The Hidden World, Rough Outline

[DrPraetor]

The Hidden World
This is a mage/werewolf/changeling/hunter reboot. That is, it is a reboot of all the components of WOD/nWOD which do *not* belong in a horror setting, but which are not lame. Mostly that is the Technocracy, which is awesome (except for the bits which suck.) Most of the mechanics are conserved from Frank's After Sundown, so to begin with, I'm going to sketch out the differences between the two games.

First, and this is important, the two game settings cannot coexist. Overcrowding becomes so severe that the Technocracy and the World Crime League need to share office space.

The setting is reverse-engineered from the following premise:
The players are a group of agents of the technocracy, who are secretly do-gooding supernatural beings but must pretend not to be, even to their superiors, who as a matter-of-policy pretend not to believe in magic. You try to combat the global plots of one or more shadowy international conspiracies (rivals in the Tecnocracy and the Old Ones, primarily), as well as the local plots of spirits or monsters run amok. You do all of this while keeping your supernatural powers secret from the popos, and your enemies are trying to keep their powers (or existence) secret as well, or the setting falls apart.

Finally, this game is not as well-balanced as After Sundown. This is partially a result of the inclusion of intrinsically-unbalancing things like "Fire Magic" which lets you do stuff with fire; partially it is a result of the alternative setting, which is heroic fantasy in a modern setting, not especially gritty or dystopic, and this is reflected in a set of magical powers which are not as limiting, but thus harder to balance.

What is, in fact, in the Hidden World:
Shoshin - Changelings / Shapeshifters / Wizards are all the same thing. For the sake of the setting, these are all "Shoshin". These are humans who have awakened to their spiritual aspect, usually without prior exposure to the supernatural. They band together in a variety of splats and try to keep their existence secret from humans, although for different reasons than in the horror setting. Exposure to the supernatural usually has a disastrous impact on human beings, so the Shoshin make considerable efforts to avoid exposing humans to the supernatural. The Shoshin are supernaturally good, whatever their various curses and failings, so the moral imperative to prevent humans from coming to harm is the primary incentive for them to avoid exposure. As a result of having their personal morality to one extent or another magically enhanced, traditionalist Shoshin are not generally well-suited to infiltrate all levels of government; however, some traditionalist Shoshin believe that because of their enhanced virtue, they should secretly govern humanity, but this particular splat has been on the losing end of a long-running political struggle with their technocracy rivals. Shoshin feel a particular charge, possibly enhanced as a result of their nature, to maintain harmony with the other world, and spend much of their time fighting or negotiating with spirits. These can be Light Others, if we wish.

Monsters - Montsers are also humans who have awakened to their supernatural nature, but unlike Shoshin, are supernaturally evil. You can play them if you wish but there is little incentive to do so. Unlike the Monsters in After Sundown, they are intended as an antagonist group, come in relatively fewer types, did not at one time openly govern humanity, and are largely independent, or organized into small clans, rather than globe-spanning splats; the exception is the technocracy, which monsters are free to join as long as they pretend they are not supernatural at all. Humans who awaken to their monstrous nature spontaneously are generally more subtle (and dangerous) than those forced into awareness of this nature by magical events, the later group having a tendency to just go on a rampage; which can rapidly spiral out of control, so the Technocracy comes down on this kind of thing like a ton of bricks, although it is often a primary source of new recruits. These can be Dark Others, if we wish.

The Technocracy - is an organization of humans who have become aware of the supernatural, and have had a particularly bad reaction to it. The leadership is composed of Shoshin or Monsters who have subconsciously or unwillingly awakened to their spiritual aspect, generally after exposure to the supernatural but officially deny that they are magical at all. Possibly as a result of self-loathing or unconscious awareness and rejection of their own state, the leadership of the Technocracy is engaged in a crusade to erase all things supernatural from the world. This results in a great deal of internal suspicion and infighting, as the leadership are supernatural themselves, but deny this fact as a matter of policy. However, it is important to note that the Technocracy view themselves, with some justification, as the good guys. The Technocracy has heavily infiltrated all levels of government, finance, etc., especially in the high-technology or industrial sphere. They are an ancient organization dedicated towards directing mankind away from mysticism and towards rationality and science.

Various independent Shoshin - These are the Shoshin splats, mentioned earlier, which are not part of the technocracy. This means they don't have to pretend not to be magical (at least to eachother), but have a harder time functioning in human society because all of their resources are magical and must be kept secret from the human public. These groups are hostile to the technocracy for one or another reason, but generally not powerful enough to do anything about it, except on a per-agent basis.

The Old Ones - an alien race (just one!), not native to earth but which existed here in ancient times. Semi-aquatic, presently slumbering beneath the sea, a once-noble people now descended into depravity. They perform a variety of horrible experiments on humans, to create their servitors. Escaped servitors are playable, although they are more or less monsters. The Old Ones are the primary rivals of the Technocracy. Because they are plotting to exterminate humanity and/or institute the future as seen in Half-Life, they are profoundly averse to exposure of any kind, including exposure of other supernatural beings to the human public. Because supernatural beings are relatively well equipped to oppose them (and possibly for other, secret mystical reasons) the Old Ones are bitter enemies to any Shoshin they encounter. The Old Ones have also heavily infiltrated all levels of government, finance, etc. and are engaged in highly-secret conflict with the Technocracy, for world domination. Most of the Old Ones were good, but they died out. The surviving Old Ones themselves are both Aliens and, from a supernatural standpoint, monsters that must feed on life force. The Old Ones have a psycho-cultural agenda, in which they wish to alter human beings to become morally depraved and creepy, so that humans can appreciate Old One culture, which the surviving Old Ones wish to see maintained. With the advanced science at their disposal, not to mention the promise of high-placement in the new world order, the Old Ones do have a sizable number of humans who are willingly enlisted in their great plan.

The Other World (just one) - The Other World, unlike the Other Worlds in a horror setting, is 60% beautiful and wondrous, and only 40% scary; more like Spirited Away than like Silent Hill. Nonetheless, it is full of spirits, who may be very friendly but are not our friends. Each spirit has an agenda, which is a fundamental part of their nature, and will try to pursue that agenda completely and without concern for human morality. That said, spirits take the long view, and value trust and cooperation, so they will play politics, they will collect and repay favors, and so forth. Spirits are deeply averse to direct exposure to humans, since this is doubly likely to attract the attention of the Technocracy, by transforming the humans who are forced into awareness of the supernatural into members!

Fiddling with the mechanics.
Fewer dice, lower numbers, that's good!
Instead of having attributes and skills scaled 1-6, adding them together and looking for hits on 5s, I have attributes and skills scaled 1-4, add them together and look for hits on 4s. This means that thresholds (numbers of required hits) can be the same, but the number of dice rolled is smaller. However, I generally prefer to convert the threshold to a number (twice the threshold) of negative dice which you are forced to roll in addition to your positive dice, hence the difficulty. This is a bit complicated to explain, and it means you need two different colors of dice to play, but it has some nice effects on the way resolution works itself out.
Each positive dice gives you a hit if it is 4+. Each negative dice substracts a hit if it is 3-. Each die, regardless of type, gives you an extra positive dice it if comes up 6, and an extra negative dice if it comes up 1.
Skills, in this system, have an extra benefit that they can be used to increase your number of dice rolled, or to reduce the difficulty of a test. This is to your advantage because the variance is lower, the fewer dice you roll. Thus, if you expect to succeed,
When you roll tests, what you actually roll is:
positive dice negative dice situation
attribute + (skill - difficulty IF GREATER THAN 0) vs. difficulty - skill
If you expect to succeed, and don't depend on extraordinary results.
attribute + skill vs difficulty
If you expect to fail, or are hoping for an extraordinarily high result more than you are trying to avoid failure.
your attribute vs. their attribute + their skill - your skill
Opposed test, if you engage someone and your position is superior. Rolling more dice is to their advantage since this increases the variance, and you expect to succeed.
your attribute + your skill - their skill vs. their attribute
Opposed test, if you engage somone and their position is superior. Rolling more dice is to your advantage since this increases the variance, and you expect to fail.
Finally, I like to interpret a result of 0 hits not as a failure but as a push or tie. This can be difficult to adjudicate in some cases, though.

[Orion]

I think this is a cool idea, but I have some misgivings.

