With RoP: Magic right around the corner (yay!!), I wanted to ask your opinions on what the Magic Realm really is? We get some clues and hints on the table of contents of the in the previews of the book, but what can we learn from that?
So, what are you hoping that it is? What should it not be?
Personally, I'm really hoping it's a place the magi can travel too, with natural laws not too different than the ones in our world. Maybe it's the "world as it could have been" or something like that?
I'm assuming that your question is "what's the Magic equivalent to Heaven, Hell, and Arcadia?"
Well, if there is one, it would probably be related to Greek Olympus.
Otherwise, it's the Garden of Eden (I know that Ancient Magic says differently, but that makes the most sense as it would be the location of the platonic exemplars).
There are some very interesting headers in the table of contents for RoP: Magic. "Worlds Within Worlds", "The Magic Archipelago" and "Pages of History".. can't wait to get the book to read on about these.
Anyway, what is the Magic equivalent of Heaven, Hell and Arcadia? I don't think it's Eden.. and I think Olympus might be a regio of some kind. I guess the place where magic comes from is less specific.. but Olympus is an interesting idea.
I hope you used Umberto Eco's Baudolino in some way. It is one of my favorite Ars Magica Sourcebooks. The historical background is lovely, and so are the chapters on mass producing relics and the Magic Realm. A must read supplement for Ars Magica!
New places to explore? Excellent. Sometimes, Mythic Europe can be a little too historical for some players. To open up new and fantastic horizons would really spice up our campaign.
From the table of contents which is already posted, some of the headers are especially interesting. What are these? Any ideas?
"The Magic Archipelago"
"The Twiligh Void"
"Pages of History"
"Worlds within Worlds"
Now, Pages of History, just to come with some wild speculation here, might be historical periods trapped in time, playing over and over again. An idea I had after watching the film 300 was to have that battle, as people who heard the tale of it imagined it, play over and over in a regio that covers the actual place. The various "stages" of the battle would be at various levels of the regio, and the magi could enter it, and move through the regio, up the levels, to experience the whole event.
Other historical events could also be "trapped" in regios in this manner, but they're flawed in some way, and the magi could enter to push things in the right direction.
Well, that's just one idea.
As for the Twilight Void, it might be where Magi go after Final Twilight. Could this be entered to access the minds of incredibly powerful magi? With a certain amount of risk, I might add.
Depending upon how much revision 5th Ed. intends to do--and I suspect that it's probably going to be extensive--then the Magic Realm is also the Spirit World. Although the anthropology of Eastern Europe's cultures needed work, and some other statements really don't mesh well with Mythic Europe as it's charted elsewhere, the Magic Realm described in "The Hidden Paths: Shamans" (3rd Ed.) is a truly fascinating place. It includes many of the phenomena described above.
In the Near Lands (those places nearest the mortal world) there were areas where time repeated, where the Animal Powers held sway, where legends lived out in ways similar to and different from their counterparts in Faerie, and where Elemental spirits dwelt. The Twilight Void was somewhere amid the Far Lands, where "reality" as we know it breaks down almost completely. For those acquainted with the original World of Darkness cosmology, yes, there were parallels to the Near and Far Umbra, but also serious differences. I thought that it was one of the better parts of "The Hidden Paths: Shamans".
Note that something akin to that depiction of the Magic Realm is assumed in the outstanding 4th Ed. Novogrod Tribunal sourcebook, "The Dragon and the Bear".
Mind it, it's not an absolute rule. The Magic realm has plenty of former humans, between daimons, legendary artists, and mages in Final Twilight. A better rule might be, is it more based on the power of stories and human imagination (faerie), or on the power of archetypes and primal nature (magic) ? But even that it's not clear-cut.
THe question is not "Does the Magic Realm have humans in it." IMO, it is "Does the Magic Realm care?"
I can see that I'm going to have to keep a bit quiet on these things until the other book is out, but the boundary that DAvid designed in ArM5 is that Faeries care about humans, and magical creatures care agbout their own goals which might or might not involve humans as incidental things.
To me, this makes Magic more a useful place for objective questing, and Faerfie more useful for stories with morals and social commentary, but that's just me.
I'm really interested to see how the 'story types' are divided amongst the realms. I am filled with doubts about whether I picked the right realm for my Outraged Giant-Talking-Crayfish Duke from my farce-like side-story last night... (I picked Magic, so that the magi could investigate once the story was resolved).
