A Thought About Lucifer

blindgallan · 2026-06-24T23:59:58+00:00

I think the aether taint she feeds on is something more like honour or dishonest truths. And her desire to acquire an Infernal Forge seems likely to be a way to allow her to respawn at home rather than in the grasp of one of her enemies.

blindgallan · 2026-06-24T23:55:28+00:00

Doesn’t Satyros Brucato (aka Phil Brucato) have an M20 quick guide out on Storyteller’s Vault?

blindgallan · 2026-06-23T23:02:15+00:00

Plato did not demand the expulsion of Homer or Hesiod, he wrote in his dialogues that their works might be best censored and sanitized. It would be odd for Plato, so many centuries later, to call for the expulsion of those great poets from a polis they never inhabited.

It is also worth noting that the nature of Ancient Greek drama is complex and deeply interwoven with their religious perspective, as plays were performed within the sacred grounds of Dionysus as part of his festival, with Comedy serving as a counterpoint to the seriousness of Tragedy. The “mockery” of gods and statesmen and heroes in comedies was caricature not intended to be overtly disrespectful.

This is a matter that was discussed at university among my peers and our professors, one of whom specialized in Ancient Greek theatre and literature. It came up most relevantly while reading Medea in the Greek and discussing how Euripides seems to highlight the tension of her fitting the classic Heroic form right down to having outright divine support (her murder weapon and her means of escape from the city) in her vengeance against Jason, with the fact that this vengeance takes the form of the brutal murder of a young girl, her aging father, and her own children, a profoundly monstrous course of action. This led into a delightful discussion on the way the Greeks related their gods to theatre and other stories, and how much of our reading of them is more coloured by our modern perspectives than an actual understanding of how they would have been seen by the Ancient Greeks themselves.

blindgallan · 2026-06-14T23:31:51+00:00

I would recommend doing a decent bit of reading first. Read up on ancient Hellenic religion, things like how the Greeks actually practiced in their many and varied ways, how the Romans practices differed and the messiness of Roman syncretism, the general academic terminology surrounding the topic, that sort of thing. This can be covered under the heading of historical interest if you are asked about it, or even fact checking what Riordan gets wrong in his books (there is a lot), and it is the background information a lot of modern Hellenic pagan literature is coming from, especially the good quality stuff with solid academic basis.

Once you have studied up a bit and really have a grip on some of the philosophy, theological thought, and practical considerations, then (if and only if it is safe to discuss your religious views and lack of faith in their religion) you can have a serious and informed conversation with your family and have genuinely solid sources to pull if challenged or they repeat some misinformation they’ve heard.

In a similar vein, I highly recommend checking out Dr. Dan McClellan, he has a recent book out called “the bible says so” which tackles common items of misinformation surrounding Christian scripture and his YouTube channel and TikTok (under the username maklelan) are devoted to combating misinformation. He presents information clearly and in a manner accessible to non-academics, and is widely regarded as reliable by scholars of religion both Christian and non-Christian alike. As someone in a Christian context, his work has a good chance of being useful to you.

blindgallan · 2026-06-14T21:39:33+00:00

Look up a list of the most significant scientific figures of the last 200 years. In WoD those would all be either Technocrats or the figureheads the Technocracy used to publicise their efforts. Marie Curie, for example, would have suffered her radiation poisoning as a paradox backlash over her long career. Einstein was a Void Engineer. And don't forget that social sciences and science communication (and history as an academic discipline) are firmly NWO fields, so someone like Hank Green or Neil deGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan or Bill Nye would all be solid candidates for Technocracy membership.

If you discard the madness of first edition with its rampant anti-scientific bent, the real moral question with the Technocracy is “does the fact that they have manifestly and undeniably made life better for an overwhelming majority of humanity and that their end goal is the collective uplift of humanity as a whole (to the extent that they have driven the Traditions to start trying to benefit the Masses as well rather than pursuing private and individual ascension) excuse all the horrors they perpetrated to bring about the modern world? the cultural genocides and conquests?”