I don't see the point of being monsters secretly working for the technocracy. I've never actually read a White Wolf book, but I always thought the fun in the Technocracy was the idea of being in a secret club that knew how things worked and being able to frankly discuss and plan with a wide variety of resources. Also, doing shit with steampunk tech. Is there a way to preserve what's cool about the technocracy in a new organization that can accept the reality of changelings and mages?

Second, if both sides value secrecy, there are two interactions that can stress the system. If you ever run a sufficient deranged villain, he can use the threat of exposure to try to compel PCs to leave him alone or even do actively evil things. On the other hand, if your players don't care about the health of your campaign setting, they may not feel constrained by the secrecy. So you'll have to be very careful setting up the incentives so it doesn't devolve into a game of chicken.

[DrPraetor]

This was always an issue with the Technocracy - they had magic, they were supposed to be scientists, but they insisted that magic wasn't real. This isn't what you would conclude from the scientific method, of course. There was a lot of flotsam around this in various sources but it's pretty much core to their concept.

The subtle use of magic was neat - as a technomancer, you had the power to alter reality at will, but you don't believe in magic so you are forced to be subtle about it. In some of the WW products this became lame, and the Technocracy was somehow focused on forcing people to use talismans, and they were okay with anything that came out of a device (or "magic item"). This was doubly lame because it made them supposedly-okay with a rune staff (?!?!?!) and supposedly-opposed to on the fly social engineering (unless you use a bleeping doodad for it).

The cool thing about the technocracy was always that you get to be Mulder and Scully with secret magic powers, which you have to pretend come from science.

[Username17]

I think at the point where you're having secret human-killing monsters, that you've pretty much gone full circle back to the horror genre. You probably want to rethink the enemies somewhat to get a more super-heroish vibe. I think you're ultimately going for a Men In Black 1 flavor (as opposed to MIB2, which is shit flavored).

Here are the major pieces of the World of Darkness that I feel that I cut for theme or space:

• Reality Manipulation Magic (Mage, Changeling)
• The Technocracy (Mage)
• Ideological World War (Mage, Changeling, Werewolf)
• Captain Planet Villains (Werewolf, Changeling, Demon)
• World Saving (Werewolf, Mage, Hunter)
• College Liberalism (Werewolf, Changeling)
• Objectionable Sexual Content (Werewolf, Changeling)
• Christianity (Demon, Hunter)
• Animism (Werewolf, Mage, Demon)
• Elves (Changeling)

I think that about covers it honestly. I would just assume get rid of characters whose powers of sexuality are enhanced by holding onto childlike actions and appearance, and I don't think the Christian end-time crap rolled up in Demon and Hunter is worth worrying about. But that still leaves a very real need to get the rest of the themes on the table. Especially Reality Manipulation Magic, because people love that conceptually (even if Mage never had the mechanics or coherence to make that work). But Elves and Captain Planet Villains fit together really well. And I think it has legs.

The basic question to ask is once you're dropping the "Horror" genre whether you're going for action packed Super Heroics like Hunter or Werewolf or paranoid Psychological Thriller like Mage or Changeling. You could try to balance it and do both, but I frankly don't know how that would work.

But for the psychological thriller angle, there is Doubt and all the stuff I did for that. Declaring that you're here to fold in the parts of World of Darkness that don't go into After Sundown really gives Doubt focus: you can see the warps in reality because you're an Elf or a Changeling. And the Conspiracy is fucking with you for the same reason. Done and done.

But that's not really the same game as Supernatural Super Heroes vs. 80s Saturday Morning Cartoon Villainy. And I'm not sure it wants to be. In short: I can totally see combining Hunter, Mage, and Changeling into a game and packaging it as Doubt and calling it a day. But I don't see working the Werewolf angle in, because Captain Planet vs. The Arctic Freon Factory doesn't fit the reality manipulation motiff. Reality Manipulation sort of demands psychological thriller material. In a way that fighting costumed polluters does not.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

Well, in a horror setting, everything is awful, and there is fear and there is horror and there are monsters. In a heroic fantasy setting, you can have just as many monsters. The black riders from Lord of the Rings are plenty scary; do they drink life force? They can totally drink life force, if they want, and this is not a problem. In a heroic fantasy setting, the forces of darkness can be all-the-way abysmally evil.

But there are also forces of light, who have magical powers which are roughly on par with the monsters and must do battle with them. This is really what distinguishes heroic fantasy (even in a modern setting) from horror (even in a modern setting.) In a modern setting, you make an automatic transition from horror into heroic fantasy when the humans achieve rough parity with the monsters, even if the humans rely on technology while the monsters get magic. This is often set out to be very gritty, but that's an aesthetic decision which isn't grounded in the source material. If you are fighting the demons from Doom, and you get bright shiny killer robots with a clean-well maintained interior supplied by a competent and transparent government, then you are in a heroic fantasy setting and not a horror setting or even a grim science fiction setting.

The core issue with regards to Doubt is that I don't think it holds up when the players are Technomancers. Technomancers aren't just awakened to the deeper reality; they also have magic, and also lots of science, and whole lab buildings full of other people doing magic and also lots of science. So you can have the villains from Doubt - but I don't find it credible that they'd stay that mysterious for that long. That said, the conspiracy from doubt is nicely crafted in that you can add it to any setting and never explain it. But you can do that with any setting.

I'm going to order those tropes by the order in which I like them/want them:

• The Technocracy (Mage)
  This is the core of what I want. Anything else I include has to play nice with this basic premise.
• Reality Manipulation Magic (Mage, Changeling)
  This should be core to what the Technocracy does, so we should have it.
• Ideological World War (Mage, Changeling, Werewolf)
  Definitely, and this dovetails nicely with the reality manipulation. But this needs some revision from the WoD version, where the core distinction seems to be:
  Q: should we melt reality into a giant lava lamp?
  A1: ... No.
  A2: YES! Go chaos!
  It's very hard to take that distinction entirely seriously, especially given the intrinsic structural advantages of team Chaos (I have a plan. Our enemies say dragons don't exist. So, let's teleport into central park and start blowing up the fing city! With dragons! Go chaos!) See next two points...
• Elves (Changeling)
  A combination of the Elves from changeling, the spirit hierarchy from Spirited Away etc., and the Elves from The Last Ringbearer. They are more or less opposed to science and modern civilization, and they have human wizards as their allies/agents. So actually that works out well, and they automatically take the somewhat strange ideological position - environmentalist, traditionalist, authoritarian - that the Traditionalist mages are supposed to take.
• Captain Planet Villains (Werewolf, Changeling, Demon)
  Again, we want to have captain planet villains, but why is this their agenda? It has to make a certain amount of sense. So, my proposal, which I think does have a certain logic to it, is this:
  • The Old Ones hate elves, elves have nature power, so getting rid of nature can't never be a bad thing.
  • The Old Ones want to do to humans whatever the Combine is doing in Half-Life. Humans have an attachment to the natural world which reinforces our humanity (probably in some mystical sense as well as in the strictly socio-cultural one, given that in the setting magic is real) so that's good.
  • The Old Ones have a high-tech futurist agenda, and environmental concerns really get in the way. Even if they didn't actively want to destroy the environment - and they do - they'll end up doing tremendous environmental damage out of sheer apathy.
  
  Further advantages accrue. Some of the minions of the Old Ones are also the Jammers from Feng Shui, who want to create a high-tech future in which humans are liberated from domination by unseen supernatural forces. The Old Ones have power, they have advanced technology, they can at least make an argument that the correct thing for us to do is to wipe out the biosphere and retreat into giant domes. So they can have followers who are the villains from Captain Planet but who are not an entirely irrational evil caricature.
  
• Animism (Werewolf, Mage, Demon)
  This fits in just fine, and provides an arena for politicking and stuff where the heroes (the technocracy) are at a distinct disadvantage to their enemies (the elves.) The elves are, of course, themselves spirits and not people, but they're not the only or even the most powerful hierarchy in the spirit world, just the most capable of intervening in human affairs.
• World Saving (Werewolf, Mage, Hunter)
  This is implicit in Ideological World War, if the competing ideologies are sufficiently bad.
• College Liberalism (Werewolf, Changeling)
  Sure.
• Objectionable Sexual Content (Werewolf, Changeling)
  Um... no.
• Christianity (Demon, Hunter)
  This goes with Objectionable Sexual Content into the sister game: Satanic Ritual Abuse.

[Username17]

OK, so we're talking about a combination of the Werewolf-style Animism and the Celestial Bureaucracy. Reality functions the way it does because of the smooth functioning of the vast army of spirits that are following procedures and being guided by legislation and executive orders and such.

