State of the Game: Part III

[jeregenest]

The Exoteric and the Esoteric

The general thrust of this conversation is that everyone agrees we’ve done a good job of outlining and developing the way magic works in the universe, and in establishing that this is a magical world and everything that has significance is magical by definition. As this was one of my major design goals I feel pretty good about that. Folks also seemed to agree that the Cabal, with all its machinations and political power plays was well represented. What they felt needed more connection was in the area of arcanums, which is interesting because they were meant to be one of the pathways towards initiation and I do agree that they were left by the wayside. One of the regrettable fallouts of the rigid structure applied to the preludes.

In the course of the discussion it seemed to me that what folks were looking for out of the Arcana were a juxtaposition to the machinations in the world that the Cabal, as invisible empire often seems to have. The point got brought up several times that they missed this potential aspect of the game and the idea was thrown around that they only operated with our magicians out of a sense of spite, which didn’t sound that fun.

As I said above Arcana were definitely one of those things that got left behind during preludes, they didn’t come up much partially as a result of so many of the prequel sessions being beyond the landscape the Arcanum usually operate in.

The solution here is pretty obvious, and I think one easy enough to capture in the game. It is an easy enough assumption to make that until the modern era the Circle has largely been focused on the exoteric nature of power and has not needed the esoteric support of their Arcanum as much, preferring to walk the corridors of power of the Cabal. The prelude sessions really enforce that attitude to me and I think its one we can all run with. And because we want to bring the arcana we set up a situation where that is no longer enough and the players need to turn to their Arcanum and become more involved. Doing this will set up a different type of social dynamic than the ones established so far and hopefully allow me to have relationships which are not all about the power but based on other emotions. That’s the hope at least. I’ll talk about this more later.