I’ll tell you the ultimate secret of magic. Any cunt could do it.
As you walk down the street, you feel it. Though the sidewalk is choked with people, they all remain oblivious, not one of them reacting to the building as they walk past it.
You were like them once, blind to the secrets beneath the skin of the world, but one day you Awakened. Somewhere high above you, the apartment — and the thing it contains, calls to you. It’s a Mystery. You will solve it, and you’ll take its power for yourself.
Mage is a game about secret knowledge and hubristic pride, about knowing too much, becoming separated from your peers by special insight into the incomprehensible forces and twisting occult conspiracies behind a Fallen World.
Mage is a game of power and hubris, of the temptation to allow your reach to exceed your grasp, of knowledge outpacing wisdom. It’s a game about obsession, turning away from comfortable Sleep to chase the weird and the occult. It’s mages as occult detectives, confronting the supernatural of a gnostic world.
Themes
Mage depicts the Awakened, human beings who have unlocked the potential buried deep within everyone to see the many layers of occult symbolism and magical conspiracy influencing everything in the world.
More than mere passive observers, though, mages have power; their insight grants them the Art of magic, the ability to manipulate symbols to cast spells. As vulnerable as any other human when surprised, but capable of grand, terrible feats of impossibility when prepared, mages deepen their insight — their Gnosis — by understanding the Mysteries of the supernatural, and apply it through their accumulated knowledge of ten Arcana, each a combination subdivision of reality and academic discipline.
The more power mages gain, the more esoteric Mysteries they can chase; and on and on it goes, until they escape the world entirely or succumb to its dangers. Mages must contend with both the monstrous inhabitants of the Fallen World and the majority of human beings, Sleepers whose souls recoil from magic.
The World is a Lie
People imagine that the world they can touch and see is real — more real than pure concepts. The abstract only exists to define the concrete. This world is all there is, a cruel, oppressive regime that grinds souls down with a thousand tyrannies. A whispering voice in the back of the head saying:
You’re worthless.
You’re only human.
Don’t look.
Concentrate on surviving the here and now.
It’s a Lie. A falsehood, created by invisible enemies from the symbolism of oppression and the Paradoxical energies of an Abyss of untruth. Mages Awaken when they confront the Lie, when they look deep inside themselves, or are shocked outside of themselves and see past the Lie to the symbols beneath.
They call this Tapestry of hidden truth the Supernal World, and the concrete universe around them the Fallen World.
Despite their Gnosis, however, mages are trapped in the Fallen World.
They can look at the Supernal, but not touch. They can see how the symbols of the Supernal inform the Fallen World, but they can’t become those symbols themselves, and experience the universe as pure magic. They do, however, have evidence that something does — the Supernal has inhabitants of its own, entities of pure magic, and over the centuries mages have realized that those they see are only the tip of the iceberg.
It is believed that deep in the unseen Supernal, tyrannical beings that mages call Exarchs have created the Lie to keep humanity both vulnerable to and ignorant of their influence.
Trapped halfway between Supernal transcendence and comforting, ignorant Sleep, mages often feel like their lives are journeys — they can’t go back, so they must go forward. They call the symbols they have affinity with their Paths, and describe the Mysteries with imagery of labyrinths and prisons.
By meditating on an imaginary journey, a mage can shut the physical world out and shift her consciousness inward, exploring Astral landscapes made of the human soul. And in the strangest, quietest corners of the Fallen World, mages find signs that it was not always Fallen, that the Exarchs did not always rule.
Addicted To Mysteries
There is one hard rule of magic as we know it:
It can’t be fully learned without being experienced.
Magic leaves the practitioner transformed, and the journey of encountering the mysterious and exploring it is as important to a mage’s development as whatever rush she feels at the end of the trail when something’s been pinned down and understood.
And the world is teeming with Mysteries.
Mages can’t shut their Gnosis off. Once your soul is opened to the insights of a Path, it’s always there. Every supernatural event, from the least ghost using its Influences to the greatest cosmic Mysteries, stands out to a mage without trying.
She feels an itch, or a faint aura, or a sense of someone walking over her grave.
Constantly.
Other supernatural beings can pretend that the world’s still “normal” despite becoming vampires, or werewolves. Mages know that the supernatural is nearly omnipresent. Even if they try to live normal lives, they’d soon be provoked by their own sense for the uncanny.
A rare minority can’t take it, lashing out at the Mysteries and even other Awakened, but most are made of sterner and more prideful stuff. Their Paths call them to face the unknown, to understand it, and grow closer to the Supernal.
With increasing insight, their powers grow, allowing them to reach for more difficult Mysteries, despite the very real risks to themselves and others.
The great flaw of the Awakened is hubris, the certainty that their obsessions are an end worth any means, and the pride in their own abilities that comes before a terrible fall.