DoPo said:
Mage: the Ascension -> Mage: the Awakening (World of Darkness)
Back in 2004 White Wolf Publishing finished the (Old) World of Darkness and rebooted into the (new) World of Darkness. They all have a bunch of game-lines but the Mage has been my favourite. I also found something I personally consider a link between the two:
- in Mage: the Awakening (the new one) the backstory is that Atlantis was real and was the capital of magick once. But then a variation of the tower of Babel myth happened - the mages tried to do something out of hubris but it failed spectacularly. This lead to Atlantis being sort of erased and the world being fucked up beyond recognition and other bad stuff. At any rate, that's the short version of it.
- in Mage: the Ascension (the old one) there was an official supplement that dealt with the end of the game-line. It presented several scenarios of how everything could end - one scenario in particular is what I'm thinking of - in it, the players manage to get ahold of all the magick in the world (magick going away was a background theme in the game) and could decide whether to return it or sort of "set sail through the universe".
So, I like to think that the mages from Ascension did that and established a new world somewhere else using that magick. That became Atlantis - later on, long after they had passed away, the new mages come in and fuck everything up. I like that idea, since it provides an in-universe explanation for the reboot. And since the new universe is literally build up from a shard of the old one, that is the reason the two universes are so similar.
Mage is probably the weirdest of the main gamelines of WW/Onyx Publishing.
The scenarios in the book don't really present as conclusive as others in the other gamelines the reformation of the world. Time of Judgment is off the fucking wall in Vampire (which was always pretty nutty), and Werewolf which probably had the biggest change in terms of the dynamics of what is. But the Mage conclusions don't suggest much in the way of that many 'decent options' as if for the creation of a new world, or the cycling of world phases in Werewolf ... whereby people had good reasons to invite a certain form of apocalypse as if to 'get the bad stuff over quickly' so that the world can start a new era of healing at the cost of great destruction. So, sure, you're trying to 'end' the world and bring on the Final Battle in Werewolf ... but that's because a progressively better one awaits in the next 6 cycles.
But with Mage, all the options aren't particularly pleasant options and some even go so far as to suggest that the Fallen is destined to die and mages need to go elsewhere to survive. Playing on the idea of Avalon and the retreat. In 2E they kind of got rid of the Atlantean Fall, and the Exarchs are merely a Supernal force that seeks to limit humanity's access to magic. Made the Mysterium more blatantly racist(?). Which is fun, because fuck Sleepers. Awakened elitism is the only
real elitism.
But funnily enough in nWoD 1E and 2E Mage they hint that they kept a lot of the confusing, self-contradicting cosmology of the universe. And specifically you have the
Realm of Dragons. Now in nWoD 1E you have the Dragon Mountain of Atlantis. Why this is odd is because in 2E they make mention that Dragons never occupied the Fallen World, and the City of the first mortal magic users, Atlantis, is somewhat stripped away from the lore.
So that could be a wink and a nod that the Magi did leave the world, and one world they left was reborn. And the world of 2E Mage is the world they founded.
In all the cosmology, alternate Earths beyond the Outer Shores does exists, as does the 'Realm of Dragons' ...
In MTAw 2E no one is entirely sure why people use the Dragon as their symbol of the Diamond as dragons don't exist on the Fallen World and never had (in direct contravention of the 1E lore). So either Atlantis wasn't lost, it may have merely been carved away (which is the hypothetical Realm of Dragons in 2E) ... or the Ascension era mages did partly leave, and some of them stayed and fell with the recreation of their original home, and the others eventually occupied the 2E Fallen World in the process of its minorly different recreation as well.
So it's not a case of MTA -> MTAw -> MTAw 2E, it's MTA -> MTAw & MTAw 2E
This might also be why the Hunter lore in nWoD 2E is so much more different.
So there is the idea that 2E is an alternate plane of existence that underwent a similar recreation of the world ... or that nWoD 1E was its own phase of the Great Wheel ... and that 2E is its own phase in the cycle of death and rebirth. Only this time, the world is at least somewhat 'nicer'. No Atlantis fall, no tyranny of magic by false gods, magic is more mutable and shapeable even with the Abyss and the Quiescence still observable, etc.
And this might be why the Werewolves don't have the Wyrm, their enemies are more 'reasonable' in the ability to counter.
Vampires never had the Methusaleh that lord over the entire world and everything on it, and will never suffer the Jyhad beyond the more 'local' and 'domestic' horrors of more intimate city Princes and internal squabbles. And the Strix is one of the few true evils that vampires face now.
Instead of these prior threats, you do have the God-Machine and their angels however. An unknowable, yet omnipresent will of inscrutable power that forms the backbone of consciousness and the rise of humanity that influences all creatures equally but is barely known. The invisible hand. But at the very least the God-Machine has a vested interest in the status quo, or at least reigning in and merely directing the efforts of the world ... as opposed to being insane, jealous, and wrathful.
Not only that, it gets even more inception-y when you consider that the nWoD 1E book speaks of terms like; 'Imagine our world, but darker, grittier, more uncaring. Wars last longer, recessions felt harder, and life is unseemly and crueler.' But in 2E it doesn't really tell you as such. It merely alludes to the shadows in the corner of your eye you can blissfully ignore if you wish. And indeed the systems of play tell you to do so....
So maybe nWod 1E (The Age of Sorrow and the 'death' of Gaia, which corresponds with the fact that Werewolves in 1E didn't have Gaia) was hinting that the world that it occupies was a past cycle of creation, and the world of 2E is like our own, and that it happens IN our cycle. That it happens in our cycle in the Great Wheel. Or in at least a cycle of the world that is very close to our own.
Which is a very cool theory. That the world of 2E is in the first of the great phases of 'healing'.
