Locations
It's the holiday season and you know what that means!
It means every bloody tv show worth watching is on hiatus, and probably has been for like a month at this point. It's awful. Sure there's an occasional series finale for Diamond Is Unbreakable here, or your Sense8 Holiday Special And Christmas Themed Orgy there, and you could probably see Rogue One five more times (it'd be worth it), but man oh man the realm of entertainment is as frozen and dead as the Ronom Glacier.
Like the Ronom Glacier, though, the frozen ice of boredom can be chipped away, revealing (hooboy this is a stretch) long lost sources of entertainment. And since this is also a season of giving gifts, I've spent some time digging through old archives, dead webpages, and ancient forum posts to bring forth once more a whole pile of old Magic the Gathering storyline materials. Some of these are short curiosities, others are extensive documents. They've all fallen out of view of the fandom, though, and it seems like a good time to bring them back. What follows, thus, is a set of five pieces that stand out to me as special in some way, with some description to give you a context for where these fit into Magic's history, and why they're worth preserving.
1. TANDE'S JOURNAL
The prose in Tande's Journal is often a little clunky, not unlike the early weird pulp fantasy stories that it draws from. Like those stories, the prose is of less overall importance than the bizarre ideas the narrative offers: a world of nested spheres within spheres, of oil and soot, of metal and flesh, a world called the Final Hell of Artifice.
Phyrexia.
Tande's Journal is a part of a project called the Encyclopedia Dominia, a repository for storyline information run by the Duelist Magazine. While the original site no longer exists, the Internet Archive has, luckily, preserved (as far as I know) the whole archive, including a bunch of encyclopedia entries (naturally) and some short stories. Tande's Journal falls into the latter category, describing the journey of an artificer and his lover into the depths of Phyrexia and their eventual escape back to Dominaria.
The real draw of this story is the glimp we get of Phyrexia, which Squirle, in his coverage of the Encyclopedia Dominia, notes is the first ever really extended look at Phyrexia, or the first four spheres at least. This lays a lot of the foundation for Phyrexia as a kind of artificial, monstrous ecology, with the mechanical animals of the First Sphere appearing years later in The Thran, where they are revealed to predate even Yawgmoth's conquest of the plane. There's not much pretense about what kind of narrative this is: we get some vague handwaving text describing how Tande used magic of some sort to make it through the various spheres, but beyond that the real interest here is in jumping from description to description of the nightmare plane. In some ways, this actually serves the narrative quite well: there's something deeply unsettling about the fact that the Yawgmoth Demon never actually does anything, but just sort of . . . watches.
This is well worth reading if you're interested in the early origins of a plane whose shadow has spread long over the Multiverse, and over Magic the Gathering.
2. THE HOMELANDS DOCUMENT
That coverage is a great start, but there's loads more to Ulgrotha than Sengir and his warped family, as this document reveals. Written by Scott Hungerford and Kyle Namvar, this document covers the whole history of the plane up to the present, as well as, astoundingly, nearly all of the cards in the original set! Everything has a place in Homelands, even if that place doesn't lead to, you know, a place within tournaments. (Half the interest of the document just might be this glimpse into a very different design philosophy from the one driving Magic now.)
It's a hell of a history, too. This story, like much of Magic's early narrative, has a pretty definitive attitude toward Planeswalkers.
They're terrible.
Or, well, not ALL of them are terrible, but when you're talking about wizards capable of leaping between worlds and summoning creatures from those worlds to hurl at each other in combat, it doesn't take that many bad eggs to really screw things up. In response to this reality, and a long history of violence inflicted on the plane by Planeswalker wars, the 'walkers Feroz and Serra close the plane off to outsiders with a world-altering Ban. Only, Feroz and Serra are now both dead and the Ban is starting to weaken . . .
What's really remarkable about the story of Homelands is the way that various levels of conflict parallel each other: the petty squabbles of villagers are mirrored by the petty squabbles of awesomely powerful Planeswalkers and immortal entities like the Sengirs and Eron the Relentless. If there's an idea in this history, it might be that raising the stakes and power levels doesn't change what people are, just how much collateral damage their bickering inflicts.
There's loads in this document to dig into and it's well worth reading at least in part, even the interesting little bits of information about individual cards. It's kind of a miracle we have it, given the way Homelands sometimes gets held up as one of the Great Failures of Magic History, and it makes sense that so many storyline fans before me have worked to preserve and share the document. My archiving and annotation of the document with the Magic: Expanded Multiverse alongside similar documents, and bringing it back here, is just an extension of that tradition.
Of course, I think we can do more than just preserve, I think we can also analyze. With that in mind, let me know in the comments for this article if you want me to write pieces in the future on the Homelands Document, or any of the other materials linked to in this article!
