Main Page: Difference between revisions

From Madtown by Night
Jump to navigation Jump to search
No edit summary
No edit summary
 
(8 intermediate revisions by the same user not shown)
Line 1: Line 1:
__NOTOC__
<div style="background:#090d12; color:#e6e8eb; padding:24px; border:1px solid #2e3b49; border-radius:8px; line-height:1.65;">


<div style="text-align:center; padding:32px 18px; background:#111923; border:1px solid #35485c; border-radius:7px;">
<div style="font-size:90%; color:#9fb1c3; letter-spacing:3px;">MAGE: THE ASCENSION • MADISON, WISCONSIN • 2025</div>
<div style="font-size:260%; color:#ffffff; font-weight:bold; margin-top:8px;">Madtown by Night</div>
<div style="font-size:135%; color:#c0cfdd; margin-top:6px;">The storm is over. The way home is still lost.</div>
</div>


[[File:Madtown main page 2025 under 2mb.jpg|left|thumb|344x344px]]
<div style="margin-top:22px; padding:18px; background:#151d27; border-left:5px solid #718da8;">
Madison looks ordinary from a distance.


= Welcome to Madtown by Night =
The Capitol dome shines across the lakes. Students crowd State Street. Traffic crawls through the isthmus. Phones glow in every hand. Beneath that familiar city, old wards are failing, forgotten spirits are moving, and doors sealed for forty years have begun appearing in dreams.


''Madison, Wisconsin. 2025.''
The Avatar Storm has ended.


Madtown by Night is a World of Darkness setting centered on Madison, Wisconsin: a city of four lakes, old spirits, political ambition, academic power, hidden monsters, and a reality faultline that should not exist.
For the first time in more than a generation, the road beyond the mortal world may be opening again.
</div>


On the surface, Madison is a modern capital city of students, organizers, researchers, nightlife, biotech, data, and constant change.
= The Friday Night Chronicle =


Underneath, it is still what it has always been: contested ground.
This is the player landing page for our weekly '''Madtown by Night''' chronicle using ''Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition''.


The [[Capitol Node]] hums beneath the city.
The game takes place in '''Madison, Wisconsin, in 2025'''. The characters are relatively inexperienced mages trying to understand their powers, survive the attention of the supernatural world, and uncover their connection to [[New Avalon]], Madison's lost Horizon Realm.
[[New Avalon]] still casts its shadow across the Umbra.
Old pacts strain.
Ancient enemies adapt.
And every faction in Madison tells itself that it can survive what is coming next.


== A Setting in Transition ==
New Avalon has been inaccessible to Madison's mages since 1985. No known ritual, portal, or expedition has restored reliable contact.


'''Madtown by Night is currently being updated from its original 1985 setting to 2025.'''
The characters are different.


This wiki began as a chronicle rooted in 1985: the year of murders, fractures, betrayals, and supernatural realignment that defined the modern history of Madison.
They sometimes reach New Avalon through dreams, visions, and unexplained transitions. They cannot control when it happens. They do not know why the realm admits them. They may be the first people in forty years to gain meaningful access.


That era still matters.
<div style="margin:22px 0; padding:16px; background:#1b2430; border:1px solid #3b4d61; border-radius:6px;">
'''The central mystery:''' Why can these young mages enter a realm that has rejected everyone else for forty years?
</div>


In many ways, 1985 was the night the city broke.
= The World After the Avatar Storm =


Now the setting has moved forward to '''2025'''. Some pages have already been updated. Others still reflect older continuity, character writeups, or historical versions of the setting.
In 1999, the Avatar Storm tore across the spirit worlds. Travel beyond the Gauntlet became dangerous, unpredictable, and often fatal. Chantries lost contact with their masters. Messengers vanished. Ancient sanctums went silent. Entire branches of magical knowledge disappeared with the people who carried them.


Unless a page says otherwise, assume:
Now, in 2025, the storm has ended.


* '''The current default setting year is 2025.'''
The silence after it may be more frightening than the storm itself.
* '''1985 material remains part of the city’s history, legend, or legacy continuity.'''
* '''Some articles are still being revised to align with the updated timeline.'''


== Madison in 2025 ==
* Elder mages are dead, missing, trapped beyond the Gauntlet, or greatly diminished.
* Old councils no longer possess unquestioned authority.
* Many surviving chantries understand only fragments of their own histories.
* Tradition lore has become contradictory, incomplete, or repeated without explanation.
* Young mages are being asked to solve problems their teachers barely understand.
* Roads through the Umbra may be opening, but nobody knows what survived on the other side.


