Mage the Ascension had a great deal of flash and very little useful substance.

GURPS Thaumatology is mostly not to my liking, but I find myself using it as a tool to disassemble Mage.

1) Mage's Sphere system is much less lucid than Ars Magica's Verb-Noun system.  Thaumatology discusses various verb-boun systems and gives an example of an ogham system that can be used with or without verb-noun rules.

2) Thaumatology's brief discussion of magic that goes against or works with the laws of reality is welcome.  However, it is very brief and there are no suggestive examples on which to build.

3) Thaumatology has two mechanics that resembles Mage Paradox: Distortion Points and Tally.  I like Distortion Points better, but I don't like the critical failure table much.

4) Thaumatology has a raw magic system that resembles Mage Quintessence.

5) Thaumatology has a brief discussion of how to divide up the universe into categories that reflect a meaningful, fictional metaphysics.  (By contrast, Mage has a lot of handwaving intended to distract readers from the notion that its designers had not only failed to create meaningful metaphysics, they had neglected to specify which rotes should be vulgar and which should be coincidental, guaranteeing 99% of game time would be devoted to nonproductive arguments.)

6) Thaumatology has a ~4-page discussion of incompatible magic systems in the same game world and how they might interact. However, a major point of Mage was that different schools of wizards had very different systems of metaphysics.  The sensible approach is to say that the game has one over-arching reality, and various paradigms can be used to try to explain that reality.  The dialect-defeating approach is to say that Protagoras' relativism applies to the game world.  This approach is nice on paper, but it is unlikely to be playtested, much less played by paying book-buyers.  Either way, this particular feature of Mage the Ascension, namely representing paradigm in a universe of discourse - is of great interest to me.

7) I am profoundly underwhelmed by Thaumatology's attempt to use the ten Sephiroth as ten verbs for magic. This book discusses the decans of the astrological signs - a rather obscure point of lore - and mentions the Hebrew letters as connecting the Sephiroth.  And then - somehow - it manages to completely miss the fact that the Hebrew letters are attributed to zodiac signs, planets, and elements.  How can a researcher go into detail with Ogham and miss the one point of pop-occultism that every fourteen-year-old headbanger knows?  If the author had bothered to discuss this, would it have been productive?  For one thing, it might have introduced a completely new paradigm of magic.  Then again, GURPS is a system that tends to present patches and bugfixes for earlier systems rather than forge ahead to new territory.  Then again, any GURPS GM willing to learn such a system is probably able to pick up Robert Wang's _Qabalistic Tarot_ and design his own in less time than it takes to learn the GURPS Campaign book rules.

My current GURPS players are not willing to learn rules by reading rule books.  Thus they are not going to start using magic until I figure it out for them and throw it at them.  I'm only motivated to do so if I can figure out how to divide the universe into categories, and how to make a fun in-game metaphysics.  Until then, magic will stick the the Basic and Campaign books, and only NPCs have it.

Whether or not my players ever get magic, though, I am interested in Thaumatology's extremely close imitation of Ars Magica's nouns:
A)Fire, Water, Air, Earth, Magic;
B)(Human)Body, Mind, Spirit;
C)Animal, Vegetable;
D)Light, Sound, Image;
E) Food.

All right, so the categories get a little bit trivial toward the end.  The overlap between "Earth" and "Mineral" is regrettable.  Beyond that, the systems overlap.  System A, the five elements, encompasses everything.  (Edit: real-world occultists have no problem expounding theories of the five elements to explain real-life events.  However, they have trouble making such explanations concise enough and impartial enough to make good TRPG elements.)  Making the noun categories separate ignores the metaphysical meaning of the five elements - which has the advantage of avoiding ambiguity, but at the cost of dodging metaphysics.

I have two approaches to putting occult paradigms into a game.  One attempts to reconcile  knowledge representation engineering with occultism, and is far too boring to be posted to therpgsite.  The other is the quick-and-dirty pop occultism way:

The Quick-and-Dirty Way: Ignore the Sephiroth and the decans.  Take the 22 Hebrew letters and use them just like the Thaumatology book uses the Futhark example.  Use common knowledge of popular Hermetic occultism to make hand-waving attempts to theorize about occult paradigms in the game world.

It's quick and easy.  I doubt that I would like it if I played it, but if I were offered an hourly rate of salary, I would playtest it, for a few hours at least.

The Hard-but-Worthwhile Way will probably never get to a tabletop RPG, but it might very well have various applications in many software-based games. Such games would not be limited to magical fantasy; first person shooters and wargames would be likely applications.  I personally would find it funny to start up a gritty, macho FPS and see a designer acknowledging the frou-frou, artsy-fartsy, bull-shine-artist influence of Mage the Ascension on the game's artificial intelligence.

Quote from: riprock;259302My current GURPS players are not willing to learn rules by reading rule books.  Thus they are not going to start using magic until I figure it out for them and throw it at them.  I'm only motivated to do so if I can figure out how to divide the universe into categories, and how to make a fun in-game metaphysics.  Until then, magic will stick the the Basic and Campaign books, and only NPCs have it.

Easy Peasy.  Start pummelling the living shit out of them with magic from all corners.

They won't be able to get their hands on the book fast enough.