The core text for Sanctuary of Ice is The White Mountains by Karl Felix Wolff. It entered the public domain recently, so I could record it or do Ars Magic annotations. I’ve been thinking about why I haven’t started work on a 25th anniversary update for Sanctuary, and I’ve decided its because the Magic Realm doesn’t seem to work and I don’t want to fix it.

I know that sounds a bit like Carl Sagan baking an apple pie from scratch by first constructing the Universe, but hear me out. The two Doma Magnae in the Greater Alps are meant to hold up the two ends of the Order’s view of the secrecy of magic so discussing them requires a Magic Realm that makes each work. Our current magic realm has never really worked for me as a place to tell stories. It, and the magical creature construction rules, are wonderfully intricate world-building that I’ve not really wanted to use because they are, numerically, heavier than I like. Note that Realms of Power : Faeries is also heavier than I’d like and I did some of that crunch, so I’m not criticizing the other authors. I’m talking about my, personal, response to the material, not making any claim as it if it is good or bad in some universal sense.

House Jerbiton believes many things, but let’s look at the least mystical view of magic. One view is that humans have been given dominion over the Earth by God, and are permitted to create things from the earth as subordinate creations. Magic is a literal Gift, a charism, given to some humans to do this. The human sense of beauty is the aptness method of measuring the way magic is being used. This idea does slightly post-date the setting, but it makes the Jerbiton the opposite of the Crimon. Where magic comes from is simple, and how magical actions can be judged is innate to all people. Jerbiton’s philosophy is why Bonisagus called magic an Art.

The Magic Realm to a Jerbiton, is where the Forms are. These are the underlying structures on which human creativity drapes matter. You might want to go there because there are things you have not seen in the real world, or which cannot yet be rendered in matter. It’s where dreams are said to come from. There’s a place for a Realm in their cosmology, in the sense that God has an attic, but it’s not of itself as interesting as, say, going to a neighboring country is likely easier and where you will also see things you’ve never seen or thought about..

House Criamon was a mess when I wrote it up. It was a pastiche of Zen Buddhism and carried the weird White Wolf idea that mental illness was a fun thing for ables to play tourist in. A previous book had tied them to Empedocles. They also liked to stab their Primi for reasons not entirely clear. Their domus magna is named after Socrates’s allegory of the cave, but in a way not connected to any of the other bits. I’m not criticizing using allegories as direct statements, by the way, that’s at least half the episodes of this podcast. My desire was to make this all come together into a single philosophy and I used Greco-Buddhism because it let me hold as many of these bits together as I could.

Criamon’s pretty clearly a Pure Land Bodhisattva. To explain what that is, a bodhisattva is a teacher who could become a buddha and pass permanently from the cycle of suffering, but has chosen not to, as an act of compassion toward those still trapped in the world. A pure land bodhisattva is a teacher of this type that has created a spiritual land where people, usually the dead, can go to avoid rejoining the cycle of suffering through reincarnation. Additionally the Pure Land might be the perfect place for spiritual study. I’d note that some of these lands are not entirely pure: some bodhisatvas allow people who are really morally compromised into their lands. Similarly, in their lands, there are things the inhabitants can do which push them further from enlightenment. This is generally to allow the bodhisattva, who resides there, to teach.

To House Criamon, magic is complicated: arguably it is so complicated that its discussion requires not only a specialist jargon, but a series of intuitive leaps that a student can be guided toward, but not carried through. To a magus dancing on the far edge of Criamon’s obscurantism, arguably the Magic Realm doesn’t exist at all, or is so poorly defined as to be a pointless thing to discuss. Certainly Twilight exists, but are we sure that any of the stuff around it is truly separate? Deep Twilight, Final Twilight – the places from which no-one returns, aren’t necessarily different from the rest of the Pure Land in a fundamental way. The Mediterranean Sea, which is relatively easy to sail in, and the Atlantic Ocean, which is notoriously not so, are connected parts of a whole. The distinction between them is a human one. Similarly the Realm of Magic might just be the Pure Land viewed by people who are, to stretch the metaphor, inexperienced sailors.

There’s an argument that Magic doesn’t have a Realm because magic isn’t actually a thing. Let’s look at this from the metaphor of physics. Centrifugal force isn’t a real force, it’s an apparent force. You’ve experienced it if you’ve ever been on a playground ride that spins, or if you’ve ridden in a car that takes a sharp corner, but that’s because your frame of reference creates the illusion of centrifugal force. What’s happening is a mixture of your inertia and your frame of reference moving without it being obvious to you. The reason I’ve mentioned this is that in special relativity, gravity is an apparent force. When you fall off a roof, are you falling toward the ground or is the ground rising up to hit you? The argument under Newton is that you’re moving toward the Earth because it is bigger, and because to a person watching you sees the Earth as stable and you as moving. The thing is, what if there were five of you falling toward the ground? You could look at that witness and say “Why is he rising up to meet us?” Consensus is convenient, but it’s not decisive because all you’re doing is comparing the frames of reference of the observers, not the underlying truth. This is one of those intuitive leaps that Criamon like so much: gravity is something you use every day and it’s not actually real.

In special relativity, gravity is the movement of an object in a straight line through curved spacetime. You, on Earth, are in an non-inertial frame of reference, which is to say you are moving, much as the roundabout is moving in the centrifugal example. If you’re ever in an inertial frame, like space, the apparent force disappears. Why am I mentioning this? Because you can argue magic in Mythic Europe is like this.

House Criamon says the washing tides of vim that coat the Earth are a result of the universe’s decay into complete chaos. This is also why Creo needs vis and Perdo doesn’t. What this means is that if you’re sitting outside the cycle of decay and integration, in Criamon’s Pure Land. You might discover magic isn’t a real force, its just an observable effect of the decay. When you drop a ball, you aren’t controlling gravity: you’re setting the ball on a straight path through spacetime. Similarly when you casting a spell, you aren’t controlling maqic, you’re just letting a thing (called a daimon by some mystery cults, unhelpfully, do what it does in through the vim aura. Looking from outside, magic may not be a thing and its Realm might an emanation of Criamon’s spirit.

Now, I’m not suggesting in Mythic Europe either of these are true. What I am saying is that if I want to expand out what Primus Andru and Prima Muscaria are doing, I need to find a way to link ideas like these into the Magic Realm book, and it doesn’t give me a lot of good points to hook in, or at least I haven’t seen them.

This is paralyzing as an author, because I’m not good at mechanics compared to the other authors, and it really does feel like when I’m looking a a Sanctuary redone to 5th edition rules, what I’d need to do first is fix the Magic Realm.