Alicornutopia

It defines harm as something that does damage to the physical or mental integrity of the elementalist. A pain-enhancing blessing is... probably possible, but it would probably cap the enhancing intensity at the point where it'd become incapacitating.

If anyone was curious, this is very much Galatea Aesthetic.

Metamancy
Metamancers make up about 1% of the population of mages (yes I changed that from the original number :P), and it's not really obvious whether they even fit the category. Before the War of Conquest and the taboos, some scholars and philosophers used to fancy metamancers as negative mages - as in, the opposite of mages, with less magic even than nonmages, effectively a negative amount of it. Thus a metamage absorbs the positive magic of others, or the passive magic of the environment, and can use any of it as one uses a tool: external to themself, something one has to learn to wield and manipulate but which fundamentally doesn't belong there.

Regardless of whether that's true (or even makes sense), metamancers cannot generate mana, only being able to use the magic of others. The metamancer's Expression is the subtlest of all four, and it can happen that someone doesn't notice they Expressed at all, especially if it happens early enough. In the same way most people aren't consciously paying attention to, say, their sense of touch on their foot unless something calls attention to it, metamancers get a whole new sense, except it just never calls attention to itself.

Like most other magical effects, it's somewhat ineffable, although it has been variously described as a visual overlay that show auras, or a smoky substance, or like chimes, or like heat. Regardless of the subjective experience, a metamancer who pays attention to their sense can pretty trivially detect the presence of magic. Understanding its properties is significantly harder, however, and even the most basic aspects can take days or weeks to be sussed out. Accurate/complete pointers about what to look for can speed that up quite a bit, but misleading or incomplete ones can send a metamancer on a fruitless analysis and waste a lot of their time. If a metamancer's on the right track, they can even figure out new things about the magic that other people might not have been aware of.

The best analogy for the kind of work this is is being presented simultaneously with a specific text in an unknown foreign language (the magic they're studying) and a dictionary/huge corpus in that language which they can then use to try to understand that text. If someone tells them what the spell does, that's like explaining what the text is about and what some of the words mean, and this knowledge can be used to figure out other parts of the text. If someone misleads them, that's like mistranslating just enough words and concepts that it doesn't become obvious until rather a lot more study has been done. Trying to understand a person's magic rather than an effect is like being given a language's corpus and a helpful syntax and grammar guide in that language; once that's understood, that person's magical effects are much easier to understand as well.

In addition to this passive unintuitive understanding of magic one gains, they can also affect magic directly. The second simplest application of active metamancy is to dispel or resist ongoing magic - a metamancer can nope most kinds of magic affecting them fairly easily. It's not as easy as merely detecting magic is, and if there are multiple effects going on a metamancer can be overwhelmed, although this is a skill that can be improved upon. This can also be used to dissipate the mana invested into an artefact and a scroll, turning the former into a nonmagical object and destroying the latter.

The next simplest form of active use is just moving magic around, converting one kind of magic into another (lossily), storing magic for later use, stuff like that. They can use that to absorb a scroll's magic and turn it into arcanist mana, or an artefact's magic and turn it into enchanter mana.

Once a metamancer understands some bit of magic, they can start tweaking it. How easy that is depends on the specific kind of magic and how well they understand it, but the basic examples of tweaking are those mentioned in the previous posts: making it possible to upgrade or change artefacts and spells, detaching one of a given arcanist's spells from its incantation, allowing an elementalist to recharge inactive blessings' mana or convert mana from one blessing to another. A capability in that vein that hasn't been mentioned yet is making magic cost less mana, or be more efficient in general. As an example, in the case of a spell, the metamancer can nudge the magic into "settling easier" into the incantation by pointing out to it how it best relates to the meanings behind the words.

Finally, the very easiest form of active metamancer manipulation is borrowing/stealing magic. If another mage is within their awareness (i.e. the metamancer knows where the mage is with respect to themself pretty precisely, usually cashes out to "nearby"), the metamancer can drain their mana or, in the case of an elementalist, steal an inactive blessing. Stealing a blessing is almost instantaneous, but draining mana takes time. A metamancer can then convert one form of magic into another, or just use them as they are, to cast spells or create artefacts or use blessings. Since metamancers cannot regenerate mana, they can only use as much as they've gotten. It is possible to give the mana back, and if a metamancer steals an elementalist's blessing that elementalist will be unable to access the blessing until the metamancer returns it, even if they have already completely drained that blessing of mana. Because of this, the Conqueror was only the straw that broke the camel's back, and metamancers did already have a bad reputation because of some tendencies towards this.

But of course, history is told by the victors, so matters are a bit subtler than that...

History
The world has four main continents and a whole lotta water.

• Galatea is surrounded by tiny islands;
• South of it there's a polar continent;
• To the west there's one basically dominated by mountain ranges with some jungles near the eastern shore;
• And in the north hemisphere there is a sprawling continent with savannas and temperate jungles, the latter crisscrossed with enough large rivers and lakes it could as well be considered a huge archipelago.

And this is important to give what's going on everywhere more context.

