masked and unmasked

opening match #6:
Exalted 2e vs Vampire: the Masquerade 5e

here we have two games where the nuances of managing one's appearance and identity might matter more than anything else. what becomes of a soul exalted by the glory of an actual sun-god above all other mortals? what becomes of a soul damned to avoid every shred of sunlight for the rest of its unholy existence?

thus far I have not fussed very much over why my tournament has featured which edition of which RPG book-- it's all been dictated by what we had in our collection and nothing else mattered. we happen to own the second edition of Exalted, so that's what I'm working with. 

in the case of Vampire, things are a tad more complicated. this time, as we come to the last of the World of Darkness-adjacent gameworlds I will cover, I must note that I did have a choice. the others I've written about so far-- Werewolf: the Foresaken, Mage: the Awakening, and Changeling: the Lost-- all come from a certain line of White Wolf RPG offerings, and while we do own the fourth piece of this little quartet-- the version that would more properly complete the whole series, Vampire: the Requiem (pictured below)-- that is not the edition I'm writing about here.

{ our very red and shiny, 2004 copy of Vampire: the Requiem that we own. its tagline is: "a modern gothic storytelling game." }

I will briefly mention the older version in my account of prior vampire characters, because I have played a short mini-campaign of Vampire: the Requiem with dear friends in Indiana. however, my main focus will be on the more recent 5th edition of Vampire: the Masquerade-- the latest in a line of game systems that actually predates the early-2000s versions featured in my prior opening matches. since almost the very moment this 2018 edition of Vampire came out, I've played many more and longer campaigns in its very similar setting but fairly different game system. so despite the incongruity it adds to my set of review matches overall, we're gonna roll with it.

I've switched up the usual outline a little bit here, diving into aesthetics and mechanics first, then overall approachability, before finally summarizing past and present characters and their stories. the preliminary verdicts for this one are perhaps the most unfair of all the opening rounds so far.

SYSTEM	Exalted (2e)	Vampire: the Masquerade (5e)
tagline =	"This is the story of the Exalted."	"Death is not the end."
publisher =	White Wolf	White Wolf
pub. date =	2006	2018
original cost =	$39.99	$55.00
length =	8 chapters / 400 pages	12 chapters / 400 pages
my exp. level =	none prior	lots

---

aesthetics

Exalted reminds me of nothing so much as the Mortal Kombat franchise. its colorful comic-book style overlaps with that of Scion a fair bit. and all three feature high-powered, more-than-human characters, with tons of lore and a sense of history inexorably iterating and perhaps repeating itself; but for style and presentation alone, Exalted exceeds Scion on almost every level. the colors and contrasts are richer, the paper is semi-glossy, the page numbers backdropped with stars, and the margins printed to look a little bit like marble. across every spread is a narrow little montage of epic fight scenes to serve as a letterhead above the rest of the contents. between every chapter we get to read mini comics following the exploits of various sample characters and villains. I almost can't overstate how shiny and dynamic it all feels.

perhaps because the world and setting of this system draw on everything that is not Tolkien, everything not already over-represented among typical classical western mythology and heroics, the book cannot simply rely on readers' general familiarity with existing mythology and mythic tropes. instead, it builds everything from scratch, new and intentional and intricately detailed. all of that gives Exalted a richness and diversity I haven't seen in any other RPG thus far. I was struck, for example, by just how many women are featured as main NPCs. that shouldn't be so remarkable, perhaps, but I think it's cool. 

aspects of this game seem quite anime/manga-ish, and other aspects remind me very much of the dark fairytale destinies of The Witcher, the cut-throat vibes from Game of Thrones, and even the razor-sharp whimsy of Discworld (mostly because the setting consists of a huge flat plane of earth, but also because the gods are referenced as playing endless little "games of divinity" with the world). it all seems very robust and crunchy, like shards of lava and obsidian rocks glinting dangerously in the sun. for all the outlandish, colorful extremes, the world needs to be taken seriously. 

-

you'd expect a game called Vampire: the Masquerade to be sexy, eh? and this one certainly channels as much sexiness as it possibly can into the pages of its rulebook. glossy pages, tons of full-bleed photo-realistic art, classy serifed type in black and white and red. glints of temptation at the edges of your vision. all the angular imagery of cities. skyscrapers. crowds. bodies in motion. techno. neon. teeth against a bottom lip. stalkers or soulmates? overstimulation. stars drowning in light pollution. the scent of old money. roses. silk. touch. adrenaline. diamonds. fangs. alleyways. the taste of unknown spices in the air. leather boots. mind-control. catacombs. castles. mystery.

for me, this is a game of intense moments layered together like leaves of fine vellum, each calligraphied with dreadful secrets, risks, bonds, and sacrifices. let's take everything I said about World of Darkness in opening round #1, but add a few gallons of flawlessly immortal elegance and deep red, viscous blood. the word masquerade itself conjures so much decadence and intrigue, artifice and uncertainty; all RPGs are games of pretending, but this one leans in as close as it can and gets really meta with what that can mean. 

you cannot play this game as a good guy. it's too late for that. you'll see. once you've been Embraced (that's the polite term for what happens when your greedy vampiric Sire takes all your mortal blood and replaces it with some of theirs), you might struggle however much you want against the Beast of your inhuman blood-- but that part of you won't be silenced and it won't be controlled. your soul is Damned. what will you do with that inescapable truth?

