Order and Chaos. Liberty and Control. The use of Power.
The man trying to perfect himself as an example to others, finding enlightenment in serving others.
The one-eyed man in the labyrinth of the blind, breaking rules and committing sins in his search for something precious.
The woman finding herself by destroying herself, ripping lives apart in a search for something real.
The Broken Diamond follows the Crucible, a Cabal of Mages, as they navigate the politics of Washington, DC - the eponymous Broken Diamond - look for the line between their normal lives and the Supernal power that have placed them above Muggles and try to find out what it is they want to do with their unlimited power. What starts as a simple, almost makework task to discover who is painting graffiti of Atlantean glyphs, however, quickly becomes something with wide-ranging consequences for the whole city, if not the rest of the Fallen World.
The Broken Diamond, along with The Soul Cage, is an absolute must-read to anyone interested in Mage: The Awakening, the New World of Darkness or Tabletop Games in general.
The story can be read here
. The character sheet may be found here.
Links to compilation of the whole Actual Play.
As per Handling Spoilers, trope listings are not to be hidden; read on at your own risk!
This Let's Play provides examples of:
- The Archmage: Samuel becomes one partway through the Chronicle. Another one is responsible for the Ananke that interferes in Kali's life. Then there's Shiva, who even fragmented into an Ochema still has Archmastery of Mind and Space.
- Bavarian Fire Drill: Wolsey deals with the belowmentioned Big Brother Is Watching by using magical and mundane tricks to pretend he's a NSA agent and the FBI are intruding on his work.
- Big Brother Is Watching: Late in the Chronicle, Wolsey catches FBI agents snooping on Consilium matters and suspects but never gets to prove that they were Seer plants.
- Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?
- Double-Meaning Title: "Broken Diamond" can refer to how DC was carved out cartographically as an uneven, somewhat diamond-like shape. It can also refer to the broken state of the Diamond Orders due to their internal politicking.
- Due to the Dead: The Crucible had little good to say about Malakii while he was still alive, but they choose nevertheless to free the shade of him in Beckett's library even though it's not the real deal's soul.
- Enemy Civil War: The House of Stone and House of Steel turn out to be opposing Ministries of Seers. Then there's Shiva, who mows down Seers in his way as nonchalantly as he does Pentacle Mages.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Shiva's motivation for intervening ultimately turns out to be freeing his wife, whose soul was trapped in the Regalia of the Dethroned Queen after her hesitation cost her the chance to Ascend to Exarchdom alongside him and she died after the Fall.
- Experienced Protagonist: While none of the three starting members of the Crucible are Adepts or even have Legacies at the start, they nevertheless have some time as Awakened under their belts and some renown already.
- Foreshadowing: Early on, Wolsey scoffs at Damascus's faith, suggesting that the Christian God is just an Exarch. We never learn if this is true, but there is at least one deity from an existing religion who is indeed an Exarch, namely Shiva.
- Fighting a Shadow: Near the end of the story, the Exarch Shiva deploys an Ochema, a fraction of his soul projected into the Fallen World.
- Great Big Book of Everything: The DC Consilium has to deal with an Abyssal that takes the form of a book and tempts people into using it by providing information that would be hard if not impossible to get otherwise.
- Lord British Postulate: Indirectly brought up by the Storyteller regarding Shiva's Ochema; the stats he has - Archmastery of Mind and Space along with Mastery of almost every other Arcanum - makes him a magical monster far above anything in the DC Consilium, never mind the Crucible, but having stats at all does make him theoretically defeatable. For better or worse, the Consilium doesn't end up needing to beat him in a fight.
- MacGuffin: Two different groups: the Regalia of the Dethroned Queen for the Dethroned Queen, along with the Eyes of Salt/Heart of Flies for Cxaxa Querephas
- Revenge Myopia: The Seers don't care that Seraph started the whole mess and that his execution came after a prolonged pattern of interference with the Pentacle; he was killed by them and that's all that matters.
- Shout-Out:
- Two Pentacle Mages are named Samuel and Beckett, with the former even involved in time travel matters.
- The final part of the Chronicle involves storming an office building in the middle of a snowstorm, like in the first Max Payne.
- The Worf Effect: Shiva no sells Beckett's spell, then kills him with contemptuous ease.
