Thanoro Azoic

[Steve Long]

Page 57 of The Mystic World notes that Thanoro Azoic's surname technically means "No Life," but that some mystics believe "Azoic" may be a mis-translation of some sort.

 

I had an idea earlier this evening:  what if Azoic means "Without the Zoas" ("zoic" in this case meaning "characteristic of, or pertaining to, the Zoas and their power")? This implies that he somehow rejected, overcame the need for, or transcended the Prime Avatars of Order, Chaos, Art, and Nature. That in turn suggests a very different "origin story" for our boy Thanoro and raises all sorts of questions that might be the "deep secret" at the heart of a "Mystic Masters" campaign or story arc.

 

Definitely have to remember this the next time I run a Champions Universe-based campaign.

[Lord Liaden]

That is a truly intriguing thought.

 

Thanoro Azoic is reputed to have founded the office of Archmage of Earth at some point in the past. The Archmage is supposed to be completely neutral in his dealings with the great occult powers; he or she serves and protects Humanity first, so cannot be beholden to any supernatural being or faction. Perhaps a rejection or transcendence of the Four Zoas was a necessary step for Thanoro to achieve that status and power himself?

 

I've often wondered when in Champions Universe history the office of Archmage began. There's no mention of one in any of the books detailing previous official Ages; although any of the great wizards mentioned in them might have held the office without that being publicly proclaimed, e.g. Kristor the Immortal, Mestor, or Coruch Crotha. Perhaps there have been other interregnums in the succession of Archmages than those mentioned in TMW, maybe of much longer duration.

 

If the office does extend into antediluvian prehistory, my suspicion would be that Thanoro Azoic may have been involved with or even spearheaded the overthrow of the Elder Worm dominion over the Earth.

[Lord Liaden]

Since Steve raised this issue, and I know Dean Shomshak has seen this thread... would either of you care to share a bit of how you'd approach the concept from a story perspective?

[Lawnmower Boy]

Or that the first archmage was "alive" in the Azoic Age. Four billion years is even longer ago than 120,000. It is a bit odd that there was no archmage active in the Turakian Age. 

 

You know, unless Takofanes was the Archmage.

[Lord Liaden]

Takofanes becoming the next Archmage in the modern era was a prospect a lot of CU mystics were terrified of. Before Robert Caliburn got the office in Champions Online.

 

But back in his namesake age? I dunno, Kal-Turak/ Takofanes always seemed 'way too chummy with the Infernal powers to have the necessary neutrality.

 

But as I mentioned upthread, certain major mages could have held the office without a source book naming them. The Archmage exists primarily to combat supernatural threats to the world, not to get involved in local politics; so the games between nations wouldn't really involve him or her. But it's unlikely there was one after Kal-Turak publicly proclaimed himself. He's just the sort of threat an Archmage would confront. Maybe Kal assassinated his era's Archmage.

[Lord Liaden]

Or that the first archmage was "alive" in the Azoic Age. Four billion years is even longer ago than 120,000.

 

That was the implication from the translation of Thanoro's name/title. But Steve is suggesting a different meaning for it, with a different implication.

[Lord Liaden]

Okay, since nothing else is happening on this thread, I'm gonna throw in two cents more, because the topic interests me.

 

I thought of a couple of CU elements which could be relevant to a story dealing with Thanoro Azoic. One is the Witness, described in Hidden Lands. Something of a Phantom Stranger analogue, the Witness is a mysterious mystic guardian of Earth, apparently a servant of some unspecified higher powers. He's also at least 100,000 years old, which perhaps coincidentally, is around the era of the overthrow of the Elder Worm on Earth. Could he be a counterpoint to Thanoro's relationship to the Four Zoas? A "Zoic" to Thanoro's "Azoic?" Might the Witness have been Thanoro's friend, comrade, even kin? His student? His teacher? His successor as a servant of the Zoas?

 

Then there are "the First," part of the background of Gargun the Seeker from Booklet Of The Empress. A troll-like humanoid species which evolved "not long after the dawn of the Multiverse," the First were naturally ageless and innately skilled in magic. An ancient war with "the Darkness That Waited" all but destroyed their race and scattered the few remaining First across the Multiverse. Gargun claims that he "knew Luathon when he was a mewling babe..." i.e. the creator of the Lights of Luathon suite of spells, an entity so ancient, legend (mentioned in The Mystic World) claims Thanoro Azoic learned the Lights from Luathon himself. And Gargun is a half-breed, not even an original member of the First.

[DShomshak]

For full information about Thanoro Azoic, see the Krypticon. Unfortunately, that book is A) lost, and fictional. So we can only speculate.

