• According to rumor, mad vampires occasionally wind their way up through the Trash Sector and burrow into the rest of the Web. Although such rumors are impos-
sible to prove — anyone can claim to be a vampire, and what the hell is a "Malkavian," anyway? — there's no denying that some deeply disturbing people use the Net as a feeding ground.
• Every so often, a spinner encounters werewolves who climb in from the boundaries of Netspace. These so- called "Glass Walkers" often walk around in Holistic mode... or at least, they do when they're being obvious about what they are. More often, Glass Walkers access the Net as Sleepers do — the true scope of the Net is not common knowledge among their kind — yet.
In game terms, werewolves are just that — badass man- critters with homicidal tendencies. As a rule, they dislike the artificial nature of Net realms, and seem edgy under even the best conditions. The Werewolf: The Apocalypse rulebook and its supplements Glass Walkers, Werewolf
Players Guide and Umbra: The Velvet Shadow explore
lupine Netwalkers in more detail.
• Web spiders infest the Net, particularly in the fringe
areas between sectors. If you look close, really close, you can see them scurrying everywhere, from the most pristine SRVRZ to ruined Haunt Sectors. Camouflaged to blend with their surroundings, these spirits range from micro- scopic twiddlers to huge glassine weavers. According to spirit-wise Netizens, Web spiders exist to mend reality itself. When something — a sector, a conduit, even an icon — needs repair, Web spiders appear and set to work.
Disconcerting as they look, these eerie spirits are not only harmless, they're beneficial. If asked nicely, a Web spider can heal one Health Level on a damaged icon for every turn that it works. See the pattern spider in Mage (p. 283) for an especially large specimen of these spirit entities. • Pale icons haunt ruined sectors where the Great Crash annihilated the inhabitants. Hackers whose curi- osity could not be stilled by death still wander the Digital Zone. So the Restless souls of ghosts retain a semblance of life in this world between flesh, mind and soul. Al- though the best of them shape icons to cloak their perished state, these walking spirits bear an uncanny chill wherever they go... and fall prey to inhuman urges in times of stress.
The Web makes a great setting for Wraith/ Mage crossovers. Virtual Adepts or other characters who kick the Earthly plane can hang around with their friends in
VR — assuming those friends aren't too freaked out. See
Guildbook Artificers and the Inhabit Arcanos in Wraith:
The Oblivion for details about ghost-hackers and the powers they possess. But watch out for Nihils; these passages to the Underworld exist in Haunt Sectors, bleed- ing the Web and the Tempest together—
• Oh, yeah. We can't forget the Sleepers in the Net — they're by far the greatest majority in Webspace. True, the bleaters tend to stick to Grid Sectors; their icons look kinda digitized, and the people behind them rarely comprehend the world they've discovered. In the last few years, though, they've grown from a cliquish group of fanatics to a vast herd of skippers, trendies, Netizens and even a few minor- league Elites who've only just clued into the real nature of the Web. In the long run, these folks will set the balance of power in the Net... just as they did back in the "real" world.
...something new is needed on the landscape. The romp through the computer networks for fun and information needs transformation, a new setting, an alternative way to bring new kinds of people into the information age.
— Ernest Holsendolph, "Web TV Puts Families on the Same Channel"
Why should the magi of this imaginary world have all the fun? If they can project themselves into cyberspace adventures, why not do the same ? Naturally, they've got a few tools you don't possess. Yet just the same, there's a huge and growing online gaming table. Moving a Mage chronicle — especially a Web-based one — online seems only natural. There are several ways a Storyteller can design and run an online Mage game. Entire books could be written about how to go about using some of these technologies for roleplaying. (They'd probably be obsolete by the time they were published, however.) Rather than offer a "bible" on such malleable subjects, we're going to give you an overview of some possibilities, then point you toward some online resources — keeping in mind that the Universal Resource Locator (or URL) may soon become obsolete, too.
Why bother trying to run a game online? For a start, players don't need to be proximate. In fact, players don't even need to be in the same time zone. As long as someone has local access, she'll he able to connect to a chat system or a MU* regardless of where the rest of the players connect. This means that games can continue (if the Storyteller is so inclined) over school breaks and on business trips.
Another advantage of working online is the ability to keep track of what's going on. Almost anything that can happen on a computer screen can be recorded in some fashion or another. Not only can this help avoid contention later about who said (or was allowed to do) what, but it lets the Storyteller use transcripts later on, as reminders of potential side-plots and after-the-fact foreshadowing. Hard copies and logs also allow players to keep histories of their characters.
Working in text (we'll discuss graphic systems later in this section) does not mean that Storytellers cannot create maps or visual aids for their players' use. If you prefer to design maps with a computer, it's simpler to distribute them by putting them on the Web than to photocopy them and snailmail them to your players.
Two issues with working online are so obvious that they're often overlooked:
• First, you and your players will have to agree upon a way to generate dice rolls. Sometimes, everyone designates another player to make their rolls; sometimes, the Story- teller rolls for everyone. Either way, the whole troupe must be able to trust the outcome. Occasionally, shareware dice- rolling programs are announced on the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.frp.misc, but do your homework before choosing a new system. Such programs are usually game- and hard- ware-specific. (One possibility is WebRPG by WebRPG Inc., at http://www.webrpg.com. A generic platform for Web gaming, this system might be just the thing.)
• A second oft-overlooked issue is that you cannot (yet) "think" communications onto the screen. You're going to have to type — sometimes a lot — and read all actions and interactions on your screen. To some people, this isn't nearly as easy or entertaining as gaming in person. Thus, online RPGs remain, for the moment at least, an acquired taste.
This section assumes that you have email access, can use a Web browser (like Netscape™ or Explorer™), and half a clue. Some of the decisions you'll need to make about running your game will depend on the hardware and tech- nical capabilities you can scrounge.
Aside from email, each of these systems allows, even demands, Realtime interactions. All of them (except, per- haps, the graphic systems) allow players to keep a record or log of what transpires. While each form of technology has some advantages and disadvantages, the required amount of hardware and software increases as we go down this list.
This is the simplest of the possibilities. Email gaming requires only that you have some sort of email reader on your computer, or that you have an email account you can access easily.
Generally, the Storyteller will write a couple of para- graphs explaining what has (or is about to) happen. Players write back, describing what they'd like to do and why. The Storyteller then decides the outcome of these actions, and the story continues.