World-Building (Magic Vegas)

v60e Chapter 1 continued
=== World-Building ===
This setting leaves a lot of flexibility. Whether that’s a feature or a bug depends on time available to prepare. Most of the magical traditions below haven’t been fleshed out, and that’s intentional as it leaves room for players to get involved, but if they don’t wish to, that burden falls to the GM. He’ll also have to profile delegates and their aides, the main people with whom player characters interact, and figure out their goals for the Council. That’s a worthwhile exercise for learning the potential of a powerful magician, and the template will help. A good approach is to fill three rolls for each delegation – operations, outreach, and security (perhaps a Strategist, Musician, and Spirit Warrior from the sample builds in Appendix I). Make one the lead delegate and the other two his aides, at the same social level as the player characters; that should generate plenty of opportunities to interact. Remember that divination is possible, so break out a Tarot deck (or find one online) and perform readings in advance for major NPCs. 
When Council activities have large-scale ramifications, think about how other magicians react. When events in the real world, from scandals to earthquakes, have possible magical explanations or ramifications, think about which magicians would have a stake in engineering them, and if they’d have the means.
The key is to start small. Even though player characters are powerful on paper, their players won’t have a handle on them, or the rules and paradigm of the setting, at first. When a player character first performs a ritual in game, break out the Ritual Plan (Appendix III) and work through it slowly; don’t worry, it will soon become second nature. Try to get a sense of where things are heading, and use time between sessions to fill in the parts of the world that will be highlighted next. If the players decide they need to consult the delegation from Mandalay Bay, work on that, or if they crash an airplane with a Gremlins ritual, decide whether anyone on the National Transportation Safety Board is connected to magicians. If a player wants to help, maybe by fleshing out one of his tradition’s Otherworlds, let him. The world is big, and even Magic Vegas is big, but the player characters can’t explore it all at once. 
==== Magic and Technology ====
In the sense that magic is an application of knowledge, magic is a technology, though it is not specifically rated by tech level; that comes with ancillary skills. Starting from zero, as technology improves, magic improves too. Wider communication through space, and with writing through time, make possible the sharing of ideas that result in a mature tradition (maximum number of paths, all applications thereof known at least to experts). Because discovering new rituals is easier than inventing new manufacturing processes, a mature magic tradition depends more on organizational technology than material culture. It happens in strong states at TL1, and then at TL2 syncretism starts to occur. On through TL3-4, changing nature to something more convenient, while quite difficult, is easier than making use of existing natural law in many respects, but starting at TL5, material technology, especially mass production, is more convenient than magic, and by TL7, people can live quite comfortably with no magic at all. 
Can magic advance to be more competitive again? While the worldlaw which rituals channel is well-known to magicians, it’s not well-understood, having never been subject to such intensive multi-generational scientific investigation as have the laws of nature. The worldlaw invoked to make walking on water possible, for instance, has significant implications for fluid dynamics that could make new kinds of chemical processes and hydraulic machines possible. Again, this is less a matter of existing material culture than a matter of organization, for the pool of scientists whose own skepticism won’t interfere with the necessary research is quite small. Collecting minerals and biosamples from dozens of worlds, then analyzing their properties on yet more worlds, would be a mammoth undertaking for legions of researchers, all of whom would have to overcome their own Skepticism in order to be involved in such a project, notwithstanding sabotage by Monotheists, Rationalists, and rivals. 
==== More Worlds ====
Channeling magicians have access to the sourceworlds of their magic, magnifying the world-building challenge exponentially. These vary in habitability. Some are deeply flawed or downright deadly, best explored in spirit as visiting in flesh requires suppressing local worldlaw on a scale that can be expensive. Since machines may not hold up well with no infrastructure to support them, the best way to get around is with the aid of a strong horse, because it can survive where humans can. Such worlds have never been well-explored, but their unattractiveness can be a virtue, so some traditions set up hidey-holes in their hell-holes. 
