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!

After just enough debate to ensure that none of us would suffer Paradox backlash from disagreeing too quickly, those of us who got together to chat (thanks to Exire and the players of Elizabeth Habsburg, Lucas Connors, Marie Thomas, Michael LaVey and Roswen Snow) came to a rough agreement on a few things:

• Having a Chantry seems like a pretty good idea. For the purposes of actually creating the Chantry, we can use the "Background points pool" described in Guide to the Traditions. Nobody mentioned any limits on or requirements for Chantry membership.
• The idea of having a PC-occupied Chantry leadership council is sound for people who would like to participate in it. To avoid any conflict of interest, the "leader" should be an NPC brought out only for storylines rather than a player character, regardless of their level of involvement.

Assuming there are no objections to this (if there are, please post them and we'll work it out before we continue), I'd appreciate it if players who are interested could post the names and Chantry ratings of the characters that they want to have involved. If you're interested in a leadership council position, please list that as well. The leadership council positions are as follows:

• Counsellor (acts as an advisor/pshrink for Chantry members)
• Ritemaster (leads group magical workings among Chantry members when needed)
• Tutor (instructor for less experienced mages, both Awakened and hedge magicians)
• Justice (settles disputes between Chantry members)
• Librarian (maintains the Chantry's mundane and magical archives)
• Sentinel (responsible for protecting the Chantry from outside threats)

As far as I'm concerned, any of these positions can be filled by anybody, whether Awakened or not (within reason - it would be awfully hard for a Psychic to act as the ritemaster for a group of Awakened Dreamspeakers). Likewise, if more than one person is interested in a position, it's up to them to figure out whether they want to split the job, rotate it between them, convince one person to stand aside, or whatever else they might feel is the best option.

Once we have a list of who's going to be involved and how many Chantry points we have in the pool, we'll hopefully be ready to go forward with designing the form of the Chantry, writing up the NPC leader and figuring who gets what position on the Chantry council. If there are any questions/comments/suggestions/concerns, please post them here!

And to start myself off: Brittany Avery, Akashic Brotherhood, Chantry 5.

Lucas Connors, Akashic Brotherhood
I can toss Chantry rating of 2 in there.

Alissa Marie Thomas
Psychic / Tradition less

Chantry ratings, gang?

While not a full blown Mage I do have Noah Bastian.

He is a Police Officer with the NYPD and he is a Sorcerer. A somewhat new character and fairly weak in magic as he has been self taught his whole life. I would love to be involved in this if you would let me. Being a good Enchanter he might make a good Sentinel or junior Sentinel for the Chantry.

I would love to play in the CHantry SL if I can contribute in any way.

Also on an OOC Level, I don't know what Chantry rating means. Regular Mage confuses the hell out of me. Hence why I stick with Sorcerer Revised. But I have a couple experience points. I think 4-5 at this point. Will have to check later. So Maybe I can purchase some.

Hey TSC, glad you could join us! We have a couple other people that are bringing characters in based on Sorcerer Revised, and we'd be happy to have you along for the ride.

EDIT: I should probably mention that there is no "Chantry SL" as such - that is, I'm not running this as a true storyline. It's intended more as a networking tool that Mage players can use in SLs or casual RP if they wish. We'll probably have to retcon it in as saying that it's always existed, even though nobody's actually developed it until now.

The "Chantry Rating" is actually a Background that you put points into, the same way as Allies, Contacts, Resources, etc. The Chantry uses the total of the dots that all its members have in the Chantry Background to buy its own Backgrounds, the same way that you get Background points to spend during character creation.

For example: If there were three members of the Chantry, and all of them had the Chantry Background at 2, the Chantry itself (separately) would have six points to spend on Backgrounds. Depending on what the players/characters agree, they could be put into any number of things - Arcane to keep people from walking in uninvited, a Library for the members to research magical topics, Resources so that the Chantry can have its own building, etc.

Yo!

Anthony Cersani, Akashic Brotherhood.

Britt knows why I'm not posting any Chantry ratings, but definitely looking forward to roleplaying with you guys.

Word.

TheMikey.

Does anyone remember the rules for buying Backgrounds with experience points? If so could you please inform me. I would like to spend my experience points to get some Chantry Rating to contribute. I say we use it for enchanting purposes since that is Noah's thing. LOL