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Societies of Mages
Misc Gaming Mechanics Index
The Awakened, like all humans, are social creatures. Even a person who can reshape the very foundations of the universe needs a friend every now and then. Mages can be broken down into three basic groups, which in turn break down into subgroups. And even the subgroups break into subgroups… but we’re not going to worry about that here. I’m just going to give you a quick run-down of the three “biggies” in the Awakened world, and their major components.

The Traditions
The Traditions are those who seek to keep magick alive and well in this modern era of rationalization and disbelief. Until recently, they fought a battle known as the Ascension War with the Technocracy- and the prize was no less than the future of humanity itself. However, the Traditions have finally conceded defeat, and no longer dream of Awakening the whole of humanity. Today, they desperately fight to continue practicing their arcane crafts in the face of the Technocracy’s persecution.

Among the Traditions
Most of the Traditions don’t see entirely eye-to-eye. This is not to say they are hostile to each other- but they aren’t known for a constant state of perfect cooperation, either. Petty bickering and conflicting ideologies take their toll, especially at the higher ranks.

Some Traditions are known for getting along especially well or especially poorly. In particular, the Virtual Adepts and Sons of Ether tend to like each other very well, even though they have different visions of where their technology is going. The Dreamspeakers and Verbena also tend to get along fairly well. On the other hand, there has long been a rivalry between the Celestial Chorus and the Verbena. (The Choristers consider the Verbena to be bloody, savage pagans, whereas the Verbena have accused the Choristers of being “spiritual fascists.”

This is not to say that every mage subscribes to the party line. There have been warm friendships even between members of the Verbena and the Chorus, and deadly rivalries between Virtual Adepts and Etherites. The Awakened are individuals first and foremost, not mouthpieces for their Tradition.

The Akashic Brotherhood
Eastern mystics who practice a regimen of physical and mental discipline. Despite the name, women are considered fully equal members of the Brotherhood. Their skills include powerful martial arts as well as potent mental abilities.

The Celestial Chorus

The Celestial Chorus is a pseudo-religious order that believes all magick comes from the One, the divine being that oversees the whole of the universe and of whom YHWH, Jehovah, and Allah are merely facets. They are masters of creation and energy.

Cult of Ecstasy
Cultists believe that enlightenment can be reached by pushing the boundaries of human experience. Cultists seek to “expand their horizons” through a variety of extreme experiences- running the gamut from blissful pleasure to excruciating pain. Sex, music, hallucinogenic drugs, and even ritual torture or self-mutilation are all considered valid pathways to greater understanding.

Dreamspeakers

Dreamspeakers are an amalgam of shamanic and animistic magicians from a number of religions, including Shinto, Native American beliefs, tribal Australian dream-wisdom, and a variety of other spirit-oriented religions. The Dreamspeakers obviously have a lot of diversity in their ranks, which is a great asset; on the other hand, their greatest weakness is that most of their component peoples are dying out in the modern world.

The Euthanatos
“Good Death”- an Eastern order who are closely in tune with the wheel of fate and karma. They often take responsibility for life and death- either aiding a person who is not yet scheduled to die, or “returning to the cycle” a wicked or evil person, to minimize the damage he does to the Wheel and to give him a chance to be reincarnated as one less disruptive.

The Order of Hermes
The Order of Hermes is what you probably think of when you hear the word “wizard.” They have codified a highly regimented, formulaic form of magick.

Sons of Ether
Your basic mad scientists. (Yes, women are welcome too, but most of the Etherites agree that “Children of Ether” or “Daughters AND Sons of Ether” don’t sound quite right.) They were once members of the Technocracy, but defected to the Traditions during the nineteenth century when their theories were banned for diverging from the Technocracy’s official view of the universe. (It’s hard to prove that nothing can go faster than the speed of light when those damned Etherites keep doing it.) If you ever see an 80-foot-tall steam-engine-driven mechanical spider or a plutonium-powered time-traveling DeLorean, odds are good a Son of Ether built it.

The Verbena
The Verbena descends from naturalist mother goddess/fertility beliefs that were held by such groups as the druids and the Keltoi. Many other traditions find these modern-day witches and warlocks disturbing, especially because of the prominent use of blood or sacrifice in their rituals- but the Verbena understand the natural cycle, and know that blood is not only a symbol of death, but of life, too.

Virtual Adepts
The newest additions to the Traditions are the Virtual Adepts. The most modern Tradition, they are masters of the computer and believe that reality itself is nothing but information- and can therefore be manipulated. Like the Sons of Ether, Virtual Adepts are self-imposed exiles from the Technocracy; having seceded in the 1940s when the Technocracy decided the Masses weren’t ready for the Adept’s view of an ultra-connected world of instantaneous travel and data exchange. With a unanimous cry of “Kiss our hairy digital asses,” the Virtual Adepts joined their expatriate brothers in the Traditions.

The Technocracy
The roots of the Technocracy lie in the medieval Order of Reason, a group of Awakened who believed that the world could be understood by universal rules that were essentially understandable to the common man. Their appeal to the average peasant was undeniable, especially in a dangerous and arcane time when vampires owned the night, packs of werewolves rampaged across the countryside, and sorcerer-barons ruled their fiefdoms with iron gauntlets. The Order of Reason offered Joe Average Peasant a chance to live in a world he could truly UNDERSTAND- where the driving force behind a bolt of lightning was not an arbitrary and uncaring nature spirit, but rather a perfectly ordinary buildup of electrostatic potential and the resulting sudden equalization of said potential. (Never mind that Joe Peasant didn’t understand a whit of this- it was just nice to know that it wasn’t specifically out to get him.)

