Not only do they add more flavour but the additional Attainments help to make inducted characters more unique. Although this new core book presents only a single fully written out legacy, the Eleventh Hour (one of the most flavourful from the old run, in my opinion), it presents simple and easy-to-use rules for writing up your own complete with concise rules for building all five Legacy Attainments – yes, that’s right, legacies now get access to not three but five of their own customized powers. The revised setting emphasizes that almost all mages, at some point, take on a legacy (something I always had believed would also occur in the previous edition as well although it was not delved into). On the subject of Attainments, Legacies have been revamped as well. Every new dot in every Arcana grants you new powers related to the purview of the Arcanum in question and they’re all well worth having. Instead, at two dots in any Arcanum, you gain the ability to just spend a point of mana and activate armor benefits both fluffy and crunchy related to that Arcanum – whether it’s the incredible luck of Fate letting you make impossible dodges or cloaking yourself in the stuff of Twilight with Spirit to downgrade certain types of damage. Other systems are greatly cleaned up and magic, in general, just feels more intuitive – even with everything now pared down to extremely rigid systems, it’s easy to customize your spells and cast them just the way you want and need to.Īnother way the rules have been cleaned up are Attainments – no longer, for example, do you need to figure out a spell for mage armor for each Arcana. It’s far easier now to determine that yes, that falls within the Arcanum dots you have with these modifiers so go ahead and throw your dice. With Second Edition, though, the system has been cleaned up and is far easier to understand – especially with the Practices more clearly defined and established. While there were always the defined spells in the book, the themes and ideas of Mage, I feel, are best expressed through the near-infinite possibilities of the creative thaumaturgy system unfortunately, in First Edition, we rarely ended up using it as it was difficult at the best of times to determine if the spells were even possible, let alone what we’d be rolling for them. Mage, to me, was always a game that was about, to paraphrase a line from Disney’s Aladdin, infinite cosmic power constrained by the universe’s attempt to backhand you for it. Now, reading this quite some time later, first and foremost I will say: the fact that Creative Thaumaturgy no longer requires a flow chart to even begin to wrap my head around is perhaps the greatest thing about Second Edition. It’s honestly taken me awhile to get around to this book because I fell out of playing Chronicles of Darkness games at approximately the same time the updated book released I got my copy of the book, did a quick read, gave an appreciative nod at some of the mechanics and then… Well, frankly I never got around to doing a full read to play a game. When I saw that he was a Developer on Second Edition, I was already sold that it was going to deliver me an experience that was, at its core, Awakening Deluxe. I’d been using some of his tweaks to the setting and rules for quite some time already. At the time this came out, I’d been playing First Edition for nearly a decade and was a huge fan of David Brookshaw’s actual play write ups, The Broken Diamond, Soul Cage, and The Man Comes Around. Straight from the get go, I have to say I was biased coming in to this book when it first released. The words are blunt and straight forward and set the tone for what’s to come. Those, dear friends, are the words awaiting you when you open up the introduction of Mage the Awakening, Second Edition from Onyx Path Publishing for the first time. I’ll tell you the ultimate secret of magic.
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