allowed you to pool your dice with other people, and then to pool that with previous rolls limited only by your character's ability to stay awake to keep casting. With a three or four man group, it wasn't unusual to have a hundred successes to work with in a game built around the expectation that even a powerful mage might have three or four to parcel out into spell range, duration, power, and so on. Two points in the correspondence sphere and your target's birth name, and you could drop all of those dice in the form of unavoidable damage on top of the target, easily overcoming any defenses and vaporizing them and anyone they've ever so much as touched. Sure, Paradox would come for you, but you could avoid that by spreading it over your ritual-mates.
• Heartwarming Moments: The description of Reynolds in Acolytes, an Acolyte for an Order of Hermes mage. Born lower-class, Reynolds dreamed of living in a Big Fancy House and having multiple servants at his beck and call. He was going nowhere until he found a service offering to train butlers and other house servants. Reynolds went above and beyond, eventually catching the eye of the aforementioned mage, who added him to his Chantry staff, ultimately to replace the headsman after he retired. Ultimately, and rarely for the World of Darkness, Reynolds is a man who has everything he ever wanted.
  He lives in a fine old house and is in charge of over thirty servants. Although the house is in a Horizon Realm, Reynolds is a contented man.
• Misaimed Fandom: The Technocracy were initially portrayed as pure evil, hunting magical creatures to extinction and ruining lives, having procedure and propaganda lifted straight from 1984 and Stalin, wanting to destroy the very concept of "creativity." But enough fans still liked them and tried different things with them that the game designers began to incorporate their ideas and made them much more sympathetic. By the end, a still significant number of people (including the actual authors of the gameline) celebrated them as the unsung heroes of the World of Darkness.
  • See: Guide to the Technocracy, a sourcebook made to both support and subtly parody them. The Technocratic Union wasn't an evil organization, it's a well-meaning one gone horribly wrong. Their actions do monstrous things, but they have also done good: they lifted mankind from the Dark Ages, and while the WoD is certainly a Crapsack World, they can be credited with stopping it from being even worse. White Wolf themselves said that the majority of Mage books were written from a Tradition viewpoint and were thus biased against the Technocracy, while the Technocracy's own books portrayed them as heroes. The real answer, says a sidebar, is somewhere in between. The question: Is it better to be relatively safe but controlled or to be free in a world of monsters? Furthermore, the Technocracy wants imagination, creativity, and breakthroughs; they just want it to be completely within their own paradigm. While the Traditions certainly want everyone to Awaken, it's almost always with the implicit idea that "Once the Sleepers Awaken, they'll follow the paradigm of my Tradition because it's the right one." In the end, the two views (and factions) aren't all that different.
    • The post-Revised Convention Books have come to embrace this view of them; the developers have gone on to state that the primary reason the Technocracy is still antagonistic is because they haven't realized they are in dire need of reforms and a respect for freedom as a concept, while the Traditions have actually undergone some soul-searching and asked themselves why they have skeletons in the closet. Technocracy: Reloaded has largely taken this theme and ran with it; by the time of the book’s release, the Technocracy has finally reached the point where the majority of its members have acknowledged that they’ve reached the "adapt or die" threshold, but the only question of course is how, with just as many Technocrats pushing for them to just declare the Ascension War for all intents and purposes over and won and to focus on more serious threats like the Nephandi, as there are hardliners pushing for a full-on return to the Pogrom.
• Rooting for the Empire: Predictably, this is what led to the Technocracy being made playable in Guide to the Technocracy to begin with; many players simply could not square the idea that the same group established in the early books as being a moustache-twirling group of cartoon villain crypto-fascists out to destroy creativity itself as an abstract concept was also responsible for everything from effectively ending the Dark Ages by bringing about the Enlightenment Era to the invention of modern medicine and the rise of democracy in the west, with many of these things being treated as if they were somehow bad. This led to the Alternative Character Interpretation above until the Technocracy was Promoted to Playable, and the Nephandi (rightfully) became the real villains of Mage.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Several elements of the Traditions, most infamously the Order of Hermes and the Verbena, are intended to be the morally-grey Anti-Hero on a mage team at worst, but their highly-reactionary views on many things, like democratic egalitarianism or modern medicine and industrial civilization respectively in the case of the above, see many players calling them worse than the Technocrats they fight against, since even the corrupt and stagnant elements of the Technocracy at least in theory believe in progressive ideals, even if they're hypocrites about them in practice. It doesn't help that sometimes the books try to treat these factions as dropping truth-bombs everywhere, no matter how mean they are about it, but (especially in the earlier editions), said truth-bombs tend towards ridiculous packs of lies, more informed by what the counterculture wanted to be true than actual, verifiable facts, immediately creating a strong, justified bias in the Technocracy's favor against them. Later editions have frantically tried to backpedal, attempting to reframe the narrative to credit fewer pieces of human progressive history to the Technocracy and more to the Traditions, like suggesting the Verbena had a hand in the modern quality-of-life philosophy in medicine, but the damage is done.