Sleeper: Huddling in Listless Ignorance.
This book is a revision of Mage: The Ascension, 2nd Edition. It has a handful of useful clarifications on the working of spheres, and a new game mechanic for resonance. That’s all I have good to say about it– if you don’t like to read open criticism, stop reading here.
Mage Revised asserts that the Ascension War is over, and that magic is dying. (Why didn’t they retitle the game: "Sleeper: Huddling in Listless Ignorance" ??) To me, it’s a no-brainer that Mage is about magic, not about whether-or-not-there-is-magic. The crucial premise of Mage is "Many Magics in the Modern World, one of them being Science." Not only is the premise "Magic is dying" totally inappropriate to the genre of Willworkers, it’s also incredibly tired and lame– it makes Mage a cheap imitation of the fragile-dream feel of Changeling. Magic cannot die, any more than reality can die.
What can die, however, is the great majority of Mage Masters. The developers decided that Mage: Revised should have very few Masters. Forgetting for the moment that the wise, powerful elder is a staple of this genre, this isn’t so bad. But instead of simply writing them out of the revised setting, they trumped up a "natural disaster" in order to kill off most Masters. Pretty as you please.
There’s no real discussion of the Technocracy, Nephandi, Marauders, or the Umbra in the revised book. These materials were in 2nd edition. They were left out of revised.
Game mechanics changed. Now, one gets very nearly as much paradox from successful vulgar magic as from botched vulgar magic– mages will be half-hoping for simple failure when they try to shape reality. Talk about undermining a Willworker’s self-confidence!
Also, nowadays, the greater your Arete, the harder it is to get into the Umbra. Someone explained this to me as the "metaphysical blip" theory of Arete. Sort of like Arete is some kind of energy one stores up, in order to muscle reality around! So, in Revised, Arete goes from insight to "power." From an in-character perspective, this makes no sense at all. It is, however, how they "explain" the deaths of most of the Masters, who had very high Aretes and were "caught off guard" by this sudden change in a fundamental structure of reality. Wouldn’t you be?
One cannot help but wonder why Mage: Revised is so unconscionably awful. There is a reason, and it’s not that the developers are Evil, per se. Before the revision, Mage was a game of high-stakes epic adventure. Higher stakes by far than any other World of Darkness game line. Mage players’ characters were powerful, and Mages as a whole defined reality itself. The scope of the game was tremendous, challenging, and rewarding.
Mage: Revised was developed in order to minimize the Mage game and Mage players into the world of White Wolf’s more profitable "Vampire: The Masquerade" line– profitability is the reason for all the changes. Magic itself was crippled, the majority of living Masters were eliminated, and easy access to the umbra cut off, so that the wide world of Mage is a little less scary and incomprehensible to the average vampire– because, apparently, the highest level of creativity gamers can rise to is "Superman vs The Hulk." Words cannot express my contempt. When will we stop debasing everything in the name of short-term profit?