 

mechanics

bring out the d10s once again. you'll need plenty for Exalted, and you'll need two distinct colors, at least five of each, to properly play Vampire.

Exalted's mechanics match up with those of Scion to a large degree-- similar stats, similar types of rolls, similar Willpower and Health tracking systems, similar bonuses for describing your actions as epic stunts-- but of course there are key differences that make Exalted its own thing. instead of Legend, the exalted are powered by Essence. and instead of skills in the basic categories of physical, mental, social, skills are divided up into sets of 5, each set favored most by a particular Solar caste.

creating an Exalted character is decently involved, but once you've done it a time or two it isn't so intimidating. first you'll choose a concept and a caste. there are five castes to choose from: Dawn, Zenith, Twilight, Night, and Eclipse. the Dawn caste exalted ones are fearless warriors, Zenith caste shining, charismatic leaders, and Twilight caste the bringers of wisdom and champions of scholarship. Night caste are the clever, stealthy bodyguard types, and Eclipse caste are the most political, interested in diplomacy and balance.

once you've chosen your caste, you get a certain amount of points for skills, advantages, and Charms, plus a few bonus points to spend on upgrading any of these things a little bit further. choosing Charms is the trickiest part. these are your magnificent heroic powers, setting you apart from any other semi-divine creature that might think it can tangle with you and walk away unscathed. you start with ten Charms, half of which must be from your favored skill domains. ten sounds like a lot, but every Charm comes with strict prerequisites for Essence level and skill level. your character will start with the basics and level up from there, just like in any good kung-fu training montage. (not all Charms are combat-related, but still.)

to use Charms, you'll spend points of Essence from either your peripheral essence pool or personal essence pool. these regenerate pretty quickly in game, so there is no excuse not to use them. the only side effect worth considering is the possibility for your character's Solar anima to manifest in more and more obvious forms. if you spend more than a certain amount of your Essence pool before it can regenerate (especially the harder-to-control peripheral Essence), the glorious light of the sun will start to leak through your skin and betray your exalted identity to anyone who might be watching. 

-

the gameplay mechanics of Vampire work very much like the other World of Darkness systems, with relatively small differences. the nine core Attributes are the same, but this time we get 9 skills per category (physical, social, and mental) and a more flexible approach to allocating points to those skills at character creation. however, the available advantages and merits are more limited here. a few are general (like linguistics or resources) but many are specific to vampires only (like a folkloric bane that makes one sensitive to garlic, or pickiness about sources of blood). 

crucially, vampires in this game are not lone hunters, slaking their hunger as they may and enduring a deathless eternity. unless they don't care too much about preserving their un-life, a vampire will be subject to the ancient bureaucratic traditions and structures of a Kindred society. the Camarilla is the ancient hierarchy of most remaining Kindred clans. in recent times, rebel Anarchs have tried to pull down what they see as the oppressive and unnecessary aspects of the Camarilla. which side of this conflict you find your vampire character on will likely depend on the game your storyteller wants to run. in either case, the political frictions within Kindred society can greatly add to the basic horror of waking up as an undead monster.

first step for character creation is to choose a Clan into which your character will be (or will have been, depending on you storyteller's timeline) initiated. there are seven playable clans, each with a particular vibe, in this core book:

• the Brujah, rebellious but down-to-earth scholars, poets, punks, and rabble-rousers 
• the Gangrel, most animalistic, wild and fierce as nature
  
• the Malkavians, touched by madness, derangement, and absurdity
• the Nosferatu, classically stealthy and strange, deformed by the curse
  
• the Toreador, those obsessed with beauty and hedonism,
  
• the Tremere, blood alchemists who stretch past the edges of magic and science in their search for power
• and the Ventrue, aristocratic and manipulative, thoroughly convinced that they deserve to rule the world.

there is a "clanless" option too. the Caitiff wander among Kindred society without the protection of a clan; perhaps there are pros and cons to that sort of undead lifestyle, but I have always found it kind of boring.

separate from your clan is your coterie-- the group of other player characters in the game, usually vampires of similar age, thrown together for some convenient but also compelling in-game purpose. and along with the bloodline of your clan, you'll gain access to a few Disciplines-- superhuman abilities granted by the vampiric blood in your veins. these are what let you effortlessly crush an enemy's throat, leap from balcony to gutter without a sound. this is how you read others' thoughts or intensify your charm to the point that mortals find your seductive glances impossible to resist. 

