Silverpit crater

I have been thinking that of putting 20k year old Doggerland Hills in a magic regionne, along with its ice age fauna such as lions, mammoths and wooly rhinos. A magical echo of an ante-Diluvian land.

But then, what could be the mystic significance of Silverpit Crater?

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There is the problem with timing of this crater in Mythic Europe: look e.g. here for a start:

But once you have decided on it, there can be a shaman having lived there, a school of shamans having worked there, a magical accident having caused the regio, .... and so on.

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Well first of all can I say I really like the idea, very "Jurassic Regio" (well, not quite Jurassic, but you know what I mean).

I had to look up Silverpit crater but a few ideas based on a quick read up.

If you go with the idea it's an impact crater then it could be somewhere a bit of celestial matter fell to earth. Part of the Lunar or one of the planetary spheres. This would have some very unusual (and possibly dangerous) mystical properties with the specifics depending on the sphere in question.

Or maybe it's not an impact crater - before the land was submerged the crater was, presumably, a lake. A lake hidden in the heart of a land lost beneath the waves seems like a definite point of interest! Maybe the lake leads to a deeper regio level, or even the magic realm itself. Perhaps a tempus reflecting the land as it was before it sank (lots of possibilities there), or an insula inhabited by mythical beasts and magical people, or a cosm connected to something (the north sea maybe?).

You could have the lake be inhabited by atlanteans or some other breed of magical human. Or some centrepiece creature - maybe it's too silly but the giant European hippopotamus ranged as far north as Doggerland. Encountering a 4000kg+ hippo in a regio in the north sea would be a surprise, to say the least. Or maybe there are no inhabitants but the water itself is supernatural (containing vis maybe?).

A trippier option might be to have the rivers of the submerged land be sort of flowing in from outside the regio and all draining into the crater, like a big plughole. It makes a strange kind of sense for a land that sank beneath the waves but also didn't in a sense.

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Doggerland as the mystical regionne where Atlanteans come from! Why didn't I think of that ?

Here I was thinking it could be the homeland for Bjornaer Great Beasts, or worse, as an antediluvian echo perhaps it has mystic significance for the titans and jotnar in their war against faeries/creation....

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I love mixed genre games. Do not worry about biblical history or "proper" Mythic Europe. Go full on Sci-Fi Fantasy!!!!

I am currently running a game involving Conquistadors that took over a city of Neanderthals. They are trapped on an ice moon orbiting a gas giant, which was seeded with Earth life 45,000 years ago by alien wizards because they needed a worker race (the ice moon was too cold for their alien biology).

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Yes, about the 16th century the church calculates Creation happened in 4004BC, so everything about Dogger Hills does not fit in with the bible.

Let me do some handwaving with the word "antediluvian"....

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Go ahead!

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I think the existence of the place in Mythic Europe still makes sense, even if the biblical account of creation is correct. It's just a bit younger than the real world counterpart.

I mean Dogger bank must exist, because medieval sailors surely would have been aware of it.

Even if the inspiration for the regio is a period which didn't exist in Mythic Europe, the same evidence we have for that period having happened in the real world probably exists in Mythic Europe (because it's something that at least educated people in the period were aware of to a point) it just has a different explanation.

Contrary maybe to the popular conception, ancient and medieval people were fully aware of the existence of fossils and had theories as to their origin. Aristotle thought that the "seeds" of animals could drift into the earth and engender stone structures resembling the animals. Avicenna upheld that there was some "plastic force" acting in the earth just sort of randomly made things that looked like bones coincidentally sometimes. Even purely religious writers like St. Augustine talk about these ideas (though in his case it's mostly just to say "don't waste time thinking about it too hard, faith is what's important"). Another theory was that the flood was so powerful that it lifted up much of the earth and animals on it and mixed them all up before depositing them, explaining how you can find seashells on mountaintops and bones embedded in stone.

All this to say that the idea of an ice-age remnant makes sense to me in Mythic Europe so long as, in-universe, the explanation is something like it being an echo of lands lost in the flood, and it's aligned with animal so has all these enlarged and more vigorous versions of animals in it.

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There are numerous ways to look at it, my suggestion is to pick one for your saga and stick with it, and see if the players figure it out (they almost never even try, but I still am amused by it). This can range from Horatiology (more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in thy philosophy) and simply magical or faerie explanations from things that just don't fit into any real history to an idea that the Divine is actually a much more recent phenominon than most people believe, that the same way faerie came into being an usurped the magic realm that the divine and infernal are actually the new kids on the block pretending to be ancient, to some cthulu/Lovecraftian based undiscovered 5th realm (possibly including the Muspeli and their "magic" auras that only they can use.

