Campaign Pitch: Left Ended Alleys

For my next pitch for this year I have an idea that has been stewing since the end of my long Mage; the Awakening game. Or really from the game I ran before that. A story of bad choices and incredible power, of street level action and left handed paths:

Left Ended Alleys

Elevator Pitch: In a city without friendly Orders, mages must find their own secretive paths under the ever searching eye of the Panopticon. Not all routes lead to Wisdom.

Once you were asleep. A simple drone scurrying under the gaze of a million electronic eyes. A mortal blindly walking amid a sea of mysteries.

You Awakened. You glimpsed the truth. You signed your name on a Watchtower and seized the power of the Supernal.

You can do magic and bend the laws of this reality. You see the horrors in the shadows and the cracks in world. The dark places promise enlightenment and danger.

However you are alone and untutored in the limits of your powers.

You need allies. Do you trust the child with the aura of carrion birds? Do you trade for the secrets to yantras with the old woman who smells strangely of pork? A potential mentor promises you the power over the darkest of nightmares. Do you take him up on his offer?

Meanwhile the electronic eyes watch and report to unseen masters.

In plain terms, you are recently Awakened mages in a modern major city that lays under the watchful eye of the Panopticon, an organization dedicated to surveilling the population and suppressing rogue Awakened. No “friendly” organization of mages exist in the city currently, forcing you work out the secrets of magic on your own or by go to dubious mentors who might be corrupt, manipulative, and possibly insane.

Theme: Trapped in the Labyrinth. Without guidance, mages have difficulty figuring out what routes will lead them closer to the truth. Or truths. Crafting one’s soul can grant great power but also irrevocably twist it. Is it better to release the paradox caused by magic, possibly twisting spells awry, or to contain it within oneself and risk Abyssal infection? Is the mage offering to recruit you into an organization trapping you in a pyramid scheme?

Mood: Paranoia. The enemy holds the high ground. They see everything. They could be anyone. That “helpful” wizard down the block. The police officer who smiles every time they see you. Your sister who sends arcane text to her new “boyfriend”. Who can you trust? Even if someone is not with “Them”, who knows what other agenda they have.

System: Mage: the Awakening 2nd Edition with some house rules for the morality mechanics. Also some merits will be off-limits initially.

My main gripes with the system has nothing to do with Mage and more to do with the Chronicle of Darkness system in general.

One of those problematic parts is Conditions. My players and I forget to apply them, forget to use them, and let them linger well past their applicability. However I’m giving the mechanic a second try. Conditions worked better in person (which this game will be in) and I intend to try to make them more readily resolvable.

More relevant for this game is the Wisdom system. I hate linear systems for sanity/morality. I like more nuance and less direct connection to experience.

House Rules (adapted from Unknown Armies): Wisdom will be replaced by several Stress Meters which measure how comfortable a character is to certain psychological strains (like exposure to the supernatural or helplessness). Each Stress Meter consists of 10 tiers of stresses. Encountering a trigger for a given strain forces the character to roll of the lower of Resolve and Composure. Success means the character grows more hardened, eventually becoming immune to the stress of such experiences. Failure causes them to suffer a momentary break (including an immediately resolved condition with a Beat) and starts a slow slide toward madness.

Recovery is divorced from the experience system. Multiple options (magic, Astral journeys, therapy) exist to remove levels of hardened or failures, each with their own costs and downsides. Too many failures and you go insane. But on the other hand, beware of getting too hardened as that leads away from Wisdom and toward the Abyss.

In the past I’ve had great success adapting Unknown Army’s Madness meters system for Hunter: the Vigil. Since I ran that game as normal people newly exposed to the supernatural, the system helped facilitate the experience of “ordinary” people falling down the rabbit hole that is the World of Darkness.

Since this game has a similar “innocence” about the characters, I figure this system could work equally well. Hardened levels to the Unnatural strain will accrue quickly (I think I might grant a +2 bonus for exposure caused by one’s own magic) but I think all the strains will eventually come into play: Violence, Helplessness (against the Panopticon), Isolation and Self (Shadow names anyone?).

Mechanically effective “Wisdom” for spellcasting purposes is 8 minus 1 per 5 levels of hardened or failed a character has for their Stress Meters.