Editing Tradition Politics (section)

==CHANTRIES==

Chantries serve as strongholds of magic, whether they are baroque hillside manors or the back of a beat-up station wagon, and control of these places of power IS one of the oldest conflicts in Awakened society. Even members of the Technocratic Union sometimes have to step in to break up fights between Conventions over a particularly powerful Node.

Different Chantries in an area may do battle with each other over local magical and mundane resources, or even to determine who will get the first pick of particularly talented Awakened students. Sometimes members of a squatter Chantry -one without a Node -will even try to oust mages from an existing Chantry to gain control of its power reservoir. Battles of this sort are typically brutal and quick, and the winners take all. Within a Chantry itself, clique feuds erupt all too frequently as different groups argue over issues such as leadership of the Chantry and who will have access to specific Chantry features. Sometimes these cliques form along Tradition lines, sometimes they center around cabals, and sometimes they simply represent social or political groups.

Chantry-versus-Chantry conflicts form some of the easiest stories to frame in Laws of Ascension. Unlike faction feuding, Chantry conflicts can easily flare up into exchanges of magical or mundane violence, and little quarter is typically i given on either side, especially when vital resources such as Nodes are at stake. These story types are fairly straightforward, and they can be the most powerful ii ones as well, depending on whether the players want a want to create a shadow war of double agents and secret meetings or a very real war that actually bums Quintessence and spills blood on the streets. It's usually just a question of how much the Storyteller wishes to emphasize politics or violence in the game.

When building stories about rivalries within the Chantry, a Storyteller has a few immediate options. He can stress open and entrenched feuds, in which different cliques don't hesitate to how their disdain for each other and do their best to alternately ignore and persecute members of other cliques. In this type of story, only dire issues such as the defense of the Chantry itself can rouse any collective response.New mages are not certainly immune to being sucked into these conflicts, whether they like it or not. Characters in those situations must choose their allies carefully and be careful to not appear too sympathetic to members of another clique, even by accident.