And now, it is time to speak with Phil Brucato. Describing himself as an individual open to the
kinds of ideas Mage deals with, he has
been the showrunner for the Ascension since the 2nd edition and is the
mastermind behind the 20th Anniversary edition. Here’s a bit from his Wikipedia entry…
“Satyros Phil Brucato is an American writer,
journalist, editor and game designer. Based in Seattle, WA, he is best known
for his work with White Wolf, Inc. - including role-playing games such as Mage:
The Ascension, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, and Mage: The Sorcerer's Crusade - and
BBI Media, for which he has written articles and columns for newWitch and
Witches & Pagans magazines. A member of the Wiley Writers group, he has
also created the Deliria: Faerie Tales for a New Millennium series of books, authored
the webcomic Arpeggio, published various short stories, and formed Quiet
Thunder Productions, a Seattle-area small press publishing and promotions
company.
Noted for his motto "To write is to tell the
Truth,", Phil uses fantasy fiction to inspire his readers toward real-life
achievements.”
And speaking for myself, Mage the Ascension I consider
a primary inspiration for my own creative muse, on several different levels.
Let us hear from the Satyr…
Satyros Phil Brucato Q&A
PART I: WHAT’S MAGE, AND WHY SHOULD I CARE?
VoS: For people who may not know about it already, could
you please describe what Mage is all
about, and tell us what Mage means to
you?
Put simply, Mage is a collaborative story-telling
game about people who believe in what they do so strongly that their beliefs
literally change the world.
Such power,
though, is dangerous. And because these “mages” – devotees of magic, faith and
science – disagree about how it should be used, they wind up fighting
shadow-wars to advance their various beliefs. Some pursue a personal
“Ascension”: the transcendence of human limitations and existence. Others try
to run the world they way they believe it should be run, justifying what they
do in the name of Ascension for all humanity. In the meantime, they make a
major fucking mess of everything they touch. Mage has many themes, ranging from complex esoterica to simple
human needs. One of the primary themes, however, is this: Believe in what you do, but be careful not to destroy everything you
love. Although Mage has an epic
scope, its core is deeply personal. “If you had the power of a god,” Mage asks, “what would you do with it?
And what would such power do to you?”
Speaking
personally, Mage has been my work, my
quest, my manifesto, my lover, and often my nemesis. Despite the many projects
I have done since 1989 – hundreds of stories, articles, books, comics, essays,
blogs, screenplays, games, and even self-help books – I keep coming back to Mage. It keeps coming back to me as
well, often in ways I don’t expect. Mage
fans pop up everywhere, and although I changed my name to Satyr around 1999 in
order to be someone other than “That Mage
Guy,” folks light up when they find out that I did Mage. In actuality, Mage
is the collaborative brainchild of dozens of talented people. My bond with Mage, however, runs deep. Mage is very much my baby, and even when
I’m doing something else, Mage is
never far from my heart.
VoS: You’re especially well-known for Mage. That series seems to call to you,
based on your writing, and it seems to call to a particular set of fans as
well. The response to the 20th
Anniversary Edition Kickstarter campaign shows this enthusiasm. What’s that
like for you?
I feel deeply
gratified. Who the hell knew, 20 years ago, that this stupid little RPG would
mean so much to so many people? The thing is, though, Mage is anything but “stupid.” Underneath all the fantasy elements
– Chantries and Horizon Realms, Fallen mages and Mad Marauders and all the epic
trappings that make up the Mage
universe – the series tells us that we MATTER.
Anyone could be a mage, but mages are
exceptional people. To be a mage, then, is to make a big fucking difference in
your world – you’re a force for change whether you want to be or not. That’s
not an easy thing to be, but it’s better than being a nobody. Mage tells us that we’re important, but
also warns us to be careful with our power.
That message, I
suspect, resonates deeply with a whole lot of people.
So often, we are
told to be small. Mage tells us to be
big. The world insists that we’re ordinary. Mage
shows us otherwise. We’re usually told to sit down, shut up, take what we’re
given, and be productive little drones in a consumer-based society that keeps
us wanting more. Mage says “Fuck that – be your own damn hero!”
