In the shards and ashes of the old—

Since I suppose I am one of the vague and flitty demiurgic spirits, after all. —I think it’s the Silver Surfer that had a group of “paraimmortal” beings, that had survived the collapse of the universe before ours, and ridden out the Big Bang into the new?

Also, I have to keep reminding myself: all this Cholæic Order stuff is just a distracting side-project, set in the mythic past, while we work on the background for the main game.

Me?
Yeah, so Kip was all into this new game he'd picked up somewhere called "Ars Magica," and I was like, "like hell we're playing in Europe after we've just put all this work into the New Known World? It was bad enough you lot made me abandon the Old Known World, and now you want to set a game in freaking Europe? Nuh-UH!" So then he was like, "but Sarah! It has LATIN!" And I was like "I don't care if it has Aramaic and butterflies besides! I'm playin' in the goddamned Known World," and then he was like "Well, okay, maybe we can adapt it or something," and I was like "Weeeeell...okay."

Or something like that. It was a long time ago.

What I do distinctly remember is that Kip wrote out these 20-year census reports showing how many members there were in each of the Houses in that year, and I got sort of. Um. Into them. And decided that it might be fun to map out the family trees of all of those magi.

And that's the real reason, by the way, that the Cholaeic Order, for all of its blustering and bluffing and ancient vedettas and festering hatreds, is nonetheless really a rather peaceable place. It's those census reports. See, if any of the magi had actually ever killed each other, like they always so badly want to, then they would never have been able to meet those numbers on the census reports.

Heh. So. An accident of the creation process. But I rather like it. It gives the Order its own peculiar character, and it makes the magi seem all the nuttier, which is all to the good, as far as I'm concerned. It gives their ancient rivalries this weird kind of ugly neurotic Freudian Family Feud feel—a whole lotta of festering hatred, not so much with the actual killing; and then when the killing finally does explode, they're all blown away and shocked and traumatized, traumatized by it. ("It's all a whooooole lotta fun, until somebody loses a life!")

Like I said, a total accident of the creation process. But I'm into it. It amuses the hell out of me.

The census reports only went up to 398, of course, which is the real reason that everything started getting a whole lot more lethal in the fifth century.

And I wonder what the author of the "Brief History" would have to say about that, if only she knew?

Caleth at Annalum
(RE: Caleth)
I think she's gone sane now, I'm glad for her...

That reminds me.

Was I the only one whose first thought upon reading the Mille Lacus comic was "Oh! So that's how Caleth spends her time at Annalum!"

Or was that just me?

Destroyer of Worlds
I think that I was the one who killed off the old known world.

We created it over the course of about two or three years (1989-1991). I still remember my first contribution to it, which was the Choleic calendar (which survived the transition to the new known world). Sarah and I were sitting in Barry and Sarahs's effeciency apartment in New York, and I thought it would be cool to have the calendar be made up of the names of abstract concepts, so we started listing abstract concepts that seemed like good names for months. After we had a list of at least 24 concepts, we started putting them in a sequence that made sense. From that, the fall of the Priest Kings was born.

When we created the Old Known World, we each created a different country, and I was given the large Empire (which I named the Orsinian Empire after LeGuin's fictional European country Orsinia).

The old known world was originally conceived as being focused on the colonies of the Empire, and on a powerful Free Port (Ebdo Aqir), but in the only long running game that we played in the old Known World, the characters spent only a little while in the colonies, before running off to the the hinterlands (We structured the first game as a rotating GM-ship, with the idea that the party would travel through the countries of each GM).

I never really liked being responsible for creating the huge empire, and I tried to farm out regions of the empire to the other participants. This never really worked very well for some reason (mostly, the scale of the empire was huge, so the number of diverse regions it should have had seemed too many).

Eventually, I felt like the old Known World didn't work wery well as a shared world creation structure (even if many parts of it were very interesting), and I pushed for creating a new shared world, retaining as much of the old known world as people wanted (or could).

That is why we ended up with such a small core region (Tympania is smaller than France).

We still were planning for the world to be structured as GM-by-country (we also originally planned to play in the period around the year 800 (rather than 420)), but the Ars Magica game seemed like it fit earlier in the history (the later history was already established as less heavily magical). Once the Choleic Order became established, that become the focus of our creation. Although I've occaisionally talked about running a game set in the modern day of the known world, I doubt it will ever happen.

My countries within the known world are Gaetan, Orsinia, the Avereth Nations, Ashreg, the Ilohimbe, the Voscii, and the Ulveg (also known as the wolf-elves). Of these, only Gaetan has actually been seen in play. The Voscii and the Ulveg, and maybe some Orsinians, will undoubtedly put in an appearance during the Nimus Animae game.

Was she the one with the yo-y
Was she the one with the yo-yo? Well she's moved up in the world from string games, then.

: )

building up and tearing down
Fascinating. I had no idea about a lot of this. I never really realized that the Known World pre-dated the Cholaeic order. I can see how the gming by country might not work out in practice--It's taken a good 10+ years for it to move from one country to another, yes?

Whatever happened to God's Land? It's still out there isn't it? And I'm glad I got to hear a lot about Rig's country as Stellan, but I'm still curious about it.

And, yes, good reminder that this is all simply discussion of the mythic past both of the in-game material and the meta, but don't we want to remember the past in order to repeat it? Or something like that.

God's land
Although God still exists (he has a secret deal with Caroline Katherine), God's Land doesn't.

Originally, it was going to exist in the future (the modern day Known World), but Barry long ago hedged on that. Now it is unclear if it exists in the modern day, not that it matters terribly much.

Murry is not from the God's Land of this world, but is instead from the God's Land of the old known world. During play in the old known world, he was lost in a trans-dimensional gate.

Several other characters also crossed over from the old known world at the end of that game (Ivelani, Tilcarnacrobiandisan Manorbolicia Endepagarven, Indigo, and Michelangelo), but they are stranded in the modern day, so will probably never be seen again.