And here’s the other half.
Cinderella
(San Felipe, Baja California)
The capital city of New California has always been a magical place since the magical iceberg known as ‘Mount Jeannie’ appeared just after the Discovery. While not as inherently arcane as the Kingdom of Virginia, Cin City has been a haven for mages for centuries. It managed to keep this status even during the height of the Universal Dominion’s power. The Dominion never explained why it did not regularly raid the realm for ‘rogue’ mages, and New Californians at the time never admitted that they had mages at all.
Today, magical power is overseen by four different groups. Formal, book-trained mages are members of the Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (ATSE). Witches and the more folk-magic types belong to the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadoras del Hogar (the Syndicate). Theurgic research is dominated by the new faith of Agni, although Catholic exorcists retain their reputation as the best in their field of study. Lastly, there is the University of New California (Cinderella), which does its best to impartially train a wide variety of magical and occult traditions. The faction fighting is usually kept down to a dull roar, but every generation or so two of the groups will square off with each other. It hasn’t gotten really bad since the War started — all the hotheads go off to trade blows with Dominion mages — but the War’s almost over, isn’t it?
Old Vegas
(Las Vegas)
Officially, Vegas University was founded two hundred years ago to train mages. Unofficially, it was founded six hundred and fifty years ago, to give refuge to those few mages who managed to escape the fall of Salt Lake City. In truth, Vegas University dates its origins to the mid twenty-second century. Its founders were former criminals who had smoothly segued into being warlords, once there were no more laws to break; they stayed neutral (and indeed clandestine) during the border squabbles between Deseret and Sonora, and kept in the shadows during Deseret’s first, sometimes heavy-handed rule. Throwing their support to the remnant of Deseret might have seemed risky at the time, but it was a bet that paid out big for the university’s Board of Commissioners.
These days, Vegas University is quite respectable. They’ve gone legit, having negotiated semi-autonomy with Deseret in exchange for their support for the Smith dynasty, and the government (in that order). But the university will still wet their beak in every deal and scheme that gets hatched in Old Vegas. It ain’t gonna be onerous, you understand? Nothing that’ll be bad for business. If people can’t earn here, they’ll go somewhere else. But anything magical in this town is gonna be the business of the Commission, capiche?
Toronto, City of Necromancers
(Toronto, Canada)
The thing that strikes visitors to Toronto is how pleasant it is, if you have a high tolerance for a black, silver, and red color palette. Toronto is the unquestioned spot in North America for studying necromancy, and the accumulated death energy should be well, killing things. Instead, it manifests in a mood that, to quote the Old Americans, is creepy and kooky, mysterious and spooky — yet not particularly ‘ooky,’ whatever that means. It probably means ‘bad.’ Trying to parse out what the Old Americans really meant whenever they referenced something magical can drive modern mages mad.
Toronto does not have a single magical university, unlike Cinderella and Old Vegas. Instead it has over a hundred schools and academies, all with their cliques and rivalries (both internal and external). Squabbling and intrigue are common pastimes, and indeed usually part of the curriculum (Second Republic necromancers have a well-deserved reputation in the Great War for playing humiliating, and hopefully fatal, tricks on Dominion mages). It is well-understood that while there are hard limits to what can be done to the living, schemes, capers, and outright pranks involving corpses are an entirely different matter. Although even then students (and their faculty advisors!) are encouraged to use skeletons, because of Hygiene.