That’s not an easy path, but it’s worth the risk. As I often say, Mage is about giving a damn so much that
you hold the keys to reality itself. That message of empowerment is more
relevant now than it ever was before.
When Stewart and
Steve Wieck, with the rest of the original creative team, wrote the first Mage: The Ascension rulebook, they
wanted to get folks thinking outside the box. When I took up the reins with the
first sourcebook, The Book of Chantries,
I brought in themes of passion, consequence, and the path of personal
transformation. As part of my own spiritual and artistic path, I work to inform
and inspire my audience through art and entertainment. Mage provides an ideal vehicle for those pursuits, and so it
strikes some pretty deep chords for everyone involved. As I said in Deliria: Faerie Tales for a New Millennium,
“to write is to tell the truth, even in the midst of fantasy.” Beneath all of its
mystic satire, Mage rings true to
those who understand it.
And seeing now
just how many people understand Mage… yeah, that feels really wonderful.
VoS: You make a point of saying that Mage is not an instruction-manual for
actual occult or magical power – that it’s just a game. Yet in your writing,
and in the fans’ response to that series, it’s clear that there’s something
sublime and transcendent in the concepts that the game is based upon. Why is
that?
I got into
gaming shortly before the “satanic panic” of the 1980s began. During that bout
of extended social idiocy, certain people claimed that RPGs were gateway drugs
for occult indoctrination. That was nonsense, of course, especially in the
early ‘80s, when the most esoteric thing you could find in an RPG book involved
arcane mathematics on the “to hit” chart.
Even so, I knew
from experience that RPGs do have a
certain psychological power. They give players a collective “theatre of the mind,”
in which they take aspects of themselves, dress those aspects up in wild
clothes, and act out things that would be impossible for them to do in real
life. For folks whose everyday lives are dull, wounded or repressed, that sort
of “aspecting” can be pretty heady stuff. I have
known people who’ve gotten a little too attached to their characters, if only
because those personas seemed more interesting than the person looking back at
those players from a mirror. I’ve written elsewhere about this aspecting
phenomenon (see http://satyrosphilbrucato.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/aspecting-song-of-my-selves/
and http://satyrosphilbrucato.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/gaming-the-magic-avatar-part-1-of-3/),
and so folks who want to know more about it can look up my observations there.
For right now, let’s just say that while I knew firsthand that the Bothered
About Dungeons & Dragons folks
were utterly full of shit, I also knew that interactive entertainment can be a
powerful tool for self-transformation… and a tricky medium when folks forget
where the game ends and reality begins.
Like I said
earlier, fantasy deals with truth. It helps us sort things out in our real
lives. Our “faerie tales” are more like coping mechanisms than like escape
hatches. And so – especially when you combine that element of fantasy with the
media of performing arts and social world-construction – you’ve got some pretty
potent stuff at your command. Even now, most RPGs gloss over the transformative
potential of roleplaying games; back in 1991, when Vampire first appeared, no one outside of White Wolf – except Greg
Stafford at Chaosium and Aaron Allston at HERO Games – seemed to recognize the
deeper potential of such games. As an actor, writer, and occasional mystic,
however, I recognized that potential.
And I wanted to run with it without running our fans off a cliff.
In my real life, I’ve been a postmodern Pagan since my late teens. Esoterica and spirituality have always intrigued me, and I’ve got deep roots in cultural history, philosophy, psychology, and avant-garde art. I believe that the things I do have larger effects, and so it’s vital to consider the consequences before I act. Personally, I am fed right the fuck up with people who harm the world through careless, selfish activities. It’s important to me, therefore, that the things I do in art and life make a positive impact on the world.
Stewart’s vision
of Mage – a game about the
transformative power of enlightened individuals – suits my approach perfectly.
