A disgusting scenario for beginning Mage the Ascension characters by Sebastian

Lindeberg.

World of Darkness, Vampire: The Masquerade, Vampire: The Dark Ages, Werewolf: The
Apocalypse, Mage: The Ascension, Wraith: The Oblivion, Changeling: The Dreaming, Hunter:
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©2018 White Wolf Entertainment AB, Västgötagatan 5, SE-118 27 Stockholm, Sweden.

Unfurl the black velvet altar cloth
Draw a white chalk Baphomet
Mistreat your altar boys long enough
And this is what you get
-The Mountain Goats, Cry for Judas

Introduction
The player characters in this scenario are a group of occultists looking to steal a city's worst
neighborhood from reality. Nobody wants it anyway. People just want to forget. Forget about the
poverty, the crime, the right wing politicians that uses it for their own gain, the guns in the street,
the rumors it generates about how dangerous the city is, the social injustice of it all, the people
that don’t look or talk like them that live there and what the entire fucking neighborhood
represents. When a lot of people wants something there is power in that desire. In that need.
Even if they don’t want it for the same reasons. The reasons may be racism, ignorance,
sadness, care, complacency, hatred, sympathy or fear. The collective desire holds real magickal
power for those with the will and the means to use it.

So the plan is simple, really. The player characters cabal will perform a ritual that will rip the
neighborhood out of reality and into its own dimension. Reality outside of the neighborhood will
continue as if nothing had happened. Nobody on the outside will even remember that the
neighborhood even existed. The ”wound” in reality and in geography will be plastered over with
some possible reality that never happened. The new neighborhood-sized reality created by the
ritual will be under the control of the mages performing the ritual. They will literally be gods of
their own very small universe. No matter what the people living there thinks about their new
situation or their new masters.

Why?!
For power! For a safe haven. For a different reality. Or maybe just because you can! Why the
characters feel the need to tear a chunk of the city away into the beyond should depend on who
the characters are. Maybe they want to make a perfect (but small) world? Maybe they have
weird religious ideas (they are mages after all)? Maybe they want to create a game preserve
without a sun for vampires? It is not for anyone but the players to decide. In a darker campaign
the players might have twisted or sadistic reasons for stealing the neighborhood. They will have
to wade through blood to reach their goals so this might be fitting. But most likely the characters
don’t even care about the people living in the place they steal. Is that problematic? Maybe. Your
job as the storyteller is to make the people in the neighborhood seem human and real. If the
players still decide to put out a cigarette in someones eye… Well, that is on them.
Playstyle
This is a very open scenario with the steps of the ritual working as milestones that keeps the
cabal going in the right direction. Beyond that this is a very open scenario. Yes, the storyteller
should be generous with suggestions for how the steps of the ritual could be performed but
these suggestions are no better than the players ideas. It is just as correct for the cabal to
”Destroy the face of the neighborhood” by creating bad PR as it is for them to do it by shooting a
celebrity from the area in the face.

The neighborhood in the pre-apocalypse

You can pick whatever bad neighborhood in whatever reasonable large city you want for this
scenario. Setting the scenario outside of the united states might mean that you need to change
some names. The important part is that this is not urban fantasy that takes place in the gutter.
This is urban fantasy that takes place among the putrefying rat carcases that litter the filthiest
parts of that gutter. Mix the general filth and decay of the city with the kind of malign magick that
uses intestine pentagrams to uphold unfair power structures and you have the right feel. It is a
toxic and hostile mix that makes the city look like a concrete vomit filled with broken and vicious
people. It is an unfair world filled with social injustice, racism, sexism and class hatred. But the
people themselves are also rotten to the core and it is unclear if their environment made them
rotten or if they just got the city they deserve. When you describe the city do it as if you were
Lovecraft describing Red Hook. You should be horrified but at the same time fascinated by the
teeming masses of humanity trapped inside the cold, dead concrete. Then you add in some
occult fuckers to make everything worse.

Occult fuckers
This is a collection of mystics, monsters and other weirdos wielding some sort of power and
being of some note in the city. They either have their own interests in the neighborhood or have
other reasons to be pulled into the player cabals jihad for their own reality. They might be allies,
enemies or perhaps just people that the player characters run into on their way to their goal.

Cuntface​​: She has a mouth like a… well, no that is not actually it since she also has a mouth. It
is more like this other orifice in her face that looks like… Look, you know from her name. The
important thing is that she knows everything worth knowing about the occult in the city and for a
price she is willing to share. She is obviously some sort of supernatural creature, most likely a
vampire. But what really matters is her knowledge.

