World Shattering is actually perhaps the best word for it - it makes distance irrelevant for most Hermetic magi if integrated into Hermetic Theory.
Suddently, ReCo (well, Rego in general really, for a variety of teleportation effects, as well as the Intangible Tunnel) becomes so significantly more useful that every magus must study it or be left behind - as if people needed more reason to study Rego or Corpus.
If you can calculate the coordinates to a location, you can affect that location - you even have an indefinate duration AC in case you need to penetrate an Aegis.
This also means exploration becomes a joke, because magi (using intelligo magics) can see any point in the world.
You never need to travel to collect ACs to new places, you've already got that.
Mongol Invasion? To quote "I just need to know one thing. Where. They. Are."
Perhaps you can't target the mongols themselves, but a Terram Magus can make the earth swallow them before they reach europe.
At this point, claims to land (and Vis sources) become jokes, because any magus worth his/her salt efectively has the same "distance" to every known location, including any known Vis source. Tribunals may well remain geographically based, but mostly out of tradition and a need for structure.
With relatively simple magics, areas can be surveyed for resources (magical or otherwise) and harvested - because you'll never need to trugde through miles of terrain to get anywhere.
"Dragon's Egg you say? Sure! The Dragon of the Pyrenees just went for water, that's a 5 min flight each way, so we have about... 8 mins to raid her lair - that's 4 diameters! Plenty of time!. Oh, and we should maybe pick up an AC to her while we're there."
I know about the threads discussing the Leap of Homecomming, and how one can just do stories based on the place of arrival rather than the journey, but they only touch the tip of the iceberg.
Believe me, Americans are quite aware of our nasty history and we deal with it on a daily basis. Unfortunately, our politicians, our misanthropes and the media do not. Please try not to judge us based on those three groups...
And, considering the colonization of America didn't begin in real history for another couple hundred years, wouldn't the sourcebook be more about what America might have been? I mean, it's Mythic Earth, so chances are the Aztecs, Iroquois, Chihauahans and so forth might be able to do a bit more than just lob tomahawks at the invaders. And, since the invaders would not have firearms, it may be that things are a bit more different in outcome. I think the book would be very interesting but there's no real reason to write it in terms of real history since the concerns that you raise didn't show up until around the 16th century. In the 13th century, it was the Danish and other scandinavians who were kicking around off the coasts.
And I find it interesting that people are completely fine roleplaying the purges of the Jewish people in medieval countries, the continual invasion and atrocities of the Crusades and the Reconquista, along with the Inquisition... But for some reason the idea of some European guy coming to America and ripping off Indians and getting his butt kicked (because they did in the beginning) is supposed to offend us and make us not buy books? Please.
The key is not the pain or remorse... it's to make it interesting for us! If all you're going to do is tell us about tribes and landscapes, yeah, we're aware of those already. It's Mythic America... there's so much more out there! But you'd have to do an amazing job of bringing it out and making it all fresh/new. Essentially a land where wilderness still reigns and who knows what type of creatures have taken up residence in those dark lands...
Yeah kinda, I'm still not that impressed. An arcane connection to a place helps primarily with travel or maybe scrying. But it isn't an AC to people or things in the place. So without some careful engineering of some fairly complex spells it's not easy to take advantage of it for penetration. You could scry on the location a dragon lives in but you wouldn't necessarily see the dragon. Or do you think that getting an AC to a room would therefor give you a penetration bonus on everyone in the room?
Yes Terram Magi can destroy whole areas with a coardinate, even covenants, but they can do that already. As far as getting around aegis your not much more powerful then teleporting a grog next to the enemy, having him reach over the enemy's border grab a clot of dirt and teleporting him back.
Not having to travel to the place is awesome but it's not like blind jumps to unknown locations will be easy. If your directions to the enemy encampment are 3-4 days ride to the south your not going to be able to target with precision.
If you think uninhibited travel is a problem it really already exists. Just create an item that allows the user to teleport 7 leagues line of sight an unlimited number of times per day. And an item that allows the user to levitate freely. Rise up to a safe height with an unobstructed view and teleport as far as you can to an equal height. Repeat until you get to where you can see your destination. You could cross all of Europe in less then an hour that way.
And my experience is that my player can and will do that engineering.
