"Woke" Franchises

LindyAF

Well-known member
I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't the mess of SJW bullshit that I got. Apparently the Technocratic Union views fighting global warming as their top priority, wants to stop right wing nationalism, and is trying to be more "inclusive" in all the ways that the left loves.

What's worse, while the section describing the Technocracy in America was waxing on about authoritarianism and nationalism, their section about China was nothing but praise for the situation there.

Leftist game developers have turned one of the coolest groups in fiction into a bunch of grievance students with ray guns. Another franchise gone woke.

Aren't the technocrats supposed to be the bad guys? That sounds kinda thematically based, actually.

Would be kinda cool to run a game with Globohomo Technocratic Union of IFLS bugmen vs small groups of dissident (implicitly right-wing) mages.
 

ShieldWife

Marchioness
A friend of mine backed the Technocracy Reloaded book for Mage the Ascension and recently let my view his backer copy.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't the mess of SJW bullshit that I got. Apparently the Technocratic Union views fighting global warming as their top priority, wants to stop right wing nationalism, and is trying to be more "inclusive" in all the ways that the left loves.

What's worse, while the section describing the Technocracy in America was waxing on about authoritarianism and nationalism, their section about China was nothing but praise for the situation there.

Leftist game developers have turned one of the coolest groups in fiction into a bunch of grievance students with ray guns. Another franchise gone woke.
Well, the Technocracy is an oppressive totalitarian organization that wants to dominate every thought and action of every human on Earth. They are the bad guys. It makes perfect sense that they are leftists. It makes perfect sense that they like China, it’s one of the nations closest to the Technocratic ideal.
 

Abhorsen

Local Degenerate
Moderator
Staff Member
Comrade
Osaul
Here's the thing, the protagonist faction isn't better either. They want a return to the good ol times where wizards ruled the world, muggles were cattle-slaves, and reality was what a local wizard wanted it to be. The Technocrats put an end to that.
This. The Technocrats are really hero antagonists very well done. Them believing in global warming is stupid though.
 

ShieldWife

Marchioness
Though the Technocracy wants a single world belief system that they completely control. You can’t have monotheists in one region, animists in another, pagans somewhere else. All humans must have one ideology - the Technocratic one. It’s a globalist, secular conspiracy to destroy culture and religion.

It is ridiculous for them to believe in global warming, since the entire claim of global warming only works in the Technocratic paradigm.
 

LindyAF

Well-known member
Here's the thing, the protagonist faction isn't better either. They want a return to the good ol times where wizards ruled the world, muggles were cattle-slaves, and reality was what a local wizard wanted it to be. The Technocrats put an end to that.

Wizarding aristocracy, nostalgia for older times, and "retvrn to tradition" aren't exactly left-wing coded traits.

Also, I'm going to disagree with people on Global Warming not making sense for the Technocratic Union- it makes perfect sense, as long as it's solvable. A major issue which is fundamentally a technical problem and which the average layperson only really interacts with by trusting the experts and believing in science is exactly the sort of thing that would help the technocracy.

Unrelated side note: Can you imagine how powerful Alex Jones would be as a mage? Technocracy Control would be trying to figure out how they got turned into extradimensional goblin vampires or something.
 

ShieldWife

Marchioness
Wizarding aristocracy, nostalgia for older times, and "retvrn to tradition" aren't exactly left-wing coded traits.

Also, I'm going to disagree with people on Global Warming not making sense for the Technocratic Union- it makes perfect sense, as long as it's solvable. A major issue which is fundamentally a technical problem and which the average layperson only really interacts with by trusting the experts and believing in science is exactly the sort of thing that would help the technocracy.
I’ve long thought that the people at WW accidentally created the world’s most right wing RPG when they made Mage, they just didn’t realize it.

I think that the Technocracy could believe in global warming, but not as a problem. It would be something which they created as a result of modernity and their version of science. In the M:tA setting, global warming would be a Technocratic plot to achieve some other goal.

Alex Jones is an orphan mage fighting the Technocracy by creating doubt about their paradigm for the public.
 

