(A) General Magic
This is archival material from previous blog
Inspired by wizards seeking immortality in articles about Magic, Madness and Sadness at https://boxfullofboxes.blogspot.com I started wondering of how magic in Donnuty Wonderland could work. And since DnD is one of better known systems due to popularity it would make great comparison to whatever I come up with.
First let me tell you about one thing â no divine magic. The âdivineâ beings are mostly touchable creatures, very powerful yet very restricted by the same rules of nature any other being is. The divine blessings are just regular âarcaneâ or âoccultâ magic filtered by elements best known and controlled by these beings. Dagon will grant you water spells, Cthulhu probably some extremofile stuff, flying and regeneration and so on. But also not for free â you either cast it as wizard with wands and ingredients and things or itâs innate for you and you are no longer human. And all magic is just ability to temporarily bend rules of reality. Some say magic itself is a being. Some that it is will of one true god. Some believe it has its own rules.
People differentiate magic by practical use. I think I will bail on 8 schools of magic schtick. They feel very whimsical. Why is necromancy different than conjuration? You just summon stuff but undead instead of demonic, elemental or other. And why abjuration is separate school? Well, my first thing is magic with way lower flashy power. No more âsummon creatureâ and it shows up out of nowhere. If you summon something it will need to physically come to you. In its time. If you summon a dragon it has to fly there. If you summon a demon it has to find a crack in reality or open portal or something and then slip through it and then get to you. If you summon swimming animal when far from any waterbed it wonât come â your spell is not strong enough to make it die trying. Or is it? Probably most summoned creatures would take weeks or months to come to your location. No more easy planar travel shit, too.
I donât think spells have levels. The difficulty lies in tools to use (you know how much CRYSTAL BALL COSTS?), ingredients to burn, preparation to handle and mostly â in gathering knowledge. If you know how to cast a spell then most of work is behind you. And since spells are more grounded, more dirty, witchy and fleshy then some concepts go away. Like, I think âNecromancyâ is not necessarily totally different school of magic. Itâs part of all of them. You bind a spirit to dead body just like mage binds familiar to themself. You cast acid or cold blast just like others throw fireballs. You get the knowledge of recently dead just as diviner gets it by using cards or dice or something. So I think some of the DnDish âschools of magicâ are just flavours given to people dealing with various elements.
There are basically three tiers of magical spells in magic schools of civilised lands â cantrips, petty magic and grand magic. Cantrips are all the spells which could be done by mundane means if you are lucky, clever, prepared or just very skillful â usually even wizards themselves donât know if such magic is real or is it a trick. Or it is a trick and they are fully aware of it. Then there is Petty Magic â this are spells which can be cast with minimal training, preparation and remote tools. Name was clearly made to mock spellcasters using âpettyâ magic. Some wizards claim only certain schools should be considered Petty, some think any schools weak spells, there are certain Binding, Evocation and Transmutation specialists claiming whole Enchantment and Divination are petty and there are no Grand Magic of these schools. The definition is fluid yet most agreed version is that if you can take simple tool, common ingredient and cast a spell on the fly then it is Petty Magic. All other spells, meaning all the more complex and difficult ones are considered Grand Magic.
The main schools of magic, which are grouped due to internal similarities and easiness in research, would be: Illusions, Enchantment, Divination, Evocation, Binding, Transmutation. And Iâm thinking of linking Enchantment to Illusions, since without high power magic the illusions wonât be so⌠real? So letâs say there are 5 schools of magic here. Enchanment (Illusions+Enchantment), Divination, Evocation, Binding (Conjuration+Abjuration) and Transmutation. Necromancy is all over the place. I think some Enchantment spells, especially these regarding personal actions and some personal Divinations could be in effect the same. Doesnât matter if you persuade someone to work on a certain goal or divinate their future to such goal. Divination deals with fate, with grand cosmic rules and on smaller scale Binding does that too â it changes and links things together or breaks them apart. Evocation uses the natural laws to bring forth certain effects. Transmutation warps the world in a way of the effects which can be also managed by Enchantment. Imagine transmuting sword to be flaming. And imagine making people believe your sword is flaming so their bodies react as if it was. You got the same effect with Transmutation and with Enchantment. I think all of them overlap a little.
