Aerb is home to many different magical phenomena, which are categorized as latent, passive, and active.[1] There are twenty two different kinds of magic that anyone can learn,[2] plus some standalone spells not associated with any of them.[3] Each entad has its own unique magic.[4] Some exclusion zones - such as the Risen Lands[5] - are home to rare and dangerous kinds of excluded magic. Some magics are hereditary and only available to certain bloodlines.[2][6] Finally, certain species - such as unicorns and anolia - have their own kinds of racial magic.[3][2]
Most athenaeums teach magic.[7]
Types
Edit
Latent magicEdit
Latent magic is the weakest kind of magic. It is emitted by things that can create magical effects but currently aren't - examples include certain entads[8] and the blood, skin, and bones of ensouled creatures.[9] In general, for most foo where "foo magic" exists, instances of foo possess latent magic.[10]
Passive MagicEdit
Passive magic is presumably the magic of continuous effects.[speculation] It is easier to detect than latent magic,[11] but more difficult to detect than active magic.[9]
Active magicEdit
Active magic is caused by activated effects. This includes spells and the artillery bow (when activated).[8]
Magic of all kinds can be detected by warders[12] and thaum-seekers[11]. This property is used as a way to classify things as magical or nonmagical, but this method of classification can lead to results that may seem unintuitive. For instance, void crystals are considered to be completely mundane,[13] and blade-bound are only considered to be pseudo-mages[14], while anything that's moving will possess latent velocity magic.[10]
Known magicsEdit
- air[15]
- blood[15]
- bloodline (excluded)[16]
- bone[15]
- butterfly (excluded)[17]
- carapace
- clock (excluded)[17]
- conjoinery (excluded)
- constriction (excluded)
- dibbling (excluded)
- dream-walking[18]
- feng shui[19]
- fire[15]
- fleshsmithing
- flower (part of Horticulture in Juniper's skills)
- funnel (excluded) [20]
- gem[15]
- glass
- gold
- gray (excluded)[21]
- ice (excluded)
- ink[15]
- illusion (excluded)
- library
- lightning (specic, vitric)
- mirror[22]
- necromancy (partially excluded)
- passion[15]
- plastic[15][23]
- portal (excluded)
- pustule
- redaction (excluded)[24]
- revision[17][15]
- rune[15]
- sand
- shadow (specic, penumbral)
- skin (excluded)[25]
- smoke (specic, he'lesh)
- soul (Essentialism in Juniper's skills)[15]
- star[15]
- steel
- still[15]
- spirit[15]
- time (specic, unicorn)[26]
- tree[27]
- velocity[15]
- vibrational[15]
- warding[15]
- water[15]
- wood[27]
References
- ↑ It had been explained to me that magic in the general sense could be divided up into three categories: latent, passive, and active.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 20: "Desert Course" - ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 There were twenty-two different kinds of magic, and that was the conservative count. Many of those only included in the less-conservative count were hereditary, racial, or otherwise not the sort of thing that was available to just anyone.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 19: "Montage!" - ↑ 3.0 3.1 There were velocity mages, water mages, wind mages, vibrational mages, steel mages, flower mages, revision mages, the list ran on and on, and on top of that, there were individual “spells” that were independent of any school, plus magic inherent to exclusion zones, plus magic only available to monsters, plus unique magics inherent in magic items.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 31: "The Loyal Elf" - ↑ “Sometimes, for reasons that no one really understands, one of these artisans will go into a forge frenzy where they’re overcome by a very particular idea and become dead-set on pursuing it, to the exclusion of money, reputation, family, sleep, food, et cetera. Once they’re finished, they come out of it, and sitting on their workbench, or wherever, is this thing that they didn’t actually know how to create, drenched in otherworldly magic and utterly, forever unique. Those are the entads. You’ve seen two of them so far, Fenn’s bow and the teleportation key.”
—Worth the Candle Chapter 17: "Voting Blocs" - ↑ “The short version is that Silmar City was the target of the attack that formed the Risen Lands, it’s awash with the walking dead, and there was once a secret facility there dedicated to the study of necrotic field effect, which I believe contains a key we can use to teleport ourselves to safety.”
—Worth the Candle Chapter 7: "Twenty Questions" - ↑ Water Magic was a bloodline magic
—Worth the Candle Chapter 106: "The One-Hand Warder" - ↑
- Seven books from The Commoner’s Guide series, which Yasin, the shopkeeper, told me were more about demystifying magic than actually teaching magic, which was by and large only done at the athenaeums.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 28: "The Impish Inn"
- Seven books from The Commoner’s Guide series, which Yasin, the shopkeeper, told me were more about demystifying magic than actually teaching magic, which was by and large only done at the athenaeums.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Fenn’s bow was latent magic, unless she used its special ability, in which case the thaum-seekers would probably see it like a lighthouse on the horizon.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 20: "Desert Course" - ↑ 9.0 9.1 The thaum-seekers would pour on speed to get at active magic, and would track passive magic from miles away, but I was assured that if they came across latent magic they wouldn’t hesitate to go for the kill. In this world that meant anyone with skin, bones, or blood, and we happened to have all three.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 20: "Desert Course" - ↑ 10.0 10.1 Wards provided generalized, rules-based, countermagic. This was really, really powerful in Aerb, where “magic” included abstract categories and concepts, like ‘blood’ or ‘bones’ or ‘water’ or even ‘velocity’, especially since wards could act on so-called latent magic.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 23: "Siege" - ↑ 11.0 11.1 Thaum-seekers (or thaum-suckers, depending on which of my party members I asked) could sense out and hunt down both passive and active magic at incredible range, but latent magic was mostly safe from them unless they were right on top of us.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 20: "Desert Course" - ↑ We moved in darkness, trusting in Grak’s magic-vision to get us where we needed to be. Based on our past discussions about the monocle, he would be able to see everything that had latent, passive, or active magic in it, which meant that it applied to about 95% of all things, including almost all magic items and most living creatures (save for non-anima).
