Thoughts on Arcadia :)

I've been thinking about making a story set in Arcadia for some time, and I have some thoughts about the nature of Arcadia and how I could use it in the campaign. So I would like to share these thoughts, and get some comments maybe :slight_smile:
First, how big is Arcadia? It's about as big as I need it to be, I guess.
I really want to set a story there more akin to Chronicles of Narnia, where the Magi need to go through a portal and take part in an epic story. In fact, the Magi will go there several times, and each time they arrive, it's a different time, and they need to be there to make the story go forward. They are the key players, so to speak. This idea came from reading the description of Arcadia in the main book.
In Arcadia, there is a Faerie aura of 10 all through, right?

Well, any thoughts? I like the ideas in the Faerie book for 3rd edition on how to move around. Towards warmth and light to get you to the Bright Summer, for example. Think these methods will stay in 5th edition?

E.

There could also be strange places where you smell colours, taste sounds see voices and so an. Maybe the characters encounter such strange things while travelling trough those portals before reaching the exit. After all, Arcadia is a place of wonders, isn't it?

you may want to find an old changling book for ideas, it's been awhile since I've read it but i recall information on the various common types of fae, and how their courts/clans operated

What about time in Arcadia? Since faeries are interested in, and mirror, humans (if I understand it correctly), will the time period in Arcadia be the same as in the real world?
For example, could there be faerie knights with plate mail armour and faeries with blackpowder weapons? Or would it stay the same as in the real world? What would be "right" with the official Ars Magica take on Arcadia, I wonder? :slight_smile:

E.

If you ask that question, you're on the wrong page already.

Arcadia is so unpredictable as to defy definition, and whatever is true today may not be tomorrow. More, it should defy our "logic", and have a logic all of its own, an Alice-in-Wonderland sort of feel, very dreamlike. Writing a "definitive" book on it, trying to create a single "canon" would be to do it a disservice, altho' some general ideas and universal concepts are generally accepted. It will be different in almost every Saga.

Time? What is this "time" of which you speak? Ask Rumplestiltskin, and get back to me on that one. Fast, slow, meaningless, sure, why not.

Black Powder weapons? Ummm... maybe not iron ones... maybe something magical, created by the dwarves or goblins, sure, why not.

Wow, where to start...

Well, one of my friends recently ran an arcadia adventure.

Some things that he did are:

roll a d10 each day to see how time passes in the real world. on a 1 a day in arcadia is a year, 2 is a season, 3 is months, 4 is weeks, 5, 6, and 7 is a day, 8 is an hour, 9 is a minute, and 10 is a second.

The "queen" of arcadia isn't a faerie. His reasoning was that all of arcadia are dreams, and if faeries are made from the dreams of mankind, then the queen of the faeries can't dream her own existence into place. He had the queen of Arcadia as a 9 year old girl - pretty creative IMHO.

Another thing he did was have different areas of arcadia be actual dreams of mortals. if a mortal was dreaming if being tortured in an infernal hell, then the aura was infernal for all practical purposes. Same thing for people dreaming of meeting "God" - of course all of these were dream versions of heaven and hell, so anything was fine. a never ending maze that you don't find a way out of until you are totally lost and the players are so pissed they are crying (LOL) or a bright light that you keep running towards but cannot reach.

Basically he was going on "Arcadia is dreams given life". anything dreamt is real there.

We ended up spending 3 years and 2 seasons (ME time) hopping from dream to dream until we found arcadia proper. After that the queen asked us to deal with the unseelie courts plans to destroy the seelie court. She understood that seelie and unseelie had to coexist, but of course the unseelie court doesn't see it that way.

Sounds like Arcadia was Dream's realm, from Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

Even with the Cuckoo :wink:

Hum... Neil Gaiman's work, like in the books of magic, can give good ideas on faeries, notably on their strangeness and nonhuman ways.

Many moons ago, I happened to catch a Twilight Zone marathon on TV, and :bulb: some of those episodes struck me as very Faerie-like. You may want to check out some DVD's of that show for inspiration.