@Jabir: How do you mean? So, if you had 13C Cahokia, the dying remnants of Prince Madoc's retinue, a few enclaves of Templars and Norsemen, why is that politically incorrect? I'm not being obtuse, I'm quite serious. I don't see it.
-Ben.
Is it wrong that I totally find that a more gamable setting then the OP. 13th century North America is just so alien a place. The Anasazi are collapsing, the Mayans recovering and the Missisipian culture is just getting good. Throw in major climactic change (Caused as we all know by the Muspelli) and it's an interesting time.
But these culture are quite different from what would be encountered in the 16th century by Europeans. And most of the world's images of "Native Americans", even the accurate ones, are more recent then that.
For instance the Tribes of Great Plains, with there iconic nomadic culture centered around buffalo, didn't really come into being until after the Spanish re-introduced the horse to North America.
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Well the tendency for westerners to look at indigenous people who have achieved some great feat of engineering or culture and see it as evidence of contact with a "more advanced culture" is more then a little racist. I believe that thinking is the origin of some of the legends Jabir cited.
Also the origins of the Ancient Astronauts and Chariots of the Gods type beliefs as well. "Look people with darker skin then us managed to move big rocks, and invent astronomy while our ancestors where still chasing each other through peat bogs with pointy sticks. Well, the only possible explanation is aliens helped them." 
More or less what Maine75man says. The Mound Builder theory essentially said that these poor benighted "Indians" could never have built things as complex as Cahokia, so it must have been someone completely different. Remember, English speaking colonists didn't reach North America until after disease had caused the abandonment of most of the urban sites and the English weren't very familiar with earlier Spanish accounts. Fringe science turned this into odd (but beautiful from a point of fantasy) speculations about all sorts of Old World contacts. A more noxious development of the theory argued that since the "Indians" of the day had "obviously" driven Mound Builders out of the land there was nothing wrong with Whites doing the same to the "Indians".
I don't have a problem with it myself, it's just silly 18th-19th century speculation but people who get offended by Dances with Wolves are probably not going to like it very much. It's about as "Mythic" as basing European paganism on Frazier.
For an interesting alternate take on this sort of thing, see Rutgers Univ. afro-centric Historian Ivan Van Sertima's book "they came before columbus." He posits an Egyptian voyage, during the Nubian Dynasty period, with some Phonecian involvement, as well as a 13th century voyage from Mali, both to Mesoamerica. The book also deals at length with the intricit racial politics of positing an outside influence for native american cultural development. He believes strongly that their was cultural contact which lead to cultural diffusion, with some mesoamerican cultures adopting some cultural and technological elements of the African cultures that visited them. However, he emphasises that this was a relatively slight influence, not a wholesale conquest.
But for the purposes of a mythic game setting one can imagine that an Irish Saint named Brendon reached Virginia and declared it the promised land/Eden, or a renegade Welsh prince reached the gulf coast/mississippi region, or even a roman legion debarking in Florida, without needing to leap the the assumption that they became lords/cultural creators of Native Americans. For a facinating tale of "strangers-in-a-strange-land," I would point to the (much later tale) of my favorite conquistador, the one who conquered nothing, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca.
I agree with the comment that the Ars team is capable of handling delicate subjects well. As models for this sort of project, I would point to the treatment of the mongols in C&C, where options were given to treat them as mundane, magic, infernal, fairie, or even divine, depending on SG and troupe preference.
As an example of a decent treatment of a subject with relatively little historical info, I would point to the treatment of the Purple Isles in AM. While I honestly didn't like some parts of it, it is a fertile seedbed that I can modify to suit my troupe's interests. Whatever changes I might want to make, the outcome will be far better than if I had tried to create the setting on my own from scratch.
Oh, and who says going to America gets you out from under the code? My troupe includes a quasitor who takes the code very seriously, considering it the only thing between order and chaos - his belief is that without the code, magi would try to openly rule mundanes, and be struck down by divine wrath. (He's also mentored by demons but that's a whole 'nother story.)
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To be clear, my extended rant about the racism of DWW was mostly intended to illustrate pitfalls. I do realize "its just a movie." It inflames my humors less because someone made this little bit of entertainment, more because America's history education is terrible and our cultural amnesia is strong, so many people see a flight of fancy like DWW and think they are watching a historically accurate docu-drama.
