Surprise Bonus Post - Angel of Mercy

 I own a few Mage-related things that aren't on my reading list - the 20th Anniversary Art Book, the novel trilogy, the tarot deck and a couple of Storyteller's Screens. You know, it's a collection, gotta have the peripheral stuff even if it's not part of my main quest.

And I was pretty content with that until I learned that the 1st edition Storyteller's Screen was supposed to come with a booklet. My so-called "complete collection" was one volume short.

Nooo!!!

But what could I do? A new 1st edition screen would set me back $30-50 (once you factor in shipping) and if I could get 1 screen sans book, I could get a second. And tracking down the book by itself was too difficult for my meager research skills. So I did something I don't normally like to do - I bought the PDF.

Because it felt weird to me to read all of the White Wolf run except this book, I'm also going to bend the blog's normal PDF policy. I present to you Angel of Mercy, the first Mage adventure.

It's okay.

I mean, it's a nothing of an adventure. There's this weird fountain that has a demon inside it. Some Nazi occultists want to let it out. You've got stop them without using so much vulgar magic that the Technocracy decides you're the greater threat. It's really more of a situation than a scenario, but it works. I'd have felt bad about paying 40 bucks for it, though.

The most notable thing about it to me, a guy who has just spent the last 10 months (almost to the day!) reading every Mage book in chronological order, is how . . . casual it seems about Mage lore. The adventure begins in a nightclub, and it suggests that "club-oriented characters (probably Hollow Ones, Cultists of Ecstasy, Verbena, Dreamspeakers, or Euthanatos mages)" might be the first to pick up on the events.

Dreamspeakers are "club-oriented," you know, because half the Traditions are just shallow stereotypes of people the White Wolf writers see at their local Goth club. It's adorable.

I've got some other notes about how the Technocracy started out working alongside paradox spirits and dispatching agents to unremarkable local malls, but that's just early 1st edition for you. The Nazi mages, The Iron Circle, make a return in Tradition Book: Verbena, the 3rd-to-last book in the entire line, which is kind of remarkable seeing as how they were in none of the books in-between, but the only notable thing about their appearance is how refreshing it is that Angel of Mercy has an absolute moral clarity in naming them the bad guys.

I don't think I'll ever run this adventure, but it was nice to circle back around to the beginning now that I've seen where this game is going to wind up.

Ukss Contribution: The Forest of Moaning Oaks. The adventure doesn't say anything about it except that some lore about the statue might be there, but I liked the name, and in as insubstantial a product as this turned out to be, I'll take what I can get.