rolling anything higher than a 6 on your d10 equals success this time: nice and simple 50/50 odds in most cases. but 1s and 10s have the possibility to shake things up in very exciting ways. mostly you'll be rolling the typical Attribute + Skill combination (sometimes adding dice for Disciplines), but with some of those normal dice replaced with Hunger dice. those are the handful of whatever different color (red, the book cooly suggests). Hunger is a stat tracked during gameplay along with health and Willpower and XP. the higher your character's Hunger levels, the greater the risk for totally uncontrolled frenzy. at Hunger 4, any perceived threat or scent of blood will trigger a dice roll which if failed, may result in the storyteller taking control of your character and leading her to act out whatever monstrous impulses fit the scene. even for regular skill checks, the more Hunger dice in your pool, the more risk there is of either bestial failure (when you roll a 1 on any Hunger dice) or a messy critical success (rolling 10s on Hunger dice). in either case something unexpectedly bloody, cruel, or tragic is about to happen. 

unlike the other World of Darkness games, this one does not use Virtues and Vices-- what virtue could a blood-sucking demon find within themselves, after all? we use Ambitions and Desires as storytelling structures for each player character, instead. an Ambition is something to guide the overarching story of your game-- an ultimate goal to work towards. maybe your vampire wants to enact revenge on the one who created them, or to get permission from the Prince to Embrace a mortal loved one. smaller than Ambitions, Desires are like the stepping stones that may help you get closer to that larger goal. ingratiating yourself with the older, more powerful vampires by doing favors for them, or tracking down resources to better secure your coterie's haven, for example.

Willpower functions almost the same, but instead of adding dice to a roll, you spend Willpower to re-roll up to three from your pool. instead of Morality, Vampire works with a Humanity mechanic. a brand new vampire may start with decently high Humanity (6 or 7 out of 10), but it's likely they won't keep it unstained for long.

approachability

Exalted and Vampire both do a nice job of presenting their systems to readers in an organized and accessible way. they both have quite a lot going on, but it's all divided up into pieces and labeled pretty clearly for us. applaudable book design all around, I say.

despite being just as old as Mage and Changeling, Exalted doesn't suffer from the "let's cram our rulebook full of stylish-but-less-readable typography choices" issue. they save the stylishness for the interstitial comics and art bits, it seems. however, it is quite a dense book, with so much interesting lore poured into practically every section, you might get lost in it. I found it tricky to navigate at first, and very tricky to remember where exactly I first read about that one important NPC or that one city's specific political conundrum. because the lore is somewhat spread out among all the other information in the book, it can feel a little mushy. 

on the other hand, I appreciate how much that lore contributes to a full and logical sense of the world. it seemed a little strange that much of the introduction delves into the lives and culture of the Dragon-blooded, or Terrestrial exalted, when players can only create Solar exalted characters. but in any case, there is a great amount of detail and nuance to build on and to hook your character concepts and plot ideas into. your Exaltation isn't random or without cause-- your Soul, chosen and empowered by the Unconquered Sun in a long-ago age, is now escaping its prison and returning to a new body, transform that body with power and glory and intense purpose. it's fun to think about how your character's original form as a Solar exalted in the First Age might inform their new incarnation.

-

the lore of Vampire is a little less overwhelming. the game has the luxury of decades-worth of tropes and vibes from existing vampire media to lean on (sidenote: Only Lovers Left Alive is the best vampire movie, if we must pick one). the book lets any potential wordiness in its exposition breathe among generous amounts of negative space and provocative art. I was intrigued by and quite pleased with its three-column layout. the shorter lines thus created by such formatting makes the text content itself nice and quick to skim, so finding things throughout the book is way easier.

perhaps most notably, for a World of Darkness property, this particular Vampire rulebook can function entirely on its own. there are mentions of the World of Darkness as a setting, and this Vampire is as compatible as its older cousins with the wider gameworld (I know our prior Vampire games have featured Mages as antagonists, at least).

I should say that the gritty gothic horror and unavoidably bloody content of Vampire might not be for everyone, either. the sexiness may not be inherent to the game, but violence in some form or another is. even so, any good storyteller should be able to balance story details against what everyone is comfortable with. every game and every gamer is different. find some that you like and let everyone else do the same. 

 

previous characters + stories

other than a vague and nameless concept I once outlined for a fame-hungry Zenith caste character, I have no prior character for Exalted-- only my two new tournament characters whom you'll meet in the next section.

there are a good handful for Vampire though. ready?

very first was Eve Richards, who technically existed in Vampire: the Requiem. not the same system, but still a vampire. we played that game for just a few awesome sessions in Indiana as I was finishing gradschool. Eve was a Gangrel, with a found-family of biker chicks. I remember her drinking pigeon blood and ultimately adopting a good and loyal (and yes, okay, blood-addicted at this point) bulldog named Winston. so cool. 

in Louisiana, a Vampire game was one of the RPGs we were able to stick with for quite a while. friends Frank and Daniel and Oona and Andy and sometimes Emily would join us every two weeks to play as Seattle-based vampires figuring out their afterlives amidst overlapping alliances of older, more powerful Kindred all trying to use them as pawns. I played Sierra Adler, a Malkavian artist/photographer with a deep strain of sibling rivalry. so many things happened in that game-- too much to even try to summarize well. near the end, Sierra confronted a shapeshifting hippie-chick Mage named Thistle and mostly failed to do anything very useful against her blatant threats. our final session came somewhat suddenly and in hindsight feels comfortably ambiguous. there was a gathering. chaos. combat. flames. death. regardless of what really happened, in my gentle rewrite of Sierra's ending, she and her sire (the deeply morose Orla Grace) both met their Final Death together, each flailing to save the other from Mage-hurled fireballs.

