Spring Realm
The Realm of Spring
What are the Themes of the Realm?
The Realm of Spring is sometimes called the Primal Forest (?) / the Green World (?). It is a Realm overflowing with life in untold variety, a Realm where things begin and are renewed second to second. It is the moment where breath is drawn in to speak a word, it’s a Realm where morning breaks to herald the start of a new day, it’s the moment just before a cut begins to bleed. It celebrates all the miracles of life, but without mercy or compassion – and without hate or malice. This is a Realm where the natural forces of fecundity and life burgeon outwards. It’s a realm of disorder – life is chaotic in its abundance. It spills out willy nilly, and while it may follow rules they are rules of its own invention and subject to change. At the same time, it is a deep realm – it’s the silence of an immense oak that has lived for hundreds of years, and it casts into grim perspective the tiny lives of most animals.
It is also a realm if inspiration – it’s the moment just before you have a good idea. Harnessing that inspiration is difficult, but at the same time you can drink of the agelessness of the green world, of the plant-life that is the foundation of all other life.
It is a realm without good or evil – it is unconcerned with morality or ethics. It can be joyful or cruel, it embraces the positive elements of life and creation and the negative elements of the decay that breeds life from rotting meat. It is a realm of childhood, but not the twee childhood of adults reminiscing. It is Lord of the Flies rather than Janet and Jogn. It is scary and strange, and the children are six feet tall with savage woody claws. They can be gentle and caring one moment, then cruelly smash something to pieces just for fun.
What kind of Magic does it cover?
The most obvious magic of Spring is the magic of healing. This includes concepts of refreshing, revitalising and regenerating. Sometimes the way the magic works may be a little unsettling – I think that it might cure a disease or a poison by accelerating the symptoms to a nightmarish degree while providing the vitality to survive them. If it takes away pain, it does so by hurling the target into a narcotic delirium. It’s not nice. Regenerating a limb is painful.
Spring is also a magic that deals with fertility – it might ensure conception where conception is possible, or ensure safe delivery of a child. It might even be able to create children without recourse to sexuality (parthenogenesis might represent a spell known in this lore). It might also be used to renew someone – to “break apart” an old human and release a younger, more vital human that shares some or all of the characteristics of the older creature. It’s possible that all this life-and-birth magic is a little dangerous – that the chaotic nature of Spring magic sometimes leads to children with odd characteristics.
Vegetation is a common theme with Spring magic, mostly in terms of creating, enhancing and spreading living plants and trees. There’s likely to be a few spells here that turn dead matter into plant life, or speed up the processes of decay – it might be specifically dangerous to physical undead, for example, turning their rotting corpses into fine compost for fungus and ferns.
Spring magic may deal heavily with images of water – floods, storms, rivers and the like. Water is also a revitalizing agent – harnessing the freshness of the air after a rainstorm, for example, or the sense of renewal that comes with the dew.
Spring magic may be able to create roleplaying effects that deal with vitality and energy, and it might also create effects that deal with primal themes – cutting away self-restraint, unleashing primeval instincts, and creating an appreciation for the natural world – although these themes might be more appropriate to Night.
Spring magic is also the magic of blood. Blood is a common component used in the rituals, and it deals with blood as the literal “stuff of life.” While I think Winter magic deals with sacrifice as an all-or-nothing concept, I think the Spring concept involves the idea of “paying” blood or life force as part of a cost to create effects, as a way to rebalance natural forces in some way. I like the blood elements, which were inspired by the Navarr brief, because I think it adds a darker shade to the otherwise largely positive healing magic of Spring.
As with Winter, some mystics and scholars say that the magic of Spring is innately dangerous. Spring magic is difficult to control; it wants to spread and to thrive like the kudzu or the rhododendron. It actively seeks to propagate itself, and magicians dealing with this magic may talk of how it tries to “get away” from them. Some rituals might have odd side-effects, and I think that the more “focused” a Spring ritual is the harder it is to cast in some way.
What is the Realm like physically? This is a realm of plant life, first and foremost. It’s a little like ancient earth before the dinosaurs – plants and plant-like things of all natures, including ferns and fungus, explode in all directions. It is largely a green realm, but it is rich with flowers of all sorts – but the flowers seem to have no reproductive function, and rarely if ever become fruit.
Any type of terrain that can support vegetation can be found here, and there are plenty of rivers, lakes and even a shallow sea choked with marine plant life. The sun is very bright, and there is constant rain and wind that waters and moves the plant life. There are insects, in millions of varieties and some quite unsettling sizes, but there are few complex animals larger than a rat or a sparrow.
It is a realm of chaotic abundance, where life bursts from every piece of ground. While the realm is still – in that the primary inhabitants are sessile – it is absolutely not a realm without conflict. Life feeds on life- trees strive towards the sun, plunging those nearby into starving shade. Dead wood breeds crocuses and mushrooms, parasites, saprophytes and symbiotes abound. Life lives on life, creating the most complex ecosystems imaginable.
Spring is vibrant. There is a constant sensation in the air as if someone has just drawn in a breath to say something – it’s the moment just before or just after the storm breaks. It’s full of potential – there’s inspiration to be found here, it’s fertile soil for new ideas to take root. It revels in novelty.
This is a realm where magic is riotous and alive – plant a staff in the ground here and within a few days it will sprout leaves and roots.
Dead things become alive here – not in the sense of reanimation or reincarnation, but in the sense of being claimed by the Realm. A dead body will begin to sprout fungus or tiny plants within a matter of hours and be entirely dissolved by sunset or sunrise, leaving only a few bones among the new plants. Likewise unattended objects, especially organic objects, are quickly consumed. Everything rots, and in doing so serves as the basis for new life.
