Changeling: the Dreaming about keeping wonder and joy alive in a world trying to crush it, so it doesn't feel as bleak as it is. Also my wife is enjoying playing as a 7-year-old disney princess who sings to the amimals and forces the grown-ups to dance along. Absolutely terrifying little monster.

In Mage: the Ascension, one of 9 Mystic Traditions is the Order of Hermes, which is exactly what you are imagining. They conform very tightly to what you immediately think of when you hear the word "wizard".

There are other kinds of Awakened you can play as, sorted into 3 factions. Here's a very far from complete list of traditions, with their corresponding factions:

• Verbena (Nine Mystic Traditions): A hodgepodge of Wiccans, pagans, new age mystics, and blood sorcerers.
• The Syndicate (Technocracy): If they have enough money to throw at the problem, they can do anything.
• Society of Ether (Nine Mystic Traditions): Steampunk mad scientists who fight dinosaur nazis from Agartha in the center of the hollow earth.
• Solificati (Disparate Alliance): Alchemists focused on ratification of the soul.
• New World Order (Technocracy): They use fear to control. Contract magic, mind control, that flashy stick thing from MIB, the works.
• The Celestial Chorus (Nine Mystic Traditions): All things are possible through God.
• Hollow Ones (Disparate Alliance): Punk as a magic system, and I mean that literally. In the core books they tend to be goth rockers, but I would imagine a more modern Hollow One would either go full Dark Academia or full Fairy Kei.
• Void Engineers (Technocracy): Space Explorers fighting Cthulhu and the Borg on Alpha Centari.
• Akashic Brotherhood (Nine Mystic Traditions): 🎶Everybody was kung fu fighting🎶

The game's about, at least in theory, winning over hearts and minds so that you can shape consensus reality in your image. For example, the big AI push we've been enduring recently was a push by Iteration X (another faction in the Technocracy) to force AGI into the consensus reality.

Personally I like setting my campaigns, regardless of system, in some post-apocalypse. Preferably, I like to veil layers of how fucked the world is so the game gets more depressing the more the players dig.

In other words, I really like the current state of the metaplot! Gaia is fully dead, the Gehenna War is fully underway, the Fomorians have overthrown the Tuatha de Danán in Arcadia, the Acsension War has been lost and the Tempest has almost destroyed the Spell of Life, not to mention that Charon has been dead for ages and God is for all intents and purposes either dead or gone depending on your interpretation of the data.

In my game's canon, Lucifer tried to start the End of Days in 2005, but it didn't stick because of Banality undoing all his work. Now he's trying to figure out what Banality is and how to counteract it at scale, but for every step of progress he makes the world gets a little worse. Then COVID-19 happens, we all get stuck inside, the trods slam shut, and the Changelings have been slowly starving to death ever since. So, all hope of the End of Days happening is dead in the water for now.

Well, on my end I'm prepping for a Changeling campaign to get out some of my teacher-specific angst in a healthy way. I'm doing my run of student teaching this year and I've seen some shit that I wish CPS cared about

Yes, ally with the Red Talons, they will 100% have your back.

Also the real risk is the 1 in 10 chance of the werewolf in question being a Black Spiral Dancer. Or 2 in 10 if you see the Cyber Dogs as the same level of risk.

no it's from a roleplaying game. A roleplaying game is a game in which players assume and play out the roles of characters in a fictional setting. So it's not a real thing

The game's theme is about trying to win the battle of ideas in the public consciousness. Like I alluded to earlier, it's easier to do your magic when people believe your magic is real. To this end, one faction, the Technocracy, has spent centuries terranorming the public to accept their brand of magic, which is why we live in a world with refrigerators and cell phones instead of dragons and unicorns.

They are opposed by the Nine Mystic Traditions, who would like dragons and unicorns instead of refrigerators and cell phones, as well as the Nephandi, who want you to not believe in anything so they can summon Space Cthulhu to bring a new age of madness.

I should mention presenting the lore this way is really glazing the Technocracy, which is the group that contains such groups as:

• the New World Order, who want you to fear them in order to give them the ability to mind control you
• The Syndicate, whose paradigm is "if I have enough money i can do whatever the fuck I want"
• Iteration X, or as I like to call them, the Borg

Theres good guys in there, but they're either off fighting Space Cthulhu or Threat Null on Alpha Centari or not making it very high up the corporate ladder.

In Mage the Ascension you play as one of the Awakened who is doing magic by realizing life is a dream and as such they can lucid dream in real life. However, it is a shared dream, and if you do something that doesn't fit into what everyone else thinks reality is, like shooting lightning from your fingers or turning into a T-Rex, reality itself will tell you to stop by giving you points of Paradox. It's better to be subtle and make magic look like something the Sleepers accept. For example, instead of using a fire spell to heat your food, you put it in a "microwave" to heat it.

If you accrue enough Paradox, bad things happen, ranging from being picked up and thrown around like a doll to the reality cops showing up and putting you in reality jail.

I just want to have a website to send to my players and tell them "I need a token for your character. Make the weirdest character you can and send me a screenshot."

I could just have them buy Oblivion Remastered on steam and refund it within an hour, but i would prefer not to make them spend money if possible.

And as a side benefit, I could use it for myself since I don't play videogames.

When I'm saying "character creator" here I'm talking about the avatar creation screens in videogames where you can pull sliders to adjust how far apart their eyes are and how pronounced their cheekbones are and how tall their hair is etc.

Truly a hate-filled beast

How do you get these?

THNAK GOD