And with any other realm, twice zero RP is still zero RP.

The argument that the PC population doesn't reflect the NPC reality is a dangerous slope, in my view. It makes it very difficult to open up a realm to RP, because the PCs are so 'special' as to be a completely ignorable minority. This puts the PC in the position of having to basically fight an immobile vacuum, where they can shout and fight all they want, nothing will actually change regarding their desires or situation.

If one is going to go that route, one should at least be able to make the PCs an actual 'class' of mages with rules that apply to them but not the general Pathi population - sort of an acknowledgment that most PCs just do not face the same situations as the Typical Pathian.

An option in that case might be to define the Exoterikos - or hey, if you want to say the Exoterikoi really do mostly stay in pathi compiling research, invent some OTHER class that means "mage who acquires information and conducts research outside of Pathi/gets involved in politics and events outside of Pathi", and start defining rules for that class which can benefit RP for the PCs while leaving the rest of Pathi in its isolationist shell.

Cos we might be Special as in rare, but we're also Special as in we can affect the world outside of Pathi - at least in theory. Pathi is not run by stupid people, just possibly paranoid people. If there are going to be people who leave Pathi *anyway*, people with ties to lands other than pathi, does it not seem intelligent and reasonable that the rulers of Pathi would find some way to treat this as a *resource*, even if officially it's disapproved of?

However, that would not, of course, reflect the PC population. We're all special :)

Another thing that makes a lot of the PCs special is that it seems like half or more have Amber blood, which makes them *very* special.

If you want to shake things up, have Pathi land on top of some other GC realm for a while :) Frankly, I don't know if its possible though, because I never learned any of the metaphysics of the place, even OOCly.

As for the Golden Hunter plot, it sounds interesting. One thing comes to mind though: most of the time, we don't /really/ fight with magic. We hurl around elements that were driven by magic. For example, one of my favorites was to create lava pebbles and shoot them at the target. Once accelerated, the rocks are real rocks, moving at real speed, and are hot as real lava. Is that a magical attack?

Another question is whether "magic immune" means "chaos immune"… :-P

In any case, I was never one looking for a fight.

I agree - pathi's IC isolationist policy has just about killed it as an RP venue. I do believe that it would benefit Pathi to work on altering the canon, as it were, to make it more accessible to non-pathians. There's also not a lot available to prospective players about Custos, so I've had to go with what little I know of them. (I think I've only met one PC custos, and she wasn't usually with her mage.)

Before I went on hiatus I had permission to take over the Golden Hunter plot, and I am still toying with the idea of Pathi deciding it's become so isolated and magic-dependent that a faction arises to *force* its borders somewhat more open - at the very least, to the level that Jade grants a sort of "status of personhood" to non-Jadians it likes. If people can't GO to Pathi to RP, and people can't READ about Pathi to understand it (even OOCly) the prop…well, it withers.

The mages that I've encountered were *not* all Testers - I think only one of the mages I met/worked with was a Tester. Mostly they seemed to go to Pathi to learn, and then take that knowledge back to their other-Shadow, either to rule it or defend it or whatever. Quinlan himself isn't a Tester; he's actually more…I think the word was "exoterikos", mage who is actually interested in researching the universe outside of Pathi (and, frankly, of the Golden Circle). Such mages could totally use a Custos (or two? is more than one allowed per mage?) and it's not unreasonable to think they might find people they think could handle the work outside of Pathi.

The Golden Hunter, as I understood it, is immune to magical attack. Thus, his appearance is a real *problem* for a Pathi whose Academy of Iron appears to be badly weakened (I seem to recall hearing a lot of the Academy of Iron got wiped out against the Black Road). Could this be used as a reasonable IC wedge to open Pathi up a bit more both IC and OOC?

Since most/all Custos came from Pathi, and everyone in Pathi is magically gifted, I think that is therefore true for all Custos. Now "magically gifted" may not mean a wizard, though my Custos was a mage as well. I suppose that should mean BLD-PA, but that is chargen-only. I guess MAG-SE would be OK as well, but that has some fairly high prereqs. I would probably tend towards being permissive, but then again, I'm not the propco…

ICly, it should probably be more surprising than not for a non-Pathi to have ever heard the term, much less meet one. After all, Pathis are supreme isolationists (well, except for those … Amberites!) and only a handful traveled outside—and most of those were Testers (which I was). My best guess is that in a given year maybe only 20-30 Pathis ever travelled, and not all had Custos (I didn't, for example).

In retrospect, having Pathi be isolationist and off-limits sounded a lot cooler than it was really practical. I think it made it a mostly "dead" place for RP. The Black Road invasion brought some badly needed socialization to the place.

Whatever you can do to rebuild interest in Pathi is great. But I notice from the +rwho that not many of us play much these days, so you'd be starting almost from scratch. That could be a liberating aspect, perhaps, as it leaves everything a much more open book.

Also, most new Pathians are mages, not custos. I'd really like to see more custos - I'd really like to see more bonded pair *Pathians*. And I think a way to do that is to open up Pathi a bit. It's already possible to be a 'late blooming mage' - that is, take the ARC-CT gift outside of chargen. Unless you've saved up a LOT of points from chargen, such mages are always going to be behind the chargen (raised in Pathi) mages; it basically takes nearly a year to cast one simple spell, two years if you have to include all the prereqs. That's two OOC years, and that's enough Special time for chargen, I think. Probably more than enough. MUSH time is supposed to be faster than RL, not slower.

It may've been getting around that I've tried getting a not-from-chargen custos at least once, too. This, however, which you'd think would be easier than a not-from-chargen mage, is actually harder; the gift is chargen locked. I think this rather unfairly limits the role of custos to "alt designed specifically for one character", rather than allowing organic relationships to form.

We are, again, talking Years Of Training - but Custos is merely a five point gift. Which, past chargen, means five months RL time. Is this too short, for someone coming to the gift 'cold'? We could add prereqs - say magicsense is required, or a fight bit (meaning the Academy of Iron doesn't have to teach you to fight PERIOD, just add the necessary skills to fight as a CUSTOS). Or a fight-lore requirement, or a quest where one gets signoffs from the mage one wants to be custos to, some training scenes with the academy of iron, tests of ability… or some combination of all of the above.

I think the custos is a very neat idea, and I think Pathi would be served as a prop by allowing it a better chance to be demonstrated in RP. Right now when I bring the term up to someone who hasn't played a Pathian, I get "What's a custos?" in return.

The prop is unlikely to grow if we're just the Land of Squishy Mages. (Men In Skirts Division.) I think that the option should be there, particularly since there are often fighting-type characters around who find themselves wondering what to do, how to grow. We could make 'custos' an option (provided there's a mage around for them to be a custos TO) and Pathi as a prop could possibly gain some IC weight on the grid.

Thoughts?