Alicornutopia

I'm kind of curious about the "book-learned, will-based" type of magic. Do you mind giving a brief summary?

Bluelantern wrote:
I must I didnt like how Africa-equivalent was ruled by were-clans, but this is really, really good.

This means that were-creatures aren't considered unholy or something?

That depends on who you ask. If you ask the Grand Victorians, werecreatures are the spawn of hell and must be destroyed, feral beasts that hijack the bodies of men, etc, etc. If you actually ask a member of one of the 'lupinian clans' (which is a stupid category since there are at least three separate major cultures in the area) then shamans are respected and valued members of the community, ranging from the equivalents of local priests to 'spiritual technicians' closer thematically to a local 'witch' - you come to them with metaphysical issues and problems you don't know how else to solve, and they may be able to help you using something that they got in trade from a spirit. Most of them use an economy of favors that interfaces a little shakily with local currency.

anthusiasum wrote:I'm kind of curious about the "book-learned, will-based" type of magic. Do you mind giving a brief summary?

Trying to summarize the entire category is difficult since it has so many applications. (Rather like asking 'what do shamans do?' Well, they trade with spirits for a variety of boons, but...)

The will-based magic, which I'll call magecraft, is the art and science of applying will to the world. At its most basic, it's the 'ability to go without tools' - to manipulate your environment in a way you could already do, but without having to use your limbs; at its most advanced, it is the ability to invent metaphysical constructs made of will and then apply them.

Let me illustrate with an example. If you want to learn to light a candle using magic, you practice meditation, excercises in willpower and concentration, and then you go and practice lighting a candle. That is, using matches, a tinderbox, something of the sort, you practice with a hundred or a thousand candles until you are certain that you can light the candle the exact same way, every time.

Then, you leave out the last step. Instead of touching the match to the candle, you bring it 90% of the way there...

And then you use your will to substitute for the remaining 10%.

If your form and will are correct, the candle will light on its own.

Then you expand the gap. You light the match, but don't bring it near to the candle. When you can light the candle with that, then you practice not having to light the match. Then you practice not having to take out the box of matches. Then you practice not carrying the box of matches on your person. Eventually, you will have the ability to light candles - and only candles- with nothing but an effort of will. This usually takes about a year of focussed study for apprentices.

Then you restart the process, only instead of lighting a candle, you light a hearth...

And once you've gone through this dull, arduous process for a few dozen iterations of 'lighting things on fire with matches', your will will develop a general tool that acts like a box of matches, which will let you strike fire anywhere you could reach. This means you have your first Implement and that means you are no longer an apprentice! Congratulations, it only took you five years of work.

At this point, you will be able to pick up additional related tools (say, a tinderbox if you started with matches) much more easily, because the intent of the will is close to your existing Implements. You know how 'lighting things on fire with your mind' works. With an extra year or so of study you will be able to make scrolls that, when read, will emulate a single function of your Implement by casting the reader's will into the right shape. Over the course of your life as a journeyman mage, you will acquire many of these Implements within an area of specialization and use them in conjunction to do great works of will.

After several decades of this, the tracks of 'using magecraft to manipulate fire' will wear grooves into your will-patterns, and you will, quite suddenly, generate a Core. A Core is a true psychic implement: it is the second-order psychic meta-construct of 'using your will to use your will to light fires." It is your mind realizing on an instinctual level that you do not need tools to manipulate fire, and therefore being limited to lighting things on fire you could actually reach with matches is dumb. At this point, you are officially a Master, and no longer care about puny laws of physics when something involves your particular specialty. Over the next few decades, you will develop more Cores from other Implements to do things that have no analog in physical tools and further expand the boundaries of your craft. The current record for held cores for a human is nine, since by the time you have that many you're reaching the end of your natural lifespan; each new core takes a decade or more to build, even after you've developed your first.

Examples of Master-level magic: Appearing an entire ship of the line from nothing after decades of ritualized purchases; massive displays of kinetic force after decades of practice with levers and trebuchets; doing complex surgery without ever making an incision after decades of work on real patients. Journeymen mages would be able to perform surgery without tools, but would have to make all the incisions a real surgeon would; conjure inexpensive objects, but not a ship of the line; and be able to punch you with their mind, but not crush you like a bug unless you were very far away. Apprentices would be able to do similar things as journeymen, but would require much more ritual, and all of them would have focusses of some form.

So could I use this to not need to eat, by having smaller and smaller meals, not finishing my meals physically, and/or gowing longer between meals, becoming a Journeyman with my complete lack of need for external food? Could I become a Master with a Core of not-needing-bodily-maintenance, drastically extending my lifespan?

Edit: Fixed question to be entirely about eating (the original post asked about stopping eating by holding my breath because of an incomplete rewrite)

Nice munchkin.

I got the idea from sorceren in the momentum world eventually becoming immortal. I haven't figured out a potential Core which would prevent disease in oneself, unfortunately.

Eva wrote:Examples of Master-level magic: Appearing an entire ship of the line from nothing after decades of ritualized purchases; massive displays of kinetic force after decades of practice with levers and trebuchets; doing complex surgery without ever making an incision after decades of work on real patients. Journeymen mages would be able to perform surgery without tools, but would have to make all the incisions a real surgeon would; conjure inexpensive objects, but not a ship of the line; and be able to punch you with their mind, but not crush you like a bug unless you were very far away. Apprentices would be able to do similar things as journeymen, but would require much more ritual, and all of them would have focusses of some form.

What you described sounds more like... the ability to teletransport a bunch of ships and make everyone think they belong to you, which now that I think about it, would look exactly the same from the outside, in fact maybe even the Master might be affected by it... Never mind, I going to use this idea somewhere else xD

How much action yourself require? Could you "learn" regeneration by cutting one self many times?

