Mage: The Ascension is a tabletop role-playing game in the World of Darkness series, where players take the roles of mages. It was originally released by White Wolf Publishing in 1993, and released in new editions in 1995 (second edition), 2000 (Revised Edition), and 2015 (20th Anniversary Edition), which update the game rules. These have been supported with supplementary game books, expanding the game mechanics and setting.[1][2]
If it helps at all, my only oWoD familiarity is with the revised editions so far as rules go. Its been awhile but from what I remember the big change in the editions for Mage had to with the ranks in the spheres. The 2e version was on the whole better explained, edited. The general trend was to reign the power in a bit. That said it is still the fantastic system of magic that was laid out in 1e. Hands down the best magic system in any rpg. I can't speak to 2e revised. AUC.register('auc_MessageboardPostRowDisplay'); AjaxBusy.register('masked', 'busy', 'auc_MessageboardPostRowDisplay', null, null) AntediluvianXIII Oct 24, 2010, 12:30 pm Without going out to the garage and asking my wife to help me bring in the storage boxes all my WoD stuff is in (yes they're heavy!!) M:TA 2e forwarded the ascension war a little and revised a bit more - little changed between paperback and hardback versions and revised - which was another RPG Company releasing tatt for extra profit....the sphere system is one of the best magic systems around IMO because it makes you think..you don't have a spell list.
Mage: The Ascension, 2nd Edition
So: if you like the spirit world and the ghosts and the Umbra from older editions: bear this in mind if you use Mage Revised. If you don't care about these things or your campaign would not be heavily concerned with them, then I would suggest going with it over the previous ones.
The resolution system was...ok...when applied to magic. "How about combat?" I hear you ask. Well, you really shouldn't have. There are two kinds of damage: normal and "aggravated." Aggravated damage was first explained somewhere around page 80 with the enlightening comment that characters can't "soak" aggravated damage. Okay...whatever. The phrase "soak" was used numerous times throughout the book. After I had finished reading it, I realized I still didn't know what the term meant. I looked back, and found it was defined in one sentence in small type at the bottom of page 257.
Like the other Old World of Darkness games, Mage has a 20th Anniversary Edition that includes options for playing any of the three previous editions, cleans up the magick system, supports playable characters from the Traditions, Technocracy, Crafts and/or Orphans, and is generally massive (they had to edit it down to 500k words, with extra material going into supplements). Its Kickstarter was funded in 45 minutes.
DriveThruRPG / Storytellers Vault is running a huge sale on the cornerstones of the World of Darkness: get 75% off every PDF from Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, and Mage: The Ascension, from every edition!
The Fallen World Chronicle Anthology - Contains 12 short stories (8 original to this collection) of magic and mystery, in celebration of the second edition of Mage: The Awakening.
As the title says, would a mage (according to the latest Revised edition) be able to use multiple applicable Foci for his Tradition/Sphere when casting an Effect in order to decrease the difficulty?The table in page 208 of the book mentions a general case with little detail however, as it may imply only mages having Arete >=6 who are using a Focus in their selected Spheres. Moreover, the question can generate multiple sub-queries related to the imposed difficulty modifier:
Like Dungeons and Dragons, Call of Cthulhu (1st Edition) has some roots in an older game, in this case RuneQuest (1st & 2nd Editions) which provides the Basic Role-Playing (BRP) which is the core of the mechanics. Call of Cthulhu (1st Edition) was published in 1981. There have been a total of six editions of Call of Cthulhu and the source material and changes in mechanics from versions 2 through 6 are so similar that RPG Geek considers them the same system.
Mechanically, the various editions are fairly similar. Characters are occult investigators (not always deliberately) who will confront the horrors of a supernatural world. Unlike many games, players are confronted by two ways their character can leave the game. They can die in a traditional manner by being killed by the horrors they encounter, or they can become insane by being exposed to those horrors or gaining knowledge of magic. In most games, the characters eventually become rich and powerful, but in Call of Cthulhu that future is promised to no one and many characters either die a grisly death or wind up in a mental institution.
Call of Cthulhu has provided many source and settings books allowing players to be occult investigators in any era from the Roman Empire to the future. The core setting is in the 1920's but other popular eras include the 1890s (Cthulhu by Gaslight) and modern times (Cthulhu Now). The six editions were published in 1981 (1st), 1983 (2nd), 1986 (3rd), 1989 (4th), 1992 (5th), and 2005 (6th).