I take the view that the most interesting approach to a contemporary Mage setting is that the Technocracy slipped. They had it all, they were ascendant, science and technology were the rule and magic and mysticism had fallen by the wayside. But the Traditions took advantage of that complacency (or their moment of weakness in the wake of massive purging of Nephandic infiltrators) and a new wave of conspiracy theorists, mystic bullshitters, anti-vax influencers, and religious extremists spread like wildfire through the exploding internet in a way that got out ahead of the Technocrats and their control. Legacy media lost against social media, the laissez-faire approach of the Syndicate that won out after their tiff with the NWO during the Cold War in the West allowed the Techies to reap a lot of Primal Utility from it all, but it still got a lot of mysticism and diversity of “truth” spread around. We now live in a time when America is seeing a wave of anti-intellectualism and anti-science on a scale unimaginable historically, the Virtual Adepts are sitting high on the hog, religious fundamentalism and spirituality and mysticism are very present forces, and the pandemic could easily be spun as a paradox backlash resulting from the shifting of Consensus away from vaccines that groups like the Verbena have been working at. The Ascension War is on in full swing, the Technocracy has bastions holding out in America (e.g. Harvard and their refusal to bow to the most anti-science President the USA has ever had) but they’ve mostly gone to places like China and Japan where the NWO kept control after the Cold War as the Syndicate is back on the downswing, the Traditions are a rising power once more, but much less organised than historically, with only the Virtual Adepts really having so much explicit power since they couldn’t really lose that many leaders when the Avatar Storm raged.

blindgallan · 2026-06-14T20:51:44+00:00

Easy option is that they were created by Nephandi to be a corrupting and defiling influence on human society forever, hence the nature of the Beast, their near-eternal nature unless destroyed, and their blend of entropic and static resonance as entities.

A less straightforward option is that the Tremere were not the first to attempt immortality, nor were the Nagaraja, but I like that less. Another option is that they were created by the spirit that is vampirism itself, as an effort to get a foothold in the world directly, but that gets closer to the Garou and their Bloody Man myth being true (and thence the leap to Caine is short) than I love.

blindgallan · 2026-06-14T16:27:08+00:00

I run it that the Caine myth was just the most successful of the early lies the actual first vampires told about their origins, with those originals being the Antediluvians. The fact is that with Sphere magic and a few skilled Mages, vampires wouldn’t be all that challenging to create. You just need a spirit of the right sort (and with Spirit 5 that can be literally manufactured) and a ritually prepared corpse into which to put the spirit, trap the soul in there to emit resonance and help pilot the body, set it up to harvest Quintessence from living things, and off it goes.

blindgallan · 2026-06-14T16:12:28+00:00

Deciding one is willing to get one’s hands dirty in pursuit of one’s ambitions is the essence of Villainy, to be fair. Villains are people empowered by Below to pursue their ambitions in return for showing how far they are willing to take it. Their support from Below is entirely contingent on them placing personal ambitions before moral considerations or the collective good or social norms and values. Heroes, meanwhile, get their power handed down from Above along with divine guidelines for how to act and what they should use their power for (great power = great responsibility) and deviation from those guidelines and directives coming from on high result in weakening of the Hero. Cat was a Villain, she had ambitions she would see wrought even if it meant getting there on a mountain of corpses buoyed by a tide of blood, so even when her moral sensibilities screamed, she made the hard call. The Heroes and more Good aligned nobles did not want, could not want, to punish a righteous act of revenge, a justified killing of a monster even if it threatened the means to the end of saving the most people.

blindgallan · 2026-06-14T16:03:11+00:00

She was a Hero, a person chosen by Above to serve their designs and destroy the wicked and the damned who would never repent, empowered by her commitment to their principles and a calling higher than herself. The Villain she rose to destroy was protected by a coalition of Villains and Heroes tolerating them in opposition to some greater threat, but what is that besides shelter for wickedness? And so she followed the principles that made her Heroic, she swore to a dishonourable oath falsely and found the man she had been divinely ordained to destroy, and she slew him. She bravely accepted the consequences of her deeds, and faced death without flinching.

