Legacies

I’ve noticed that one of the bigger points of confusion for some people who are just getting into Mage: the Awakening would be the concept of Legacies.

Mechanically, Legacies seem simple enough.  Upon reaching Gnosis 3, a Mage may then learn a Legacy.  This often involves buying up all the perquisite merits / skills and paying 1 Willpower Point to seal the deal.  The mentor who is going to induct the character into the Legacy spends 1 Willpower Dot to establish the link between master and apprentice and the Mage gains access to the Legacy’s first Attainment, a supernatural ability that does not incur Paradox even if it behaves like a spell.

But what does it all mean?

Let’s start at the basics.  Mage: the Awakening has a built-in assumption that Magic springs from the soul.  Without a soul, a Mage loses the ability to cast magic.  Therefore, Magic is a function of channeling your deepest, most intimate self to enact changes to reality.

With that out of the way, Mages have managed to find ways to use that fact to their benefit.  The first way (which we will not go into too much detail for today) is crafting a Soul Stone, which involves a ritual whereupon a Mage actually tears off a chunk of his soul and fashions that piece of himself into a physical object, which he can then use to craft a Demesne, a territory upon which his magics encounter less resistance, granting a bonus to spellcasting rolls and reducing paradox.

Legacies are the second way.  Joining a Legacy is not just learning a secret handshake.  To join a Legacy is to willingly alter the most essential part of yourself, (i.e. your soul) to become something other (some say better) than human.  Undertaking a Legacy is a huge step in the life of a Mage.  It is the moment whereupon the Mage commits himself to a given cause or philosophy so completely that the process alters who he is.

Legacies cannot be unlearned.  You can’t just unsubscribe to it.  When you take on a Legacy, you’re in for life.

This in turn answers the question of why Legacies seem to have a very distinct set of priorities and behaviors.  In undertaking a Legacy, the alteration to the self is so absolute that the core values of the Legacy is as natural to you as breathing.  You don’t question why you breathe a certain way, it simply is.

We’ve already taken a look at what undertaking a Legacy involves, but we have to take a little glimpse at the most important question:  Why?

Taking on a Legacy (or forging one yourself) is no easy undertaking.  As we’ve noted earlier, it involves essentially rewriting the most essential part of who you are, and there’s no way to take it back.  Therefore it takes a huge amount of two things to even consider doing this:  Hubris and Willpower.

Some people find the conviction necessary to take this step to dedicate their lives to a given goal.  Whether it’s the perfection of the self, evolving to the next step of humanity, punishing the wicked, exploring magic, communing with the spirits… there are goals that a person could wholeheartedly dedicate their lives to.  Many priests, monks and other similarly inclined individuals are living proof of this sort of conviction.

Legacies don’t have to be high-minded ideals either.  There’s also a very simple motivation in the form of Power that everyone understands.  Less spiritually inclined Mages might take a given Legacy to give them a leg up in Consilium politics, the power they need to kill off a rival, or otherwise advance themselves in this world rather than the next.

Personally, my ideal take on Legacies is to have ones that make sense to the Players.  Joining any of the prebuilt Legacies in the corebook and supplements are fine, but there’s something to be said about the kind of sacrifice, and personal stories that emerge from a player character that tries to make his own Legacy to fulfill a personal goal.