The Book of Chantries (Mage)

Rating:
Summary: A Must Have For Every Mage Players!
Review: The book of chantries is an absolute necessity. Mages, like humans, are social beings. They require interaction with other Mages. The Book of Chantries allows mages and storytellers to focus on the social aspect. It allows players to group together to create a chantry or to even join the largest of all chantries, Doissetep.

In the book there are detailed descriptions of Tradition Chantries, Technocracy Constructs and Nephandi Labyrinths. Each of these includes information on story ideas, NPCs, Locations, Nodes, History, Art and much, much, more.

The book also has a section that explains how to create chantries. In this section are details of how chantries are defended, how sanctums work inside chantries, how nodes are added, and the horizon realms chantries can have. And many other bits and pieces.

The Book contains Information on a few rotes. This is probably the most useless page. The rotes are short, boring, uncreative, and a waste of space. On the bright side it only takes up one side of a page so it does not lower the over all value of the book to much.

There is also a short story called "Harvest Time". This centers on a Verbana hereditary chantry owned by the Crombey's. It is an OK story. It is original and an asset too anybody looking for a new idea for a story, however I did not care for the ending it suggested and take a different route every time I use it.

Altogether a great book! A page is wasted on rotes, but everything else more than makes up for it. A must have for every mage player and storyteller interested in chantries.

Rating:
Summary: Old Mage Material but Still Good
Review: This really old and out-dated Mage book gives detailed information concerning Chantries and how to make them. It starts out with some very basic stuff about Chantries and Cabals, but then goes on to give a handful of sample Chantries. The first five are Tradition Chantries, including Doissetep, the corrupted Euthanatoi House of Helekar, the Lodge of the Gray Squirrel, Vali Shallar and a haunted mansion controlled by the Hollow Ones. By far and away I found the Lodge of the Gray Squirrel and Vali Shallar to be the two most interesting of these. The former being a pan-Native American Dreamspeaker realm dwelling the spirit worlds of the Dine (Navajo) and including Native American medicine lodges and survivors of Tecumseh's war. Vali Shallar, conversely was an ancient Mayan-Toltec Dreamspeaker realm that was invaded by a group of Akashic refugees from Tibet and Nepal. Today it is split between the two Traditions and fuses Asian, Latin American and Pacific cultures together. I've brought both into games in the past, particularly the first (and both made it into the revised setting). Others might find more use for other Chantries, particularly Doissetep and the House of Helekar which feature in the revised metaplot.

There are also details concerning Chantries controlled by the "enemy". One chapter covers the Technocracy and includes Null-B, the Technocracy's greatest Construct, as well as Iteration-X's slave labor facility in MECHA and the Progenitor's realm of Moreauvia where they use genetic engineering to create beast men. The next covers the Nephandi, including a sea of darkness ruled over by a Dreamspeaker barrabi and the criminal underground of Chicago's Chinatown which is led by a fallen Akashic. Alot of this stuff smacks of second edition stereotypes about the Technocracy being "evvvvvil!" but you can still get lots of use out of it. It closes out with some great rules for creating Chantries in depth (and EVERY aspect you can imagine) plus some legendary Chantries, but also includes an annoying game you can run involving Sam Haight (*ick*) plundering from a Verbena farm Chantry in rural Kansas. Just ignore it and its a fairly decent, if dated, book.