With the master's gone, how is an Adept to achieve Mastery? By learning the secrets of the ancients through a mix of cultural outreach and maybe a little grave-robbing. Dead Magic explores the magic of the cradle of humanity, the ruins of Babylon, the forbidding tracts of North American of Arctic, and the visceral practices of Greece. Adam and Terry tour through the ruins of past magick and give recommendations on how to bring the contents into your game. Warning! This is a Black Dog Game Factory supplement and is a bit more gorey and bad-touchy than most Mage books.
This book: Dead Magic
Next book: Blood Treachery
Rework of Giant’s Playground by Adam
Shaping up the Giant’s Playground should remain within Revised Edition’s parameters of keeping things on Earth so no portals to the Umbra or Horizon Realms. Making it mystically interesting goes against Revised Edition’s rich character development but I swear I’m going to print some T shirts with the message “Rage Against the Rich Character Development”. Yes, this is a reference to page 81 of The Bitter Road.
The Giant’s Playground is a popular destination for visitors to Namibia although very few suspect its true significance. Mages who venture beyond the most popular rock formations and explore the interior will eventually reach a point where their mystic senses are aroused (Awareness + Perception or Wits, diff 6). Those who score 3 or more successes get a sense that space is stretched and wound differently than normal. Those with less successes get a feeling the place is special somehow and are free to try their first level Sphere senses. Those who botch become convinced someone has set a trap for the Awakened and will want to leave.
The first level of Correspondence is enough to let mages perceive an entrance to the Playground’s true interior. The first level of Spirit should also be enough to let a mage open their senses to the spirits of the land who will guide the mage to the entrance. Once inside the true Giant’s Playground the visitors disappear from the view of aerial observers and Sleepers. The old, squarish rocks loom higher and closer as the visitors walk and form a labyrinth. Visitors will need an excellent sense of direction or the favor of the local rock spirits to find their way out safely. Correspondence magic is more difficult to use here, as if normal notions of space, volume and distance don’t apply.
There is a palpable sense of power here. Old designs scratched into the stones hint at forgotten rituals. Those with Spirit magic will find it markedly easier to communicate with rock spirits here (Axis Mundi pg. 122).
Some passages of the labyrinth, always open to the sky, lead to chambers that surround low, flat rocks roughly 10 feet in diameter. It isn’t hard to imagine the mages of long ago conducting rites here but information on what was done or who did it is lost to time. All Sphere magic used to scry here is blocked. The mage sees an image of an enigmatic stone idol.
Members of the Ngoma claim the site is sacred and forbid others to visit. However, they do not guard it or interfere with anyone who has visited. The members of the Mad Zimbabwe sect of the Euthanatos will not speak of it at all.