Archetypes

Books or other References:

M20 Anniversary, p268-272 (M20)

M20 Book of Secrets, p14-17 (M20 BOS)

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Activist

You fix a broken world.

Strength: Action "You’re not one to sit things out. There’s no time to waste on mindless self-indulgence and no room to stay scared of what might happen."

Weakness: Outrage "There’s never room to sit back and enjoy life. As far as you’re concerned, complacency is a sin. Your fury’s justified, of course, but it gets old all the same. Before you can truly Ascend, you’ve got to balance righteous pyrotechnics with calm acceptance. Life never has been – and never will be – perfect. Finding a place of serenity within your storm is an essential part of your transcendence."

– Regain Willpower when you successfully confront abuse, right wrongs, or reveal an actual conspiracy and, by doing so, bring it down. (M20)

Architect

It’s up to you to provide stability and create things that endure.

Strength: Purpose guides your designs. You’ve got one eye on your tools and another on the legacy you’ll leave behind.

Weakness: Obsession As far as you’re concerned, your way is the best way, and that fixation sometimes interferes with your ability to see the world in any way other than your own. For Mages: To Ascend, you’ll have to learn to accept imperfections, diversity, and designs that differ from your own.

– Regain Willpower when you create or provide something with lasting value or importance. (M20)

Artist

Guided by inspiration, you reshape the world in accordance with your vision of the Truth as you see it.

Strength: Expression Through art, you channel feelings and observations into a form that other folks can recognize.

Weakness: Stuck in Your Own Head Your vision can become so self-focused that no one else can understand what you’re trying to express. At worst, this can lead to egotism, disconnection, depression, and insanity. Artists have a long tradition of going bugfuck nuts, and the Path of Artistry runs dangerously close to the Path to Marauderdom/Insanity.

– Regain Willpower whenever you create a work of art in your chosen medium that communicates a sense of sublime Truth to your intended audience. (M20 BOS)

Barterer

The art of the deal is the art of life. The Barterer Archetype exults in getting something potent for a low price, and takes personal pride in being savvy enough to avoid bad deals and capitalize on good ones.

— Regain a point of Willpower whenever you gain a significant commodity at a good price: this must be something potent akin to a fetish or a favor, not simply sniping an online auction for a bauble. (WW20 Ann)

Benefactor

It’s a cruel world, but you make things easier. Generous sometimes to a fault, you supply whatever you can provide: money, advice, protection, maybe just a shoulder when someone really needs to cry. You can’t just turn blind eyes to suffering and need. It’s your moral duty to do whatever you can do to make things right. When things get tough, you call upon your inner White Knight and charge in, bringing gifts, guidance, and occasional force when nothing else will do.

Strength: Altruism is all too rare, especially in the World of Darkness. Helping people is your pleasure. Magick, as far as you’re concerned, is a tool for helping folks less fortunate than yourself. To do less is an abuse of the powers you possess.

Weakness: Obligation even when you’re not actually needed. This, in turn, can become resentment – both on your part and on the parts of people who now feel, rightly or wrongly, that they owe you. Sometimes, you just need to back off, chill out, and let people do things for themselves. Martyrdom isn’t always the best Path toward Ascension.

– Regain Willpower when you provide help that someone else desperately needs. The key here is that desperate part. Teaching Sunday school isn’t meeting that level of need; if you used your Arts to assist autistic kids, however, you’d clearly be making a difference in their lives.

Bon Vivant

Grabbing hold of all the fun you can find, you’re a devotee of excitement and experience.

Strength: Joie de vivre (“love of life”) Nothing gets you down for long.

Weakness: Superficiality Not only do your fun-seeking ways bring you into risky situations, they also trivialize things that really do need to be taken seriously. Pleasure in itself is not wrong. For mages: to Ascend beyond such superficial concerns, though, you’ll need to face whatever pain you’re hiding beyond that party-hearty façade.

