Illumination Through Gaming
Can roleplaying games be used as a tool of initiation in occult traditions?
I had a real fascination with Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980ās. The local library had a catalog of Dragon Magazine, with its amazing cover illustrations and explorations of, primarily, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, then published by TSR. I flipped through the pages of rules expansions, exotic new monsters, new character classes and races and not a page of it made a lick of sense to me. I didnāt care, of course. Dragon was a look into a forbidden world of high-flying imagination. Up to that point, I never cracked the rule books. My mom wouldnāt let me have them. This was the 1980ās and Satanic Panic was happening. There were tales of ritual murder, suicide, and madness and Dungeons and Dragons lie at the black heart of every story of children driven to mayhem. Not one of them was true, of course, but that didnāt matter at my house.
And then my grandmother bought me the red beginners box for Christmas one year. Unwrapping it was like opening a rifle. My own disbelief at the contraband Iād been gifted was rivaled only by my motherās own disbelief that her mother had opened a door that could never again be closed. It was curtains for me, her poor doomed son, but she could never have predicted the power of social backlash. What I would soon find out, something that I could never have suspected at twelve years old, was that D&D was a powerful talisman for warding away friends. It was some Grade A nerd shit and to my motherās relief, no one wanted to play with me. I still read the magazines and books, but I learned to keep my mouth shut about RPGs until I was in my twenties and being a certified cool guy no longer carried the value that it once did. The stakes were gradually getting lower and lower as the years progressed and I found comfort in no longer having to hide this unrequited love of mine. I eventually even started gaming with friends and learned that, much to my own dismay, high fantasy role playing just didn't hit me like I thought it would. The emphasis was placed on expansive dungeon crawls and die rolling for monster hunting. Deep, black dungeons lie in the heart of thickly forested mountain kingdoms and the setting was little more than set dressing for elaborate games of mathematics. I got bored with it and drifted away but everything changed the day the weird old dude that managed to drift into our social circle mentioned the game Vampire: The Masquerade.
Role playing games reached a zenith of grognard inaccessibility somewhere in the late 80's. Every system sought to differentiate itself from D&D but no matter what they did, the core gameplay of character stats always stayed the same. You had your central statistics, strength, intelligence, charisma, and then a set of skills with numbers attached to them. Using these stats in the game involved rolling dice and then applying those numbers to your stats to see if a skill check passed or failed. Early D&D rules were fairly simple but Advanced Dungeons and Dragons came along and changed the rules and added this bananas combat mechanic called THAC0, which stands for To Hit Armor Class 0. For whatever reason, D&D measured hit-ability on a scale of falling armor class scores combined with weapon bonuses and a die roll. It's since been simplified but back then you rolled your dice and then did some math acrobatics to figure out if your attack succeeded and hurt the monster or if you whiffed and your sword bounced off of its scaly, armored hide. Some people like this. I don't. But there's a real market for these complicated games that have you working out skill checks on paper and performing a lot of table lookups. Advanced Squad Leader has a rulebook that comes in a thick three-ring binder. But the escalating convolution of these games started to drive people out. Every game was functionally the same system but involved more and more complicated rule checks so that they were legally distinct from the others. And then came White Wolf and everything changed.
The White Wolf effect on tabletop gaming in the early 90's cannot be overstated. It changed everything. From its beginnings in the 70's, role playing games came in varying flavors of heroes vs. villains. There were a few grimy games on the independent market that offered you the chance to be the bad guys and D&D, with its chaotic/evil alignment system, also offered you the chance to theoretically get down and dirty but the genre had reached a point where alignment and role playing just didn't much matter. At the end of the day, your gaming session was you and your friends against a series of monsters and their escalating statistics and it didn't matter how evil your character sheet said you were as long as your stats afforded you decent odds to kill monsters and stay alive. White Wolf was one of the first companies to come along and offer something new, special, and different. White Wolf games put the emphasis on character and story. As a matter of fact, Game Masters/Dungeon Masters are called Storytellers in their system. Their flagship title was Vampire: The Masquerade.
Horror gaming wasn't new in 1991. Call of Cthulhu had been the crown jewel of horror gaming since 1980 and many publishers had their own versions of the game, or horror games that were more in line with American expectations of slashers and killers but the core fundamentals were always the same. You play the hapless heroes and investigators and the horror happens to you. Vampire was the first game that I know of that made you the monster but in a way that made narrative sense. You were predators and killers, but still inhabited human bodies. You exist on the periphery of human life and need to fit in or otherwise be discovered and destroyed by a hysterical public. White Wolf dug deep into Anne Rice territory. They pulled inspiration from TV shows like Forever Knight, where societies of vampires live and feed beneath the consciousness of normal human beings. There was a political order, factions struggling for control, different bloodlines with different traits and abilities. Some vampires looked like regular human beings. Some were cursed with horrific, monstrous appearances while others were stricken with madness from the gnosis that their bloodline afforded them. Vampire had this rich gameplay setting that was like nothing else out there and it clicked with me because I was a closet drama club geek that wanted to sink into a character and be someone else for a few hours rather than just a pair of hands holding a sword. Vampire allowed this and really got its hooks into me since I was already a moody young dude with black clothes, black hair, leather jackets, strappy tank boots, and a taste for gothic rock music.
