Review: Mage: The Awakening – The Free Council
Product Name: The Free Council
Publisher: White Wolf Publishing
Author: David Chart, Jess Hartley, Will Hindmarch, Steve Kenson
Interior Artist: Joel Biske, John Bridges, Brian LeBlanc, Justin Norman, Michael Komarck
Page Count:144
Price: $26.99 Hard Copy / $16.19 PDF
From the Publisher
“Oppenheimer was no mage, but how can you say he wasn’t a wizard? I’m sure he’d never seen any Watchtower or Atlantis god-king or any of your other old myths. But he conjured up something the world had never seen before and changed this Earth forever. No mage had ever done what he did, but we consider ourselves the Awakened people. I’ll bet you anything that when he saw the flash, he woke up, whether it was like us or not. Imagine what we can do when we see through the Lie and recognize that magic and science are all the same thing: wondrous.” — Morton, Libertine Futurist
Modern Magic, Modern Myths
Rethink it. Rethink what you know about magic. About human history. About what’s real and what’s myth. The Free Council is questioning everything. Sometimes this leads to new breakthroughs in sorcery. Sometimes this leads to disaster. What it never creates… is trust.
An Order book for Mage: The Awakening™
• The definitive guide on the youngest of the five Orders of Atlantean magic — a must for any Mage player.
• An insider’s look at the Free Council, including unique cabals blending technology and magic, new spells and rotes, and artifacts utilizing both science and magic.
• A history of the Free Council and an exploration of the cults, clubs and cells that make up its unusual social structure — and how to tell thrilling stories using it all.
First Thoughts
Yay! Jess Hartley! She’s my favorite current White Wolf freelancer, and I knew that whatever bit she wrote was going to be great.
The Good
I have a fondness for technomagic, modern syncretic mysticism, whatever you like to call it. Of the five orders that I am aware of in Awakening, it’s the Free Council that most tickled my interest.
The Bad
Like many of White Wolf’s products, they are a group effort. The writing style ranges from excellent to fair throughout the book. I’d also have liked more technomancy than I got.
The Ugly
None.
It’s Time to Play The Game
The Free Council book is a little more streamlined (and sadly a bit shorter) than the other Mage books I own, and makes the attempt to represent the faction in a more truthful light than normal. (Most are legendary in approach. This aims at historical.) This book describes the political and magical history and the theories that stemmed from this in reasonable detail for the entire history of the order. This includes a short description of the embarrassing truth about the Great Refusal.
Included are new rotes which cover various aspects of what the Council researched as new ways of looking at things, and also demonstrate the sorts of extremes that they went to to survive as an order.
It’s got a very nice section of different philosophical and personal approaches in the Free Council, the factions actually makes sense for the most part, the sidebars have some nice storyhooks in them and it has a nicely expansive section on the way in which technology and magic work together. It’s not quite technomagic but more applying a magical approach to science and a scientific approach to magic and getting nifty stuff when they both cross.
Overall Rating