This is not the Madison of payphones, ashtrays, and Cold War paranoia alone.
The Age of Masters is over.


This is a city of smartphones, surveillance cameras, encrypted chats, mutual aid networks, corporate medicine, student protest, disappearing neighborhoods, rising rents, haunted infrastructure, and digital ghosts that move faster than rumor.
What comes next belongs to people who were never properly prepared for it.


The old powers did not vanish when the century turned.
= Why the Characters Matter =
They scaled.


The Technocracy learned how to disappear into systems.
The characters are not Archmages, chosen rulers, or legendary heroes. They are young Awakened people trying to keep ordinary lives from collapsing beneath extraordinary truths.
The Kindred learned how to rule through institutions, wealth, and image.
The Garou learned that every acre of surviving sacred ground must be fought for.
The Fae learned that memory is harder to preserve in a city that scrolls past itself.
And the Mages of Madison learned that modernity did not kill magick.


It industrialized the war over reality.
Yet they share something Madison's surviving mages desperately want: '''access to New Avalon'''.


== What Lies Beneath ==
Some see the characters as explorers. Some see them as students. Some see them as keys.


Madison is built on more than politics and pavement.
They may be protected, recruited, studied, tested, or manipulated. Every interested mage claims to have good reasons. Few agree about who should control New Avalon if it can be reopened.


It is a city balanced on layered worlds:
The characters may decide who enters the realm, which lost secrets return to the world, and what kind of magical society rises from the ruins of the old one.


* The '''[[Capitol Node]]''', a spiritual and metaphysical anchor of enormous significance.
= Magick and Magic =
* '''[[New Avalon]]''', the Horizon Realm tied to the city’s magical architecture, dreams, and failures.
* '''New Eden''', the digital frontier where code, consciousness, and recursion blur.
* The lingering shadow of '''[[The Nameless]]''', whose influence stains memory, identity, and history itself.
* The echo of '''Digi-8''', an intelligence born from the collision of magick, data, and impossible continuity.


Madison is not merely haunted.
Most people use the word ''magic'' for anything supernatural. Many young mages do the same.


It is networked across worlds.
Among the Awakened, '''magick''' means something deeper. It is the conscious reshaping of reality through enlightened will, belief, practice, and understanding.


== The Supernatural Landscape ==
A ritual is not merely a set of motions. A wand is not simply a tool. A prayer is not automatically a spell. Code, meditation, music, mathematics, chemistry, martial discipline, ecstatic dance, and communion with spirits can all become instruments of magick when they express how a mage believes reality works.


'''The Mages'''
The problem in 2025 is that much of this understanding has been lost.
Madison’s Awakened remain divided between Traditionalists, technomancers, mystics, rebels, and those who believe the city should be opened to outsiders rather than controlled by old councils. The battle over the Capitol Node never really ended.


'''The Kindred'''
Many mages know procedures without understanding their purpose. They inherit broken teachings, copied rituals, damaged grimoires, abandoned servers, and warnings written by masters who never returned.
The city’s vampires remain political, territorial, and dangerous. Old Anarch-Camarilla tensions never truly died; they evolved. Madison’s undead still seek influence over the city’s institutions, nightlife, wealth, and occult infrastructure.


'''The Garou'''
The characters must learn not only '''how''' to perform magick, but '''why their magick works'''.
The Garou fight to protect the remaining sacred places of Madison, especially those tied to the Arboretum, Peace Park, and the city’s deeper spiritual roots. Their war is no longer only in forests and caerns. It is in zoning fights, poisoned land, corporate predation, and spiritual corrosion.


'''The Fae'''
= New Avalon =
Madison’s changelings and dreaming powers remain tied to memory, Glamour, and the hidden places beneath the city. They understand better than most that what is forgotten is never truly gone.


'''The Technocracy, Nephandi, and Other Threats'''
[[New Avalon]] is a Horizon Realm bound to Madison through occult architecture, powerful Nodes, and the work of [[Jay Dee]].
Some enemies want to control reality. Others want to erase it. Madison has always attracted both.


== Why 1985 Still Matters ==
It was created as a sanctuary beyond ordinary reality. For generations, it held homes, libraries, workshops, laboratories, gardens, spirits, and whole communities devoted to the Awakened world.


The 1985 era is not obsolete lore.
Then came 1985.


It is the foundation of the modern setting.
New Avalon closed. Madison's mages lost their sanctuary, their archives, and much of their connection to the wider magical world. Later generations inherited stories, fragments, and arguments about what happened.


Many of the city’s current grudges, alliances, disappearances, cults, spiritual wounds, and hidden truths can be traced back to the events of that year. As this wiki is updated, some pages will remain valuable as historical records of that crisis, even when their “current” details are no longer current.
The characters have seen pieces of the realm in dreams:


Think of 1985 as the break point.
* Corridors that feel remembered rather than discovered
Think of 2025 as the aftermath.
* Buildings whose purposes seem familiar even when their names are not
* Doors opening onto places that cannot share the same geography
* Empty rooms prepared for people who never arrived
* A city waiting beneath a sky that does not belong to Earth


== Start Here ==
Dreams are not maps. Memory is not proof. New Avalon may not be exactly as the surviving accounts describe it.


If you are new to the setting, begin with:
<div style="margin:22px 0; padding:16px; background:#211a25; border-left:5px solid #89699a;">
'''Remember:''' Reaching New Avalon in a dream does not guarantee that everyone experienced the same journey, or that everyone remembers it the same way.
</div>
 
= What the Characters Currently Know =
 
* The Avatar Storm has ended.
* Elder mages are now exceedingly rare.
* Madison's magical communities are weakened and divided.
* New Avalon has been inaccessible through ordinary means since 1985.
* The characters have entered or glimpsed New Avalon through dreams.
* Their access is unpredictable and cannot yet be reproduced reliably.
* Other mages know the characters possess some connection to the realm.
* Several people and factions want New Avalon reopened.
* They do not agree about what should happen afterward.
* Much of Madison's recorded magical history may be incomplete or wrong.
 
Everything beyond these facts must be discovered in play.
 
= Madison Beneath Madison =
 
The Awakened do not inhabit a separate city. They live inside the same Madison as everyone else.
 
They work ordinary jobs. They pay rent. They lose sleep. They walk beneath security cameras and past buildings whose foundations contain symbols older than the streets around them.
 
Madison is also a meeting place of overlapping supernatural powers:
 
* The [[Mages of Madison]] struggle to rebuild after decades of isolation.
* The [[Vampires of Madison]] maintain their own laws, territories, and political wars.
* The [[Garou of Madison]] defend sacred ground and the surviving spirit world.
* The [[Fae of Madison]] guard memory, imagination, and places touched by the Dreaming.
* The [[Wraith of Madison|Wraiths of Madison]] linger around old violence and unfinished history.
* [[Mortals & Hunters]] investigate what the supernatural world fails to conceal.
* [[Important Supernaturals]] records people whose influence crosses factional boundaries.
 
These groups do not share a complete understanding of Madison. Each possesses part of the truth. Each has reasons to hide the rest.
 
= Friday Night Play =
 
The chronicle focuses on discovery, character choices, and the consequences of learning how reality works.
 
Players should expect:
 
* Mysteries with more than one possible explanation
* Conflicting mentors and unreliable authorities
* Personal beliefs that shape how magick is performed
* Dreams that may contain memories, warnings, or invitations
* Negotiation with mages and other supernatural factions
* Difficult decisions about dangerous knowledge
* Consequences that may not become visible immediately
 
You do not need to master every Sphere, Tradition, faction, or historical event before playing. Your character is allowed to be uncertain. In this chronicle, ignorance is not a failure of preparation.
 
It is part of the world.
 
= Start Here =
 
'''Essential player reading'''
 
* [[Mages of Madison]]: Madison's Awakened community and surviving institutions
* [[New Avalon]]: The recorded history and known structure of the lost Horizon Realm
* [[Madison]]: The city's supernatural foundations and the importance of 1985
* [[Key Locations]]: Places connected to Madison's hidden world
* [[Important Supernaturals]]: Influential figures across the city's factions
 
'''The wider World of Darkness'''


* [[Madison]]
* [[Capitol Node]]
* [[New Avalon]]
* [[Madtown World of Darkness Timeline]]
* [[Vampires of Madison]]
* [[Vampires of Madison]]
* [[Garou of Madison]]
* [[Garou of Madison]]
* [[Mages of Madtown]]
* [[Fae of Madison]]
* [[Fae of Madison]]
* [[Wraith of Madison]]
* [[Mortals & Hunters]]
'''Important figures'''
* [[Jay Dee]]: Founder of New Avalon and architect of Madison's magical order
* [[Abel Washington]]: Leader within Madison's Virtual Adept community
* [[Ann Johnston]]: A survivor of Madison's older Awakened generation
* [[Peggy Fitzgerald]]: The presence still bound to Mother Fool's


== Editorial Note ==
= Wiki Status =


This wiki is actively being revised to reflect the 2025 setting.
<div style="padding:16px; background:#2a2418; border:1px solid #705f35; border-radius:6px;">
'''This setting is being updated to 2025.'''


Some pages may contain legacy 1985 material, contradictory accounts, or overlapping versions of events. In-universe, this can often be read as rumor, fractured memory, propaganda, or supernatural distortion.
Some linked pages still describe Madison as it existed in 1985. Treat those pages as historical records, incomplete accounts, or material awaiting revision unless the Storyteller confirms otherwise.


Out of universe, it means the archive is still evolving.
When a page conflicts with information revealed during the current chronicle, the events of the game take priority.
</div>


Welcome to Madison.
<div style="text-align:center; margin-top:30px; padding:24px; background:#111923; border-top:1px solid #40546b;">
<div style="font-size:135%; color:#ffffff;">The storm has passed.</div>
<div style="color:#9fb3c8; margin-top:6px;">Something is dreaming beneath Madison.</div>
<div style="color:#9fb3c8;">Now it knows your name.</div>
</div>


Reality is already in progress.
</div>

Latest revision as of 14:00, 3 September 2026

MAGE: THE ASCENSION • MADISON, WISCONSIN • 2025
Madtown by Night
The storm is over. The way home is still lost.

Madison looks ordinary from a distance.

The Capitol dome shines across the lakes. Students crowd State Street. Traffic crawls through the isthmus. Phones glow in every hand. Beneath that familiar city, old wards are failing, forgotten spirits are moving, and doors sealed for forty years have begun appearing in dreams.

The Avatar Storm has ended.

For the first time in more than a generation, the road beyond the mortal world may be opening again.

The Friday Night Chronicle

This is the player landing page for our weekly Madtown by Night chronicle using Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition.

The game takes place in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2025. The characters are relatively inexperienced mages trying to understand their powers, survive the attention of the supernatural world, and uncover their connection to New Avalon, Madison's lost Horizon Realm.

New Avalon has been inaccessible to Madison's mages since 1985. No known ritual, portal, or expedition has restored reliable contact.

The characters are different.

They sometimes reach New Avalon through dreams, visions, and unexplained transitions. They cannot control when it happens. They do not know why the realm admits them. They may be the first people in forty years to gain meaningful access.

The central mystery: Why can these young mages enter a realm that has rejected everyone else for forty years?

The World After the Avatar Storm

In 1999, the Avatar Storm tore across the spirit worlds. Travel beyond the Gauntlet became dangerous, unpredictable, and often fatal. Chantries lost contact with their masters. Messengers vanished. Ancient sanctums went silent. Entire branches of magical knowledge disappeared with the people who carried them.

Now, in 2025, the storm has ended.

The silence after it may be more frightening than the storm itself.

  • Elder mages are dead, missing, trapped beyond the Gauntlet, or greatly diminished.
  • Old councils no longer possess unquestioned authority.
  • Many surviving chantries understand only fragments of their own histories.
  • Tradition lore has become contradictory, incomplete, or repeated without explanation.
  • Young mages are being asked to solve problems their teachers barely understand.
  • Roads through the Umbra may be opening, but nobody knows what survived on the other side.

The Age of Masters is over.

What comes next belongs to people who were never properly prepared for it.

Why the Characters Matter

The characters are not Archmages, chosen rulers, or legendary heroes. They are young Awakened people trying to keep ordinary lives from collapsing beneath extraordinary truths.

Yet they share something Madison's surviving mages desperately want: access to New Avalon.

Some see the characters as explorers. Some see them as students. Some see them as keys.

They may be protected, recruited, studied, tested, or manipulated. Every interested mage claims to have good reasons. Few agree about who should control New Avalon if it can be reopened.

The characters may decide who enters the realm, which lost secrets return to the world, and what kind of magical society rises from the ruins of the old one.

Magick and Magic

Most people use the word magic for anything supernatural. Many young mages do the same.

Among the Awakened, magick means something deeper. It is the conscious reshaping of reality through enlightened will, belief, practice, and understanding.

A ritual is not merely a set of motions. A wand is not simply a tool. A prayer is not automatically a spell. Code, meditation, music, mathematics, chemistry, martial discipline, ecstatic dance, and communion with spirits can all become instruments of magick when they express how a mage believes reality works.

The problem in 2025 is that much of this understanding has been lost.

Many mages know procedures without understanding their purpose. They inherit broken teachings, copied rituals, damaged grimoires, abandoned servers, and warnings written by masters who never returned.

The characters must learn not only how to perform magick, but why their magick works.

New Avalon

New Avalon is a Horizon Realm bound to Madison through occult architecture, powerful Nodes, and the work of Jay Dee.

It was created as a sanctuary beyond ordinary reality. For generations, it held homes, libraries, workshops, laboratories, gardens, spirits, and whole communities devoted to the Awakened world.

Then came 1985.

New Avalon closed. Madison's mages lost their sanctuary, their archives, and much of their connection to the wider magical world. Later generations inherited stories, fragments, and arguments about what happened.

The characters have seen pieces of the realm in dreams:

  • Corridors that feel remembered rather than discovered
  • Buildings whose purposes seem familiar even when their names are not
  • Doors opening onto places that cannot share the same geography
  • Empty rooms prepared for people who never arrived
  • A city waiting beneath a sky that does not belong to Earth

Dreams are not maps. Memory is not proof. New Avalon may not be exactly as the surviving accounts describe it.

Remember: Reaching New Avalon in a dream does not guarantee that everyone experienced the same journey, or that everyone remembers it the same way.

What the Characters Currently Know

  • The Avatar Storm has ended.
  • Elder mages are now exceedingly rare.
  • Madison's magical communities are weakened and divided.
  • New Avalon has been inaccessible through ordinary means since 1985.
  • The characters have entered or glimpsed New Avalon through dreams.
  • Their access is unpredictable and cannot yet be reproduced reliably.
  • Other mages know the characters possess some connection to the realm.
  • Several people and factions want New Avalon reopened.
  • They do not agree about what should happen afterward.
  • Much of Madison's recorded magical history may be incomplete or wrong.

Everything beyond these facts must be discovered in play.

Madison Beneath Madison

The Awakened do not inhabit a separate city. They live inside the same Madison as everyone else.

They work ordinary jobs. They pay rent. They lose sleep. They walk beneath security cameras and past buildings whose foundations contain symbols older than the streets around them.

Madison is also a meeting place of overlapping supernatural powers:

These groups do not share a complete understanding of Madison. Each possesses part of the truth. Each has reasons to hide the rest.

Friday Night Play

The chronicle focuses on discovery, character choices, and the consequences of learning how reality works.

Players should expect:

  • Mysteries with more than one possible explanation
  • Conflicting mentors and unreliable authorities
  • Personal beliefs that shape how magick is performed
  • Dreams that may contain memories, warnings, or invitations
  • Negotiation with mages and other supernatural factions
  • Difficult decisions about dangerous knowledge
  • Consequences that may not become visible immediately

You do not need to master every Sphere, Tradition, faction, or historical event before playing. Your character is allowed to be uncertain. In this chronicle, ignorance is not a failure of preparation.

It is part of the world.

Start Here

Essential player reading

  • Mages of Madison: Madison's Awakened community and surviving institutions
  • New Avalon: The recorded history and known structure of the lost Horizon Realm
  • Madison: The city's supernatural foundations and the importance of 1985
  • Key Locations: Places connected to Madison's hidden world
  • Important Supernaturals: Influential figures across the city's factions

The wider World of Darkness

Important figures

  • Jay Dee: Founder of New Avalon and architect of Madison's magical order
  • Abel Washington: Leader within Madison's Virtual Adept community
  • Ann Johnston: A survivor of Madison's older Awakened generation
  • Peggy Fitzgerald: The presence still bound to Mother Fool's

Wiki Status

This setting is being updated to 2025.

Some linked pages still describe Madison as it existed in 1985. Treat those pages as historical records, incomplete accounts, or material awaiting revision unless the Storyteller confirms otherwise.

When a page conflicts with information revealed during the current chronicle, the events of the game take priority.

The storm has passed.
Something is dreaming beneath Madison.
Now it knows your name.
Retrieved from "https://wiki.madtownbynight.com/index.php?title=Main_Page&oldid=413"