How do you describe a Kingdom populated entirely by magic users?

[MonkeySage]

There's a fallen kingdom in my setting; it was at one time a sort of paradise, in which everyone could at the very least cast a couple of cantrips. Magic was so common place that it dominated every facet of even the lowliest commoners' lives. Basically, to call it a "magocracy" would be redundant.

It was eventually destroyed in a war between celestial and demonic forces, and the inhabitants were punished for magic abuse.

It is unlikely that my players will ever come into direct contact with this place, but it plays a central role in the history of my setting and an even bigger role in the plot of my current campaign. The people of my setting have mostly forgotten this place ever really existed, and even scholars dismiss it as mythology.

[TheYell]

Not sure I understand the question.

But, it sounds so unique, the name itself is the label. Like Camelot or Atlantis or Mu.

[MonkeySage]

Well, in the 'painting a picture' department, I'm pretty bad. I would like to impart a sense of mystery or something when my players come across this place, even indirectly. I wanna make them want to dig deeper.

[b4ndito]

Be brief. Tell them it was a civilization of magicians. Trust your players to imagine the rest

[TheYell]

From a distance the city glows faintly like moonlight.

Coming closer you see utter rubble. The city walls are not leveled, you realize they have been stove straight down so that the top of the wall is at ground level all around the city. It is as if no two bricks were left in place with each other. Looking closer, you notice no straight lines in the rubble, no mortar joining any angles. Some of the buildings looked to be clusters of spheres that fell and shattered. The topmost layers of rubble appear to be shattered walkways of natural wood as if buildings had grown smooth flat branches between them.

Walking through the radiant city, you notice a faint pleasant scent that changes by district, cinammon, lavender, lilac, honeysuckle, hot coffee, ginger.

Through the city you notice squat blocks of basalt rock man-high with steps carved along the faces. The tops are covered with ornate glyphs in a circle with broken pillars. The glyphs blaze with cold fire when you stand in the center, but the secret of the teleports is lost.

Pavements sometimes end in pools of water in front of cliffs, but the secret of the elevator fountains is gone.
There are grates in the pavement, some of which steam and give off a noise of distant underground machinery.

In the center of the city are rings of basalt stone statues, left upright but with the carved names and the faces melted to lava. When you reach the city center you realize that there is no wind in the city center, but walking to it or away from it the breezes blow from the center outward. Once the center of the city was marked with an ornate pool of mosaic tiles showing children eating a teeming platter of fruit; this has been broken and standing looking from the the south you see stamped into the tiles in stone-cracking footprints:

GEFALLEN
DER GROSSE
BABYLON

[GrayDeath]

You shall not google-translate.
Write it three dozen times!


If you wanted to repeat the usual sentence "Fallen has Babylon" in German its not quite...what you intended.
You wrote "Fallen The Big Babylon", which is somewhat funny, especially since you used the masculine form of "the big". ^^



The rest of your post however is really good.

Add in some remains that CAN (with difficulty) yield real information and its a go.

[Segev]

I would let them notice, with a perception check, a lack of tools amongst the detritus. Few wheeled conveyances, or even signs of beasts of burden. With magic being ubiquitous, mage hand, unseen servant, and tenser's floating disk would replace a lot of those things. Prestidigitation being a common thing would mean that colors are not a big deal, either; make everything in utilitarian colors, at least in terms of personal garments and items. People just color them as they wish whenever the mood takes them, as a rule.

Describe it in lavish colors, too, when anything references it; this should stand in stark contrast to their lack in the remains. (Again, prestidigitation was responsible, and without it, those colors are gone.)

You might also read a novel called Elantris, by Brandon Sanderson, for ideas. Whenever the eponymous city is discussed in terms of what it used to be, it's pretty good for the kind of thing you might want.

[TheYell]

well its a quote and anyhow he stamped it into the pavement as graffiti and left out IST and the commas. And as Martin Lawrence once said "The man's in Hell not in college"

glad it suits tho :p

OK I checked on my PC and the quote was "Sie ist gefallen, sie ist gefallen, Babylon, die große, " which makes me a cretin

[JohnnyCancer]

I have heard that the most common documentation to survive the civilizations of antiquity are related to agriculture and finance. Maybe invoices for eye of newt survived the fall of your magic civilization.

[Sam113097]

Emphasize its sheer alien-ness. This place was not built by normal tools, and it should show. If magic was omnipresent, the very buildings themselves could have been held together by magic. What is now a pile of overgrown rubble could have once been a series of floating gardens. There should be tools, magical devices, and inscriptions that make no sense, even when they are translated. In the real world, there are many specific terms used in science or computing. If these people were so magically advanced, they probably had magic down to a science.