Dungeons and Dragons is the oldest of the three games inducted in 2010, with roots in the 1971 game Chainmail. The release of Dungeons & Dragons (Original Edition) in 1974 started the path of what is still the most commercially successful role-playing game in history. It has spawned multiple editions, two feature films, a Saturday morning cartoon, and a raft of best-selling novels. It has also inspired numerous imitators, the basics of many online role-playing games, and more than three decades of play.
Beginning in 1977, there were actually two divergent paths for the game. Basic Dungeons & Dragons was the simpler set of rules and was released typically in boxed sets with everything needed for characters in a range of levels. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1st Edition) was considered more complex and was actually released over the course of 1977-1979. Several versions of Dungeons and Dragons were released over the ensuing years with new versions in 1981, 1983 and the fifth and final version in 1991. Meanwhile Advanced Dungeons and Dragons did not have a second edition until 1989. The next edition was Dungeons & Dragons (3rd Edition) which was released in 2000 and marked the return to a single game under the Dungeons & Dragons brand. Three years later, Dungeons & Dragons (3.5 Edition) joined the family.
2008 saw the release of Dungeons & Dragons (4th Edition). This latest version marked a major departure from the previous releases and sought to integrate lessons learned from the world of online gaming. The game retained its class and level structure, but the classes and powers were changed greatly with an eye towards making every character useful in combat all the time. The new version also emphasized the use of miniatures more strongly than any of the previous editions. In 2010, D&D Essentials was released creating a new entry point for the 4th edition of the game.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1st Edition) is based on the success of the Setting: Warhammer Fantasy Wargames. The role-playing game is set in the same universe as the miniatures game and uses much of the same intellectual property which is known as The Old World. In early editions, the stats used for characters were the same (though not always the same scale) as those used in the miniatures game. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1st Edition) uses careers as a way for characters to advance their powers and skills.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1st Edition) was published by Games Workshop Ltd. in 1986. Control of the game was turned over to their subsidiary Flame Publications in 1989. They managed it until 1992 when it was dropped. The Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (2nd Edition) was released by Black Industries in 1995. In 2002, Black Industries closed and the game was out of print until 2005 when Fantasy Flight Games acquired the rights to publish some games which had previous been produced by Games Workshop Ltd.. The Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (3rd Edition) edition was released as a box set in 2009.
The latest edition of the game eschews the previous percentile based system in favor of a dice pool system allowing players to combine pools for various tasks. The dice are custom created for the game. There is also an inherent "party" mechanic allowing players to establish some benefits and limitations based on their groups play style.
Traveller was, according to the creator Marc W. Miller, an attempt to do Dungeons and Dragons in space. There are many hallmarks of that in the rules, not the least of which is a lack of a detailed setting in the core books. Traveller has had many editions, most of which used the same basic rules of the 1977 edition. That edition, now called "Classic Traveller" by some, is still in print today.
The tale does not end there. In 2011 White Wolf announced the publication of a 20th Anniversary edition of Vampire. The fanbase responded so enthusiastically that further new releases are now planned and the Classic World of Darkness is again enjoying new publications. The back catalogue of titles is also available in both PDF and print-on-demand formats from Steve Wieck's DrivethruRPG. The Classic World of Darkness contains role-playing opportunities to meet the tastes of nearly every gamer. That diversity has earned it a large fanbase that has never stopped playing its games and now continues to support its ongoing publication.
Paranoia was published by West End Games in 1984. Originally designed by Dan Gelber, and developed by Greg Costikyan and Eric Goldberg, the first edition employed various permutations for using a ten-sided dice, mechanics dropped in later editions in favour of a twenty-sided dice. Following three editions from WEG, the game went out of print after the company went defunct. When the creators got the rights back for the game, Paranoia returned in 2004, under licence by Mongoose Publishing. Allen Varney led the design of the new edition, briefly entitled Paranoia XP, and recruited a team of relatively unknown writers - collectively known as the Traitor Recycling Studio - to put together the supporting line of new material that followed. In 2009, Mongoose Publishing released a 25th Anniversary Edition that used most of the core materials from the previous, but broke the setting down into three separate books. Each book provided a self-contained and playable game allowing players to run characters as Troubleshooters, Internal Security or High Programmers, mapping the lowliest, middle and highest levels of security clearance in Alpha Complex society. 2ff7e9595c
