We just released a new video on our world building magic, and we thought we’d follow up with a bit more detail, for those who are curious.

The first place you see in the video, with the fountains, misty mountains, and cypress trees, is part of the village called Memorata. Remember Gordon’s blog “Memorata Magic“? This is where you’ll learn about revisiting your past and harvesting your memories. It’s also where, if you share your memories with other mages, a gold statue of your avatar will allow other mages to access your memories. Can you imagine this place filled with golden statues of mages, each one containing their shared memories?

The dark locale is the beginnings of a Village called The Festivale. It will be the gathering place, magical showcase, and celebration center of Mage Faire, where you’ll find buskers, games, and other magical entertainment. It’s always night time in the Festivale, and it’ll be decked out in a sort of New Orleans Mardi Gras style. For the video, we left it wide open, so there would be plenty of room for world-building. When it’s completed, it will be like strolling around a magical version of the French Quarter.

The spectacularly colorful forest with the gigantic mushrooms is part of Majestica. Here you learn all sorts of customization, like changing color and size, as well as how to conjure and destroy things, and the world-building itself.

In this video, we focused on making what we call an architectum (pronouced ahr-kuh-TEK-tum). Any world-building “thing,” from the cloud walkways to the palm tree forests to the fanciful sparkles is an architectum. A key aspect of making an architectum is choosing your sources. And that raises the very important question: Where do the sources come from?

Early in your mage life, you find them through exploring the world, or in scavenger hunts. You’ll be grateful, we think, for the beautiful sources our artists have created for you. As you get more advanced, though, you may wish for more control over what goes into your architectums, and you can learn how to create and animate the sources themselves.

The other key aspect of making an architectum is how you move your avatar, and we have found that this generates frequent surprises! You can choose the exact same source, and move a different way and have no idea what you’re going to get until you back up and see what you made. A week or so ago, I made the golden “cage” in the video inside-out by accident. I just turned the other direction or something without thinking. And when I moved back to see, I burst out laughing, because it looked like a giant golden martini glass! Who would have guessed?

Another point we want to make about architectums is that once you’ve made one, you can conjure it again and again. We might, for example, use the cobblestone bridge with lamps that we made in the video to go over every canal in The Festivale. It feels amazingly powerful to do one spell, Conjurus Architectum, and make this huge thing appear out of thin air!

Thanks for watching (and reading)!