The enemies include straight up reality-melting black hats who either want to hop the queue and gain personal power at the expense of reality melting for everyone else or just plain assholes who want to lava lamp the universe. But it also includes villains whose position is more understandable: you got guys who want to make the rules of the universe way laxer, thereby hastening the end by billions of years but allowing a giant party right now; you got guys who think that Science is basically tax evasion and they want to take it away from humans; you got spirits who simply don't exist in reality as currently formed and are super pissed about that.

Reality is defined by a multi-part body that is basically the Dark Assembly from Disgaea. The default player character is a reality enforcer for the Assembly who is like one of the main characters in Yu Yu Hakusho or Bleach. While you're operating in reality, you're supposed to follow the reality rules as currently drafted. This allows you a certain amount of leeway, such as breaking reality in ways that are not immediately apparent and using "high tech" gadgetry that follows some of the laws of the universe that are still a bit iffy and vague.

Rocks fall because Gravity Fairies pull them downward, but a Gravity Fairy mostly follows the letter of the current universal mass attraction appropriation as drafted by the standing committee on weights and inertias. But as sworn officers of the Accounting, you can flash your badge and have a spirit pop out of anything (like in Werewolf, or Spirited Away), and use your pull to get special exemptions made. And a hook for an adventure might include some mountain spirit going on strike and refusing to provide a frictional coefficient.

So players can be humans or spirits, but they can also reincarnate between missions like Disgaea characters by having an Assembly Committee issue them a new body.

That's a setup that covers Technocrats, Reality Manipulation, Philosophy Affecting Reality, Elves, Super Heroics, and oWoD style Animism. Seems totally workable.

-Username17

[Maxus]

I sort of like this.

Will pay attention and watch.

[DrPraetor]

I'm not that keen on Yu Yu Hakusho police, or at least, I'm not keen on the Technocracy thinking that is their job. Instead, the spirits all think your job is to be the guys from Yu Yu Hakusho, except your life is much more difficult because the spirits are politically opposed to the Technocracy, so you are much-hated political police / commisars instead. The characters do not work for the Celestial Court, they work for the Technocracy. The Technocracy rules reality, whoever rules reality makes policy which the Celestial Court is then required to enforce. So, again, as far as the Celestial Bureaucracy is concerned, Technocracy agents are political police sent to stir up trouble. However, because current policy doesn't allow for magic to exist, the spirit world police themselves have no jurisdiction in reality (being spirits, which don't exist), so they keep bothering Technocracy agents to enforce the rules on spirits who break the rules and enter reality (which the spirits do all the time.)

So, the Technocracy are the science police, among-other-reasons because demons occasionally send them messages telling them this is their job. As an institution, the spirits acknowledge that the Technocracy rules reality. They don't like it, because the Technocracy is boring and stodgy and doesn't let them do what they want. So there is a celestial bureaucracy which is compelled to obey the directives of the Technocracy, but the Technocracy doesn't believe in magic and either doesn't know (or pretends not to know) how any such policy directives might arrive in the spirit world. Furthermore, it's unclear what the celestial bureaucracy is actually doing, how it functions, or what it does. The spirit world isn't so insanely crowded that each and every falling pin requires a self-aware spirit (a "gravity fairy") to negotiate the process, but sometimes there is a gravity fairy and sometimes the gravity fairy can suspend gravity, but this is a grave breach of protocol, which the gravity fairy takes it as-given that any agent of the Technocracy will enforce.

The Technocracy, meanwhile, is made of scientists, and denies that magic exists, as a matter of policy. So this causes them several problems.

• It's hard to fight to defend your rulership of reality, when you do not acknowledge that any such mystical mumbo-jumbo even exists.
• Everyone in the spirit world hates the Technocracy (as an institution) and would rather that someone else rules reality. This gives a leg-up to a huge variety of opportunists, black hats and hippies, because they have an easy time making spirit allies who want them to take over. However that is done. No-one seems to know.
• Not everyone in the technocracy cares about winning the war for reality. It's pretty unclear, in fact, what would actually happen if the technocracy lost. Probably, the laws of nature would change, but even this isn't entirely clear.
• A lot of the members of the Technocracy are themselves wizards or sorcerers, which means that they have an awakened spirit-alter-ego, which is a highly magical thing to have.

So most agents of the Technocracy are human, but they are awakened to the magical reality so they have an alter-ego in the Otherworld. The nature of your alter-ego is the first category of Splat you choose from. The second category of Splat is the official/technical branch of the technocracy you serve; enemy wizards have the first type of splat just like you, but get a second splat from an antagonist organization. The technocracy has a few spirit allies, but they have to pretend to be artificial intelligences or something, even if they can form human bodies out of spirit matter and walk around like the programs in Tron.

So, yes, the Technocracy agents do have reality-master badges, but they have to pretend not to have them and the official rule they are enforcing is: magic isn't real, if anything appears to be magic, shoot it in the face before it causes the sleepers to freak out.

Let's do some splat-1s:
In general, everyone in the Otherworld is at-least elf-looking. That is, in the Other World, you have pointed ears. Elves are spirits, and not people. But, when human-like spirits come to the human world, which some can do, they ordinarily look human (that is, they lose the pointed ears.) Sometimes you can look-like your Otherworld alter-ego while in reality, but this freaks out the sleepers.

Sidh Knight
In the Otherworld, you appear as an Elf, but at-will you are kitted in mighty (if archaic), arms and armor, which it seems cannot be taken away. This has some obvious utility from a combat standpoint, but also provides significant social standing, although your heraldry immediately reveals your affiliation. For whatever reason, true spirits are very rarely Knights, so spirits will know you are human, in some sense, although this doesn't seem to change their reaction much.
For most Knights, your guiding passion is Courage.

Wee Folk
In the Otherworld, you are small and have functional butterfly wings. When you adopt a Fae aspect in the real world, this gives you the wings but you don't shrink; this is rarely advisable because it causes sleeper observers to freak the hell out more even than usual.
For most Wee Folk, your guiding passion is Hope.

Sidh Lord
By default, this is an antagonist-only splat. In the Otherworld, you are one of the courtly-looking Alfar or Spirit-folk. This makes you astonishingly good looking, and means that, unless you take pains to carry some identifying mark, spirits you encounter will regard you as one of the Elves, which is a big problem for those few Sidh Lords who are in the Technocracy, because the Elves are among your primary adversaries. Actual elves regard you as a foul traitor.
For most Sidh Lords, your guiding passion is Faith. This doesn't have-to-mean devotional or religious faith (although often it does), but can mean a willingness to trust and rely on other people, or a deep devotion to the worthiness of some high ideal, in addition. But in any case, it's the kind of passion which is seldom found among scientists, so this splat should be avoided by PCs, unless you work things out with the MC.

Let's do some splat-2s:
The Technocracy is divided into half a dozen directorates. Each directorate gets an acronym, which sometimes includes a D or an & and sometimes doesn't.

Directorate of Industry, Engineering and Process Optimization
It isn't all computerized numerical control; it's also waste management, mechanical and aeronautical engineering, computer programming, and a bit of economics.
With the rise of the internet, the IEPO is the largest single directorate of the Technocracy. The IEPO makes anything big, metal and durable that the technocracy may require, they write the computer programs that make the industrial, communications and military infrastructure of the Technocracy go. IEPO is the only branch of the Technocracy with a sizable number of non-human allies; everyone has agreed to agree that these allies are artificial intelligences, and not spirits. The spirit world regards IEPO as part of the celestial bureaucracy, in charge of maintaining the "natural function" of computer networks and the like. When inter-branch conflicts arise, the spirits magically contact IEPO-maintained artificial intelligences, who may or may not correspond with the human-ish leadership of IEPO via e-mail.

Directorate of Applied Social and Economic Sciences
DASE is in charge of secretly ruling all world government, and other large institutions. Because they'd like to think they do a good job ruling the world, they're also a giant think-tank/consulting service/research program in questions relevant to their very broad purview of secretly dominating all human affairs.
The mere existence of DASE seems to drive spirits who are loyal members of the celestial bureaucracy absolutely bonkers; no-one is 100% sure why this is, but spirits seem to think that DASE agents exist to bribe or suborn them. Other spirits don't mind DASE agents at all, but for some reason always think that DASE agents are willing and able to pull strings and bribe spirits (often with "special permission" to act in the material world) in exchange for favors. So the reaction a DASE agent will get from a spirit depends on whether that spirit is worried about a seeming-willingness to accept bribes.