3. THE INTERROGATION
And it's a hell of a story. Written by longtime Magic writer Scott McGough for the Encyclopedia Dominia, The Interrogation isn't an action-heavy narrative, but it's got a delightful little twist to it that makes it relatively well known in the fandom. The players are limited: Endrek Sahr, master thrull breeder for the Order of the Ebon Hand, and a Phyrexian devotee, captured and questioned.
Like Tande's Journal, this piece is interesting for the glimpse it gives us into the workings of Phyrexia, though this time we don't see the plane itself but its ideology, its mythology. This is a contest of wills between two Black-aligned entities, both convinced that they are at the top of the heap, either through personal brilliance in the case of Sahr, or through their place in a merciless engine of inhuman domination in the case of the Phyrexian. It's one of several windows into Phyrexian beliefs that we get in the storyline, one of the others being the Phyrexian mythology revealed in J Robert King's story "Phyrexian Creations," which you can read transcribed by Eidte lnvil here. A deep part of that ideology is the will to subvert and transform the ends of others into the Will of Yawgmoth.
And in the end, if we dig into the cards of Fallen Empires, we'll find out what Phyrexia's plans were for Endrek Sahr.
4. LOVE SONG OF NIGHT AND DAY
its fire extending, bends, expands, beats and breaks your hiding places."
Sometimes, though, WotC has commissioned whole texts to be mined for flavor. One such text is the Love Song of Night and Day, which can be found on a whole slew of cards from Mirage and Visions. The poem supposedly comes from Jamuraa, the setting for those sets, and like Afari's Tales it serves to add texture and naturalism to Jamuraa's diverse and innovative setting. And, luckily, the whole original poem has been posted online.
What makes the Love Song of Night and Day compelling to me is not just its status as a curiosity of Magic worldbuilding, but the kind of speculative realism that it embraces. As the storyline guru Jaya notes in the phyrexia.com posting of this poem, "The Love Song of Night and Day has little to do with the story of Mirage and Visions yet everything to do with the culture in which it takes place." This is primarily a poem about love, and it is through the poetic exploration of that love that we learn more about the fictional culture from which it derives.
This production of artifacts from another, speculative civilization as a kind of primary object isn't something one runs into much in speculative fiction, outside of the really weird and experimental, and I think its existence is made possible in part by the wider shared universe of Magic. I have a friend who's fond of describing Dominia as a setting that is all settings, and we might extend that logic further to say that Magic's story can be all stories, even ones that radically depart from traditional adventuring fantasy fare. This poem can depend on having a context of cards and stories to give it its importance, to give us a reason for reading it. This makes it possible for the text to be something more experimental, a meditation on a complicated love that transcends its origins.
5. THE INVASION MINISITE
This was one of the minisites produced at various times to promote various sets. Astonishingly, much of this one, despite its old age, remains intact, though unfortunately there are pages missing.
What's really remarkable to me is not the site itself, or even the pieces of storyline information we get on the site (which largely retread the narratives of the Invasion, Planeshift, and, presumably, Apocalypse books), but the way that information is conveyed. Apparently WotC paid veteran artist Kevin Walker to produce a comic overview of the early parts of the three books. In fact, this isn't just a comic but a hypercomic — a comic that can only exist on the web because, in this case, of its interactive elements.
This was produced during the first big boom of hypercomics experimentation (which, if you follow my other work, you'll know I have a deep interest in), and while the Invasion and Planeshift comics are kind of a mess in some places, in others they really give a sense of the vast scope of this war of three worlds, of gods and god-machines. There's actually some great effects on display here: limiters on how fast the reader can progress through a page enabling slow reveals of Phyrexia devastation, and images of amassed airships overlaid with thin panels of characters talking.
The Planeshift comic unfortunately wrestles the controls away from the reader to mostly disastrous effect, but hey, this was an early experiment in a medium that's STILL just barely finding its feet. I'm less inclined to criticize what is still a fascinating effort and an example of Magic's long history of innovation in storytelling, than to praise the moments when it does truly work to convey the scale of the Invasion.
Well that, and I'm inclined to mourn the loss of the third part of this narrative: the Apocalypse comic is no longer up on the site, nor is it saved in the Internet Archive, and it may be lost to time, a grim reminder of how easy it is for our history to slip through the cracks of the web.
Digging through old archives and chasing down forgotten storyline materials takes work, but if I can pass on the gift of this information, this part of the fandom's heritage, it's work worth doing. What I ask in return is just this: preserve this information wherever and however you can. Pass it on. Keep the flow of information going.
The best way of showing thanks to all those who made this information available is to keep gifting it to others, over and over again.
