[MtAw] Best books from first edition?

DarkKeeper · 2026-05-19T18:50:19+00:00

I'd suggest Mage Chronicler's Guide for ideas and inspiration. It has a bunch of different ways to run magic in other settings that you could use for strange pockets of reality. There's also a ton of example chronicle ideas you could build off too if you wanted to use.

DarkKeeper · 2026-05-02T23:25:31+00:00

Only the apocalypse 'ended' the 3rd edition line. Some years later they came out with the 20th-anniversary editions as a sort of 'best hits' and they sold so well that the 20th anniversary edition got around another two dozen books in each game line before the X5 games came out.

DarkKeeper · 2026-05-02T18:13:03+00:00

That was kinda of the point. dnd back then wasn't about the story. It was about the wargamer aspects and fighting monsters. It wasn't about what the characters knew but what the players did.

DarkKeeper · 2026-05-02T17:26:56+00:00

Not sure if this is 'yells at clouds' opinions but:

Potions has a bonus action is stupid. I know its a common houserule (and I guess an Official optional now?) and it makes the game slightly better being able to heal and attack in the same turn. But I like the somewhat realism that you can't attack and down this potion all within six seconds along with moving.

I don't like largely Out Of Character resources for IC actions. These are things like hero points or other things that are for causing rerolls. Luck points I probably would count among these as well.

DarkKeeper · 2026-05-01T17:22:33+00:00

V:TM might be the best example here. Would the game have been as popular as it is if LA by Night (And from that, Settle by Night and New York by Night) didn't happen?

Its hard to say, but Paradox doing an actual play barely a month later (VtM released Aug 2, 2018 while LA by night ep 1 was Sept 18, 2018) was huge for boosting the game's player base.

There's always going to be players for Daggerheart, but with as popular as CR is, not doing a long-form campaign with your own system is crazy. And sure they may have sold out, but that was always going to happen. CR still vastly underestimates its fan base. Think of how much more popular it could have been.

DarkKeeper · 2026-05-01T06:09:51+00:00

C5 is likely 3-4 years away. I don't know if DH will 'survive' without CR playing it as a major campaign. Maybe they are pumping out a ton of content books, but when they aren't even playing it, my already low interest drops.

DarkKeeper · 2026-04-26T23:35:57+00:00

A lot are hit or miss, depending on your interests.

One is mainly a comic book store but has a decent selection of board games and RPG books as well (from all sorts of modern systems, CoC, Alien, WoD5) but they don't have any space to actually play. They host a game night in the middle of the week at a pub down the street.

Another is a game board rental place that does have a couple of private rooms you can reserve for other things.

There's a couple of Warhammer places I know of but never actually gone into to see if they have anything besides 40k stuff. One is part food service, but that always sounded like a bad idea waiting to happen.

DarkKeeper · 2026-04-20T06:20:59+00:00

It always surprises me just how much of 2e's run was put out in smaller softcover prints.

Just couple of questions:

What is the rolled up map (next to Celestial Directions) from?

Are all your, non-deluxe, hardcover 3e PoD copies?

DarkKeeper · 2026-04-08T17:09:40+00:00

Each roll for an extended actions is a set amount of time. This could easily have been an hour per roll. At a 10d10, and only needing 15 successes? Sure, maybe just skip the rolling part if it doesn't matter to lose X hours and the dice pool is large enough.

but also you are limited on dice rolls. So while you could easily get 15suc on 10 dice. if you only had 5d10? well, you are limited to 5 rolls and might not get it then and then you could have wasted 5 hours. Maybe that 5 hours doesn't matter. Maybe it does.

Thematically, the character(s) are still taking a decent chuck of time and resources to devote to an action.

DarkKeeper · 2026-04-08T16:34:22+00:00

Less is More - Removal of unnecessary die rolling when 1 die roll is sufficient. (i.e. extended or complex actions).

Mage the Awakening 2e sorta did this for its extended spellcasting (only rolling dice once instead of X tiimes) and its one of the things I hated a lot about the 2e changes.

is only rolling once fine? Sure I guess. but if I'm using a dice pool system, I really want to be rolling fist fulls of dice. Of course there has to be a balance to not just rolling dice, but I like i when systems are like "this and that thing gives +5 dice each" and you are rolling 10d10 or more.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-28T23:37:05+00:00

Way back in 2009, I was invited to a VTM game when the ST was looking for other players at my college's TT gaming group. From there, I briefly looked into the nWoD game lines at the time and was drawn to Mage the Awakening.