But the thing that really set Vampire apart from its contemporaries was the rule system. It was robust. There was so much that a character could do and each clan could be played a thousand ways. The sky is the limit with Vampire but the thing which clinched its reputation for being so awesome was its simplicity. Vampire emerged at a time when gamers seemed to be making the conscious choice to reject the grognard rule slogs. We wanted games that were faster to play and that required little rules referencing. Vampire delivered this by removing percentiles and the trusty old numeric scores and indicated a particular statistic on a scale of 1 to 5 dots. To perform a particular feat, the Storyteller would decide which stats this skill involved and then for each dot in this ability pool, you rolled that many d10s and the degree of success was based on how many 6+ results you rolled. There was a bit more in there to indicate the chance for critical failures and successes and a true success depended on meeting a threshold of successful dies rolled but this was a dramatic departure from other games. White Wolf's d10 system had its flaws, of course. You could tell that the game was created by writers because the emphasis was on story but also, the dice math sucked! Being good at a particular thing meant rolling more dice, which meant more chances for success but since rolling 1's canceled a successful roll on another die, it also meant you were equally as likely to fuck up. The newest edition of Vampire fixes this but variations on this mechanic persisted for twenty years. In spite of this, the game maintained wild popularity for years. There was even a shitty TV show based on it. But then it seemed to fall off.
In the intervening years, White Wolf published more X: the Y games. Werewolf: The Apocalypse came next. There was also Wraith: The Oblivion, which was like ghosts or something. I could never really get my head around that one. Changeling: The Dreaming was the last of what is typically considered the core of White Wolf's World of Darkness setting (though, there are also smaller books for games about Mummies, Demons, and other shit). But the one that I want to address here is ostensibly one of the greatest role playing games ever written: Mage: The Ascension.
Nearly every role playing game has a magic system or something like it. Sci-fi games typically have psi characters or netrunners as their magic system stand in for folks who just have to have a bag of tricks that they manage on the side while everyone else is sharpening swords and drinking healing potions. But Mage is different. Every character is a magic user. It's the entire game. But it deviates wildly from the usual sources. All those other games have sections of rulebooks or, in some cases, entire books, dedicated to a concrete list of magic spells available to this kind of mage or that: fireballs, detect traps, heal light wounds, etc. Mage doesn't. At all. It has a few suggestions of things you, as a Mage, can do, but the effects of your magic are entirely up to you. They just have to conform to the game's rather loose creative system. Like its sibling games, Mages are broken up into factions, and each faction has a few options of what sort of magic your Mage starts with; time, elemental forces, spirit, entropy, etc. The core set of Traditions. they're called, represent a broad range real world esoteric practice, Witches, Hermetics, martial artists, shamans, etc. In true 90's gaming fashion, an entire class of Mage deals entirely with the internet, which was so mysterious and at the center of psychedelic consciousness at the time via people like RU Sirius and Timothy Leary. And everyone had goatees and trench coats. Mage even beat Steampunk to the punch by about ten years with a class of Mage that deals entirely with weird technology and mad science.
Apart from being unique to its core (itās actually a slight update of an older game called Ars Magica), and one of the most creative gaming experiences out there, the Mage core rule book is researched in real world esoteric practice and Gnosticism in a way that is positively shocking. Without a hint of irony, it is a far better explanation of magic, what it is, how it works, and the various paradigms of practice than anything ever published by Llewelyn or Scarlet Imprint. And Iām talking about a book intended for dorky role play, not the applied occult sciences. At the time that I first discovered it, it merely struck me as an exciting new idea in gaming but now as a grown-ass man with occult study and experience under me, I canāt help but wonder if this game was written with an ulterior motive.
The fundamental truth in the Mage lore should be familiar to anyone that has ever worked the Western Esoteric Tradition. Magicians divine the future with tarot cards, work their will through sigils, invoke extra dimensional entities through Enochian calls, but in game terms these are considered foci. Theyāre the lens through which you focus your will. The real magic comes from the spark of the divine within. They call it Capital-A Avatar. There are magicians in the game world that do all of the same rituals to the same ends, but itās all performance as far as the real Mages are concerned. The difference between the hedge mages and the Mages of the title is a spiritual awakening; realizing that the Avatar is there, that itās a part of you, and that it gives you control over the primal forces of magic. In other words, real gnosis. The gameās ultimate goal is ascension, as the title suggests. Through struggle, you advance your characterās stats. Itās your basic experience and upgrade system but rather than just opening doors for you to take on bigger monsters, you empower your spirit and elevate your character toward Nirvana. You rise through the Otz Chiim, becoming more enlightened and having less in common with mundane humanity. The gameās ultimate goal, which Iāve not once ever heard of anyone accomplishing, is to spiritually rise and join the unity.
