Power and Shape

All magic requires exactly two components: Power and Shape. It's the specifics that people spend lifetimes mastering. Power is the source of fuel that allows magic to exist. Most commonly, some small sliver of a mage's life essence is used, often bolstered by material components. Shape is what gives that power direction and purpose. This takes the form of words, gestures, or both for more powerful spells. Each half of the puzzle is complimentary to each other - to cast a spell, one must have both, but if a mage is inexperienced, they can get around their spell's poor shape by pumping more raw power into it. Conversely, a highly practiced mage can take very little power and shape it expertly. In truth, this is what separates the most powerful mages - most any arcanist can dump their life essence into a single powerful spell (often dying or burning out their magical potential in the process), but only those of great practice can weave such spells with perfect shape, allowing them to use much less power for the same effect in the process.

​

Limitations and Rituals

A mage can only channel so much power at once, one's soul is not designed to be a conduit, and widening that conduit too far can have disastrous results - from severe injury, to losing the ability to channel magic, to death. As mages grow in talent and knowledge, and as their shapes become more practiced, they can channel less power to gain the same effects, allowing those who master techniques to cast the same spells more often, or else channel the same power to garner a better effect. In this way, experienced mages may appear more powerful, but truly they are simply better at using the power they have. The way around this limitation is to cast rituals - larger pieces of magical work that allow mages to channel their power slowly into material storage over a longer period of time. Rituals all require the full scope of a mage's power and shape - gestures, words, materials, and a sliver of their life essence - as well as the time to carefully prepare and execute everything.

​

Dos and Don'ts

Do...

• Make magic yours: Play any type of mage you like, but expect it to take a toll. Channeling raw power may drain your stamina, force you to tap into your life essence, require the expenditure of material, and/or require a lengthy casting time.

• Play into the cost: If your ritual demands gallons of blood, roleplay the challenge of acquiring it. Will you ask, barter, or deceive to get what you need? If your mage regularly eschews alternate power sources, how does the drain on their life essence affect them? 

• Respect the limits: Lifting a quill or a book is nearly effortless, but heavier objects demand more. Catching a falling ally with levitation may work in a pinch, but holding them aloft will strain your concentration and possibly require additional components. True flight is beyond even master mages.

​

Don't...

• Zero effort cast: All magic requires intent, energy, and often sacrifice.

• Master magic overnight: True power takes years, decades, or even centuries to refine. No shortcuts.

• Ignore the costs of magic: Every spell must follow the established rules. Casting silently without gestures is impossible, and casting silently with subtle gestures is incredibly difficult even for relatively simple spells. 

​

Portraying Long Term Cost

While novice mages typically look completely normal, the more magic one casts, the more it affects their bodies. Practiced mages may start to show signs of magical corruption, while master mages typically have at least one (and often more) affliction in their severe form, and a few in their minor forms. Mages that attempt spells beyond their ken will often gather multiple afflictions quite rapidly, and they will tend to progress swiftly. Here are some ideas to display that on an avatar or RP out:

• Reddened skin around the eyes, like sunburn. Severe: Blackened areas around the eyes, scorched by the power.

• Blackened fingertips. Severe: Fingers that turn hard (though still mobile), look like obsidian, and sometime leak smoke.

• Veins becoming darker and more visible. Severe: Veins blackening, their paths traced in larger blackened areas on the skin.

• Sclera darkening while the iris remains the same. Severe: Eyes blackening fully.

• Patterned bumps on the skin. Severe: Cancerous growths.

• Wrinkles and skin tightening much too early. Severe: True rapid aging, and a shortening of the natural lifespan.

• Paranoia. Severe: Full madness.

• Short term memory issues. Severe: Amnesia. 

• Migraines. Severe: Seizures.

