Thematic Overview

Belief in the supernatural has existed for as long as there have been believers. The ancient Egyptians had sorcerers and oracles who communicated the will of the gods to the people, while the Greeks told stories of nymphs, muses, and swans that seduced Spartan queens. The tribal peoples from Aboriginal Australia, to the Amazon rainforest, all the way to pagan Europe built their societies around folk religion and tenable connections to the magical world.

Spellbound MUX assumes that most of it is real.

It also assumes that, beginning in the eighteenth century with the emergence of the Industrial Revolution, the supernatural world began to lose its power and influence over mankind as belief in magic was replaced by advances in science and technology. By the start of the twenty-first century, much of the evidence of its existence had either faded into obscurity or been completely wiped out, but enough of its strength remained that it was able to fight back in one last effort to preserve itself, reducing the great metropolitan centers of the world to ruins and the mortal population to a few hundred million.

In the century that followed, mankind reverted to a simpler way of life, salvaging what little technology it could, and repopulating small villages and towns across the globe, far away from the reminders of what once was.

Spellbound MUX takes place roughly one hundred and thirty years after magic took the world back and is set in a post-apocalyptic version of Scotland heavily influenced by Celtic mythology. Its focus is Dornie, a settlement on the coastal Highlands in the process of gradually reclaiming lost technology in the form of a primitive hydroelectric plant and an ammunitions factory that is one of the largest weapons producers in the region. In the world inhabited by Dornie's people, survival is a challenge that the community approaches together — there are not only dragons and trolls to contend with, but brutal winters, cholera epidemics, and famines as well.

The players on Spellbound MUX are all here not only to tell Dornie's story, but the stories of individual characters as well, which — when woven together — form a tapestry that all its writers are collectively responsible for.