—Worth the Candle Chapter 87: "Down And Out" - ↑ And void crystals were “mundane” though every bone in my body was telling me that they were basically witchcraft.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 20: "Desert Course" - ↑ “There are things that a handgun won’t work on. The majority of entad armor will stop a small-caliber round, and a minority will stop larger calibers. There are also a wide variety of mages who are immune or resistant to gunfire, including pseudo-mages like the bladebound. There are species who will shrug off a bullet and monsters who will only gain power from them. Wards will also stop bullets dead in their tracks, if your target is bunkered down. It’s by no means a perfect solution, but it’s the first one you should reach for.”
—Worth the Candle Chapter 145: "Freshman" - ↑ 15.00 15.01 15.02 15.03 15.04 15.05 15.06 15.07 15.08 15.09 15.10 15.11 15.12 15.13 15.14 15.15 15.16 15.17 There were a few skills that were Tier 1, never removed from any possible reformulation of the character sheet. Those were Essentialism, Spirit, Bone Magic, and Still Magic, all of which were cost-less and evergreen.
[...]
Vibrational Magic, Blood Magic, Revision Magic, Star Magic, Velocity Magic, Plastic Magic, Ink Magic, Passion Magic, Water Magic, Warding, Gem Magic, Air Magic, Fire Magic, and Rune Magic all made the cut
—Worth the Candle Chapter 172: "Respec" - ↑ [Juniper’s Notes: Not to be confused with bloodline magic, which acts on a person’s bloodline. Pretty much no one knows about bloodline magic, and it’s excluded, so it’s a confusion of terms that only affects a very few.]
—A Brief Description of Aerb Chapter 5: "Magics" - ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 In its heyday, Claw & Clocks was home to three separate time-related magics, which had all been united under a single institution: butterfly magic, clock magic, and revision magic. The former two were excluded, leaving revision magic to be taught alone, sometimes seen as the weakest of the triad. Opposite the time-related powers were the bodily magics, which in the beginning included various forms of lycanthropy, a number of specic magics, and fleshsmithing, a discipline shared with other centers of learning.
—A Brief Description of Aerb Chapter 2: "Athenaeums" - ↑ It’s often said that the plane of dreams is excluded, but this doesn’t fully convey the reality of the situation. What instead happened was that the magic of dream-walking was apparently excluded, to an unknown exclusion zone, if there is one, which cut off the ability of anyone on Aerb to step into the plane of dreams through that method.
—A Brief Description of Aerb Chapter 4: "Cosmology" - ↑ “The magics of Aerb can be divided into four distinct categories,” said the sea monster, “The first is phenomenological, magics founded on simple, understandable, base principles. Of these, gem magic, feng shui, and conjoinery are the most prototypical examples. The second category is metaphorical, where there is no one binding truth to the magic, merely reflections of humanoid interaction with the base subject. Blood magic, dibbling, and water magic are the most prototypical examples. The third --”
—Worth the Candle Chapter 147: "Good Vibrations" - ↑ I had a very slight advantage here, in that I had a list of eighty-two excluded skills. They didn’t fully map to the exclusions, but there was a list I could start going down. Funnel magic? Conjoinery? Uniqulomancy? Carrollism (please no)?
—Worth the Candle Chapter 109: "The Veil of the World" - ↑ tree as Dorian Gray ref (sp? maybe read, Wilde, close to historical Gray Magic (excluded))
—Worth the Candle Chapter 105: "Notes" - ↑ When mirror magic was excluded, apparently all forms of access to the plane of mirrors went with it.
—A Brief Description of Aerb Chapter 4: "Cosmology" - ↑ [P]lastic had its own brand of magic to it.
The first half of it was easy enough; it was Reed Richards’ superpower, flexibility and stretchiness, which came with an ability to tank hits like there was no tomorrow, mediated by the plastic plates that were attached, fused, or integrated into their skin. At the magus level, with ten years of training, they could reshape themselves nearly at will, altering most aspects of their appearance. The second half of that was a bit scarier, with plasticity applied to their minds, allowing them to think and adapt faster than they could before. The old lady version of Amaryllis joked that she’d accidentally reinvented dopplegangers, but it wasn’t too far from the truth, especially given how often they were given infiltration and assassination missions.
(Two or more sufficiently skilled plastic mages could merge with one another, and that was where you started getting problems, insofar as things that might be exclusion worthy. That research was permanently banned after an incident that came close to destroying the world and was only stopped through heavy use of void weapons. After that, the members of the Plasticlique were rarely given assignments together, for fear that they would try something inadvisable.)
—Worth the Candle Chapter 136: "Krinrael" - ↑ Lots of libraries in J’s games, but only three really magical ones, Boundless Library with all books, Ascentium (sp?) with books whose stories become real, and Libor Mortis w/ something like redaction magic (excluded, Bowdler)
—Worth the Candle Chapter 105: "Notes" - ↑ I decided on cutting skin magic, to save you the suspense.”
“You excluded all of skin magic?” I asked. “Scars and tattoos?”
“There were a few subfields that no one discovered,” he replied. “I always try to include little secrets like that, ways to expand things. I’d always wanted to do something with prehensile hair. But yes, all of it.”
—Worth the Candle Chapter 162: "Deus Ex" - ↑ One example of this would be a unicorn, whose ability to distort time grows more powerful over time.
—A Brief Description of Aerb Chapter 5: "Magics" - ↑ 27.0 27.1 Tree Magic: distinct from Wood Magic.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 105: "Notes"
Community content is available under CC-BY-SA
unless otherwise noted.