[TheYell]

One of the ways to indirectly reference it would be to involve the legends of its fall. It might be said that Twenty celestial captains fought Twenty demonic knights for control of X__ and the demons lost so X__ was razed but not enslaved. And your party could meet one of the Forty of X__.

[Erik the Green]

If you're looking for atmosphere and attitude, I strongly suggest you get a hold of a copy of the 2005 collection of M. John Harrison's _Viriconium_ stories, especially "The Pastel City." These are in the same thought-space as Vance's _Dying Earth_, but less in a "the Sun could go out any minute" mode and more (if I can get the quote right) "the last of the Afternoon Cultures wrote their very names in the stars, not that any who came after could read them. Having achieved such satisfaction from the Universe as their abilities and desires would allow, they moved on. Years later, there came Viriconium." Anyway, Harrison's world-building has always struck me as more real than Vance, in the sense that even the mysterious things that no-one understood anymore were half-apprehendable and seemed like they had been made to do a thing, not just to be pulled out of the Sack O' Plot Devices.

P.S. And you could troll your players by having a clockwork metal raven swoop out of the sky periodically and warn them to "beware the geteit chemosit."

[ImNotTrevor]

There's a fallen kingdom in my setting; it was at one time a sort of paradise, in which everyone could at the very least cast a couple of cantrips. Magic was so common place that it dominated every facet of even the lowliest commoners' lives. Basically, to call it a "magocracy" would be redundant.

It was eventually destroyed in a war between celestial and demonic forces, and the inhabitants were punished for magic abuse.

It is unlikely that my players will ever come into direct contact with this place, but it plays a central role in the history of my setting and an even bigger role in the plot of my current campaign. The people of my setting have mostly forgotten this place ever really existed, and even scholars dismiss it as mythology.

If it is a place only rumored to exist, speak of it through children's stories and tall tales. Have it be the fictional backdrop for proverbs and parables. If it is forgotten and/or treated as myth, just do exactly that. Treat it like it's a myth. People who have artifacts from there should tend to be obsessive, insane, paranoid, or conspiratorial.

It should be the subject of a common saying, especially of incredulousness. "Oh yes, you're a guard. And (city) is a real place."
Or
"Stories of (city)" could be a common phrase for outlandish lies and stories.

You want to drive home "This place doesn't exist. It never existed." But don't be in their face about it (unless the whole story is obviously about tracking down this city). Just let its name trickle in as turns of phrase, old stories, or even viewed backwards as a zionistic yet-to-be paradise.

[Fri]

A magical realm A cookie to whoever know what this a reference to

[Storm_Of_Snow]

A magical realm A cookie to whoever know what this a reference to

Ah, you mean Tahiti.

Whatever survives would be heavily influenced by the most powerful mage in the area - from the architectural style to the plants in the area, and could wildly differ from one place to another within the kingdom (Archmage-dom?). Native plants may have started to grow back if the area's been abandoned, and some of the transplanted plants may have died because they can't handle the local weather conditions and were protected by magic that's now faded, but there could also be highly invasive species that are spreading virulently.

Same goes for animals, especially those that can have components for spells/magic items harvested.

Or you could have the magical equivalent of the exclusion zone around Chernobyl - something PTerry looked at with the Wyrmberg in Colour of Magic. And there's also Sourcery to look at for what happens when it all falls apart. And treasure hunters and similar scavengers might give the place a wide berth, despite the potential riches on offer, because so many protective spells still exist, while other spells are beginning to fade and are dangerously unpredictable, while some of the items that could be recovered are unstable.

Going back to tools, some mages might insist that people use tools for various tasks, and have to earn the right to use spells. Other people might have to use them because they never quite got the hang of the cantrips for, say, reaping wheat, removing the ears and binding the stalks up, but still have to bring the harvest in.

[Fri]

Oh yeah, or you could have the magical version of the zone in Stalker/Roadside Picnic (though the original roadside picnic novel works better)

Basically there's this zone of magical radiation filled with dangers and mutated animals and mysterious warped environment and magical storm (though might still be beautiful in weird way instead of a desolate wasteland). The stronger you are to the center the stronger the warp and mutated monsters are. The zone is filled with ancient artifacts, so people still venture there to scavenge them, but it's very dangerous, and nobody ever reached the center.

You can add what other suggested in the zone, like ruins where even the lowliest hut have weird things, and the magical artifacts aren't necessarily magic armor or weapons, but frying pan that heat itself, self-filling inkpot, shovel +2 against manure, etc.

[goto124]

self-filling inkpot

Spoiler: Remember the story of the magic porridge pot?

Show

[Kantaki]

You shall not google-translate.
Write it three dozen times!