 

In The Mystic World, I suggested that "Azoic" (as in "Before life on Earth" could be a misinterpretation or mistranslation, and Steve suggested a good alternate meaning. But it also does not contradict the original meaning given way back in Mystic Masters. Just because Thanoro Azoic was the first Archmage of Earth's dimension does not mean he was the first Archmage of Earth. (Humans are so parochial!) The office might not only pass between mages of different cultures, but between mages of different planets. (In the Marvel Universe, one alternate future had Doctor Strange as the Ancient One of a thousand years hence, with an alien Sorcerer Supreme as his pupil.) Or there could be several worlds with their own lines of Archmages, with Thanoro the first Archmage of the first sapient race in this universe to learn magic. (A concept one might use to integrate my Devachan setting of interstellar magic into the CU -- cough cough, plug plug.)

 

For actual campaigning, though, I would keep Thanoro Azoic mysterious. Tales of the mystical thrive on such hints and allusions. PCs might search for powerful magic items such as the staff and talisman of the First Archmage, or the blade he forged to kill the Beast at the End of Time. If an ancient evil is breaking loose after epochs of imprisonment, I might say Thanoro Azoic is the one who bound it. Stuff like that.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Lord Liaden]

Hey, I'm down with a fictional quest to relocate a fictional book with information about a fictional person. That's the sort of thing we all do here.

 

I definitely agree that a degree of mystery and open-endedness are good for campaigns in general, and mystic ones in particular. OTOH one of the more fun things about being a GM is having insight into some of the facts behind the mysteries that the game world at large (and the PCs) don't share... at least until you get a good idea for springing that stuff on them.

[Lord Liaden]

In The Mystic World, I suggested that "Azoic" (as in "Before life on Earth" could be a misinterpretation or mistranslation, and Steve suggested a good alternate meaning. But it also does not contradict the original meaning given way back in Mystic Masters. Just because Thanoro Azoic was the first Archmage of Earth's dimension does not mean he was the first Archmage of Earth. (Humans are so parochial!) The office might not only pass between mages of different cultures, but between mages of different planets. (In the Marvel Universe, one alternate future had Doctor Strange as the Ancient One of a thousand years hence, with an alien Sorcerer Supreme as his pupil.) Or there could be several worlds with their own lines of Archmages, with Thanoro the first Archmage of the first sapient race in this universe to learn magic.

 

Absolutely right. The First, whom I mentioned earlier, would be handy whenever you need a primordial magician for a given world or culture, as champion or teacher. So could the Nagas (last seen in The Mystic World) also be, if someone's interpretation of them is sufficiently ancient and non-terrestrial.

[Steve Long]

Stoopid fictional Krypticon. 

 

I don't recall the Dr. Strange story you mention, Dean, but I do recall one in which an alien sorcerer from another planet -- Urthona, not to be confused with the Blake character of the same name -- attempted to usurp Dr. Strange's position and steal all his magical goodies, in the end forcing our boy Stephen to destroy said goodies rather than let them fall into evil hands. So there's certainly Marvel Universe precedent for the Sorcerer Supreme not being a Human. Nor do I recall any CU precedent to that effect. It's just that being Humans, we have more fun reading about other Humans.

 

Maybe we need new terminology:  Archmage for the wizard charged with protecting a given planet, and thus by definition from a species and culture native to that planet; and "Arch-Archmage," who protects the entire dimension (and perhaps to some extent "oversees" the Archmages). If you wanted to, you could even organize this into a mystic equivalent of the Green Lantern Corps, with other ranks, secret handshakes, special spells other wizards don't get to learn, and a secret decoder ring.

 

We can probably do better than Arch-Archmage, though. Empyrean Epopt? Adeptus Magnificatus? The Adept?

[L. Marcus]

Archmage Supreme.

[Steve Long]

 

 

Archmage Supreme. 

 

Since there is no intonation in a post, rest assured that I am saying this humorously, not snarkily or in a mean way.

 

That sounds like one of those yummy deserts that they wheel out to your table in a fancy restaurant and then set on fire before serving to you.

 

Mmmm, Archmage Supreme -- with sprinkles!

[Haerandir]

I was toying with variants on 'Sorceror Supreme' to find the silliest one (Enchanter Extreme or Conjuror Consummate? I still can't decide.) Then I came up with Thaumaturge Transcendent, which I actually kinda like.

[Lord Liaden]

I don't recall the Dr. Strange story you mention, Dean, but I do recall one in which an alien sorcerer from another planet -- Urthona, not to be confused with the Blake character of the same name -- attempted to usurp Dr. Strange's position and steal all his magical goodies, in the end forcing our boy Stephen to destroy said goodies rather than let them fall into evil hands. So there's certainly Marvel Universe precedent for the Sorcerer Supreme not being a Human.

