• cjoll4@lemmy.world
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    19 hours ago

    I’m vaguely familiar with Hermetic magic in the “medieval Græco-Egyptian esotericism” sense. Does “Hermetic Mage” refer to something specific in an RPG?

    • Section Ratio General@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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      14 hours ago

      In Mage: the Ascension, one of 9 Mystic Traditions is the Order of Hermes, which is exactly what you are imagining. They conform very tightly to what you immediately think of when you hear the word “wizard”.

      There are other kinds of Awakened you can play as, sorted into 3 factions. Here’s a very far from complete list of traditions, with their corresponding factions:

      • Verbena (Nine Mystic Traditions): A hodgepodge of Wiccans, pagans, new age mystics, and blood sorcerers.
      • The Syndicate (Technocracy): If they have enough money to throw at the problem, they can do anything.
      • Society of Ether (Nine Mystic Traditions): Steampunk mad scientists who fight dinosaur nazis from Agartha in the center of the hollow earth.
      • Solificati (Disparate Alliance): Alchemists focused on ratification of the soul.
      • New World Order (Technocracy): They use fear to control. Contract magic, mind control, that flashy stick thing from MIB, the works.
      • The Celestial Chorus (Nine Mystic Traditions): All things are possible through God.
      • Hollow Ones (Disparate Alliance): Punk as a magic system, and I mean that literally. In the core books they tend to be goth rockers, but I would imagine a more modern Hollow One would either go full Dark Academia or full Fairy Kei.
      • Void Engineers (Technocracy): Space Explorers fighting Cthulhu and the Borg on Alpha Centari.
      • Akashic Brotherhood (Nine Mystic Traditions): 🎶Everybody was kung fu fighting🎶

      The game’s about, at least in theory, winning over hearts and minds so that you can shape consensus reality in your image. For example, the big AI push we’ve been enduring recently was a push by Iteration X (another faction in the Technocracy) to force AGI into the consensus reality.

      • wyldrstallyns@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        16 hours ago

        See? This timeline gets the shit from our beloved sci-fi, but can’t seem to wrap its damn head around Star Trek’s burgeoning universal peace (nor hoverboards, telepathy, collaborative aliens, et al) 🥲