Alicornutopia

Metamancer
Manamancer
Thaumancer
Thaumomancer

Which of these is a better replacement for metamage?

in descending order of how much my brain likes them for the purpose:

Metamancer
Thaumomancer
Manamancer



Thaumancer

Likable ones on top...

Metamancer
Thaum-o-mancer
Thaumancer
Thau-mo-mancer
Manamancer

Also Thaumaturgy > thaumoturgy, regardless of caster name! >.> Shhhhhhh.

I think I agree with Kappa, though with "Metamancer" and "Thaumomancer" being pretty close and "Thaumancer" not being so far from "Manamancer".

Metamancer seems to be The Will Of The People

Golems! and other artefacts
Artefact is the general name given to any inanimate object that has been infused with magic by an enchanter (or metamancer). The process for making an artefact has two parts: coming up with a sufficiently precise description of what the artefact does, and imbuing it with this description via magic.

The description needn't be in any specific format or even stored anywhere; it needs to merely be sufficiently understood by the enchanter. An example of a simple artefact is a floating tray, which could be described as follows: it floats one metre and a half above solid and liquid surfaces, and can exert a reactive vertical force pointing up of up to one hundred Newtons; pushing or pulling it in a given horizontal direction makes it float towards that direction for as long as it's being pushed or pulled and it decelerates at a rate of ten centimetres per second per second; pushing it up makes it stop floating; if it is let go above or below its normal operation height it will fall or rise at a constant rate of ten centimetres per second; it will resist all attempts at rotating it around a horizontal axis. All "moving parts" need to be specified, but they needn't actually be separate - it is possible to make a statue made of contiguous stone move like a human does with sufficiently detailed definitions. This is, of course, fairly complex, and a bigger limitation than size, which is normally no limitation at all - it is as easy to make an artefact out of a toy castle as out of a real castle, though mana costs grow with size, too.

Once an enchanter has a satisfactory definition in mind (or on paper or whatever) they will have an intuitive reading of how much mana it costs to make the artefact and how much charge it has and takes (explained below). If they have enough mana for it they can enchant the appropriate object by thinking through the full definition (memory aids like notebooks are okay) while dumping magic into it. This only works if the object is not yet an artefact. There is no distance limit but the enchanter needs to have a clear picture/understanding of the object's position with respect to themself. The process of enchanting an artefact must be done in a single, continuous sitting, and if the enchanter at any point stops for any reason it will be enchanted up to the point they stopped.

The object has then become an artefact, but other than any obvious magical features it has (like floating in the aforementioned case) cannot be distinguished as an artefact by any means other than metamancy or attempted destruction. If it is inactive or does not have obvious magical properties it will look like a regular object to nonmetas until they try to destroy it; then it will be revealed to be much sturdier than its nonmagical counterpart. It is mostly indestructible when it comes to regular use and wear and tear, since the magic is keeping it together, but concerted, directed effort (not necessarily conscious, a machine could do it) could destroy it. An example of how this resistance works is that an artefact is more likely to slide along a rockslide than be crushed by it, unless it is stuck somewhere so that it can't do that. If an artefact is destroyed beyond recognition, it will lose its magic; otherwise, it is still magic and if it is glued back together it can resume functioning normally. This does not mean, however, that their definition is stored physically anywhere in the artefact; it is maybe more useful to think of the magic as a "soul" or something, immaterial and occupying no space and animating it.

Artefacts are not perpetual motion engines - they have a "battery." Any enchanter (or metamancer) can dump aimless magic into them in order to recharge this battery, and regular use depletes it. The creator has a roughly intuitive reading on how long it takes to drain an artefact's energy under certain conditions of use upon artefact creation, and an enchanter who is dumping magic into an artefact also gets an intuitive reading of how much this is helping. If an artefact runs out of mana, it stops functioning according to its specification, but does not cease being an artefact, and can be recharged and rebooted at any time. If aimless magic is dumped into a nonartefact, though, it will become an artefact with arbitrary-but-thematically-appropriate magic (like a sword becoming very sharp and such).

Some things are fundamentally possible for artefacts: they can emit light and sound from anywhere, and what it looks/sounds like needs to also be specified in the definition. They can also react to pretty specific actions, which leads to pretty light-based touch interfaces instead of buttons. It is also a primitive action to add locations from which artefacts "sense" things, so they can see and hear and stuff from places, and sound interfaces are also a thing - usually in the form of pass phrases, but it is generally easier for artefacts to parse natural languages than for modern computers to do it.

Metamancers can turn artefacts into nonmagical objects, either dissipating or draining their remaining amount of mana plus an extra "fixed" amount that has been invested into the artefact upon its creation. It can then be reenchanted, or just remain as a regular nonmagical object. Metamancers can also allow improvements to be made upon artefacts, thus circumventing the "one sitting" rule: an enchanter can dump magic into an artefact until they need to stop, then when they return the metamancer can "open" the channel of upgrading the artefact again, and the enchanter can return from where they left off. Metamancers can also allow parts of an artefact to be edited/modified.

