Howdy, folks. A few of us (Mikey, Dre, Lucas and I) have been chatting about ways to breathe some life into the Mage game* here without confining people to SLs or having people burn out from STing. We've come up with a few ideas that I wanted to offer to everyone, to see if there's enough interest to go forward.
* When I say "Mage" I mean all the purples: Awakened, Sorcerers, mortal Consors, whatever. In the beginning it would be Traditions-focused, but as you'll see, it could be expanded easily enough.
A quick blurb about myself: I've been playing on various forms of moderated and unmoderated WoD chats since about a year before New Bremen was taken offline, primarily in the Mage venue. I've also STed Mage in a tabletop setting for both Second Ed (which I'm really rusty on) and Revised. No, this doesn't make me better or more qualified than anyone else, I'm just here to have fun.
The idea that the four of us have been sending around is, probably unsurprisingly, the creation of a Chantry. The Chantry would have a council of seven senior members, one of whom would be semi-NPCed (I'll explain that in a minute), while the rest of the spots are open to player characters of whatever stripe people feel like playing. The goal is that players would be able to use the "structure" of having a Chantry to set up opportunities for RP, whether casual or SL-based, without having to rely on one person STing them. If people want to play political games, the Chantry structure gives them a means to do so. If they don't want to bother with that kind of thing, they can still use the Chantry as a way of meeting people and getting stuff going. If enough people are interested, we can look at blue-booking a "canon" Chantry forum thread and/or wiki page. Alternately, if people really don't give a damn, they can just ignore the entire thing and go on their merry way. Works for everyone, right?
The leader of the Chantry council would, ideally, be either a proper NPC or a "ST PC". I'd be happy to offer my main Mage character, Brittany Avery, for the role. The reason I'd call Britt a semi-NPC is because I'd love to be able to have her in an RP setting, but stats-wise, a decade of playing her in various incarnations has made her too damn powerful to play well with others. So, my hope is that her involvement on an RP level would be useful to start SLs without necessarily dealing with politics (from the perspective of "hey, the Chantry leader is calling a meeting") without having to deal with the dice-rolling nightmare of a character that's a walking deus ex machina. Now, all that said, I'm not particularly attached to the idea of Britt heading this thing up - if someone else wants to do it, they're welcome to jump in.
If it looks like people are interested, I'll go into more detail with what I had in mind - that, and there are a few points I thought of that I haven't had a chance to discuss with the other three yet, so I don't want to spring anything on them! In the meantime, leave us a note and let us know what you think!
