Players: Derek, ET, Kevin, Ryan

We kicked off this Fall of Magic game to a great start. Typically the "collect the party" phase takes a while, but this time we just jumped right in:

• Derek, the scholar, kicked things off as a demonstration to Ryan,
  
• Ryan, the apprentice, even though it was his first time at Story Games, dove right in and presented a clear picture of his character's personality and motivations,
  
• which I immediately exploited forcing the two of us together (as the golem it was easy to push the story forward with seeming magical motivations.)
  
• Then ET got in on the action, riding up, surrounding us, and demanding "That's mine! The seed goes to Stormguard."...Ryan and I protested a bit, but seeing as Stormguard is along the way (yup a bit of meta-gaming ) we agreed to go towards Stormguard.
  
• That just left us with needing to pull Derek into the party...

...and boom -- party formed. Plus, now we had enough inter-party conflict to keep us occupied all night long.

Unfortunately, Ryan had to leave early, so we created a way out for his character where I gave him the magus (it was a seed pod) and told him to run on ahead alone, because we couldn't let ET take the magus to Stormguard (*cough* be my Frodo *cough*,) which meant we spent the rest of the game without the magus and trying to chase after Ryan (once ET's character found out what I'd done.)

This was also the first time I've played a game where the Magus was an object, a seed pod - ala "the One Ring" - rather than a person. This forced our characters to interact more with each other, and we had to find different motivators to drive us forward than "the magus told us to go this way."

Removing the Magus as an actor is genius. I think you're exactly right that taking out the central mysterious figure puts the characters into direct interaction, which is much more interesting.