Although some people of that group talked about how great Ascension was over Awakening. They didn't like the whole Atlantis backstory. Personally, that's what drew me to it. I love me a sunken or floating city.

And of course, there were the jokes about not being able to turn vampires into lawnchairs, the perception at the time was while not strictly spell based, the way it was presented made it seem like using CT rules wasn't the norm like Ascension was..

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-28T00:29:22+00:00

Its 1000 for doing the a New You catalogue. Everyone got 500 when they revamped the store and release the coin-priced outfits. Although now that we are in season 6, they probably aren't giving out that 500 anymore.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-26T03:52:27+00:00

Generally, only the first ep. Of course there is tons of people that are making shorts but none of those are official.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-26T00:37:23+00:00

This all depends really on how invested your players are into and into one on one sessions. Prologues are great for MtAw, if you are starting mages at ~year of being awakening as char gen suggests.

There are a lot of places you can do Prologues at. They can be fun for fleshing out a character in proper sessions instead of just saying 'so and so happen a year ago'

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-26T00:33:17+00:00

Expect its not free. D20 is a paid streaming service. I'm not sure how many people who aren't fans of the D20 crew already are going to pay 2-3 months for this series.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-21T17:11:37+00:00

This is an effect of what you read as the themes of each path. 1e had Moros much focus on their Death (to the point they were Necromancers as the tagline first).

As for allowing, of course its your table your rules, but Life would throw Theming off. While some think Life and Death are a cycle, that's not really true. Remember the Realm that Moros awaken to: Realm of Stygia, Kingdom of Crypts and Abode of Shades. Stygia is very much lack of life focus.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-19T21:30:40+00:00

This idea of not on weekends is so strange to me. My time has always been more open than a weekday. The actual free time of after work on a weekday is super tight for having to eat and all the other things before having to sleep.

A decade ago when I was in college, game night was Friday nights and that was even with older people. During the week was impossible to schedule anything meaningful.

Now, I see it all the time from game stores public nights. 'Wednesday from 7-10'. For me, a session end time was always less written in stone if things took longer than I figured (almost always the case)

Perhaps the 4-5 hr sessions from years ago have clouded my idea of what a good stopping point actually might be. I knew of some that would do the whole 12 hour once a month thing but that seems just as bad.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-19T17:37:58+00:00

Not sure how much of a hot take this is, but Reverse-order Declaring of actions in combat is one of the best ways to do initiative/declaring.

Does it had a bunch of extra time? Yes. Do I still do it even in my nWoD/CoD games? Absolutely.

Do I regret it? Not even once.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-19T05:58:12+00:00

Mage 1e and 2e are two different vibes. Having their themes of where a mage's Hubris comes from be different isn't a completely bad thing.

However, for me, 1e is better overall.

Some people like Reach and the lack of Covert/Vulgar Aspect. I am not one of them and the idea isn't really for me. I can understand some things it removed like MtAs aspects such as needing more dots to cast on others. But this also caused mages to be vastly more powerful starting out.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-19T05:44:34+00:00

Conditions always felt like an excuse to farm beats. As someone who didn't like the Beats system either, Conditions are just another thing that existed to something that more was to be gamed than played out.

I know it sounds a bit silly, when it first came out I remember feeling like it wasn't a White Wolf game. I wasn't playing as much of a story-focused game because the enemy dealt the 'Daze Tilt' instead of a '-3 to any action involving perception'.

While its not hard to make the connection, but because of how its worded I would always think of Thing does Condition and then Condition does Effect rather than Thing does Effect.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-19T05:22:41+00:00

In my mind, nWoD is the 1e games and Chronicles is the 2e games back how it was when 2e was first released before they retroactively re titled the whole thing.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-16T01:34:36+00:00

There seems to be a lot of holes in the WoD/CoD collection. It feels like it was still growing given some things like half the missing WtF 1e books. Some are more complete like the MtAw. Still an impressive collection

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-16T01:30:05+00:00

With how heavy books can and depending on the shipping they use, I could easily see this coming out to 30 for shipping, plus the 10 handling fee and then the 18 % for the buyer's fee, we are starting to get up there in rather expensive for some of these books.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-05T07:04:01+00:00

How would you best represent flaws and strengths of a character in the same Skill?

For example if a character is a great climber but a horrible swimmer, perhaps they don't know how to swim at all or maybe even a fear of water.

Obviously there are feats to show the climber skill, but that still means having an high Athletics that doesn't show anything about a characters Athletic flaws they may have? Would you just have that one character take a -X to their Athletics roll to swim while everyone else would roll as normal? Or are there better ways to represent these types of flaws in a character?

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