Editing Mage: The Ascension (section)

===The Nine Traditions===

====[[Akashic Brotherhood]]====
Kung fu Buddhist wizards. [[Awesome|They can flip over cars with flying kicks]] and their super-special martial art, which is called Dao, Chinese for "the Way," (both the suffix of every martial arts ever and a reference to Taoism, the basis of their magic). They specialize in Mind since they're basically Jedi anyway and need to do the mind-trick to make it complete.

====[[Celestial Chorus]]====
The religious, "miracle worker" class, mostly comprised of various Abrahamic religions and their followers. They focus more on the ecstatic, "spirit-filled" religious practices than on old-fashioned tradition, with the Kabbalists joining the Order of Hermes and the hyper-traditionalist Muslims sticking with their ethnic craft, the Batini. Unfortunately, given the largely-paganist bent of White Wolf's design team, this also meant they didn't get a ton of focus or cool new stuff outside of their one write-up. Their sphere is Prime.

====[[Cult of Ecstasy]]====
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll, man. But, like, not for their own sakes, man, but so that they can, like, free themselves from the concerns of the material, temporal world, and, like, achieve a higher state of pure... like... I dunno, pass me some more of that ganja goodness, man. ...Yeah, can you tell that the development team was full of hippies yet? It will be a running theme in this article. 

There are ways to do the Ecstasists right (the ones who hunt down child pornographers to make pleasure as a whole more clean were welcomed for being an extension of the concept that ''wasn't'' just more of the same), but a lot of people just played them in very boring, "more of the same" ways. Have mastery of the sphere of Time, either as a play on "living from the moment," or because all the various substances inside of them make them lose track of it all the time, and they needed ''some'' way to get it back.

====[[Dreamspeakers]]====
The Dreamspeakers represent old-tyme tribal magic from indigenous peoples throughout the world. Which part of the world? ''All of it.'' Wait, so like, all the different Africans, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans get lumped together because they're all "primitive?" [[/pol/|That's racist as ''shit''!]] ''Yes. Yes, it is. Welcome to early White Wolf, you poor sap. We've got support groups.'' 

To play devil's advocate for a moment, an alternate view of this is that the various ethnic mages realized that they were too few and scattered to have any real power unless they worked together. No one is going to pay attention to the two remaining shamans of a tradition most people can't even pronounce, but a hundred of them from a variety of sources bound into a coherent group with unfamiliar powers and an ax to grind is a different story. Later versions made this explicitly canonical, with the Dreamspeakers themselves aware and resentful of the fact that the other Eurasian-dominated factions clumped a bunch of minor ethnic crafts together to make a coherent tradition for condescending political purposes. 

Their mastery is the sphere of Spirit, which mostly focuses on summoning and binding magic. Every sphere has its powerful, broken-ass exploits, and for Dreamspeakers, this means making like a [[D&D]] mage and abusing the fuck out of your ability to conjure things with their own powers to do whatever you like whenever you like it.

====[[Euthanatos]]====
Crazy Hindu/Buddhist assassin wizards, who serve the Wheel of rebirth by killing "bad" people so they can reincarnate into better people. Literally the plot of Wanted. They attracted their share of emo roleplayers and [[Vampire: The Masquerade]] immigrants, but there were always some good bits thrown in too. Their sphere, Entropy is all about influencing luck, fate, and decay, which is good because "luck" doesn't necessarily ding the oppressive system of Consensus quite as overtly as some of the others.

====[[Order of Hermes]]====
The old-tyme wizards, with the beards, staffs, and so on. Used to be the top dogs and run the world, but they were such dickheads that they more-or-less forced the modern Technocracy into being to keep them in check. (Or so the Technocracy and modern books claim. The books actually set in the Dark Ages admit that one particular cabal of mages was out of control, but doesn't actually deliver on a whole lot of dickery, and the narration actually defends their behavior; this is likely down to either retcons, unreliable narrators, or WW getting their heads out of their arses. Though the thing about them not giving a shit about non-mage quality of life is at least consistent.) Their upper guard is extremely bitter about this, and while they're more united than most Traditions their hidebound ways prevent them from actually getting anywhere. In fact, they are divided into stiffly rigid and systemized "houses" with harshly defined specialties, now more prone to infighting than combating the rise of other Traditions and the Technocracy. Just as well: they didn't do a great job ruling the world the first time around. 