 

I recall both stories. The one Dean's referring to is from the last series for the 30th Century version of Guardians of the Galaxy, in which Steven Strange's disciple, and later successor as Sorcerer Supreme, was an alien named Krugarr. And come to think of it, the Urthona storyline introduced the extra-dimensional alien Rintrah, who also was Strange's disciple for a time. (Not to mention the name of a figure from William Blake's poetry which inspired part of Dean's mystic cosmology. It all comes back around, doesn't it?)

 

Say, Clea was Dr. Strange's disciple for a long time, and she was from the Dark Dimension. What's Strange got against his fellow humans, anyway?!

[Lord Liaden]

Maybe we need new terminology:  Archmage for the wizard charged with protecting a given planet, and thus by definition from a species and culture native to that planet; and "Arch-Archmage," who protects the entire dimension (and perhaps to some extent "oversees" the Archmages). If you wanted to, you could even organize this into a mystic equivalent of the Green Lantern Corps, with other ranks, secret handshakes, special spells other wizards don't get to learn, and a secret decoder ring.

 

We can probably do better than Arch-Archmage, though. Empyrean Epopt? Adeptus Magnificatus? The Adept?

 

 

Well, heck, if you want to go that route, I'd say we already have the perfect name for the being holding that position...

 

 

Thanoro Azoic. 

[DShomshak]

In the run of Doctor Strange that LL mentions, Doc als o took his shredded Cloak of Levitation to a being called Enitharmon the Weaver to mend. I should note that by that time I was already a Blake fan, and wrote a letter to the writer (argh, can't remember his name) encouraging him to use more Blakean concepts and not just the names. He didn't, so I did.

 

ADDENDUM: I looked it up: It was Peter Gillis.

 

Dean Shomshak

[pinecone]

Maybe Thanoro originally worked for the Zoas, but became unhappy when they were nuetral concerning the Eldar Worm. So he quit, declared neutrality from the Zoas, and went after the Worm, and then any other "big bads".

 

And thus was the new office of Arch Mage created.

[Lord Liaden]

If I was writing a story around the character, given the little officially defined for him, that's more or less the way I would go.

 

The Quaternion Banishment spell that the Archmage commands could be an element in that plot, given that there are four Zoas and four Parterres.

[Lawnmower Boy]

In the beginning there was light: light so energetic that it made exotic particles out of itself, and in collisions beyond reckoning, its exuberance transcended the physical to the metaphysical, and life was born without the Zoas. Life before life could be, swimming in the hadrons and baryons, the gamma ray soup of the primordial. It had no name, but when it came to name itself, it would be "Thanoro Azoic."

 

And yet in that roil of energy, hot with latency for the life and souls that would come after, there was a . .discordancy. A structure out of an older universe, sheltering cruel, proud beings, last survivors of that cosmos. And, too, there was the appetite from which these "Ravens of Dispersion" cowered. Rapturously hungry, licking energy and latency out of Creation it exuded an almost-pathetic pleasure at this new home it had found itself.

 

Thanoro Azoic was not inclined to begrudge its appetite. At least, not at first. Surely there was enough for all! But the ancient ones came to him, and warned him, and, at last, he saw the wisdom behind their touchy pride, and saw, through their eyes, the awful gallery of lost universes that those appetites had left behind them.

 

In that moment, Thanoro Azoic cried out to a higher power, and received an answer: a cruel answer. If the Creation Thanoro Azoic treasured was to live out its days and expire in its own time, gentle nursery of uncounted souls, fifty billion years hence, it would be by its own efforts. The Zoas must needs be neutral in this fight. 

 

It can never be said that Thanoro Azoic was created for a purpose. Purpose is  a kind of metaphysics, and the only metaphysics Thanoro Azoic knows are the kind made when exotic particles collide with the force of smashing worlds. But it also cannot be said that Thanoro Azoic did  not find a purpose. Thanoro Azoic will shepherd Creation from its beginning to its end. And even though the first of beings can no longer manifest anywhere cooler than the event horizon of a galactic black hole, plans long-laid still proceed, and there is teaching to be done, to those brave and wise enough to reach out. 

[Lord Liaden]

Interesting. This background takes the "always been there" approach to Thanoro Azoic. While that's a perfectly legitimate tack, I would find it more compelling to craft a story in which he rises from humbler beginnings, through adversity, to achieve a loftier status and purpose. But that's just my taste.