#RPGaDAY2023 Day 23: “COOLEST looking RPG product / book”
One of the coolest games I’ve ever played – and would dearly love to play more with – is Mage: The Ascension. The coolest book I own is probably the 20th Anniversary Edition.
It’s printed in a faux-leather edition and is about 2 inches thick, 295 pages of gold-edged heavy stock full-colour delightfulness.
From the beginning, I loved the premise of Mage and the wizards of the World of Darkness. The idea that reality is fundamentally malleable has always resonated with me.
The artwork is delicious and varied. The text is overwritten but I still enjoy the indulgent style, communicating as it does the rich world that hides in the shadows of the everyday.
Photos can’t do it justice but suffice it to say that this book has inspired many hours of reading, pondering, and a life dedicated to the study of things religious, philosophical, and occult.
Of course, nowadays I probably wouldn’t play it with the Storyteller System as written. Or would I?
Game on!
Roleplay Rescue’s Blog 
I still use Storyteller when I break out old WW games. While replacing the system in games from the less-liked to the liked is often easier than it gets made out to be, it is an additional layer of translation and preparation for some or all of the players. I used Storyteller for more than a decade. I found its problems were often exaggerated, typically user error, and mostly avoidable.
In this case, though, you have set a course for apprenticeship through an application of GURPS, so taking on M20 as or largely as written is something of a tangent. 😉
There were GURPS versions of the core WoD games, though, including Mage, so in this case, much of the work of replacement has been done for you. You might only have to cut out the excess between you and a stripped down GURPS you have identified a preference for, if you decide a Storyteller tangent is not in the cards~
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Yeah, Storyteller was fine back twenty or so years ago when I last played around with it. I own all three of the GURPS WoD books, so conversion is made simpler there. I think it’s more likely that elements of WoD are going to slip into my own Modern games. 😉
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GURPS Mage: The Ascension was a book that I picked up because the cover looked really cool to me. I ended up running a WoD game with GURPS for years, and buying a ton of the White Wolf WoD books for the lore. One of those is probably coolest looking RPG books I have. White Wolf really upped the production value of game books.
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