Mage: The Podcast

Adam talks about Emmy Allen’s Stygian Library, the library that doesn’t end. Will your players find the knowledge they’re looking for? Can they evade the mysterious librarians and their super computer? The sister volume to Gardens of Ynn is full of ideas that may find a place in your Mage games. Just watch out for the ink blots. They stain.
Show Notes
Stygian Library overview (DriveThruRPG) - A strange old place, part haunted mansion, part endless library tucked outside the world.
Coins and Scrolls - OSR procedural dungeon design basics
Mage: The Ascension (White Wolf overview) - At its heart, Mage is all about the long road to Ascension. Nt just for one soul, but for all of humanity. Trouble is, nobody’s pinned down exactly what that means or how you get there.
Umbral Realms & High Umbra concepts - Folks also call it the Spirit World, the Shadow, or the Velvet Shadow, one of those places that’s right there beside our world, even if you can’t quite touch it. It runs alongside the everyday, separate but close, like a reflection in a dark window just waiting to be noticed.
Procedural generation in RPGs (design concepts)- “Xandering” a dungeon means designing it like the old-school masters did (full of branching paths, secret routes, and meaningful choices) so players truly explore and shape their own adventure instead of being led down a straight, railroaded path.
Ternary computing background (for Virtual Adept ideas) - A ternary (sometimes folks say trinary) computer is just a machine that counts a little different than most. Instead of using the usual on-or-off binary way of thinking, it works in threes. So where regular computers use bits, these use “trits,” giving them an extra option to work with each step of the way.

Pooka and Lee discuss Such Pain, the first Mage novel published in 1995.  Can novel-length stories help you envision the world of Mage?  Did the author hit it out of the park with this one?  Hear Pooka and Lee’s review of the book.  Their commentary highlights how the World of Darkness was a little different during Mage’s first edition.

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Adam and Pooka discuss the weird fiction of Arthur Machen, Welshman extraordinaire. Do turn of the century horror stories offer anything to modern Mage games? Is this a boon to Victorian Mage Storytellers? Do the powers of darkness really want to redecorate your office? Tune in & hear story ideas, horror commentary and hermetic code names.
Show Notes
The Great God Pan and ”The White People”, both tied to Machen’s reputation in weird fiction.
Machen’s ties to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a hush-hush British magic club from back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, where folks mixed Rosicrucian ideas, Masonic style, and occult study in hopes of climbing a little closer to the spiritual stars.
Reality Deviant Book Club: King in Yellow - Adam and Pooka discuss Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow mythos and other stories.
Video on ternary computers - Ternary computing is a 3-state system (−1, 0, + 1 or "trits") offering higher information density, faster processing, and greater energy efficiency than binary.
Oldstyle Tales Press - Publisher of classic horror, ghost stories, and weird fiction from Mary Shelley to M. R. James. Annotated and illustrated.
The Great God Pan, The White People, and Other Horrors: The Best Weird Fiction and Ghost Stories of Arthur Machen (Oldstyle Tales of Murder, Mystery, Horror, and Hauntings) - This illustrated collection gathers Arthur Machen’s finest eerie tales, where hinted-at horrors and hidden sins creep beneath everyday life, revealing a world of dark magic, ancient evil, and the uneasy split between humanity’s light and shadow.

Adam, Jenna, and Pooka take a gleeful ride through The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, celebrating its pulpy charm, wild 80s style, oddball science, and Mage-ready Etherite energy. They cover what works, what wobbles, how to “Mage-ify” it, and why this messy cult classic still sparks game ideas, big laughs, and deep affection.
Show Notes The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) — brain surgeon, rock star, test pilot, alien-fighting chaos agent.
The Hong Kong Cavaliers — Buckaroo Banzai’s loose but capable inner circle: a half rock band, half super-science/adventure team built around gifted oddballs, runaways, scholars, hackers, and fighters. They include veterans like Rawhide, Reno Nevada, Perfect Tommy, Pecos, New Jersey, Billy Travers, Big Norse, plus close Institute allies like Professor Hikita, Mrs. Johnson, and Pinky Carruthers.
Dr. Emilio Lizardo — Brilliant but doomed physicist who, in 1938 at Princeton, tested an early Oscillation Overthruster and briefly entered the 8th dimension, where he was possessed by the alien tyrant John Whorfin of Planet 10; returning to Earth apparently insane, Lizardo became the vessel through which Whorfin plots to escape Earth and conquer again.
Watch it: stream on Tubi.

Truth Until Paradox
Pooka and T.L. Webb crack open Truth Until Paradox, Mage’s first fiction anthology. They chat why tie-in stories matter, then speed-tour 17 wildly uneven, very ’90s tales—Technocracy vs Traditions, Nephandi schemes, HIT-Marks, odd Wonders, and fan-fic energy.
Show Notes
Truth Until Paradox (Mage anthology, Feb 1994) - Tucked inside are seven tales from the World of Darkness, a place that looks a lot like our own, except the supernatural is real, and shadowy forces are always moving just out of sight. They’ve been chosen and edited by Stewart Wieck, the creator of Mage: The Ascension and co-creator of the World of Darkness.
Key faves: “Silver Nutmeg, Golden Pair” + “Grim Reminders” (Penny Dreadful)
Concepts: Ascension War vibe, coincidental magic, backstabbing, Wonders, Paradox oddities
T.L. Webb on Bluesky and Tumblr