This one setting thingy with witches and stuff?

[Kappa]

Hmm... maybe. That might be a good direction to go for Mystery Element, and to help straighten out Autumn a little, and maybe come up with more characteristics for Winter. But it still doesn't leave me with a solid idea of what properties to pick for those two. I like something-similar-to 'work' for Autumn to connect it to Iron through Strength; I'm very fond of the Fear link between Night and Autumn, so I would want Autumn to keep one property that supports that connection; and Winter needs a characteristic to connect it to Night through Sleep, plus one more to give Mystery Element something to hold onto.

Also, I want to fit 'air' somewhere, and I think it might work best as the link between Winter and Mystery Element opposing Iron.

edit: Further thoughts - The word "witch" is a little bit overloaded in Effulgence; not that I'm especially planning an Effulgence 'verse based on this fascinating little setting, but against the vague possibility that it might happen, it'd be good to have another word for People What Does This Magic Thing. Any suggestions?

[Kappa]

Who is "Anonymous Otter" (viewing the elements chart)? That's adorable.

[Bluelantern]

"Sorcerer" could work instead of witch? Or mage?

EDIT: It is probably for the best to drop the seasons thematic/names or at very least drop autumn from it.

EDIT 2: maybe we could take something from Baqua http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagua ?

[Kappa]

I'm so close to having Autumn work, though, it seems a shame to quit on it now! XD

I'll think about this some more.

(Now there's an Anonymous Gopher! I'M SO CHARMED)

[Sky]

Well this is lots of fun to think about.
Why not ghosts instead of spirits?

Smoke or Mist as the mystery element? It could link to Winter(storm aspect) via Air and to Spring(water aspect) via Change. (relevant properties could be clouds or lightness, and motion.) If Iron and Autumn shared something like building/construction instead of Strength then Smoke's opposing aspect could be chaos. Or if Strength stayed then the opposing property could be something like, I dunno, subtlety.

[Kappa]

Ooh. I like the smoke/mist/fog idea, but I'm going to take it in a a slightly different direction. Did you know that the word "gas" was coined as a derivative of "chaos"? Now you do!

So now we have:

Spring (nature, healing, water) opposes the Fear pair (Autumn-Night) through its aspect of healing, which relates to safety and protection.
Summer (fire, light, energy) opposes the Sleep pair (Night-Winter) through its aspect of energy, which relates to alertness/awakeness.
Iron (metal, engineering, durability/solidity) opposes the Air pair (Winter-Chaos) through its aspect of durability/solidity.
Autumn (the harvest (work, material wealth), ghosts/spirits) opposes the Creation pair (Chaos-Spring) through its aspect of the harvest, which relates to destructive transformation.
Night (darkness, dreams, death) opposes the Life pair (Spring-Summer) through its aspect of death.
Winter (cold, wind/storms, stasis/preservation) opposes the Heat pair (Summer-Iron) through its aspect of cold.
Chaos (formlessness/insubstantiality, change, intuition/inspiration) opposes the Strength pair (Iron-Autumn) through its aspect of insubstantiality.

Still not totally sure about the formulations for Autumn, Chaos, and Winter, but hey! It's done, more or less!

Now: manifestations... XD

[Alphabeta]

So, how do the rules against excessive trading get actually enforced, if the end of the obvious scheme results in a sorcerer/mage/witch/whatever out of legend?

[Kappa]

Well, if you've only done one too many trades, you're not yet so legendary that twenty more witches-or-whatever can't take care of you, presumably.

[Bluelantern]

Trade enforcement: The ritual should require time and effort that the common witches couldn't achieve easily, likely the law enforces trading under supervision only. There is also the simple matter of finding a witch with the gift that you want (and that want a gift that you have too). There could be rituals that detect or analyze a witch's current powers and simply using the wrong gift in front of the wrong witness could do to incriminate you.

Another idea: the ritual (or at least the common version) has a limitation of a single use per witch pair, so if Sherlock and Tony trade powers once, they couldn't trade ever again, they could trade-by-proxy using two rituals and a third person. This would make trading even harder since each instance requires a new person to be involved, and the rumor of a potential legendary-witch spreads faster (even if you kill the witches that would be Witch-police-folk suspicion).

---

I still don't like Autumn and Chaos, not sure what to replace Autumnn with. Chaos could be Storm-Thunder (focused on eletricity and wind)?

About manifestations:

There is the blade one as a rule-of-cool. I can't see what a "Autumn Blade" should be made of, but for the sake of being colaborative, how about if the Blade power doesn't actually "create" a blade, but allows the Witch to enchant a weapon (maybe even allowing it to be summoned at will), the weapon is made of the same materials and behaves mostly as before but when the witch uses it some extra power manifests?

From the original material we have word. To change things a bit, maybe the specific word varies from individual witch to individual witch (the effects relate to the gift), a annoying side-effect is that the witch no longer can speak the word without activating the gift and if there is a use-per-day limit, the witch can't speak the word at all afterwards. The witch can still convey the specific word through code or similar.

A new manifestation Companion, it changes a creature into a familiar of sorts, with traits that depend on the element.

[Kappa]

I've already filled in all the Blades in the spreadsheet, and I think they work pretty well. I'm not sure whether they'd be summoned or enchanted onto an existing sword; it's possible that either could work.

I am far too fond of Chaos and Autumn to get rid of them now that I've finally got them more or less nailed down XD But there's nothing preventing you from coming up with a variant system if you feel like it!

I'm also toying with the notion that it's possible to combine multiple Blade spells if you happen to know more than one, so you could end up with a Blade of Frost and Dawn that is made of flaming ice and makes you tireless and immune to both heat and cold.