Hidden Lore

Mage: the Ascension

by Brian Campbell, Allen Varney, John R. Robey

A Storyteller's work is never done. A few helpful charts, secrets and reference sheets, however, can make his (or her) life a whole lot easier.

All the charts you need for your Mage chronicle can be found within this fold-out screen - combat tables, easy-reference Sphere sheets, character creation steps and more. Meanwhile, the enclosed booklet offers a variety of goodies for players and storytellers alike.

Hidden Lore: The Second Edition Book and Screen contains a host of helpful hints and useful magiks, including:

Easy-access charts and tables, and full-page sphere descriptions. A complete Chantry set in Seattle, Washington. A selection of spells for mysticks of all kinds, plus background details, famous mages, rules options and more.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Fantasy, Reference, Fiction, Urban Fantasy, Gaming

72 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 1996

About the author

Librarian Note: There are more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[R J Royer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great reference book for Mage: the Ascension. I used it for many years but am now giving it away as I no longer have time to play so I want someone else to get some use out of it.

[Max · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, as the authors themselves admit, this is basically a book containing some stuff they wanted to include in the core Mage book, but had to leave out for space reasons. It's nice that they went ahead and published the leftovers. What's less nice is that this is a pretty mixed bag. On the one hand, there are some pre-made magick spells for each Tradition and a handful for the Technocracy, Nephandi, and Marauders. It's nice to see how each faction approaches magick, as it gives me a better idea of what makes them different. Plus, the Void Engineers have a rote that lets them turn any vehicle into a spaceship, which is awesome. Also, there's a pretty good write-up for a Chantry based out of a magic shop in Seattle, and I totally want to run a game using it as the PCs' home base. There are some well-done characters and interesting plot potential. On the other hand, the rest of the book is kinda disappointing. There's some pretty limited and pretty basic roleplaying advice for players, and there's a section for Storytellers that's supposed to go into some of the behind the scenes details of the factions, but it really doesn't tell anything more than what I learned from the core book. Thankfully I think the Storyteller book corrects this with much more in-depth information. The section of one page summaries of the nine Spheres is useful, I guess, but since all my books are PDFs, I can just find the relevant pages in the core book pretty easily. All in all, I wish the good stuff had just been in the main Mage book, because it wouldn't have added too much length, and it would have made this not too great supplement entirely unnecessary.

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book, sadly, isn't very good. The best part of it is the list of rotes (many of which are out of date and need work to use for modern editions) along with the sphere handouts (similar), but the rest is at best pointless and at worst absurd. Two noteworthy examples: In the write-up of the Seattle setting the Chantry under "Pike's [sic] Place Market" has access to 20 points of Quintessence a Day via 4 nodes, causing them to average being 35 point Nodes, which must be among the most powerful on the planet, but they're not discussed as being of global importance. Another bit is "The archetypal Nephandus is a woman" which, while yes it is then mentioned to be "more to do with the witch-harlot stereotype than with real membership or power" it was a bizarre thing to encounter.

In general, this book consists of cut material from Mage 2e, and it's very, very clear why most of it was cut.