From nv91-asa@hemul.nada.kth.se Fri May 20 13:59:20 1994 Date: Fri, 20 May 1994 13:21:21 +0200 (MET DST) From: Anders Sandberg Subject: The Nameless Mage To: mage-l@wizards.com Message-ID: Thanks for all your praise for the Goetic mages and the spheres of CoE! I'm currently finishing a lot of the small, weird files I found in a subdirectory at home. Here is one rather strange mage: The Nameless Mage ----------------- The Nameless Mage is a master of mind who lives inside the Collective Unconscious. He has no longer any body, and exists purely inside the minds of people. He moves from person to person, or dives deep into the Collective Unconscious. Sometimes he emerges to the surface, looking out through the eyes of people and using their bodies to do something. But this is rare. The mage spend much time looking inside the minds of different persons, examining their memories, personalities, feelings and thoughts. He is quite interested in seeing the world through the eyes of different people, feeling what they feel and thinking what they think. He can spend several days studying an interesting person. He is not very interested in helping anybody or interfering with them, if he don't think he will gain anything from the experience. When the mage is not studying people, he wanders the deeper layers of the Unconscious. He has travelled around the world. studying and experimenting with It. He has found many strange beings who live here. Some are archetypes, who are fuelled by the collective belief in them. Others are small parasites, beings who live on the scraps from the conscious worlds. There are strange realms inside the Unconscious, some bordering to the chimerae, others to the Deep Umbra. Exactly how the mage views his world is not very clear. He seems to view everything as abstract phenomena, a web of relations. He no longer sees reality as consisting of objects and events, but of interconnections and symbols. When the mage sees a picture (or memory) of a dog, he will see it as something that connects the Dog (the archetypal dog) with an image. These are also nexuses of interconnections. Each image is something that interconnect different shapes and colours. Due to his studies of the human mind, he often regard people as clusters of different parts. A person is not a single entity, but a society of interconnecting systems. The Mage have never had any problems with paradox inside the collective unconscious, where the laws of reality are changing and quite liberal. When he rises towards the conscious layers of mind, reality gets more and more rigid, and he begins to feel constrained. Recently, he has noticed that it is harder for him to reach the conscious plane. It may be that he has begun accumulating paradox in the physical world, which slowly pushes him deeper and deeper into the subconscious. But the mage has also noticed other problems. He has forgotten his name. He have forgotten everything he did before entering the Unconscious, and perhaps much after. He seems to have begun to dissolve, loosing parts of his mind into the sea of humanity. He regards this as very interesting. The Mage often behaves quite strangely. Much of the time he uses Mind 1 liberally, turning himself into a cloud of coperating subpersonalities and small, independent servant minds. He dislikes negative emotions, so he has stopped becoming afraid, angry, frustrated, bored or feel any pain. He has a perfect memory (when he decides to). When he talks to anybody, he often tries to cohere into a single person, but he tends to take several different views at once, interrupt himself and start to pleasantly argue with his different parts. Most normal people would regard him as quite mad, and they might be right. When he communicates with people, he often sends messages from the Deep Subconscious. These may manifest as dreams, hallucinations or coincidences. If it is important, he may rise into the mind of the person he want to talk to, and talk with him inside his head. He seldom "talk" in the normal way. Instead he just dump whole concepts, memories and ideas into the mind of another, and read their minds to find the answer. Sometimes he may posses another person, but this is hard work and irritating. This is the last resort, when he have tried the other methods and failed. When talking to different persons, he often split himself up, and move into their heads in turn. He can be a quite confusing conversationalist, especially since he regard each human mind as many parts. He can begin to talk to someones superego or childhood fears if he is not reminded in any way of the normal human procedures for communication. The mage have several allies in the deep subconscious, beings who live there. Some are archetypes or aspects of archetypes, like his friends The Young Hero or The Grey Bureaucrat. Others are strange beings who only exist inside the subconscious, like the nameless being who feels like a diagram over an amoeba with a magnetic field. Some of his allies may even be parts of himself, who have become independent. These allies can be quite powerful, and could influence people and reality to some extent. But most of the time they are quite inactive. He does not have any body, and no longer remember how he looked. Normally he doesn't look like anything, preferring to be an abstract concept. When he talks to people he is felt as a strange presence. If he would try to take a shape inside someones mind, he would probably use what imagery he found and look somewhat like the persons idea of himself. Essence:Questing Nature: Visionary Demeanour:Loner Str: - Cha: **** Per: *** Dex: - Man: *** Int: ***** Sta: - App: - Wit: ***** Awareness: *** Meditation:**** Cosmology: **** Dodge: *** Stealth: *** Culture: *** Intuition:***** Enigmas: ***** Subterfuge:*** Intimidation:***** Spheres: Corr: **** Matter: Prime: Ent: Mind:***** Spirit:*** Forc: Life: Time: Arete: 6 Willpower: 7 Allies: ***** Arcane: ***** (He is impossible to trace using normal means) Dream: ****** (sic! He has a deep connection to the Collective Unconscious, and may use Dream more often than normal mages.) Avatar: *** Influence: * (Through manipulations of the Collective Unconscious. However, he doesn't use such methods, since he doesn't care about the physical world.) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! nv91-asa@hemul.nada.kth.se GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y