About Mage: The Podcast
The world’s longest-running Mage: The Ascension podcast.
Mage: The Podcast helps players, Storytellers, and curious seekers understand, run, and fall deeper in love with one of tabletop gaming’s strangest, richest, and most rewarding worlds.
Since 2018, We’ve Been Exploring the Tellurian
350+ episodes
Deep dives, interviews, reviews, advice, and strange corners of Mage lore.
Seven years and counting
A long-running conversation about magic, belief, power, and reality.
A growing community
Listeners, players, Storytellers, designers, and fans from around the world.
Supported by Patrons
Made possible by people who want more Mage in the world.
Our Mission
Mage: The Podcast exists to make Mage: The Ascension easier to understand, easier to run, and more inspiring to play.
Mage can be beautiful, intimidating, philosophical, messy, brilliant, and occasionally impossible to explain to your friends. We’re here to help with that.
We treat the books as a toolbox, not a cage. Our goal is not to tell you the “right” way to play Mage. Our goal is to help you find the version of Mage that makes your table come alive.
What You’ll Learn
Whether you’re opening the books for the first time or have been arguing about Paradigm since the 90s, you’ll find episodes on:
- Mage lore, factions, Traditions, Conventions, Crafts, and weird metaphysics
- Storytelling advice for running better chronicles
- Rules explanations that make the game less intimidating
- Book reviews and reading guides
- Interviews with writers, designers, and fans
- Character ideas, campaign frames, and table inspiration
- The history, philosophy, and strange beauty of Mage: The Ascension
Meet Adam
Adam Simpson has been playing Mage since before First Edition reached store shelves, which is either impressive, alarming, or proof of a long-running temporal anomaly.
As co-host of Mage: The Podcast, Adam brings decades of experience with the game, a deep love of the World of Darkness, and a practical belief that Mage works best when the books become tools for your own imagination.
He is a web developer, traveler, storyteller, and longtime fan of games that ask dangerous questions about reality.
Meet Pooka
Pooka is a poet, social scientist, linguist, writer, designer, traveler, and longtime World of Darkness enthusiast.
A regular guest on Mage: The Podcast, they bring a wide-ranging curiosity, deep textual knowledge, and a particular gift for connecting game mechanics, cultural context, and the strange emotional machinery that makes the World of Darkness work.
Pooka has spent decades moving through tabletop gaming in many forms, co-hosts Changeling: The Podcast, and writes across World of Darkness lines for the Storytellers Vault. Their work is shaped by a love of language, folklore, travel, pastry, and the persistent need to cross-check obscure Mage rules against equally obscure Mage metaphysics.
They can usually be found somewhere in the Northeast Megalopolis, muttering about Quintessence, Book of Madness side effects, or whatever new project has just appeared on the horizon.
Meet Josh
Josh Heath is a writer, editor, game designer, and longtime Mage enthusiast.
As co-host of Mage: The Podcast, Josh brings sharp analysis, historical context, design insight, and a deep appreciation for the strange machinery that makes Mage work at the table.
He cares about how games teach us to think, how stories shape belief, and how Mage keeps finding new ways to be relevant, difficult, and alive.
Meet Joseph
Joseph is the founder and host of Mage: The Podcast, a long-running exploration of Mage: The Ascension, its history, ideas, creators, and community.
His work approaches Mage as more than a roleplaying game. Through interviews, book reviews, deep-dive discussions, and conversations with players and designers, Joseph examines the philosophy, occult traditions, cultural influences, and competing visions of reality that make Mage distinctive.
He is particularly interested in the places where roleplaying games intersect with magic, technology, politics, psychology, comics, film, and contemporary culture. His goal is to make Mage’s complicated cosmology accessible to newcomers while giving experienced players and Storytellers new ways to understand, discuss, and use the game.
Through Mage: The Podcast, Joseph works to preserve the game’s history, highlight the people creating within its community, and help more players enter, understand, play, and love Mage: The Ascension.
Why We Started
Mage: The Ascension is one of the most ambitious roleplaying games ever made.
It is also one of the hardest to explain.
We started Mage: The Podcast because we wanted a place to talk through the books, the rules, the setting, the contradictions, the brilliance, and the beautiful confusion of it all.
Over time, that conversation became something bigger: a resource for new players, a gathering place for longtime fans, and a living archive for people who still believe Mage has something important to say.
Join the Community
Mage is better when people are arguing, laughing, theorizing, building characters, sharing chronicles, and helping each other make sense of the impossible.
Join us beyond the podcast:
Start with an episode that catches your eye.
Watch interviews, conversations, and Mage discussions.
Meet other players, Storytellers, and fans.
Help keep the show going and get more Mage in your life.
Reality Is Up for Debate
Whether you’re new to Mage, returning after years away, or deep enough in the lore to have strong opinions about the Avatar Storm, we’re glad you found us.
Pull up a chair.
The Tellurian is big.
Let’s explore it together.