Now, I've covered my love for both Mage: the Awakening and Ascension, and I've made clear that I see them as two very different settings (with very similar mechanics). Now, one of the main themes of Ascension is that no one really is the bad guy. The vast majority of the Technocracy are genuine idealists, who believe to the core of their beings that a world without 'Magic' would be a better one for everyone. Marauders are often not at fault (although obviously there are exceptions) for the damage that they cause, and even the Nephandi can be portrayed sympathetically if you imagine them as trying to mercy-kill the world. Ascension is a game about belief, and everyone needs to believe in what they're doing to accomplish anything at all.
Awakening has a different theme. If Ascension's core premise is that 'everyone can make a difference, and that's awesome,' Awakening's premise is 'everyone can make a difference and that's awesome and occasionally, fucking terrifying.' Awakening's antagonists are brutal. The Seers of the Throne are a far cry from the Technocracy, seeing Magic as their divine right and purposely crushing innovation and creativity among the human race for the specific purpose of ensuring that no one will ever be able to challenge them. Goetia can bring the worst aspects of humanity to life, even the most positive spirit of happiness could eat your face off if it thought it would increase its power, and mages of all stripes are just as often good-guy freedom fighters as they are batshit insane monsters, and all of them can warp reality to their whim. None of these can compare even remotely to the horror of the Abyss. The Abyss is an unreality. The Abyss is quite literally something that shouldn't exist.
The word 'Lovecraftian' is thrown around a lot, especially in horror circles, and the more it gets thrown around, the more misused it becomes. The core premise behind Lovecraftian horror, at its base is a universe that doesn't care about the individual, and is incomprehensible. In Lovecraft's mind, incomprehensible meant ancient, skyscraper-sized elder gods with tentacles from the sea. It also meant ancient aliens from beyond the stars and sentient colors. The Abyss takes that entire premise and really runs with it. Beings from the Abyss almost never incarnate as gigantic, tentacled monsters, not because it is outside of their power, but because it is far too comprehensible and predictable.
Understanding the Abyss requires understanding how it came about. When the Exarchs ascended to the Supernal in the distant past, they forced the worlds apart, taking the vast majority of magic with them from the aptly named Fallen World. The wound that they left behind in the universe was the Abyss, an endless realm of nightmarish, mind-twisting horror that separates the Fallen World (ours) and the Supernal World of magic, and it is constantly trying to invade both worlds and devour them. The Abyss has no true form. Nothing that could be contained within the physics of the Fallen World even if it allowed for Cthulhu to be sleeping in the ocean's depths. The Abyss needs to 'cloak' itself, infecting something within the Fallen World and spreading its influence. The Abyss can infect, insinuate itself into anything. Living beings are just one option.
Now, the sourcebook that covers the Abyss, 'Intruders: Encounters with the Abyss' details some truly incredible and bizarre monsters. The Abyss can be anything, from a titanic, void-born monstrosities, to sentient memetics, to strings of genes hidden within backwood communities, to in one particularly terrifying case, a sentient, alternate timeline. The Abyss manifests in these abstract concepts because it has no understanding of the Fallen World and will grab onto anything in its reach and attempt to use it as an entry vector. In forcing itself into the Fallen World, the Abyss can take some truly bizarre forms, very often as conceptual and metaphorical as they are physical and tangible. Obviously, this makes Abyssal infestation quite hard to fight, but mages are reality warpers as well. Banishing the Abyss tends to involve cutting away the contaminated parts of the world, exiling the intruders, but lessening the Fallen World slightly, widening the gap between our world and the Supernal. This is, however, only applicable to mages. Mortals and even other supernatural beings are truly screwed facing off against anything from the Abyss. How do you fight an entity that's a sentient time of day, or one that can contaminate any kind of representation of the number nine?
The worst part of the Abyss is that all magic must cross over it when mages draw it down from the realms Supernal, and sometimes, it manages to cling on and contaminate a mage's magic. In Awakening, this is the reason for Paradox, as every mortal carries a small mote of the Abyss in his or her soul, and that sympathy allows some of the Void to invade whenever a spell goes awry. These things can be simple little things, like tearing into the unfortunate mage's pattern or branding him with some abstract weirdness from another realm. it could drive the mage partially insane as he stares into the screaming Void between worlds, or worse, it could bring an actual entity into the world, one that can only be banished by its summoner's death. Almost every act of magic, every mote of Supernal essence pulled into the Fallen World via magick has a chance of bringing Abyssal infestation with it, and a mage's hubris is the entire reason that the nightmare reality exists.
Here are some neat pieces of fiction to inspire a campaign dealing primarily with the Abyss:
Doom Patrol: Particularly Grant Morrison's run, where the themes and baddies really start getting weird. Many abstract villains appear, like the Brotherhood of Dada, literally a group of villains that defy logic and sanity. There are others, like Scissormen, monsters from a fictional city that can 'cut' their victims out of reality, a painting that absorbs matter and may contain the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, or the ghost of a broken mirror that eats time. All of these things could be Abyssal manifestations, and really drive home the mind-bending horror of things that defy conventional reality.
The Number 23: A cerebral little thriller about a man being stalked by a number. It sounds insane and it is, and it's really thrown up in the air whether something supernatural is happening, or whether the protagonist is just stone-cold crazy. As reality and fiction blend into one, it's the sort of movie that makes a person feel paranoid and shows how scary it can be when the world is just slightly 'off.'
Occulus: A movie that really goes out of its way to ensure the protagonists are prepared for anything, and it really doesn't help. The baddy is a mirror with illusory powers among other things, and the protagonists study it, setting up video cameras that can't be fooled by illusions, potted plants at regular intervals to see how far the creature's influence is spreading (it drains the life out of small creatures) and even setting up an axe on the ceiling to go off if a timer isn't reset, to prevent it from simply killing them. Like the Number 23, the Mirror appears to warp reality, but it could all just be the protagonist's paranoia, and no one can be quite sure if what's happening before their eyes is real.
- Kephn
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