The Fragile Path: Testaments of the First Cabal

Mage: the Ascension

by Jim Moore, Elizabeth Fischi

And I have seen it pass sterile into textbooks, just more facts to be learned to please a stern tutor, then forgotten when the lesson is over.

But the lessons of the Awakened must never end. By the divine Avatar within each of us, we are bound to history just as we are charged to create it. We, of all mortals, cannot forget what has gone before us. Nor can we shunt it into scraps of paper and shove it onto library shelves, just another book to be checked out when required. We are history, the past, present, and future incarnate, and we must not forget those who went before us - what they did, what they gave, what they eventually won - lest we become the last chapter in the final history book.

This is the tale of the First Cabal; five Testaments, plus my own observations and commentary. As so few of our kind have the tolerance to sift through the archaic wordcraft, I have taken the (laborious) liberty of translating these testimonies...

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

136 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1995

About the author

Librarian note: There is more than one author with this name.

Reviews

[Francisco Becerra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another beautiful book in the same line as the Book of Nod or the Chronicle of the Black Labirinth. This one deals with making of the difference a whole and the price of betrayal. It lacks the beautiful graphics of BoN, but is more diverse in story.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Fragile Path is an in-world document, one of several across the World of Darkness, but the only one specifically for Mage. All in all, a good document, though at times it's a bit tricky to read (the Song of Bernadette is interesting and creative, but not the easiest thing to follow). In the end, it's very much worth reading, especially if you're playing or running a game in the Sorcerer's Crusade era. However, a few things about it do fall flat: it doesn't actually sell that Eloine is so irresistable that everyone is falling in love with her, and the case for Heylel is even weaker. In fact, playing Heylel in charge is a baffling choice for the nascent council, given that the description of Heylel comes off as a wildly unqualified and erratic individual. Those things are forgivable, however, due to the fact that it's supposedly testaments from the survivors of the betrayal.

[Ian James · Rating 4 out of 5]

another beautiful book i read turning my WOD phase.