Been reading a lot of Mage the Ascension lately as my group will be dipping our toes into it soon, and have started with M20 since I'm most familiar with that line of the WoD. I have to say, the response from the writers of this book to White Wolf's prior mean-spirted editing is quite funny See, Mage Revised, the 3rd edition of the game, made the pretty controversial choice to take what was the most hopeful setting of the World of Darkness and slam it back down into a "dark and gritty" tone to match with the rest of the edgy shit of Revised WOD. Gone were the Horizon Realms, the wondrous inter-dimensional fortresses and academies of the magic world, gone was basically the entire Umbra, having been basically sealed off by metaplot (thus making the Spirit Sphere basically useless). Also the bad guys win, and all magic now causes Paradox. Oh, and all the Crafts, the smaller magic user groups who were basically the equivalent to the Bloodlines of Vampire or the Fera of Werewolf? Yeah, they all got genocided. Literally all of them. Gone. Bad guys killed them all. Oh White Wolf... But then M20 brought them all back. Mage was normally framed as a conflict between the classical magic Traditions vs the techno-facist Technocracy, with there being a few Crafts here and there that hadn't picked a side or just didn't want to join the Traditions for whatever reason (or the Traditions wouldn't let them join for whatever reason.) And when Mage20 brought back the Crafts they suddenly had all the Crafts join together in what's called the Disparate Alliance, basically making a third faction in the Ascension War. This is despite the fact that the Crafts were even more diverse and varied in their beliefs than the Traditions, and included groups like the Sisters of Hippolyta, radical feminist pagans fighting against the patriarchy, alongside the motherfucking Knights Templar, who were re-framed as modern all-male "warriors for Christ" wearing kevlar and army surplus fatigues and generally looking like a bunch of guys who were definitely at Jan 6th. (White Wolf hilariously walked back this portrayal in the Crafts book this year and made them all just a bunch of dorky knights with swords and armor). And it's weird because you read about the Disparate Alliance and they don't really have like... a goal? They're basically a defensive alliance. Except that in M20 the Technocracy has largely stopped the Pogrom, the genocide of non-Tech Mages, and the Traditions weren't ever fighting them anyways. So who is the Disparate Alliance allied against? It's White Wolf. No joke. This was all but admitted to in an FAQ from one of the writers. They banded all the smaller Crafts together and made them their own force with a nebulous-to-nonexistent goal because they wanted to make it harder for a spiteful gamer-bro of a future White Wolf editor to write them all out of the game and say they got genocided again. It was less a response to in-lore events within the game, and a response to editing drama. The Crafts have become self aware and know that there are metaphysical forces in the universe that what to wipe them out. Those forces are White Wolf And that's the most Mage thing ever