Most of the Petty Magic would be really in Divination and Enchantment department. But youâd probably also have some minor Evocations â creating gusts of wind or making water flows, Bindings â circles of protection and some simple temporary talismans or animal summonings, Transmutation â probably something too? Maybe tricks of temporary rusting or curses of weakening equipment. Then Grand Magic would be everything else. And by Grand Magic I mean all the spells which wonât be cast at will in a moment. Nope. You gotta work for it. Either specially carve symbols on your coins to make them look like they are golden or bath them in alchemical solution to make them golden. You need to sing a whole Hymn of the Wind and Sky to summon flock of birds, draw Runes of Fire Breath with red paint to cast fiery missiles, specifically tone your Story of Seven Rivers to enchant guards to hand you the keys to your cell. All this is Grand Magic. Sometimes itâs allowed to delay spells in trinkets â thatâs why wizards carry with them so much random stuff â to preserve their spells there, and that's also why theyâre staffs are usually heavily decorated â some of this stuff are just spell. The biggest, baddest spells need you to plan and execute whole environment around to cast spells. I read once a story about immortal sleeping princess â in order to cast such spell someone built five perfectly situated fortresses. Hard to tell if it was supposed to be a blessing in face of adversity or a wizard trying to curse rulers child. This is the Grand Magic Iâm talking about.
For Enchanters â all the petty frauds, thieves and charlatans on the verge of mundane. But also artists, Minstrels, Bards, Troubadours which can charm you with their music. Sneaky advisors, identity thieves and con artists. Masters of illusions, tricks, charismatic and influential. In the end of their magical journey comes psychosphere, interconnected human consciousness by which they can transfer their mind to other bodies, or make figments of their sleeping selves appear. I imagine yet another way â some Enchanters loose their bodies entirely, throw away their humanity to become the beings of pure thought, concepts and ideas. Legends say there are certain melodies, speeches or even whole languages who were old powerful wizards from ancient days. Some people say this is how all enchantment spells are created. Some say this is how spirits became realâŚ
Divination. Basic diviners are also frauds and charlatans, and shamans and duckton others. But also seers, oracles, visionaries, people most sought after in ancient times, capable of predicting most distant, most important events. Most diviners are not only receivers of the fate but dabble in the laws of fate and time. They are selfish egos, controllers of people and societies, spiders in a web. They usually grow distant and indifferent to human lives experiencing more than regular person can in one lifetime. Seekers of immortality either become Fateless, tricky and chaotic beings whose simple presence breaks the law of reality or they sew themselves into loom of fate, become executors of the fate.
The Binding school gives us the conjurers and summoners. There are rarely weak adepts of this school, probably because poor binding job can easily kill you. Though some beastmasters are considered as petty binders. Their main domains are summoning creatures and forces, as necromancers and spiritualists, some called druids even. They also specialise in the contrary of binding â abjuring, manipulating world connections to protect, to push away creatures and forces. Eventually binders try to bind something they shouldnât, become one with the most primal elements of the world and turn into elementals or become the aliens to the natural order who abjured themselves from the whole world â just like bodies of dead gods floating in unknown spaces.
Evokers are rare. Spells of such flashiness, destructiveness and materiality bring forth a lot of unwanted attention. Evokers then are rarely solitary wizards â they work in groups, covens, convents and congregations, sometimes pretending to be priests of a god. If youâve met Priests of Fire with not necessarily spiritual rituals then they were probably wizards of Evocation undercover. Also they are one of the biggest threats on the battlefield if one side manages to convince them to participate. If they donât kill themselves in the process of spell discovery or infighting with their fellows they may grow paranoid over their mortality. Some connect themselves to powerful forces they used to evoke and become lenses of immense power others start to evoke themselves, turn into forces of nature or cosmos.
Transmutation can be less temporary than other magic schools. This school is usually bringing the most scientific focused mages, as it allows to experiment with the materials and elements even without all the materials. Transmuters using more and more of the power grow distant to stability of the world. They see it more in terms of potential and change. In time they seek immortality they can choose one of the ways. More generalist casters often become beholders as they knowledge of spells allows to manipulate body and mind and make it one with certain spells. Wizards focused mostly on transmutation rather embrace the transmutative nature and become everlasting shapechangers, kind of like blue shapeshifter from Adventure Time. As their body and in turn also mind warps constantly they lose connection to their mortal form and become boiling masses of potentiality â and some say Shub-Niggurath, the mother-goddess of all monsters is one of first Transmuters.
If you are confused and cannot really guess from which school of magic the spell or effect could come itâs ok. This is not some grand rule of universe. Itâs just how people managed to find similarities and differences in magic and made arbitrary rules about that.