Ever since I first read Mage: The Ascension sometime back around the end of 1993, I’ve had a strong desire to play in that specific iteration of the World of Darkness published by White Wolf and now Onyx Path. This weekend, being in a state of detachment induced by illness, I decided to bring three things together: Mythic, Cypher (2e), and Mage20.

Mage was encountered by my mind as a breath of wild thought, most notably speaking to my soul of the belief I didn’t quite realise I held that reality is fundamentally malleable. I was a young man about to get married and entering into the wider world of work after university. This was a game that spoke against the established order of things.

I’ve been a fan of the Cypher System ever since being encouraged to explore it by an old friend of the podcast, Dave Aldridge, in a dedicated conversation with him about Numenera and the Cypher System aired in June 2020 as Season 6, Episode 12. As resistant as I was at that time, Dave’s insistence that Numenera drastically changed and liberated his approach to session prep peaked my interest.

It wasn’t until earlier this year that the real joy of Cypher finally revealed itself to me through playing with the face-to-face group in Nottingham in our Ariadne’s Thread game. I backed the new edition of the system in a heartbeat and a few days ago received the final .PDF version of the Cypher Character Rulebook. This truly is a refined edition with many new ideas and significant changes.

And so I was tipped over into wanted to try playing with the Cypher rules. The Character Rulebook introduces the design of a player character through a progression of complexity, beginning with the ‘core character’ and taking you into ‘The Real World’ with types you might like to play. Cypher has a more grounded starting point that resonates with me. It reminded me of Mage.

I’ve adopted an analogue-first approach where I, as the creative solo player, roll physical dice, consult my Mythic GM Deck, and discover the events at the table as they happen. My messy shorthand notes and quick table look-ups are fed into an LLM which turns them into short, clean, readable logs. By linking Mythic’s scene alterations and random events directly to Cypher’s GM Intrusions, I have created a streamlined approach that keeps the focus entirely on the emerging story.

My character is a young newly-minted Teacher of RE at a British Secondary School in London named Jamie Tennant. He’s interested in magickal lore, especially the Hermetic tradition from the so-called Order of the Golden Dawn. Yes, there’s a fair dose of younger me in that player character and that’s half the fun of playing solo: no one gets to tell you you’re doing it wrong when there’s only you at the table.

The shadow on an empty shelf? The chilling, impossible moment when Silas – a local contact of Jamie’s – discovered the Crowley text he’d obtained was missing. He opened his untouched, locked steel safe and saw the book sitting exactly where he left it, but his flashlight cast absolutely no shadow, and the polished metal behind it reflected an entirely empty shelf. When Silas reached out to grab the spine, his fingers passed through thin air and the image shattered like static on a broken television screen.

The solo game has begun and I found myself deep in a flow state, playing more easily and swiftly than I have with other approaches in the past. This combination of character, Otherworld, system, solo tool, physical cards and dice has been revelatory in and of itself. How much of the Mage lore will I utilise? I aim to discover that through play but within the context of Jamie’s experience, I suspect he is close to Awakening.

Game on!