Actually, it would be stupid for the other group NOT to grant at least Accord-level protection.  If they don't, then the White Council can just whack the rogue mage whenever they wish, no consequences.

That's a fair point, sorry, that was badly phrased. My point is that the price for that protection is probably going to be far higher than just joining the White Council. After all the White Council will pretty much leave you alone most of the time (in peacetime at least) so long as you're not breaking any laws - you don't have to attend meetings, you don't have to jump at every little request. Any other faction will require you to work for them all of the time, and enforce it either by addiction, oaths or bargains. Essentially you'd be exchanging the relative freedom offered by joining the White Council for either a life of constantly looking over your shoulder, or a collar and leash.

For a Wizard the benefits of being a member of the White Council by far outweigh the benefits of being rogue or working for another faction. That's not to say rogues don't happen, just that they would be a rarity, and that anyone stood without White Council protection is likely not to remain a free agent for very long at all - they'd be killed or recruited (willing or not) very swiftly. And the price of that recruitment is likely to be very high indeed, regardless of how it appears on the surface. There are probably a lot of cautionary tales of people who thought there were better offers that the White Council, and most of them are probably verifiably true....

Re: grappling: does this mean a high grapple roll can still nobble someone's defence roll even if they break out? Seems rather crippling to the unfortunate victim. Still, grapples take some setting up, and that grapple roll could equally well have gone into a direct attack.

My reading is that a grapple works as a block on all actions, including defensive ones, until it is broken, once you do break free the block on actions no longer affects you. Remember that blocks don't prevent actions being attempted, they just make them more difficult to accomplish. If you roll high enough to beat the grapple you break the hold - depending on the kind of action you're taking and specifically whether it's logical that it would directly break the grapple. In the case of dodging the physical movement should be enough justification to break a grapple if the roll is successful. The value of the Grapple is not taken off the roll before it's applied to defence, it's just that if you roll higher than the result you need to dodge, but less than the value you'd need to break the grapple, you'd fail to dodge because of the grapple pinning you in place. Conversely, I think if you roll higher than the grapple value, but not enough to dodge, then you successfully break the grapple, but still get hit by whatever you were trying to dodge - I may be wrong on that last but though, I don't have the rulebook to hand.

I always got the impression that joining the White Council is more a matter of necessity for survival than anything else. There are a lot of other factions out there that would be only too happy to gain the use of a spellcaster of White Council level power - willing or not. Remember, being a member of the White Council means that you are protected by the Accords. Not being a member basically means that you're powerful enough to attract the notice of other factions, but completely unprotected against them going after you. So, sooner or later you'll end up either in the White Council (when you go running to them tail between your legs begging for their protection) or under the control of one of the other factions. Nobody is going to let a White Council power level spellcaster run around loose for long, and the likelihood is that the various factions will take the long view of "Well, if I can't control them, I'm not letting them be used against me."

The White Council may not actively pursue a character but I do get the impression that they might just drop a few words in the right places to make sure that a threat arises to force a person to beg for membership.

The council has always been presented as a faction that may have it's internal bickering, but always bands together against an external threat. So joining doesn't necessarily mean that a character has to compromise their beliefs if they were going to follow the laws of magic anyway. Yes it puts certain obligations on you, but it doesn't mean that Council business will be rammed down your throat at every opportunity - and game-wise you can buy off a compel if you really don't want council business wrapped up in what you're doing.

It seems to me like everyone is treating a block as though it prevents an action from being attempted. It doesn't. It just makes that action a little more difficult to accomplish. I have absolutely no problem with the concept that being involved in a grapple might feasibly make it more difficult to successfully incite emotion in the person doing the grappling. To put it another way why on earth should a person who's managed (somehow, given a WCV's natural advantages) to get the drop on a WCV be penalised for doing so? I'd argue that the reason the block should apply to Incite Emotion is more tied in with the mental focus of the person doing the grappling than with anything specifically physical - they're in a position of power, focussed on preventing their quarry from escaping. Essentially it takes more to break their focus than in a different situation, but it's not impossible.

My ruling on it would be that disrupting the ritual circle should cause an automatic failure on the caster's discipline roll for that round. Forcing them to choose to take the backlash to continue the spell (at least long enough to release the energy safely), or to release the energy as fallout.

The fallout could place the aspect of 'uncontrolled magic' on the scene, which could then be invoked by any caster present to aid their own spells.

Having said all that,

the bones were found by a group of cultists.  Cultists with just enough magical knowledge to recognize what they have, but not enough to fully understand it (or use the NeverNever, for that matter).

A, nothing's more dangerous than enthusiastic amateurs! 

I do like the idea of the Russian Freighter bearing the bones of Baba Yaga, but I have to ask - if they are being brought over as a magical weapon of sorts, why wouldn't those involved transport them through the Never Never? I'm not saying the ship's an invalid option by any means, I'm just curious.

The ship idea has great possibilities for a straight up horror scenario too. Taking the idea from FM's post above about drawing power from the people on board the ship rather than the magical energies of the environment, I quite like the idea of the bones starting to reanimate, rebuilding the Crone using flesh and blood from the people on board. If each time she does it she's drawing power from the rest of the living on board you could run symptoms a little like radiation sickness spreading among the crew - just to muddy the waters as to whether the occult threat is the only dangerous thing aboard... first the rats start dying off, then the ships cat. After that one of the crew in the ship's sick bay is found shriveled and eviscerated, then everyone starts experiencing headaches and nausea, and the body of the ship's engineer is found. Yes, that's right, the engineer who was trying desperately to get the engines started again. Now would be a great time to call the coastguard, but around the time everyone got sick all the electrics on board ship went out. So now you've got to hunt through the bowels of the ship with some flashlights and cigarette lighters, and the flashlights are starting to fail....

Actually, maybe I just answered my own question as to why they were sent over water rather than through the Never Never. Maybe they're one of those weapons that you just don't want to be holding when it goes off.

I'd recommend Mark Chadbourn's Age of Misrule trilogy (and the two follow on trilogies - The Dark Age and The Kingdom of the Serpent).