Circle of Willis

Well-known member
uhhh, can someone explain what everyone is talking about?
I'm confused AF right now.:unsure:
Mage: The Ascension, which is part of the World of Darkness, a series of tabletop games set in our world but there's vampires, werewolves, mages, etc. around. The Technocracy, who were IIRC part part Illuminati/MJ12 from Deus Ex (as in, they're a ruling conspiracy of...well...technocrats and scientists) and part Gnostic-archons-but-human (as they try to suppress mages like the player characters because they're literally capable of warping reality as the core of their magic, and the Technocrats would very much like reality to continue existing as-is), originally appear as an antagonistic force - they were supposed to be the bland boring jackboots of The Man. However, they have been interpreted more sympathetically (perhaps a lot more) since.

I'm actually surprised WOD is still trucking on. I thought White Wolf was basically killed after the Chechen gay purge controversy a couple years ago, and Paradox is just wearing them as a skinsuit these days?
 

Navarro

Well-known member
Wizarding aristocracy, nostalgia for older times, and "retvrn to tradition" aren't exactly left-wing coded traits.

The Traditions, at least as originally conceived, are basically a bunch of hippie stereotypes fighting "The Man" as personified in the Technocracy. You have your kung-fu masters, l33t h4xx0rs, your shamans and neopagans, your free-love druggies, and not only one but two "Goth" factions who are all edgy and shit. And what are they up against?

The military-industrial complex, 1950s G-Men, corporate fat cats, and Big Pharma - all the boogeymen of the decade that coined the term "vast right-wing conspiracy". For all the talk here right now of them being left-wing, a decent bunch of the fans still view them as basically reality-fascists (cuz they won't let my character summon a dragon in the middle of Times Square! Waaah, waaah!).

Though the Technocracy wants a single world belief system that they completely control. You can’t have monotheists in one region, animists in another, pagans somewhere else. All humans must have one ideology - the Technocratic one. It’s a globalist, secular conspiracy to destroy culture and religion.

It is ridiculous for them to believe in global warming, since the entire claim of global warming only works in the Technocratic paradigm.

Technocracy is less totalitarian these days, after metaplot had the Hidden Masters cut off from their underlings. Latest stuff on them has a civil war looming while the Hidden Masters themselves prepare to invade Earth.

Mage: The Ascension, which is part of the World of Darkness, a series of tabletop games set in our world but there's vampires, werewolves, mages, etc. around. The Technocracy, who were IIRC part part Illuminati/MJ12 from Deus Ex (as in, they're a ruling conspiracy of...well...technocrats and scientists) and part Gnostic-archons-but-human (as they try to suppress mages like the player characters because they're literally capable of warping reality as the core of their magic, and the Technocrats would very much like reality to continue existing as-is), originally appear as an antagonistic force - they were supposed to be the bland boring jackboots of The Man. However, they have been interpreted more sympathetically (perhaps a lot more) since.

The default antags these days are a bunch of uber-evil, uber-edgy demon-and/or-Cthulhu-worshipping mages who infiltrate both factions. Traditions and Technocracy is more like Alliance and Horde in World of Warcraft.
 
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Bear Ribs

Well-known member
uhhh, can someone explain what everyone is talking about?
I'm confused AF right now.:unsure:
To go a little deeper to the base lore, in Mage, the laws of physics are literally created by people believing there are laws of physics. If most of the world believes silver kills werewolves, then silver kills werewolves. If most of the world believes a four leaf clover gives good luck, it really will. If humanity believes in global warming, the earth will grow warmer and contrarily, if you convinced most of humanity that an ice age is on us, the global temperature would actually drop from the power of their beliefs.

The technocracy is a group of wizards who call their magic "science" and have been running a scam for thousands of years to convince people that there are actual, fixed and unchanging, laws of physics. They've convinced enough of mankind that physics exist to become the most powerful wizards in the setting and they're shutting down all the other magic traditions by making people believe there's no such thing as magic.
 

LindyAF

Well-known member
The Traditions, at least as originally conceived, are basically a bunch of hippie stereotypes fighting "The Man" as personified in the Technocracy. You have your kung-fu masters, l33t h4xx0rs, your shamans and neopagans, your free-love druggies, and not only one but two "Goth" factions who are all edgy and shit. And what are they up against?

The army, 1950s G-Men, corporate fat cats, and Big Pharma - all the boogeymen of the decade that coined the term "vast right-wing conspiracy".

