Mages
Willworkers in the Rust and Shadow
What They Are
Mages are humanity’s great dreamers and terrible deceivers, the willworkers who bend reality not through fangs or claws but through belief and will. To most mortals, Ironwood’s decay is just urban blight, its forests just dangerous wilderness. To mages, Ironwood is a battlefield of paradigms, a living crucible where consensus and belief clash. Unlike @vampires or @Garou, mages are not cursed by blood or spirit; their struggle is philosophical, metaphysical, and deeply human. They are both explorers and revolutionaries, rewriting the rules of existence one ritual, invention, or revelation at a time.
Arrival in Ironwood
Mages first came to Ironwood alongside the city’s human settlers. Indigenous shamans already worked their traditions within the forests and rivers long before European colonists arrived. Their practices left spiritual scars and blessings still felt today. When Ironwood became a steel giant in the 19th century, the Technocracy—newly ascendant—followed industry and railroads, embedding itself in boardrooms, factories, and city planning commissions. Where there was invention, there was Enlightened Science.
The Traditions came in their wake, often as reactionaries: the Verbena among immigrant healers and herbalists, the Cult of Ecstasy in nightclubs and counterculture movements, the Virtual Adepts hiding in early computer labs of Ironwood Tech, the Euthanatoi in funeral homes along Spiritglass Lake. Each found a reason to plant roots here, even as the city rose and later declined.
By the mid-20th century, Ironwood had become a front-line city in the Ascension War. The Technocracy used its influence to shape urban renewal, highways, and surveillance. The Traditions resisted by turning to grassroots magic, alternative faiths, and cultural resistance. Even now, every district of Ironwood bears the mark of unseen mage conflict—skylines shaped by one paradigm, slums left to another.
Organization and Management
Mages in Ironwood are fractured but not directionless.
The Technocracy maintains strong influence in Hollowpoint, parts of Halycon Park, and the corporate towers in Midtown. Iteration X runs research through local defense contractors; the New World Order infiltrates city hall and police forces; the Syndicate manipulates the flow of money through shadow banking. Their goal is control through “progress,” tightening the grip of consensus science.
The Traditions hold a patchwork resistance. The Verbena keep ties to Greenbelt’s herbalists and pagan communities. Cultists of Ecstasy thrive in Hollowpoint’s music scene, using raves and sensory rituals to escape the prison of consensual reality. The Virtual Adepts run pirate networks and surveillance-countermeasures, their servers hidden in abandoned factories. Dreamspeakers commune with the restless spirits around Spiritglass Lake and Wyrdbark Thicket, bridging the gap between human and Umbra.
Orphans and Crafts abound in Ironwood. Hedge mages, psychics, and mystics practice half-formed paradigms in forgotten neighborhoods. Some fade into obscurity, others stumble onto great power. The city is a crucible for experimentation, and the lines between Tradition, Technocrat, and independent grow blurred in the heat of conflict.
Mages manage themselves loosely, through chantries, cabals, and cells. Traditions often gather in makeshift sanctums—tattoo parlors, occult bookstores, abandoned churches—while Technocrats prefer sleek office spaces, labs, or municipal departments. Conflicts erupt often, but the balance of power is strangely persistent; neither side can claim Ironwood outright.
Beliefs and Culture
Mage culture in Ironwood is deeply shaped by the city’s contradictions.
Belief in Struggle – Both Technocrats and Tradition mages agree: Ironwood is a contested ground where paradigms clash hardest. To the Technocracy, it is a place to prove the supremacy of rational science over myth. To the Traditions, it is a refuge for dreamers, proof that belief can survive even amidst decay.
Rust and Revelation – Mages here often adopt imagery of rust, smoke, and ruin. Traditions see it as proof that old paradigms persist beneath collapse; Technocrats see it as the price of failed belief, justifying their order.
Community and Isolation – Unlike vampires, mages can walk openly among mortals. Yet they live double lives. Many Ironwood mages hide as artists, hackers, professors, or shamans, trying to blend the supernatural with the mundane. Their “culture” is less visible than Garou packs or Kindred clans, but among themselves, they share rituals, symbology, and coded language that lets them recognize allies in the crowd.
Why They Stay
Mages stay in Ironwood for the same reasons they came: the city is a crucible of belief. The haunted forests and resonant lakes serve as living laboratories where spirits cross easily into the material. The decline of industry created abandoned spaces where reality is weaker, consensus frays, and Awakened will can more easily rewrite the rules. For the Technocracy, Ironwood is a proving ground to test surveillance and social engineering on a manageable population. For the Traditions, it is one of the few places in America where grassroots magic still breathes.
Ironwood’s unique resonance—industrial despair fused with wild, unbroken spirit—makes it invaluable to willworkers. It is not merely a backdrop but a font of possibility. Some mages whisper that Ironwood itself is an incipient node, a city whose soul could one day awaken as a being of will, shaped by whoever claims it first.
Relationships with Other Supernaturals
Other supernaturals regard Mages with a mix of awe, fear, and mistrust.
Garou see them as dangerous meddlers. Though some respect their ability to heal or ward off spirits, most distrust their manipulation of the Umbra and reality itself, calling them arrogant weavers of patterns they don’t fully grasp.
Vampires envy their power but also consider them unstable and unpredictable—alliances with mages rarely last, and Kindred whisper that a mage’s wrath can burn even ancient bloodlines.
Changelings sense in mages a kinship of sorts—both bend reality through will and dream—but find their methods too rigid and intellectual, lacking the wild heart of true fae magic.
Wraiths fear and resent them most; mages can bind or banish the dead, yet also offer rare liberation. To a wraith, a mage is both tormentor and savior.
In short: Mages are seen as walking paradoxes, tempting allies, but always dangerous.
The Nights and Days of Ironwood
For a mage, walking Ironwood is like moving through a living grimoire. The boarded-up factory is an alchemical lab waiting to be awakened; the graffiti mural is a talisman if painted with intent; the siren of a police car becomes a binding sigil in the right hands. Reality itself feels fragile here, as though one could peel back the veil with enough focus.
Ironwood is not just a city to mages—it is an arena, a forge, a question. Will belief collapse into the order of the Technocracy, or erupt into the polyphonic chaos of the Traditions? Will the city fall deeper into decay, or be rewritten into something stranger, brighter, or darker than ever before?
For now, Ironwood’s mages endure, pulled between hope and despair, freedom and control. They stay because Ironwood is not only a place of power—it is a mirror of their own struggle. Like them, the city is fractured, vibrant, dangerous, and alive with possibility.