next we have one of my most favorite characters out of all the characters I've ever played: Ms. Victoria Abigail Evanston Bell. for this game, set in 1920s Chicago, we played a few prologue sessions as mortals before falling into our fates as vampires. I styled Vic as a high society heiress trying half-heartedly to hide her tomboyish, absinthe-drinking flapper side from the newspapers. she was so much fun. our small coterie (a Gangrel Celia and Malkavian Doyle, later joined by a techie Nosferatu Ethel) helped her recognize and fight back against Vic's awfully controlling Toreador sire and survive the Valentine's Day massacre all in the same weekend. she obviously had to give up her high society life, but as consolation she opened a little back-alley cinema and dabbled in producing films herself. at one point, Vic's hunger got the better of her (see my notes on frenzy, above) and she tore apart an entire speakeasy of gangsters almost single-handedly. many nights later, as the coterie was just about to uncover more clues to the whole deadly underworld conspiracy of it all, a pack of rogue Gangrel in coyote form ambushed them in a city park. none of her friends could save Vic from being torn apart herself. so tragic.

for the same campaign story, now time-jumped into the '60s, I drew up the character Maeve Wells, an eager young Tremere whose curiosity outweighed her sense of ethics even before she was bitten. she was interested in the effects of psychotropic drugs in combination with vampire blood. the clan leaders had all kinds of ideas for experiments she could run, and Maeve was quite prepared to impress them as much as possible. unfortunately the campaign dissolved a little while after that, so we'll never know just how depraved she may have let herself become.

and finally, in addition to those three, I've got Margo Wallace. she starts out as just a teenager cocooned in a tight-knit group of wannabe-enlightened friends, bemoaning the death of the local mall and dreaming off and on about fashion design school or something. she was also destined for clan Tremere, but this campaign barely got off the ground either. maybe we'll pick it back up one of these days... 

lastly for this section-- I also dabbled in running a Vampire story for Jeremiah once upon a time. I still have pages and pages of notes and maps, tracking my ideas for the Kindred who might sneak around drinking blood and manipulating the world of Salt Lake City after dark. there were going to be secret backroom hideouts downtown and ancient cultish libraries and child trafficking rings and the ruthless redirection of refugees into very particular households... but we only played three or four sessions before I just got too intimidated by the prospect of engineering that much darkness.

new characters

I created Zaya Greane, Eclipse caste, to play in a simple one-shot session. she's a mash up of Varys from Game of Thrones, Gus from Breaking Bad, and Madeline Stillwell from The Boys, with some sprinkles of Lorelei Gilmore from the seasons where they're running the charming little Dragonfly Inn. prior to our short one-on-one session of Exalted, we spent a good amount of time developing a setting and context for Zaya. she was ambitious and very skilled with business, negotiations, and managing people even before her Exaltation. after, she would be unstoppable.

and she was. almost. in a world where Solar exalted are seen as dangerously overpowered and in urgent need of annihilation, she faced her fair share of threats. playing her had me tapping into the most determined, fearless, un-intimidatable version of myself. I unlocked secrets, forged alliances, generally struck fear into all the underlings in my service, and succeeded in humiliating Zaya's ex-lover in battle. it was great fun.

for a second Exalted character, I made a Dawn caste gladiator named Canessa. after her Exaltation she is suddenly burdened with far grander ambitions than to win every fight, battle, or war. instead, how about we take down the Empire by infiltrating the mystical center of its powers? why not? Canessa is sure she's powerful enough to find and topple the Imperial Manse. perhaps she'll find the Red Empress there and be the one to finally supplant her. that would be suitably epic, I think. 

as promised, I've taken little Briella Jameson, rock-climbing activist, and complicated her life by throwing mystical alternate realities at it. she will not have a good time as a vampire, I imagine. but anyway-- clan Brujah immediately seemed most fitting for this idealistic activist and advocate for the unhoused that I created. I did toy for a moment with making her either a Nosferatu or a Ventrue. her willingness to work in proximity to the dirt and ugliness of the street might put her in the path of a sewer rat Nosferatu, and such a transformation would be quite interesting storywise. conversely, her political connections would make her attractive to the aristocratic pullers-of-strings that are the Ventrue. but the Brujah vibes were just too perfect, so I went with it. Briella will fit right in with them, eventually. but at the moment she is too squeamish to drink from humans, too confounded to know exactly how she'll survive. perhaps she and her raccoon companion (what should I name it? hmm) will run into Eve and Winston hunting pigeons and stray cats and such, one of these evenings.

