Over at rpg.net, DaveB, famous for his Mage game descriptions in the Actual Play forums, described Mage: the Awakening thus:
“IMO, it’s this – Vampire and Werewolf are your classic “once-human monsters” games, Vampire especially. Humans are things to be feared and envied.
Changeling and Promethean, the younger games, have humanity as a thing to be aspired to. Changeling is about reclaiming your life after abuse. Promethean about becoming a person. The new World of Darkness tries hard to make the normal human being something other than a joke.
Mage is aligned entirely the other way – it’s about people who have what all the other game lines envy or try to get but aren’t satisfied. Humans that turn themselves into monsters chasing power. The anti-Changeling, if you will.
Everything’s about that power. The Lie is the Gnostic vision of the world – the world of darkness we know is the proverbial shadows on the back of a cave, with the Supernal as the light and the Abyss as the thing casting the shadows, interposing itself and creating reality as we know it as a result.
And incidentally, Matthias? That’s what the Abyss is – it’s negatives. That isn’t a calculator, it’s the thing that makes a calculator shape when you shine the Aether behind it. Abyssal Intrusions are things like mathematics gone wrong, language gone wrong, false histories that kill and parasites that reverse your sense of pain so you become addicted to eating glass. They’re *lies*. The Supernal is everything that Is, the Abyss is everything that Is Not and the World of Darkness the interface between the two.
Mages are obssessed with Truth, though they have a funny way of showing it. They’ve squinted out into the light and convinced themselves that it’s better than staying in the cave. Never mind that the cave is neccessary for human life as we know it. Never mind that fire burns – the Supernal is True therefore it must be Right.
Mages give themselves magical identities – their Shadow Names – only partially out of a sense of self-preservation. It’s not *that* big an effect on sympathetic magic, after all, not until you get (through Archmastery) close enough to touch the light and replace your real name with it entirely. It’s a rejection of the world and recasting themselves as they want to be. Luminous beings we are, not this crude matter. Mages lose wisdom as they deny their responsibility to the world in favour of chasing Ascension or becoming wrapped up in their power. They cling to half-remembered bits and pieces of the Ur-Civilisation the Guardians of the Veil would like everyone to call “Atlantis” because it was closer to Truth, and those that don’t like it as a myth substitute their own quests.
Never mind that the last time anyone walked out of the cave en masse they killed the campers, took over the camp fire outside and built a sturdy gate over the cave’s entrance so noone else can get out.
And the Light isn’t Nice. The Primal Wild is not a cartoon Eden (I personally have been gently corrected when Freelancing for comparing it to Eden in the same sense that Aether is often compared to Heaven). It’s the Truth of Nature, and the Truth of Nature is not a pleasent place for humans to visit. The Aether is the Truth of Power; not for the faint-hearted, even for those that prefer beautiful women with fluffy wings to old-testement visions of how Angels appear and behave.
What kind of person rejects everything around them, in favour of chasing the ability to play with that kind of fire? They’d have to be *crazy*. Visionary. Inspired, reckless, hubristic and any other adjectives you like.
That’s Mage. Marching wide-eyed into certain destruction out of a sense of a better world. The Tarot Fool at the edge of the cliff. When the end comes and they get chewed up by the things they go poking into in this world, the Abyssal things they try to force their way past, the Supernal things they’re trying to grab by the tail or (most often) their own fellow Mages, shoving and jostling for prime tail-grabbing position, there’s no True Fae, Demiurge or Sire they can point to – it’s all their own fault.”