Directorate of Communication, Media, and Public Relations
While DASE interacts with the world's governments and major corporations, and IEPO physically maintains the communications infrastructure used by the Technocracy, it is up to CM&P what the Technocracy actually says, both to the sleepers of the world and to anyone else... who might not be human... if any such non-humans existed, which of course they don't. CM&P is substantially the least-prestigious directorate, as far as the Technocracy is concerned, being a dumping ground for marketing majors and similar scum. However, for whatever reason, the denizens of the Spirit World seem to think that CM&P is whom they should contact when they want something policed. There are two basic theories about this: either it is rulership of the mass of sleepers which somehow confers rulership over reality, so spirits view CM&P as the "true" rulers of the world; or, the spirits are just following the bureaucratic guidelines, so of course when they want to talk to the technocracy, they contact the public relations department.


Servants of the Old Ones

Order of Dragonwright

OK, so we're talking about a combination of the Werewolf-style Animism and the Celestial Bureaucracy. Reality functions the way it does because of the smooth functioning of the vast army of spirits that are following procedures and being guided by legislation and executive orders and such.

The enemies include straight up reality-melting black hats who either want to hop the queue and gain personal power at the expense of reality melting for everyone else or just plain assholes who want to lava lamp the universe. But it also includes villains whose position is more understandable: you got guys who want to make the rules of the universe way laxer, thereby hastening the end by billions of years but allowing a giant party right now; you got guys who think that Science is basically tax evasion and they want to take it away from humans; you got spirits who simply don't exist in reality as currently formed and are super pissed about that.

Reality is defined by a multi-part body that is basically the Dark Assembly from Disgaea. The default player character is a reality enforcer for the Assembly who is like one of the main characters in Yu Yu Hakusho or Bleach. While you're operating in reality, you're supposed to follow the reality rules as currently drafted. This allows you a certain amount of leeway, such as breaking reality in ways that are not immediately apparent and using "high tech" gadgetry that follows some of the laws of the universe that are still a bit iffy and vague.

Rocks fall because Gravity Fairies pull them downward, but a Gravity Fairy mostly follows the letter of the current universal mass attraction appropriation as drafted by the standing committee on weights and inertias. But as sworn officers of the Accounting, you can flash your badge and have a spirit pop out of anything (like in Werewolf, or Spirited Away), and use your pull to get special exemptions made. And a hook for an adventure might include some mountain spirit going on strike and refusing to provide a frictional coefficient.

So players can be humans or spirits, but they can also reincarnate between missions like Disgaea characters by having an Assembly Committee issue them a new body.

That's a setup that covers Technocrats, Reality Manipulation, Philosophy Affecting Reality, Elves, Super Heroics, and oWoD style Animism. Seems totally workable.

-Username17

[Username17]

There are a couple of competing problems with Animism. First of all, if you're going to have spirits of random stuff, there has to be spirits in literally everything. Because otherwise you get a mother-may-I situation where the players grind the game to a halt by asking if there happens to be a spirit in the glass of milk or the car stereo or whatever. It's super time consuming and I don't want to do it. So the answer to "Is there a spirit in that?" has to always be the same, because otherwise players will end up discussing the spiritual contents of every single thing in the entire sandbox. And that's unworkable.

But then there's the flip side: with spirits everywhere, the players still need to be able to get stuff done. The spirits of soda cans and doorknobs and crap have to be neatly out of the way in a way that doesn't clutter the field or make things inaccessible or confusing. Basically, you want things to work like Nature Spirits in Shadowrun or Speak With Plants in D&D. The spirits are always there, but it takes actively doing something for that to matter, and it still only matters for whatever is focused on at the time.

So you've got to have at least three states of being. You have running around in the material world (of course), you have running around in the Netherworld, and you have irrelevant spirits that are continuously passively making the world work but not actually interacting in any important or meaningful way with player characters or their enemies.

So whatever you model that third state as (I would suggest that spirits occupy things like cubicles and they go back to the Netherworld when they are off shift - because I personally want to track down an off-duty car spirit while he is drinking in a bar so that I can question him about events from last Thursday), you want the things in to simply passively make the universe go until someone in the physical world pulls them out. So a balloon spirit can go on a rampage, but only by having someone in the material world "activate" it. So people can incarnate into flowers and rocks and stuff like in Phantom Brave and your summoning follows the basic Sailor Moon model.

So the Technocracy has a set of rules where spirits stay in the Netherworld or whatever you call the Jobs World, and the humans and physical objects stay in the Mortal World, and nothing crosses over. Except of course, the actual enforcement agents (the PCs) have to cross over in order to do their jobs, so they are automatically big hypocrites.

So your magic works on a preparation basis, where you can get waivers and edits approved that you can pop out specific short term reality modifications; and similarly you can get magitech gear issued to you that does pretty much the same thing. But it also acts on a continuous basis, where there are reality loopholes that as an agent you can just personally know. And it acts on a spontaneous basis through summoning. You incarnate the spirit of some random object, and that empowers it to do things other than follow normal laws.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

Frank, that's silly. That's like saying - if there are heavily armed mercenaries in some rooms, there have to be heavily armed mercenaries in all the rooms, or the players will bog down the plot asking the MC if there are heavily armed mercenaries.

Bob: I slip in the room, trying to move silently.
MC: (rolls some dice) There's a long window against the far wall, which is the source of the orange light you saw earlier. The room is sparsely furnished with hospital-waiting room style couches and has a cheap coffee table in the middle, covered with magazines. No other doors.
Bob: Ah, okay. Are there any black-clad mercenaries in the room, bristling with deadly weaponry?
MC: Yes, there are three such mercenaries.

The PCs have the ability to passively sense spirits. So if there is an active spirit in the room with you, you don't have to ask - is there a spirit in the room? - you just know.

So, fine, it may be the case that there are also dormant spirits in everything else, but it doesn't matter from a game balance standpoint.

and you have irrelevant spirits that are continuously passively making the world work but not actually interacting in any important or meaningful way with player characters or their enemies.

The players mainly have reality manipulation magic, and not animist magic. They have this ability probably-because they are spirits themselves, not because they talk to spirits and get them to do things. Although maybe-sometimes-not. The animist angle is mainly a source of antagonism for the technocracy, not a source of power. So, yes, there are dormant and irrelevant spirits in most objects, probably. Certainly, if there is a tree in the room with you, there is something cluttering up the Otherworld space corresponding to your room, which if you do things to it, things happen to the tree, and that's spirit-stuff at the least. But the Celestial Bureaucracy does not seem to have spiritual staff remotely sufficient for this tree to be in a cubicle somewhere. There's a vizier of pins, and he has some vassals/underlings who include the baron of safety pins, sir push, knight of the thumbtacks, and so forth. If an individual pin has an aware, intelligent spirit all of it's own, then that pin is ipso facto a talisman, and a highly magical and significant pin.

Also, due in part to the absentee-governance of the rulers of the world (the Technocracy), the actual influence of the Celestial Courts over the spirit world is seriously deficient. Individual spirits are, in fact, somehow compelled to acknowledge your authority if you interact with them, but that only goes so far when they hate your science-loving guts. So part of the setting is that the heavens are not in harmony with the earth, the spiritual hierarchy is falling apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the spirit world.

Occult Sciences
Each Occult Science is driven off of a mundane skill. Occult Sciences allow you to do magic, in the world, which does not appear magical. The Technocracy (that's you) has access to all of the Occult Sciences. Traditionalist mages generally don't have any science, so they usually do not have access to Occult Sciences which are derived from Technical skills. Meanwhile, those mages in the employ of the old ones have access to all kinds of high technology, but their rejection of the human condition means that they lack access to Occult Sciences derived from social skills.

In addition to whatever magical feats you can perform, your rating in an Occult Science provides bonus edge points which you can spend, once every time your edge points refresh, but only on tests where the corresponding skill is a component. These bonus points can also be spent on any use of Occult Sciences which "costs edge".

One important point about Occult Sciences - although they let you do amazing, literally magical things, they do not make any of your own skills moot. Occult Science - Stealth makes you really good at hiding, it never makes you literally invisible. Even if you have the magical power to be uncannily good at persuading people, you still have to be good enough at persuading people to take advantage of that fact, and so forth.