preliminary verdicts

someone asked me, as I was explaining this tournament project back at the very beginning, which game might win if I had to pick a champion right that moment, without any of this everso rigorous process. it didn't take much time at all for me to think and answer: Vampire: the Masquerade. it can't quite compete with D&D on number of characters or total hours played, but there is something about the setting and the tension and the way dear husband Jeremiah runs this game... maybe it's the mostly modern setting, giving my brain a more relatable, more seamless set of connections for my roleplaying and storytelling muscles? somehow I find gameplay in this system the most intensely invigorating. all the sensuous and visceral details, the quiet scenes of inner struggle and the obscene moments of bestial ferocity, and everything in between. this game and its stories come alive in the best way for me, somehow. I guess measuring all the deepest, most horrible selfishness of an actual vampire against beautiful little shreds of hope and humanity is really cathartic, or something.

it's definitely not fair to judge one three-hour session of Exalted against all that, but I will say that it had an intensity and sensuousness of its own, and that fed my enjoyment of it quite well. in this case, some of the same reasons I don't mesh with Scion (huge, bombastic stunt descriptions are tricky) are also at work. but at least I felt very well-situated in the game's central conflict. that helped me bring Zaya to life pretty well, and it was very fun to watch her (us?) in action.

when I revisit my preliminary judgements at the end of the opening round, we'll see how everything shakes out for real.

 

next match-up review: 7th Sea vs. Cyberpunk RED

next (and final!) new mini-campaign: A Song of Ice and Fire

so much potential

opening match 3: Pathfinder 2e vs Mage: the Awakening

these two are systems I've played only a little bit. as a result they seem pretty evenly matched overall-- at least markedly more even than either of the prior pairs. my brain has had about the same amount of exposure to each of them. that's all we need for less bias, right?

both systems seem pretty complex and crunchy, with pretty hefty rulebooks (600+ pages and almost 400 pages, respectively). and both have grown out of/alongside other core systems. Pathfinder more or less began as a splintered-off version of older Dungeons & Dragons editions; it's got plenty of unique flavor and mechanics all its own, but the two share plenty of DNA.  

Mage, of course, is designed to work with World of Darkness and its other various add-on systems. Jeremiah has thrilling tales of extended roleplaying campaigns (the live-action kind) in which vampires, mages, and werewolves all interact within the same in-game territories. in our past Vampire chronicles, NPC mages have shown up as rather major threats, bending reality and wielding fireballs in quite a horrifying manner.

the commonality I see in Mage and Pathfinder is in the double-sided freedom and responsibility they present to their players. these massively detailed systems encourage customization in many senses of the word. player imagination and choices are important in all RPGs, but with these games, even moreso. they both seem to ask for an extra step or two of proactive engagement.

I've kept the same outline of sorts for this review: a table of metadata, summaries of characters I've made in each system, then thoughts on their aesthetics, approachability, and mechanics.

SYSTEM	Pathfinder (2e)	Mage: the Awakening
back cover tagline =	"Advance your game."	"A storytelling game of modern sorcery."
publisher =	Paizo	White Wolf
pub. date =	2019	2005
original cost =	$59.99	$39.99
length =	11 chapters / 638 pages	9 major sections / 398 pages
my exp. level =	some	some

---

previous characters + games

husband and I, during the pandemic, turned to Pathfinder as a relatively new-to-us-both game that we could learn together and, as we learned, run for each other in an informal, two-person campaign. we planned to trade off roles as dungeon master and share in the work of creating and exploring the in-game world. Jeremiah made a halfling named Tibeth, and I made a whisper elf monk named Kasahna Dohrn. we played for a month or so, traversing forests and rivers and towns. but it fell to the wayside after a while. I do want to go back to it, someday. I have notes and sketches for a pseudo prince-and-the-pauper side quest stashed away for if we ever do.

my Mage experience does add up to very slightly more than my Pathfinder experience. two characters, two different short games--one solo and one with friends. there is the aforementioned Hannah McLaughlin, shadow name Rosemary, who started out as a normal enough teenager and bumbled her way a few yards into this dark world of magical threats...

and there is Poppy. that's her shadow name, which is the name your Mage character sheet leaves space for at the top (real names in this world being too precious and dangerous to share with just anyone). Poppy does have a real name, but I do not recall what it must have been. I created her as a savvy local businesswoman running a bakery, Awakened to the Path of Doom to wield Moros magic (the kind that some call necromancy, focused on transitions, transformations, borders). for a group one-shot some months back she joined up with two others first to mentor a brand new member of Awakened society, and then to find out how and why some mysterious evil enemies attacked him and drained away his life force. it was a short game, concluding on the most ominous of cliffhangers. I think at least one of us got yanked into another dimension, never to be heard from again.