True, but with a creature that large, you should be able to detect it from it's effects on it's enviroment,
As a matter of fact I don't, though I have had the argument advanced at me.
True - the problem here isn't that it can be done - it clearly can - but the ease with which this happens.
...and spending a season in the lab, fixing as and AC, but true, good point.
Scry first - it's not like you don't have an AC.
See above.
True. Again the problem here isn't that it can be done - it clearly can - but the ease with which this happens.
You may see no problems - I do.
Not as many as with the canaan necromancy, sure, but problems galore never the less.
The thing is, in 1220, the east coast of what is now the US is pretty heavily urbanised. It only becomes wilderness once the people die in the plagues, and their croplands are reclaimed by a sort of prettified nature. It's not a land where wilderness reigns.
Urbanized is not exactly the word I would have used. Settled might be a bit more accurate. And why would we want a book about the East Coast... Easties are all daft, every American knows that
You asked the question, I provided my opinion. I would add also that I agree with many of the individuals indicating that the book treads a fair line between out-and-out fantasy and realism. That line is different for many people and, chances are, a good minority will dislike whatever direction you take. But they won't dislike it because it harbors some national shame... they won't like it because they want Mythic Europe, not Mythic America.
The Mississippian culture is mostly in the midwest and from my understanding tended to stay away from the coast. They are actually just entering there middle period as of the 13th century. I think scholars actually ascribe much of their agricultural and cultural collapse to the mini-ice age not European disease's as it seemed to be well underway by the 16th century. (Dang Muspelli)
Well, there is always the Book of Mormon itself, which is available online.
But, in essence, the Book of Mormon is the story of a religion, not of a culture or a nation, and for a decent chunk of the narrative it's little more than a minority religion of a single city-state. The narrator (Mormon) has been in the process of witnessing the destruction of his faction in a bloody, protracted civil war around 400 AD, and so eschatological issues weigh heavily on his mind as he compiles his take on the rise and fall of the Nephite brand of Abrahamic faith.
Not necessarily, because it hasnĀ“t happened yet. If the focus is on the "then", you simply donĀ“t have to get into what historically happens later. Basically, what happens later is not a preset fact.
And what you have mentioned previously, with magi just doing a curbstomp all over "the natives", well who said that the natives donĀ“t have decent protections against magic regardless what access to magic they may or may not have?
The issue LuciusT and Xavi etc. mentions about "outside the scope of the game feel" might be the bigger issue.
And as Leonis said, the mythic version could have a lot of myths used, could make for lots of interesting stuff.
If i look at the worst parts of the history of my own country, do i have a problem seeing that in an RPG? Nope, iĀ“ve played some of that as well(like the pacification of the ex-Danes in Scania). If thereĀ“s anything that annoys me, itĀ“s if the source material is simply poorly done or ahistorical while claiming to be realistic. And thatĀ“s not really something i think you would write.
In the games iĀ“ve been in, weĀ“ve been literally around the world many times over, and if we had had some more official sourcematerial about both the Americas, the far east, Australia, etc etc, that would have been totally great!
Oh and ill throw in a suggestion that if any sourcematerial has space left over, a short writeup on the possibility of a civilisation on the edge of Antarctica might be a cool addition.(even though there technically may not have been any icefree areas there since 12000 years ago, who knows, a small part of it might have the benefit of a warm ocean current and be livable almost to modern times )
You could always go back further in American history to the time when the ancestors of the Indians came over on the land bridge and exterminated the previous colonists. Those proto-asians who had crossed the bridge even earlier didn't stand a chance against their invaders either. Unfortunately, none are alive today to accept the heartfelt apologies of their exterminators' descendants...an apology I have no doubt would be forthcoming...
actually that's a much better example of "genocide" than any I've seen mentioned here...apparently by folks who haven't bothered to look the word up in a dictionary.
I think going that far back (to the Beringians or Clovis cultures) is not a viable option because of the lack of the rest of the setting, but I did outline a book for the 13C, picked up research books...I just never got the time to push with it, and I'm not sure who'd need to be engaged to consider it, but I did talk to a friend with contacts who could put me in touch if I got that far... It's tough, because I've seen a lot of missteps since considering this, but still think it could be done well.