Structures are reasonably rare here unless they are formed by shaping living plants,. Dead wooden structures quickly collapse and become overgrown, while stone buildings will be rapidly reduced to ruins by questing roots and vines.
What are the inhabitants of the Realm like? The Eternals of Spring have more in common with trees, ferns and fungi than they do with people. Images might include those of the dryads for 4th-edition D&D and Warhammer Fantasy Battle (and indeed Maelstrom), the spriggan from Skyrim or the tricksy pagans from the Thief series, or the comic book characters Swamp Thing andPoison Ivy, and even to a degree the Ents from Tolkein – there is room for both Treebeard and the Huorns in this realm. This is also realm for characters such as Mister Tumnus from the Narnia books, representing a character who is simultaneously innocent and worldly, or maybe even for the Greek God Dionysus who combines themes of fertility and fecundity with wildness.
These Eternals exist along a “sliding scale” – the smaller, mobile Eternals slowly age and develop to become larger and larger and eventually stop moving altogether, becoming closer and closer to the plants they resemble. Sometimes the older Eternals die and split apart to release a new, young, mobile Eternal which might be a new creature or simply the old creature in a new body.
I don’t have a name for these Eternals yet – “nymph” brings too much baggage as does “elemental.” Like the Winter Eternals they may be able of presenting a “pleasing” facade, but this might make them feel too much like faeries. They include some fey themes (wildness, amorality) but they are not faeries.
While many are amoral and seem cruel, others are capable of being gentle and caring. They can be nurturing, but indiscriminately so. They encourage competition between life-forms not for their amusement but because this is the natural state of life – to feed on and prey on each other.
The most of the Eternals of this Realm are individuals, and don’t naturally seek out each others’ company, there are others who form loose associations in the manner of Tolkien’s “council of Ents.” Unlike other Eternals, though, I don’t think there are lots of “lesser Eternals” running around as hangers-on to the Eternal lords of the Realm. I think encounters with these creatures represent encounters with either a single very powerful creature or several connected creatures who share an agenda.
There is no lineage definitively connected with this Realm at this time, although there are themes in the Navarr brief that could be developed to fill that niche.
What do the Eternals want from Mortals? First of all, the Eternals of Spring are selfish – even the most outwardly friendly Eternals do not do nothing for nothing. They may not be obvious about it, but they expect a lot of quid for their pro quo. They do nothing out of the goodness of their hearts, because thats not how nature works.
Many of the Eternals of Spring want mortals to submit to the power of the green – they want humans to achieve a balance with the natural world that favours the natural world. They want people to move out of cities, to stop cutting down trees and to step away from the trappings of civilisation.
Some of the Eternals give this a postiive spin – they want mortals to achieve a more harmonious existence. They want them to recognise the wonder and joy that comes from communing with the natural world, and represent themes of peace and tranqulity – albeit a peace that comes in part from denying the drives of human nature to move forward and overcome or control natural forces.
Other Eternals give this a more negative spin – they want mortals to submit entirely to the power of nature, to revert to earlier stages of social existence, to behave more like animals than sentient beings. These are the Eternals who want to actively destroy those who try and harness natural forces, who embrace concepts of “eco terrorism”.
Finally there is a tendency of these Eternals who want to encourage mortals to become more like them – unrestrained and primal in their nature – to embrace their instincts and dismantle social conventions that restrict their behaviour. Again this might be a theme that is more appropriate to the Night realm, but I think with the Spring Eternals it is about regression to a more “natural” state than it is about unleashing passions.
I think that all these Eternals are a little hungry for the “life” of mortals – for literal blood, maybe even hungry for reverence and “attention” in the way a child can be hungry for attention. I think some of them want to be worshipped as avatars of the natural world, and may want to form cults dedicated to the worst interpretation of LRP paganism.
What are some things these Eternals can give to Mortals? More than other Eternals, those of Spring love to infuse mortals directly with power, to change them, heal them and to fill them with vitality. They prefer to change living things rather than create dead artefacts, and where they do offer “items” these are likely to be living things – circlets of leaves that never age or die, for example, or staves or wands of living wood. They can provide articles that enhance or focus the magic of Spring, but these often require blood be spilled to use them. They might likewise offer items that convert health points into mana in some way, or that can be used to directly power a ritual (for example) through the expenditure of blood (hit points).
They can heal, obviously, but they can also kill by creating new life out of something that is currently alive.
They can revitalise areas of land, filling damaged soil with vitality, or use similar powers to create impenetrable forests. They aren’t really into blessing crops as such – the vitality they produce tends to see every plant in an area grow and spread, and that is as likely to affect weeds or unwanted plant-life as it is to be focused on corn or wheat.
What themes aren’t appropriate to this Realm? This isn’t a realm that is “nice.” At the same time, it’s not evil. It’s beautiful, but it’s resonant with the darker elements of nature as seen by people. It’s not red in tooth and nail as such, because there’s not many animal themes here, but it plays up the similar themes of competition that exists in the plant world.
I’ve held of a little, but I do wonder if disease and decay aren’t as central to this Realm as pure healing. It’s all the processes of life, after all.
This Realm doesn’t have a lot of time for individual humans. It’s scary because childhood is a bit scary.
It’s a realm of Natural magic that mirrors Winter more than it does Summer or Autumn, a Realm that has little time for social niceties. I plays on the worst stereotypes of childhood as Winter plays on the worst stereotypes of old age, but it’s also full of innocence and the joy of just being alive.