I'm obviously familiar with that one, but I wasn't aware that it was still kicking around as serious theory through the 50's.
I'm not sure about creating a survivor of the planet, however. One of the conceptual problems with Mage is that it is a war of ideas, and the Technocracy has been winning by painstakingly editing out the ideas of their opponents from the world consciousness, leaving Paradox to handle the actual destruction of their opposition.
This means that the exploration of space once the Sons of the Ether split from the Technocracy has been a slow eradication of Etheric ideas, with the corresponding erosion of their power base. Each discovery about space, no matter how wonderful we science gooks may find them, is less magical than the Etherics would have had them. Vulcan is eradicated and the Etherics lose a central base; Mars is redefined and the Etherics four armed warrior allies become so paradox laden that they cannot be maintained; Venus becomes too hot to support life and the Etheric's paradise world (perhaps constructed with the Verbena) is boiled away under the weight of sleeper 'understanding'.
What the loss of the idea of a destroyed planet as the asteroid belt brings to mind is the Technocracy counter attack against a potential 'discovery' of non-Technocracy approved life or technology inside an asteroid. The appearance of such a thing would have been readily accepted in the 50's, and might have been a good play by the Sons of the Ether to recover lost ground.
I'm still not sure this is viable as a campaign idea, but it has its charms. I still wish I could develop a campaign seed as clever as the one presented in Tear the Scales From Their Eyes in Pyramid, where the world of Aberrant developed from a tradition counter-strike against the technocracy. But these are all things I would like to try as a player in Mage game, not force on my players in a game I was running. If Mage is a war of creativity, I have to trust my players to be creative, and to think BIG, in the setting. So far, I'm not sure that would work.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2006-11-15 05:46 pm (UTC)I'm not sure about creating a survivor of the planet, however. One of the conceptual problems with Mage is that it is a war of ideas, and the Technocracy has been winning by painstakingly editing out the ideas of their opponents from the world consciousness, leaving Paradox to handle the actual destruction of their opposition.
This means that the exploration of space once the Sons of the Ether split from the Technocracy has been a slow eradication of Etheric ideas, with the corresponding erosion of their power base. Each discovery about space, no matter how wonderful we science gooks may find them, is less magical than the Etherics would have had them. Vulcan is eradicated and the Etherics lose a central base; Mars is redefined and the Etherics four armed warrior allies become so paradox laden that they cannot be maintained; Venus becomes too hot to support life and the Etheric's paradise world (perhaps constructed with the Verbena) is boiled away under the weight of sleeper 'understanding'.
What the loss of the idea of a destroyed planet as the asteroid belt brings to mind is the Technocracy counter attack against a potential 'discovery' of non-Technocracy approved life or technology inside an asteroid. The appearance of such a thing would have been readily accepted in the 50's, and might have been a good play by the Sons of the Ether to recover lost ground.
I'm still not sure this is viable as a campaign idea, but it has its charms. I still wish I could develop a campaign seed as clever as the one presented in Tear the Scales From Their Eyes in Pyramid, where the world of Aberrant developed from a tradition counter-strike against the technocracy. But these are all things I would like to try as a player in Mage game, not force on my players in a game I was running. If Mage is a war of creativity, I have to trust my players to be creative, and to think BIG, in the setting. So far, I'm not sure that would work.