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Author Topic: nMage and fashionable marxism  (Read 708 times)

RPGPundit

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nMage and fashionable marxism
« on: October 27, 2006, 01:52:12 PM »
No, I'm not going to talk about why I think the new Mage sucks, its obvious that I would think so.
I'm going to talk about the swine, and how I actually go as far as to feel sort of bad for the poor unfortunate bastard who wrote the book.
 
Of course, getting White Wolf fanboys to act like Swine is sort of like shooting fish in a barrel, or actually closer to expecting the sun to rise in the morning. Its pretty well a given fact of nature.
Which is the problem that WW has now had to confront with its own new edition.  Many of the swine have chosen the release of the new edition as the pivotal moment when they begin to devour each other.
 
But topping all this off is the cherry of a fact that apparently, someone in White Wolf's memo department wasn't doing their job, and forgot to pass the news onto Mage's designer that anything remotely related to western civilization is EVIL.
 
Yes, apparently the Swine have chosen to latch onto the idea that because the new Mage apparently uses the context of hermeticism (however inauthentically) as the basis of their magic system, its "eurocentric" and "racist" for ignoring all the non-european magical traditions.
 
Never mind that Hermeticism essentially acknowledges the applicability of most other forms of occultism within the context of its cosmology; never mind that most other forms of occultism do likewise within the context of their own cosmology.  It is somehow "cultural imperialism" for hermetics to suggest that voodoo or eastern tantra can be defined in a hermetic context.
 
This comes down to a context of the conflict between marxism and comparative religion.  Marxist scholars  of religion hate the very idea that there are certain unifying mystical formulas that appear again and again in different ways in almost every human culture, because it would imply that religion is something other than just a product of socio-economic necessity completely specific to the cultural group of each specific faith or system.
 
It doesn't matter that the weight of evidence is totally against them.
 
Anyways, since the new Mage game appears to incorporate that in some way or another, and since most of the Swine are (ironically usually self-hating) anti-western with marxist traits, not even out of any real understanding of what those things are but just because those things are fashionable to be if you're a pretentious retard with minimal college education, the end result is that Mage has become the hotcake of the Swine's anti-nWoD backlash.
 
For me, this is a win-win situation. How low they have sunk, that they are now slowly tearing each other apart.  The battle against D20 long since lost to them, they now are reduced to ideologically killing each other over the scraps of being able to show off their pretentiousness to each other in forums full of fellow-travellers. No longer even able to preach to the choir, they are proceeding to beat the rest of the choir's heads in to get at the gooey insides.
 
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Samarkand

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nMage and fashionable marxism
« Reply #1 on: October 27, 2006, 09:30:14 PM »
I flipped through the nMage book and read a couple reviews.  What depressed me about the re-imagined Awakened was how bloody *bland* the entire setting had become.  Alright, oMage was a bunch of New Age Luddist concepts thrown together with post-modern metaphysics.  But it had energy.  Humour.  Scope.  Sons of Ether fighting Nephandic biomechanical umbral horrors with Ether Cannons.

   *pause*

    Well, okay, I mostly liked it for the Sons of Ether.

    But this new edition...Consiliums?  Exarchs?  Everyone is a spiritual descendent of Atlantis?  It just seems so lacking compared to the Cinemascope breadth of oMage.   Not to mention a choice of font colour and graphic scheme that makes it utterly impossible to read the damn rulebook.

Andrew
 

Hastur T. Fannon

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nMage and fashionable marxism
« Reply #2 on: October 28, 2006, 04:44:29 AM »
I came up with a setting that was basically oMage feel with nMage stats.  Combined the traditions until there were only five (face it - there's no real difference between the Dreamspeakers and Verbena or between the Chorus and the Hermetics) and threw in some post-Apocalyptic stuff for fun (I'd just finished a Knight of the Word)

Never got a chance to see how it ran, but it's on my list for when I get a moment