Where is your Atlantis?

I decided that Atlantis, the original one, was a demiplane between the supernal world and the material world. It is now part of the abyss. You could access the city at the lowest levels of awakening via an astral journey, or alternatively travel there in bodily form with higher levels of arcana. This meant people from all over the planet had an easier time of going to and from Atlantis, hence why there are atlantean ruins all over the planet. People made satellite temples in the material world, as well as in the shadow, the astral, a few in the underworld, and even one on mars. The built these temples, libraries, bunkers, and the like for the purpose of supernatural conflict. Sometimes an Atlantean did not want to keep his stuff in a city full of wizards. Vampires and spirits were around back then too and sometimes meddle in and disrupted a mages enlightened plans for the sleeper populace of his original home. Further, the construction of the celestial ladder required flanges in different parts of the world to be stable, one of which was at the site of the modern day city of Chicago.

Honestly I don't even worry about "where it is" or even "if it was ever really there."  My games have enough other things interfering in the Fallen World to worry to heavily about something like that.

In the PC's dreams, that's a given; but it's also not a very helpful answer.

It's also metaphysically connected to every actual Fallen World city, and so the only real, actual, reliable way to bring it back is to unleash a truly gigantic alchemy/geomancy effect on every city there is that unites all of them into a single rebis-like entity/thing/place that turns out to be all these cities, at the same time.

Not that doing so would be a good thing, seeing as Atlantis was destroyed for a good reason.

But the PCs don't know these things. Yet.

I go with Mage myth being the history of the universe. The other types get meshed in wherever it happens to fit from the mage perspective. This means that vampires and werewolves are second class citizens in the mythos department, but I don't care, because they're not the focus of my game. I don't have a written down coherent story because it's not important because no one even knows the whole truth in the first place. Instead, it's a collection of bullet points, some of which are known by the players.