You can tell that the game was written by practicing magicians, too. Most of White Wolfās titles feature a morality system to keep you from turning the game into a bloodbath. The tight rope of not slipping into oblivion in these games offers a narrative balance that keeps things interesting. In Mage, the system is called Paradox. As long as you have the skill requirements, you can do whatever you want in the game. Need some cash? What luck! Thereās a winning scratch ticket in your pocket. Technocracy cyborgs have you pinned down? Throw a classic fireball! Just like the witchy Rule of Three, though, what you put out there comes back to you and the universe decides how bad itās going to hurt by way of Paradox. When you work your magic, itās like punching a trampoline. Something subtle, that could have been coincidental to an observer, like a wining scratch-off in your pocket, gently presses your fist into the trampoline. The trampolineās surface conforms to the shape of your fist. When you pull it back, you do so gently and the trampoline ripples only slightly. Paradox burning your ass is highly unlikely here. But a fireball is some nasty, vulgar fantasy shit. Suddenly producing a raging ball of flame in front of some filthy normies is impossible by the laws of nature. You can do it because youāre a magician but itās the cosmic equivalent of throwing a wild haymaker at the trampoline. You get your fireball, but the surface of the trampoline bounces back and forth wildly, trying to correct itself to a state of equilibrium. That self-correction comes back to you in the game by an accrual of Paradox points and as you gain more, weird shit starts to happen: You suddenly have a tail. Birds fly out of your pockets. Up is down. If youāre not careful, and Paradox hasnāt literally blown you to smithereens or a cartoon anvil hasnāt inexplicably fallen on your head, you can be overcome by paradox and join a rank of magician whose very existence is chaotic, schizophrenic, and impossible. In a recent game, such a being came into play as the avatar of Florida Man, a crass individual that embodies the very essence of wild Floridian criminal headlines. You can bleed Paradox off through deliberate acts of catastrophe (my chaos magic using Mage had a habit of bleeding off paradox by intentionally bombing at stand up comedy open mics) and collecting paradox is an eventuality but being smart and creative about the magic you work in the game is the way to go. Just like real magic. Itās why I donāt do much spell work these days. The cosmic clap back struck in really terrible ways and I learned that the best way to change the universe is to change yourself within.
Iāve been wondering lately: Could you use Mage the Ascension as a tool for initiation? A friend of mine that shares my enthusiasm for this game credits it with sparking an interest in Gnosticism. As far as I know, heās not as into the occult as I am but thereās a hook there now where there wasnāt before he found the game that I could use to draw him into the deeper labyrinth. Itās a realization of Jack Chickās worst suspicions.
The magic of Mage isnāt the currency that it is in other games. Youāre not memorizing and forgetting spells as you use them. The power isnāt a gift/curse bestowed on select individuals like Harry Potter. Itās a power within us all that can only be used when the avatar awakens. Depending on your gameās arc, the goal is to awaken the world or hoard the gnosis all for yourself. The way that you do this is to imagine elaborate rituals to activate the magic and that act of imagination, in itself, is wildly magical in a real-world occult sense. Alan Mooreās entire magical practice is heavily based on this idea. What you can imagine becomes real on the astral, what becomes real on the astral can find its shadow in the physical world. The character that you embody in the game becomes your avatar in this hypothetical astral space. Simply by playing the game, you form a relationship with your higher self. Call it your Holy Guardian Angel, your Genius, Augoeides, but it's out there for all of us, waiting to be found and while this relationship is theoretically possible to build out of characters in even the dumbest role playing games, The philosophy which drives Mage is a reflection of the spiritual ideal that us gnostics and Hermetics spend our lives chasing. Mage, through this novel abstraction of The Great Work, opens a much bigger door, in my opinion, than reading Crowley or The Sacred Magic of Abramelin The Mage. Abstract concepts of ideal form, higher consciousness, the unity of all things, God, whatever you're chasing in your own occult practice becomes so much more accessible when viewed through the lens of a mystical but flawed hero archetype embodied in the hypothetical space of the game. Grant Morrison's comic, The Invisibles, explicitly set out to do this very thing and was successful to some degree in initiating a few folks into Grant's wild world of Chaos but even in this context, experiencing the struggle of The Invisibles through the third person perspective by way of King Mob put up a degree of separation between awakening and the reader. The same can be said for Alan Moore's amazing comic, Promethea. The actual practice of magic in these books is still quite obscure and never fully explained in a way that can be directly applied by the readers. It's all highly theoretical. Mage puts you fully in control of a magical character. You come to inhabit the archetype and if you have the interest to follow the rabbit down the hole or, pardon the tacky and toxic expression, take the red pill, your Mage character can reach out and open your third eye to your place in creation. It's about as direct a metaphor as I can think of for Plato's Cave.
Hermetics are constantly talking about the above and below relationship. That everything here is a reflection of everything there. But role playing games, especially in the context of Mage: The Ascension, put us in the role of the divine and the characters becomes a reflection of us. And by the philosophy of Hermes Trismegistus, we become a reflection of the characters. By this fuzzy occult logic, that characters we create come to be a vessel for our higher selves and through this yin/yang integration, we can more easily get in touch with that higher self and potentially open ourselves up to gnosis.