On the other hand, a few Otherworlds are quite desirable real estate; most traditions have one, and some have more, likely settled since ancient days, and even a tradition effectively dead in modern times could have a Believer base on its Otherworlds, to various degrees isolated and possibly unwelcoming to interlopers, even those who share their magic. How large are these communities, and to what degree have they explored and expanded across the worlds they inhabit? What are flora and fauna like? Do manifest spirits dwell among them, and do ghosts of Believers supplement their population? How have their cultures and languages evolved, what wars have they fought, and how sophisticated is their technology? 
Here’s a default set of answers to these questions: Colonizing has its challenges, do initial populations were small, but they grew fast because the worlds where they exist are so nice, but that amounts to wealth, which slowed the growth. Nice worlds support high population densities, so while they may have explored they haven’t expanded much, maybe quadruple the territory historically held by their cultures of origin. Even so, there’s room enough that political disagreements tend to result in weaker factions leaving to start their own city-states, and enough time has passed since the heyday of any tradition that there are quite a few teeming cities that have changed alliances many times. Geography isn’t a perfect match to Earth-as-we-know-it and may include places and biological cryptids known from legends of the culture of origin, but anyone opening a gate from dry land will arrive on dry land, at ground level, regardless of relative elevation. Magic is widespread, an industry, with as many magicians per capita as a modern world has engineers, but nearly everyone is a Believer. Therefore assorted spirits can walk among them and rise to honored positions if they participate in society. Ghosts of Believers from elsewhere don’t manifest but do reincarnate in babies born on the Otherworld. The teaching of magic keeps language from drifting much; all local languages are dialects (one-level default) of the liturgical language. Tech level is around 4+1, with the +1 based on discoveries about the application of local worldlaw; it’s less than modern partly because idyllic worlds generate less necessity to mother invention and partly because small populations innovate more slowly. However, even if the population has long been isolated, magicians can channel their past lives, some of whom are familiar with near-modern technology, but knowing about it doesn’t make deployment easy. For those in contact with magicians of their tradition in more technologically advanced places, import is an option, but that’s inhibited by differing worldlaw and by protectionism. 
==== Gods and Other Spirits ====
Players don’t get all the fun, designing their traditions, for here are a couple of important questions left for the GM: First, what are path-gods like? The easy answer is that they’re alien and aloof, inscrutable, operating at a time rate so slow and a level of consciousness so deep that clear communication is impossible, tinged more by the supplicant’s expectation than the god’s response, if any. They sleep and dream their worlds into existence, and while they could abjure any act of channeling, the magician who draws upon their power will be dead before they even notice his existence, but there’s no rule against activist path gods. Just ask yourself how many path gods there are, how many magicians can channel each, and what proportion of these relationships you’ll need to track. 
The other big question is what happens when we die, and this setting postulates an undying spirit (but not unkillable – take enough damage while immaterial, from other spirits or Ghost Sword, and risk annihilation). This undying spirit can reincarnate, go to an Otherworld (or both), or interact with the living via magic or their own powers. The easy answer is that spirits of non-Believers reincarnate with no memories of previous lives (often as beasts), that spirits of Believers likewise reincarnate if that’s what they Believe in, or go to an Otherworld if that’s what they believe in, where they may yet reincarnate if living things exist in that world, and that Lay to Rest means they can’t come back. When it is dramatically appropriate, the spirit persists as a ghost, usually an Eidolon but potentially any other kind, often with but a shadow of the skills and sense of identity it had in life. From there it can fade away or grow in ST, gaining points which it can apply toward recovering its lost knowledge or even acquiring new skills. The GM decides all these things, including what if any conditions, like Day of the Dead celebration, support this growth. 
The question is most relevant for a tradition with habitable worlds, and again the easy answer is that ghosts first haunt these worlds (during which they could be Summoned back) and then reincarnate as inhabitants, with no access to their own memories. However, some fraction of them may become magicians, and these can Channel their own past lives. Unfortunately their current consciousness is suppressed during the procedure, but an accomplice can interview the past life and perhaps learn things that enable the Otherworld to keep up with scientific advancements on Midgard. As usual, harder answers can be more satisfying.