Oh. I thought the Magic Realm was the Twilight Void, or vice versa, and that has to exist, no?
I don't bother with the Magic Realm as a place in my sagas, so this change means nothing to me. If you keep magic creatures with might and powers as before, we are back to my original trouble with 3ed/4ed. What is the difference between faerie and magic?
I'm far more into the "Merge Faerie and Magic together" camp rather than "eliminate" one or the other.
I haven't thought that out. My first thought is that, since magi are still human and magic can't override or subvert the divine, their souls are still ultimately subject to the same laws as everyone else's. It could be some kind of Limbo. If we introduced that fourth realm of Death and Undeath, then the Twilight Void could be part of that.
My idea is more like merging Magic and the natural world or mundane realm.
As to what to call that realm of death, in my own games I've used Eldriche, which is Old English for "The Weird Realm". I suppose in Latin we could use Erebus.
Would the Death Realm have auras and regione and vis and mighted beasts?
Yeah, I would think so. Vampires, ghouls, wights, draugr, barghests, nightmares.... Auras would be centered around cemeteries, ancient barrows, old battlefields. Maybe you get a minor one when a house burns down with the family inside (ever felt that creepy feeling when you pass one?) Vis sources from bones of the dead, black, dead, creepy trees in the middle of a swamp, the undead creatures themselves, maybe creatures that feed on death like flies and maggots.
So that would give you five realms, each with its own auras, regione, vis, powers, and whatnot, even if it do not necessarily have an extraterrestrial land of its own.
Where would you put the typical dragon? Most are magic in canon, but if magic is nature, dragons no longer fit. Are they faerie?
I thought I understood but now I donāt. So there would be a realm that is not a realm? How would this magic non-realm interact with other realms? Or would it?
If we eliminated the magic realm, that is, made it one with the natural world, then it would still be four. If we're going by traditional European lore, dragons would be infernal. Other magical creatures on a case by case basis. But there could still be magical creatures in the world--should be, really, if magic is inherent in nature. I'd put the white stag in Faerie because when they follow it in medieval literature, that's where it leads them. Probably unicorns too. But a magical cat, or horse, or whatever, that could be the equivalent of humans being born with the Gift.
That is true if you actually eliminate it, but you suggested removing only the realm as a place, but retain auras, vis, and powers associated with the realm. Since I have never seen a PC even attempting to enter the Magic Realm as a place, that would hardly change the game at all.
Iām just wondering if this is a distinction without a difference or a difference without a distinction from what we had before The Magic Realm was introduced as a place in RoP:M.
Magic would be a thing, a power, but not a separate realm; not a "place" with metaphysical geography. Magic would be, like in the della Porta quote in my previous post, simply the occult power inherent in nature, and the art of magic would be extracting, exploiting, and manipulating that occult power. So a regio would be just an area high in that power, like some places have higher electromagnetism than others. In other words, it would be an extension of the Empedoclean and Aristotelian physics which are true in this world: the five elements, forms and substance, and all that. You could even associate Vim with Aether. In other words, magic would do in Mythic Europe what science does in the modern world.
Yes, that's what I'm going for--not to change the functioning of magic, really, just the theoretical substructure. So, now, if you picture the realms as overlapping circles with the natural world in the center, and the four circles of Divine, Infernal, Magic, and Faerie around it: this would make the Natural and Magic the same circle in the center, and make the peripheral circles Divine, Infernal, Faerie, and Eldritch (or whatever we decide to call it).
Then you have not solved, or even addressed, the problem I always had with Magic versus Faerie in 3ed/4ed. What goes where? Which creatures and entities are faerie, magic, and deathly? And in particular, where do the dragons go?
Well, we'd have to work that out on a case-by-case basis. I think my previous answer got lost above among several replies.
But they could still all be vis sources--Infernal, Divine, whatever. This is in accordance with history: it was very common to use the Consecrated Host in magic. Still is--Catholic churches in Latin America still have a problem with Brujos stealing the reserve Host.
You had the beasts of virtue covered already; the cattiest of cats etc. If we limit magic beasts to the exceptional specimens of species already associated with nature, I am fine.
Dragons seem to predate Christianity in folklore though; shouldn't that mean that need to belong to something other than Divine/Infernal?
This is not really the problem though, is the need for case by case decisions without any rule of thumb. Of course, if we ignore the Death Realm for now, and restrict magic to beasts of virtue, we essentially shuffle a whole lot of now magic beings into faerie. That would work, except that at one point I thought that you wanted to keep the magic beasts as magic.
If you add a Death Realm, you blow up the complexity again, and I shall oppose it as a matter of KISS.
Well, I say "we" work it out, meaning it would be done so as part of the re-design process; not by the players and SGs in each saga. What I really mean is that I haven't gone through and thought about what each one would be, yet.
Dragons pre-date Christianity, but in Mythic Europe, nothing predates the truth which Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions teach, about the Creation, the Fall, etc. So if pre-Christian pagans had a different view of dragons, they would simply have been mistaken, as they were about the gods. But I don't think it's necessary either to say that all legendary or mythical beasts belong to one of the four external realms: they could just exist, in the world, as part of nature. Of the magical version of nature we're discussing, that is.
To me, that is not good enough. Troupes need custom beasts too, and they need to assign a realm. I am not happy with just an arbitrary assignment.
That's just the Magic Realm then. You have simply said that the putative Location of the Magic Realm, whose existence has been doubted and disputed IC already, in fact does not exist. That gains us nothing; it only deprives us of the entertaining in character doubt that is Ars Magica's forte.
If you really want simplicity and clarity of definition, I suppose we could put anything completely mythical or legendary--unicorns, flying horses, chimaerae, centaurs, etc., in Faerie, and magical versions of real beasts (including extinct ones) and perhaps also beasts which never existed in nature but could have, in the Natural world.
Loke already made this point but to me it sounds exactly like you want a return to the corebook definition of realms (ignoring for a moment some relatively cosmetic reclassifications of beings). Sure, a āMagic Realmā along the lines of Heaven, Hell, and Arcadia is thought to maybe exist but there isnāt proof and it is a distinction without a difference from the Core rulebook definitions if it is definitively said that it does not exist.