Miseryomancers​​: A cult of hedge mages and witches working as social workers, nurses and
immigration officers in the area. They work to keep the neighborhood an awful place and uses
the misery of the people stuck living in it to power their magic. They will murder the absolute
fuck out of anybody coming between them and the source of their magic. They will most likely
understand what the player cabal is up to around step 3 or 4 and will come after the player
characters with shotguns and black magic. They are mostly middle aged, mostly women and
mostly people of color. They are in other words the people stuck working the worst jobs in this
godforsaken neighborhood because of racism, sexism and ageism. But in that place they have
found just a little bit of power and magic. They are ready to kill to protect it.

The assistant nurse​​: A 47 year old woman with rheumatism that just have gotten her lips
enlarged. I think you know what kind of person she is just from that information. She was stuck
in a back breaking job that each day destroyed a little more of her soul when she found that she
had a special skill. She can make all evidence and traces of something or someone disappear
like it never happened with a snap of her fingers. Now she makes crime scenes and evidence of
the supernatural disappear for cash and every occult fucker in the city knows her name.

Aina​​: A tulpa mind construct made from the fear, hate and anxiety that people in the area feel
towards the police. The psychic energy fills the corpse of the most recently dead cop buried in
the neighborhood. Then he or she crawls out of the grave like a zombie, materialises a uniform
and climbs into a rusted out patrol car that shouldn't work in order to hunt down criminals. Not
that often, but now and again, Aina shows up and brutally beats someone to death with a
nightstick. Aina can't die. It can't stop. It shakes off powerful magickal attacks like bee stings and
just keeps going. If the player cabal breaks the law while performing the ritual Aina will try to
hunt them down like dogs.

The Ritual
The Ritual is old, ancient even. It has made neighborhoods disappear in Moscow, New York
and Constantinople over the years. It has been used so many times and for so long that it has
become hedge magic. A part of reality, even if it is a hidden part. It is not clear who created the
ritual or why. Some hermetics claim to have stolen it from demons. Some choristers warns that
it is nephandic in nature. Some Verbena claims that it is a part of realities hygiene. Nobody
knows for sure. What is important is that the player characters have gotten hold of it and know
how to perform it.

The ritual has five steps that needs to be performed in the correct order for the ritual to work.
The steps are:

1. Destroy the face of the neighborhood.

2. Ghosts must haunt the heart of the neighborhood.
3. The connections to the outside world must be cut.
4. Blood must be in the streets.
5. The neighborhoods greatest enemy must be ritually sacrificed in the neighborhoods holiest
place.
Let us go over the steps of the ritual in more detail

Destroy the face of the neighborhood​​: The part of the ritual most open to interpretation. This
might mean destroying the most famous building in the neighborhood, giving the neighborhood
bad press, killing the most famous person from the neighborhood or something else. The most
important thing about this part of the scenario is that the players get to flex their creative
muscles.

Ghosts must haunt the heart of the neighborhood​​: What is the heart of a place? Is it a spirit
or a building or something else? That part of this step will need player creativity. But the ghosts
needs to be actual ghosts. Like, from dead people. How is the cabal meant to get ghosts to
haunt something? Well, they might be able to enslave them with magick or they might make a
deal with them. Groups without the means to do either might decide to do something like buying
a haunted house, tearing it down and rebuilding it inside the neighborhood. Or if they are the
brutal sort they might decide to ”make” some ghosts with violence.

The connections to the outside world must be cut​​: Easier said than done nowadays but the
area needs to be isolated in some way from the outside world. A total communications blackout
can work but so could destroying bridges and tunnels if those are all that connects the
neighborhood to the rest of the city. This should be a largely logistical challenge with the
characters trying to use as their magick and guile to punch up way outside their weight class
and cut the neighborhood off from the rest of the city.

Blood must be in the streets​​: Great violence needs to happen with a real body count to show
for it. This won’t be a problem for a brutal or evil cabal but it should cause problema of morality
for most. Can the Euthanos make this happen by only killing the wicked? Can the Chorister
even justify it at all? This might be where the scenario ends because the cabal can’t bring
themselves to do what is needed to complete the ritual.

The neighborhoods greatest enemy must be ritually sacrificed in the neighborhoods

holiest place​​: The final step of the ritual is the most dramatic. By this time the cabal should be
hunted by at least the miserymancers but probably others as well. Under those conditions they
need to find whatever place the community holds most sacred, paint a pentagram there and in
that pentagram ritually cut out the heart of whoever they have identified as the greatest enemy
of the neighborhood. That person might be everything from a local crime boss to a politician
who have made the area a worse place to live. Maybe the cabal think they are the worst
enemies of the neighborhood and chose to ritually sacrifice one of their own.
When the ritual is completed
Then the characters will have access to their own horizon realm that only they can access or
leave. Inside the realm they are free from the dangers of paradox. But more than that they will
have a moment, exactly when they complete the ritual, when they can change the horizon realm
into whatever they like. But only if they agree. If they don’t they get a twisted compromise.