And yet, as much as I strive for authenticity in my work, I also don’t want to
live up to the old stereotype of the “occult propagandist,” or hand out
esoteric toolkits to anyone with a few bucks and a gaming group. Because the
mystic arts are real disciplines (and because messing around with them can have
all sorts of ugly consequences), I kept actual practices out of the Mage line. At times, this led to
conflicts with some of my collaborators, one of whom insisted that we were
shortchanging the material and cheating our fans. As I told him, though, Mage is not an occult textbook to begin
with – it’s a game about personal transformation. Magick, in Mage, is a metaphor for growth.
(Beyond those
considerations, real-life esoterica is complicated, obtuse, frequently boring,
and often ridiculous. Different practices use wildly different principles, and
it would be impossible to do justice to them all in a fantasy game series.
Considering that real-world occult practices also tie into deeply held cultural
and spiritual beliefs, it would be insulting to trivialize them that way –
especially if the game held up one specific belief-system as the “One True
Magick.” I wasn’t willing to do any of those
things, either.)
In all of my
work, I strive to bring out a sense of the sublime. I really do believe that
we’re living out a crazy and often frightening miracle through the passion-play
of human existence, and I want to inspire people to want better, and be better, than they might accept
otherwise. The sense of what I often call “miracles just out of sight” is
integral to my life and art. Mage
taps into that sense, and gives folks a vehicle for exploring it themselves. In
an artistic sense, Mage is authentically
magickal – not in the sense of teaching occult rituals, but in the sense of
changing your world through imaginative intent.
VoS: The entire World of Darkness works as a
commentary on its times, and yet one might say that Mage is the one that goes the deepest and flies the highest with
regards to the truly transcendent concept involved in that series. What are
your thoughts on this?
The entire World
of Darkness is a socio-political satire of the world at large. That was always
our intent. Andrew and Daniel Greenberg, Mark Rein•Hagen, Sam Chupp, Bill
Bridges… we were all deliberately taking a wrecking-ball to social
comfort-zones and convenient lies. We wanted to get people thinking as they ran their personal shadow-selves through our
satirical chamber of horrors. That freaked some people out, especially in the
early days. We had folks trying to ban us, shut us down, drive us out of
business because we dared to be “pretentious” enough to bring taboos and
subversion to the gaming table. And y’know what? We DID upset some apple-carts that needed to be tipped over. Issues of
gender, race, identity, truth – we put them front-and-center in our weird
little world, and I’m proud to see the results.
Gaming, when I
began, was such a fucking white-boys’ club. Girls were discouraged or harassed,
gay fans kept their closets shut, and folks outside the Standard White Fantasy
Default were passively and sometimes actively discouraged from joining the
gamer subculture. Although these things are still true now, they’re far less
true – and FAR less acceptable – than
they were around 1991, much less 1980. (I discovered gaming in 1978.) And
although White Wolf has played just one part of that overall transformation, it
is what we set out to do in the 1990s. Our work wasn’t perfect, nor was our
behavior, but the legacy speaks for itself. It makes me happy to see fans of
all genders and ethnicities at fantasy conventions. I’m ecstatic to hear from
fans in Africa, Asia and South America, and I aim, especially now, to make Mage a global force for social change. RPGs are big enough to include
everyone.
As I mentioned
earlier, Mage is about empowerment.
That’s a fucking radical idea, especially these days, when we have a mass-media
machine that makes money by keeping us in fear. Mage says, “Be aware, not
afraid,” and gives people the tools
to look past the big game that’s being played at our expense. I suspect that
one of the reasons that so many Mage
fans have taken the concepts of the game into their everyday lives is because Mage invites its players to look beyond
the obvious surface of things, to look at what they see, and to change those
elements – both internal and external – when they don’t like what they
perceive.
Beyond its
themes of power and pride, Mage
stresses change and ultimate transcendence. I don’t see that as “a ‘90s thing”
– I see it as a message for Right Fucking Now.
Stay tuned for Part 2, where Mr. Brucato talks about why revisiting the classic World of Darkness is worthwhile, offers advice for game designers and the like. There is eight days left to get involved with the Mage The Ascension 20th Anniversary Kickstarter, btw. Check it out at...
No comments:
Post a Comment