So that last post was terrible and I can’t even remember it without cringing, I’m going to edit this post with a hopefully less terrible version eventually. The previous post will remain there as a humiliating reminder.
Take Dungeons & Dragons, saturate it with enough magic that trolls can use spells just by attacking that hard, redesign almost all of the races, make gods different, and make the alignments Lawful Jerkass, Neutral Jerkass, and Chaotic Jerkass. Throw in always happy endings, and put new amazing discoveries in every wood.
It’s a place where everything is possible, and you can always find something novel and fantastic.
There’s no good or evil, just varying degrees of jerkassness.
Example: Angels are holier than thou jerkasses that see people as ants, demons are selfish jerkasses that see people as useful ants.
Not entirely but it’s mostly that. There are a few other things that aren’t that that are classified as necromancy due to having the same side effects, e.g. roosters laying eggs, cows giving sour milk, and dogs instinctively disliking the caster.
Necromancers and farms don’t mix.
Let’s say you call a demon. You’d have to make a deal with it to make it serve you, and the deal would be magically binding.
Oftentimes, lesser demons are content to have a body in a world where people really can’t do them much harm, and will serve you as long as you give them form. Usually they have something they want to do in this world, such as pulling dumb pranks without having to worry about the repercussions.
Others will only serve you if you say sacrifice a quart of your blood a month to them, out of some bizzare demonic egotism. Yeah, demon’s don’t actually need a virgin’s soul to be called down, they’re just pricks that made sure you can’t bug them without a major sacrifice, and you’d really have to want their power to call them. They don’t want some amateur that just got his first spellbook to call them and not have anything worth trading for. Don’t want their time wasted, y’know? Just because they killed the moron that called them doesn’t change the fact they lost time they could have spent doing something else.
Basically, Death doesn’t take you until you want it to.
What’s that thing called that makes you want to die when in pain? Thanatos instinct?
As long as you don’t cave into that, you’ll live. Brain injuries are more likely to be fatal, though. It’s hard to tell the Reaper to shove his scythe where the sun don’t shine when you don’t have a will left to do it with.
Obsessed madmen tend to live for ages as long as they don’t complete their goal, and even if they’re killed, they could keep at it as a ghost if they really wanted to. Grim’s a lazy bastard and won’t ferry you to the other side if he has to hold you down or drag you kicking and screaming. There’s a dozen other souls out there that’d go quietly, why would he waste his time on the unwilling?
But yeah, you could recover from fatal wounds as long as you simply refuse to die.
You’d be surprised at how difficult that ends up being.
AKA why you should respect your elders.
Generally, as non-humans age, they become more intelligent, powerful and human in appearance. However, when humans age, they become weaker for direct confrontation.
Generally, as humans become older, they gain wrinkles, lose their strength, yadda yadda yadda. You should know this already. Despite this, as a human ages, they become better at indirect combat. A human mage that couldn’t fend a mouse off with his spells could curse towns and bring (un)natural disasters. Old-looking people are easy targets in a direct fight, but you’ll end up losing, even if you win. Though, this only applies to magic-uses. Fighters tend to lose force in exchange for tricks; a fogie fighter could disarm a man wielding a broadsword using a sharp rock. Hell, if he’s really good, he’ll use a dull one.
Non-magicborn non-humans, however,
Ah, the living dead. Revenants, ghouls, zombies… They have many names, don’t they?
The ones here, though, don’t moan, they don’t shriek. They are silent as the grave.
The two main types of zeds are Ghouls and Revenants. Difference between the two is free will.
Ghouls spread like a plague. Pretty standard zombie fare, though silent, and don’t eat those they’ve bitten.
Pretty much form solid walls of rotting flesh, silently marching onward, ranks getting larger and larger. Really, no more a threat than a plague, but every so often a pack of ghouls shows up to trim the population a bit.
Revenants are controlled by something. They aren’t diseased, they’re meat puppets.
Really, there’s no way to predict what you get from a revenant. Some never spread the control, some do, some kill things on sight, others are just out running errands. Some are slower than a paralyzed snail climbing up a waterfall of molasses in winter, some –quite literally– race lightning. Some are mindless, unskilled corpses, some can conjure up the most hidden works of arcane might. Best to just avoid ‘em altogether.
Not actually a ghost.
She’s an automancer that specializes in being unspecialized.
That last statement makes no sense.
She’s an automancer that specializes in using any and all man-made objects as weapons, instead of focusing on one or two types, like dolls or wooden snakes.
Not to say she can’t use them; she’s just not good at it. She earned the nickname “Poltergeist” by having household objects attack the owners of the house. When they run out to get someone or something to banish or exorcise the ghost, she makes robs them.
She managed to become an immortal magician at an unusually early age. She looks and acts no older than a 14-year-old child.
She’s not particularly dangerous. I mean, take her away from civilization or nail everything down and she’s about as much of a threat as a 14 year old child. Were she stuck in the woods, she’d be pretty much useless.
A bit short for her apparent age, black hair that frames her face and rather bright blue eyes.
1: Blackwhite, absolutes, polar opposites, English and French folklore, Grimm, day and night.
2: Greenblue, joy, luck, water, emeralds, Irish folklore, spinning.
3: Brownish red, summoning, world folklore, familiars, single mindedness, obsession, isolation, pets.
4a: Dark colors, duty, lasers, crosses, power, strength, overpowered, unfocused force, raw strength, oppression.
4b: Bright colors, hope, innocence, moe, honesty, perseverance, tarot, elementalism, fate, screw destiny.
5: Blue with hints of red, duty, loyalty, honor, service, balance, knowledge, understanding, yin and yang, light and dark, salt and pepper, cooking, Japanese legends, Musashi I think his name was, dragons.
6: Red, passion, luck, fortune, birds, phoenix, power, emotion, Chinese and Japanese folklore, beauty, pride, arrogance, godhood.
Extra: lol no. Just tellin’ ya Native American and Hindu.
This is complicated.
There are many, many, MANY different schools and types of magic, but I think it’d be best to cover basic magic that’s used by pretty much everything before delving into stuff like summoning.
H’okay, rule of thumb for base magic. (Source wavelength / target wavelength) * (inertia/target’s mana) = Energy needed for whatever the hell you’re doing. Source is what you’re drawing from for power, often a concept or an element, such as war or fire. I honestly have no clue how to measure the wavelengths of anything, but apparently there’s some order to it from 0 to some huge number. Magical wavelength is like the distance between two concepts. Fire and burning are close on the spectrum, water and burning are not, though water and fire are close due to both being elements. It makes no sense to me, and it seems it’s really less of a spectrum and more of a hypercube.
Anyhoo, basically this means that it’s easier to use a source that’s similar to what you want done, like fire and making fire.
Inertia is magical resistance, not sure what it’s measured in but it’s easier to make things happen to things that have a higher number. Don’t know the term for opposite of inertia so it’ll do just fine. Everything posses a source of mana, just not necessarily a lot of it. Humans and non-magical objects have comparatively little, while magical creatures can rip off spells that a human could only match if they were backed by a God, or had some really powerful artifacts. Embodiments of a concept usually have an unlimited amount of mana, but can’t necessarily use it infinitely. I’m honestly not sure why. Hell, there are magical creatures that can use and regenerate magic faster than embodiments, making it virtually limitless, but don’t actually have infinite magic.
Keep in mind, though, that this is “pure” magic. More muddied stuff like shamanism and divination work by entirely different rules, and I have no clue about ‘em. Hell, swordplay can be classified as a form of magic if you’re good enough at it.
Man, looking back and reading this, I realize it makes no freaking sense to anyone trying to read it. Oh well.