And this is, in fact, the only way to make golems, which are just very complex artefacts. Something is called a golem if it can respond to natural language queries and react autonomously to many situations, or all possible situations in a given class of them. Most golems are conceptually narrow - such as exclusively building buildings from blueprints, or exclusively going on errands - but they can even be sentient. They're not exactly computer AIs nor can they be compilers - there is no understanding of memory addresses or source code, their primitive actions are similar to humans' - so they can't really self-improve easily. Making a sentient golem is a project of decades or longer to a very dedicated pair of enchanter and metamancer, and very few if any were ever made. Given the state of affairs with respect to metamancers, golems are all invariably ancient artefacts, and there exists a society of people who go around old ruins looking for old inactive artefacts and especially these golems.

Another notable kind of artefact are the floating university cities of Teinnab. Given the need for enchanter upkeep, it is said that Teinn created them to foster cooperation between different kinds of mages. Traffic to and from the floating cities is typically by flying bus or flying private car. They cannot move, and merely float statically and prettily. Given their size, they need a fair amount of upkeep, with dozens of enchanters employed to keep the cities up. Batteries are also a possible artefact - they are objects that store enchanter mana and can transfer it into other artefacts (with some loss). They are typically shining crystals, and they consume mana at a very low constant rate just for existing, so they can't hold it indefinitely, but definitely can for pretty long - centuries, even.

Can you make an artefact that does nothing? This could be useful if you just want something particularly durable.
Can enchanters make artefacts that take power from things other than mana? For example, if you attach a (technological) electric motor and solar panel to an artefact, can it use the solar power to move the thing the motor is attached to and take less magic?
Can a metamancer make an artefact all by themselves? If for some reason an enchanter could work really fast, or go without sleep for decades, or have some other implausible benefit along those lines, could they make a golem by themself?

You cannot make an artefact that specifically does nothing, but "is very durable" is a thing you can enchant an artefact to do. It occurs to me that an artefact that has run out of charge is probably no more durable than a nonmagical object.

You can attach nonmagical objects like motors to an artefact and thus automate some parts of an artefact's work, but what this will in fact do is merely reduce the number of things you're specifying in the artefact's definition. An artefact cannot use nonmana energy to replace mana in its upkeep.

A metamancer can only make an artefact if they have borrowed/stolen enchanter mana. Metamancers in general can do anything other mages can do if they borrow/steal their mana, with the exception of generating, themselves, more mana.

An enchanter who didn't need to pause to ever do anything or was incredibly fast could indeed create a golem by themself.

Languages
Galatea: is a continent. As such, even though it has three enormous kingdoms spanning its territory, it has historically had several peoples, geographically separated enough to form several languages even if not enough to form several language families.

Each of the Kingdoms has its own official language, but the three are similar enough that deities' and kingdoms' and rulers' names are the same. They're more like different dialects of the same language than different languages, but only in the same sense Italian and French are technically close enough to be dialects.

Bezanab has the most variation of the three kingdoms when it comes to languages, with two other language families than that of the official ones: one spoken by the peoples who lived in the mountains, and one spoken by those who came from the small islands that pepper the northern coast and fled the storm countless years ago. The other two kingdoms have the same two language families: the official language's, and one used by people from the continent south of Galatea.

Amongst nobility and royalty, naming customs follow parent status: people have a first name, followed by 'am' (means roughly 'of') and then their highest-status parent's name. For example, this world's Sadde is called Kaede am Takara, because their father was named Takara and he is a king. When marrying someone of higher rank, their name replaces that of the high-ranking parent, with an 'ab' instead of an 'am' - meaning the same thing it means in the suffixes of the country names Bezanab, Teinnab, and Laokab, with the connotation that the lower-ranking spouse "belongs to" and "is blessed by" the higher-ranking spouse, who in turn provides for, protects, and guides the lower-ranking one. There are some rules with respect to gender (which are very complicated, and get even worse if magic is involved) but in practice they never come up, and sexism in the higher/more magical echelons of society is mostly related to magic anyway.

Amongst the common people, there isn't a very strong custom of last names. Rather, people are referred to by first name, sometimes mentioning a distinguishing parent (usually the father), or by titles/professions. This behaves slightly different when people belong to guilds/societies but I'll explain that later.

In addition to the naturally evolved languages there is the arcanist conlang. Since spells are cheaper when their text involves things that are related to what they do, this language was created to not be used in regular parlance so that people don't cast things accidentally while having conversations and so that spells are fairly cheap. However, the rules for what counts as a language understood by the spell are similar to the Names Fairyland ones, if a bit more stringent: the language needs to, at the time the spell is created, be actually used fairly extensively for communication. The solution people have found for this is a language that has two version of every word (or at least every noun), and which is used in universities and magic books. When attaching a spell to a sentence or word, arcanists choose one of the two words and thenceforth only use the other one in conversation. They are encouraged to choose randomly, in order not to accidentally make any one word too rarely used to count. Conversations are pretty great in this language.

I haven't ever tried actually conlanging and I'm not sure I will do that for this other than some very specific words/proper nouns, but that may change at some point.

Inspired by Tricky: mountainfolk language has lots of words smushed together like german, islander language has lots of elision over vowels.