Mages of the Caribbean--or, a White Wolf game of pirates

The Game Room
1

I haven’t run a RPG in many years, to my dismay–it was once one of the great joys of my life. Next month I’m thinking of starting back up the the titular idea, and I was wondering if folks here would want to be my sounding board for ideas.

Executive summary: players will start the game in 1670s Spain in a world with significant magical influences. They will play members of the COuncil of Nine (in white wolf terms, these are a group of mages who are more-or-less opposed to the scientific worldview). Events in the first few sessions will lead to their travel to the New World. This is a world in which Haiti has already undergone a slave revolt and whose rulers are trying to monopolize the (now multiracial) slave trade in the Caribbean. The Aztecs fought the Spanish to a standstill and still control a large empire in Mexico, an empire that’s uneasily allied with Spain against rebellious states to the north and south. And, of course, pirates and buccaneers sail the seas, interfering with the Spanish Flotilla and having all sorts of swashbuckling adventures.

If folks are interested in providing feedback, I’ll post some more in-depth ideas.

2

The set up sounds interesting. I don’t know anything about the White Wolf system, but how will you balance magic vs gunpowder? Seems like one fireball spell would settle most ship to ship battles, unless there’s a mage on both ships, and if both get their fireballs cast, then everybody is swimming…

3

Bah.

At that time there were no Sons Of Ether (nor even any Electrodyne Engineers). What fun is mage without SOEs?

Are you going to have the lost traditions (Al I Bahtin and what not) available for play?

Have you read Blood Dimmed Tide, the WOD oceans resource book?

Are the Settites going to be in control of Haiti?

Important Point For Those Unfamiliar With Mage- Magic in Mage does not work like in D&D or most other games. In order to avoid nasty consequences, a mage must make the effects of his magic look like coincidence or the result of standard physical laws. A mage cannot cast fireball at an enemy ship. However, a mage with the right rankings could make all the powder in the armory explode at once.

4

The primary sourcebook I’m using is an ebayed copy of Mage: Sorcerer’s Crusade, a stand-alone Mage game set in 1450. I figure moving it 200 years into the future will require some adjustments, but the basic rules are fine.

These rules don’t require coincidental magic as long as the mage is using a recognizeable magical tradition, given the high belief in magic at the time. I’m thinking that in Europe, this is starting to be replaced by the modern Mage rules for coincidental magic by the 1670s, but that in the Americas, it might not be.

Ship-to-ship combat is a difficult question. The range of most combat will provide some limitations, as will the size of ships: doing serious damage to a ship will be pretty difficult (but not impossible). I’d like for mages to each be about as powerful as a big old cannon, albeit much more flexible: a ship with a cabal aboard SHOULD present a nasty threat. Of course, mages are imminently killable, and they’ll be the first ones targeted by snipers atop masts, and the need for mages to be enacting ritual motions to complete their spells (none of this coincidental nonsense back in the seventeenth century!) will make them visible targets.

I played with the idea of having salt water “ground” magic, making ship-to-ship spellcasting very difficult, but that sounds like a real buzzkill. Instead I think I’ll just set up soak rules for ships that make ships pretty tough.

So, basic outline:
-Through some hook or another, depending on PC backgrounds, the cabal ends up in Seville in September as la flota hoves into view. This is the flotilla of galleons and their guardians, carrying the treasure of the New World. Seville has a festival around this time (I assume–can’t find historical verification, but it seems really likely that such an influx of wealth and horny sailors would lead to a festival), so the game will begin in citified chaotic fun.
-One of the items aboard a ship is a root/section of an exotic orchid. Really, really exotic, supercharged with magical energies. PCs will scheme, plot, and fight to get it away from the science mages who want to classify it and study it and thereby rob its power for themselves.
-The PCs will eventually make off with the orchid for their own magical stronghold, where their mentors will begin its study deep in the stronghold’s labs.
-The science mages, having followed them back to the stronghold, will attack. PCs will be sent to defend the labs at all costs.
-The orchid, now in a location of strong magical power, comes alive, growing at a tremendous and violent rate, taking over the lab, PCs inside, and turning it into a jungle.
-By the time the PCs hack their way free of the jungle lab, they’ll find themselves under the Caribbean sky, on an island. Nearby, a band of pirates has landed and are on the verge of open violence in a dispute about shares of plunder…

The first few sessions may be somewhat railroady, to get them to the Caribbean, but once they’re there, I plan to make it a lot more open.

Oh, and Doc, virtually all the Science Mages are like the Sons of Ether in this time period, IMO. Da Vinci is major major inspiration for them. At some point they’ll be attacked by a rocket-launcher-wielding science mage flying after them using an ornithopter harness.

5

You contradict yourself below. They can’t do it or they need not do it?

If the former, Mages will be very obvious and kill-on-sight for many. If the latter, they are just as ungodly powerful as ever.

Difficult with those rules. Mages are ludicrously powerful and are mostly “balanced” (to the extent the game needs or has balance) by the fact their enemies are also ludicrously powerful and that they are individually quite weak.