Larceny
[*] Highly educated guess
People are very bad at making random decisions. This means, using a little applied psychology, that you can make really good guesses about passwords, safe combinations, secret code phrases, the first names of people you've never met, and other snippets of information which were chosen arbitrarily by a person. The MC will secretly roll Larceny+Intuition, against a difficulty determined by the complexity of the thing you have to guess: 0 for a locker combination, given name, pass phrase or easy password, 2 for a good password, the combination to a safe, or series of pass phrases ("the weather is good this morning!", "sure, if ).
The MC is, by the way, entitled to activate this power without telling you, so that whatever random banter you may make

[*][*] Yoink
You can retroactively steal stuff (or commit other acts of larceny). This requires an opportunity and knowledge of the object you wish-you-had-grabbed. Thus, if you know officer Crumpky had a gun, and you were in the room with him after he put it away, you can retroactively declare that you stole it, if you find yourself later in the day in a situation where you could use an extra firearm.
This can apply to any use of the larceny skill, so you can retroactively declare that you picked a lock, but mostly it is useful for having palmed some needed item.
If you screw up, and steal something after the person you're robbing used it without you seeing them (MCs - use this sparingly and only if strongly dictated by the narrative), this is a level-2 reality violation.
In any case, the actual test is probably Agility+Larceny, as it would be if you really had stolen the item in the first place.

[*][*][*] False Flag
When you commit illicit acts, you automatically leave behind all kinds of evidence incriminating other people. Bullets ricochet in just such a way that they appear to have come from across the street. Your fingerprints smudge in just such a way that they are a seven-point match to that asshole who cut you off in traffic this morning, and so forth.
Roll Larceny + Intuition, you can leave one piece of evidence incriminating a random stranger for each hit, or you can leave a piece of evidence incriminating a specific person you know for two hits. Outrageously physically unlikely evidence (leaving someone else's blood type splattered on a door handle; getting the neighbor girl pregnant with your rivals DNA), require one or more additional hits and are a level 1 reality violation.

[*][*][*][*] Retroplay
You can either alter the past or see the future, it's hard to say which you really did. This lets you alter any of your own past actions, but only if the consequences have not yet been observed. So, for example, if you set the timer on a bomb to two hours but it hasn't gone off yet, you can change your mind and set it for four hours. Either you are changing the past, or back in the past you saw the future and set it for four hours instead because you had some inkling that was the correct thing to do.
Use of this ability costs an edge. Technomancers find it impossible to generate a reality-violation by trying to do this (it just doesn't work), but their enemies may be able to change the past even after the consequences have arrived (or maybe they are seeing the future and this is what a time paradox looks like, no-one knows), which would be a level-3 reality violation so they don't do it often.

Enchanting Items / Making Super Science Stuff
Based on the setting, wizards should spend a lot of time in their magic libraries, and technomancers should spend a lot of time in their labs. Furthermore, as a super-scientist, you should be running around with a super ray-gun that you totally made yourself! That is how you roll. However, actually spending time worrying about labs is boring, and this will rapidly go nuts since if you can make a sweet ray gun you're going to make a sweet ray gun for everybody! Also, sometimes you want to be able to make one of your friends a sweet ray gun, so we don't want to eliminate that possibility entirely.
This is resolved thus:
you are entitled to make magic items (or enchant servitors, or place permanent super-science effects on your base), with a total rating equal to your Edge. Almost everything has a rating of 1, a rating of 2 will get you a robot sidekick that is nearly as good as you are, a rating of 3 will provide anti-magic forcefields to the residents of the greater Houston metropolitan area.
Keep in mind that Edge actually runs from 1 to 4 in this system, so you're likely to be restricted to 2 or 3 super-science gadgets.
If you exceed this limit, each extra point reduces your edge attribute by 1! You can have a negative edge, but this will cause reality to crush you into a fine paste in short order, so don't do it.

Mighty Rituals of Vast Power
Game mechanically, there are two types of rituals, even if they are more or less the same within the game world.
One class of rituals is just a mechanism by which you access your resources. So, if you have contacts in the Court of Brass and Glass, you get some cool steam punk shit and some candles and a pentagram any time you want to call them up and say hi. The fact that you know the ritual spell Contact Varsorn, Duke of Optics is not that relevant if Varsorn doesn't take your calls.
In addition, you may know ritual spells that do other stuff, not reflected in your resources. If a ritual isn't reflected in the resources that you own, then as long as the effects of that ritual remain in place it takes up one of the same "slots" of edge that your super-science toys want to use (see previous section.)
That said, while some traditionalist mages may pass down an entire talmud worth of cultic practices orally, ritual magic is generally found in books. These books can be very dangerous to have as a technomancer (I'm a folklore major! I don't actually believe any of this crap, I swear!) but what you (may) actually have is the skill to use rituals in a given category.
Rituals are categorized according to the court of spirits with which the interact. Thus, Aegis against Fire is a ritual of the Court of Fire, as is Call the Inferno, Seal Volcano, and so forth.
So, first, you need to determine the Court and Level of your ritual. The Court
Of course, spirits themselves know lots of such rituals and they can probably just tell you how to do them. This is generally somewhat easier than convincing the spirit to do something on its own, but this depends on circumstances.

[Username17]

Frank, that's silly. That's like saying - if there are heavily armed mercenaries in some rooms, there have to be heavily armed mercenaries in all the rooms, or the players will bog down the plot asking the MC if there are heavily armed mercenaries.

I see you've never tried to be in a game with a Mage who had Spirit sphere or a Werewolf who decided to go the summoner route. The spirits in the room are the animist character's potential summoning pool. If there's a rating 4 spirit in the fireplace, the animist can summon a rating 4 fireplace spirit, if there's a rating 2 carpet spirit, then he can summon a rating 2 carpet spirit. And so on. The animist character has to pester the MC about what spirits are available every scene because his actual character powers are to pick something off that list and run with it. Which means that if he wants to be able to contribute at all, he needs to get the list for every scene. This is a straight up fucked system.

Shadowrun gets around this by having unlimited spirit summonings at any power level you arbitrarily choose when you start the conjuration. This means that the Shaman never needs to ask the MC what the spirit list is, because he has access to the full list all the time no matter where he is. Note that older editions of Shadowrun had a much milder version of this problem where you had to ask what domain your present area technically counted as for purposes of getting your conjuration on, but you still never ran out of spirits to summon and could always choose whatever force you wanted no matter where you were. So it was nowhere near as fucking painful as World of Darkness spirit magic was.

But that's where you're going to have to go with that. You are going to have characters who are Summoners, and they are going to want to invoke spirits wherever they happen to be. And that means that you need to have it be assumed that the player can incarnate a spirit on anything at any time at any power level that is available to them based on the information on their character sheet. Because if there is a mother-may-I step in that process then the summoner is going to ask his mother-may-I questions every fucking scene.

So you can incarnate a gravity fairy any time there is a falling object. And it incarnates at a power level proportionate to the power you pump into it, not its own intrinsic capabilities.

The players mainly have reality manipulation magic, and not animist magic. They have this ability probably-because they are spirits themselves, not because they talk to spirits and get them to do things. Although maybe-sometimes-not. The animist angle is mainly a source of antagonism for the technocracy, not a source of power. So, yes, there are dormant and irrelevant spirits in most objects, probably. Certainly, if there is a tree in the room with you, there is something cluttering up the Otherworld space corresponding to your room, which if you do things to it, things happen to the tree, and that's spirit-stuff at the least. But the Celestial Bureaucracy does not seem to have spiritual staff remotely sufficient for this tree to be in a cubicle somewhere.

You are missing out on a lot of plot potential if you don't have that tree spirit having time off in the nether world where it goes to bath houses and restaurants like in Spirited Away.

But as for the actual magic that characters do, my thoughts is that it should break down roughly like this:

• Mandates - these are granted to you by the standing committees of the netherworld. You can bureaucratically request them and trade them around. Basically they are fucking magic scrolls that make weird shit happen to reality when used. Legal purists like these, because they are wholly legal (being government documents). Ideological purists fucking hate them, because they are magic.
• Exploits - these are pieces of "super science" that you can use to do crazy stuff that is "indistinguishable from magic" because reality has some extra rules in it that are weirdly and surprisingly defined. Ideological purists like these, because they are grounded in reality and science and stuff. Legal purists fucking hate them, because they rely on dubious interpretations of natural law.
• Incarnation - this is the magic you get that doesn't have to be prepared ahead of time like a D&D Wizard or James Bond. You point at something and pump power into it, and then the spirit of that object becomes a real boy in the real world that you can then talk to or send to perform Pokemon battles for you.
• Spirit Magic - Spirits you incarnate can use this stuff and so can you (because you are also a spirit). But using Spirit Magic in the mortal world is straight up illegal, in addition to being counter-revolutionary thought. So the Legal and Ideological Purists will both be mad at characters who use Spirit Magic.

