Mage - The Awakening.pdf - Mage - The Awakening - RPG

STORYTELLING

GAME

MODERN

SORCERY

Where to begin?

I’ve never written a journal before. It’s too much work, you

know. Something you’ve got to do every day, come rain or shine,

or else you start to feel guilty. Of course, that’s why they tell

me I’ve got to start one and keep it every day. Discipline, they

say. It’s what I need. Damn punk kid.

A “magical” journal, “a record of my magical findings.”

Does that make sense? As weird as it is to admit,

yeah, it does. It wouldn’t have once. If you laid that

load on me a few months ago, I’d have laughed in your

face and probably begun plotting some elaborate

prank that’d teach you not to go around spewing

hippy bullshit. What can I say? I was young, stupid

and Asleep. (Note Important Capital Letters.

Magicians Use Lots of Capital Letters.)

So, here it is. The journal. It’s supposed to be

just for me, never to be shown to anyone, but I

know masters Aurem and Potestas (dig those

names!) will sneak a peek, just to check on my

progress. Hell, they might be watching now, for all

I know. I don’t have a spell up that’d let me know

if they were, and if I started casting, they’d

cancel the scrying window before I could see it. So,

if you’re reading this, honored masters,

Scrying. The Arcanum of Space. I’m

trying to learn it. I’ve got the basics down —

all that stuff about distance being an

illusion, that everything is really one point,

blah, blah, blah. I took basic philosophy in

school — Plato and all that shit — but none of

that comes close to the esoteric mindfuck

of this magic stuff. The point is, I’m

supposed to be keeping a “scrying

record” along with this journal. You

A scrying record is a collection of photos (they

work best) and drawings that act as “mne-

monics” for reaching out to those things. Smart

mages don’t keep them; they’ve learned to keep

it all in their heads. But kindergarteners like me

need something to start with. That’s why I’ve

got to start keeping clippings and shit, to give

me something to reference in case I need to

view things from far off.

go screw yourselves.

see, when you cast spells at things you

can’t see or hear, you have to reach out to

their Patterns. Again, distance is an

illusion (whateverÖ), so the difficulty is

not the mileage but the picture you get in

your mind about whatever it is you’re

affecting. The hazier the picture, the

harder the spell.

All right, enough digression. I’m told I need to start with

a summary of my life up to now, a “what I did with my summer vacation”

essay, except that it includes my entire life up to now. Why? That’s

what I asked.

Arctos. “The Little Bear.” That’s what Morvran called me. My

shadow name. You can’t use real names in this business. Scrying

again — sympathetic magic, as it’s called. If they know your real name,

you’re screwed. It’s way harder to reach out to a Pattern if you don’t know its name.

So we use these handles and call names, like truckers on CB radios or fighter pilots — or

hell, superheroes, right? Most of us choose our new names, but I was too freaked out at

the time. Morvran gave me mine. What the hell? I like it.

Morvran. He’s this old Sean Connery type who saved my ass when I was having the worst

bad trip in existence. He’s the guy who brought me here, the guy who inducted me into the

“Threads

Destiny,

Arctos,

threads

Destiny.”

Mysterium. I’ll talk about him some more later. If I’m going to do this

thing, I might as well get things down in chronological order.

I was born 20 years ago, give or take a few years. (I’m not listing

my birthdate, social security number or name — all for the reasons I

mentioned above.) My parents were mostly AWOL in the attention

and affection department. They aren’t bad people. Just narcissistic

yuppies who became dot-commers and then Republican greed-heads.

I was often “left to my own devices” growing up, and developed a somewhat “erratic

moral compass,” as my school counselor said. I did the whole obligatory juvenile delin-

quent shoplifting thing, but I never got caught and so never “learned my lesson.” I

barely squeaked into college, mainly because my parents were too mortified to have a

non-college-educated child. They threw money at the dean of this small urban arts

college. (No, I’m not listing its name, either — hire a private detective if you want.) I

liked doodling enough, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life.

That’s when I met Sigmund. He was this weird outsider who was into “magic” and

Crowley and other sorts of occult shit. I say “magic” in quotes because it wasn’t

magic, not really. It was what Sleepers think is magic — it’s what I thought was magic.

It was cool and elitist and gave us all sorts of excuses to look down our noses at all the

rubes who weren’t clued in. God, we were such pricks.

Anyway, Sigmund was neo-Goth. He wore makeup and had

long nails and had this keen ability to turn verbal assaults

back at his attackers, making them say stupid things

without realizing it. I started hanging out with him and

learning “magic.”

I thought I’d finally found it — what I’d always been

looking for but never knew it. Something about it —

the imagery, the ritual, the whole atmosphere —

clicked deep in a way nothing else ever had. I was in

serious danger of losing my jaded, Gen-X credentials

and actually becoming interested in something

meaningful for once in my life.

One night , Sigmund started getting on my case,

accusing me of being a lily-white shit who was

afraid to evoke a Goetic demon. I couldn’t let that go,

so me, Sigmund and another kid who hung out with us,

this twerp named Thomas, pulled out the Lesser Key

of Solomon and started an evocation.

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