It is perfectly true that the universe was created in about 4000 BC, in Divine and Infernal regios.

It is / can be perfectly true that magic places may be older than that.

In Ars Magica, reality is a local phenomenon.

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That is one way to look at it- YSMV

Traditionally Faerie Regio are often time-bending phenomena.
While Magic is an echo of the perfect. Maybe realler than real. Hence has a lot more History condensed into it. Hmmm, I am not certain where I am going with that thought.

Perhaps because Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Beasts resonate so deeply with a psyche, they are realler than real, and hence magical?

I think if you are going to have dinosaurs in your game that you have to work your game world cosmology into working with them rather than trying to justify it in terms of standard ars magica cosmology.

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I am just gonna leave this here...

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I wouldn't bring any prehistoric, dinosaur-age stuff in Mythic Europe as a GM, as I really don't think it fits. Things like the Silverpit crater are underwater, have been recently discovered, and therefore wouldn't be known or need to feature in a game at all. Any site that featured dinosaur remains that would have been known back then, I would probably explain away with mythical elements like dragons and giants. But if it entertains you to have a game with pterodaktyls and wooly mammoths, hey, more power to you. It doesn't fit in canon, but that doesn't mean you can't modfy the campaign setting and make it your own.

Okay, look, I am gonna apologize ahead of time if this stirs up trouble. I am saying this as a Greek Orthodox Christian.
...
Limiting the scope of the game to biblical history as interpreted by Europeans can be seen racist and dogmatic. That is NOT to say that has ever been nor ever will be the intent of the creators and writers. Mythic Europe is a piece of science fantasy fiction (the science in this instance being anthropology as relates to the study of history and sociology). This horse has been beat to death over more than thirty years. It tends to glorify ethnic mythology over actual history, and in that it can play into some uncomfortable ethno nationalism. Again, not accusing any one of that intent. But I see that effect all over the place in peoples posts. I see it in myself and games I have run!

If Ars Magica & Mythic Europe are to ever evolve and grow, if the producers of the game seek to expand the base of fans and customers, it needs to break the shackles that bind it to a specific place/time/religion/culture.

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For timelines, I also go with with it's dependent on who's answering. For my saga, Zoroaster gets placed at around 6,250 BC, the Western and Eastern Christian churches have different dates, Judaism ranges from 50,000 to 100,000 years, for Islam the Jinn were around before humans for many generations and jinn could live up to 1,000 years each so unknowable and pagan religions it depends on the religion. (Please note this does not represent the real world religion and is just a detail I added for my fictional saga that from very cursory internet research).

I also follow Tim's approach above and, depending upon the regio, all of the answers above are true. I don't give or have a definite answer in my sagas as the characters in my sagas have their own beliefs.

While not canon, I also leave the concept of whether the Divine is actually the Supreme realm in doubt. I follow all of the game mechanics for it overwriting auras etc, but there is no involvement from the Divine except through agents while with the religions based off of faerie deities said deities will actually intervene and be seen (the 'our gods walk among us' approach as articulated by Lagertha in Vikings is a similar example).

If Prometheus, for example, were to be interrogated by magic all results would give that Prometheus created all men from clay. On a angel based on the Abrahamic religions, all results would give that humanity came from Adam and Eve. The age of the world would depend on either whom the regio sprung from or give indeterminate results (Empyrean auras).

For Zorastrianism an angel (yazata) would give results consistent with Zorastrianism.

Essentially, I make the actual age and creation unknowable so that any answer could register as perfectly true, even if contradictory. Knowing the actual age of the world and which religion is the most powerful or most correct remains completely undefined. Something like Silverpit Crater can then easily fit in without any explanation needed.

TLDR: I like multiple explanations for unknowable knowledge such as who created the world, age of the world, etc in my games. Depending on the regio and whom the characters speak to, different answers will register as true even if the answers contradict each other.

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Ah, the real reason for the Limit of Time: if broken, it would allow magi to definitively determine the age of the earth, and thus determine which God is correct, which would violate the Limit of the Divine by breaching a divinely-appointed unknowable Mystery :stuck_out_tongue:

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The Doggerland artefacts exist in game - they are thought to be from before Noah's Flood. I stole the depth (and the Time Team special) for Transforming Mythic Europe.

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So, a source/deposit of Celestial Vis?? Being the micro-diamonds, of course.

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