 

new characters

once again I have used my base World of Darkness character, Briella Jameson, as a template. in her Mage form, she's been Awakened to the Thyrsus path of magic, which attunes her more deeply to plants and animals and primal forces, granting her access to Life magic. I gave her a hummingbird familiar, too, partially in honor of the little plain-capped starthroat that has built a nest in the strands of twinkly lights around our patio in real life.

my new Pathfinder character was not much more difficult to throw together. I had never played a bard before, and I thought I'd explore some of the ancestries unique to Pathfinder, even if those concepts likely wouldn't be my first choice in an actual game. playing a goblin just seems odd, doesn't it? goblins are grimy little antagonist minions-- they can't be heroes, can they? 

stereotypical attitudes aside, I created Damlyn the snow goblin bard, with the barrister background. she started out as a fancy lawyer, got bored of it, and started adventuring as a way of showing off how smart and talented she is. her chosen instrument is the harmonica. very cool.

because I've played at least a little bit of both games, there are no summer one-shots scheduled for these, and thus my new characters haven't seen any gameplay. most likely they won't for a good while. but it was fun to make them and think about what stories I might want to enact using them as lenses.

aesthetics

as I look over Pathfinder's core rulebook, the word that comes to mind is 'sumptuous.' it conjures warmth and sturdiness, embossed leather and shiny buckles, hand-carved lintels and ornate knife handles, slightly wrinkled parchment and candlewax. the gameworlds of Pathfinder follow along somewhat with the Tolkein-ish high fantasy of D&D, that same very Lord-of-the-Rings style but somewhat more evolved. I find its vibe less black-and-white with regard to moral and racial structures. in fact, Pathfinder doesn't use "race" as a category at all, opting for "ancestry" as a more acceptable term for pretty much the same in-game concept.  

the ornate style of the Mage rulebook shines glossy and green, its cover iridescent and reflective, half the type on its pages colored in gold. the contrasts of gilded headings and rather spare line art here give a sense of some slightly rustic, slightly refined Arthurian glamour mixed with just a tablespoon of modern grunge. it feels less sumptuous and more delicate, at least on the surface. Mage takes handfuls of urban grit from the World of Darkness core and frames each little particle of it with a lot of silvery-gold occult filigree. maybe we could call it Arthurian noir, or something like that.

{ interior of Mage: the Awakening. that font for the minor headings is straight up Zapfino-- quite classy, but not always easy to read. }

both books have a richness and depth to them. the worlds they evoke are massive, cathedral-like. in these worlds, godly beings exist and share their powers with mortals. true magic and otherworldly planes exist for player characters to dabble in. the possibility and potential of it all is pretty exciting.

Mage narrows in on that arcane magical potential in a more grounded and gritty way-- darker and more tragic, which we should expect given its core World of Darkness basis, of course. 

Pathfinder paints with broader strokes. I could repeat 89% of my aesthetic assessment for D&D here and I think all of it would still apply. in general I imagine that people play a game like Pathfinder to be straightforwardly heroic, and people play Mage for tricksy, arcane politics and keeping secrets.

 

approachability

have I mentioned how fat these books are? I think Pathfinder is the fattest RPG book in our collection, though I haven't actually compared them all properly. Shadowrun might be its nearest rival. 

but anyway, regardless of its massive page count, Pathfinder is very nicely designed. it's got all the lovely paratextual bits one loves to see in a lengthy instructional document-- concise table of contents, headers, page numbers, navigation tabs, good cross references, etc. the order of things makes tons of sense overall, and the combo glossary/index is usefully detailed. without all of that, the sheer amount of information and options and details in this book would be horribly overwhelming. as it is, it's still a little bit overwhelming, but nothing a determined roleplayer wouldn't be able to overcome as they get used to the system.

I find Mage a difficult book for a few reasons. as far as intimidating levels of information and detail go, the chapter on magic alone is almost 200 pages of spell descriptions and mechanics. some of the same wayfinding design elements are here, too, but they seem less effective to me, mostly down to the relative lack of contrast. the type and line spacing feel small, the columns a bit on the crowded side, and the gold headings aren't the easiest to discern. all the real useful wayfinding is in the index. which is alright, but could be better.

both games come with added risk of decision fatigue: Mage moreso in its basic character creation process and Pathfinder moreso in its later advancement options. some people (even me on the right afternoon, perhaps) might find all those decisions delightful. 

mechanics

like D&D, Pathfinder uses the same set of 7 polyhedral dice, with the d20 as a centerpiece. and like its base game, Mage uses d10s.

so what's different? gameplay-wise, Pathfinder follows in D&D's footsteps fairly closely. explore, encounter stuff, fight, and get creative with downtime, in whatever ratios you like. the main differences I see are in its character advancement systems and its action economy-- both more granular and therefore a little more flexible. each class comes with an outline to follow for character advancement: new feats and skill boosts, etc. but players often have lots of choice for which feats they want to take from each specified list of options. and instead of the basic actions, bonus actions, and reactions of D&D, Pathfinder breaks things down further into free actions, single actions, reactions, and 'activities' (either two-action or three-action versions). it seems like a lot to keep track of, but you do get used to it.

the Pathfinder character sheet does invite the player to keep track of what seems like million things, from the progression of attributes and skills, to specific feats, spell components, and nuances of proficiency. the attributes and skills themselves are simple enough-- almost but not quite the same as D&D's, but as we've established Pathfinder likes so much to be, it's more granular. each skill, every weapon, and any piece of armor you might use in this game comes with four possible levels of proficiency-- your character can be untrained, trained, expert, masterful, or legendary. and this level of granularity means you get to choose specifically where you want to focus as your character advances and gains skills. but with great options for flexibility comes a great deal of math. 

