Occultists Anonymous

Occultists Anonymous is an actual play podcast, and the game on the table is Mage the Awakening. The chronicle heard here is called Into The West, and it is not told as one party marching forward together. Episodes come back to particular characters and pairings instead. There is Jesse, who plays Petrichor. There is the Craig and Theodosia thread, which sends Theodosia down into the underworld looking for an anchor of the God Machine. There is also the Ash and Helena thread. Most of the show's energy goes into narration. An underworld forge clangs loudly but never echoes, because the place is so vast it swallows sound, and the narrator sets that against mine tunnels where a whisper carries for an hour. Constantinople shows up at sunset under gas lights while a squad of spirits of desire and hedonism fans out to report back. A swooping landing drops one character into a werewolf camp, where every head snaps up and pandemonium follows. The mechanics are never hidden. Rolls are called, willpower is added, successes are counted out loud, and players talk through how their characters move, as when Max's fighting is compared to Krav Maga: controlled, aggressive, with no openings left. Quieter scenes get the same attention. In one, a character feels a little Mysterium click, decides that knowledge should be shared, and has to work up her nerve while walking a visitor to the door with the air of someone meeting a celebrity. Around all this sits a loose, friendly frame. Cold opens stumble over the show's own name, patron lists get read aloud and derailed by a missed scroll, and a whiny cat wants attention. The housekeeping can also be practical. One session includes a notice asking patrons who signed up through the iOS app to switch to the website so Apple does not take a cut. Another closing asks for photos of holiday baking, and specifies that it means the food kind. Listeners are also invited to send theories about what really happened to a chunk of the border march. The closings steer people toward a Discord described as a welcoming space with no real-world arguments, and one points out that although the community grew up around Mage, its members know plenty about other games too. What a listener gets is a tabletop chronicle with the seams showing, and that is the appeal. The dice, the table talk and the scene-setting all share the same stretch of audio, so the story unfolds the way it would at a real table.