Sorry for the long pause, readers (though I know there aren’t too many of you). Having a girlfriend, moving to live on one’s own and generally arranging one’s life takes up a lot of time and energy. Enough to almost forget about one’s blog, it seems… But not nearly enough to stop me from thinking and developing both old and new ideas.
One of the new ones came up after I started to read SLA Industries a second time. That’s one of those table-top RPGs I’ve read and tried to make a character for, but never actually even tried to play.
The idea formed itself around a little twist on magic in an otherwise undefined fantasy world. It remains to be seen if that world defines itself some more through its magic, or if it stays as just another half-developed idea, but as I’m equally glad if someone gets kicks out of my ideas as when I see them to their (bitter) end, I’ll write up that twist here.
Magic in this world is certainly a force many people utilise. But it is not the only way to view it; it can also be seen as an entity in itself, a creature. Let’s call that creature, for a lack of a more unique term, mana. It lives everywhere, as several parts but still a single creature. It draws sustenance from everywhere around it, especially from the minds of those who use it and those on whom it is used. It has – or is – a terrible power but it is only very rarely when it uses that power on its own. A lot more often, that power is wielded by others.
But wielding that power also means taking a bit of the symbiote/parasite (whichever way you want to see it) called mana into oneself, and that affects the user. The effects appear in three ways: As immediate visual effects, as long-term changes in appearance, and as more subtle mental effects. In a lot lesser amouts these are also noticed in the targets of magic, but only mage-hunters are exposed on that enough that any of the long-term effects show up.
The immediate visual effects show up as a glow around the mage’s body parts appropriate to the spell cast, the mage’s emotions and the associations of the mage and his culture. For example, a flamboyant mage casting a large but low-burning fireball on his hated enemies might gain a fire-red glow around his whole body, while a cunning and jealous money-maker putting a spell of generosity on his more succesful rival just gets a slight flash of green in his eyes.
When one uses a same type of spell or casts a lot of spells under a similar emotion, the color of that emotion starts to stay on him, even when not casting a spell. These are the long-term appearance changes, and by them it is very easy to recognise an experienced mage. Often, these colours are used to describe a group of mages, but don’t let it mislead you: As mana takes its color associations from the mind of those it affects, a “white mage” might be a saintly healer – or a brooding antagonist dealing with spells of death, depending on their culture.
Lastly, as mana takes its energy and sustenance mainly from emotions of sentient beings, it tends to make those beings more susceptible to strong emotions. This might not be easy to notice, but a wrathful red mage is a lot more likely to burst out in anger than a healer with hair of gold – or a berserker barbarian either, for what it matters.
That was not quite everything I have thought of, but it should be enough information to let you see the core of my idea, and to form your opinion on that world and its mages.
Finally, hopefully the time between the next update and this will be a lot shorter than between this and the prevoius one, now that my life is finally starting to seem even somewhat normalised.