Yeah, and I definitely don't disagree that an alternative coding to the one I presented is the original intention. But it seems like a lot of people ended up thinking the Technocracy as originally conceived was cool, and would rather side with them than those hippies meddling with stuff they don't understand, always knocking down Chesterton's Fences without understanding why they're there. So, since it turned out people liked them, WW started giving them more sympathetic lore, made them playable, and now that it's sort of a Gray vs Gray moral conflict, have started coding them as more left- experts and scientists concerned with RW nationalism and global warming.

I'd say there's a lesson there about the changing understanding of The System, but that'd be reading too much into stuff.

And hey, if they're going to code the original bad guys that way, why not take it and run with it?

But yeah, to run a game like I suggested, you would probably have to do a lot of re-jiggering with the Traditions side of it.
 
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Navarro

Well-known member
To go a little deeper to the base lore, in Mage, the laws of physics are literally created by people believing there are laws of physics. If most of the world believes silver kills werewolves, then silver kills werewolves. If most of the world believes a four leaf clover gives good luck, it really will. If humanity believes in global warming, the earth will grow warmer and contrarily, if you convinced most of humanity that an ice age is on us, the global temperature would actually drop from the power of their beliefs.

The hilarious thing is that Werewolf has its own cosmology which is basically a bunch of Captain Planet nonsense. And Vampire's lore is basically Bible fanfic. They tried to tie it all together by saying that Avatars are the "image of God" mentioned in Genesis and that werewolves were created by one of the angels who was neutral in the war in heaven.

Then they kicked on the idea that the real backstory for the WoD was the creation story of Exalted, which is basically based on the ancient Greek creation myth - the world is created out of primal Chaos by the titans, the titans create the gods, then the gods fight a war against the titans and seal them away forever. Then they abandoned that too, so who knows anymore.
 
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BlackDragon98

Freikorps Kommandant
Banned - Politics
To go a little deeper to the base lore, in Mage, the laws of physics are literally created by people believing there are laws of physics. If most of the world believes silver kills werewolves, then silver kills werewolves. If most of the world believes a four leaf clover gives good luck, it really will. If humanity believes in global warming, the earth will grow warmer and contrarily, if you convinced most of humanity that an ice age is on us, the global temperature would actually drop from the power of their beliefs.

The technocracy is a group of wizards who call their magic "science" and have been running a scam for thousands of years to convince people that there are actual, fixed and unchanging, laws of physics. They've convinced enough of mankind that physics exist to become the most powerful wizards in the setting and they're shutting down all the other magic traditions by making people believe there's no such thing as magic.
So basically, everyone has a little bit of reality warping powers (like the kind Scarlet Witch has) and if a bunch of people all concentrate on the same thing, it becomes reality?

So why don't the good guys just concentrate on the idea that the bad guys don't exist anymore or have some disorder that will kill them in the next 3 seconds, thereby defeating them in a single stroke.
 

LindyAF

Well-known member
So basically, everyone has a little bit of reality warping powers (like the kind Scarlet Witch has) and if a bunch of people all concentrate on the same thing, it becomes reality?

So why don't the good guys just concentrate on the idea that the bad guys don't exist anymore or have some disorder that will kill them in the next 3 seconds, thereby defeating them in a single stroke.

Partially because most people Sleepers, don't know they have the power, but they nevertheless form a Consensus that magic doesn't exist, so you can't do anything too obviously magic.

And also partially because the bad guys have magic too, and they believe they exist.
 

Urabrask Revealed

Let them go.
Founder
One anon on 4chan explained the various factions thus: If you put a mage, a werewolf, and vampire in a full theatre and made them transform into wolves in front of mundane people, the following things would happen:
- the vampire would get an ovation for a neat magical trick and also dinged for a masquerade violation
- the werewolf would trigger a mass-panic and/or mass-coma
- the mage would explode
have started coding them as more left- experts and scientists concerned with RW nationalism and global warming.
That's a recurring thing with the Left. Demonize a popular thing time and again until they can get their filthy claws on it, then present it as the best thing since sliced bread and communism, so people will love it even more.
 

Navarro

Well-known member
But yeah, to run a game like I suggested, you would probably have to do a lot of re-jiggering with the Traditions side of it.

You should also note that canonically the Traditions' goal isn't to "bring back the good old days" but to create some kind of utopia where everybody's Paradigms intermingle and Paradox doesn't exist (basically, where everything is true, even those things that contradict each other).
 
