Clouded beauty

[subplotkudzu]

Of course, Vulcan isn't the only planet that the Sons of the Ether have lost to the technocracy. Early scientific reports of Venus - especially after Mikhail Lomonosov discovered her atmosphere in 1761 - postulated it as a lush abode of Earth-Like life, perfectly in keeping with the Sons' ethos. The Russian Venera and Vega missions in the 70's and 80's were the final ten nails in the coffin of that image.

Other games have made use of that world, but as a battleground in the Ascension of Mage I believe that the fetid swamps of Venus remain untapped. Their loss would be a retreating action as the Sons of the Ether pulled back the main body of their work to Vulcan, only to have that stripped away from them by Einstein. By the mid 20th century they just had pockets of the other reality on Venus, losing them one by one. Of course if the game is set in the early 20th century, the PCs might have just lost Vulcan and are hiding out in one of those Venusian outposts.

More might come up on this game concept if Dava Sobel's The Planets continues to delight.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Don't forget the asteroids as the ruins of a destroyed planet; that one was still around in the 1950s when Heinlein was writing his classic juveniles. It might have been one of the inspirations for Krypton's destruction. In any case, you could have a survivor of the ruined planet in suspended animation, or a desperate struggle over the similar destruction of Mars.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

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.