Would Mythic America be what actually was going on in the Americas at the time, or the legends of vinland that came down from the Vikings who visited? I expect these would be two extremely different things. Also how does the theory of the Americas being dominated by faerie power instead of divine work into the picture?
I'd been looking at a large range of elements, mainly because I want a setting chock full of bits to play with and factions to interact with, and it's got a lot of speculative theory that makes good grist for the mill. Respectfully addressing Native American faiths adds a layer to the design. Cahokia doesn't have direct descendants (from my research, but I could be wrong), but there are a lot of other areas which do, and which you want to consider for a commercial project. People rightfully take their heritage seriously, and it's easy to misstep-- I just look at what Monte Cook Games experienced with what they thought was a well-intentioned small recursion entry for The Strange, which was not well received. This would need to work with a pretty wide range of Native American cultures, even if you just went to the Mississippi River (and its immediate surroundings), which was really all the further I was considering. It's a lot, just looking at this, which is supposed to be pre-Columbian contact-- but it notes Cahokia, which I've found is a subtribe of the Illini, which... well, you can see it's a lot and we don't even know what the timeframe for this map is, and the fact that we don't have written records combined with incomplete oral histories...where do you decide which tribe where and...augh! I look at that folder every once in a while, put in another printed copy of an article or an issue of Archaeology where they've made new discoveries I can go back to reference, but...
Seems to me it would be a lot easier to write a fictional mythic vinland than to try and manage all of that with the possible cultural misunderstandings.
It might be, but you lose a lot-- no lost Phoenicians in Florida, no missing Welsh prince and his retinue in Georgia, no Irish monks in New England, no giant men with double rows of teeth in New England and the Rust Belt, no Aztecs and Cahokians (and that's just what I can remember off the top of my head), just some vikings and skraelings in Vinland, maybe Templars in Nova Scotia, which isn't far off of what you might deal with in Iceland or the Orkneys. Is that a full enough space? I don't know that it is.
Templars never made it to Vinland, and the Vikings did record the existence of native inhabitants, but little about them. Given the assumption from Arts and Acadame that north America would be ruled by the faerie, there are all kinds of possibilities involved. The good part however, is that instead of saying "these are the Cahokians and their myths" you get to say "these are people inspired by the Cahokians and how they might have been mythologized by Norse explorers" which separates you significantly from any outrage over inaccuracy or bias, since the inaccuracy is proclaimed as part of teh setting. Plus you only have to include references to those tribes whose mythic counterparts you find inspiring for the land.
Faeries represent the stories being told, and I don't have much research on medieval European myths about what lay over the Western Sea, other than Brendan the Navigator, the Welsh prince, and possibly the Sidhe; that doesn't give a lot to work with. If you do nothing with the Native American cultures, then you run the risk of someone saying you're erasing them. It's tough either way. Plus, there's some fun stuff I'd love to do with the Diedne in Mesoamerica, and that requires Central America cultures.
The Templars are potential architects of Oak Island in Nova Scotia, according to some theories, and the Rosalyn Chapel in Scotland (thought to be associated with the Templars) has carvings which some believe to be North American plants, which would imply they knew of the Americas and had visited.
Like I said, there's a lot of speculative theories out there which make good grist for the mill.
The carvings of native American plants is far more likely to be something that was passed down from Vikings who briefly settled parts of North America, and also had settlements in Nova Scotia. If the templars did visit America (which s frankly unlikely) it would have been well after the crusades were finished, which means after the timeframe of the saga.
Findings at Oak Island include some palm fronds which supposedly date to the 13C, and the construction there is allegedly pretty intense-- recent discoveries there include some strange items which suggest Templars, a lead cross, possibly a Roman pilum. But it doesn't matter if it really happened, it makes for a good possibility, and the idea that the Templars are hiding the treasure from beneath the Temple Mount in a subterranean trap shaft complex in Nova Scotia is too cool to ignore. The same way that oversized humans with double rows of teeth are too cool to ignore, and the idea of a Punic settlement in Florida around the Fountain of Youth is too cool to ignore.
I'm less interested in what is likely and what is interesting and riffs well off what's possible. I want to make something that draws off of the fantastical speculative theories, the elements we do know, and creates a fun melange for stories.
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