one more thing that I liked a lot about Pathfinder is the process of character creation has you choose ancestry and background before choosing your class-- it makes so much sense to think through it that way, and it helps make your character feel more like a real personality, not just a mechanical construct.

what does Mage add to the mechanics of regular World of Darkness? similarly to Werewolf, we get to choose which of 5 unique arcane paths our character will Awaken to and which of 5 unique political orders of mages we'll align ourselves with. (the 5 x 5 matrix of options is a staple of these early World of Darkness games, it seems). 

and then of course you choose (to some degree) your magical powers. the Path you choose dictates which Arcana you'll have access to, but from there you are free to balance those Arcana in a few different directions and to choose the merits and advantages you might tie to your magic. 

the system of Arcana is highly interesting to me. there are ten, arranged into gross/subtle pairs along the points and lines of the pentagram: Death, Fate, Forces, Life, Matter, Mind, Prime, Spirit, Space, and Time. whichever pair your character learns, you can choose which is primary by assigning more or fewer dots to that line on your character sheet. beyond those two Arcana, you also get to choose a third to round out your abilities.  

one of the most tedious decision-making pieces of creating a Mage character, for me, is choosing rotes: the "ready-made" spells that a mage can cast most easily from the Arcana she knows. even if your character only has access to less than one-third of the 200-pages-worth of possible rotes, that is still plenty to go over and decide about. and those 200 pages of rotes isn't even all the possible magic your mage can cast during any given game session. improvised spells can be almost anything! you're really only limited by your imaginative and descriptive capabilities (and the prerogatives of your lead storyteller, of course). 

Mage swaps out the essence and primal urge of Werewolf with gnosis and mana-- resources spent to enhance your magics in various ways. instead of Morality or Harmony, we have Wisdom. using magic wisely and carefully will prevent Paradox and prevent mages and humans alike from its dangers. the same Virtue and Vice system is also at play.

decision fatigue aside, gameplay for both these systems may involve a few more nooks and nuances than the prior games I've reviewed. 

preliminary verdicts

of course all my broad strokes descriptions and assessments above are going to break down if your DM or storyteller wants to run things very differently. I have no way of accounting for those endless possibilities, do I? it's been tricky enough to boil down the expanse of possibilities that the game systems themselves are offering here. 

in my admittedly limited and very-influenced-by-my-life-partner's-views perspective, Pathfinder has a reputation for being crunchy and numbers-y and mechanically on-purpose quite min-max-able. I have a sense that it is designed to be even more combat-focused than D&D and even more exacting, perhaps more 'realistic.' I didn't think I'd enjoy it very much, but for the few months we played it was quite fun. we made it our own. and I found myself getting used to the crunchiness.

I really love the idea of Mage. waking up to a world that is exponentially deeper and more mysterious than you ever dreamed just sounds cool. tapping into an intellectual, spiritual reality and making exciting things happen in the name of saving the world... yeah why not? some of the introductory paragraphs of Mage put it like this:

"The modern scientific worldview tends to treat ideas as secondary realities, less real than matter. The magical worldview knows that ideas are more real than matter" (p. 34)

and I love that. ideas with real physical influence? heck yes. thinking and willing some awesome result just hard enough, leaning at just the right angle on the right mystical buttons, and watching your power bend reality into what you want it to be? sign me up.

my experience with Mage hasn't (yet) measured up to just how cool it sounds on paper. this is in part because in practice, I'm quite intimidated by the wide open possibility this game throws at me. being prepared to grapple with all that, while balancing the strictures of the mechanics fairly, and somehow also roleplay effectively has been too difficult. 

and so despite how evenly matched these two appeared in the beginning, my review is clearly leaning towards one over the other.

 

next match-up review: Changeling: the Lost vs. Star Wars: Force & Destiny

next new one-shot (soon...): The One Ring or Exalted

nowhere everywhere

the world is big. it's even bigger than Texas (and Texas thinks it is the biggest place there is. it's not... but we love it anyway). there are so many far-flung parts of the world that look awesomely different. they feel different. they talk different. they're just different.

they've got different sorts of street signs. (I kind of love whatever typeface that might be, there. very good choice, city-planners of Budapest.)

they paint their buildings different colors. that's the university library, there.

the sun still sets in the west. the sky still gets swept full of gorgeous smudgy clouds.

but they put different stuff on their pizza. this was a seafood pizza we had in Sighişoara, Romania, and it was the most marvelous thing ever. new favourite food. yes. also: the hot chocolate at this place was gloriously thick and smooth and chocolatey and I will dream about it for the rest of my life.

they have different names for things. in Hungary this river is the Duna. in Romania: Dunărea. in Slovak: Dunaj. and in Austria it is the Donau. why do we say the Danube in English? I am not sure. let's blame the Romans. while we were in Bratislava, we got to canoe for a bit down this, the second-longest river in Europe. very nice.

