My players just reached the mindscape border for the first time, and obviously one of them used detect magic.
In retrospect, I'm not sure if the mindscape border should register as magic or not- it is part of a curse, but also just the edge of the plane.
My first guess was it would br magic, but now I think it isn't. What do you think?
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My handling of it is that the Wall of Ghosts detects as being magical but that the mindscape border does not... the mindscape border is certainly a supernatural effect of some sort, but I viewed it more as 'this is the edge of the world and how it naturally works' whereas the Wall of Ghosts is an active magical effect within the world. I also helped use this to clue the party in that the Wall of Ghosts should be their focus... that it should be easier to figure out a way to address a clearly magical effect than to address something that apparently isn't magical despite seeming like it should be.
Also worth noting that the mindscape border is not actually part of a curse. Though the locals come to refer to the fog barrier as being a curse, this is just because it's their best guess based on what they're seeing. In actuality it isn't really a curse in the sense of long-term malignant or afflicting magic. Once the party finds out about the mindscape it'll be clear that 'curse' perhaps wasn't the most accurate terminology.
Creative Director
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The border should for sure be something that *detect magic* can pick up, since it's certainly not a natural feature, but it also shouldn't give the PCs any extra tool or resource to figure out what's going on beyond what's already an option for them presented in the adventure... other than to potentially confirm to them that the weird blockade that feels unnatural is indeed unnatural.
I will disagree with the mighty T-Rex and say I would have the mindscape border not register as magic.
There are two reasons for this.
First is the same reason that a ghost would not register as magic in my campaigns.
In real life, I would of course consider any fantasy element to be magic, a suspension of nature. But inside a fantasy setting where elves and restless dead are a known part of the world, part of nature (even if it isn't Primal or animal nature), magic then becomes not a measure of something being unnatural so much as being the places, people and things that have been *altered* by spells, rituals, enchantment and powers beyond what's "normal".
So one zombie that rose spontaneously due to some unresolved business, it would not detect as magic in my games, but the other one that was raised by a necromancer, it would definately detect as magical, specifically, the corpse is not magical but the spell that animates it does.
I would let it detect some creatures and things that are not explicitly affected by a spell, like a familiar, because it can be assumed to be a suspension of the natural way of things through magic, even if it isn't an ongoing spell effect or a magical item in rules-terms.
So what is the mindscape border then? Well, it's not the effect of a spell, or even a deliberately created thing. It is literally the end of the world, if the mindscape was an island then the border would be the beaches and cliffs where land ends. It is a "natural" feature of a mindscape formed from the collective consensus of the beings inside it, same as all the buildings that exist in the mindscape but have fallen apart in the real world. It's the reason the mindscape itself does not detect as magic.
The second reason is that letting the border register as magic invites more prodding and attempts to dispel it as a spell effect. But this is a dead end and is not the insurmountable obstacle that we want the players to be focusing their attention on. With it being the "natural" end of the world, I would rather have this register as nothing at all. That could raise more questions, but also makes it seem more like a force of nature that will not budge. The message is that whatever it is, it is "supposed" to be there.
The wall of ghosts however is both the result of a suspension of the "natural" way things are (as far as things are natural in the mindscape), and we want the players to prod and to try and affect it before trying to do something with the border.
I totally agree with what Synapse17 has laid out here and they articulated it in a more thorough way than I could have.