They use hermetic magic, which involves old Medieval stuff like Decanic Trappings, Sepiroth, and the Seal of Solomon. They master the sphere of Forces. Tend to be pretty fun, but Hermetics also tend to explode into giblets due to Paradox pretty easily if they stick to tradition, and the politics of the Order demands that they do. They also have an embarrassing tendency to fuck up everything in the back story and create terrible splinter groups. The most infamous and important of these are House Tremere, who became Clan [[Tremere]] over in "[[Vampire: The Masquerade]]."

====[[Sons of Ether]]====
By general consensus of the player-base, the coolest tradition. They are mad scientist-wizards, each following a vision of '''Science!''' that hasn't been current for at least half a decade. But it still works, because they will it so. Formerly aligned with the Technocracy, but they defected in a huff once their brother Technocrats approved letting the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment Michelson-Morley experiment] go forward. (The joke is that it disproved the Luminiferous Ether. Don't worry, they got their revenge by slipping the wacky fun-house world of quantum mechanics into the Consensus on their way out.) 

Nowadays they've gone from Technocratic organization to being even less united that the other Traditions, constantly fighting over which outdated bit of mad science is right. This is usually accomplished through intellectual sniping in underground scholarly journals, and sometimes through actual sniping via lightning guns and disintegration beams. They have the Matter sphere. The possibilities are endless... so long as, in a bit of Technocratic heritage, it remains internally consistent with your gobbledegook non-science technobabble. 

In the 20th Anniversary edition, the Sons got officially renamed to the more P.C. "Society of Ether," though lady Etherites had been lobbying for it in the background of several previous editions.

====[[Verbena]]====
Think a ''D&D'' [[druid]] and you'll be in the ballpark since their progenitors were the original article. Full of Wiccans and tree huggers, but they also cling to the less-savory side of the druid game in blood-sacrifices and a general discomfort towards the modern world. They aren't ''all'' crazy eco-terrorists, but enough are that one hopes they don't end up on top. And because White Wolf is full of hippies, neo-pagans, and New Age-types, [[Derp|we are supposed to find them sympathetic anyway]]. 

They have the sphere of Life, naturally, and can use it to instantly cause a Technocrat's body to instantly reject all of its gene-mods or cyborg bits. [[Fail|Because of ''course,'' the neo-pagan eco-crazies need an "I win" button when taking on Team Establishment]]. [[Werewolf: The Apocalypse|How long have you been in town, mister?]]

====[[Virtual Adepts]]====
Very literal computer wizards, and the ''other'' Tradition that emigrated from the Technocracy. In their case, it was a one-two punch of finding out they'd had Alan Turing chemically castrated and murdered, and learning that the Internet was being released to the Masses. The philosophy on why this was a bad thing had its good points ("They aren't equipped to handle it yet! It'll turn them all into lazy basement-dwelling trolls [[World of Warcraft|obsessed with trivialities]]!" which was pretty fucking prescient for the time) and its bad points ("[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September Waaaaah! Newbs on mah Internets! I'm not special anymore!]"). 

Since they cast spells with programs and the Internet, they're great for nerds who want to play nerds and don't want to stretch. Masters of the Correspondence sphere, which lets them work with space and distance. Their shit works because the Internet is just the upper layers of a great Web of information that connects all things, and also cyberspace is a physical place in the spirit world which you can actually go visit in person, which is how they can hack your wallpaper and make it change color to send messages. And we don't mean your computer background.

{{WoD-Traditions}}