Places

This is where that Vidare concept comes in handy again. A traveler who wants to reach a certain level of the Umbra has an easier time of doing so if she already sees the world in that fashion.

• If she views things through the Vidare Astral, she’ll soon notice doors, mirrors, reflective pools, and other idea-based gateways into the High Umbra.

• If she’s got a passionate Vidare Spiritus, she’ll find herself drawn toward pathways through the mist, inviting groves, illuminated Moon Paths, and other features of the landscape that seem to beckon the traveler toward them. This, of course, is an excellent time to practice discretion and watch out for traps.

• If her melancholy temperament favors the gloomy Vidare Mortem, she’ll perceive the rotting Shadowlands. In the distance, she’ll hear the ever-moaning winds of the Tempest, an eternal storm that has been called “the Voice of Oblivion.” Dour-minded reincarnationists claim that the Tempest is the whirl of Entropy itself, the karmic blender through which dying things are recycled for their next rebirth. It’s been said that the Avatar Storm came up from this Tempest, after some sort of spiritual bomb had been dropped on a city of the dead. As with so many things in our world, that’s open to debate. The idea, though, makes a certain degree of sense.

Regardless of your usual perspective, you can think yourself in a different direction if you have the proper magicks to reach all three worlds. Thinking upward can draw you toward the High Umbra, going with your gut can pull you into the Middle Umbra, and feeling down can take you toward the fringes of the Shadowlands… although, as I mentioned earlier, it takes specific kinds of magicks to reach the Realm of the Dead, unless you want to die first.

A portal, or an Otherworldly creature with the right powers, can take you almost anywhere. A traveler passing through a gateway, using an appropriate device, or riding on a spirit’s coattails doesn’t need magical knowledge in order to reach the Otherworlds. If you don’t travel under your own power, though, then you’re at the mercy of whatever force brought you there in the first place. For obvious reasons, this is not a method I’d recommend.

Since the late 1990s, such excursions have become much harder to make, at least in the increasingly industrialized world. For whatever reason – probably for many reasons – the Gauntlet feels thicker, and the journey on the other side has proven more hazardous than it was before. And yet, there are aspects to a mage’s Path – mystic and otherwise – that cannot be fulfilled without such adventures. Whether or not you ever make the trip, I feel it’s important to at least know what you might find in the Realms Beyond…