Also, due in part to the absentee-governance of the rulers of the world (the Technocracy), the actual influence of the Celestial Courts over the spirit world is seriously deficient. Individual spirits are, in fact, somehow compelled to acknowledge your authority if you interact with them, but that only goes so far when they hate your science-loving guts. So part of the setting is that the heavens are not in harmony with the earth, the spiritual hierarchy is falling apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the spirit world.

Oh I definitely agree. One of the big drawbacks of Incarnation should be that a spirit granted a body on the mortal world has a chance of running off and causing havoc because the vast majority of spirits are not in fact OK with the status quo.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

Because if there is a mother-may-I step in that process then the summoner is going to ask his mother-may-I questions every fucking scene.

So you can incarnate a gravity fairy any time there is a falling object. And it incarnates at a power level proportionate to the power you pump into it, not its own intrinsic capabilities.

Fair enough. My simple fix would be - if the MC specifically says there's a major spirit already in the room, you can talk to it (but don't bother asking because there probably isn't.)

Otherwise, you can have one be there, but it costs you an edge.

You are missing out on a lot of plot potential if you don't have that tree spirit having time off in the nether world where it goes to bath houses and restaurants like in Spirited Away.

If there's an awakened tree spirit, it can definitely do this. All I'm saying is that not every tree has an awakened spirit; hardly any do. If you want to awaken one, you spend an edge.

• Mandates - these are granted to you by the standing committees of the netherworld. You can bureaucratically request them and trade them around. Basically they are fucking magic scrolls that make weird shit happen to reality when used. Legal purists like these, because they are wholly legal (being government documents). Ideological purists fucking hate them, because they are magic.
• Exploits - these are pieces of "super science" that you can use to do crazy stuff that is "indistinguishable from magic" because reality has some extra rules in it that are weirdly and surprisingly defined. Ideological purists like these, because they are grounded in reality and science and stuff. Legal purists fucking hate them, because they rely on dubious interpretations of natural law.
• Incarnation - this is the magic you get that doesn't have to be prepared ahead of time like a D&D Wizard or James Bond. You point at something and pump power into it, and then the spirit of that object becomes a real boy in the real world that you can then talk to or send to perform Pokemon battles for you.
• Spirit Magic - Spirits you incarnate can use this stuff and so can you (because you are also a spirit). But using Spirit Magic in the mortal world is straight up illegal, in addition to being counter-revolutionary thought. So the Legal and Ideological Purists will both be mad at characters who use Spirit Magic.

Yeah, that works. Mandates generally require you to go through additional ritualistic steps to use them, and arrive as a form of resources, but with longer and more specific rules than the somewhat vague Destiny stuff in After Sundown. You have a Mandate score from each court, which also translates into an overall level of official respect you are given by spirits in that court.

Incarnation costs an Edge, but isn't a reality violation (for you), though it might be for the spirit, depending on what orders you (try to) give it. You can also cast this ability on yourself, and you adopt your own spirit-form while in the physical world, which pisses everyone and his brother off.

I wouldn't draw a game-mechanical distinction between "Exploits" and "Spirit Magic". Both of these are driven off of your Occult Sciences, and possibly your Spiritual Influences as well. But, it's an exploit unless it's obvious/you get caught by sleepers doing something like violating causality, in which case that's Spirit Magic and a reality violation.

[Blasted]

Because if there is a mother-may-I step in that process then the summoner is going to ask his mother-may-I questions every fucking scene.

So you can incarnate a gravity fairy any time there is a falling object. And it incarnates at a power level proportionate to the power you pump into it, not its own intrinsic capabilities.

Fair enough. My simple fix would be - if the MC specifically says there's a major spirit already in the room, you can talk to it (but don't bother asking because there probably isn't.)

Otherwise, you can have one be there, but it costs you an edge.

Having the option of checking for a spirit in each room, even if the chances are minimal, leads to the same "I search for secret doors!" which takes up too much time when playing D&D.

[Grek]

I feel that there should be degrees of awakening, for which the default is 0. If you want to make an object present become more awakened so that you can interact with it on a spiritual level, you roll your awakening dicepool and awaken it by your net hits. Possibly, this could be accomplished with a Summons Mandate, which requires that a spirit present itself before the bearer of the mandate for interregation or testimony.

Net Hits	Mandated Effects
0	Spirit does not respond.
1	Spirit is able, but not required to talk to you.
3	Spirit is compelled to answer your questions.
3	Spirit is compelled to appear physically.

[DrPraetor]

That works, but again I pretty-well insist that dealing with spirits costs an Edge.

Possibly - because the celestial hierarchy is adversarial to you, it costs you an edge to talk to spirits. Your pro-spirit enemies can do it for free.

The rationale is basically this:
[*] There are some players who will want to devote serious screen time to banter and negotiation every time they buy cigarettes. This bogs down the plot, and is to be avoided.

[*] If you are going to awaken spirits and have them do stuff for you, this should always be a strange and wondrous thing. So, yeah, you should have screen time to banter with the spirit. On the other hand, we don't want the plot to bog down while you negotiate with every doorknob. Therefore, awakening spirits should not be something you do casually, it should cost edge.

That said, yes, we can have a table where net hits awaken spirits to varying degrees.

I feel that there should be degrees of awakening, for which the default is 0. If you want to make an object present become more awakened so that you can interact with it on a spiritual level, you roll your awakening dicepool and awaken it by your net hits. Possibly, this could be accomplished with a Summons Mandate, which requires that a spirit present itself before the bearer of the mandate for interregation or testimony.

Net Hits	Mandated Effects
0	Spirit does not respond.
1	Spirit is able, but not required to talk to you.
3	Spirit is compelled to answer your questions.
3	Spirit is compelled to appear physically.

[Username17]

I think it should cost power points. Basically you want some character to have the schtick where they walk around animating fishbowls and shit so that they can shake them down for "what they saw", but you don't want characters to get nothing from the fishbowl and then start questioning the lightswitch and the curtains, because that gets tedious.

Power Points is a good cost, because it's expensive enough that noone is going to run around shaking down every little thing, but still cheap enough that players can base a character off of it.

-Username17

[Grek]

That raises the question of how people in this setting get power points. Feeding seems to be right out, and lunar is out if people can use their reality warping powers to travel outside the gravity well or make the moon set sooner or later than it should. This leaves ritual, which is probably not enough variety.

[RadiantPhoenix]

You could get your powers back when the sun/moon rises/sets on wherever you spent the PPs on; the sun and moon never rise or set on themselves, so manipulating them is a really bad idea because you won't get those PPs back unless they were spent by someone with a different recharge mechanic; making the sun or moon rise or set early or late would also be a major violation, so you'd get some people after you for doing it too.

[DrPraetor]

This was a problem in the original Mage, as well. The technocracy doesn't believe in magic but they still have to get their power points back somehow. You have a number of different options to recover power points.

The setting includes Sailor Moon villains, who recover power points on a feeding schedule, but covertly and they inflict normal (rather than lethal) damage. These alternative power-recovery modes are generally a power, and some spirits can "feed" off people without "hurting" them, although some degree of transitory impairment (getting people drunk, for example) should probably be required. These routes are almost exclusive to the opposition, however.

There are feng shui sites / nodes / whatever, which enable you to recover power points by visiting them, on a per-scenario basis. These sites are tied to the rhythms of the deep cosmos, not to the sidereal period; that is to say, they refresh every adventure. I am disinclined to have such places produce mana-berries (raw vis? No, that's Ars Magica) but do see some advantages to that.

You are a spirit-of-good. So being good gets your power points, via the Mandate of Heaven. You get power points back, in addition to or in-place-of edge, by serving your guiding passion (you also have a driving passion just like a normal person). Your guiding passion, if this wasn't clear, is meant to be an advantage. Basically, if your guiding passion is Courage, you get some power points back every fight, as long as your are valiantly facing superior opposition. Guiding passions give you power points back more often if they tend to get you in trouble (Courage, Honesty) than if they don't (Temperance, Compassion.)

And finally you can go back to your lab, grind up some raw science and snort it. Possibly you do experiments, read scientific articles, fiddle with gadgets; if you are an economist maybe you dork around on intrade for six hours; maybe you blog.

