What seems like a lifetime ago, two months before the first of these Open Development posts, I was on holiday (that’s proper English for “vacation”) in the Orkney Islands. One day, I visited a Distillery and bought a reasonably old whisky. It’s sat, undisturbed, in its bottle in the corner of my living room ever … Read more
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
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
We’ve talked about Paths and Legacies already, so we’re past due to talk about the Orders. If Path and Legacy are broad and narrow definitions of magical style, how a mage works her magic, then it’s the job of the last axis of character definition to provide the why, when, and where. From a game … Read more