Dave Brookshaw 
Attainments! Early in the discussions around a new edition of Awakening‘s ruleset, the team expressed a desire to tidy up some of the exceptions and secondary effects built into the system – things like Sympathetic casting, Aimed Spells, Spell Triggers, Counterspell, Summoning. Anything that was magical, but didn’t strictly speaking follow the magic rules. Some … Read more
Welcome, faithful readers! Bit of a departure from the usual format for Second Edition blogs this week, as we’re firmly into “second drafts are arriving back” phase, and there isn’t really anything to show you that you haven’t already seen in first-draft form, not yet. What we do have, though, is a third draft, for … Read more
We all need mirrors. The Awakened are strange, maddening people to be around. Imagine the most insular subculture you’ve ever come across, where the members have their own bizarre rituals, jargon, and shared references, then multiply it by a thousand. Then curse almost everyone else to be driven mad by exposure to that subculture even … Read more
Welcome back, faithful readers! Mage: The Awakening Second Edition has spent the last four months being redlined with a fine-toothed comb, and is now back with the authors for a spruce-up before evolving into its final form. As second drafts come back in, I’ll be sharing the topics we didn’t get around to in the … Read more
Hello everyone! I’m calling a break on the blog for the time being, as Mage has hit the point of me writing up my redlines so that the authors come back from the Holidays and start the final draft. Those of you who came to GenCon saw the first stages of the redlines, in traditional … Read more
As selected in last week’s poll, here is the full first draft of Tokyo in Awakening Second Edition’s setting chapter. Along with London, Tucson, Los Angeles, and Salamanca, it serves as an example of how Mage works in a specific setting, rather than the general terms we write most of the books in. Tokyo, as you … Read more
The people have spoken, and so Nimbus it is. Some supernatural beings in the World of Darkness are possessed of an “aura”, a spiritual presence that tells those so sensitive that the being is something else. Vampires have a predatory aura, werewolves have a powerful, feral mein about them. Mages’ souls are wrapped in the stuff … Read more
Wizards We’ve explored a lot of the setting and the character creation options of the game, so now it’s time to make a U-Turn and dig into the Mage Template itself. First up on this tour is Wisdom. Pride’s counter and Gnosis’ counterpart, Wisdom is both an in-world concept (older factions in the Orders call … Read more
It’s another layover week, and there’s one Path left, so it’s time to look at the Thyrsus. (It’s okay, though, we’ve got five Orders to get through before I run-out of emergency fill-in material.) So. The Thyrsus. I know we’re not supposed to have favorites, and from a game design perspective I don’t, but let … Read more
A long time ago – what seems like an incredibly long time to me, but is probably actually about a year and a half, I had a conversation with Ian Watson. I was newly-minted Awakening Developer but still claiming to not be in threads because second edition hadn’t been publicly announced. Ian was recently released … Read more