Fair Warning: It is in several places wildly different from what I gather a normal Mage setting is like:
```First, the game is set on "Terra", not Earth. This lets me use a different set of maps, countries, megacorps, cities, and so on.
```Before The Fall, Atlantis was probably somewhere in the pacific, like near Hawaii. During The Fall all of history went through a retcon, and Atlantis wasn't ever included in the Fallen version of things. So "now" it's not there, nor has it "ever" been.
```Before The Fall, there were several great civilizations. Atlantis, Egypt, Arabia, China, and Mesoamerica were "strong" enough to have various parts of their civilizations survive The Fall (both their ancient peoples, which went on to rebuild Mage society, and artifacts and ruins, which are still being explored and discovered today). Others existed, but didn't survive in any form known today.
```Vampires weren't around pre-fall, but Werewolves were. The Forsaken Curse of the Werewolves is related to The Fall, though both Mages and Werewolves aren't quite aware of it.
```Aliens exist. Some of them are exactly as terrible as all the nightmares that people have about them. However, due to an agreement among the various agents of supreme power (Exarchs, Oracles, and even others), the moon's orbit acts as a two-way barrier. Aliens can't tread in, and "Terra-kin" of any kind can't spread out. This is the Lunar Sphere Alliance. In the modern day, only the parts of this agreement are known to Mages (even most Archmages), and to them it is known as the Pax Arcana (seemingly a much simpler treaty against the use of Imperial magic).
```One section of the agreement that is not known is that the Lunar Sphere Alliance demanded the creation of the Abyss. It's like a pervasive energy barrier against the Supernal. It locks reality into a limited form and eats at those to change it (Paradox). It forces humans to reject Supernal Magic (Disbelief), and even uses them as a weapon against Supernal users (Unraveling, increased Paradox chance). It's the void between the Fallen world and everything else, where abyssal horrors made of non-existence can somehow form anyways.
```Due to a post-Fall but pre-Historic event, there is a Britan-sized island country on Terran that exists outside the Lunar Sphere Alliance. It is called Proxima, and The Abyss does not affect it at all. Aliens and other creatures can drift in, and humans are able to witness vulgar magic without any problems. The public there still don't believe in magic anyways, due to Guardian cover ups, government cover ups, and the seeming insanity of it all. Mages that awaken on that island don't awaken to the five watchtowers that those elsewhere do. Hunters definitely never really run out of work on Proxima.

In my game, Atlantis is fairly by the book. An empire from before recorded human history. The location of the actual city is unknown, but shards of Atlantis have been found. Temples, shrines, ancient ruins that seem to have been a part of an ancient city of Awakened.

However the Fall of Atlantis is ongoing in the game. The Fallen World, the Abyss, the Shadow, all of these are a result of the ongoing process of the Fall, a false reality put in place after the destruction of the ladder. I have given them glimpses of Atlantean time, as I'm running the Reign of the Exarchs storyline. An astral Atlantis exists, like an easter egg in the Fallen World's programming.

As my games are very focused on a single city in the material, rather than on any spirit realm or such, I've never bothered.   I'm a firm believer applying in Schrodinger's Cat to things like Arcadia and Atlantis.   Every possible variation of the myth is both true and false until the moment you "observe" it during game play.

Christian A:

It's also metaphysically connected to every actual Fallen World city, and so the only real, actual, reliable way to bring it back is to unleash a truly gigantic alchemy/geomancy effect on every city there is that unites all of them into a single rebis-like entity/thing/place that turns out to be all these cities, at the same time.

Very much in way like the Metropolis from the Kul RPG...

Both Metropolis from Kult and my Atlantis make use of the same source of inspiration. Of course, Metropolis is already a fact of the setting of Kult, whereas Atlantis doesn't exist, yet.

Depends on the campaign I'm running, really.

My standard take is "heck, nobody knows, and nobody can know". I look through Secrets of the Ruined Temple and look at the oodles and oodles of ideas and theories, and then consider that the pre-fall world supposedly worked along different rules of logic and causality and reality than ours do, and come to the conclusion that I could never come up with an answer that was good enough. Because it's the Ultimate Mystery, and pinning it down would be like ripping out a man's heart to learn how he manages to feel love.

In other campaigns I do it differently. In the Las Vegas game I ran for a year Atlantis was the city built by the slaves of the First Children of the God Machine, a sort of orbital headquarters the size of africa. It was basically gigantic stone technology running on resonance and archmastery spells, with humans "grown" with life spells so that the angelic figures responsible for the upkeep of the material world wouldn't have to worry about menial tasks so much. The Fall was when the servitor race stole weapons from the armory and assaulted their masters, killing almost all of them, and then realized they couldn't actually control the city. And it crashed.

In that setting Atlantis was fractured across most of the globe, fist-sized lumps of rock burning up in the atmosphere, while some city-sized lumps broke off earlier and fell out of time and space alltogether, only existing tangentially to our reality during the times of the solar eclipse. The oracles are just five humans who had a teleportation accident while trying to flee, and ended up in a halfway state where they're partially fused to the upper end of the God Machine where it interfaces with the "hardware" of the supernal.

In fact, during the first two of the three final sessions I had one of the larger fragments of Atlantis crash-land in the nevada desert. While the players were in the area and investigating. It was sort of the build-up to the actual climax, but it was still fun to have players turn on mage sight and trying to scrutinizing atlantis itself.....while it's still Falling.

'course, that was the campaign where I decided to fling mage "canon" away with great gusto and violate as many beliefs of the pentacle as possible. For kicks.


So yeah, it depends.

my version of the world prefall is bacially a version of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Altantis had two sister nations, Mu and Thule and consently bickered with them (not full out mage war but realpoltik way).

they existed up until Altantis started building the ladder and the abyss ate everything.

There are little pieces of Atlantis everywhere.  In addition to the bulk of the interdimensional continent's dust, which makes up this universe's hydrogen atoms, much larger chunks of Atlantis have remerged with our Spacetime undigested.  They will collide spontaneously with our reality, and thus seem as though intended to be here, left as if by fate stranded on our world at some seemingly random time.  Mages stumble across these ruins, and have since prehistoric times.  It is likely that future mages will still find pieces of Atlantis that have yet pushed through into our universe.

The largest chunk by far was the Imperial Palace, which had been the base of the Celestial Ladder after the great machine was built.  No one is exactly sure how, but the entire Palace seemed to survive whole, colliding into our universe unharmed sometime before or during our planet's formation.  The Palace is a grand tiered structure that makes up the entire southern and central portion of our planet.  Is is beleived the Palace goes so deep into our world that the lowest innermost floors have melted away and fused with the Core.  The uttmost tip of the Palace forms the Antarctic continent, though the majority of the Palace is burried under billions of years of ice.  However, there are known to be at least one or two places where fate has left some city-sized wing of the grand Palace partially open to anyone daring enough to cross the ice and find it.  Inside would be the greatest cache of Atltantean treasures, as well as the most well preserved guards, safety measures, and booby traps.

Christian A:

In the PC's dreams, that's a given; but it's also not a very helpful answer.

It's also metaphysically connected to every actual Fallen World city, and so the only real, actual, reliable way to bring it back is to unleash a truly gigantic alchemy/geomancy effect on every city there is that unites all of them into a single rebis-like entity/thing/place that turns out to be all these cities, at the same time.

Actually, Christian, that is a very satisfying answer (to me at least). It resonates on a monomythic/panglobal way.

My Atlantis usually exists as a literal lost city.  The Dimond orders think they know about where it might have been but thats about it.

          I'm  tossing around the idea that dosen't use Atlantis as a past awakened utopia, but more of a darker visceral history-like the rise and fall of the Roman empire. A society that while embraced the ideas of a republic, would feed people to lions for entertainment. That just sounds more World of Darkness to me. As PC's progress in the story, they find out things about this supposed perfect place that drives them to question just what they should believe-if it dosen't drive them crazy first.

      That idea popped in my head as I was writing the first line, sorry if its too far off topic.

I ran a game where the reason the location of Atlantis is unanswerable in the Fallen World precisely because it could not fit in the diminished Fallen World. Atlantis existed in ways that are literally impossible using the diminished dimensions of Fate/Space/Time left. Pieces of it remain in the shards of the Fallen World, but all the signs of Atlantis that remain are merely projections of a greater dimensional structure onto something more limited.

It was a fun little game while it lasted. The Supernal and Inner Realms were connected to all pieces of the shattered fallen world, and note that each piece seems to be a complete "reality" under the Supernal. Each shard appears to its inhabitants to be the singular Fallen World.

I use Blunt Vorpal's method... That said Christian A comes up with the kind of thing I'd go for if I wanted Atlantis to be real.