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Mage: the Ascension
Beyond the Barriers: The Book of Worlds
Worlds Within Worlds...
Pass through the Gauntlet, wander past the Penumbra, and encounter an infinity of worlds floating just beyond consciousness. Heavens, hells, Paradox Realms, Chantries, Umbral reflections and mysterious Zones spin in the unmappable dance of creation. Push on through the Horizon, and endless space becomes your playground. Just watch your step...
...Outside, Within and Across...
Wise travelers need a guide. Between these covers, a collection of mysticks offers such assistance, based upon their own observations and discoveries. Cosmology, traveler tips and Realm descriptions fill this book to overflowing. Heed their words; they may save your soul.
...Creation Without Limits Realms Without End.
The Book of Worlds is a massive sourcebook for Umbral travelers, detailing rough cosmologies, sample Realms and mystick places. It includes:
Crossover compatible with Werewolf and the other World of Darkness games;
Details about the puzzling Worlds Beyond, including the Three Umbrae, the Hollow World and myriad Realms - Balador, Autocthonia, Victoria Station, and many others;
Creatures, vessels, Storyteller Hints and much more.
Pass through the Gauntlet, wander past the Penumbra, and encounter an infinity of worlds floating just beyond consciousness. Heavens, hells, Paradox Realms, Chantries, Umbral reflections and mysterious Zones spin in the unmappable dance of creation. Push on through the Horizon, and endless space becomes your playground. Just watch your step...
...Outside, Within and Across...
Wise travelers need a guide. Between these covers, a collection of mysticks offers such assistance, based upon their own observations and discoveries. Cosmology, traveler tips and Realm descriptions fill this book to overflowing. Heed their words; they may save your soul.
...Creation Without Limits Realms Without End.
The Book of Worlds is a massive sourcebook for Umbral travelers, detailing rough cosmologies, sample Realms and mystick places. It includes:
Crossover compatible with Werewolf and the other World of Darkness games;
Details about the puzzling Worlds Beyond, including the Three Umbrae, the Hollow World and myriad Realms - Balador, Autocthonia, Victoria Station, and many others;
Creatures, vessels, Storyteller Hints and much more.
197 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1996
22 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 18, 2018
I described this book in the following words when I was about halfway through it:
This is the Umbra supplement for Mage, about the spirit worlds surrounding the Earth. And since Mage has an extremely broad focus, basically every possible kind of alternate world is crammed into here. Consensual reality means that the spirit world is different in different places, and different for different people who look at it, leading to situations like the quoted one above. The moon is simultaneously the dead rock we know, but with a Technocratic base on the dark side that serves as a guard for Earth against the horrors that dwell in the void; a rock with fading ruins of a past civilization where no human has set foot since Horatio Savage's ethership landed there in the 19th century, with a Victorian train station in orbit and Urr Re'ok the time-traveling psychic dinosaur; and the court of Luna, goddess of change. It depends on how you look at it.
Reading this makes me understand the change of focus in Mage: The Ascension Revised Edition, though now I think it's misguided because the most interesting parts of the Umbra by far are the ones away from Earth. Penumbra Venus is the Venus of early sci fi, with vast steaming jungles, intelligent lizard people, and dinosaurs. The major battles of the Ascension War takes place around the moons of Jupiter, with several moons trading hands multiple times a year and the Nephandi, Technocracy, Marauders, and Traditions engaged in an ongoing multi-front war. Thereiswas a Hermetic chantry on Mus, the secret moon of Mercury that's invisible from Earth, until the Nephandi took it in a surprise attack and the survivors had to evacuate to the Euthanatos stronghold on Cerberus, the second moon of Pluto. The Void Engineers have a Dyson sphere they've found around Alpha Centauri.
How is the Tree of Life or the realm of childhood nightmares supposed to compare with that? Give me space marines fighting wizards riding dragons off the moons of Jupiter any day.
