This is a really easy one to pin down, but there is a bit of backstory to the one-shot itself. The TL;DR reply is – I ran a rerun of a Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition one shot called The Italian Pavilion. But there is far more to the story than that.
This post’s cover image is the Italian Pavilion found in Zagreb Fair and a few of the twelve inverted pyramids that make its core structure. The whole fair is filled with interesting and culturally significant buildings, for the curious I can only recommend this article and a translation tool.
A long time Mage fan I was happy to get an excuse to buy the latest edition and skim through it. After playing in the system twice, I realised that the Storyteller system is simply not what I am into anymore; and that it is almost fighting me while I run it. I am pretty sure this was the last time I’ll use the system.
The real story here was the session itself. We have a local group, That Other Group, that organises (mostly) one shots of games you can’t or don’t play with your home group. A little while ago we the theme for one of the gatherings were less played Storyteller games, and I snagged a GMing slot for Mage.
The session brewed in my mind for months, with a lot of ideas I wanted to include. The core was a subversion of (player) expectations and the inate weirdness of Mage. But I also wanted it to be very humanistic. The World of Darkness settings really work when the actors are overpowered beings, but still very human. What drove a lot of the idea was – what happens when an extremely powerful mind mage starts losing his grip on reality.
I ran it twice so far, and both times to very positive feedback from the two groups. For a one shot I wrote about it a lot, in Croatian only if you want to use a translating tool to skim through the content:
- The original pitch for The Italian Pavilion.
- Some thoughts after the first run.
- Some additional thoughts after the rerun.
- Questions for the PCs, answered as a warm-up, one for each tradition.