Would it make it easier if (using the candle example) you tried to use a burned match? How many hours of daily practice someone needs? Could some kind of craftsman learn to do this by accident? or in fact, is this easy enough that it makes sense to learn it to make one's non-magical job easier?

DanielH wrote:So could I use this to not need to eat, by having smaller and smaller meals, not finishing my meals physically, and/or gowing longer between meals, becoming a Journeyman with my complete lack of need for external food? Could I become a Master with a Core of not-needing-bodily-maintenance, drastically extending my lifespan?

Edit: Fixed question to be entirely about eating (the original post asked about stopping eating by holding my breath because of an incomplete rewrite)

Yes, you could! Although it would probably be a bit unpleasant because in the short-term you'd be effectively bulimic, since the last step of eating food is likely closer to 'digestion' than 'eating the last bite of your meal.' You could, however, circumvent this by first having a Implement in another form of applicable biomancy, which will let you 'fudge' the addition of new ones more. So if you first learned how to say, ritually recover from the common cold, then you might not have to involve throwing up in your training plan. The relevant Core would likely be something along the lines of "Sustenance", the power to will yourself no longer hungry, thirsty, suffocating etc. Once you developed it, then "Agelessness", as a 'nonexistent tool', could likely be created with another decade of study.

Note that lifespan is the primary limiting factor on Magecraft power. Once you did this, you would then have time to develop many, many more Cores. Around fifty or so is when you would generate a third-level psychic construct, "using your will to use your will to use your will to manipulate the world." The technical term for such a construct is a Mantle, and possessing one makes you more or less a localized god: this is the level at which you instinctively realize that your will can do anything you ask, so why do you need to do all this hard work, again? Mantled mages are able to manipulate reality within their perceptions to be basically anything they want. They are lucid dreamers in a world where everyone else is asleep. None of them have ever been verified to exist: this level of mastery is the stuff myths and fables are built on.

Bluelantern wrote: What you described sounds more like... the ability to teletransport a bunch of ships and make everyone think they belong to you, which now that I think about it, would look exactly the same from the outside, in fact maybe even the Master might be affected by it... Never mind, I going to use this idea somewhere else xD

This would likely depend on the exact manner you focussed your will during training, and is the exact reason why discipline, focus, and mental clarity is necessary. You want to manifest the power of 'conjuration', not 'acquisition'. Indeed, in order to develop the core properly you would likely need to spend at least some time as various technicians and workers, ranging from 'baker' to 'shipwright.'

Or you could just cut corners, manifest 'acquisition', and magically embezzle your way to greatness, if you don't care about ethics enough to spend an extra decade of your life.

Bluelantern wrote: How much action yourself require? Could you "learn" regeneration by cutting one self many times?

You could "learn" regeneration by cutting yourself and then treating the wound many times. It would likely be an advanced Implement to learn, though: you would need a good will to compress 'and then my body does the healing' into a single mental step. Having another 'nearby' Implement would probably be a good idea.

(Also, it would not be reflexive unless you manifested a higher-order Core for that specific purpose. Effort of will is central.)

Bluelantern wrote: Would it make it easier if (using the candle example) you tried to use a burned match? How many hours of daily practice someone needs? Could some kind of craftsman learn to do this by accident? or in fact, is this easy enough that it makes sense to learn it to make one's non-magical job easier?

Using a burned match might make it easier or harder, depending on the student.

The timescale for mastery I've given above is assuming that the apprentice or journeyman is spending 40-hour work weeks on nothing but learning, practicing, and applying magic. If you put in less time, you will manifest slower: if you put in more, then you will manifest quicker. Continuous effort is important, in order to maintain the will and focus necessary.

A master craftsman who has managed to make a specific task instinctual might in a blue moon manifest an Implement by accident; more likely is the case that they will realize that they left out the last step on one of their iterations of the task, and it still worked. Magical scholars agree that this is likely the sort of situation that led to magecraft's original discovery.

However, in modern days this is an inefficient way to learn Magecraft. It's far more accurate that 'in the process of learning Magecraft, you will have to learn a trade' than the other way around: the ritualized work and extensive mental discipline necessary for apprenticeship somewhat limits its usefulness. (This is a large part of the reason why mages are uncommon: you will need a patron or wealth of your own if you are going to apprentice, because your apprenticeship is unlikely to pay for itself.)

What you're likely to see population-wise with regards to mages - in a community that actively trains them- is a decent population of 'hedge mages', apprentices that dropped out of the gruelling programs of instruction before developing an Implement. They have a trick or two that they can use as a sideline of business, but the number of them keeps costs down, and the specificity of their powers prevents most of them from living entirely off their magic. Then, above them, there will be a smaller selection of journeyman mages, who charge commensurably more for their more generalist skills. These mages are more likely to make their living entirely from magic. Then, above them, are the Masters: Journeyman mages with decades of experience under their belt, who had the discipline, drive, and time to continue experimenting and pushing the boundaries of the field even once they had enough magic to provide for themselves. In a city, you might have one or two Masters with Cores.

It seems to me that you could use apprentice mage type people in assembly lines if you were creative.

Alicorn wrote:It seems to me that you could use apprentice mage type people in assembly lines if you were creative.

There is the problem of interchangeable parts only just starting to exist, but yes, it might well prove profitable to train 'craftmages' in a particular single task that can be done more efficiently by magic.

Eva wrote:

Alicorn wrote:It seems to me that you could use apprentice mage type people in assembly lines if you were creative.

There is the problem of interchangeable parts only just starting to exist, but yes, it might well prove profitable to train 'craftmages' in a particular single task that can be done more efficiently by magic.

That sounds like a useful use for slaves

Scrolls are re-usable? How magecraft magic would interact with someone that has other magical powers and tried to mix them with magecraft?