​​​​​

Life Beyond Death

To exist path death is the goal of many a mage, though those that truly achieve it are rare. The most common form is not true life, but rather the puppeteering of a corpse by means of magic. These animated dead do not just follow the whims of their master, but are fully controlled and given life by their magic. In this, the soul of the original owner of the corpse is long gone to the beyond, and what is left is merely flesh or bone maneuvered by magical strings - something that requires a tremendous amount of power, and thus is often done by those not using their own life essence to fuel their spells. The next most common is also the most reliable, but it has limitations. With the correct ritual, a Saultshard can be sunk into the body of the recently deceased (or, with a more complicated ritual, used to reform a body), anchoring their soul to the mortal plane. But this can only been done once, and that is not enough for some. The last and most terrible method is similar, but it first involves carefully corrupting the Saultshard. Instead of shaping enough power to keep the soul anchored, instead it shapes far more power, making the recipient far more resilient, and allowing the repeated return past multiple deaths. Such power, however, comes at a cost, and rapidly corrupts the soul, turning what may have once been good people into twisted abominations.

​

History

​Legends speak of magic being born in the birthing fits of the gods - though which gods, naturally, is a subject of much theological debate. In that mix of disordered elements and primordial matter, the first mages grasped at power beyond their ken, producing wonderous works the likes have never been replicated. Little is known about these mages, beyond the scant evidence found of them by early peoples and the cryptic words that some immortals share. Theories abound, between them being scoured from the world by their own power (or that of a chosen deity), to having ascended to higher planes of existence as celestials, fiends, elementals, or any other thing. Still, no one is sure what truly happened to them.

​

While nothing has reached the height of those first mages, in the age of dominion there were arcanists of such skill that they could weave High Magic. A shadow of the works of the First, and yet a blinding sun compared to what most mages could muster, these magics were practiced by Dragon God-Kings and High Elven Sorcerer-Lords. These archmagi could create constructs of living metal, summon great elemental spirits of destruction and anchor them to the mortal plane, conjure storms from nothing, or call great flaming stones from the sky to shatter entire formations. In this, they shaped antiquity to their often opposing desires. The secrets of High Magic are either long lost or long hidden, and those who attempt to reconstruct them invariably die a death of nightmares, even in the rare instances where they succeed. It may well have faded into legend, if their works did not live on in great artefacts, lingering areas of incredible magics, and inscrutable tomes.

​

The current understanding of the rules and limitations of magic has been constructed from centuries of experimentation, study, and the collating of contradictory and oppositional histories passed down from greater powers that mortals have bargained with. Ultimately, it is a functional though still incomplete body of knowledge, passed from mage to mage in great schools, cloistered monasteries, and private tutelage. Still, those great researchers of the era ponder the perpetual question: did the laws of magic change, or merely our understanding of them? Some of those in Aer Arnad posit that magic has recently been democratized amongst living creatures, and that superstitious human serfs ignorant in the ways of magic possess the majority of magical potential left in the world. Yet others simply believe a god removed the mortal ability to channel High Magic, to protect or spite those who may reach for such heights. Both, and most other theories serve as convenient explanations for the waning of magic that does not lay blame at their own feet.

​

Regardless, in this age those who attempt to closely follow - let alone bend or break - the laws of magic often suffer at least minor corrupting effects. In extremis, this can include rapid aging, spontaneous combustion, or other spectacular self-destructive effects. In their more minor forms, this can include blackening of extremities, power leaking from eyes, blindness, blackened veins, or dozens of other effects showing the power's hold on a mage. While these costs can be mitigated with the use of ample material components, or redirected by using the life force of another (ritual sacrifice, utilizing blood as a material), it is an inevitability that mortals will eventually succumb to them - if something else doesn't kill them first.

​

This is particularly true of untrained mages who can, through trial and error, earn a functioning understanding of the rules and limitations of magic. Without tutelage or manuals to guide them along accepted, safer paths, however, such hedge mages will tend to burn bright, but burn quickly. It is often said that hedge mages "burn the wick at both ends", though in truth they rarely last as long as the expression would make it sound. The terrible effects of unchecked channeling age them nearly twice as fast, and the other effects threaten to claim them much sooner and much worse as the power burns through their body and soul. These hedge mages will often produce impressive, but inefficient magic, and will often burn out completely in a few short years of activity. This, of course, makes them perfect folk heroes, and many a village has a patron hedge mage, long passed to the beyond yet still celebrated.

​​

​