Mage: The Ascension
tabletop role-playing game (rpg family)

Mage: The Ascension is a supernatural fiction tabletop role-playing game first published on August 19, 1993, by White Wolf Publishing. It is set in the World of Darkness universe.
History
Following the success of Vampire: The Masquerade, Mage: The Ascension was released as the third of the five initial World of Darkness games. The first chapter of the Mage series was launched by White Wolf Publishing at the Gen Con gaming convention on August 19, 1993. A second edition followed in December 1995, with a revised edition released in March 2000. In 2005, White Wolf Publishing merged with CCP Games. Following company layoffs in October 2011, White Wolf's Creative Director, Richard Thomas, founded Onyx Path Publishing to continue publishing Tabletop role-playing games. Onyx Path Publishing later introduced the 20th Anniversary Edition of Mage: The Ascension in September 2015, representing the game's fourth iteration.
Game setting
Mage: The Ascension is set in the fictional World of Darkness, a fictional modern Earth wherein supernatural entities clandestinely manipulate everyday life. Players and major characters are "Mages", normal people who "Awaken" to be able to manipulate reality, usually in an expression of gnosis.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mage: The Ascension” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.