Stephansdom in Vienna. we wandered in one evening to this eery purple-blue light, and it engendered in me a very hushed and solemn otherworldly feeling--one I hope to remember for a very long time.

we got to see a concert of Strauss and Mozart and other miscellaneous classical greatness. there were ballerinas and opera singers, too. the people sitting next to us were a quartet of Asians from Vancouver, Canada, and they were very friendly.

and these two crazies from the UK showed up at the end. dear Nic and dear Chris met us in Budapest for a few days. how awesome. it was seriously lovely to see them.

there is of course much much more to be said. and a million more pictures to show. we'll see what I can throw into my future blogposts. any requests?

nothing is known of Saint Valentine

I've just been playing around with this little doodle, originally posted way back in July.

there are no love-related holidays in July, are there?

not that I can think of. there are tuesdays though. I love tuesdays.

love is an irrational thing, you know. I have no reason to love tuesdays, but I do anyway. even though they're not always the greatest. not always the most fun.

at least my irrational love of tuesdays is completely unconditional.

as is my love for ice cream (chocolate ice cream, of course).

and my love for plaid. goats. typography. sunrises.

unconditional, irrational love. today is all about celebrating that.

and, underneath all the sugary pink and candy-coated chocolate-ness, also about the real stuff, which can perhaps be just as irrational, but is nevertheless far more intense and profound and committed and transforming than a love of tuesdays (however genuine) ever could be. loving people is better. let's do more of that, shall we?

pictures make things better too

I don't know if I'd trade a whole thousand words just for one... but they are nice. they make a lot of things better than they would be without. the internet, for example. and blank walls. scrapbooks. children's books. wedding invitations, sometimes. and especially cookbooks. every cookbook should be required to have at least a handful of decent color photographs. someone somewhere should be in charge of policing all cookbook publishers. words don't really make food better. but photographs... they make cookbooks awesome. they make you hungry, and being hungry always makes food better, doesn't it?

I came home from the library yesterday with a cookbook: The Ultimate Slow Cooker Book from Better Homes & Gardens. it has pictures--almost one or two on every page--and also a bunch of colorful headings in a very nice slab-serif font.

I could've picked any other cookbook from the packed shelves in the cookbook section, but I picked this one because I really do love Better Homes & Gardens, for some reason, and also because my dear sister(who never blogs) and her new husband gave me a crock pot for my birthday. it's beautiful and red and I can't wait to use it. (this is your cue, everyone, to start sending me your favourite crock pot recipes. especially you Bekah--I know you have a few awesome ones.)

ironically, there are no pictures in this blogpost. I will take some later, perhaps, so you can all see my one and only kitchen appliance.

let's keep going

the presentation went well. eventually I may stick my slide-show up somewhere for anyone who might be curious, but for now, all you get is one little slice.

it was a small affair, but I loved seeing Lisa and Mandy again, and meeting some of the other chapter members. they've got some cool stuff going on over there. with any luck I'll find a way to see more of them all and perhaps stay somewhat involved. who knows?

when I'd finished leading my little discussion about online portfolios and crawling through my few gathered examples, Joe (one of the other presenters) came up and asked me what font I'd used for all these slides. it's Century Gothic, a font I've always loved in sizes over 24 pt. it looks great, doesn't it? Century Gothic and that soft middling orange color just might become vital elements in my trademark style. maybe. and those curly brackets. I love those.

tributaries

my new favourite superhero: wordgirl. she's an alien. from the planet Lexicon. and she's here to fight evildoers and teach your little ones about words like "ruckus" and "vegetarian." we watched all the cute 2-minute episodes on the website yesterday. i love it. make fun of me if you must.

while we're on the topic of words, i want to share all the very best quotes out of Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style:

"... there are no paths at all where there are no shared desires and directions."

"... the greatest threat to communication is not difference but sameness. Communication ceases when one being is no different from another: when there is nothing strange to wonder at and no new information to exchange."

and these from an interview the man did for typebooks.com:

"The most powerful type and design tools in the world are the pencil and the pen, which have been pretty accessible and affordable for quite a while. Some people, it is true, are so enchanted by the computer that they now can’t draw or write by hand, just as some are so enchanted by the car that they’re incapable of walking."

"The masters of the art, it seems to me, are those who never stop apprenticing."

the books is magic and full of lovely metaphors, a mix of things i already know and things i didn't know.
today i'm looking through a very old box of high school stuff. it seems to be full of mistakes and delusions and advice i didn't take. when i get to the bottom, what am i going to do with it all?

cut it up into pieces. dissect the past. make something new.

zyx wv uts rqp

i've taken up, for my extracurricular christmas studying this year, the subject of typography.

somehow i'm not nearly as afraid of type design as i am of open source computer software. it isn't that surprising, i suppose. type design grows a little bit naturally out of my background as a technical writer and my secret otherlife as a wannabe designer. i already knew about serifs and roman faces, baselines and kerning and justification.

i've been reading Jan Tschichold and prowling the web for information on all the basics. counters, bowls, cross-strokes, terminals, descenders, hairlines--so much terminology, i'm never going to remember it all.this may be the beginning of something. or it may be just another phase.

either way, should be fun.