a brief introduction to mage, a much better book

Changing Breeds Part XI 1/2: Mages Are Broken

Disclaimer: None of this works quite the way I say it does if you assume that Magic > Physics, which the system does in order to prevent maniacs like me from doing what I'm about to do. I'm going to be showing what happens if people forget that rule (and, from a questioning of my friends who play WoD, most of us HAD), or deliberately ignore it.

Hello, and welcome back to The Battle of the Century, Round 2. After having the title of Manliest Thing In The World wrested from him, The Man Your Man Could Kill Like went back to the drawing board.



He puts on his robe and wizard hat and casts Level 3 Eroticism and becomes The Mage Your Mage Could Cast Like.

Mage in nWoD claims to be cross-splat compatible, but this is a damned dirty lie. Mage is only cross-splat in that the mechanics are the same as the other systems. When it comes to relative levels of power, a munchkined Mage at character creation could easily mop the floor with just about any other character at creation barring humongous amounts of munchkinry and more planning than Batman. Mages thrive on being paranoid and always prepared, and also having about a dozen or so pre-made powers (and potentially infinite powers if you're creative enough) per dot of their supernatural power as opposed to only one. Also, they have ten different Arcana to choose from (Death, Matter, Life, Spirit, Time, Fate, Mind, Space, Forces, and Prime).

Half the reason I'm doing this is to remind you that no matter how broken Changing Breeds gets, it can always be worse. The other half is because this example horrifies me.

So, our hero still has 5 in every Attribute and Skill, and now we'll give him Gnosis 5 and the maximum amount in each Arcana he can. He can't have five dots in all Arcana, because Gnosis sets hard limits for each Arcana you learn after the first. For example, at Gnosis 1, your first four Arcana are limited to three dots maximum, the next three are two dots, and the last three are one dot. A mage with Gnosis 1 who has learned all the Arcana before increasing his raw power would be exceptionally weird, however.

We're staying at Gnosis 5 because Gnosis 6 and above is really powerful and unlocks Arcana above 5 dots, which is considered to be the domain of Archmastery, and Archmages are synonymous with "ST Fiat."

There's about eleven thousand ways to kill, maim, humiliate, destroy, trick, enslave, annoy, or benefit somebody with each Arcana, with certain arcana (hello, Mind, Space, and Fate) being exceptionally good at what they do. However, a few Arcana seem innocuous enough until you apply advanced learning to them, at which point they suddenly become some of the most hideously powerful stuff available to ANYTHING in the whole system.

I'm referring to Matter and Forces in the hands of somebody with a degree in either Chemistry or Physics.

That's right, is the deadliest thing in the World of Darkness.

Imagine the open battlefield that our hero and the Elephant Man were on last time. Let's make our hero's three five-dot Arcana Forces, Matter, and Space. Space 5 means that, given a sympathetic connection (like a hair clipping, some blood, or a photo), he can be on the other side of the planet from Elephant Man and still cast a spell on him (albeit not one that's full-out offensive). Or, in this case, just open a Scrying window and cast through that. The Mage Your Mage Could Cast Like is definitely going to want to be at least one county away for this one.

With his fifteen dice roll for the rote, our hero casts the Matter 4 spell, Lesser Transmogrification. With his average of five successes, he is able to affect an "olympic swimming pool"'s worth of one kind of matter and transform it into one kind of liquid, and vice versa. The only real limitation is that you can't make impossible things, like liquid wood.

Our hero busts out his chemistry textbook, and settles on turning a 29x29x29 meter chunk of the ground below Elephant Man into liquid chlorine triflouride. (If you count this as an exotic substance, this technically requires Archmastery to do sympathetically.)

This stuff oxidizes more than oxygen itself does, meaning it can burn things you probably think are impossible to burn, like ashes, sand, water, solid asbestos, concrete, bricks, and probably the human soul. As mentioned in the article, a one ton spill of this - which translates to about 512 liters if my math is right - burned through a foot of concrete and at least a meter of sand and gravel before guttering out, while burning off hydroflouric acid fumes, an acid that gives you a fucking heart attack as it burns your skin off.

That was 512 liters. An olympic swimming pool has 2,500,000 liters.

That, my friends, is a whole lot of burning.

Also, if the ambient temperature where the spell is cast is about 13 Celsius or 55 Fahrenheit, the liquid will immediately turn into a gaseous state, probably explosively, sending Satan's own hot sauce soaring through the air. If the area is even remotely wooded, or otherwise full of things that burn well to begin with, I would honestly expect to be able to see the fire from space.

Suffice to say, I don't think you even need to figure out how many dice are rolled to burn up Elephant Man before saying "Fuck it, he's dead. And so is a good portion of the county."

Other possible japes with Forces and Matter include:

- Warping gravity with enough force in a wide enough area to make a significant portion of the planet's crust implode

- Turning bullets into solid Caesium slugs mid-flight

- Being able to remotely access any information being transmitted wirelessly, WITH YOUR BRAIN

- Doing the chlorine triflouride trick with liquid nitrogen, flash-freezing the poor idiot before the liquid nitrogen turns into gaseous nitrogen at insane rates

- Make your Storytellers go crosseyed when you ask how it's unfair to be able to turn water into napalm when the only mechanical restrictions between Matter dots are mostly based on the metaphysical value of matter so you can't turn dirt to gold until 5 dots

And much more. This is only a small fraction of what you can do with two of the Arcana, as well. There's commanding legions of zombies, spiritual hordes, giving people aneurysms with a thought, becoming The Incredible Hulk, and scores of other ways to break the game.

So, what's stopping some lunatic Mage from blowing up the planet shortly after Awakening? Three things, really.

1: Archmages. Basically, if you survive long enough to become an Archmage, you know that the balance of power in the world is hilariously fragile, and all the Archmages - Pentacle or Seer (looooong story, but they're two opposing groups) - observe Pax Arcana. This generally means "Don't do stupid obvious bullshit with Archmastery or magic in general that would reveal Mages or ruin the planet/reality, or we'll fucking kill you." And they will, because they're essentially demigods by the time they're slinging Archmastery around.

2: Paradox. The Abyss - a horrible, sucking un-reality defined by its lack of definition or form or logic, created by a huge magical catastrophe in the past - notices when spells are cast that flagrantly go against how reality should work. It proceeds to latch on to these spells and devour that delicious Supernal energy with all it has, screwing with how the spell is cast. At best, this is you getting a nasty headache from internalizing the damage. At worst, the Abyss spills into reality where the spell is cast, and all sorts of horrible abominations come out hungry for a meal of Dumbass Mage. Casting a spell like this doesn't mechanically guarantee the Abyss noticing it, but any Storyteller worth a fuck would immediately have the Abyss explode in from how vulgar the spell is. Really, it's arguable whether or not the incursion is better or worse than the actual spell. At this point, Archmages would probably be interfering as well.

3: Despite how broken Mage can get, it requires you to actually sit down and think about how to break it. At first glance, it just seems moderately powerful, but as soon as someone with a devious mind, a command of how the Storyteller system works, and a good amount of practical knowledge sets themselves to breaking the game, the game breaks in a spectacular fashion.

There's also the argument that the actual tone of the game setting itself could mean any phenomenal cosmic power you wield is utterly meaningless in the face of a horrible nega-universe devouring everything and false gods who hate you on a personal level sitting in the thrones of heaven controlling everything, but that doesn't negate the fact that Crazy Steve just blew up Cleveland.

In summation, Mage Storytellers should pray they don't play with douchebag munchkins, and if they do, they'd better be ready to flat out say "No, fuck you, you don't get to do that."

Next time: I actually go on with what this review is supposed to be about.