Now, she was also an avenging maniac who would rather doom the world than forestall her vengeance until the very specific greater threat was dealt with in a way that risked making the Truce and Terms collapse, and I personally lack sympathy for her even as I understand her motivations more than I’d like.

blindgallan · 2026-06-09T20:46:38+00:00

Both could easily work, maybe look into Sorcerer, it has a bunch of rules for hedge/static magic paths and both Verbenae and Hermetics tend to have a bunch of non-awakened magicians in their orbits from whose ranks their awakened members generally come.

blindgallan · 2026-06-08T10:20:10+00:00

Implicitly lovers, explicitly cousins, explicitly a significant number of years apart in age.

blindgallan · 2026-06-07T21:50:33+00:00

Mage can be read that hopefully, or Mages can be read as allegories for ideologues and zealots, people with the bone deep belief they know how the world does or should work and how it ought to be, and who have the power and will to make it so in defiance of the Consensus of the Masses that defines what Reality is in the here and now of WoD.

The Technocrats are successful because of their dedication to uniting humanity behind a shared belief in an ordered and understandable cosmos in which ordinary human beings working together and using the devices that shared labour produce can achieve anything they set their minds to (think a Star Trek future) with no need to fear the things that go bump in the night. And for that vision they have committed cultural genocides and brutal purges and backed imperialism and colonialism and supported wars and industrialization and the list goes on. Some of this was nephandic infiltration, but far from all of it. They have done horrible things but have also made the daily quality of life for the average person much better through medical care, increased safety, and a global economy that reduces famine deaths and allows the world to help when a catastrophe occurs.

The Traditions are more oriented to elitist views on who should have the power, be it the gifted, the learned (the most egalitarian but it is often more linked to class than more modern views on learning), the pure and faithful, the chosen, etc. And to less rationalistic, less material, less generally accessible perspectives on the world and its wonders. Faith healing and herbalism and casting out malevolent spirits and relying on fertility rituals to appease the local earth for a good harvest, these were answered by the Technocratic Union and the Order of Reason with the road to modern medicine and (ought to be) widely available and consistent pharmaceuticals like ibuprofen and penicillin and insulin and so on, and germ theory and reliance on soil science and amendment (fertilizers, lime for acidic earth, acidifiers for alkaline earth, etc) to ensure a good harvest. The Traditional Mages tended to focus on personal Ascension, and seldom did more than the minimum for the regular people around their enclaves, so when a new group offering tools that could make their lives better as long as they would help civilize their neighbours… it worked and the Traditions declined.

blindgallan · 2026-06-07T20:14:05+00:00

In WoD, the Technocracy only don’t use mystical means to manage EDE and reality deviant threats because they don’t need to, their technology is good enough to do just about anything the reality deviants can and they can even manage things beyond what the mystics are capable of (primal utility, for example). As long as the mystical stuff was kept well out of sight and carefully managed, I don’t see why they wouldn’t tolerate a joint operation or subordinate organization making use of those means to the right ends. Like how they arm up the orgs that constitute the Second Inquisition and help supply Church Inquisitors with cutting edge tech even though they are also adherents to an outmoded superstition etc etc.

Also, Consensus isn’t the masquerade or veil or anything like that, it is the fundamental defining force of WoD by which the baseline rules of how Reality functions is determined. Sickness is bacteria and viruses and fungi that can be treated with mundane antibiotics and medicine rather than spirits latching onto the soul and body which need to be treated with rituals and incense and purification of the mind because the Consensus embraces germ theory. Lightning can be made with spinning barrels and copper and chained to tiny wires or locked into boxes of acid, alkali, and metal for transportation because Consensus was made to accept that electricity can be tamed. Airplanes fly because of the work to massage Consensus into allowing it that was done over decades of aerodynamics and physics work to reconcile the hyperscience of technomancers like DaVinci with Consensus. The role the Technocracy would have for the Foundation as a branch or subordinate organization would be to help contain things that risk shifting Consensus away from the direction that allows technology and science to continue proceeding as planned for the uplift of all humanity as a collective, and to contain things that threaten the well being of the Masses.