– Regain Willpower whenever you have a truly awesome time and bring other folks along for the ride. (M20 BOS)

Caregiver

When people need you, you’re there. Although you might lack the resources of a Benefactor or the vision of an Architect, you give time, work, and compassion to folks in need.

Strength: Kindness provides a wellspring for your strength. It keeps you going and provides the emotional reserves you’ll need in such a fucked-up world. Because kindness often

Weakness: Insecurity Maybe you feel as though folks will ignore you unless you make yourself valuable to them. People also take advantage of you at times… which, in turn, fuels your insecurities.

– Regain Willpower when you successfully protect, comfort or nurture someone who really needs it. You’ve got to actually help that other person in some way, but whether or not they acknowledge your assistance, you still feel good about yourself. (M20 BOS)

Conformist

Every team needs players. That’s what you’re there for.

Strength: Cooperation Your reliability stands as an example for others to follow.

Weakness: Compliance Sure, it’s great to provide support for other people’s work. If you want to reach toward Ascension, you’ll need to know when and how to become your own boss. As long as you choose to be a cog, you’ll never leave the factory floor.

– Regain Willpower when you support an effort that goes according to plan because you were there to back it up. (M20 BOS)

Contrary

You invert order to reveal greater truths. (i.e, Devil's Advocate)

Strength: Insight Your inversions succeed because they point to a deeper truth. If you’re serious about this path (that is, if you’re an actual Contrary, not simply an asshole), then you’re a jester with a clue. That ability to see beyond appearances is extremely useful in the Awakened realm.

Weakness: Your perpetual Subversion can be annoying, intrusive, and outright destructive. Certain assumptions really are true, and inverting them doesn’t provide any particular wisdom. If you seriously want to reach beyond appearances, you have to realize that your own contrariness can be its own limitation. True wisdom comes through a balance between rejection and acceptance.

– Regain Willpower whenever your inversion of expectations leads folks to realize how false those expectations had been. (M20)

Crusader

People need a hero, and you’re there to fill that role.

Strength: Zeal propels you through every challenge you face. Lesser souls might falter, but you will not.

Weakness: Fanaticism, though, is the mark of a Crusader. Your convictions leave little room for compromise. When everything looks like a nail, it’s hard to stop hammering. Until and unless you learn to temper your enthusiasm and question your own assumptions, you’re just chasing shadows of your own extremism.

– Regain Willpower when you accomplish some great deed in the name of your higher goal. As a player, you need to define what that higher goal is, and then follow it even when it hurts you. A true Crusader’s beliefs are not governed by convenience. (M20 BOS)

Director

You’re here to sort things out, lay down the law, and make sure that people follow through on things that must be done.

Strength: Leadership While other folks stand around dithering, you know what to do, how to do it, and what will happen if things aren’t done properly.

Weakness: Intolerance The real world never does run smoothly, and you can drive yourself (and everyone around you) crazy trying to implement your vision. For mage: In order to Ascend, you must integrate other possibilities into your approach. Collaboration might sound like a bad word to you, but a truly great leader learns how to accept compromise.

– Regain Willpower when you lead a group to accomplish a challenging task. (M20 BOS)

Entertainer

Life sucks. Good thing you’re here to brighten things up!

Strength: ' Fun and Entertaining to be around – important gifts when folks are fighting for their lives. Beyond that, you inspire people to look past despair and find beauty and humor even in ugly situations.

Weakness: Ego Doing what you do, it’s pretty easy to get lost in your own illusions of importance. Now, you need a strong ego in order to put yourself out there day after day; unless you learn to balance it with authentic self-reflection and restraint, however, you’re just setting yourself up to be a punch line somewhere down the road. Ascension demands more than artistic sensibilities. To transcend your limitations, you need to swallow your ego and accept that you can’t always be the star.

– Regain Willpower when your work makes some significant change in the lives of people around you. (M20 BOS)

Guardian

Shepherding the weak through the Valley of Darkness, you are truly your brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children.