Like in our planet, humanity evolved in the savanna. Unlike in our planet, humanity had magic. But it actually took several thousand years to be discovered, since Expressions never happen accidentally. So, for the first stretch of human prehistory, this planet's development was pretty similar to real life. People spread out, tribes started existing, cultures and languages developed more or less independently, all without leaving the north continent because there were no convenient land bridges for the nomadic peoples to cross.

And then someone discovered magic.

They probably weren't literally the first person to do so, but they were the first to get anywhere further than "when the tribe's shaman chants weird things happen." They were an enchanter and made the first boat, drawn by the mysterious dead plants that sometimes washed ashore. But they couldn't do it alone, and used a metamancer's help. They were friends and lovers and they brought their tribe to the lush wetlands of the south continent.

The enchanter died on the way, as well as several tribespeople.

The shaman condemned the metamancer, saying magic that didn't come from the gods, from ritual and prayer, was acursed magic, and all who practised it would be damned.

So that tribe spread farther south, and the continent slowly became populated.

In the meantime, the peoples of the north one by one discovered and developed magic under somewhat more auspicious circumstances, and of course used it for war. Agriculture and writing were invented approximately simultaneously, nomadic tribes became sedentary tribes became villages became cities became fiefdoms became kingdoms. Technological development was much accelerated by the comparative ease of magic versus actual engineering, and cultural advances did not lag too far behind.

One of those kingdoms sent a boat south, to explore more of the world, and they found the now mostly desertified northern shores of the continent that would come to be known as Galatea. The people they met venerated these new arrivals as gods, and two hundred years of peace (read: massive slaughter of the natives and destruction of their culture) followed in the south. Galateans were catching up.

But at the same time, a cultural revolution was happening in the north. More and more metamancers who used other people's magic instead of helping them were cropping up and seizing power. New laws were written, declaring that metamancers had to be officially registered and watched, creating a divide and lots of mistrust. One by one, the kingdoms of the north fell to coups or even outright massacres, and the ruling class became the mage class. Metamancer rulers were powerful enough to take on dozens of other mages, loyalties were divided, every kingdom was at war with at least one other kingdom.

Galatea got almost completely cut off, and the news they did get of the north were terrifying (selection bias: people who went south were usually coming to escape the worst parts of war). The same cultural hostility towards metamancers found in the north slowly spread in the south.

One pretender, who couldn't make it in the north, got it into their head that there was a primitive land with resources just lying around they could take. Who cares about petty kingdoms when you could have a continent? They marched south with a small band of followers, and the peoples of Galatea worked to just save their own arses and everyone else be damned. This divided land made it easy for the relatively powerful metamancer to enlarge their army and continue their quest for domination unimpeded by smarter, more powerful competitors from their homeland.

Until a handful of kingdoms decided to join forces and squash the metamancer from the north like a bug. The metamancer was more powerful than anyone else in Galatea, but there were many more Galateans than they could deal with. This whole affair lasted sixty years, and in the end only ruins and three powerful kingdoms were left.

They sailed north, only to find an impassable storm that would never end, the last relic of a devastating war between entities as powerful as gods.

The societal and religious taboo did not emerge naturally, out of fear of the unknown; it was created and designed by an elite of rulers, out of full knowledge of what happened.

Hundreds of years later, all that's left are contradictory impossible tales of treacherous metamancers, the creation of mankind, and an eternal war between the gods.

Nitpick: I think linguists believe language only emerged once, although it has obviously diverged significantly since.

This magic is unable to make things permanent; how long is the storm going to go on?

When I said "developed" that's what I meant, it emerged once and then as the tribes separated evolved differently.

About the storm: undecided, and I think it'll probably vary based on the needs of the 'box and what's most narratively interesting.

Guilds
A "guild" is a large-scale association without (direct) political power and which focuses on a skill, job, or craft. Any more specific definition than that will necessarily exclude some group Galateans are used to calling guild. Membership rules, hierarchy, involvement, power, etc, are all things that vary from guild to guild. Some guilds disallow members from belonging to some other guild at the same time, while others are freer. Some guilds have a fixed headquarters somewhere, while others are more social organisation than anything. Some guilds have very influential and politically well-connected members, while others are mostly made up of people who either have no political power or bring none to the table. Some guilds are very individualistic, some are group-centric. Most guilds give people a new last name if they want it; some mandatorily; some don't have this. And so on.

So, with all these differences, what exactly do they do? What are they for? I will answer this with a few examples.

The Guild of Explorers is one with very very loose membership rules and hierarchical structure. They're basically a group of people who are interested in finding cool stuff that the war lost all those years ago, or exploring new places. To be a member, you need to provide the Guild with some form of yearly contribution, either in the form of new findings or by helping other Guild members with their findings. Members have a magical piece of jewellery - often but not always a ring - called a "token" with the Guild's symbol engraved on it, which has a charge that lasts a year and which can be used to recognise other charged tokens. I have lots of Thoughts about how these tokens work but don't wanna include them here. When your finding gives you money, it is customary to donate a part of it to the Guild, and people can draw some of that money (and other resources) from the guild if they use those resources to further the Guild's project. They are very apolitical, and care very little about people belonging to other guilds. They don't have a central headquarters but do have outposts in various cities and towns and keeps to help other guild members or sell stuff to non-members. The Golem Hunters are an unofficial group of the Explorers that specifically tries to track golems lost to the ages. They spend a surprising amount of time indoors, looking through history books for hints of where golems might be found, and are much more tightly-knit than the Guild in general.

