Mage: The Awakening - Antagonists

Antagonists

• Seers of the Throne: The Seers are Awakened who have sworn service to the Exarchs. They claim to follow the will of the Exarchs, and seek to remove magic from the world, enforce power structures that support unquestioning obedience, and strengthen the Lie. Seers believe that an Exarch is a man-made-god, and serve them in the hopes that once they succeed in destroying those that oppose them they will be rewarded by their distant masters. They also believe that, given their power, the Exarchs will inevitably triumph and reality will ultimately come into accordance with their desires. The inevitability of the Exarchs' victory is a major part of the Seers philosophy: the success of the Exarchs' agenda will permanently "fix" reality, and once that happens, the only viable path to enlightenment will be to accept the sovereignty of the Exarchs' hierarchy. They are not traditionally evil in the sense of fantasy or horror antagonists, but their philosophy is so at odds with that of mainstream society (in this case the mystical Atlantean Orders) that conflict is nearly inevitable.
• The Banishers: Banishers are warped Mages who dedicate themselves to destroying other Mages. Generally speaking, their Awakening was traumatic, undesired, and misunderstood, and they do not accept their mystical powers. They exist outside of normal mage society, and are often obsessed with hunting and killing other mages, usually driven by a desire for repentance or a belief that doing so will cause their life to be returned to normal.
• The Mad: Mad are Mages whose Awakening caused them to lose their minds, rendering them insane mystics who use their magic for their own mad ends. In game terms, they have a Wisdom (Morality) score of zero.
• The Acamoth: They reside beyond the threshold of existence, in the Abyssal gulf between the Supernal Realm and the Fallen World. Because of their nature, they are incapable of contacting or having any power in either the Supernal or Fallen World, and as such they require agents to grant them potency. Few knowingly or willingly serve them, and rather service their agendas by proxy, but those who do understand and submit are amongst the most feared and despised of beings.
• The Scelesti: Mortal mages who serve/worship the Abyss are known as "Scelesti" (sing. Scelestus), or simply "The Wicked". They serve the "Divine Purity" of the Abyss and seek the end of all things. They are hunted as heretics and abominations by all other Mages and are arguably the closest entity in the game to being "pure evil".
• Goetic Demons: Goetia is a practice that mages use that summons the vices of their minds into a physical form, in the belief that it will make them possible to subdue, or even destroy. Quite often, however, a Goetic mage will summon an "inner demon" that is too powerful for him to defeat, and it will escape, or even take control of the overconfident mage. Needless to say, these creatures are hunted down at all costs.
• Tremere Liches: A Left-Handed Legacy of Liches who consume the souls of others in exchange for immortality and power. They were created when a group of Vampires (already called the Tremere) attempted to remove the curse of Vampirism by diablerizing (consuming the soul of) Awakened mages as part of magical rituals. The Vampires were destroyed and the mortal mages had their souls irrevokably altered: trapped in a state between life and death, these spiritual vampires must consume the souls of others to survive, and pass on a terrible dark "gift" to those they consider to be truly worthy of the secrets of eternal "life". The original Tremere appeared, in a very different form, in the old World of Darkness vampire game as one of the thirteen clans, though they had once been part of the Mage tradition known as the Order of Hermes as seen on Ars Magica, also written by Mark Rein·Hagen (creator of Vampire: The Masquerade), where House Tremere is one of the twelve houses that constitute the Order of Hermes.
• Witch Hunters: Mortals who seek out and destroy mages for ideological reasons.