Strength: Courage is your calling card. It takes guts to do what you do, and by all the Gods, you’ve got fortitude to spare.

Weakness: Self-Sacrifice could be your Achilles’ heel. Lots of would-be Guardians wind up ground into mulch by constant conflict. A knight needs battle, true enough; but until she learns when to stop fighting – to step aside, perhaps, and let people defend themselves or else make their own decisions – a Guardian can become a martyr, a bully, or just one more monster in a world already full of them.

– Regain Willpower when your actions directly save a weaker group or character from assured destruction. (M20 BOS)

Hacker

You upgrade things by taking them apart. Strength: Imagination is your greatest strength. You see things not as they are, but as they could be once you get done with them! Driven to dismantle existing systems and then put them together in interesting new shapes, you tend to pepper your compulsions with sincerely-held philosophy. You’re not a vandal, for crying out loud – you’re a visionary who refuses to accept shit sandwiches handed out as lunch.

Weakness: Perversity leads you to tear apart things that weren’t broken… things that may, in fact, have been better left alone.

– Regain Willpower when you detect a flaw in some important structure, system, or device, or else when you puzzle out a way to improve something that was supposedly designed well to begin with. (M20)

Heretic

Grab your chainsaw and line up the sacred cows! Whatever your companions regard as “orthodox” and proper is, to you, anathema.

Strength: Integrity drives you. After all, if you did not possess immense (often dangerous) degrees of integrity, you would simply go with the flow, not resist it the way you do.

Weakness: Iconoclasm could get you… and other people… killed. That is, after all, what often happens to heretics. Folks don’t like to have their cherished beliefs overturned, and so as you run through life’s market flipping over tables in the name of your belief, remember that one of those tables could very well land on top of you.

– Regain Willpower whenever you challenge a commonly held conviction and manage to change people’s minds about that belief. <BOS20>

Idealist

A greater Truth awaits us, and you know what it is.

Strength: Conviction is your life’s blood. You possess near-unshakable faith in your ideal – the kind of faith that shapes reality.

Weakness: You’re Dogmatic to a fault. Blind to any potential flaws, you’ll fight – sometimes literally – to assure the truth of your beliefs. All mages are idealists to a point; in your case, though, this devotion seems stifling. When reality falls short of your ideals, you might wind up depressed, violent, or – as with many Marauders – insane.

– Regain Willpower when your beliefs are tested to the breaking point yet do not fail (M20)

Innovator

Your imagination drives progress forward.

Strength: Creativity is your strong point. Let other people follow the established paths – you’re busy drawing up the next road toward a goal most folks don’t even know exists.

Weakness: Your Restless Unorthodoxy' though, can get you in trouble. Especially if you belong to a sect or faction based on established results and protocols (the Technocracy, the Hermetic Order, the Akashayana, and so on), your innovations might be someone else’s heresy. Many mages have been burnt at stakes both literal and symbolic for doing the things you do, and a missed step could make (an) ash of you.

– Regain Willpower when your inspiration leads to a helpful new breakthrough. (M20)

Kid

Innocent and playful, you inspire others to take care of you.

Strength: There’s a kind of Innocence to you, and it provides the source of your strength.

Weakness: The extreme of innocence, though, is Immaturity. Trusting too easily, acting too rashly, jumping into things without considering their potential consequences… you’re guilty of all these things and more. You can slide from charming child to spoiled brat in the space between two heartbeats, and the traits that inspire people to take care of you can become infuriating as well. If and when you want to reach a higher state, you’ll have to put certain childish things aside.

– Regain Willpower when you bring out the nurturing side of someone who doesn’t normally care much for other people.(M20)

Loner <BANNED>

Machine

Weakness is for lesser beings.

Strength: A Diligent, Stoic creature, you push yourself to the limits of endurance. Everything you do is done to exacting standards, without complaint or hesitation. The Technocratic Union loves operatives like you.

Weakness: You’re Creepy and Prone to Burn-Out. Whatever illusions you harbor about your perfection, you’re as flawed as any other mortal thing.