Moreover, Mages are inhumanly flexible. A starting Mage has access to nigh-infinite varieties of powers.

(Eminently. Imminant means “just about to happen”.)

First thing said in a ship battle: “I’m going belowdecks, looking ut a gunport, and casting my spell.”

Alternatively, if they can use coincidence, the enemy ships will have the first cannon they try explode in their faces and set their ship on fire. Or a sudden gust rips their sails off. Or they run aground on a hidden reef. Or an unseen sniper kills the captain.

See above.

There’s only so far you can take that. The hull is just thick wood. Give the ship lots of wounds in different sections, with cumulative penalties to its operation.

6

Let me step back in and explain where I think you’re going wrong, L. H. of D. Mages are not “powerful as a big old cannon.” They are about equal to God Himself With Power in His Right Hand and Terror in His Left if they use their power right. In fact, whether they are coincidental or not, the key issue in any Mage game is that a group of mages can probably do any damn thing they please if they have time. It’s not really built to be an action game. If it does get into action, either the Mages can obliterate their opponents or there’s very little they can do. Further, the differences between Mages makes them widely varying in terms of capability. One Mage with Forces and a knowledge of how to use it can destroy a warhip without much fuss and without big explosions.

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smiling bandit, let’s just say you have a very different gaming group than mine. Given my familiarity with the group, the rules, and most of all myself, I anticipate no problems with the power creep you suggest, and if I thought I couldn’t handle my group in that respect, I wouldn’t be putting myself in the storyteller seat in the first place. And that’s all I’ll say about that.

The rules set is chosen; that decision isn’t really something I’m interested in discussing. I’m more interested in folks’ ideas about awesome things either in Spain or in the New World that I really ought to include.

I’d also really like folks’ ideas on interesting personalities. What would be some good characters for the opposition science mages? for older members of the Traditions? For mages in the New World?

I like the idea of putting vampires in control of Haiti. I’d planned on making them an African magic society, and I may still do that, but vampires could also work.

8

Which side is Newton on? Kind of too bad you’re off in the Caribbean and nowhere near Newton or Liebnitz.

Though you could always have Enoch Root put in an appearance.

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Not all scientists are mages, Tom, although Newton probably is. In modern mage, the techno-mages are for the most part unremittingly evil; in this version, it’s much more of a conflict of ideologies.

The way I’m going to handle the science mages is to say that they’re deist utopians. They believe that their work involves understanding God’s machine, and that other groups of mages are purposefully mystifying people about how the world really works. They want to spread a universal understanding of science; in doing so, they’ll create an egalitarian (or meritocratic) society in which mages can’t rule as tyrants, not even as behind-the-scenes tyrants, since the only “magic” that works will be the magic of science, and science will be available to everyone. But they know that mages are encouraging alternate explanations for the cosmos, and that these alternate explanations present the single greatest barrier to their utopian vision; as such, science mages devote a fair amount of energy to slaughtering other mages AND to wiping out entire societies that prove to be too resistant to the science worldview.

So they’re still kind of scary folk.

Enoch Root is an interesting idea; I’ll see if there’s a place to work him in.

10

This is pretty close to Enoch Root’s stated program in the Baroque Cycle (as I recall and of course it’s not exactly a straightforward story). I’m afraid I’m not having many interesting ideas about Spain or the Caribbean; I’m still a bit caught in the fact that you’ve set your campaign right in the golden age of the Royal Society (and of course English pirates were a scourge upon Spanish shipping all through those times, so there’s some connection there).

Elsewhere, 1670 is 30 years after the death of Cardinal Richelieu, but Louis XIV is at the height of his powers; the tulip mania was in the 1630s and the 80 years war has been over for 20 years; the second siege of Vienna is 12 years in the future.

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I’m assuming the Aztecs are necromancers?

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Aztecs aren’t necromancers, in the sense of dabbling with the dead. They’re more in the business of creating the dead, by the thousands, to fuel immense magic on a scale beyond any magic anywhere else on earth. If their magic weren’t limited by proximity to one of their temples, they surely would have overtaken the planet by now; as it is, they rule Mexico absolutely, and have had trouble expanding their borders much beyond.

Their shaky alliance with Spain, an alliance that allows them to buy a lot of slaves, may tip this balance.

13

Speaking of France, assuming Dumas’s histories are accurate, Aramis is the sole surviving Musketeer (including D’Artagnan) and the Spanish ambassador to France in the late 1660s/early 1670s. Though he could end up elsewhere. He’d be a rather old man by then (50s or 60s) modulo any fountain of youth.

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Another thought: Have you read On Stranger Tides?

15

Ooh, Aramis is a fantastic idea! He could totally end up in the Caribbean; I’d love to put him as a garrulous old drunkard at a tavern, or maybe a fencing master that the PCs can hire to bone up on their swashbuckling skills. And reading On Stranger Tides a month or so ago is what brought the idea for this game back to mind (I first thought of it on the ride back from Gencon 2008).

Aramis is exactly the sort of idea I’m looking for; thanks!