Sorcerer

Mage: the Ascension

by Heather Grove, Conrad Hubbard, Scott Taylor

Small Miracles

Hedge wizards and minor magicians - condemned to the limited powers of rigid Paths and subtle phenomena. Without Awakening, they cannot grasp the true potential of magic - but they're far from weaklings. With careful study and strong will, they unlock power without risk of Paradox. Now that the Reckoning has come, even sorcerers are needed in the Traditions. Whether wizards, visionaries or psychics, these crafty humans are more than mere mortals.

Great Potential

Revised and updated, this volume elaborates on the powers of subtle sorcery in the new Mage Revised Edition line. Here you'll find rules for the various Paths of study, sorcerous Rituals and the Merits and Flaws of visionaries, mediums, and sensitives. Plus, techno-sorcery, exceptional science, psychic phenomena, magical heritage and more, all under one cover at last and suited for those who are a little more than human but still careful enough to escape the scourge of Paradox.

Genres: Gaming, Role Playing Games, Fantasy, World Of Darkness, Urban Fantasy

Paperback

First published June 1, 2000

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I loved reading Mage: the Ascension, one of the things that struck me as I read it was that it doesn't have a lot of elements of magic as it's usually depicted in fiction. Since all magic(k) is an expression of the mage's will, and any implements they use to enact it are merely tools that fall away at higher levels of enlightenment, there's no actual need for poring over ancient tomes, or seeking out rare ingredients by moonlight, or practicing ancient languages to get the pronunciation exactly right. Some mages do all of that, but it's the equivalent of a fidget cube. It's an aid to concentration.

Well, Sorcerer Revised has wizards that do need all of that.

Sorcerers cast magic, but rather than the freeform Spheres used by mages, they use Paths that are more similar to the Disciplines of vampires or the Arcanoi of wraiths, with an escalating progression that allows greater effects at each level. The Path of Conveyance allows faster travel, starting with increased speed and ending with teleportation. The Path of Shapeshifting allows changing hair or eye color at lower levels and moves up to turning into a cat. The Path of Enchantment allows the creation of magical items, starting with something like a jacket that makes the wearer harder to pick out of a crowd and ending in a golem or a wallet that always has $10 in it. The Path of Healing allows curing headaches at lower levels and moves up to curing AIDS or ebola or even raising the dead (as long as they died a few minutes previously).

Each Path has Aspects that can be used similarly to Spheres, but in a much more limited fashion, creating effects on the fly after a few turns of casting, but they also have Rituals, which require exotic ingredients, a lot of time, people chanting under the moonlight while they cut their palms and pour their blood into a bowl, all the kind of things that I usually think of when I think of urban fantasy magic. There's some elements of player choice, since the player can decide how powerful to make an Aspect when casting a spell, but also a lot of static effects that are easier to adjudicate that the Spheres of Mage. Lighting a candle across the room requires Forces 3, Correspondence 2, and Prime 2, you say? Nah, it's a Aspect 1 Path of Hellfire effect.

Psychic powers get folded into the same system, too, though with the Aspects and rituals removed. They're just linear collections of powers rated one to five, exactly like Disciplines, that increase in utility or potency as the rating goes up. Psychokinesis 1 allows the psychic to lift 5 pounds and move it at a crawl, whereas Psychokinesis 5 allows the psychic to life a few hundred pounds and move it at running speed.

The split does mean that there's some arbitrary divisions. Astral Projection is a psychic power even though there's plenty of stories of shamans sending their spirits out on vision quests, and similarly with Channeling. I mean, Aleister Crowley claimed that the Liber Al vel Legis was dictated to him by a spirit, so this isn't something that's foreign to magick-with-a-k.

There's also a large section at the beginning of the book that makes it clear that both the Traditions and the Technocracy have large numbers of sorcerers in their ranks. Possibly more sorcerers than enlightened mages by numbers, considering the number of sorcerer societies, initiatory groups, cabals, and so on in each Tradition. Beyond that, there are a few societies dictated that don't belong to any established Tradition, like the Cult of Isis (of mummy-creating fame), the Star Council (who stole a bunch of "alien technology" from a warehouse), and Nebu-Aatef, the Order of the Golden Fly, who claims descent from Egyptian sorcerers who lost their firstborn to the tenth plague and want revenge on the Jews. Fortunately, there's Magen Ha Chav, the protectors of the thirty-six tzaddikim, to oppose them.

I really loved Mage when I read it, but I loved it for its cosmic wackiness and grand scale. The war for the nature of reality, wizards on dragons fighting space marines off the moons of Jupiter, and how The Book of Worlds has a Technocracy base in a Dyson sphere enclosing Alpha Centauri A. It leads to great gaming, but it does make it harder to bring the game down-to-earth. And as I said, there's no reason for mages to seek out ancient tomes or forbidden lore. Sorcerer Revised solves both of those difficulties simultaneously, and if I ever want to run a game with a secret cabal of sorcerers, hunting for scraps of knowledge and using their powers in the shadows, I'll do it with this book.

And there's already a supplement someone made for it over on the Storyteller's Vault, so there's at least one other person who feels the same way.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a substantial expansion and update of World of Darkness: Sorcerer, but had many problems that the previous edition lacked. First, the good: the powers were updated nicely, including some Paths being made substantially more useful without, in general, being overpowered. The Fellowships were good, and including psychic powers and Fellowships made the book seem more complete. There were, however, some bad things as well. Much of the ST advice is generic to the point of recommending that the best way to have a lower power game is to give out less XP. The Merits and Flaws section was mostly lackluster, with two standout bad merits: Blood Magic which gives no benefit whatsoever as written and Struggling Awake, which allows a sorcerer to use Forces 5 one time in ten (they are, in fact, the same price). Another odd thing was that there were not one but two factions of nasty sorcerers whose entire Fellowship was founded on hating Jews, which was a bit uncomfortable, though one was largely broken. And another big piece of bad advice was that a mage could possibly have numina, a thing that is implicitly declared impossible in other books.

Overall, it's a good book with some weird aspects that are best ignored or require fixing, a solid update of World of Darkness: Sorcerer to Revised Edition.