– Regain Willpower when you transcend the limits of mere flesh, bone, and steel, accomplishing something that no one else has managed to do.(M20)

Mad Scientist

True science knows no bounds!

Strength: You do, in fact, have Vision.

Weakness: Problem is, you are Batshit Insane. The Technocracy, Virtual Adepts, and especially the Etherites might depend upon minds like yours, but they also keep a wary eye out for the times when you’ll go too far – because you will.

– Regain Willpower when you successfully bend the rules of your technomancer sect while still applying something that seems oddly like science and manage to avoid invoking Paradox. This feat should feature a bizarre stroke of ingenuity that shouldn’t work and yet somehow does.(M20)

Martyr

It’s your pleasure to serve.

Strength: Sacrifice is a mighty thing.

Weakness: Self-Deprecation can have unfortunate consequences far beyond simple hazards to your health.

– Regain Willpower whenever you manage to make a noticeably positive difference in someone else’s situation by giving deeply of yourself.(M20)

Mentor

You’ve got knowledge and experience that can benefit other people, so you share it as freely as you can.

Strength: Dedication It’s important to you that other people share in what you have to offer. Because you care about the results, and probably about the students too, you’ll put yourself out there in surprising ways.

Weakness: Pedantic Lecturing becomes a habit, with every circumstance providing an opportunity for more lessons. Occasionally, even the most accomplished teacher must step out from behind the podium. Your potential for Ascension depends in part upon humanity, and that’s a hard thing to hang on to when you’re always in the Professor role.

– Regain Willpower when your guidance helps your pupil(s) accomplish something that had been beyond their reach before.<BOS20>

Monster <RESTRICTED>

You’re the unapologetic shadow in the mirror of your world.

Strengths: You Reveal Dark Truths that many people are afraid to face. When you show up, Pollyanna runs screaming for the hills. Your existence undercuts the comfortable lies of polite society. Anyone can play a hero, but a memorable villain is worth his weight in blood.

Weakness: You’re Depraved. There might be a heroic heel-turn in your future, but that’s unlikely. Chances are, you’re headed for the Cauls; if you haven’t Fallen with the Nephandi already, you probably will soon enough.

– Regain Willpower by performing spectacular acts of heartlessness and ruin.(M20)

Prophet

Speaking truth to power is your life’s work.

Strength: Insight is your greatest strength. Prophets tend to see things that are hidden to most people: secrets, omens, visions of the future, and so forth. Even if you lack the blessing/ curse of prophecy, few mysteries escape your sight.

Weakness: Ruthlessness is the traditional flaw of prophets. Driven by their vision of Truth, such people tend to be impatient, fanatical, and defiant of mortal power. You’ll probably score lots of points for guts, but you might find those guts roasting on a spit in some ruler’s torture garden. True prophets often meet unhappy ends… and they tend to take their followers down with them when they go.

– Regain Willpower when you speak Truth to power and inspire a successful change.(M20)

Rogue

Rebellion is your gospel and your fame. Strength: Defiance is your life’s blood, the pillar of your soul

Weakness: Selfishness. So dedicated are you to your own individuality that you’ll ignore the concerns of other folks.

– Regain Willpower whenever you manage to score a victory against the forces of oppressive authority. (M20)

Romantic

In a world filled with ugliness, you seek and find beauty.

Strength: Passion When other folks hesitate, you plunge in, reveling in the raw excitement of life’s dance.

Weakness: Careless Like the original Romantics, your excesses hurt a lot of people. Eventually, you’ll need to develop a greater sense of responsibility and moderation if you ever wish to Ascend.

– Regain Willpower when you throw yourself into a gloriously ruinous affair or reveal life’s howling beauty to a previously hesitant soul. (M20 BOS)

Sensualist

Sensation is your drug of choice.

Strength: Receptiveness is your gift. Your devotion to sensuality inspires you to challenge yourself. You’re not shy about sharing, either, and your delight in even the most painful stimulations can get other people to explore them with you too.