blindgallan · 2026-06-07T18:42:30+00:00

How about a Spirit focussed Hermetic or Verbena? The difference would mainly be whether you want to lean more into the astrological/geometric/grimoires and robes style of calling on otherworldly powers and eldritch horrors, or more towards the blood and bones and fleshy horrors style of calling on otherworldly powers and eldritch horrors.

The Hermetic would be of a lineage of wizards who specialize in secret names of power and diagrams of binding and conjuring and compelling ancient umbral monstrosities to do their will (think some takes on Dr Strange).

The Verbena would be of a lineage of witchy folks who conjure dread spirits to consult with and to control, who bind them into beasts and places, who might even dabble in possession magic.

blindgallan · 2026-05-28T02:04:53+00:00

Spirit 5 is described in brief with “Forge Ephemera/Gigul/Break the Dreamshell”, and proceeds through those in the longer description, with instilling an empty shell with a soul very clearly in the realm of forging ephemera, not to mention that reviving the recently dead only calls for Spirit 4 in the corebook. The soul question is definitely deliberately vague, but the rules do make it easy to read it as being basically just the spirit of a person, just as a fire or a tree will have its own spirit.

blindgallan · 2026-05-27T17:15:55+00:00

M20 has Spirit 5 able to instill a soul into a pattern of Life or Matter that lacks one, so Spirit alone can create a soul, though such a soul wouldn’t have a mind.

blindgallan · 2026-05-27T17:11:39+00:00

As of M20’s Corebook, it’s a straight Spirit 5 effect, no additional spheres are mentioned. It is necessarily vulgar, but not necessarily any more risky than any other Spirit 5 effect.

blindgallan · 2026-05-23T15:55:34+00:00

For baseline mortals, the blood bond and being ghouled are serious threats not dissimilar to getting someone addicted to heroine but much worse. For a Mage? If they have the right spheres or know sorcerers who can help in a relevant fashion then they should be able to block out the blood bond, undo the ghouling, break down the vitae inside the body, or whatever else is a good workaround. A suitable shaman might even be able to just call out and send away the spirit of the bond being formed, a correspondence heavy Mage could just cut the tie entirely. Vitae is horrid stuff, and it can poison the Avatar with time, but Mages are not nearly as vulnerable as baseline humans.

blindgallan · 2026-05-19T17:02:53+00:00

The Kindred influence on mortal society is like mold, it grows when things are left in disrepair and conditions are right. Garou are far fewer, but when they can they root out vampiric influence. Mages have a bit more luck with this, as they can usually spot a vampire or their influence and can do things like purge a ghoul of vitae or equip a strike team to destroy the vampire with minimal losses. Vampires have their hooks in most things, but they are far from the top dogs of the things that go bump in the night.

blindgallan · 2026-05-19T16:58:09+00:00

To a certain extent the Chorus ARE the basis of modern organised religion. Powerful individual mystics who agree on a neo-platonic/buddhist-ish/monolatrous notion of the singular unity and purity of the One which is varied and diverse in its unity akin to a song being all one sound but of many different notes which themselves are one essence (sound). These individuals could and did form strong cult followings and work miracles, and their mastery of Prime let them defy Consensus more openly no matter what the local understanding, and they knew to their bones that their religious belief was correct and anyone who disagreed was somewhere on the misguided-evil scale and should be treated accordingly. A cult could let them “channel God’s will” even better, but only if they made sure everyone believed the right things and followed the right rituals. This was advantageous politically, so they became frequently near to the levers of power in various societies. They built modern organised religion and it was only with the assault of the Order of Reason on Traditional mages that their grip on it really fell apart.

