![[OC] The Synthetic Gods — a Mage: The Ascension campaign disguised as a 90s GeoCities site (playable in browser)](https://external-preview.redd.it/F6W3L4ciYyWbUL31c8owysJBWiQIlo6xntDecxlDXjw.jpeg?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=abed40bcbddc08dba241f99e24dea8f77af7880b)
[OC] The Synthetic Gods — a Mage: The Ascension campaign disguised as a 90s GeoCities site (playable in browser)
I run a Mage: The Ascension campaign called The Synthetic Gods . I built a website for it, and now there's a browser game inside it.
What it is
Set in 1999. The Millennium is breaking and the magic is happening on the early web: GeoCities, webrings, IRC, guestbooks, Usenet. The premise is that code can be crafted into a sigil, that a shared space where enough people believe in something grows an egregore, and that an egregore worshipped hard enough crystallizes into an astrosoma. A synthetic god made of silicon and faith.
The site is meant to be a thing my players found, not a wiki I handed them. HTML tags are the components. GeoCities neighborhoods are the spheres.
Static HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No build step, no framework, no dependencies, no accounts. You open the URL and it works. 47 pages, 4 faction hubs, 40 NPC dossiers.
The campaign info is locked behind the site
This is the part that turned it into an actual campaign tool. Reading the grimoire isn't the game. What you do on the page is.
Egregore power is the currency. Visits, sigils you draw, guestbook entries and bug reports all push a 0–100 meter. The astrosoma needs 10,000 to arrive, which is out of reach for anyone who just clicks around for ten minutes.
Sigil generation. You type an intent and it renders as one of five arrangements (linear, mirrored, spiral, grid, runic). Then you charge it: progress bar, egregore power, a tone. Drawn sigils persist in your browser.
The Neon Oracle.
You ask a question, you get an HTTP status code out of seventeen (200 201 204 301 302 304 400 401 403 404 408 418 429 500 502 503 504) plus an interpretation of it. The interpretation reads your actual question, so the register shifts depending on whether you asked something technical, personal, prophetic or mystical. Asking costs egregore power. There's also a Daily Fortune seeded by the date, so everyone gets the same reading on a given day, and a query history you can export as JSON.
Faction reputation. Four tracks, 0–100 each: Technocracy, Virtual Adepts, Cypherpunks, Hollow Ones. You gain rep by doing things that fit the faction. Report bugs and care about standards, the Technocracy likes you. Break things, the Virtual Adepts do. ROT13 and crypto, the Cypherpunks. Visit at 03:33, break the glitch effects, write poetry, the Hollow Ones. Hit the threshold and that faction's hub and roster unlock.
The Konami code turns on GOD MODE, which shows the four faction hubs directly.
Quest log. Objectives check against your live state, completions notify, follow-ups unlock.
Ritual Hour. At 03:33 UTC something happens. If you're on the site you'll know.
The endgame.
The Great Work needs maxed egregore power, high rep across factions, several sigils, a fed guestbook, and at least one Ritual Hour visit. Then you open the console and run window.SYNTHETIC_GODS.ascend(). If it lands, an astrosoma is born and claims its Domain. If it doesn't, you get the other ending.
At the table it goes like this: you find a weird website, you start clicking things, then you notice the clicking is doing something and something is doing something back.
Links
Play it (the minigames live here): https://cha0smagick.github.io/thy-Syntetic-gods---mage-the-ascencion/
Contribute: https://github.com/Cha0smagick/thy-Syntetic-gods---mage-the-ascencion
The README has the site map, all 40 dossiers linked, faction rosters, a walkthrough from first visit to Ascension, a secrets catalog (five tiers, one of them View-Source only), the lore framework, and how it's built.
What I want
Two kinds of help.
Collaborators. ISC licensed, all plain static files. Mostly looking for writers to add more lore and more dossiers, people who want to build more minigames, and anyone who wants to extend the quest log. Tables that play a very different flavor of Mage would be welcome even if your setting isn't mine.
People who want to break it. I built the Oracle, the sigil workshop, the reputation system and the console rituals, and I have no idea which parts are actually satisfying and which are just friction I've stopped noticing. Play it with no context. Tell me where you got confused, where you gave up, what you expected to happen instead, and whether the ending landed.
If something is broken or ugly, report it. There's an in-site bug report hook and it feeds Technocracy rep, so the site pays you for filing one.
Caveats
English only. I'm Colombian, this is in the language of the games I actually play, and if someone wants to localize it to Spanish I'd be grateful.
The art is AI generated (NVIDIA Flux). Evocative, not consistent. The character portraits are deliberately a bit wrong. That was a choice.
There's no account, no server, nothing persists outside your own browser, and anyone with devtools can rewrite their own egregore power. Fits the theme more than it probably should.
One person who wanted to make something and kept adding easter eggs long past the point where it made sense. The scope crept.
Thanks
Thanks for reading this insignificant post in an indifferent multiverse.
Any comment works, including the ones telling me the faction thresholds are too high, which is the comment I expect most.