Weakness: Hedonism is your curse. Those indulgences can drive you to do stupid, reckless, selfish things. (M20)

Survivor

No matter what happens, you endure.

Strength: Perseverance is your defining trait.

Weakness: Callousness. You’ve shut down so much in order to keep going that folks often wonder if you feel anything at all.

– Regain Willpower whenever you survive a difficult situation through stubborn cunning and a refusal to give in.(M20)

Traditionalist

As far as you’re concerned, the old ways are best.

Strength: Your Consistency is a virtue.

Weakness: Rigidity, though, can destroy you. Stasis tends to lead to Entropy, especially where mages are concerned.

– Regain Willpower when your efforts prove the value of old-fashioned ways.(M20)

Trickster

You make the world your toy.

Strength: Cleverness is your claim to fame. Your tricks display considerable flair.

Weakness: Untrustworthiness is your crown of thorns. Charming as you might be, there’s an edge to you that smart people perceive.

– Regain Willpower when your clever plans result in a big gain for you and your companions or a big loss for your enemies.(M20)

Tycoon

Money makes the world go ‘round, and you’re at the controls for that particular ride.

Strength: Resources You're probably wealthy. Power is your drug, influence your bread and butter. Sure, you like the money and all the goodies it can bring. It’s the game, though, not the prize, that provides your true reward. Savvy Calculating enough to get things done, you’re a master manipulator and an asset to your cause. You know how to shake up your world, bringing good things to everyone concerned.

Weakness: Greed “Enough” is not part of your vocabulary. It’s been said that gold blinds those who love it most, and in your case that’s probably true. Before you can Ascend to greater things, you’ve got to love more than money, power, and the game of winning both.

– Regain Willpower when a long-shot plan of yours pays off in grand style. Not simply with money – that’s too easy – but with influence, love, or other marvelous achievements. (M20 BOS)

Vigilante

True justice comes only from those willing to take it up themselves.

Strength: Retribution This dedication keeps you going long after other folks would have given up. Delay is acceptable, but compromise is not. Extremism in pursuit of justice is no vice at all.

Weakness: Ruthlessness poisons both your cause and your soul. Tangled up in the idea of beating whomever you’re after, you can’t look yourself squarely in the mirror. If you could, you’d see how little difference there is between you and your enemies. To rise beyond this sort of thing, you’ll have to leave the warpath and cultivate compassion beyond vengeance. True Justice is more than simple punishment.

– Regain Willpower when you inflict major suffering on your target of choice. This target must be larger and more powerful than a single person. It could be an organization, a mage-sect, a government conspiracy, or an aspect of the underworld. Whatever it is, it’s big enough to consume your entire life… or end it. Such vigilance is an endless task. (M20 BOS)

Visionary

You see beyond the obvious and chase a greater vision for us all.

Strength: Inspiration guides your steps, inspiring you to see what others can’t or won’t perceive.

Weakness: Your weakness, though, is Pride in your stubborn search for truth. To Ascend, you must learn humility, seeking visions that other people can enjoy as well.

– Regain Willpower when you convince folks that your vision is worth their devotion too, or when your actions turn your vision into practical reality.(M20)

Zealot

A flipside to the ```Heretic```, you pursue your beliefs with extreme enthusiasm.

Strength: 'Conviction is your armor, shield, and sword. That steadfast confidence in your beliefs will stand with you when no one and nothing else will do.

Weakness: Extremity, however, can inspire abhorrent acts in the name of your beliefs. A zealot, after all, is by definition someone who will sacrifice anything and anyone for the cause. A zealot mage, in particular, can be a terrifying force. The Fallen, Mad, and Technocracy have plenty of uses for such people, and even the supposedly moderate Traditions and Disparates have members who’d sooner kill a busload of kids than step back on their convictions.

– Regain Willpower whenever your deeply held beliefs are proved right through your behavior.