The Guild of Arcanists is very strict about membership. If you're part of it, you need to be willing to teach new arcanists about magic and how to best formulate spells. They write books on spell design, with very specific definitions of effects and tradeoffs between mana and effectiveness of incantation and length and so on. They revise spells as language evolves and certain symbols become more or less common in popular usage, they are the final arbitrers of the rules of the arcanist language, and overall keepers of arcanist lore and knowledge. Veritable scholars, researching efficiency and effectiveness of spells, with a rigid hierarchical structure and initiation ceremonies and secret meetings. They are based in one specific university city in Teinnab. Belonging to this guild means you can't belong to any others, but you'll have a very strong group backing you in your academic endeavours. They also influence research in all areas but don't have a lot of political power to speak of.

The Guild of Historians is, surprisingly, one of the most deeply political ones. You can belong to other guilds, yes, but the Guild must always take precedence. They are the keepers of all historical knowledge, and lots of powerful and influential people belong to it. They teach the approved version of history to royalty and nobles, and they double as general information source on everything that's going on in the three kingdoms. There are several conspiracy theories about what their secrecy is due to, most of them very inconsistent, and they feed those secretly, while keeping a front of being the guardians of truth and wanting to make sure people do not spread misinformation and lies around - which happens pretty often, they say, with people wanting to resurrect old rebellions or agents of Vinkar trying to corrupt people.

There are also more mundane guilds, such as the Guild of Shoemakers or the Guild of Smiths, which are more focused on keeping tradition alive and teaching people who want to follow that "career." The secret cult of Vinkar might or might not be classified as a guild, but very little is known about it - even its existence is uncertain.

Dates and Customs
The year has 365 24-hour-long days, with 6-day-long weeks, 15 24-day-long months, and 5 days that aren't part of any month. These five days are spread around the year as holidays. I don't have names yet for months and days of the week. The first and last days are two of the extra ones, supposedly marking the anniversary of Galatea's victory over the Conqueror, conveniently falling on or near summer solstice; winter solstice is another of these five days, a holiday, and both it and the month it falls in are dedicated to Laoku; autumn equinox is dedicated to Teinn and so is its month; and spring equinox and its month are dedicated to Bezana.

There are a few scattered holidays, most of them dedicated to this great ruler or that, or to this great battle or that, plus a few local holidays that vary some in content, like some associated with harvest or with the town/village anniversary or local ruler's birthday.

Every week has mass-like celebrations where passages from their Holy Book - which tells a warped version of the War and pre-War history, with various holy people that are avatars of the gods and a trio which eventually founded the kingdoms - are quoted. As far as behavioural incentives go, it is seen as impolite to perform overt magic in public when you don't strictly need to (using artefacts is okay, arcanist scrolls mostly okay), on the grounds that performing magic is an act of communion with the gods and should be treated with respect. People who use magic for work tend to take much pride in it and sometimes even see it as a sacred calling - even arcanists and enchanters who produce stuff to sell.

Marriages are religious ceremonies, and there are three kinds of ceremony, one for each god. When you get married you and your future spouse pick which god you are going to ask to bless you. There are superstitions about it - those blessed by Bezana will have many offspring, those blessed by Laoku will be rich and prosperous, those blessed by Teinn will have a loyal family with close friends and be pillars of the community - so people tend to pick accordingly, and selection bias keeps the superstitions alive. Polyamorous arrangements are not unheard of, but the only non-monoamorous arrangement that's religiously and "legally" backed is a triad, and there is a special ceremony for that where all three gods bless this arrangement. It is typically between a man and two women, but there are variations. Succession rules are a bit different with a triad: the ruler has to pick one of their spouses to be their primary heir-producer and another their secondary, and children by the secondary partner come between children by the primary and non-children in the line of succession, but having the appropriate kinds of magic trumps it all as usual.

Amongst the rich and powerful homophobia basically doesn't exist - spells for same-sex couples to produce offspring (with a surrogate in the case of two men) have been around for a long time, and so are regarded as a blessing of the gods - but the commoners aren't so lucky. Sexism works by a similar token, where rulers don't really have much in the way of succession rules that take gender into account, whereas commoners have strict gender roles and jobs. Even so, sexism isn't absent from the higher echelons of society; it merely does not affect (much) the succession to the various thrones or managements of various estates and countships and what-have-you. There are still some cultural gender distinctions, like women typically taking care of the estate and men doing work outside and the more overt part of politicking.

(I think you accidentally copied two sentences over, with the sexismPolyamorous)

How common are the triads? I imagine some people would seek it out just for the multiple blessings even without being naturally inclined to plural relationships.

(Fixed.)

There is an effect like that on the commonness of triads, but selection effects are less pronounced when it comes to "being literally perfect at everything ever" so the superstitions are that you shouldn't have a triad for the blessings, because that's greedy and manipulative and Vinkar will curse you.