The Order’s power grew steadily, and so did their hubris. Eventually the Order declared that their reality was the only reality- in a sense, they turned their backs on all they were as mages. Convinced that the “supernatural” was a dangerous and unnecessary threat to human existence, they grew determined to eradicate the “Reality Deviants”, for the good of all humanity.

Don’t think of the Technocracy as the “bad guys.” The universe isn’t that simple. Clear-cut, black and white, bad guy vs. good guy situations are rare. The Technocracy isn’t evil inasmuch as it is deluded by its colossal power and arrogance. While they are responsible for the all-but-total extermination of magick in the world today, they have also long protected the world from dire supernatural threats that lurk within our world and outside of it. In the Technocrats’ favor, they have mostly scaled back their systematic program of wiping out the Traditions (known as the Pogrom) ever since the Ascension War was declared over. (They no longer send Men in Black to erase the memories of teenage girls who “got lucky” playing around with Wicca, for example.)

It was something of a Pyrrhic victory for the Technocrats, however: The Technocracy, too, is finding it harder and harder to practice their Enlightened Science these days. For all their pomp and preening, Enlightened Science is still essentially magick. (Alternately, it is equally accurate to say that True Magick is essentially another kind of Enlightened Science. Few people on either side of the issue will actually admit this.) Just as for all types of magick, belief dictates reality… and the Masses don’t believe in super-science any more. Nobody gives a fuck about whether or not we’ll go back to the Moon. Science fiction is considered juvenile escapist entertainment- who but a pimply-faced, no-social-life 15-year-old would read Ray Bradbury or watch Star Trek? Nobody cares. As long as he has regular meals and cable TV, John Q. Public isn’t interested. The common man’s idea of “super science” ends at the microwave oven.

For centuries, the Technocracy developed new technologies, to be gradually released to the Masses on a carefully drafted schedule. Distressingly, many recently released technologies have inexplicably failed to work in the hands of the Masses. (The Cold Fusion experiments in the 1970s were a classic example of this.) Of course, the Technocrats don’t think that what they are doing is magick, so they can’t understand (or won’t admit) that it doesn’t work because nobody wants it to work. Nonetheless, the technocracy keeps trying.

The Order of Reason

The organization of the Order of Reason has evolved constantly throughout the years since its founding. In its modern incarnation, the Technocracy is divided into five loosely affiliated groups, called Conventions:

Iteration X
Iteration X believes that the destiny of mankind is to continually create and refine better and better tools. Today, they forge powerful material technologies, ranging from cybernetic implants to ultra-efficient engines to fusion-powered robot servants.

New World Order

Members of the New World Order want to create a utopian social system in which all citizens will be happy- or, at least, content. They have created powerful psychological and sociological principles that can be used to understand the people’s thoughts, desires and goals- as well as influence or manipulate said thoughts, desires and goals.

Progenitors
Progenitors originate with the first farmers and healers. Their biological sciences have helped to increase the human life expectancy dramatically, and their agricultural and stockbreeding expertise has helped keep many humans well fed. Today, Progenitors are genetic engineers and biotechnicians without peer. They seek to use biotechnology to make humans smarter, more adaptable, and healthier, and to create super-efficient food plants and yeast vats that will keep the world strong and well fed.

The Syndicate

The Syndicate believes that humanity can best be served by establishing a perfect economy, in which all people will have plenty of disposable income and nobody will ever lack for resources. Their super-science focuses on controlling the dynamics of fate and the future, as well as the flow of quantifiable concepts (like money).

Void Engineers
Void Engineers are both humanity’s vanguard and its last line of defense. Ever pushing back the boundaries of the unknown, they travel through space, time, and even other dimensions in search of new knowledge and greater understanding. An old running joke among the Void Engineers is that “We boldly go where no man has gone before- and sometimes we even come back.”

The Others

Hollow Ones
Hollow Ones are not so much a group of mages as a subculture- a subset of the modern “Goth” movement. All Hollow Ones at least pretend to be magicians. Few of them have any idea that magick is really real, and instead consider it a trendy little addition to their fashion wardrobe. A few of them, however, ARE truly Awakened, even if they don’t realize it.

The exceedingly rare few who Awaken, but then learn magick on their own, without subscribing to any particular Tradition- or even knowing that such things exist- are known as Orphans. Orphans often have radically unconventional techniques and beliefs, things that just shouldn’t work, according to everything every other Tradition and Convention knows… but, of course, it does anyway. Sometimes Orphans don’t realize they’re doing magick- after all, there’s no such thing, right?

Marauders
Magick isn’t all wine and roses, and Marauders are proof of that. Sometimes a mage attempts something way beyond his grasp, or he witnesses something no mortal mind was ever meant to see, and his mental grasp of reality is annihilated. Unable to tell the difference between the Consensus and their own insane fantasies, Marauders tear a swath of impossibility and shredded reality everywhere they go. Fortunately, the threat posed by any single Marauder is usually short-lived, as they are eventually catapulted out of our reality altogether into mad worlds of their own, where they can live out their delusions unfettered for the rest of their (usually brief) lives.

The Nephandi
The Nephandi are truly evil, if anything is. Nephandi are mages who have entered the service of heinous, ancient beings that existed long before the universe had shape or form- creatures older and deeper than any Satan or Iblis or Moloch. The vision of the Nephandi is that of a universe’s descent and devolution into formless chaos once more- a void that cannot even be called void, for to give it a name would define its existence. Sometimes a Nephandus (the singular form) deliberately enters the service of these abominable entities, craving ultimate revenge on the universe, or motivated simply by twisted hate. An arrogant few think at first that they can turn the power of the Nameless Ones to their own ends- but they soon come to realize that the yoke of slavery inevitably falls on all who serve such masters.

Reality is a big place, and there are groups that don’t easily fall into one category or another.

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