The Umbra closer to Earth is divided into three separate realms. The first is the High Umbra, which is basically Plato's World of Forms. This contains Heaven and Hell--or rather the Heavens and the Hells, because all religions are represented there, and it might be reflections of the concept of the afterlife rather than the reality--Inventium, the world of inventions; Dystopia, the horrible cyberpunk future city; and a bunch of others. The second is the Middle Umbra, which is a reflection of nature and of people's concepts about the physical world. A lot of the places here are Mythic Realms, which are humanity's mythology given life. Not just the myth of King Arthur, but all myths of King Arthur, and each separate one has its own realm. Finally, the Low Umbra is the realms of the dead and the setting of Wraith: The Oblivion, and is more difficult to get to than either of the other two.
There was more crossover in here that I was expecting. I guess it's unavoidable, considering how much Werewolf: The Apocalypse deals with the Umbra as well, but there's a lot of references to consulting with werewolves, or asking werewolves about particular places in the Umbra before you go there, or not going somewhere without a werewolf escort. The aforementioned Court of Luna, or the various other courts of the planetary Incarna, for example. There's even a few mentions of how vampires can enter the Umbra using Auspex, though I have to admit the description of Astral Projection in Vampire: The Masquerade doesn't sound like the High Umbra they supposedly enter at all. Changeling: The Dreaming even gets a shoutout with the way that Maya, the Dream Realm, is conflated with the Dreaming.
The major benefit of Beyond the Barriers: the Book of Worlds is that it provides an excuse to do pretty much any kind of game. The Mythic Realms alone allows for literally any setting that humanity has or could ever imagine, and while a game about wizards is not the place I would have thought of to play space marines fighting aliens, the conflation of horrible spirits from beyond reality with horrible aliens from beyond the solar system means that there's a division of the Technocracy that's dedicated to doing just that (and the book actually calls out Call of Cthulhu for those who want inspiration on what exactly is out there, which made me smile pretty widely). Really, exploring ruins from the vanished Martian civilization or founding a secret base on a Saturnian moon sounds far more interesting to me than visiting the conception of pure color or the Realm of Winter.
If there's a problem with this book, it's laid out in the introduction. The author doesn't like rules and says that he runs everything narratively, and that means that all the rules are crammed into the back of the book and mostly just consist of "raise the Difficulty and require a lot of successes." Sometimes some of the Spheres get banned for good measure. It's true that human mythology paints the spirit world as a capricious and dangerous place--don't eat the food in the Underworld, don't look back as you ascend the stairs, don't wear clothing of mixed fibers inside the sanctuary--but the rules are mostly not very exciting, and they seem especially dry after the wondrous descriptions of all these alternate worlds.
I saw the flamewars back when Mage Revised came out, but until now I didn't really understand what they were about. Cutting off the Umbra does bring the action down to Earth, but there's so much that was lost in the process. This book makes me want to take a game about modern wizards and use it to run starship battles off the moons of Jupiter, and that's no mean feat.
Mage: the Ascension, a storytelling game about the consequences of being able to change reality, and also about telepathic, time-traveling pink dinosaurs who live in a Victorian train station in orbit around the Moon.And yeah, that's Beyond the Barriers: the Book of Worlds in a one-line summary.
This is the Umbra supplement for Mage, about the spirit worlds surrounding the Earth. And since Mage has an extremely broad focus, basically every possible kind of alternate world is crammed into here. Consensual reality means that the spirit world is different in different places, and different for different people who look at it, leading to situations like the quoted one above. The moon is simultaneously the dead rock we know, but with a Technocratic base on the dark side that serves as a guard for Earth against the horrors that dwell in the void; a rock with fading ruins of a past civilization where no human has set foot since Horatio Savage's ethership landed there in the 19th century, with a Victorian train station in orbit and Urr Re'ok the time-traveling psychic dinosaur; and the court of Luna, goddess of change. It depends on how you look at it.
Reading this makes me understand the change of focus in Mage: The Ascension Revised Edition, though now I think it's misguided because the most interesting parts of the Umbra by far are the ones away from Earth. Penumbra Venus is the Venus of early sci fi, with vast steaming jungles, intelligent lizard people, and dinosaurs. The major battles of the Ascension War takes place around the moons of Jupiter, with several moons trading hands multiple times a year and the Nephandi, Technocracy, Marauders, and Traditions engaged in an ongoing multi-front war. There
How is the Tree of Life or the realm of childhood nightmares supposed to compare with that? Give me space marines fighting wizards riding dragons off the moons of Jupiter any day.