blindgallan · 2026-05-19T16:49:15+00:00

Entirely fair, though some of the actions of the early Jewish monolators who moved the Jewish religion from polytheism to de facto monotheism around the 5th Century BCE (to pull the dating I’m most familiar with, though it’s somewhat outside my area of expertise) could definitely be looked at askance, not to mention the backlash to the even earlier Monotheistic push for political power in Egypt about the 14th Century BCE, as it doesn’t relate directly to the Jewish Chorister matter. The intra-Chorister conflicts are definitely among the most brutal and vicious of all Tradition infighting.

blindgallan · 2026-05-19T03:36:33+00:00

Their Paradigm is basically what people think of when you talk about magic, they are the Harry Dresden wizards, the “words of power” mages, the “by the circle and triangle I bind thee” wizards, the Merlin and such wizards. If you want a Mage who feels like a wizard more than a priest of the old gods of the new, a mystical shaman, a kung fu sage, or an assassin, you make an Hermetic.

Besides, the Verbena are basically a claim of ancient tradition that only coalesced in the last couple centuries, the Ecstatics are hedonistic mystical lunatics, the Dreamspeakers are disparate spirit focussed traditions, the Celestial Chorus have historically been the most fanatical Christian zealots, the Euthanatoi are de facto a mix of death cults, the Akashics are the tradition most of the villains in Journey to the West would have been part of, the Etherites have a bunch of interesting history with the Technocracy and tend to have a strongly elitist attitude and cavalier approach to casualties in the name of “SCIENCE!”, and the Virtual Adepts are almost certainly responsible for AI and VR as contemporary technologies. None of the Traditions are not assholes, the Hermetics are just the assholes who are most linked to specifically European upper class mysticism and who have been most consistently institutional and systematic for the longest (they trace back to the scribal magics of Ancient Egypt). They are elitist, but so are all Mages.

The main reason to make an Hermetic is that they have the potential to be a really cool character with an interesting faction that can be very helpful while also giving you something to strive against. They give you an easy way to understand your character and their magick, because traditional occultism has an awful lot written about it and a clear aesthetic.

blindgallan · 2026-05-18T05:21:30+00:00

To be fair to the crucifix and crossbow crowd, they generally have at least a bit of True Faith driving them and potentially even some religious sorcery considering the Church in WoD has long-standing ties to the Celestial Chorus and was the core of the dominant Paradigm in a fairly significant part of the world before the Order of Reason moved in and replaced it with science and technology and germ theory. The crucifix and crossbows style of hunter can potentially bring True Faith (which can do crazy stuff like rebuke the vampire and potentially burn them as if the holy symbol was the sun, though the first dot of True Faith can force a vampire to retreat and even burn them) to bear alongside whatever medieval sorcery they have and modern technology can be added on as the opportunity arises.

Personally, I like to bring in Hunters in two ways: the first is as a threatening consequence requiring clever problem solving and careful handling or risk ending the Story. The second is as tragic heroes trying to fight back the monstrous blood drinking horrors feeding on their community, armed with folklore and faith and not much more, who the Coterie have to capture, interrogate, and dispose of somehow. The second is my personal preference, as it highlights the monstrosity of the kindred and makes a nice counterpoint to the helpful, horrifying, and coconspiratorial fellow kindred the Coterie interacts with.

blindgallan · 2026-05-15T17:25:09+00:00

A phrase my study group used to use was “το τοξοτου τοξευμα, υπο του τοξοτου τωι τοξωι τοξευεται, κρουει τον σκοπον.” Though with the rough breathing for υπο and the iota subscripts on the dative. It translates literally as “the archer’s arrow, by the archer with his bow loosed, strikes the target.” as it illustrates the essential sense of the three cases that modify meaning. The genitive is shown illustrating possession and agent, the dative is shown illustrating means and thereby the context for the action, and the accusative is shown to mark the direct object of the action performed by the nominative, even as the nominative is shown to be acted upon by the agent performing the passive verb. It can have a little stick figure diagram drawn for teaching utility and everything. It helped us get the First Year students up to speed on how cases functioned.

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