If you wanted to repeat the usual sentence "Fallen has Babylon" in German its not quite...what you intended.
You wrote "Fallen The Big Babylon", which is somewhat funny, especially since you used the masculine form of "the big". ^^

The rest of your post however is really good.

Add in some remains that CAN (with difficulty) yield real information and its a go.

Eh, "der" aside* the sentence is fine. The phrasing is a bit poetic/archaic sounding, but for a fallen magocracy it should be fine.
*"das" or maybe "die"** would be a better choice.
**Unless I'm wrong it should be "die". Cities are like ships. They count as female

Spoiler: Remember the story of the magic porridge pot?

Show

What's the problem? They didn't starve and got a fancy wall for their city. They might come to hate Porridge after a while, but that's a minor drawback.
Ink would even less troublesome, it flows away.

[Coidzor]

What's this about Germans going on about Babylon and being so frazzled they bork their grammar?

[ThinkMinty]

A magikopolis, or something to that effect. A magocracy is merely ruled by magicians, but a magikopolis is a state of magicians.

[Guran]

In the homebrew campaign world I built I named the magic driven "kingdom" the Magiperium. Or at least that is how outsiders refer to the land.

[Coidzor]

I'm reminded of the Greek(?) Conception of there having been several races of Men that came before them, made from different substances, one of which challenged the gods and we're destroyed for their hubris.

They also thought that the grand constructions of the proto-Greek culture there had to have been made by great giants, the cyclopses, hence Cyclopean architecture.

So that leads to a potential for either A. Thinking it's some other creatures' work or B. Associating it with a mythohistoric race of High Men.

Or they could call it a den of witches, I guess.

[Donnadogsoth]

There's a fallen kingdom in my setting; it was at one time a sort of paradise, in which everyone could at the very least cast a couple of cantrips. Magic was so common place that it dominated every facet of even the lowliest commoners' lives. Basically, to call it a "magocracy" would be redundant.

It was eventually destroyed in a war between celestial and demonic forces, and the inhabitants were punished for magic abuse.

It is unlikely that my players will ever come into direct contact with this place, but it plays a central role in the history of my setting and an even bigger role in the plot of my current campaign. The people of my setting have mostly forgotten this place ever really existed, and even scholars dismiss it as mythology.

Try this world, it's close to what you describe.

Darksword
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darksword

Darksword Adventures: The Complete Guide to Venturing in the Enchanted Realm of Thimhallan
http://www.amazon.com/Darksword-Adve.../dp/055327600X

[Beleriphon]

To a degree a kingdom populated entirely by magic users is going to be much like Harry Potter's world. At least the magical one, where everything and I mean everything has a ridiculous magical way of doing things even though mundane functions might be easier to use.

[LokiRagnarok]

Eh, "der" aside* the sentence is fine. The phrasing is a bit poetic/archaic sounding, but for a fallen magocracy it should be fine.
*"das" or maybe "die"** would be a better choice.
**Unless I'm wrong it should be "die". Cities are like ships. They count as female.

Not true. Mostly you don't use any articles with proper names, like city names.
I'd translate it as "Gefallen ist Babylon".

[GrayDeath]

Indeed, the proper translation for the abbreviated variant.
If you add in "Die Große" its a bit more melodramatic.

Also we Germans dont bork our Grammar. it is borked already, we just ... live with it. ^^

[Kantaki]

Not true. Mostly you don't use any articles with proper names, like city names.
I'd translate it as "Gefallen ist Babylon".

That is certainly true for „normal” speech. If you start using more poetic, flowery, melodramatic speech, titles and epitaphs articles can be appropriate.
In this case calling Babylon „die Große” is fitting.
Poetry usually can break/ignore/creatively reinterpret grammar rules.

On topic: Depending who is describing that city it could be called Utopia, Abomination, Nightmare, Home, the (old) Enemy... or simply (and most likely if it was unique) by its name and/or epitaphs.

[Bohandas]

Spoiler: Remember the story of the magic porridge pot?

Show

The version I heard as a kid had pasta

[Concrete]

I'd suggest using charlatans.
Let the most gullible people around be those who'll buy anything connected to the place.
Let the most outrageous con-artists claim to have extrapolated their secrets and turned them into a hair-tonic.
Let the laziest bards tell of outlandish journeys there, let them use it as a backdrop for any bawdy lay about magic.

But if it's forgotten, maybe it survives in words. Words alluding to hubris. Words cautioning against making powerful enemies.
Or maybe words used to describe great skill or genius.
Or words used as in-jokes between the smuggest of scholars?

Depending on how much has been forgotten, it's hard to describe it at all.

[Kantaki]

The version I heard as a kid had pasta

I think I heard it with mashed potatoes. And/Or some other kind of mash/pap. Doesn't this story exist (almost) everywhere? Usually with some local version of simple, but filling (and usually tasty) food?