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Bear Ribs

Well-known member
So basically, everyone has a little bit of reality warping powers (like the kind Scarlet Witch has) and if a bunch of people all concentrate on the same thing, it becomes reality?

So why don't the good guys just concentrate on the idea that the bad guys don't exist anymore or have some disorder that will kill them in the next 3 seconds, thereby defeating them in a single stroke.
Bear in mind I'm not an expert on the lore and haven't played in years, so I could be a bit off.

First there's a mechanic called Paradox. Reality does not like going against the belief of most of humanity. If most of mankind thinks you can't kill the bad guys by concentrating for 3 seconds, their combined belief is going to make reality squish you like a bug for trying. You have to be really careful with your magic and use it to cast spells that people think could plausibly happen to avoid Paradox biting you in the backside.

Second there's more bad guys and they are more powerful. The reason the Technocracy is so powerful is because they've convinced most of mankind in science. So if you go against science, you have to be stronger than both everybody in the technocracy (who are the most powerful wizards in the world) and also the combined belief of about 8 billion humans.

As for why the Technocracy doesn't concentrate on killing the good guys in three seconds, their power base is science. If they don't use Science! to solve their problems their own belief system fails and then paradox bites them in the backside for it too.
 

Navarro

Well-known member
So basically, everyone has a little bit of reality warping powers (like the kind Scarlet Witch has) and if a bunch of people all concentrate on the same thing, it becomes reality?

So why don't the good guys just concentrate on the idea that the bad guys don't exist anymore or have some disorder that will kill them in the next 3 seconds, thereby defeating them in a single stroke.

The "bad guys" can do that too. You also have to actually develop your understanding of the aspects of reality you want to influence and your ability to influence it - it's not Calvinball, this is an RPG after all (you're describing a Correspondence/Life or Prime conjunctional attack spell, BTW). Also, only the archmages of the setting know that they're actually manipulating reality through belief. Everybody else really does believe that their magic runes or potion or laser gun works because it's a magic rune, potion or laser gun.
 

Circle of Willis

Well-known member
That's a recurring thing with the Left. Demonize a popular thing time and again until they can get their filthy claws on it, then present it as the best thing since sliced bread and communism, so people will love it even more.
Incidentally (and since I did mention DX before) I think this is what's basically happened with Deus Ex since Square Enix got the rights to the setting: it's been made superficially woke to the detriment of the original's message. Not that Human Revolution was a bad game - I actually found it to be quite fun - but in hindsight I think it's quite telling that the focus and central themes of the series have drifted away from confronting the conjoined twins of unchecked corporate & government power and the notion of an out-of-touch technocratic elite with delusions of godhood & absolute supremacy over the masses that they clearly hate, to an allusion to racism, police brutality and apartheid in the treatment of mech-augs (who aren't even a major factor anymore in the original DX, I just finished that game for the thousandth time and there's like three mech-augs from start to finish). I'm reminded of how the progressive stack conveniently cropped up to conveniently hit Occupy Wall Street where it hurts conveniently at a time where both the far-left and far-right were saying 'man, the rich fat cats with golden parachutes suck' in unison...

It's a good thing the original Deus Ex will never be remade in the present cultural climate, because if it were, UNATCO and by extension Majestic 12 would doubtless be recast as the good guys. They're the ones after a thoroughly secularized and technocratic one world order led by a central bureaucracy & scientist corps who wield unchecked power over the filthy plebs, after all. Not to mention their leader, Bob Page, is a trillionaire with fingers in every economic pie, but most notably the Internet/computer technologies in general (via the Aquinas Protocol) and biological sciences/pharmaceuticals (via Versalife), and his public act is all about controlling both for the public good...

Conversely, the NSF (the main 'bad guys' for the first act of the game) were clearly made out to be American militia types: some worthless petty criminals like JoJo Fine or the Rook gang, to be sure, but most are shown through what dialogue you can have with them/overhear to be American patriots who deeply resent the globalist encroachment on their country, were especially pissed off by a gun confiscation campaign in the backstory, and are explicitly devoted to God, with liberally sprinkled Southern accents topping it all off. No way a group like that would be allowed to retain the positive light they got after the first third of the game, to say nothing of the triads (established as big practitioners of digital piracy) or the Illuminati (the more conservative and less aggressively secular conspiracy of 'pretentious old men', as Page called them).
 

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