I once had an undergrad at a public university express to me that she was surprised to learn "that was how Hitler died" after seeing Inglorious Bastards. When I explained that the movie is counter historical entertainment, she earnestly replied that "it must be true, otherwise they wouldn't be allowed to put it in the movie." Apparantly, she had somehow conflated the ideas of historical accuracy and libel/slander. =-O
So all Pagan's would have a grumpy ex-cop father and a foppish anal retentive brother?
That's how I play them. Odin's always having trouble with grumpy old Tyr and "rainbow" Heimdall. Good thing he's known in his neighborhood mead hall.
Naturally I meant Frazer but I like your idea.
It could certainly make for fun games, I agree. But in a much more pure fantasy sort of way than the blend between history, period legend, and modern fantasy that makes up Ars Magica.
But no one's suggested a straight up repackaging of the 19C stories. As I've read it, this would be a look at that the advanced, fairly populated Native American cultural landscape that was 13C North America, with some of the speculative Precolumbian Transatlantic contact theories thrown in for color and diversity. I certainly don't think anyone's suggested the whole place is subservient to Ancient Overlords From Across the Sea.
And in my opinion, there's a lot there to make a fun, diverse setting which is a remote frontier, really more on the edge than being in North Africa or the Eastern edge of Novgorod and the Levant. That ocean is a barrier which says "help is not showing up in significant numbers anytime soon. Better be smart."
And sure, you could have magi with sufficient power to do some Leaps of Homecoming, maybe providing emergency responses to critical needs, but large-scale transport of important resources is going to be rough unless a Hermes Portal is set up. And if you're able to easily do that, well, then you've got to look at the Ars America setting as the first contact opportunity with new Rival magics and the politics of creating a new Tribunal, because the survival aspect won't be an issue.
-Ben.
On the other hand, who's to say that there isn't a (as yet undiscovered) maximum range on an Arcane Connection? This is the furthest from home that Hermetic wizards have gotten; it might exist but never have come up yet.
In the same way that Einstein was only able to spot the flaws in Newton once we'd got the data from modern astronomy (which allowed us to study physics occurring over vastly larger distances), it's possible that someone will spot the errors in Bonisagus's work once the cross-Atlantic distance becomes relevant. (Or, more positively, it might give us the clues we need for a Hermetic breakthrough to solve some of those outstanding problems within Magic Theory.)
There's always Potolomic coordinates...
There are never Ptolomaic coordinates.
Sorry for my atrocious spelling.
Why not?
However you spell them Ptolemaic Coordinates shouldn't work in a setting where the New World exists. They rely on the Canary Islands being the westernmost edge of the world.
New World or no, Ptolemaic Coordinates just shouldn't work.
They're a beautiful mapping system and could be combined with the stellar navigation suggested in the Astrology section of the Mysteries to enable the Order to make maps far better than the mundane.
But making what's essentially a GPS coordinate into an arcane connection is, imo, silly. Arcane connections should be much rarer and harder to find than that. Maybe if you went full whole-hog Ancient Magic and figured out how to express them in the Adamic tongue they'd qualify as arcane connections but not when used in any normal way. Otherwise they're so powerful and world changing that you can't introduce them into the game as a mapping system without radically altering the whole setting.
The Purple Islands adventure connecting with the Coordinates is beautiful though.
...that was rather close to what I wanted to communicate, but much more polite.
That said, Ancient Magic is quite possibly my least favorite Ars Magica book ever, across now five editions.
Some of the ideas are nice, but the executions of most of them? Eugh!
I'm sorry I just don't see it. How is the ability to get an Arcane Connection to a place is so world shattering?
Uh, by 1220 the Mormon-based stuff is supposed to have been done with for about 800 years, which is more than enough time to be replaced by a successor culture which has, in turn, been replaced by another successor culture.
-Albert
The biggest problem with Mythic America is that it is prehistoric time. It won't be grounded in reality, and how would that be different from fantasy worlds?
We have tons of written records for Europe and we only need ArsMag to define the Mythic portion.
Sorry, I'm not really up on the details of Mormon North American prehistory. I wouldn't want to offend believers anyway with what would certainly be a skeptical attitude on my part. I probably would enjoy reading more Mormon material, to be honest.
My point was that using these 19th century theories about early America - among which I do include the Mormon material - neither corresponds to modern understandings of North America nor to the sensitivities of those particularly concerned about the injustices that Native Americans have suffered. It can still be fun gaming to those of us (like me) able to put their sensitivities aside, but history it ain't.