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No Great Surprise
Apr. 26th, 2002 08:35 pmWell, I finished the Niccolo series, very happily. There's more than a touch of the soap opera to the whole thing, and I think Dunnett does give in to the desire to have ubercompetent protagonists, but that's somehow tempered by the fact that she expects her readers to keep up with Niccolo. And the prose is so beautiful.
Mage: the Sorcerers Crusade would not in any sense be a good setting to do Dunnett in. The background provided in the main book is spotty and poorly researched, and there's just no tradition vs. innovation dynamic in M:tSC. As I said, no great surprise. The proto-Technomancer schools are pretty good, and Niccolo and his Bank would fit in there well (if you substituted the Celestial Chorus for the Gabrielites) but you'd have to drop the Traditions entirely. The flavor is just wrong.
So it's hard to see what the point would be, except that the magic system would provide an interesting method for solving the problem of playing social characters when you don't have the corresponding social skills. If you define Niccolo's achievements as rotes, you could allow PCs to do similar things rather than expecting players to intuitively divine the workings of their opponents.
Still and all, better to lift the magic system entirely and transplant it into some other game.
Not that I'm obsessive.
Mage: the Sorcerers Crusade would not in any sense be a good setting to do Dunnett in. The background provided in the main book is spotty and poorly researched, and there's just no tradition vs. innovation dynamic in M:tSC. As I said, no great surprise. The proto-Technomancer schools are pretty good, and Niccolo and his Bank would fit in there well (if you substituted the Celestial Chorus for the Gabrielites) but you'd have to drop the Traditions entirely. The flavor is just wrong.
So it's hard to see what the point would be, except that the magic system would provide an interesting method for solving the problem of playing social characters when you don't have the corresponding social skills. If you define Niccolo's achievements as rotes, you could allow PCs to do similar things rather than expecting players to intuitively divine the workings of their opponents.
Still and all, better to lift the magic system entirely and transplant it into some other game.
Not that I'm obsessive.