[Grek]

I'm seeing four main factions: the Technocracy, the Old Ones, the Traditions and the Celestial Bureaucracy. Each has their own membership, powers and objectives, which are as follows:

-The Technocracy is a historically successful revolutionary group founded by enlightenment thinkers that want to create and enforce a single, unified natural law without exceptions for "magic" or other unscientific thought. They get their power primarily from exploits, but also from the fact that early Techocracy revolutionaries managed to make it so that a PhD confers various mandates from departments of the relevant field that allow the doctorates in question to disprove and eliminate unscientific regulations and exceptions passed by other factions.

-The Old Ones are ancient, sufficently advanced aliens that rely exclusively on exploits, do not have access to mandates and are able to produce results largely indistinguishable from magic using those exploits. They wish to manipulate human culture and physiology in such a way as to make humans appreciate Old One culture and technology. They also may want to create Human-Old One hybrids so that they can carry on their lineage to the next generation.

-The Traditions are a coaliition of wizards, mages, sorcerers, shamans, priests and other individuals who have obtained mandates from the Celestial Bureaucracy dating back to ancient times when humanity and the spirit world got along. While the Traditions highly diverse with a wide assortment of mandates and magical powers available and are the faction which is most popular with the spirit world right now, they are also highly schismatic and divided into subfactions that we may or may not detail later on.

-The Celestial Bureaucracy is the governing body of the spirit world, which enforces natural law. It governs all spirits on earth and the surrounding regions, but is beholden to humans with mandates and to ancient laws passed in the days of old. They are divided politically, with a slim plurality favouring the Traditions, the next biggest group being in favour of wanting to take power out of mortal hands entirely and reletively tiny factions in favour of the Technocracy or even the Old Ones.

[DrPraetor]

- The Technocracy is a historically successful revolutionary group founded by enlightenment thinkers intent on giving the humanity the tools needed to overcome superstition, conflict and disease through productive social dialogue and scientific understanding leading to mastery of the natural world. Because of the overall success of this approach, the Technocracy as a group has the Mandate of Heaven, which is supreme among all Mandates and gives you command over the Celestial Bureaucracy. This means that spirits have to call you Sir/Lord/Count/Duke/Prince/Emperor, and that you are the government and sole source of policy.
* Because of your spiritual nature, you can make subtle alterations to reality on the fly (so you have reality manipulation). Because of the mandate of heaven, you are allowed to do this as long as the changes you make are congruent with your mandate - that is, as long as they don't observably violate established principles of natural law, causality, etc.
* You can combine the previous power with your extensive scientific knowledge to generate impressive effects, largely because you know what you can and can't do.
* Members of the Technocracy are also spirits and have individual Mandates intrinsic to their spirit nature, that give them magic powers which they are not supposed to use.
* They also have a spirit-form, which they're certainly not supposed to adopt while in the real world, but they can.
* They may have additional Mandates but this is actually quite rare, since the celestial bureaucracy gets to hand these out and they put up all kinds of institutional hurdles.

- The Old Ones are ancient, sufficently advanced aliens that rely on super science. They wish to manipulate human culture and physiology in such a way as to make humans appreciate Old One culture and technology. They also may want to create Human-Old One hybrids so that they can carry on their lineage to the next generation.
* They have ancient Mandates, which predate humanity, that let them live by draining life force from people, and gibber and meep beyond the spheres like any Cthulhu monster; so they can crawl in the fourth dimension and just looking at them drives you insane and so forth.
* They also have super-science.
* They have reality manipulation and they have exploits, but they do not have the Mandate of Heaven and any use of these powers is not allowed; which just means it is much riskier for them than it is for you, but they care less about the consequences...
* Since the spirit world hates you and doesn't have to do what you say, you seldom get other mandates. They have human and spirit followers/allies who can have other Mandates, including the mandate of heaven but their rank (and thus their ability to use reality manipulation without consequences) is always lower.

-The Traditions are a coalition of wizards, mages, sorcerers, shamans, priests and other individuals who are either skilled in spirit-world politics (to some degree), or have obtained mandates from the Celestial Bureaucracy dating back to ancient times when humanity and the spirit world got along. While the Traditions highly diverse with a wide assortment of mandates and magical powers available and are the faction which is most popular with the spirit world right now, they are also highly schismatic and divided into subfactions that we may or may not detail later on.
* Individual wizards are also spirits, so just like a member of the Technocracy they have a spirit form which has super-powers and mandates intrinsic to it's nature. Unlike members of the technocracy, they embrace their dual-nature and a wizard is perfectly happy to turn into a fire troll (who is a troll, and shoots fireballs) if they can get away with it.
* By the classic definition, sorcery is: telling occult forces to do something, and having them do it. Wizards are very skilled in this, so wizards spend a lot of time awakening individual spirits and getting them to do things.
* Wizards can also use reality manipulation, but tend not to know enough actual science to use it effectively. Some wizards do also enjoy the mandate of heaven, but their rank (and thus ability to use reality manipulation without consequence) is considerably lower.

- The Celestial Bureaucracy is the governing body of the spirit world, which enforces natural law. It governs all spirits on earth and the surrounding regions, but it does not determine policy, this is the job of the political leadership, nobles who have the mandate of heaven. That said, they do have some leeway, and a lot of grandfather clauses, and ancient directives passed in the days of old. Because of dis-satisfaction with the current political leadership, a majority of spirits are now in passive rebellion against the hierarchy, obeying orders from above only when forced to do so (which is much of the time, so reality continues to function normally.) They are divided politically, with a slim plurality favouring the Traditions, the next biggest group being in favour of wanting to take power out of mortal hands entirely and reletively tiny factions in favour of the Technocracy or even the Old Ones.
* Spirits, obviously, have mandates of their own and can use them. These mandates are an intrinsic part of their nature. Likewise, an individual spirit may be a twenty-foot tall white buffalo with lightning bolts arcing between his horns, which is a pretty overt display of magic just by existing.
* Spirits can have the mandate of heaven, and there are Faerie lords who do have this mandate, and lordly titles to match. Trying to pull rank on them is inadvisable, even if you have a nominally higher title. They are almost uniformly inclined to taking over reality entirely. Their mandate derives in some sense from the custody of the natural world, but they are hide-bound elitist nobles themselves, so they are mostly eco-nazis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Nazi).
* Many spirits can adopt human form while in the real world. This includes Faerie Lords and other human-like spirits. While in this state, they actually become human and may choose to live (and die) as humans. They are prone to falling in love and then doing exactly that. Other than their anachronistic upbringing (horses, swords and so forth) these individuals are not distinguishable from human wizards.

[Grek]

I've been using "mandate" as a stand in for any specific power that you can be granted over the spirit world that is not an exploit. But that's not how you're using it, so I'll pick a new word for that concept: Dispensation.

The Mandate of Heaven would then be the authority that allows the Technocracy to grant new dispensations, propose ammendments to the laws of physics and revoke old dispensations given they know that they exist and can drag the more obstructive factions in the Celestial Bureaucracy kicking and screaming into actually going through with it.

Example: Honzi the Hedge Wizard has a dispensation dating back to the days of Soloman which was given to his great great umpteen times great grandfather and his heirs in perpetuity. This allows him to fiddle with the local weather and make magical conconctions which heal people despite the fact that, scientifically speaking, they're just a bunch of leaves and water. If a Technocracy team shows up and finds out what he is doing, they can use their own mandate and/or dispensations to prevent his magic from working and, if they can pull all the right strings, get Honzi's dispensation removed by petitioning the Celestial Bureaucracy to do so.

Further, I would not make it possible to break the current laws of the universe as laid down by the Celestial Bureaucracy. If you try to do something that is against the laws of physics, it just fails. If you want to fireball someone, you have to get the Celestial Bureaucracy to approve a 'special dispensation for the creation of fire' that allows you to ignore certain parts of the laws of physics wherever and whenever it applies. It's the Technocracy's stated goal to crack down on that sort of thing wherever possible, while the Traditions want to maintain and expand the special dispensations that they are granted by the Celestial Bureaucracy. A Technocracy agent that gets a fireballing dispensation would be a "loose cannon" and possibly a bad cop in the eyes of the Technocracy and either be grudgingly tolerated or given the boot depending on how effective they are at stopping other reality deviants and exactly what they ask the Celestial Bureaucracy for in terms of special dispensations.