The Umbra closer to Earth is divided into three separate realms. The first is the High Umbra, which is basically Plato's World of Forms. This contains Heaven and Hell--or rather the Heavens and the Hells, because all religions are represented there, and it might be reflections of the concept of the afterlife rather than the reality--Inventium, the world of inventions; Dystopia, the horrible cyberpunk future city; and a bunch of others. The second is the Middle Umbra, which is a reflection of nature and of people's concepts about the physical world. A lot of the places here are Mythic Realms, which are humanity's mythology given life. Not just the myth of King Arthur, but all myths of King Arthur, and each separate one has its own realm. Finally, the Low Umbra is the realms of the dead and the setting of Wraith: The Oblivion, and is more difficult to get to than either of the other two.
There was more crossover in here that I was expecting. I guess it's unavoidable, considering how much Werewolf: The Apocalypse deals with the Umbra as well, but there's a lot of references to consulting with werewolves, or asking werewolves about particular places in the Umbra before you go there, or not going somewhere without a werewolf escort. The aforementioned Court of Luna, or the various other courts of the planetary Incarna, for example. There's even a few mentions of how vampires can enter the Umbra using Auspex, though I have to admit the description of Astral Projection in Vampire: The Masquerade doesn't sound like the High Umbra they supposedly enter at all. Changeling: The Dreaming even gets a shoutout with the way that Maya, the Dream Realm, is conflated with the Dreaming.
The major benefit of Beyond the Barriers: the Book of Worlds is that it provides an excuse to do pretty much any kind of game. The Mythic Realms alone allows for literally any setting that humanity has or could ever imagine, and while a game about wizards is not the place I would have thought of to play space marines fighting aliens, the conflation of horrible spirits from beyond reality with horrible aliens from beyond the solar system means that there's a division of the Technocracy that's dedicated to doing just that (and the book actually calls out Call of Cthulhu for those who want inspiration on what exactly is out there, which made me smile pretty widely). Really, exploring ruins from the vanished Martian civilization or founding a secret base on a Saturnian moon sounds far more interesting to me than visiting the conception of pure color or the Realm of Winter.
If there's a problem with this book, it's laid out in the introduction. The author doesn't like rules and says that he runs everything narratively, and that means that all the rules are crammed into the back of the book and mostly just consist of "raise the Difficulty and require a lot of successes." Sometimes some of the Spheres get banned for good measure. It's true that human mythology paints the spirit world as a capricious and dangerous place--don't eat the food in the Underworld, don't look back as you ascend the stairs, don't wear clothing of mixed fibers inside the sanctuary--but the rules are mostly not very exciting, and they seem especially dry after the wondrous descriptions of all these alternate worlds.
I saw the flamewars back when Mage Revised came out, but until now I didn't really understand what they were about. Cutting off the Umbra does bring the action down to Earth, but there's so much that was lost in the process. This book makes me want to take a game about modern wizards and use it to run starship battles off the moons of Jupiter, and that's no mean feat.
Read
August 1, 2021I bought this book as part of my exploration into older Mage books. I was a little bit nervous about it when I discovered it was written in character, but I enjoyed more than I thought I would.
March 19, 2019
Book of Worlds has many things that I disagree with in it, some of which were changed by Infinite Tapestry, some of which I just think go against the themes of Mage that I prefer. Overall, though, it's a solid book, and has a lot to offer in its tour of the Otherworlds.
One thing I wasn't a fan of was the experiment of separating the mechanics from the flavor. Having the entire book written in character was a mixed bag, but worked for what they were trying to do. But not including sidebars with mechanics and relegating them to the appendix will make it a lot harder to find things in it later.
One thing I wasn't a fan of was the experiment of separating the mechanics from the flavor. Having the entire book written in character was a mixed bag, but worked for what they were trying to do. But not including sidebars with mechanics and relegating them to the appendix will make it a lot harder to find things in it later.
March 22, 2014
The Umbra is the best part of the World of Darkness and this book shows how surreal and mindbogglingly huge and bizarre it can get. If you like venturing to unusual and strange worlds, it's definitely a good read.
November 1, 2015
One of the best books about the Umbra, full of fantastic scenarios and breathtaking places. This book propels Mage to fantastic heights, each page full of jewels of the imagination. A must!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews