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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:
- 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 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
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.