I'd also recomend against giving every single member of the Technocracy a spirit-form. Sure, some of them can be spirits, but you should be able to play Technocracy character as as an Agent Scully type that refuses to admit, even to themselves, that the supernatural exists at all and who relies entirely on exploits and disproving magic. In fact, I would go so far as to say that nobody should be able to assume their spirit form in the physical world. At least not today. Maybe it used to be possible, but the Technocracy passed a law against it actually finally managed to get all of the dispensations that would allow someone to do that revoked. Maybe it was never possible at all. But at no point should a character be forced to admit that elves are real because they and all of their friends turned into elves to do battle with a trollish wizard who accidentally set fire to Times Square.

[Username17]

I like the whole Mandate of Heaven bit. I also like the Old Ones as previous Mandate holders with grandfathered in legacy effects from back when they ran things. That makes permanently banishing Azathoth into something akin to closing a legal loophole, which is awesome and hilarious.

I'm not sold on the Traditions, because in oWoD they were really fucking stupid and I hated them then and would probably still hate them now. I think I'd rather have simple Counter Revolutionaries. So they could be "Traditionalists" or something, but they wouldn't be called "The Traditions", because that term is a pool that has been peed in.

As such, I would like to split up counter revolutionary thought more. That could actually helpfully explain why they don't take over reality despite being the biggest faction. So you'd have Traditionalists, who think the Technocracy has gone "too far" and want reality scaled back to Phlogiston or something. You have Conservatives, who think that the Technocracy is going too far, and want to limit reality to an imaginary golden era in the very recent past with Bohr atoms and ghosts. And you have outright Counter Revolutionaries, who want to undo all Technomantic progress and fix the Earth on pillars or something.

-Username17

[Maxus]

"Y’AI ’NG’NGAH,
YOG-SOTHOTH
H’EE—L’GEB
F’AI THRODOG


YOG-SOTHOTH! THIS IS YOUR NOTICE THAT CLAUSE 4 OF PARAGRAPH 9 NO LONGER APPLIES! YOU MAY NO LONGER COME TO THE PHYSICAL WORLD WITHOUT INVITATION! IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS, CONTACT MANTOROK AT THE DEPARTMENT OF REALITY INTEGRITY! THANK YOU FOR YOUR COMPLIANCE!

OGTHROD AI’F
GEB’L—EE’H
YOG-SOTHOTH
’NGAH’NG AI’Y
ZHRO"

"That's Yog-Sothoth. Okay, check over Nyarlathotep's contract. Yes, again. I want to be absolutely sure the squirrelly bastard still doesn't have a loophole left to him."

[DrPraetor]

Scully can not-have-overt-magic through the simple expedient of not buying any. It makes an interesting game to have some characters who are incapable of covert/reality alteration magic, but I think this is a false choice - magic is awesomely powerful, people are not generally going to forego having it.

Furthermore, when Scully goes to Faerie Land, she shows up in a green velvet dress with a parasol and the spirit hierarchy insists on calling her Countess Scully of the Desmesne of the Panopticon, Lady of Investigations, Guardian of the Threshold.

I agree that the Traditions, as a joint organization, are very bad. They should have multiple factions which are quite hostile - the spirit courts want *one or the other of these groups* to overthrow the Technocracy, and may or may not be particular about which one:

The Children of the Light
deleted, using Stellar Oracles instead.

Other than that, I think I'll copy some splats from After Sundown:
The Marduk Society
In this setting, Marduk was a good wizard. His followers have a supposed agenda of enabling everyone to use magic equally (which they propose is somehow equivalent to letting everyone use flashlights, and do not care to have it explained that this is nuts), with themselves being considerably more equal. This is the human instrumentality project and the Marduk Society has adopted some tactics from the Old Ones playbook, but seem to be at war with the Old Ones.
Note that they cannot achieve this goal by making people think that magic exists (otherwise the setting falls apart.) In order to achieve this goal they have to somehow seize the Mandate, which is a much harder thing to achieve. The Marduk Society is pro-magic but not anti-science so they have more scientific know-how than many traditions.

The Storm Lords
The Storm Lords are also pro-magic-comes-back, but they've got no particular science to speak of. They have a relatively radical agenda of normalizing human-spirit relations to be considerably more open.
This makes them very popular with the spirit world, especially those spirits who think it would be a great idea for them to be able to run around in central park wrecking havoc. Again, merely convincing people that this is possible ought in principle to be easy, but they avoid doing it because it doesn't help them seize the mandate, which is what they really want.

The Church of Set
Screw the mandate. These guys want ritual magic to work, but they want to use it to make themselves rich and powerful. They're not exactly evil, but they sure don't care much for ethical restrictions on their behavior.
It was long ago realized that the Cosmos does not think this is cool, so the Church of Set has given up on seizing the Mandate, and intend tries to corrupt individual spirits and other members of the hierarchy so that the Mandate is not enforced. They have some alliances with the Old Ones who also seem more interested in overthrowing heaven entirely than in somehow having the mandate. The Church of Set tends not to have much science, just because they like quick and easy power and learning how reality operates is generally more work than they care to pursue.

Chain of Coronis
The Chain of Coronis worships elves, that is, spirits who are like humans, but do not defend human concerns. Elves are unusual in that, like the Lorax, they speak for the trees. This gives them an alternative route to obtain the Mandate, and members of the Chain likewise seek to seize the mandate through successful Deep Ecology. It is unclear exactly how having the Mandate works, but there are some elves who are very, very old and probably understand it much better than any humans do.
The Chain of Coronis is very popular with a certain subset of spirits, but highly unpopular with the many spirits who would lose out seriously if they were to ascend.

The False Face
As in After Sundown, this is the tradition of shamans and priests which once covered the new world. They are much more likely to have the mandate than other traditions, because they never lost it: the Stellar Oracles just butchered them anyway. This may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but it almost certainly cost the Stellar Oracles their mandate, so those members of the Technocracy who care about such things are very leery about the preferred method of dealing with their mortal and near-mortal enemies (that is, by extreme violence.)
A substantial share of the membership of the False Face has joined the Technocracy since. The remainder have relatively good relations with certain factions of the spirit world, including Elves since the False Face has a (possibly completely unwarranted) reputation as being good stewards of the natural environment.

Rolnicy
A very similar organization to the False Face, but native to the (much more restricted, less populated) region of north-central Asia. There are two wings of this organization which are at each other's throats in a big way: one joined the Technocracy as soon as the Technocracy started fighting the Stellar Oracles; the other wing has remained shamanic since about the Tartar Yoke and doesn't care what you think.

Stellar Oracles
In the west: Used to rule most of the world prior to the ascension of the Technocracy. They're pro-monotheism, but they're only moderately religious, mainly they believe in using religion as a tool of social engineering. They date their organization to Zarathustra, whose innovation was to designate half of the inhabitants of the spirit world as "False Gods" or "Demons", which is really what they're about. The Technocracy has it's organization roots in this organization, which probably lost the Mandate during the early colonial period (the Technocracy being the progressive/free-thinking opposition to Colonialism, at least at the time.) The Stellar Oracles used to be pro-science, but due to their progressive membership jumping ship for the Technocracy around 1800, they are now very much anti-science and would much prefer that the earth was flat and possibly 4,000 years old.
They're not especially popular with the spiritual hierarchy since they carry a big stick, but are much preferred to the Technocracy since they at least allow some spirits to act in the material world.
In the east: As in the west, they were overthrown from within by members of the Technocracy, although the transition to modernity has been considerably slower and less violent in India and China. A faction of the Stellar Oracles remains "traditional", which means that they are pro-magic, but in a considerably less intensive way than groups like the Storm Lords. Their relatively moderate position, and opposition to strong magical influence in human affairs, wins them no strong support in the spirit world but their relatively strong remaining Mandate makes them somewhat popular.

The enemy of my enemy is not my friend
It is true that all of these groups are in a state of belligerence towards the Technocracy, both because the Technocracy is actively suppressing their use of magic (sometimes with violence) and because the Technocracy holds the reins of cosmic governance which they wish to take away.
So mages of the different traditions are likely to live-and-let-live, but they do not get together in mixed-faction scooby gangs to fight to bring magic back. That would make no sense, for a number of reasons which were surprisingly-clearly-detailed in the various notes from Mage: The Awakening but which were then followed by, "but because the Technocracy is such a threat, they do it anyway!". As Frank points out, that's bollocks.
That said, there are factions in the spirit world which are not so-much pro-anything as they are anti-technocracy, and these spirits do try to keep the various tradition mages on-task by mediating disputes between them.